The New Daughter (2009) 1h 48m

 

I haven't watched a Kevin Costner movie in years.  I was also was confusing him with Kevin Bacon before I hit play and spent a bunch of time thinking about how I unnaturally love the film Stir of Echos.  Seriously, I have some strange horror boner for that film.  It's not that great.  The plot is okay.  It's much better than this piece of shit and I would much rather have watched Stir of Echos over The New Daughter.  There are a lot of things I would rather have watched than The New Daughter.

Okay, let's go over this mess.  Kevin Costner's wife leaves him for another guy and KC and his kids move to a house somewhere else.  I don't think I paid attention where to.  In the back yard is a mound of dirt which holds a bunch of made up shit that they try to pass off as Native American.  His teenage daughter begins to change and make a nest in her closet, he doesn't know how to be a father or act outside of some strange Clint Eastwood-esq growl/yell type thing, and his youngest son fucks up the whole ending of the film with poor emotional acting.

The New Daughter has nothing redeemable about it.  There are scenes of nothing, the characters don't evoke any type of emotional response from the viewer or each other, and the creature reveal is incredibly disappointing.  The fact that someone had this shitty idea and then just thought "meh, I'll make this some sort of Native American shit," makes me want to throw a book at that person.  Read something other than your bullshit high school notebook drabbles that make your friends think of you as their "writer" friend.  Then choke on a million dicks.  Exactly one fucking million.  I'll count them to make sure you at least do that right.

I give The New Daughter 0 whatever the fuck this is out of 5:

Abattoir (2016) 1h 38m

Abattoir (noun) - Slaughterhouse

I never learned this word while I was studying French in college so I'm let down it didn't mean something cooler.  I don't know what I wanted but I feel like "slaughterhouse" doesn't really fit.  I get what they were going for, and Abattoir is much better, but suck my ass with this being "slaughterhouse."

Abattoir starts with a Henry David Thoreau quote and a narrator.  Don't let this over pretentiousness turn you off though because the plot is kind of rad.  Julia, a reality reporter (which is a thing I guess) gets a call from a man that says he just murdered her sister and the sister's family.  After the funerals Julia, with her cop "friend" Declan, go back to her sister's house to find answers.  They find the room where the murder happened completely missing from the house.  Using her reality knowledge and reporter skills Julia finds that similar occurrences have been happening for around 50 years and trace back to Jebediah Crone as well as the town the sisters were born.

For the first two acts of Abattoir everything happens at high speed.  It's paced well, but when the time comes for the third act everything screeches to a halt in order for you to get a guided tour of the payoff you've been waiting for.  If they trimmed it by 5 or 10 minutes then it would've been just right.  They didn't, it made my interest wain.  Luckily, by the very end, this film got its shit together and I was all in.  It helps that this movie has one of my favorite things: the bad guy wins.

I want a sequel to Abattoir.  Don't do the same town or Jebediah again, but the plot of everything can go much further now that we have a foundation.  Make it!  Make it happen!  Appease me!

I give Abattoir 4 copies of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five out of 5:

Phantom of the Theatre (2016) 1h 43m

As soon as I started watching this film I began to spiral down a Wikipedia hole where I kept reading more and more about the types of Chinese ghosts.  I don't know where I got it stuck in my head that jiangshi were the primary ghost type in China.  They're not even ghosts, they're more along the lines of a vampire.  That said, there are some really awesome types of ghosts in their culture based off of their behavior in life.  Actually, both Japan and China have some really cool spirits.  We just get shit like Casper over here, and he's a dildo.

Phantom of the Theatre takes us to an undetermined time period in China.  An abandoned theatre is full of the spirits of a murdered acrobat troop which can kill by causing a person to burn from the inside out.  When a man approaches an up and coming actress to star in the film he wrote, she accepts once he decides to film it in the old theatre.  The pasts of both characters hold many secrets which rise to the surface during the filming and premier of their movie.

I don't know why I feel stunned by this, but it has been a while where I watched a film where the plot was so coherently addressed and wrapped up.  There were no loose ends, everything made sense, and the ending left me wanting.  Why is this something that is so hard to achieve in horror?   The sets and costumes were beautiful.  The visual and CG effects were acceptable although there tends to be some borderline Mortal Kombat skulls flying around (also a brief character named Liu Kang didn't help).

Twinsies!

I think my favorite part of this film was the actual Phantom.  He looked like some sort of Chinese King Diamond.  Look at him over there.  He looks like he's going to break out some sweet Merciful Fate covers or talk to you about his interest in black magick.  If Phantom of the Theatre was just this guy killing everyone then I would've given this film the highest rating ever!  Instead...

I give Phantom of the Theatre 4 Kennywood Phantom Fright Night logos out of 5:

Aliens: Zone of Silence (2017) 1h 19m

 

Oh found footage films, we meet again.  Only this time you're on Netflix due to an inside job.  This is the directorial debut of Andy Fowler, also known as the Director of VFX for Netflix itself.  Yes, this film is on more streaming platforms than just Netflix, the fact that this was a direct to streaming production and had no theatrical release gives you an idea of what I had to deal with here.  So why am I'm being such a cranky bastard with this film?  Journey with me, into the zone of silence...

Based off of a real location in Mexico, Aliens: Zone of Silence follows a woman as she tries to find her brother after he disappears while searching for aliens for his YouTube channel.  Similar to the Bermuda Triangle, the Zone of Silence has issues with magnetic fields and the breaking down of mechanical instruments.  Lucky for our leading woman, she has the help of Goose, an ex-communications officer in the military that seems to have his own command station at his house.  They're able to keep in constant visual and audio contact except for times when the aliens are around.

This movie should be called the White Woman: Slog of Boring.  It's just a bunch of camcorder, GoPro, and computer screen shots that were so uninteresting to watch that I listened to this movie more than I watched it.  It reminds me of the night shots of Blair Witch only they're mostly in a tent or in the daytime so it takes away the suspense factor.  Also, Goose is the worst physical actor I have seen in a while.  There's a section where he's supposed to be having this inner panic of what to do since he lost contact with the woman and it was painful to watch.  Side note:  Don't name someone Goose in your film, it makes me think of Top Gun.

We never see the aliens.  Instead we get the fake hand of a grey pushing on the side of a tent.  The final shot we get looks like someone took a picture of Jesus and/or Mary statues and then put a bunch of vapor wave video filters on them.  That's cool with the kids, right?  We can make this ending relevant to youth culture, right?  Fuck off!

I give Aliens: Zone of Silence 0 photos of Goose from Top Gun out of 5:

XX (2017) 1h 20m

Anthology horror films have started to pop up more and more.  We have the V/H/S films, Southbound, The ABCs of Death series, and now we have XX.  An anthology where the focus is on the women in horror that aren't scream queens, but are the ones that make the scream queens scream.

XX consists of four short films: The Box (based off of a Jack Ketchum short story) where a boy catches a glimpse of what's inside of stranger's present and he is never the same.  The Birthday Party which has a mother about to host her daughter's seventh birthday party only to find her husband dead of pills and booze and she tries to hide his corpse.  Don't Fall, where four 20-something campers stumble across an area which caries a violent curse.  Then the final short is Her Only Living Son, in which a single mother is dealing with the fact that her son is coming into his own around his 18th birthday and the past catches up to them.  All four of these are framed by strange stop motion sequences which I could only describe as if a living house were into gothic-lolita.

I was glad this film came up because I spent a lot of time this week trying to remember where I saw The Box before.  It's my call for the strongest of these shorts but each of them are really well done.  If I had to pin one down as the weakest short then it would be The Birthday Party. I'm only saying this because when you get to the very end you realize it was a 15 minute set-up for a joke, and it's one of those jokes though where you kind of laugh but then do an exhaled sigh at the end because a part of you just died for laughing.  It is worth watching though because the styling and usage of color are fantastic.  Also, I would like a large purple toilet costume.

I give XX 3.5 Rosie the Riveters out of 5:

Red Christmas (2016) 1h 22m

Uggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh.  I think that this might be the first movie that caused me to say "this movie sucks" out loud to an empty room.  It wasn't even a quiet comment.  It was an exclamation of dismay at the fact that I had resigned to sit and watch this movie.  It was my acquiescence to being the vehicle of my own of my own torment.  I know now what lead a samurai to commit seppuku in order to pay for his own sins so that he may hopefully redeem himself upon death.

Red Christmas is an Australian slasher flick where my suspension of disbelief went out the window from the start.  Opening on an abortion clinic where a someone set a bomb, we have a bucket slapped with a biohazard sticker contains a living baby... somehow.  I don't know what Australian abortion laws were 20 years ago, but I'm pretty sure third trimester abortions were not a voluntary option.  The bomber finds the bucket baby and leaves.  Twenty years later we get a family celebrating Christmas when a man wrapped in bandages and wearing a cloak shows up on their front step.  I wish it was Darkman because I would much rather watch Darkman.  It ends up being the aborted child of the family's matriarch.  Her choice for the abortion was because they already had a child with Down Syndrom and this baby was going to born with it as well.  On top of that, her husband was diagnosed with cancer (I think) and she couldn't handle the situation.  Not Darkman starts killing everyone because he isn't loved by his real mom.

This film was the hottest trash.  I felt like the entire thing was set up to be this big "Look at her!  She's the real bad guy because of her want of an abortion!"  We do get a view of the killer without his hood and bandages and I almost flipped a fucking table because they made him this horribly deformed creature.  I'm surprised the actor that legitimately had Down Syndrome didn't turn to the director and just go "are you fucking kidding me?" when it was revealed.  I couldn't handle this entire mess.  I actually have the note "fuck this entire film!"

The only shining light of Red Christmas comes from the kills.  We get a one-and-done axe blow that splits a woman in half, an amazing bear trap on the head kill, and a priest's rubber head shooting blood out of the eyes.  Look up a kill montage on YouTube or something and avoid the shit out of this film.

I give Red Christmas 1 copy of Darkman out of 5, only because of those kills:

The Reaping (2007) 1h 39m

 

I love films that involve Satanic cults.  I dig this plot device because it's always more in line with some sort of hold-over "Satanic panic" idea of Satanism as opposed to LaVey Satanism or  Luciferianism.  It's as if everything has to be the extreme opposite of anything that people view as holy.  I also love biblical references, especially when it comes to something like the 10 plagues of Egypt.  This film served up both of these, so how well does it deliver?

The Reaping follows Katherine, an ex-priest that spends her time going to sites of assumed miracles and debunking them through scientific means.  As an aside, I would 100% be down for this as a career.  Katherine gets a call from a friend/priest warning her that photos he has of her burned themselves into a backwards Blue Oyster Cult logo and this is a sign of something to come.  She is then called to the town of Haven, Louisiana (it doesn't exist, I checked) because their river has turned to blood.  During her investigation the other plaugues continue to manifest all while she uncovers a secret Satanic cult attempting to bring about the Anti-Christ.

I liked this movie more than I should have.  The random made up prophecy of bringing about the Anti-Christ was cheesy in a good way.  Katherine's back story could've been flushed out a bit better because her reason for leaving the cloth comes from such an extreme situation it's hard to believe.  It mainly exists so we have a reason for the friend-priest to be in this film and be in contact with her.  The Reaping pulls a twist and an ending reveal, both of which caught me off guard.  So kudos to you 11-year-old movie.

I give The Reaping 4 BOC albums out of 5: