The New Daughter (2009) 1h 48m

 

I haven't watched a Kevin Costner movie in years.  I was also was confusing him with Kevin Bacon before I hit play and spent a bunch of time thinking about how I unnaturally love the film Stir of Echos.  Seriously, I have some strange horror boner for that film.  It's not that great.  The plot is okay.  It's much better than this piece of shit and I would much rather have watched Stir of Echos over The New Daughter.  There are a lot of things I would rather have watched than The New Daughter.

Okay, let's go over this mess.  Kevin Costner's wife leaves him for another guy and KC and his kids move to a house somewhere else.  I don't think I paid attention where to.  In the back yard is a mound of dirt which holds a bunch of made up shit that they try to pass off as Native American.  His teenage daughter begins to change and make a nest in her closet, he doesn't know how to be a father or act outside of some strange Clint Eastwood-esq growl/yell type thing, and his youngest son fucks up the whole ending of the film with poor emotional acting.

The New Daughter has nothing redeemable about it.  There are scenes of nothing, the characters don't evoke any type of emotional response from the viewer or each other, and the creature reveal is incredibly disappointing.  The fact that someone had this shitty idea and then just thought "meh, I'll make this some sort of Native American shit," makes me want to throw a book at that person.  Read something other than your bullshit high school notebook drabbles that make your friends think of you as their "writer" friend.  Then choke on a million dicks.  Exactly one fucking million.  I'll count them to make sure you at least do that right.

I give The New Daughter 0 whatever the fuck this is out of 5:

They Look Like People (2015) 1h 20m

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

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

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

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

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

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

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