Hungerford (2014) 1h 19m

I don't know about you, but if I were an alien planning some sort of invasion I don't think that I would start in a small UK town.  The idea of starting low key in a suburb is good; less people to notice, easy to take over an area quickly, etc.  I just don't feel like picking somewhere on a large island would work out well in the long run.  Unless it was Australia and then you learned to weaponize the hellscape of fauna that exist there.  You know, this is all if I were planning an alien invasion...

Hungerford is set in the UK, where a film student decides to film every aspect of his life for an entire week.  It just so happens that this week is the one where a parasitic alien race decided to start invading the Earth via his small town.  Armed with cans of deodorant, an axe, and a camera, our film student and his flat mates all set out to secure a love interest while attempting to fend off these alien brain slugs.

This movie felt like it was a really long trailer for a video game.  The ending came and I felt like I needed to pick up my PS4 controller to help them fight off the invading hoard.  With that in mind, Hungerford does toe that Shaun of the Dead line.  It just lacks the humor and charm that Shaun has.  I think they realized this too during filming because there is a mention of Shaun of the Dead by name.

Hungerford is a bit slow and we're given a lot of shaky cam footage which gives us zero visual content.  Otherwise, Hungerford is pretty solid.  By the end, it satisfied me enough to be pleased but left me open to wanting more.  I doubt that sequel will ever come, but I'll throw in a few bucks to a Kickstarter or whatever if they announce it.

I do want to address that this movie sent me down a huge personal research spiral because I couldn't remember what movie, TV show, book, comic, or video game had a similar type of alien.  Something that was invisible until the connection was broken, slug-like, and controlled the host through the back of the neck.  The closest I found was 1994's The Puppet Masters but that's not what I'm thinking of.  For some reason I keep thinking it might be in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but that feels wrong too.  So if anyone knows what I might be thinking of (as that's not vague at all) please hit me up on Twitter @30daysofplight or e-mail me at 30daysofplight@gmail.com because it's driving me insane!

I give Hungerford 3 Eldritch Parasite MTG cards out of 5:

Antibirth (2016) 1h 34m

What the fuck did I just watch?  For real,  what the fuck is this film?  I spent so much time trying not to fall asleep and then just... fuck it.  Let's get into it.

Antibirth takes one of the girls from Orange is the New Black and fucks her up on all of the drugs.  After a night out at a party she wakes up and begins to show signs of being pregnant.  She doesn't remember much from the party but is pretty sure she didn't have sex with anyone.  The pregnancy has weird side effects like skin peeling or lactating blood or the grossest blister drain scene I've seen in a while.  The final payoff in this film consisted of me yelling "what the fuck is that?!" or "what the fuck is going on?!" at the screen multiple times.

I've complained of slow burns before but this was like a fuse that never let.  Most of the film's story is told while people are getting high and then faux artsy drug induced shots of TVs or scenery.  A lot of the music was baby's first Casio pre-programmed drum beats with mumble lyrics and effects pedals over it.  There was one song that sounded like it was a Brian Jonestown Massacre song but it could just have been a rip off.

Then the ending, Jesus barebacking Christ, the fucking ending.  If you ever wondered what it'd look like if Bigfoot fucked the Creature from the Black Lagoon then look up the last 10 minutes of this movie.  Don't watch the rest, just watch the ending because the rest of the movie does not fucking warn you!  I can't handle this.  I'm done.  Fuck this movie!

I give Antibirth 0 boys wearing an "I'm preggers" shirt out of 5:

Day 16: Spiders/ Spiders 3D (2013) 1h 29m

I recently completed a playthrough of the 2016 version of Doom.  Being a fan of the original two (and kind of liking the 3rd... kind of) I knew exactly what I was expecting.  Imps, Pinkys, all sorts of hell demons.  You know how it works.  So why am I bringing up a video game on my horror film blog?  It's because as I approached the final level I knew exactly what boss I'd be facing: The Spider Mastermind!  A giant cyber demon spider monster that was brought to mind by the "queen" spider in this film.

Also, yes, I know.  Spiders don't have queens.

Spiders (or Spiders 3D if you watch that shit in the third dimension) is one of those horror movies that seems like it wants to be a good film, but if it embraced the cheese factor of it then it could be amazing.  Our plot runs as thus: the former U.S.S.R. had a space station with these creatures that just happen to look like spiders on it.  A part of the space station crashes from space and into the NY subway.  Eventually the military is brought in as well as a Russian scientist that was working on the project and they begin collecting the spiders to continue with the original plan.  We're stuck with an upper level subway security person and his ex-wife/current public health doctor/scientist/Shannon Dorhety impersonator.  So space spiders escape, and giant queen spider attacks the city... etc. etc.

There were shots in this film that reminded me of Them! or The Giant Gila Monster and I wish that they would have gone down that road.  Like I said above, as a cheesy movie this would've been great and adding a camp factor on purpose would make it fun.  They didn't though, and instead blew an estimated $7 million on trying to make a polished turd.

I give Spiders/Spiders 3D 2 Queen Elizabeth I paintings out of 5:

Day 5: Hangar 10 (2014) 1h 23m

This movie was The Blair Witch Project with the military and aliens instead of a witch.  That's it.  "Found" footage, getting lost in the woods, weird events, losing one of your members and finding them in the place where the big bad is; it's all there.  The only thing that was kind of interesting was the military helicopter doing sick air burnouts before it explodes and crashes.

I'm not wasting time writing more because I checked the fuck out mid-way through this movie and it just became background noise.

Hangar 10 gets 0 stupid alien clipart pics out of 5:

Day 7: The Brainiac (1962) 1h 17m

Tagged as "the most bizarre horror movie," 1962's The Brainiac is a Mexican masterpiece of b-movies.  This film needs to put on a Luchador mask and become a folk hero for a small village.  It's that kind of movie.

We kick things off on 1661 (or IGGI as the choice of typeface for this info was butt).  A man is being tried for heresy, necromancy, and all the other things that good metal albums are written about.  While laughing off the list of tortures they attempted on him, his hooded judges eventually send him to be burned at the stake.  Before he gets lit up we get to look at a blurry painting of what a five-year-old thinks a comet looks like, over and over again.  He then says that in 300 years he will return to kill the ancestors of the judges and proceeds to call out each of their names, even though their identities are hidden.  From there it's a tiny model of a bonfire that is really close to the camera while the rest of the people are in the background.

Fast forward those 300 years, because fuck history of anything, and another comet is seen in the sky.  A professor and some amateur astronomers look through a super powered telescope to find it.  Then the amateurs go outside with what might as well be a paper towel roll and see the comet ten times as big over the city!  The comet becomes a foam stone on a string and gently sets down outside the city before transforming into a space monster.  Why a space monster?  I don't know.  Maybe our crispy strip from the past was into the X-files.

So he eats part of a guys brain with a snake tongue to the back of the neck, and then turns into a Mexican man.  I feel like this is how certain political candidates see the Mexican people.  You know who I'm talking about.  Eh! EH!

The rest of the movie is a series of awkward transformations and poorly executed Dracula eye lighting.  On top of that, probably 75% of scenes are someone walking toward a photo backdrop.  He also just has a bowl of brains he occasionally eats out of and hides it in the worst places ever!  I don't really get how his powers work either.  It might be hypnotizing but it might be some alien power, maybe it's the CIA, I have no clue.  There is a train of revenge murders and some bootleg proton packs that are apparently flame throwers and that's the end of our moon necromancer from the year IGGI!

I love bad horror movies, so if I were going to give this a rating as far as the artistic merit and storytelling, then it would be a fat round zero.  However, I give this a rating based on what I thought of it...

I give The Brainiac a solid 3 tin foil hats out of 5:

Day 27: Alien Abduction (2014) 1h 25min

See the credit "original concept by" at the end of this film is kind of laughable because Alien Abduction is a combination of films that have definitely been done before and done better.  This isn't to say that it's all bad but it was definitely not great.

Alien Abduction is a "found footage" film where what you see is all from the camcorder of an 11 year old autistic boy.  This camcorder must be the most expensive one you can buy because they didn't even try to make it have any kind of filters to make it seem like it was anything less than a real movie camera.  This camera also somehow functions in the cold blackness of space at one point, does not burn up upon reentry into the Earth's atmosphere, and survives falling and crashing into the ground all while still recording.  This is the kind of camcorder that would be handed down to man by Greek gods!

Set in Brown Mountain, N.C... yes, Brown Mountain....  The amount of poop jokes made at the expensive of the location were great.  Brown Mountain apparently has UFO light anomalies and strange things happening to people.  You would think the family in this movie would have thought to research where they're going to camp and seen some of this.  I can't fault them though.  Something like this would kind of be a selling point for me to go camp there.

As expected, alien encounters occur and family members are picked off one by one.  The aliens also have the power to throw and make it rain dead birds.  They are apparently three year olds.  The aliens though are mostly shown through brief jump scares and it works well.  I jumped.  It scared me.  Successful jump scare accomplished.  Aside from these though it wasn't keeping my attention though.  It did feature the song "smell yo dick," which is a real song.  It exists and has a video.

There's a backwoods redneck that pops up and helps them, then he's sucked into space after being broken in half.  All of the family gets sucked up.  The camera films a bit in the ship before it's shot out of a tube and somehow has enough force to jettison it right back to Earth.  Maybe the ship was just at the top of the atmosphere to allow for gravity to effect it.  I don't know.  Camera of the gods!

Overall, this film gets some points for the aliens, but loses more because it's nothing I haven't seen before.  I like a good "found footage" film, but there are too many that are just not worth the time.  If you want to see a scarier alien film then I would suggest watching The Fourth Kind, or Fire In the Sky.  I think I might have mentioned both of these before, but that's because they're worth it.

I give Alien Abduction 1 Alan Rickman from Galaxy Quest out of 5: