Ladronas de Almas (2015) 1h 28m

I know nothing about the war for Mexican independence, so I can only take this film as  documentarian fact!  With that in mind, here's my sum up of how Mexico won its independence:  Sisters that use ancient magick killed the Spanish with zombies of their own men.  They then used the treasure of gigantic coins that are the size of my head to establish a government and make a rad flag with an eagle giving no fucks as it sits on a cactus and devours a snake.  I someday dream we will have a flag that cool.  Way to lame it out, Betsy Ross!

I gave a bunch away there, but Ladronas de Almas takes place on a villa in Mexico.  A group of shady men claiming to be rebels roll up and ask for shelter when in truth they're looking for the lost treasure that was carried by missing Spanish soldiers.  When men start vanishing these "rebels" show their true colors only to have to fight off some pretty badass sisters and zombies of dead generals.

This film is a series of peaks and valleys for me.  The overall story was interesting enough to keep me present in the film, but there is an over abundance of time spent focusing on the faux rebels.  I would have liked to have seen a bit more about the sisters and their magick practice.  Maybe they were playing it safe so that when the intensity of the sisters is revealed it hits harder, in which case I have no room to complain because they come out swinging when the turn happens.

The zombies in this film are a good mix of the Haitian vodou zombie and the standard horror film zombie.  We have a creature that maintains some sense of identity and reasoning all while being a reanimated corpse.  You don't see a zombie throwing counters and blocks too often on celluloid so it was a good switch-up.  All in all, if you're tired of the zombie wave that crashed long ago, then this isn't for you.  If you want something a little bit different, and don't mind subtitles, give this a shot.

I give Ladronas de Almas 2.5 maps of Mexico out of 5:

The Devil's Candy (2015) 1h 19m

All this time and metal got it wrong.  Satan doesn't like super fast riffs or growling vocals coming from someone in corpse paint, he just wants a single drop-D chord played in the most boring manner over and over.  That, and apparently child murder, which I didn't sign up for when I started listening to Gorgoroth.

The Devil's Candy might be one of the most metal horror movies I've ever watched.  A small family move into a cheap farmhouse where two old people were killed by their son (which I thought was Kyle Gass for part of this film, but isn't).  The father is a painter and a semi-serious metal head.  After moving into the house, the father begins to hear strange music from the walls and has moments where he blacks out while painting only to come to and see he's created some of the sickest shit ever put on a canvas.  Connected to the murderous son, the father and family are now faced with something straight out of some Dark Throne lyrics.

As a whole, The Devil's Candy is a total package for a horror film.  We have solid and down-to-earth characters being wrapped up in this supernatural element and having to fight back against that.  They do too.  Holy fuck do they and we get a rad final death.  It's so rad that I almost stopped typing to throw up the horns so you know it's metal as fuck!

My favorite thing in The Devil's Candy is the art gallery where the father is trying to get shown is named Belial.  Belial is a fallen angel that is said to have been created after Lucifer and is possibly the first angel to fall to Earth during the angelic revolt.  The owner of the gallery talks of being "represented by Belial" and having to "sacrifice," basically in order to gain material wealth.  I thought it was a good touch.

I give The Devil's Candy 5 Emperor albums out of 5:

Demonic (2015) 1h 23m

I've mentioned before that I have a pretty large library of books in regards to magick, folklore, etc., so when this film introduced a sigil it referred to as the "circle of the left hand path" I was at a loss.  I had never seen this sigil before so I did a quick Google search only to find that the main places this image existed are in this film and some crazy spiritual warfare site that looks like it was copy/pasted from Geocities.  I can only assume that the person that runs that site saw this movie and took it to be a documentary.  The website also had all the sigils drawn in sharpie and scanned, which leads to a hilariously bad Cross of Leviathan.

Demonic takes place in a house where a series of ritual murders happened years prior.  Police are called out after a caretaker finds the lock broken on the home and they find a sole survivor among the bodies.  While the cops attempt to make sense of the scene, we get told most of the film in flashbacks.  Our survivor is the son of the only woman to escape the previous murders.  He, his girlfriend, and a group of semi-friends go to this home in a half-assed attempt at ghost hunting.  As the unexplained happens around them they decide to do a seance (because they're fucking idiots) and everything goes to hot fuck!

The ending reveal of this film was unexpected and I liked that.  What I didn't like was another one of these "Let's go to this haunted house and find spooky things!" movies.  Do you hear me film makers?!  No more of this Blair Witch/Grave Encounters shit!  It's been done, to death!  Fucking buried and in the grave, never to return!

I will say, in this film's defense, the meat of it was good.  The special effects and camera work were done well.  The set design was just that perfect mix of old house and creepy ritual site, and the acting was solid.  It's a shame the overall content of the plot couldn't have been worked out to be stronger.

I give Demonic 1 Dark Ritual MTG card out of 5:

Patchwork (2015) 1h 26m

There's been such an interesting 80's revival happening over time.  Maybe it's starting to taper off a bit, but we've had this odd nostalgia with the uptick of 80's inspired synthwave and all of these remakes of old beloved things or just homages to that time period.  Stranger Things hit that hard, the soundtrack to Drive (which, let's be honest, is fucking great), and the It remake.  I know the original It came out in 1990, but I get some leeway here.  So with a poster like I have posted above, I was expecting some sort of nod or throwback, which I got concept-wise, but it was so much more...

Patchwork is a horror comedy where Dr. Frankenstein hung out with Herbert West and they just happened to have three recently deceased women to combine into one.  However, instead of being of a single mind, each of the three women still exist inside of this creature.  It's kind of like an old episode of Herman's Head only each of them can be in control at the same time.  Their plan is to find out who did this to them, but along the way they turn their investigation into an outright murder spree.

I'm getting this out of the way first, but before the 3-in-1 woman unifies her look, she looks like a genderswap of the anime character Blackjack.  Seriously, look at this shit!

After I got over that revelation I got really into this movie.  There's a reference to Reanimator with a glowing green-filled syringe being the device that reanimates the body, a character playing the original Castlevania and doing the Frankenstein's Monster/Hunchback boss fight, and probably the greatest 15-seconds of film ever with the release of the Owlcat.  The acting is fantastic as our ladies' body movements are jerky and broken in all the right ways.  We're also treated to a wonderfully done rampage section in a frat house where she just puts in ear buds and dances/dispatches douche bags left and right.

You should definitely add this to your must-watch list for horror films if you haven't seen it yet.  It's just a fun time with a great take on body horror.  I will most likely add this film to my personal collection when I have the money.

I give Patchwork 5 surgical staplers out of 5:

Night of the Living Deb (2015) 1h 25m

Both on and off of this blog I've watched a lot of horror comedies.  Sometimes you want to be able to laugh while also seeing gore as opposed to laughing at the poorly done gore.  John Dies at the End, Tucker & Dale..., Shaun of the Dead, Deathgasm, all great examples of mixing hilarious comedy with fantastic horror.  So what happens when a horror comedy does neither their horror nor their comedy aspects well?

Night of the Living Deb doesn't have much going for it in the plot department.  Deb attempts to hit on a guy without knowing his fiancé is there and pissed at him.  They end up getting drunk and passing out back at his place.  The next morning is awkward but then so are the zombies that exist everywhere now due to water contamination by the water company owned by the guy's father.  That's about it.

There's an attempt at an awkward romantic angle here but the dialog feels really forced and disingenuous between our leading characters.  It's only made worse by 90% of the lines in this film attempting to be jokes.  I had a few laughs while watching this but to be bombarded with mediocre humor consistently made me dislike this film even more.

If I had to sum up Night of the Living Deb in a few words then I would say this is the equivalent of some college friends realizing one of them had a video camera and trying to make a zombie movie in a weekend.  Okay, that's more than a few, but we're not quite at "shit sandwich" level of bad with this film.

I give Night of the Living Deb 0 copies of Shaun of the Dead out of 5:

Pay the Ghost (2015) 1h 34m

I've been spending a lot of time recently looking into prop design, especially when it comes to stop motion animation.  One of the main things you need when doing any stop motion is a foundation.  Normally it consists of a table-like structure so you can make sure your puppet doesn't fall on its ass every time you pose it.  The foundation is extremely important because it's going to hold your set, your characters and, at its essence, your story together.  I mention this not because I would like to work for Laika in their design department (but seriously, Laika, that would be my dream job, hit me up) but because this film, stripped down, had a really interesting story concept for the foundation.  Unfortunately, instead of making interesting characters and a great setting they chose to whip out their collective parts and piss all over the foundation.

Pay The Ghost is Nicolas Cage being a distant father while attempting to get tenure at his university.  He misses trick-or-treating with his family and to make up for it he takes his son to a Halloween carnival around the corner.  His child promptly vanishes after asking Mr. Cage if they can "pay the ghost."  Skip to a year later and ol' Nickleback has put together a crazy board of missing kid cases and finds connections between Halloween, missing kids, the phrase "pay the ghost," and eventually a poorly constructed witch story where they take actual pagan symbols and give you half stories about them while they make a bunch of shit up to fit their narrative.

I'm probably not doing it justice but as I said, the foundation of the story was good.  Witch woman steals three kids everyone Halloween to avenge her lost children from a time when people didn't wash their ass regularly.  I'm on board with that.  From there though it starts to get muddy.  There are some great scenes where the witch absolutely wrecks people with some sort of ghostly Falcon Punch but mostly it's Nicolas Cage playing a crazy Nicolas Cage character and everyone else is along for the ride.  I was expecting a "he saves his son but sacrifices himself" ending but nope, everyone's happy, except me because I watched this and because the sequence after the first credits made it seem like they had a sequel in mind.  Fuck that!  I'll pay a ghost to not have another of these movies exist!

I give Pay the Ghost 1 piece of Joss Paper out of 5:

The Lazarus Effect (2015) 1h 23m

Why does this movie poster have two taglines?  Why aren't Mark Duplass, Evan Peters, and Donald Glover listed on this poster as well?  Is she really possessed because I'm not sure if we ever get confirmation of that?  Why does this image remind me so much of the Resident Evil movies? So many questions, so few answers.  Just a red faced woman staring at my nightstand as I type this.  I think she's wondering if I'm ever going to finish all the books there with bookmarks in them (spoilers: probably not).

The Lazarus Effect introduces us to an odd mix of individuals working on an experiment to reanimate dead animals.  Finally the process works with a dog but shortly after their grant is cancelled and the lab and experiment are confiscated by big pharma.  In order to get their data back they break into the lab to recreate the experiment but Oliva Wilde is killed in the process.  Mark Duplass brings her back to life but upon her return things aren't entirely okay with Ms. Wilde.  Crazy brain functions, penchants for violence, psychic powers, and her soul possibly still residing in Hell lead to some crazy highjinks as this movie made me wish I was watching Flatliners.

I think that my big issue with The Lazarus Effect is that I can't really shit on it, but at the same time I wasn't impressed by it.  There are tons of these movies that come out each year backed by a huge budget and a good cast but they don't bring anything interesting to the table.  They're safe, and when it comes to horror I don't want safe.  I want a horror movie that keeps me up at night, that I can't watch alone in the dark.  I want new and terrifying things that I'm awed and frightened of.  Films like this are the equivalent of someone trying to scare you with a ghost costume made out of a bed sheet.

I give The Lazarus Effect 1 Lazarus Pit out of 5:

The Similars (a.k.a. Los Parecidos) (2015) 1h 29m

My family didn't get cable until I was in high school.  Prior to that a majority of my sci-fi/fantasy watching were Brisco County Jr. and the random things you got on Saturday afternoon.  Mostly Xena and Hercules unless you got stuck with Cleopatra 2525 (which my husband just sang the theme song to me when I asked him if he remembered the name of it).  Once I had cable I had access to the Sci-Fi Channel (now just Syfy, I think) and their airings of Twilight Zone, especially the New Years marathons which became background staples at celebrations from high school on with friends.  My love of The Twilight Zone runs deep, so when I started watching The Similars I felt that I had found a long lost episode.

Over the course of a single night in 1968, eight individuals find themselves trapped inside of a bus station just outside of Mexico City.  Their small world descends into chaos as the two employees appear to be suffering from strange injuries and are claiming that one of the men there is the devil.  While this is going on we receive updates via radio that the rain outside isn't earthly and is part of some strange world wide weather phenomenon.  The people inside want out, they want answers, and when they get them it's not what they expect.

I loved this film.  It's colored with a grey tonality over it but as everything progresses the color fades from the film totally until the end.  The turns this movie takes are on par with anything I'd see Rod Serling pull.  We even get a narrator voice over at the beginning and end.  I really couldn't find anything bad about this film if I tried.

It does remind me of two specific episodes of The Twilight Zone though.  The first being The Eye of the Beholder (where a woman is getting surgery to become "normal" but it fails and although she looks beautiful to the viewer, her race doesn't look like that and she is the ugly one).  The other is It's a Good Life which I won't go into as it gives some of this film away.  If you're familiar with it then you already know.  And knowing is half the battle.  GO JOE!

I give The Similars 5 TV Guides with Rod Serling on the cover out of 5:

The Duplex (2015) 2h 38m

I'm going to be completely honest here.  If someone offered me a house for a super cheap price and I then found out it was haunted then I'd be okay with that.  I feel like after the 10th time of the ghost showing up to try and scare me and it would be one of those "OOOOOOO! Oh goddamnit! You're masturbating again!" moments then he'd just fuck right off.  Bustin' makes me feel good...

The Duplex is our first Nigerian horror film here on 30 Days of Plight.  A couple buys a home for an insanely cheap price only to have the pregnant wife repeatedly seeing some sort of specter move about their house.  Eventually the spirit causes the woman to miscarriage and it leaves with the baby.  This becomes the turning point for the man to see the ghost instead and then finally attempt to deal with the issue.  It's kind of dickish.

This film is rough around the edges.  The elements are all there but the script is just too long, the effects are behind (in comparison to U.S. films), and the plot needed some tightening up.  I did enjoy that the film brought in the idea of the entity being some form of "spiritual warfare" being waged by someone in the village.  We tend to assume that how people practice their faith is similar to what we know but there are variations everywhere because of exceptions that had to be made to integrate a new religion... other than swords, guns, and colonization.

If I had to sum up The Duplex then I'd say it was a roller coaster, but a shitty roller coaster.  I was all on board for it at the beginning but after two hours of the slow incline I began to wonder where the hell this was going and then suddenly it was over and I was told to exit the ride.  Then I get off the ride to find out someone stole my Motley Crue "mirror" I won in at the dart throwing game because people are scum!  That never happened but I'd cut a fucker for stealing my Motley Crue mirror if I had one.

 I give The Duplex 1.5 Bible Adventure cartridges out of 5:

13 Days of Christmas Day 7: Krampus (2015) 1h 38m

I almost impulse bought the DVD of Krampus this year.  I hadn't seen it previously but I remember a decent buzz existing around this film.  I couldn't rectify the $10 price tag I saw on it at the time though.  I like Adam Scott, but not $10 like Adam Scott.  Maybe more like $5.  $4.99 + tax like him.  Let's go with that.

Krampus takes it weird and makes it weird.  An awkward holiday get together becomes an even bigger tragedy after Max's letter to Santa is read aloud and calls out his family on most of their unspoken shit.  In a fit of anger and embarrassment Max "loses faith," tears up the letter, and scatters it to the wind.  This apparently summons Krampus, his minions, and freak snow storm that would make the North East blush.

I was disappointed with this film.  Despite an excellent cast (Adam Scott, Toni Collette, David Koechner) Krampus didn't know if it wanted to be a dark or light horror film.  It's loosely based on the lore of Krampus (like Krampus Unleashed was) and the only tie-in to its roots was that the grandmother of the family had summoned the entity when she was a child in her Germanic village.  The pacing was also a bit off but I think that this may have been more of an editing issue with how the scenes and passages of time flowed together.  Finally, the Shrek-esq gingerbread men can suck a fat fuck.

Conversely, Krampus did have some really great creature designs.  There's some sort of owl creature with a doll face that I want as a pet.  Krampus himself looked amazing and when we get our first look at him he's running from rooftop to rooftop in the most menacing manner.  He also had his own version of Christmas elves that were all wearing uniquely carved masks and need their own horror film.  Additionally there was a visual element that never gets any verbal confirmation, but each person that Krampus takes has a snowman made in their image on the family's front lawn.  I was hoping that this became a bigger part in the film (such as the snowmen would break into the house) but it never came to pass.

I think that the hype around Krampus hurt it here.  Once again, the U.S. got a giant collective boner over learning about this anti-Santa but putting a budget and some well known actors behind this really didn't pull it together for me.  At the same time I feel like my gushing for Santa's Slay earlier in these 13 Days of Christmas colors what I want in a film.  If Adam Scott was replaced with Kenny Omega or Krampus replaced with Bray Wyatt then I'd be more into this.

I give Krampus 2 ripped Santas out of 5:

Ava's Possessions (2015) 1h 29m

Someone reviewed this film as "The Hangover but with a lot more demons."  It's up there on that poster.  If The Hangover has become the standard description for any film where someone has a loss of memory and tries to figure out what happened during that time then that sucks.  The Hangover was a terrible movie and aside from the point I just touched on is not relatable to this film at all.

Ava's Possessions starts with an exorcism.  Once cleansed, to avoid jail time from her month long demon possession, Ava agrees to go to a recovery group for people that were inhabited by a demon.  Much like a regular 12-steps recovery, Ava has to seek out the people that she wronged to apologize but also to put the pieces together from her lost time.

This film had some great casting. Wass Stevens (that I know from being Max in Daria) was the demon possession counselor, Deborah Rush (Strangers With Candy) played Ava's mother, and mother fucking Carol Kane (Adam's Family Values / The Princess Bride / Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt / a million other awesome things) as the magick shop owner all killed it in Ava's Possessions.  Also, after a ton of possessed girl movies, it was great to see one just treat the possession with a recovery program.  It feels like a much more "modern" view instead of bumbling attempts with religious archaism or an obsession with The Exorcist.

Also, I want to give a quick shout out to whomever the person was that had to do the research for the demonic possession spell portion of the movie.  It was kind of a hodgepodge of stuff but I recognized the parts that were (if I'm remembering these details right) a Hermetic spell to ask for the favor of a demon.  It looked as the sigil on the floor was either Goetic or Enochian.  So thumbs fucking up for that.

On the flip side to this praise, the things I liked in this movie were overshadowed by the fact that it felt more like I was watching this for three hours as opposed to an hour and a half.  There was always something going on but the pacing just felt off.  Which leads me to my other complaint of the third act of this film had its own third act where they pushed all these reveals and explanations to the last little bit.  It felt really wrapped up well but instead of letting it ride they threw more and more onto you.  You probably aren't going to make a sequel to this.  This isn't like when Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm street were made and you needed to add a scene on to make a franchise.  Just let it go!

I give Ava's Possessions 2 Regans out of 5:

Pod (2015) 1h 16m

Hey.  We haven't sat down in a while and talked about a good tin-foil hat style movie.  What happened to those kind of films?  I feel as though that plot has just vanished from existence recently.  Maybe it was the government getting too worried about us getting close to flat earth lizard people working for the Illuminati and running the world's governments while the Greys prepare to enslave humanity!  Did I miss anything there?

Pod revolves around a set of three siblings.  After receiving a strange message from one of the brothers, the remaining two siblings fear for the brother's mental stability and drive out to check on him.  What they find is a crazed man talking about being experimented on while he was in the service and that he has captured one of the "things from the pod," which is locked in his basement.  Is this man losing his grip on reality?  What's in the basement?  How did he fire off a bunch of shots from a bolt action rifle without using the bolt? *cue X-Files theme*

I have two complaints which I'm going to throw here first because they're brief.  First is the initial dialog between one brother and the sister where he informs her about the message. This is the most uncoordinated five to ten minutes of script of the film.  It felt bumbling in the way a play goes awkward when an actor forgets the order of their lines and the scene is a mismatch of dialog.  It could've been much shorter and to the point as opposed to this drawn out hostility.  Second, I'm not entirely sure what the point was meant to be in regards to certain character development points.  Why was the sister drinking so much?  Was the scene with the guy she just slept with leaving and her drinking to show that she's not as straight laced as the one brother?  If so, why is she such an emotionally lose cannon in the film?

Those few things aside, after that awkward scene, I really liked Pod.  While I could tell where things were going to go most of the time, it would occasionally swerve into the other direction just enough to leave you a bit freaked out.  The creature looked great when we get the reveal and was this great mix of alien/cryptid/undead design.  The acting from the military brother and the sister were fucking stellar.  The brother's manic behavior and later the sister's breakdown and crying actually resonated with me.  What can I say?  I was entertained... except for about five minutes where I got distracted on my laptop with the Ryan Gosling not eating his cereal video, but that's entertainment in itself.

I give Pod 3 Dana Scully rolling her eyes out of 5:

Tremors 5: Bloodlines (2015) 1h 39m

You know what's delicious? Bacon.  You know who was in the original Tremors?  Kevin Bacon.  You know what Kevin Bacon is doing right now?  NOT FUCKING MAKING TREMORS SEQUELS!

Tremors 5 is a hot fucking mess.  The original Tremors came out in 1990 so the fact that this release is 25 years later should let you know that they're really cashing in on that current hot Tremors' cash.  In the first movie it was just "Graboids" that existed in the ground.  Think Shai Huluds in middle America.  I didn't keep up with the films or lore but apparently there are multiple types now including one that shoots fire out of its ass.

Speaking of fires, this fucking dumpster fire takes place in South Africa.  The monster hunter/survivalist that has apparently taken over as the main character for these films comes there after a poacher tricks him into thinking he's from some wildlife organization.  Jaime Kennedy (who I don't really have anything against, but whatever) is a professional douche bag/side kick during this too.

I didn't care about Tremors in 1990.  I won't care about Tremors X in 2090.  This franchise needs to die and stay dead.  I don't even know who the audience was for this movie.  Is it for people that only buy movies from the $5 bin at Wal-Mart?  Because if that's the case then fucking score for you.  The really sad thing is that this movie has decent acting and better than average CGI.  I hope all of these people got paid well, because I shop in that $5 bin a lot and I wouldn't buy this shit.

I give Tremors 5: Bloodlines 0 Shai Hulud out of 5:

The Rezort (2015) 1h 33m

When working with a fuse one should give themselves enough time to get to a safe spot after lighting it.  Sometimes someone fucks up and it blows up in their face.  Sometimes it takes too long and becomes more trouble than it's worth.   Then there are times where it takes just a moment too long and lures you into that sense of security...

If The Rezort were a mixed drink, you would take one part Jurassic Park, one part The Most Dangerous Game, and blend it all with a large amount of the Dead Island video game series.  After an almost apocalyptic viral outbreak caused the living to fight the dead, an island exists with the last remaining infected on it.  Vacationers can come to The Rezort to have a controlled zombie hunting experience and work out whatever fantasy or internal anguish they might carry.  You probably have a good idea what happens in this film.

I mentioned that false sense of security previously because this film has that slow burn that takes you to the point where one can assume exactly how the rest of this movie is going to play out.  Instead though, when it blows up, there's a pause and you find out that there were some fireworks mixed in with that explosion.  It leads to some serious "oooo's" and "ahhh's".

The character development is done really well.  They don't waste time trying to hide anything about the "surface" people and the characters we want to know more about get teased right until we are given that informational relief.  I personally loved that one of the women came to the island to deal with her PTSD from the previous "war."  The end of this film delivers some fantastic reveals and creates a couple more questions that I would love to have answered.  Just not in a sequel form.  Maybe in short film format.  I could live with that.

I give The Rezort 2 copies of Dead Island out of 5:

Day 14: Ludo (2015) 1h 30m

I can't recall the last time I've had a fever dream.  Thankfully, I rolled Ludo which might as well have been some sickness induced dream spiral that unleashes some strange darkness that dwells in the innermost working of the human soul!  Either that, or a mess of crap which makes no sense.

I can only sum up Ludo as such:  Oh, these young people are going out for a night on the town.  When did they start playing this game.  Wait, are those zombies, cannibals, vampires, or ghosts?  What is going on?  Why is there suddenly a sexual assault attempt?  Who the fuck are these people?!  Wait, this is based on some board game Jumanji shit?  Ohhhhh, that's who those people are.  Wait, who is this person that sucks on the flute?  Is the last half of this film just trying to explain the first half?  Is this over yet?

The real underlying plot is that there is a forbidden game known as Ludo (which is a real game based on Pachisi)  Apparently an alchemist had it locked up in a safe where the key was a flute and his son and (maybe daughter) son's girlfriend unlock the safe and play the game.  The alchemist finds them and curses them before killing himself and spraying them with his blood.  The game then makes them hunger eternally but mainly for blood.  These kids just get caught up in the bullshit.

Ludo did a poor job of story telling in an attempt to either seem artsy or just to add more mystery to the film.  While it would have large sections of consecutive time, there would be these broken up sections shown in flashes or quick time jumps where you would have no idea what was really going on.  I found it hard to follow and it made me loose interest.  When I did get the explanation of the plot it was so lengthy, absurd, and full of these quick jumps that I just didn't care.

I give Ludo 0 Pachisi games out of 5:

Day 12: #Horror (2015) 1h 41m

I'm just old enough that when I was young I still got to enjoy the tail end of after school specials.  I wasn't old enough though to really understand them.  At four they're less "after school" and more "background noise while playing He-Man."  With this film I didn't know if it was trying to be more of an after school special or one of those ill informed films for paranoid parents.

#Horror follows a group of spoiled tween girls while they basically Instagram their dumb time hanging out with each other.  Some real life in-group bullying happens, then it kind of goes online (although everyone is still pretty much together) until one of the girls is kicked out of the house and she wanders the wilderness like some fucking wild animal.  Her dad comes after a phone message and scares the shit out of all the girls.  Then the girls begin to get killed while all being live streamed or having photos of their corpse uploaded.

This movie was trash.  It felt like it was done by someone so disconnected from the use of social media that they made a lot of choices based solely on what they thought tween/teens did with social media. They keep trying to throw in assumed elements of social media on the screen but it just looks like some sort of "my first Geocities page: circa 1993."  Also, for a film using a hashtag in its title, it would misuse them when putting them on the screen.  A hashtag is not quotation marks, you don't put #killer#!!  That doesn't work!  Seriously!  It's like someone's unhip mom went to Wal-mart and bought the bin full of emoji pillows for their child because their kid texts a lot.

I give #Horror 0 poop emojis out of 5:

Day 11: What We Become (2015) 1h 25m

When I think of the general Norway/Sweden/Denmark area of Europe I tend to think about black metal, and ABBA, but mostly black metal.  So when I rolled the Danish film What We Become and saw this poster image I was hoping it was going to be bloody with satan and cool shit.  What I got was a 28 Days Later knock off.  So what I became was bored.

What We Become starts with a viral outbreak in a small city area.  It quickly becomes a militarized zone where those that turn are pulled out and taken somewhere to be killed and the survivors have to live just on small rations.  Shit goes down hard thanks to our "teenage" jagbag, Gustav, sneaking out and basically leading to things getting out of control way faster than normal time would allow.

These characters were lame.  The teens are oversexed and the parents appear absurdly laid back at times.  Gustav sucked so hard as a person that the greatest monster in this film is his sheer existence.  The course this film takes is just a slow crawl of what 28 Days... did much better.

Apparently this is the first "post-apocalyptic zombie" film to come from Denmark.  While I'd say this were more early-apocalypse than post-apocalyptic, I wish it would have been more inventive.  There were some good visual elements but at one point the windows to the outside world get blacked out and I assume that this was put in as a plot point only because they couldn't keep filming with the background showing people doing their normal life things and breaking the immersion.  I could be wrong, but it felt like that was the reason.

I give What We Become 1 copy of 28 Days Later out of 5:

Day 10: The Nightmare (2015) 1h 31m

Full disclosure:  In the course of my adult life I have had three events of sleep paralysis.  All three happened while I lived in the same apartment in Pittsburgh, PA.  Aside from those three, I have never had any other cases of sleep paralysis that I can recall.  Why am I disclosing this?  Because while the title and this poster make you think that The Nightmare could be a horror film (and despite being in the "horror" listing), it's actually a documentary about sleep paralysis and other individuals that have had experiences with it.  The disclosure is so you know that when I comment, I'm not just offhandedly making a comment with no background in the subject matter.

So despite my initial disappointment with this not being a real horror film, The Nightmare let us hear stories from people all over the world in regards to their experiences with sleep paralysis and what they saw, heard, and felt, not only through their own words but also through decent dramatizations.  What was interesting here was that when we're being presented these stories each one seems to build off of the previous in some way.  The only exception to this being that guy that was getting tickled by aliens.  I don't know what the hell was going on with that one.

Looking at this analytically, the commonalities between these create the question: why do these similar scenarios exist?  To talk about my own experience, only once did I ever feel a physical presence.  The other two times where one that I knew something was either there or around but I couldn't feel it, and the second was more along the lines of the symptoms of the "old hag" you read about in association with cases of sleep paralysis.  In this film there's the talk of shadow men, one of which may be wearing a hat, one that might have been an incubus, and the dumb tickle aliens.  Seriously, fuck the tickle alien thing.  Although he did make an awesome Halloween mask based on them.

I can't really give this a review as it's not a horror movie really.  Sure, things that happen in real life that can't be explained easily are scary as hell.  Some people view these experiences as an attempt at demonic possession, or UFO encounters, or just a state of sleep in which you feel you're awake but aren't and thus can't control your body despite your consciousness telling you that you should be able to.  I know this goes in the opposite direction of the rest of this blog, and fucking runs that way, but I'm going to attempt to wrap this up.

Since I'm not rating this film I will say to watch it if you have an interest in the experience of sleep paralysis.  While you do so, take it with a grain of salt.

Fuckin' tickle aliens, man...

Day 9: The Girl in the Photographs (2015) 1h 35m

I don't know so much about this being a "brutal thriller" any more that I could assume that Wes Craven would have been proud of this (this was the last film he had any involvement in prior to his death).  I, however, don't really find this to be "brutal."  I feel like people that use this term in cases like this don't listen to metal.  Although, that quote is from Fangoria... so maybe they listen to some weird metal I don't know about that specifically sings about white guys having henchman that are bald, refuse to wear a shirt or underwear, don't speak, and live in a weird basement room where he apparently didn't find enough woods porn to cover more than a small section of the concrete wall.  Actually, that does sound kind of brutal...

The Girl in the Photographs revolves around a woman that has a stalker but doesn't know it.  She only knows that there's something fucked up happening because she keeps finding photos of murdered females that the killer leaves specifically for her to find.  He is also posing his "models" in similar poses as a famous photographer that came from their town.  This photographer (Kumar from Harold and Kumar) decides to return home to find the photos and do a shoot for inspiration.  He's a total dick sandwich with mayo, questionable mayo.

This is pretty much the whole film.  I was bored as fuck.  The ending was actually decent for TGitP but, in this case, the ends do not justify the means.  If that were the case then this should've been done in a short film format and then I could go back to playing Dark Souls III.

I give The Girl in the Photographs 1 woods porn mag out of 5:

Day 5: Sendero (Path) (2015) 1h 25m

You know, I was really excited to get back into doing this cut.  The holiday was over, I got my shit sorted, so I turned to Netflix in hopes that it would just feel the motivation and child-like energy I was ready to put back into this blog.  Then it gave me Sendero.  A film that moved slow and tried sooooooo hard to be edgy that all I could do was fart on the couch and count the minutes until I could play video games.

Sendero is set in Argentina and exists in some sort of time warp where I can't tell if it is the 80's or if it's modern times and this section of Argentina is so far behind that 80's style only just arrived.  We meet a group of 20-somethings getting together for a road trip.  For all horror films, this plot is fucking dead!

The group eventually encounter a woman sitting in the road, bleeding from multiple wounds.  Another vehicle shows up and the two guys inside get out and wreck our co-ed New Kids tribute act.  From here we meet the "family" of the two guys and some sort of mother-ish figure.  I'm not really sure what she is because she seems close to the same age, if not younger, and just dressed older.  This is where the ultimate fuckery begins.

We're treated to some confusing dialog, unnatural and excessive props (such as a web of chains keeping a guy chained to what I assume was a free standing window frame), and hyper-aggressive sexual displays.  It's like they saw an Eli Roth film and thought "we can do that," and then got drunk while coming up with ideas of what's edgy.

Here's a great example.  The guy chained the window is getting checked on by one of the two "family" guys.  The family guy eventually whips his dick out and starts jerking it in front of the chained man.  The other family guy, comes in and makes a scene about how the prisoners "aren't ours" and to never do that again, but then proceeds to bend the first guy over a chair and butt fuck him in front of the chained guy.

It's such a "man, this is fucked up, but let's make it more fucked up!!!" scene.  It was things like this that made me roll my eyes.  Add the fact that the subtitles were 1-2 lines behind what was being said onscreen made this film a goddamn knife to my eyes!  I rolled my eyes right into a knife, then rolled knives around my orbital cavities!

I give Sendero 0 Argentinian flag out of 5... but also a million couch farts: