Friday Final Cut!

We did it!  After some rockiness a few months ago we got this cut started and finished!  I don't know if it was worth it because holy fuck were there a ton of zeros this time.

Actually, I do really like doing this.  Despite every piece of trash I slog through I did get some great ones.  The winner this time would probably be Beyond the Gates since I bought the damn movie.  The loser is whatever that fucking Indian horror movie was for 8-year-olds.  Fuck that shit.

I also want to say thanks for everyone that stuck with me while I got this rolling again; the occassional comment or message to help with the site, every like on Facebook.  All of that stuff.  Mostly though, thanks for reading the curse laiden posts which sprawl across this blog.  I'm not sure how the fuck the "views" thing works really but it says we passed 10,000 views in just over a year.

So please, share this with your friends, your family, people you want to make uncomfortable with swearing and talk of my penis, fellow horror fans, you know...

This will now be the down time between Cuts.  We'll start back up on Sunday, July 9th.  I'd do it sooner but I have a stack of DVDs and Blu-Rays I've purchased recently and would like to watch and not have to type about.  Don't forget you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter at 30daysofplight.

I'll be right back...

The Den (2013) 1h 21m

I thought that "found footage" films were going to be my worst film adversaries.  I completely forgot that there is a greater evil out there.  For I have seen the face of death, and it grinned at me while showing me one of those films that take place entirely on webcam/facetime.  Don't get me wrong.  I love when someone can take new technology and use it to make something cool.  But this... this is the devil committed to celluloid.  This is watching your own children die.  It's film genocide.

The Den is a website that might as well be Chatroulette.  Complete with pervs, dicks, trolls, and masturbaters.  Elizabeth gets a grant to spend a bunch of time on The Den in some form of shitty social experiment.  She starts to get cyber stalked for a bit before she ends up witnessing a murder on the site.  From there he friends and family begin to get attacked and murdered.  The whole thing ends up being some sort of weird network of violent murders that put the videos on some fucked up pay site.  Elizabeth ends up dead but only after she gets taken to some sort of underground murder space where people are kept to be murdered.

I wish this could have been scary.  It has the foundation of something realistic but rather than staying in the realm of everyday life it runs and jumps off the cliff of the absurd.  I'm not saying this isn't a possible scenario, it's just so intensely extreme that it makes it feel more unrealistic.  Although, now that I think about it, there have been a lot of news stories of large groups of people being freed from some crazy kidnapping shit.  Who knows?  Not this film, because its webcam/phone cam bullshit made this horrible to watch.  At least there was one cool sledgehammer kill.

I give The Den 0 dens out of 5:

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Dreamcatcher (2003) 2h 14m

It's been a long ass time since I've read a Stephen King book.  My husband has read a bunch though and told me that the movies are always bad versions of the books because they miss a lot of explanation.  Holy fuck does this movie have a lot that feels random and I just need to accept.  Dick biting lamprey creatures, the greys, psychic powers that might as well be the Shining, Morgan Freeman, Morgan Freeman's giant eyebrows, mind libraries, neurodiverse individuals with greater psychic powers, Jason Lee...

Dreamcatcher has a group of friends that all share some form of psychic connection.  We find out that these are gifted to them by Dudits, the neurodiverse boy they rescue from some teenage assholes in a really uncomfortable scene.  When the group is getting together for one of their planned Winter cabin bro-outs the animals all start running away and then a dick biting lamprey comes out of some stranger's butt.  From there we get more aliens, psychic crap, and then even weirder alien stuff all mixed with Morgan Freeman's crazy eyebrow extensions and covert military stuff.

Like I said, there was entirely too much going on in this film and not enough explanation.  It had a decent cast, acting, and effects (for 2003) but I still don't know why the fuck Morgan Freeman was so obsessed with this shit or ordered there.  Or why the fucking monsters went straight for the dick!  The ending was not bad but once again more fucking random alien shit and then it's just over.  Done.  Just like I am with this review.

I give Dreamcatcher 1 lamprey out of 5:

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Tank 432 (aka Belly of the Bulldog) (2015) 1h 28m

Everyone knows that one person that pulls the "Oh, look at how deep/crazy/etc" shit, but they push it rather than let it be natural.  You know, like the Hot Topic kids 10 - 15 years ago that were wearing t-shirts that said shit like "You laugh because I'm different, I laugh because you're all the same," or "I do what the voices tell me to."  I feel like Tank432 was written by one of those people that became an adult and still wanted to do that "Look at me!  Look at my art and how weird I can make it!"

A group of mercenaries have two hostages and are attempting to escape what seems like the woods behind someone's house.  We don't get an explanation of the hostages, the battle, or the mercenaries.  Instead we're dropped in balls deep in whatever this mess is.  The hostages look like Guantanamo Bay prisoners with orange jump suits and black hoods.  Once again, no explanation to their dress.  Oh, they also find some girl in a shipping crate that just screams.

The group eventually makes it to an old abandoned Bulldog tank in the middle of a field.  After the medic gives everyone a tranq to help them sleep they wake up to find out the door is jammed.  They have a few nightmare/dream scenes that are bad art school projects too.  While trapped in the tank they find some powder named "Kratos" (which is essentially Cheetos dust) and files on each of them.  Everyone's freaking out and then someone they left behind (due to a bad leg injury) shows up outside talking about crazy shit and dumping Kratos all over himself and in his nose.  They run him over with the tank because, why not?  Everyone ends up dead in the tank except for one guy but then a bunch of hazmat suit guys with flame throwers show up and torch the tank.

From there we hear a siren and a notice to clear the testing area because the next experiment is about to begin.  We then get a new soldier emerging from an underground shelter and looking real freaked out.

This movie tried so hard to be some sort of psychological thriller/horror deal but it was a bunch of "I don't give a fuck," with a twist ending that I couldn't be bothered with.  I get it.  You tried to be all "OOOOOOOO! Look at my movie ending!  Did you see that coming?!  How about that dream shit?  I'm so edgy!"  and to that I say *leans to the left and rips a loud fart*.

I give Tank 432 0 kawaii tanks out of 5:

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Most Likely to Die (2015) 1h 30m

I ended up going to see Wonder Woman before coming home and watching this.  That was a mistake.  Not seeing Wonder Woman.  That movie was awesome. But you can't have a steak and then be served bologna and expect it to be the same.

Most Likely to Die is a C-grade movie with D-list actors.  Seriously, Jake Busey?  Perez Hilton?  Get the fuck out with this shit.  The plot is that a bunch of old friends get together for their own celebration before their 10-year reunion.  I don't know what school they went to because the yearbook had all of the seniors listed as a "most likely too..."  We didn't have that.  I also went to a school in the fucking mountains.  I still don't know what kind of school they went to... but I digress... though not really.

Everyone starts dying based on what their "most likely" thing was.  Apparently everyone was a scumbag rich kid asshole and then continued to not quite measure up as an adult.  A murderer dressed in a cap and gown with a paper maché mask is your killer.  The only good thing about this guy is that the mortar board had some razors along the edge which made it like Oddjob's hat.  Between a sweet headbutt/throat slash and a Kung Lao fatality, that cap was the best thing in this film.  The killer was the class clown guy but more out of some psychotic personal guilt thing in relation to the person they bullied all through school.  Then after he's dead a mysterious person dressed in the same outfit steps up and takes the mask from joker's corpse and puts it on.

I hope there isn't a fucking sequel to this.  I would rather watch the Chipmunk movie sequels than another one of these films.  At least those have Jason Lee in them.  Fuckin' Jake Busey... all he does is creep around for like 10 minutes and then gets strangled!

I give Most Likely to Die 1 graduation cap out of 5 only because of the sweet graduation cap kills:

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Carnage Park (2016) 1h 30m

I feel like the person that wrote the description for this film was given a couple of blurry .jpgs and told to "figure it out."  It made it seem like this was going to be a mix of vigilante justice and survival instincts.  The actual movie was more of a broken wish for grindhouse goodness and a clown's tear in the lonely desert.  You figure out what that means because it just came to mind when thinking about this.

Carnage Park's main protagonist is a woman kidnapped during a bank robbery.  After a very Tarantino/Reservoir Dogs intro where one robber is driving the car and the other is shot in the backseat yelling about how he is about to die, they both end up dead.  The former is killed by a crazy most-dangerous-game-esq sniper.  The sniper then sets up the kidnapped girl to hunt her in the fuck-all California desert.

I seriously thought this film was over at three different occasions before it actually ended.  I found myself wishing that each time it would have.  They drop the grindhouse flow by the end of the first quarter of the film with only smatterings of it coming back.  They have the Tarantino beginning but then end it very Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  Add about an hour of just a woman wandering in the desert and that's all this film was.  I got up and dropped a deuce and just left the film playing because I knew I wouldn't missing anything of merit.

I give Carnage Park 0 Mr. Pinks out of 5:

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Friday's Choice Cuts: Nightmare (aka Atmosfear) (1991: A Couple 'A Cowboys/J.W. Spears & Sons)

image from Bloody-Disgusting.com

Since I mentioned it earlier this week while covering Beyond the Gates I figured today's Choice Cut would be the Nightmare VCR board game (or if you're in other parts of the world it might be known as Atmosfear... which is weird because I definitely remember commercials for both as a kid).

As far as the board game portion goes, your goal is simple:  Collect keys and then make it to the center.  In the center are pieces that each player wrote their own "nightmare" on and you have to pick one and hope it isn't yours.  If you do this, and accomplish it all before the VHS is done, you win.  You'll have cards to play at specific times too which will require you to yell or do something in order to gain an advantage.  The fate cards are like "chance" in Monopoly where it might be good or bad.  Each of your characters are taken from religious, folk, or actual history.  For example, you could play as the blood countess Elizabeth Bathory, or the king of the Ghede in Vodou, Baron Samedi.  Of course they just have their name and list them as "vampire," or "zombie" so it's not getting too in depth there.

Now for the tape part.  This is the golden portion of the board game.  With the first game you get a random guy in shitty lighting and a potato sack hood as the "Gatekeeper."  He will assign you to do things, banish you to the black hole, free you from the black hole, or just make you do weird stuff before continuing.  As you get in the last 10-15 minutes of the game he gets fucking bat shit crazy with making weird noises and saying crazy stuff.  I can see why, if you were a kid, and you played this in the dark with some friends, you might piss your TMNT undies with this guy popping up randomly and screaming at you.  As an adult it's just hilarious but you'd be surprised how quickly people get into it.  You can actually check out the video on YouTube, or just watch some of it now here:

There are supposedly two sequels to it with booster tapes and then a reboot of sorts that came out in 2004.  As I mentioned, I have the second game (or the first booster) but I haven't played it yet.  I have watched some of the tape and it's pretty much the same thing only this time with Baron Samedi as the gatekeeper.

I lucked out and found this for $3 at a thrift store around 10 years ago.  I'm sure it could be in others as well because who really owns a VCR any more?  However, you can play this just via YouTube and there are pictures of the board and rules online so you could basically do your own.  Although if you want you could just put the video on at a party or make it into a drinking game.

Die Prӓsenz (The Presence) (2014) 1h 23m

ARRRRRGGGHHHHH found footage films, you are the bane of my horror loving existence. Initially I blamed The Blair Witch Project for foisting this affliction upon us.  I have nothing against Blair Witch as a film but it was the first major breakthrough for a found footage film.  Then things like Paranormal Activity came around at a time when promotion through social media became a big thing and that was the final fucking nail in the coffin.  People saw they could spend a few thousand on a film and might turn some sort of crazy profit.  Instead we get a huge pile of shit.  If I wanted to watch "real" people react to spooky shit then I'd set a camera up in my neighbors window and make ghost noises at 3am.  Actually, in this neighborhood, that'd get me shot.

The Presence has one interesting thing going for it and that it takes place in a castle.  I forget the Europe just has them scattered all over the damn place.  Otherwise it's the same stupid plot with the same I-don't-give-a-fuck-about-you characters, just in German.  I only know how to count to four, swear, and say "you hate me," in German and that all comes from video games and Rammstein albums.

This film doesn't even warrant a full review, just this rant piece I've created here.  Seriously though, if you're going to do a "found footage" film, please make something new and fresh and original.  No more "this is haunted, let's go with cameras!" or "what's this weird ghost shit in my house?  Get a camera!" or even the fucking Cloverfield shit.  Something new!  N-E-W!  Crapface!

I give The Presence 0 German castles out of 5:

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The Ouija Experiment 2: Theater of Death (a.k.a. The Ouija Resurrection) (2015) 1h 26m

Netflix is still busted and only showing 27 choices in the Horror category.  I might have found a way around it but soon it may involve pulling out a d4 to add to the shenanigans.  I feel like a white person in an infomercial just fumbling dice and remotes before making an over acted "well ain't that some shit" face.

Anyway, that leads us to today's film, The Ouija Experiment 2: Theater of Death, or The Ouija Resurrection, or The Ouija Resurrection Ouija Experiment 2: Electric Boogaloo.  That poster doesn't know what it wants to be and I don't blame it.  Actually, who the fuck is that child on the box and why is Courtney Love stalking her?!  None of that happened!

The scariest part of this movie, for me, was at the very beginning where they splice in super fast summaries of the first film in between the credits.  It was frightening because I realized that at some point I watched the first film and had wiped it from my memory!  Luckily, if you haven't seen the first one, you don't need to.  TOE2 is a meta film that takes place in a supposedly haunted theater where the people that made and acted in TOE1 are hosting a spooky night there.  I refuse to believe that fans of the first film could fill a theater as well.

I don't even want to go into the plot because it's all awful.  Just know that some weird inborn child-woman ghost comes back due to not saying "goodbye" on an Ouija board and almost everyone ends up dead except for a woman with an English accent and a girl that looks like Death from the Sandman comics.  The acting is shit and the writing isn't much better.  They have a gay character but he seems like he was written by someone who doesn't know a single gay person or their only experience is with some super camp queen that was set to 11 all the time.  I'm glad he gets killed by his trendy scarf... asshole.  You're wearing a t-shirt!  You don't need a scarf indoors!  I hope that ghost bit your dick off!

Actually, now I don't get why it was a ghost but then in the end of the movie it was a physical person chained to a wall.  In fact, by the last half of this movie they had obviously given up.  The camera just gets shaky, a woman holds a knife with her thumb wrapped tightly around the blade (don't worry, you can see it's spray painted cardboard), and despite having their throat cut a guy manages to crawl around and then survive?  Fuck this shit.  How do these assholes get to make two movies and I haven't even written one yet?

I give whatever the fuck this movie's real title is 0 Ouija boards out of 5:

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Beyond the Gates (2016) 1h 24m

Netflix was broken for some reason and only loaded 27 movies when I looked up the horror section.  This sucks because I rolled 113 as far as what film to watch.  Being the resourceful person I deny being but really am, I chose one that looked the most 80's: Beyond the Gates.

Are you old enough to remember VHS board games?  Ones like Atmosfear/Nightmare?  If you weren't then what it consisted of was a board, pieces, and a VHS movie you interacted with while playing.  I own Nightmare, and thanks to a friend burning the VHS to a DVD for me I've played it dozens of times.  I also have the sequel but haven't played it out of laziness.  A majority of the time is just rolling the dice and moving your piece while collecting things, but every so often you would get screamed at by some old guy in shitty make-up about calling him "Gatekeeper" or being banished to the black hole.  You know, stuff you pay people on the internet to do now.

So why am I bringing up weird nostalgia you don't care about?  Beyond the Gates is a horror film based around a VHS game with the same name.  After their father goes missing for months, two brothers are left with emptying and closing down the family video store.  They end up finding the game in the locked office and the tape in the VCR.  The brothers watch the start of the tape but then bring it home to show one of the brother's girlfriend-wife-person-thing.  The woman on the tape tells them that the only way to save their dad's soul is to play the game.  So the game ensues...

This was a fucking rad movie.  I still had 15 minutes left and I was already on Amazon buying the blu-ray of it.  It has its b-movie moments but I feel like they knew what they were making.  Nods to the 80's, including some sweet synth score work, combined with a well thought out plot and some great gore and kills.... fucking stellar.  Also, I didn't realize this while choosing it, but the cast has some clout (at least to me).  One of the brothers is Chase Williamson who plays Dave in John Dies at the End, David Bruckner who directed V/H/S and Southbound has an appearance, and Jesse Merlin who does the voice of Fang in Street Fighter V (okay, less horror, more geek related) has a small roll.

I give Beyond the Gates 5 mac n' cheese spiral boxes out of 5 (because I ate too much of it while watching this:

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Dead Silence (2007) 1h 29m

I swear that there is an 80's horror film that has this same poster.  At first I thought it was Silent Night Deadly Night 5 but that just looks like a terrible X-mas card you get from some relatives you forgot with their shit kid on it.  Then I thought it might have been Dolls but that's just a baby doll holding her own eyes.  The only thing I can narrow it down to is the Goosebumps book Night of the Living Dummy.  I also thought this was a remake of said imaginary 80's film that I fucking swear I remember seeing on the shelf in Phar-Mor's shitty video section!!  Why do you haunt my life?!

Dead Silence must've taken every single horror thing they could think of and whipped it at the wall.  Whatever stuck became the plot of this movie.  Buckle the fuck up because here we go: Jamie (the actor that plays Jason Stackhouse in True Blood, I'm not looking up his name again) gets a weird ventriloquist dummy in the mail from an unknown sender.

I'm stopping this already to say that if you get a fucking ventriloquist dummy in the mail and you didn't order that shit, burn the fuck out of it!  Burn it and then pee pee on the ashes!  If you did order the ventriloquist dummy then you are a terrible person and I should pee pee on you.

So this dummy shows up and murders Jamie's wife by having her jaw distended and tongue cut out.  We later find out that this is actually a common for people in the town.  Apparently there was a famous female ventriloquist that murdered a child and had he tongue cut out by the family and some other towns people.  Here spirit haunted her 101 (yes, fucking 101) dummies (which were all buried in coffins around her) and when one of the dolls showed up the ghost killed. OOOOOoooooooo spooky.  Oh, also, she only kills you if you scream.  You can do anything you want, but if you scream then you're dead.

There are a ton of times I wanted people to just burn something and be done with it.  Old house/performance hall that was her home: don't look around in it, burn that shit to the ground.  Dummy that probably killed your wife: torch it.  Random pond you have to cross to get to the house/hall: dump oil in it, burn it.  Light that shit up like Lake Erie in '69!  Dead Silence: eh... maybe wave a lighter under it and if it burns up then it burns up.  No big loss.

I give Dead Silence 1 piece of nightmare fuel out of 5:

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The Pack (2015) 1h 30m

Australia is well known as one of those places where everything that can kill you pretty much lives there.  Land, sea, air, nowhere is safe.  So when people from Australia make a horror movie about packs of wild dogs then I assume they must have some insane steroid laced dogs using bath salts mixed with meth on their continent.

Unfortunately, The Pack doesn't go any further than a home invasion movie with dogs.  In addition to that, dogs are shit actors.  I'm pretty sure I mentioned this when I covered Cujo but you can't have a scary dog when the dog's posture is happy or submissive.  Just because you taught it to snarl doesn't change other dog behavior.

Also, this film isn't frightening in the least.  As i mentioned above, maybe in Australia it is but I was just bored through this.  Also, the daughter sucks in this.  She doesn't play any kind of major role but all she does is complain that she's stuck there and why can't she move to the city.  Mother fucker!  They're foreclosing on your house!  That's why you can't!  You need a job that doesn't rely on your parents or your parents' shit!  Maybe Millennials are the true horror... or whatever generation this girl counts for.  The fuckin' worst generation.  Damn, I'm old...

I give The Pack 0 adorable fluffy puppies out of 5:

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Friday's Choice Cuts: VHS Massacre: Cult Films and the Decline of Physical Media (2016) 1h 20m

I've made it no secret that I'm a fan of Troma Films.  So recently I was on their website looking through the sale items and I noticed this gem:  VHS Massacre: Cult films and the Decline of Physical Media.

I'm old enough to remember the mom and pop video store.  Originally our local pharmacy had a small video rental section.  After that we had a place called Video and Sound where you could rent Beta and VHS tapes.  It eventually evolved to VHS and game rentals.  Our local grocery store opened their Iggle Video which was a full sized video store in one corner.  I remember turning 18 and getting cards for both of these places as well as the Blockbuster which eventually came to our town.  As of now all these places are closed.

VHS Massacre examines how VHS rentals, and especially mom and pop stores, helped independent film companies during its boom.  I still remember seeing VHS sleeve art like House or Critters and being scared of it as a tiny child, but those stuck in my mind.  Having that availability and visual presence helped to culminate that era of cult film.

This documentary gives us a decent history lesson, bringing up studios, films, actors/actresses, and even personal memories which I had forgotten about.  It also goes into detail about how corporate structures made it hard then, and make it hard now, for the indie companies to get things out or even keep up.  At the same time they tackle how people view things like torrents, where some use the term "piracy" but, in the case of Lloyd Kaufman, he uses the term "file sharing" and claims it has been helpful for people to see the films they put out.

The climax of the film is the actual VHS Massacre which was a competition where the people involved had to find VHS tapes where they would watch any random five-minute section of it to find the worst one.  The winner is well deserved.

All in all, this is a definite watch for anyone that is a fan of cult film.  The people in this film are very passionate about how they fit into this world.  It presents a ton of info that I never even considered and gave me a bunch of directions to pursue to not only expand my knowledge but to find some great movies I would be missing out on otherwise.

"Never give up the fight for truly independent cinema!"

Hellions (2015) 1h 20m

Canada is a mysterious land.  Even though I have visited you many times I will never quite understand the mystical north.  This film has made you even more of a quandary as to what the everlasting fuck are you?!?

Hellions is a mess of a film with pink gels on all the lights.  It opens with the most romantic things teenagers can do which is blow smoke in each other's faces while the other person is talking.  The girl has to leave to go to the clinic where she finds out she's preggo.  Seventeen and up the duff from the town's local badass teen.  She returns home and turns down trick-or-treating with her mom and younger brother because teens are too cool for that shit.  Only smoking, baths, and pregnancy for this girl!

Since she stays home she hands candy out to the children that come.  They don't live in any kind of neighborhood so the fact that someone even walks into the middle of nowhere Canada for candy says a lot about the quality of their candy.  The kids end up being part of a weird harvest ritual where they want the baby.  This fetus grows at an alarming rate and the kids keep killing people.  The last half hour is basically an acid trip in pink.  It's film effects, cgi exploding pumpkin patches, repeated scenes of kids in weird masks... I can't even describe all of it aside from the fact she wakes up in the hospital and had the baby.  Dumb harvest baby.  Shit movie.  Fuckin' home of Nickleback.  CLOSE THE BORDERS!

I give Hellions 0 fart men out of 5:

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