The Unborn (2009) 1h 28m

One of the taglines for this film is "It wants to be born."  Fuck that noise.  I want to abort this movie before it even existed.  I will invent time travel for the sole purpose of erasing this film from ever being released.

The Unborn goes all over the goddamn place.  What is initially just a girl being haunted by the ghost of a boy that wants to be born jumps those rails and crashes into a pile of everything.  Apparently the ghost is meant to be her twin brother that died in the womb.  But then we find out that thanks to Nazi's and their occult/medical experiments on twins they caused a dybbuk to return in the body of the great-uncle of our protagonist.  Her grandmother killed her twin/dybbuk which then attempted to come back in the twin brother that died.  Now he's haunting our girl in order to take over her body.

There is seriously just way too much going on here.  Twins, suicides, Jewish mysticism, Nazis, the occult, a dog wearing a mask, people and things with upside down heads, suddenly being in a Silent Hill bathroom, Gary Oldman... just too much.  There was a hilarious jump scare where our protagonist opens her medicine cabinet and the boy is inside there and kind of screams at her.  I laughed really hard at that but the rest of this was absurd trash with a few good visual effects.

I give The Unborn 1 smoking fish chicken (which came up when I image searched dybbuk) out of 5:

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A Christmas Horror Story (2015) 1h 39m

I'm not a fan of Christmas.  I haven't been since I was a teenager and as I aged into adulthood I liked it even less.  The only movie I readily acknowledge as a Christmas movie is Die Hard and fuck the rest.  So finding out I was about to watch A Christmas Horror Story meant that I was prepared to zone out over the next hour and a half.  However, as the song goes... you better watch out!

A Christmas Horror Story is an anthology of four different story lines that all share small intersections.  We have one where a zombie plague spreads through Santa's elves and Santa fucks some shit up with a sharpened staff.  Another involves three maybe high school or early college kids as they go to film in an old convent where some mysterious murders took place a year ago.  Number three has a nuclear family facing off against Krampus.  The final one is a boy and his parents going out to get a Christmas tree from way out in the boonies off of someone's property and the son suddenly goes missing.

That's all I'm giving you as far as this film because it was honestly fun to watch.  The story lines all interweave as far as what you're watching so it's less of a Tales from the Crypt style and more of a cohesive movie.  They do a great job of what I can only refer to as horror edging because they will build up to an exciting point in one story and back you off by switching to another and building again.  My greatest complaint though was that I only liked two of the four endings (Santa's story and the Krampus story).  This doesn't make the other two stories bad, just not what I would've enjoyed as a climax.

Other randomness from this film includes William Shatner as "Dangerous Dan" the radio DJ who fucking loves Christmas and Jesus.  He has a great line of "You know who saw that?  Jesus! And his dad!" when someone shows him a sign that says "FUCK CHRISTMAS." David Hayter was an executive producer.  You might know him as the voice of Solid Snake in the US versions of almost all of the Metal Gear Solid games (except for the last few where Kiefer Sutherland took over).  Finally, and this is more of a personal observation, the singing over the opening credits sounds like it was done by the same program they use for Hatsune Miku.  That's more of my nerdy shit though.

I give A Christmas Horror Story 4 copies of King Diamond's No Presents for Christmas out of 5:

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The Houses October Built (2014) 1h 31m

That poster looks like it's from one of those hidden object game pack CD-Roms you find at Wal-Mart for $10.  I know about these because my obsession with Paranormal State caused me to track down their game on one of those... and something like five Wal-Marts in a 30-mile radius.  DON'T JUDGE ME!  Instead, judge this "found footage" film, because that shit has been done to fucking death.

The Houses October Built crew consists of some 20-somethings that get the idea that they want to go on a road-trip to find an "extreme" haunted house.  This road trip is only six days and they pretty much stay in Texas until they catch wind of a place known as "Blue Skeleton."  Think of it as the speakeasy of haunted houses where you have to get a weird invite in a creepy way and then go somewhere to meet someone.  Along their voyage they stop at a few different actual haunted houses and, usually the guy with the beard, ends up doing something asshole-ish and pissing off the workers.

They get followed and creeped on by all kind of crazy haunted house workers until they are picked up by the skeleton crew.  Then they're buried alive after being fucked with in some creepy house in the swamp/woods.  Whatever.  Fuck 'em.

I had actually seen parts of this film before because my husband (P.S.  I got married before this cut started) watched it and I was probably sitting on my laptop while he did that.  It didn't keep my interest much then and this time it started okay before my interest waned again.  I also, for the life of me, don't know where in the hell they found an alley off Bourbon St.  I saw there were doors so I assume it was a private drive-way or something.  Seriously, the Quarter is dolphin's butthole tight with their blocks.

I give The Houses October Built 1 supposedly real haunted house out of 5:

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Deathgasm (2015) 1h 26m

Can I just give this a 5 right now?  Seriously, this hit on all my favorite things as far as a horror-comedy.  It's fucking called Deathgasm for Lucifer's sake!

Take one part Evil Dead 2, one part John Dies at the End, and throw in every heavy metal album cover ever and you have Deathgasm.  After finding out there's an old metal musician in hiding in their town, Brodie and Zakk end up with a copy of "The Black Hymn."  Their shitty metal band (named Deathgasm) play the song and suddenly the town becomes possessed.

I haven't laughed out loud (on purpose) at a good horror-comedy in a while and this one had me rolling on the couch.  It's such a great combination of juvenile humor mixed with metal references, corpse paint, cheesy blood and gore, and even a Sub-Zero fatality at one point.  Also boobs... what's a metal movie without boobs?  Have you even seen Heavy Metal?

Fucking 5 pictures of Gaahl out of 5!!!!:

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Friday's Choice Cuts: Hisako (from Killer Instinct) figure (Ultimate Source)

I have a lot of toys that are related to horror and/or video games.  A majority of which sit around and look cool.  This Hisako figure sits around and looks badass!

I haven't even played the new Killer Instinct game (as I don't have an Xbone or a computer that could run KI) but as soon as Hisako was announced I was all in on her.  The character moves in that jerky/shaky J-horror style while bending her body in impossible ways and even distending her mouth and elongating her teeth to razor sharp points.  Hisako is known as an "onryō,"  a Japanese spirit that has been pulled back from purgatory in order to extract revenge upon the living.  She fights using her father's naginata.

The sculpting on this figure is fantastic.  It's not so much an action figure though so you can't have cool battles with, say, the Tyrant from the Resident Evil toy line of the 90's, but the pose is awesome.  She comes with two naginatas (one with a ribbon as seen above and one that has tiny orange skulls) as well as a replaceable head so if you want to switch to the razor teeth and elongated jaw.

As I said, I haven't played the game so I didn't buy this as a diehard KI fan.  I bought this more because of my love of J-horror and I haven't regretted it to this day.  And at some point I will be able to play KI and I will pretty much only play as her.  Hisako, you're so dreamy!! <3 <3 <3

The Host (2006) 2h

I like horror.  I like comedies.  I like horror-comedies.  Sometimes though you can tilt in one direction too much, or teeter-totter between extremes and it takes away from a film.  At the same time, this shit was two hours long so I guess if that's what they were shooting for then they really needed to pad it.

The Host has a simple plot, but there's a lot kind of going on so bare with me on this.  Set in South Korea, the movie focuses on a family consisting of a father in his 60's, two sons (one of which has a daughter), and a daughter that is apparently some sort of archery Olympian (or hot shit archery person, I don't know).  The father, one son, and the son's daughter all live in some snack stand by the river that the father runs.

Back in 2000 some buttlord of a mortician tells his assistant to pour a ton of chemicals down the drain because the bottles got dusty.  These chemicals get in the river and create some kind of amphibious monster that looks like a mix between a lantern fish, a lizard, and a Vaporeon (from Pokémon) mixed with the rad jaws of the Predator race.  So now, in 2006, this monster appears and wrecks the river side and supposedly eats the daughter.  Later the son gets a late night call from his daughter saying she's trapped in a sewer and this sets off the family on an escape from quarantine to find the child.

This could have been shorter, and it could've done with a lot less of the goofier shit in the beginning, but all in all this was an okay film.  The monster looked good, except for one scene where I think they rendered the monster in one program and flames in another program, and those two things were put together and were making a nasty baby.  The acting was good but the characters I didn't really care about.  So middle of the road.  Middle of the South Korean road...

I give The Host 2.5 Vaporeons out of 5 (so you don't have to look it up if you don't know):

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Resurrección (Resurrection) (2015) 1h 42m

Argentina... where the hell did you come from with this film?  Damn!  Resurrection (or, it's original title, Resurrección, which I'm not typing over and over because of ASCII laziness) was not what I was expecting to get into but I'm glad I did.

Resurrection revolves around a priest in the 1800's that is traveling to Buenos Aires to help victims of a plague.  His journey passes by his brother's home and he visits, only to find the wife has locked herself and her daughter in the chapel and the brother is sick with the plague.  After kicking a weird healer out of the home, the priest becomes infected while giving his brother his last rites.  From there we don't know what is real, a dream, or supernatural in regards to the daughter begging to escape as the others want to kill her.

I'm a sucker for religious imagery and Resurrection has that in spades.  There exists the obvious such as stigmata wounds, or crucifixion poses, but it goes much deeper than that.  There tends to be a lot based around the "father," in the literal sense.  Fathers and grandfathers are brought up a few times and their actions and consequences of doing what's good for the family.  There is also the sense of god giving man free will and standing back while the devil tempts them.  Faith becomes a common thread too as it is tested in relation to faith in god, man, science, etc.  Finally, my favorite done here is a moment reminiscent of "Father, if you are willing, let this cup pass from me..." the night prior to Christ's crucifixion.

Damn catholic upbringing...

The film looks great, the subtitles are actually good, and there's a scene with a woman that gets set on fire and then shot that was cool.  She was trying to kill the priest so it's not as if she's some innocent person.  Also, chickens don't give a fuck about any plague.  They are the fucking supermen of this film as they will just random be downstairs doing chicken stuff.  Bring on Resurrection 2: The Cluckening of Christ!

I give Resurrection 4 Holy Chicken images (by pjusis on DeviantArt) out of 5:

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The Hallow (2015) 1h 37m

When the opening production credits have four production companies, one co-production company, and one "in association with" listed, I begin to question the credibility of the film I'm about to watch.  In this case though, it seems that this meeting of the Euros worked out in this movie's favor.

The Hallow is an Irish film that brought together a bit of science with a lot of folklore and made it work well.  We have our typical family of Adam, Clare, baby Finn, and a dog which I could never understand what Adam was calling it.  Iggy?  Digby?  Biggy?  (credit spoilers: it's Iggy... which wasn't even the dog's real name so that explains why it didn't listen to him, ever.)  Adam is surveying a patch of forest for a lumber company when he comes across some strange mold on a dead horse in an abandoned house.  That is about as dumb as that sentence sounds.

The neighbor man keeps coming around saying he and Adam need to talk and that the forest belongs to the Hallow.  His daughter was apparently taken by them.  This is pretty much the set-up for this film.  They bring in classic folk practices like using iron to keep evil/spirits away, there's the introduction of kidnapping a baby and replacing them with a changeling, and they even go as far as to add a vampire-based element with light, especially sunlight, harming the creatures or those infected.

As with any film I enjoyed I'm not going to spoil it on here.  I will say that a good part of this film felt a bit middle-of-the-road for a while but the last section really turned it around for me.  There's a flaming scythe, some good CGI and practical make-up/effects, a rad beheading, and a section of stop-motion that looks like it should be from a Tool video from the mid-90's.

I give The Hallow a solid 3.5 copies of Irish folk tales out of 5:

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Bhoothnath (2008) 2h 30m

Oh man.  Netflix is just punishing me for some reason.  I don't know why my rating of a "thumbs up" to one Indian film has now cursed me for an eternity of shit ones.  Look at that poster.  Fucking look at it!  This was in the horror section and also under its heading was "movies ages 8-10."

Fuck you so hard Netflix!

Bhoothnath revolves around a haunted house where a child and his mother stay while the father is out being a captain or something on a cruise ship.  Stupid shit happens and the kid sucks.  The ghost is an old turd and there's some homeless vagrant that is some sort of "oh... that scamp," character.  There was a musical/dance number with elementary school kids in the style of Beat It but only they were dressed in rap video thug clothes with bling and shit.  One has a fake afro wig!

I made it about half way through this movie to where a musical number was going to kick in about the kid and the ghost being some sort of bros and I fucking turned it off.  In the entirety of this blog, something like 120-ish movies, this is the first one I ended up going "Nawww dog... fuck this shit," and turning it off.

Fucking ages 8-10 movie in the horror section, suck on my left nut while the right one sweats in your fucking eye Netflix.  Also, fuck your shit subtitles.  When someone says, in English, "this place is so cool," and you put on the screen "this place is so nice," mmmmmmmmmmmm.... you mother fucker.  So much rage and anger...

This was trash, so instead of a rating it gets this .gif of Murderface because if this movie had a face I would murder it!

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[REC] 4: Apocalypse (2014) 1h 35m

I can't remember which of the [REC] series I've seen before. I'm pretty sure I haven't seen the original because it's either never on Netflix or costs way too much on DVD because it's a foreign film.  That's kind of a bummer though because it's supposed to be really good.  [REC] 4: Apocalypse though, questionable at best.

It starts with a group of military guys sweeping building and planting explosives.  They apparently are poorly trained as their sweeps don't show that there are fuck tons of zombies they missed which end up wrecking their lives.  One ends up finding our main reporter girl and they escape only to wake up on a ship with a bunch of caged monkeys, a small crew, military, and scientists?  I don't know what the hell happened.  Neither do they, so I guess we're all in the same... you know what... never mind.

The rest of the film is outbreak city followed by one of those "this person must have the cure! Get them!" shit for a good half of the movie.  This was actually pretty boring.  Also, that outboard motor she's posing with in that poster... it's a weapon.  Pretty much the dumbest weapon I've seen in a zombie movie because those things are heavy as fuck and don't have huge blades.  A boat full of guys with a ton of guns, and you mother fuckers find a dumb ass motor.

I think this is one of those points where a franchise has just gone on too long.  The fucking zombies Naruto run at them sometimes which instantly made me hate them.  Then the subtitles were not always correct.  I may not know much Spanish, but I know when someone says "you don't have the balls," as opposed to "I would like to see you try it."

This movie also started with some things I might have been reading into waaaaaayyyy too much.  For example, the ship's name is the Zarathustra which I assume was in reference to the Neitzsche book.  The radio/IT person was wearing a Nosferatu shirt and they're all on a boat with this "monster" plague.  I'm probably just trying too hard to save this film by wanting it to be smarter than zombies on a ship in Spanish.

I give [REC] 4: Apocalypse 2 "judges you in Spanish" memes out of 5:

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Friday's Choice Cuts: Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (Capcom)

I mentioned during the last mini-Cut that our household purchased the latest in the Resident Evil series.  Now, we played through it once and I've since watched the Super Best Friends LP of it as well as the Game Grumps LP so I've seen a ton of stuff we missed on our sessions.

Resident Evil (or Biohazard as it's known in Japan) set the stage for modern survival horror video games.  When Resident Evil 4 was released it evolved the series out of survival horror and into a more action-horror feel.  RE4 and RE5 were both great games but moved further away from what the original fans wanted.  Resident Evil 6 was rough.  Really rough.  It became the turning point which lead to Resident Evil 7: Biohazard.

(A quick aside:  I know I'm totally skipping things like Outbreak, Dead Aim, the Chronicles games, Revelations, and Operation Raccoon city.  For the sake of this review I wanted to stick to the core series.)

Resident Evil 7 was herald as a return to survival horror, a game for the original fans.  When we first started playing this game we got super hyped on it.  There were jump scares, sneaking around while trying to solve puzzles and find items, and more importantly, a scary human element chasing you.

The story follows Ethan (you) going to a random home in the swamps of Louisiana after getting a video message from his missing wife, Mia.  You end up being captured by the Baker family that lives in the house and when you find your wife she seems to have these violent episodes where her personality switches.  You eventually are contacted by Zoe, the daughter of the family, who attempts to help you find the cure you need to help Mia and also cure Zoe.

A majority of this game was really good.  My issues with it come in the form of the boss fights.  Typical to an RE game you have boss fights where you need to find the target item or spot in order to win.  They broke up the flow of the game and killed the immersion.  To go from sneaking around a decaying house to suddenly having to fight a spider-person with huge orange eye targets all over its body is a jarring experience.

We also encountered a poor cut in this game where if you choose Zoe instead of Mia at this one point there's an event and cut but it still has you just become Mia instead of Zoe in the next scene which made no sense.

It's not perfect, but it's definitely a great big leap in the right direction.  The game looked amazing, played really well, and from what I saw of people doing the VR, it makes for a much more frightening experience.  There's DLC which revolves around each of the members of the Baker family but it isn't necessary and one is just a shitty mercenaries-mode esq thing where you play as Zoe to get food and booze for Jack to eat on his birthday.  There is some shit animation there as Jack appears to just eat the bottle of wine.  That said, I'm looking forward to when RE8 comes out... unless they fuck that up.

Best moments:
+ Jack doing sick burnouts in his garage
+ Old woman's face melting scene which reminds me of Raiders of the Lost Ark
+ Creep ass clockwork clown

They Look Like People (2015) 1h 20m

Rather than jump right in and write a review for this film, I took some space before returning to my keyboard.  It isn't so much that this was some deep and introspective film that changed my perception of the world around me (spoilers: it didn't), but more a combination of "what's this faux artsy crap," mixed with "does this cross a line?"

They Look Like People has a simple premise.  Wyatt's back in town and stays with his old friend Christian.  We find out that Wyatt has been getting messages one his phone about about some other kind of entity that have the ability to look like people.  There is meant to be some war between the humans and this other thing and he is one of the chosen to know about it and see the others.

In truth, Wyatt just is dealing with some form of mental illness which causes him to have these delusions and hallucinations.  We just keep getting dragged around with the concept of "is it real?  Is it just fantasy?... 'caught in the landslide, no escape from reality..."  Dragged because it's very obviously mental illness and there may be about two minutes where you question that before returning to obvious.

This film reminded me of a mix of Mark Duplass' Creep (which I covered previously here) and shitty mumble-core films like Funny Ha-Ha or Mutual Appreciation.  I fucking hate those mumble core films, so with the random scenes in here with barely audible conversations and sock fights... just fuck this film.

Fuck this film too for making the real "horror" here being mental illness.  I very rarely get soap-boxy on this blog.  I mean, I talk about my dick and punching stuff in the dick a lot on here, but...It's a cop out for a writer to just make someone that has a violent tendency or distorted reality have a mental illness.  People live with these diagnoses every day, don't fucking demonize them with your shit ass horror film.  You're not doing anything good.  It's bad and you should feel bad.  Shit dick.

I give They Look Like People 0 bottles of Zyprexa out of 5:

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Fairlane Road (2016) 1h 32m

 

Johnny Depp's "Tonto" make up should never be copied... ever!  Not because it's iconic or anything like that, but because it looks like shit and is probably offensive to Native peoples.  With that image in your head, a woman definitely ends up with similar shit on her face toward the end of this film.  So buckle the fuck up because we're taking a ride down Fairlane Road!

We start with a man going outside and falling to his knees while dragging his oxygen tank.  He goes to screen but it ends up being a phone ringing noise that comes out instead.  Jumping to our main character (of whom I didn't even bother to remember his name, and don't care enough to hit my IMDB bookmark to look up) we find out that he has a shitty mom that convinces him to go take care of his uncle (the man we saw at the beginning) for the weekend while his nurse is away.  Fuck this phone mom with a rusty manhole cover, she sucks so hard.  So our guy drives out to take care of his uncle who doesn't really want him there.

Eventually we found out that his uncle is less his uncle and more of his actual dad.  Not only that, but he came home drunk, knocked down his then pregnant (and alive) wife, and on the way to the hospital ran over a Native girl and left her by the side of the road.  Oh, also, because he was drunk and not paying attention that accident caused his wife to hit the windshield which lead to her death.  The mother of the Native girl was coming back for revenge and after finding out that uncle-dad did have offspring, she causes Jack (the uncle-dad) to accidentally kill his son.  We're then treated to the same intro sequence again only we get the scream instead of the phone ring.

Moral of the story:  Don't be a scumbag drunk?  Do a better job of keeping your kids away from the curses of Native people?  Don't watch this film?  Yeah, the last one.  Fuckin' ignore this shit's existence.

I give Fairline Road 0 cacti that phone mom can jam in her can out of 5:

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Navy Seals vs. Zombies AKA Navy Seals: The Battle for New Orleans (2015) 1h 37m

Did you know that the battle for New Orleans wouldn't take place in New Orleans?  It, in fact, takes place almost two hours away in Baton Rouge.  Nobody gives a shit about Baton Rouge though, but everybody fuckin' loves the idea of Mardi Gras so we'll say it's New Orleans.  I can see why this ends up becoming Navy Seals vs. Zombies later.  Not because it isn't in New Orleans, but more so because it's a shitty B-film which needs a shitty b-film title.

So NSvZ starts off with a Baton Rouge based press conference with the Vice President.  After a "...suspicious suspect at 9 o'clock" attacks a secret service agent and further zombies attack, the Seal team is called in.  We meet AJ and his wife here and his wife sucks. "Where are you going?  What are you doing?  When are you going to be back?"  Shut up!  He's a fucking Seal and he hasn't even had a briefing yet.  You literally just woke the fuck up to this!

The Seals go on, extract the VP, his chopper crashes in fantastically iffy CGI.  Mission fucking accomplished!  They're given a secondary target to extract CIA scientists that might have a cure.  You can imagine what happens there.  So after getting the scientists, loosing a few men, and AJ getting bit, the team convinces AJ to come with them because the scientists might be able to cure him.  Surprisingly AJ doesn't turn and is apparently immune due to the 7-Shots, which Google is not telling me what the fuck that is aside from a vaccine for dogs.  These mother fuckers are Seals, not dogs!  Unless they're seal-dog hybrids created by the military to shoot bees out of their mouths when they bark!!  First the "gay bomb," now this!  Seriously, the "gay bomb" was a real thing in development until I think the 70's or 80's... look it up.

This movie was kind of dumb.  Well, more than kind of, it's just dumb.  There wasn't anything original here.  It looks like it was shot on television film as opposed to movie film.  Some of the dialogue fails pretty hard.  Also, for being in the deep south, no one they encounter is rockin' a southern accent.  Not that the zombies should be stumbling around going "Y'aaaaaallllllll!  Brains y'allllllllll!" but if you're already fuckin' up the New Orleans part of your movie, at least keep the southern parts correct.

I give Navy Seals vs. Zombies 1 Confederate zombie costume out of 5:

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Kill or Be Killed (2015) 1h 43m

You can't outrun the washing machine is more like it.  For the 1900's, these people all have impeccably clean clothes.  Even the prisoner chain gain building the railroad at the beginning were taken away by Calgon.  I guess that just matches their well trimmed or shaved facial hair and perfect coifs, but they did put some dirt on their faces (just not their hands).  Oh, also, this isn't a fucking horror movie Netflix!  Get your shit together!

Kill or Be Killed follows a group of bandits in search of a hidden stash of money from a previous heist.  They start the journey by robbing a church and shooting their way out.  In the process they kill two priests.  This is important for the end, otherwise... you know... whatever.  Their journey west (or further west...) ends each night with one of the members dying in growing violent fashions.  Each body has a strange circular symbol on their arm.

As the nights progress. their leader continues to hear a bell ding in the darkness and every day he loses his mind greater and greater.  In the end he is the only one left.  He fakes his own death which leads to a boy walking out of the tall grass.  He then marks the man's arm as he jumps up from the ground and tussles with the kid.  Eventually he breaks the boy's neck and staggers until he finds the treasure.  He passes out from exhaustion to find the boy watching him.  He is left for dead by the kid who ends up being the brother of the other boy that was just killed and the son of one of the priests killed in the beginning.  See, that shit comes back!  But in that uncomfortable way... like herpes... except you can't just turn off or rate herpes with a thumbs down in hopes of getting less herpes.

So, not a horror film.  Maybe a thriller-ish type thing?  Barely a western.  Horses, revolvers, and racist terms for Native Americans don't make westerns... wait... maybe they did.  That's all John Wayne films were, right?  I always cared more about the Eastwood Dollars trilogy.

I give Kill or Be Killed 0 adorable pictures I found when Google image searching "cowboy ghost" out of 5:

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Darr @ the Mall (2014) 2h 4m

Netflix had a moment of "Remember when you liked that other Indian horror film?  Well now you get this one!"  My reply to Netflix is just "You filthy fucking asshole!"

I'm not sure what Darr @ the Mall is really meant to be.  Apparently there is the Amity Mall, which is built over what was the burned out shell of an orphanage.  An orphanage where a nun burned it down and killed a ton of children with only one child unaccounted for.  This info you don't find out until about midway through the movie.  Initially we just get a bunch of dead security guards, some sort of ghost figure, and the mall management planning a huge party for some superstar.  The superstar does get a song and dance number about piña coladas and how it's like the expensive alcohol of life... if I could side eye this movie from this blog then imagine that's what I'm doing.

I have no clue of the layout of this mall.  There's an ice rink, something like four levels, a huge club/bar, a basement and a bunch of other crap that makes no sense.  Nothing appears to be locked as four random 20-somethings run around the mall despite a sick cyber-goth-steampunk party going on.

The story of this film is just too disjunct or just presented in a poor order.  The acting and cinematography are all good.  I can't fault them for it being a bad film, just a bad story, which once again drags through 2 fucking hours.

I give Darr @ the Mall 2 shopping bag clip arts out of 5:

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Friday's Choice Cuts: Yakuza Demon Killers (IDW Publishing)

Keeping with the new format, Fridays are going to be a kind of grab-bag day for me to keep myself from getting too swamped with bad films.  Hence, Friday's Choice Cuts, where I going to cover something I like that's horror related.  So for our first entry in the FCCs I'm presenting the comic series Yakuza Demon Killers; written by Amit Chauhan, with the artist Eli Powell, and published by IDW Publishing.

Currently spanning four loose issues (with a hardback version of these on the way), Yakuza Demon Killers ties Eldritch horror with modern day Japan and throws in a sprinkle of Silent Hill-esq character design.  The art style reminds me of the earlier Walking Dead comics but more frantic.  Its sketchy moments add to action of the panels and helps to add a certain sense of "edge" reminiscent of the small publisher comics of the 90's.  Story wise, it's pretty solid.  If they never make a 5th issue then I wouldn't really be too torn up because I always like a good "the villain wins" reveal.  I know that's kind of a spoiler, but without the story you have no clue who I'm talking about anyway.

I bought all four issues at once solely based on the name, covers, and a quick flip through an issue.  I can say that I am definitely not disappointed with my purchase.  I recommend checking it out or at least waiting until the hard bound version comes out because I'm sure it'll have some extra stuff thrown in as well.


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1920 London (2016) 2h

I've seen horror films from India before but never an actual Bollywood horror film.  While there is only one short dance section, we still get treated to three or four montages set to epic songs.  The sets are elaborate and remind me of the early MGM big budget films.  Also, this movie is long as fuck for no real reason other than Bollywood makes long films.  Fuckin' way too long...

1920 London revolves around a prince/princess couple getting a cursed locket in the mail.  The prince becomes possessed by an evil spirit and the wife returns home to seek help.  Eventually she has to turn to her ex-love that at some point learned all kinds of magick during or after she sent him to prison.

Unlike most of the films I rant about on here, I'm not going to spoil this one.  I was really into 1920 London.  Sure, it was long and at one point I picked up my 3DS and played a bunch of Project X Zone because I got tired of another flashback/song section but everything that this film brought to the table was well done.  Some things I've seen before but nothing felt recycled.  They kept old ideas fresh and had some great scenes and special effects with it.  Some great special effects... not all.  There were smoke effects that looked really bad for modern CGI.  We also had a scene where an exorcism is being performed and the possessed girl is almost always in red light.  This may be for a visual sense of "evil", but it's also a very lazy tool to make bad make-up look good.  The classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde film had the character transitions done by switching the lighting color.  You couldn't tell because it was black and white, but he had colored make-up on that only shows up when a green gel was showing or a red gel was showing.  That's a little horror history.  I went off track with that...

I give 1920 London 4 possibly haunted lockets out of 5:

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The Dead Room (2015) 1h 20m

"Hey guys!  I have access to this empty house for the weekend, do you want to make a movie?"
"Sure, whatever."
"We'll call it 'The Dead Room' and it will have minimal explanation for what happens!"

And that's the story of how The Dead room was made... or at least how I assume it was made.  I'm sure this had a budget in the sum of money I will never see at one time in my entire life, but I honestly have no clue what was really going on at the end.

Two paranormal investigators and a psychic come to a house in the middle of fuck all New Zealand after being called by a family we never see.  The house is haunted by the ghost of a "giant" man.  Initially they think that he is trying to attack them to get them to leave but they discover that he is trying to get them to leave in order to save them.  Save them from what, you ask yourself (or you don't.  Whatever.  I don't blame you).  Save them from the mummified woman that is chained up in a secret basement under the house that you have to bust through the dry wall which you only know because of a ghost hand print on a thermal image scan.  That's a long sentence.  It took a long time for this movie to get up to this point when watching it.

Cops are called, the body is gone, and they realize the ghost was trying to save them from the Mummies Alive!  Everybody dies super fast and the ghost/mummy/witch/whatever moves at the camera quickly and we're done.

This movie sucked.  I was briefly excited at the prospect of this weird corpse in the basement but it's like they've been edging this whole time just to fucking shoot their spooky load in the last 10 minutes.  While I'm complaining about this movie (as it's pretty much what I do on this blog), the choice to have a cage of birds in this film was a poor one.  First off, the birds don't care when they get fed after supposedly not eating for a few days.  I've seen pigeons pull a knife on other pigeons for french fries after having just ate one.  Goddamn pigeons and their adorable switchblades!  Second, these birds are horrible actors as they don't react to anything the people are.  Third, their cage gets thrown across the room at our group of losers and in the next shot the cage apparently righted itself and the birds are totally ready to just nap.  Like the ghost was like "Oh shit! Sorry birds!  Let me fix that for you."  Birds fucking suck as actors.  Kick them out of SAG.

I give The Dead Room 1 parakeet out of 5, and this is only because of a mummy woman being chained in the basement and that was briefly cool:

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The Devil's Dolls (2016) 1h 25m

Netflix didn't even spell the name of this film right.  That's how little they cared about The Devil's Dolls.  When you have an image with the correct spelling for reference and you just completely ignore that to fuck right off and do your own thing, you really don't give a shit.  Kudos to taking that shit to an all new level, Netflix.

The Devil's Dolls are literally small dolls made out of coffin nails, string, and fabric.  After tracking down and shooting a serial killer, a police officer has them as evidence.  Like a true professional he just puts the box of them in the back of his car for his daughter to find.  She thinks that they are for making jewelry.

This child is not the brightest bulb in the bunch.  I have some coffin nails and they're heavy.  You wouldn't want to make a necklace out of dolls made from them.  She does though, and since they're imbued with the essence of Satan, the farts of a demon, or were up a donkey's ass, they have evil power which causes the person possessing them to snap and kill people and do sick graffiti in the blood.  The daughter has an episode while holding on to one and it's enough to get sympathy from those that see, so they end up buying the other necklaces.  Let this go to show that children are the tools of the devil, to work their child trickery, and make you get possessed by rejected Etsy arts n' crafts!

We find out that the daughter will most likely die from her exposure unless the dolls are collected and given to this film's "magical negro" character.  Never, in my entire life, have I seen someone take that trope so literally as they have a woman of color that is a straight up hoodoo/root worker trying to save the day with magick.  P.S.  the cause of this entire film... this woman right here.  She set this shit in motion by being a dumbass.  She does have a good fire-run into the swamp towards the end.  Speaking of which, I don't know where this film is set or I just didn't care.  I assume the South, probably Louisiana with the swamp and root worker and racism of that character.  Whatever.  It's on the fucking North Pole for all I care.

When I looked this film up on IMDB I noticed that there's a section for plot keywords.  For some reason there are "tied up while barefoot" and "tied feet" as two of the seven keywords.  I don't know who the fuck fapped to this film, but you're already on the internet.  You can find much better foot fetish porn without having to waste your time watching a shit movie for a freeze frame to do a five-knuckle shuffle.  Google that porn shit.  I'm not judging your fetish, I'm judging you for putting this shit film in your spank bank.  Close that account and open one up somewhere else.

I give The Devil's Dolls 1 Ebay haunted doll listing out of 5:

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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006) 1h 30m

One of the things I've always liked about our iconic monsters was the fact that we were given a quick back-story but had the assumption that these characters were different and evil to begin with.  Jason had deformities.  He was picked on and eventually murdered at summer camp.  Freddy was a child molester and murderer that was then hunted down and burned alive.  Leatherface came from a bunch of weird rednecks that were cannibals and he was based on the killer Ed Gein.

At some point in the mid-to-late 00's horror films felt the need to humanize these characters more, to further develop their backstory.  It's something I feel was unnecessary because every gap we filled in with our imagination was most likely scarier than anything that ended up coming out.  I want my monsters to be monsters, not humans.

So why this rant?  TCH:TB gave what was probably the dumbest set of scenes to set up Leatherface's background.  It starts with a meat inspector in a slaughterhouse going into labor/dying on the work floor while newborn Leatherface climbs out of her lady parts.  The baby is ugly so he's wrapped in meat paper and then thrown in the dumpsters out back.  He's later found by Mama who is going through trash for raw meat scraps to eat.  She takes him home and they keep him.

That's it.  Ugly meat baby adopted from dumpster.

Anyway, our protagonists are two couples where one brother is reenlisting and the other is drafted for Vietnam.  They end up in a wreck while someone I can only describe as Sarah Connor chases them down to rob them.  Maybe the cow they hit was sent back by Skynet to stop Matt Bomer from reenlisting.  The "father" of the family, now posing as a police officer, comes upon them, kills Sarah Connor which sets up Doomsday since she can't give birth to Edward Furlong now.  You can guess what really happens.  It's not like this varies much from the formula.

Now, the Vietnam war lasted from about '54/'55 until '75.  This movie has the feeling of wanting to be set in the 70's but is very obviously being made in 2000's.  It's so bad that even with the period pieces I couldn't buy it wasn't modern.  Couple this with the shit-ass back story and this movie was a hot turd.  There are some shining moments in this film.  First, some of the gore is great.  One of the girls gets pulled out of a moving vehicle by Leatherface sticking a meat hook in her shoulder and yanking her out.  It was one of those scenes you tense because you can feel it as you see it.  There's also a post-kill with the chainsaw where our boy Leatherface just swings the chainsaw so the body on it slides off and thuds into a wall.  It sounds simple but the shot is great.

Overall, despite liking some of the reboots or remakes, I wish my monsters were still just monsters...  not dumpster fuglies.

I give The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning 2 dumpsters out of 5:

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Midnight Meat Train (2008) 1h 40m

For years my mom kept talking up how good Midnight Meat Train was.  Previously I had watched about a half-hour of the film before falling asleep or doing something else.  You know, man stuff!  I find it fitting though that when I'm coming back in and really making a serious attempt at keeping up with this blog, the movie I would end up rolling would be this one.  I started this blog shortly after she passed away, partially out of our shared love of horror.  So this one is for you mom. *cue "Crossroads" by Bone Thugs n' Harmony*

Midnight Meat Train focuses around a photographer named Leon (Bradley Cooper).  After realizing a woman he photographed on the subway has disappeared he becomes obsessed with a series of missing person cases.  His obsession leads him to discover an underground cabal of murder in order to maintain a balance between the known and unknown world.

I think I might have made this movie sound way better than it actually is (sorry, mom).  Somehow a short story was adapted to an hour and forty minute movie (of course, Hellraiser was based on a short story too).  Mostly they did this by padding it with scenes of the train murders, which was probably smart.  Some of these kills were great and the CGI stuff of eyes popping out and arterial sprays made this much more interesting.  There were talks of Barker making this into a trilogy but, despite being a Clive Barker fan, I wouldn't watch this again, let alone two more films.  I've got man shit to do!

I give Midnight Meat Train 2 hotdog trains out of 5:

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