Better question, why do people keep going to houses and cabins in rural locations? So we have more horror movies to watch, of course! So let’s get into these three.
DEADSTREAM (2022)
This is essentially a horror comedy found footage one man show, co-written and co-directed by the star. The first half is all fun and goofy humor, but at the 40-minute mark the comedy tone blends with traditional found footage horror elements and plenty of jump scares and freaky creeps. This is definitely not just a tour of forest leaves like The Blair Witch Project.
How much you enjoy the comedy depends on how much you like the leading man. Some might find him a bit shrill…especially when he screams. And he screams a lot. Throughout the entire movie. The first few times I thought it was funny, but when it turned out it was part of his shtick for the full 90 minutes it became tedious, and it’s really the biggest complaint I have about this film, which is a blast otherwise.
So this dude is an online celebrity who fell out of favor after making some bad mistakes with his live stream. For his comeback he decides to spend the night in a derelict, haunted house in the woods.
The first forty minutes has him killing time trying to entertain the audience with a tour of the creepy house and stories of those that have died there. He also responds to viewers as their comments scroll up the side of the screen.
When the ghouls in the house suddenly begin terrorizing him, it’s no joke. It is scary fun straight through, and the main ghost girl eventually becomes reminiscent of Deadites in Evil Dead. Her frightening companions are freaky enough to give the monsters from Silent Hill a run for their money as well. Fun fun fun.
MONSTROUS (2022)
Monstrous comes to us from the director of All Cheerleaders Die, and while this works visually as a frightening supernatural specter film reminiscent of PG-13 horror of the early 00s, it’s the writing that just completely falls apart. The hubby and I tried to piece it together after it was over with no success, and even consulting some of those “ending explained” sites online, I discovered they made ridiculous errors in trying to make it all make sense.
The worst part of it is that there’s a turning point in the film when I saw a great and different twist being set up perfectly. Unfortunately, somehow the writer completely overlooked the opportunity and instead went for something we’ve seen before, tried to complicate it so it wouldn’t seem like it was so obvious, then just made a mess of the twist in the process.
Anyway, it’s the 1950s, and Christina Ricci and her little boy run away from their life to live in a rental house in a rural area. It becomes clear she is trying to escape her husband.
Then the son begins to see some sort of monster coming out of the pond by their house on a nightly basis. He begins to beg Christina to just take him home, but she insists at first that he’s just imagining it.
That all changes when there are a few freaky encounters with the ghoul. Awesome.
That’s when the film falls apart. Bummer. You’ll most likely figure out the ending, yet still have so many questions after you do.
3 DEMONS (2022)
I really don’t know how to feel about 3 Demons. It has that classic setup of one man dealing with a demonic presence at a cabin in the woods, but it’s also a film that deals entirely with abstractions, so you’re never sure if the man is really experiencing any of the horrors or if they’re all symbolic of his own deeper issues. And for me, that just always equals a lack of fear. I just can’t feel frightened for a character when I am convinced they’re not actually dealing with tangible horror.
The whole premise is built around a wraparound of our main man telling his story to a psychiatrist. Clips of this session are interspersed throughout the film and add nothing to the overarching story.
And that story is…this deputy is assigned to “protect” the body of a dead woman under a sheet in the woods by a cabin.
Left alone with his thoughts about a personal loss, he spends the movie in a sort of multidimensional reality being haunted by shadowy specters in the woods, along with the sheeted body, which tends to move around a lot.
There is definitely plenty of eerie visual stimulation to go around here, so I enjoyed that aspect of it, but don’t expect any concrete explanation to why any of this is happening to him (or not actually happening to him).
