The Collection (2012) 1h 22m

I have never seen The Collection prior to this viewing, but before I even started watching it I had it confused with about five other films that came out around this same time.  All of them slightly interchangeable in content and plot but pretty much the same.  It also doesn't help that the villain here wears a modified version of the mask from Nightbreed, which, while I'm on the subject, what the hell are those masks made of?!  They look like hard plastic but then are some sort of weird fabric.  What is your secret?!

The Collection focuses on a nameless serial killer that has the news all atwitter.  While unconfirmed, it's believed that they kidnap at least one person from a scene.  One of the Collector's captives (Arkin) escapes at a night club slaying but he's replaced by the sole living woman.  This woman is apparently from a loaded family because some sort of mini-mercenary team lead by Lee Tergesen (Beecher from Oz, or Chett from the Weird Science TV show) grab the escapee and make him help find the Collector's hideout.  Then they force him inside despite his refusal.  Then it's some of the dumbest traps you've ever seen for about an hour.

This movie came out in 2012.  That's eight years after Saw, seven years after Hostel, and 17 years after Seven, and yet it still felt like it was ripping all of these movies off.  The traps were so absurd and overthought that they don't make any sense.  Tripwires are fine but three giant spikes coming down from the ceiling in a very specific spot seem a bit excessive.  This film also starts strangely similar to Blade.  Both have an underground nightclub where the audience knows everything is going bad.  The only difference is that while Blade had the "bloodbath," The Collection had a thresher from the front of a threshing machine just mow down an entire crowd of people.

While I'm complaining about things, I don't get the giant cubes of weird skeleton and body part things he made.  If they're just suspended in water then that would mean that the flesh would still decay in there, but if it's something like formaldehyde, well that shit would definitely not put a fire out.  It would make your face explode.  Explain this to me!  Honestly, explain to me anything this killer does because I don't get it.  He's eccentric just for eccentric sake and it stinks like a steak fart.

I did like how Arkin helped them find the hide out and his overall problem solving in this film.  Lee Tergesen is also a shining light in this darkness, but he has to die for the good of all mankind.  He's too pure for this world.

I give The Collection 1 Decker from Nightbreed out of 5:

Gallowwalkers (2012) 1h 30m

Mother fucking Wesley Snipes!  Fuckin' Blade!  Mother fucking Simon Phoenix!  A man that has vanished from the public eye (except for the one time my friend was his Uber driver).  He's back!  Or at least he was back in 2012 with today's film.  Is my excitement warranted?  Does Snipes live up to my hype?  Does this film do him justice and vice versa?  Ehhhh......

Gallowwalkers (yes, all one word) takes us to the old west where a badass looking Mr. Snipes is hunting down a specific individual all while doing Sub Zero head-rip fatalities and being a rad cowboy.  We come to find that the man he's looking for is a strangely skinless person that steals the flesh from a young man and harasses a cult known as Enoch's Hammer.  His actions are all because he thinks that Mr. Snipes killed his son.  Wesley picks up a sidekick at some point and then everyone meets on the farm where our hero was raised for some final gun shooting and rock throwing.

Okay, real talk, as hyped as I have been sounding with this review, this film isn't that great.  Wesley Snipes looks cool but when he talks it feels lackluster for someone that is meant to be a shoot-first-growl-talk-later type of guy.  As a "presence" though, he kills it.

The plot and character design are what saves Gallowwalkers for me.  If this were just a bunch of jagoffs in cowboy hats shooting each other because of "reasons" then I would've counted this as a total loss.  Instead we have men that steal the skin of other men (and in one case, lizards), carrying around a crucified mummy, all while hunting down Wesley Snipes.  On the other side we have sick dreadlock and grey-in-the-right-places Wesley hunting them down in return and ripping people's heads and spines off to satisfy his own revenge, and counter the curse upon him.

I made this movie sound sick as hell again...

I give Gallowwalkers 3 Simon Phoenix's out of 5:

Stitches (2012) 1h 26m

I don't like clowns.  I'm not afraid of them, I just think that they use their shtick to violate my personal space and it makes me want to punch them.  Y'all mother fuckers can still do the same shit a good two feet away and I'll enjoy it much more then having you creep all up on me like we're in the club.  Like Bozo, he knew not to creep up on people and he gave children prizes for playing with balls... wait a minute...

Stitches is a horror comedy where a terrible clown deals with horrible children at a party, or maybe that's just how kids and clowns are in Ireland.  The kids take their pranks too far and they cause Stitches the Clown to trip and fall on a carving knife... twice.  Well, technically the second time it falls on him.  The birthday boy, Tom, goes to visit the clown's grave and stumbles upon a satanic coven of clowns where he finds out that a clown that doesn't finish a party can never rest.  It's dumb but they need a reason for this clown to come back for revenge six years later.

I have actually watched Stitches previously because my husband has an odd inclination toward clown horror films.  The first time around I wasn't a fan of it.  I expected more and it wasn't what a wanted.  Going into it this time though I knew that while the plot line is something straight out of a B-film, the work here really isn't.  In fact, if you like practical effects with a lot of fake blood then this could be just for you.  There are a ton of blood splatters, decapitations by punt or by explosion, severed arms, ears, genitalia, and just a touch of CGI when things like the umbrella spear wouldn't have worked well live.

The humor is like a low-grade Beetlejuice and the character development is kind of weak.  It's also high school kids so it's mostly tropes or just shitty teenagers.  I can't fault it too much.  I'm not expecting some sort of epic backstory development from a movie about a clown that returns from the dead.  This second watch-through did cause it to rise up a bit in my internal head rating.  I won't have it on my shelf, but it's probably background at a party good.

I give Stitches 2 clown horns out of 5:

Day 8: Mine Games (2012) 1h 32m

You never forget the first time.  Unless it's something like your first birthday when the mind hasn't formed enough to maintain a proper memory.  Then sometimes you want to forget your first time.  Like the first time you accidentally mistook a fart and pooped a little, or the first time you masturbated dry and a bit too rough so you got that brush burn on your dong... am I right guys?

Mine games falls into the latter of these options.  Not so much like sharting yourself, but kind of like the uncomfortable rub of your sore dick on the inside of your undies.  While this was my first time watching it, I wish I could forget this cliche plot and the boring entitled characters.

A play on the term "Mind Games," (because this film involves a mine and poorly plays with one's mind) we follow a bunch of lame people as they go to a cabin for a weekend or some length of time.  I really can't recall.  On the way up they almost hit someone in the road and wreck their van.  Luckily the cabin is close enough to walk to.  Over time they find the mine with strange things happening including finding some of their own corpses.  Eventually they realize they're in some sort of time loop where the same events keep happening over and over.

Don't waste your time with this though.  The only good part was probably the last five seconds of the film where you see something happen to break the cycle.  The rest of this film made me just want to play the game Until Dawn which is slightly similar but instead of the cycle it has cryptozoological shit mixed with a butterfly effect of player choices.  Play Until Dawn.  Don't watch Mine Games.  Just don't.

I give Mine Games 0 Miner 49er's from Scooby Doo out of 5:

Day 14: Para Elisa (2012) 1h 15m

Have you ever heard the Patton Oswalt bit about his TiVO?  I feel that way with some of the movies Netflix puts in their horror listing when I'm counting to the number I rolled.  It seems that since I enjoyed some of the foreign horror films I've watched on this blog that Netflix has the idea that I must like all foreign horror.  "But you like the horsee shows! NO TiVO! BAD TiVO!"  Bad Netflix!

Para Elisa comes to us from Spain and revolves around a spoiled shit of a college girl whose mom won't lend her 1000 Euros for a trip with her friends because the mother had just paid for her to take a trip to London.  Her drug dealer boyfriend sees a poster for a babysitting job, calls the number, and hands her the phone.  She eventually goes to find out that the girl she is supposed to baby sit is a grown ass woman that the mother has completely fucked up in the head.  After being drugged, our leading lady wakes up to realize that she is not meant to babysit, but to become a living doll for the daughter to play house with.

This movie wasn't for a horror fan.  This is more for the vanilla movie watcher that wanted to watch something scary.  Yes, the premise is kind of fucked up and the mother/daughter relationship is bizarre but it really didn't keep me invested in the film.  In addition, a leading character that I instantly did not like (as obvious above) really gave me no one to root for.  Plus, you see the ending coming way to early.  I know that's a constant complaint I bring up on here, but I want to be surprised.  Just once.

I give Para Elisa 1 creepy doll out of 5:

Day 11: Kill Zombie! (2012) 1h 30m

Don't be distracted by the hand throwing up the Dio horns on the poster.  I feel like there should be another hand next to it making an asterisk.  I don't know how, but it is that other hand's responsibility to figure it out!  People need to know that this movie isn't as rock n' roll as they hope.

Kill Zombie! comes to us from the Netherlands.  It's mostly with subtitles except for the Russian (which might have just been Russian sounding gibberish) and the few sentences in English.  While I'm mentioning the English, words like "zombie," "bitch," and "fuck/motherfucker," haven't been translated to Dutch.  So a lot of the time when you know they're saying something else, the subtitles were something entirely different.  Also, as a native English speaker (although my writing may not always reflect that) I'm kind of disappointed that the use of "bitch" as a negative term for another person has been adopted by other languages.  'Tis a dark day for our vernacular history...

Back to the matter at hand,  Kill Zombie! is a poor man's combination of Shaun of the Dead with a bit of Scott Pilgrim.  A few survivors attempt to survive with a bunch of meh jokes.  One of them wants to go save his "girlfriend" and on the way zombie hijinks ensue.  Suddenly, vampires!  The end.

There wasn't much substance here and it's hard to be a zombie horror comedy with something like Shaun of the Dead having done it so well.

I give Kill Zombie! 2 bowling ball hands out of 5:

Day 18: Would You Rather (2012) 1h 33m

Oh god!  That fucking poster... I don't even know what the onamonapia would be to describe the internal wretch that my body did when I first saw this.  The noise for me watching this movie though is a solid "meeeehhhhhhhhhh."

Would You Rather is exactly what you think it is.  Rich douche bags assemble a group of individuals under the pretense of giving them money for simply playing a game.  We're not aware of why each player is assembled except for one girl named Iris.  She is playing to be able to get her brother a bone marrow transplant so he won't die.  The game itself is an extreme version where they go around the table with the violent dares until each round ends.  Someone does cut their eye with a razor.  Fuck that scene because not much makes me squirm but, goddamn man!

At its core, this is just another torture porn film.  Giving people the option to choose doesn't take away from that fact.  It just makes your villain more evil.  They try too hard to make Iris overly "human" in this, and the "shock" at the very end becomes all too obvious because of this fact.  I really didn't give a fuck about any of the characters in this, even Iris.  The bad guys made me hate them, but everyone else was just flat.

I give Would You Rather 1 hilarious looking dude bending a sjambok out of 5:

Day 12: The Seasoning House (2012) 1h 30m

The Seasoning House isn't really a horror movie, unless it is meant to show us the horrors of how terrible humanity can be.  The movie revolves around kidnapped girls in a military run area that are then drugged and sex trafficked.  The main character is a deaf girl that "takes care" of the girls.

That's all I'm writing.  I'm not going to attempt to make any jokes about something this real.  It was uncomfortable to watch, so I feel that this movie probably accomplished what it really set out to do.

I give The Seasoning House 2 stars out of 5 for brutal honesty:

Day 4: Here Comes the Devil (Ahí va el Diablo) (2012) 1h 37m

Returning back to our continent and our neighbors to the south, Here Comes the Devil is a Mexican horror film in which I couldn't give two shits about after watching this.  The pacing was slow and added nothing of suspense to it.  The story was boring as hell.  The acting was fine in it, so I can't fault anyone there.  However, rather than my usual "I'll explain this film so you don't have to watch it," tactic I take with bad films, I'm just going to type up my notes for it so you can hopefully create a better film in your head.  Some of this would make good book titles.  Here we go!

Instant lesbians!
Naked whaaa?
Period
Is this gonna be weird incest?
Did the devil bang her?
Is that the Mexican Captain Spalding?
You can't be a badass w/a filet knife
That's not the same knife
That's not how throats work
Wait. WTF was the point of that lesbian scene?!
If "Lucio" is lucifer, fuck this shit
I wish this woman had a sweet mustache too
Ewww weird satanic incest
Wait, real kids are dead
Party clothes? Church trap?
Did she fart on the fake child?!
Ah, fuck this movie!
Satan can't drive for shit!
Why grindcore now?!

The end.  I don't know why a movie with almost no music aside from atmosphere instrumentation suddenly had fucking metal growling over the credits.  I guess they figured they dropped the Satan ball on the 1-yard line and needed to pick it up somehow to score.

Here Comes the Devil gets 0 devil lotería cards out of 5: