When Animals Dream (a.k.a. Når dyrene drømmer) (2014) 1h 24m

Denmark: A country that I looked up a bunch of facts on and, while most of them are pretty cool, I don't feel like sharing them on here.  A land where people live simple lives and work at a factory that processes fish.  A land where one guy is a total asshole to his female co-worker and he and a friend do a fake sexual assault using a fish, as if that makes the shit joke okay...

When Animals Dream is less of a horror movie and more of a light thriller with a horror element.  Marie lives with her father and ailing mother.  She lands a job at the local fish processing plant and all seems to be going well.  That is until she starts to unravel a secret about her mother being part of some Russian tests and that whatever the mother has might have been passed on to Marie.  I'm being vague but long story short, it's some kind of lycanthropy, and everyone in the town knows what's up.  Some people end up missing and they come for Marie and her mother.

This film was incredibly slow if you're looking at it solely from a horror stand point.  The actual wolfwomen segments are minimal and it's not a shock because I guessed what this was going to be about just based on the title.  I don't know why werewolves are the thing to associate with this "coming of age."  Just last week I covered the same general plot with Uncaged.  There's also Ginger Snaps which everyone knows by this point.

I get it!  Puberty sucked for us all.  Hair where the was no hair before, adult teeth bumpin' in, primal urges to jizz into all the tissues that exist in the house, yeah, we get it.  The same with the passage from teen-to-adult.  We fucking get it!  After watching this I spent a bunch of time trying to think of a different monster we could use for this metaphor but nothing really works well... except for maybe the Creature From the Black Lagoon.  You could hit puberty and get weird dick gills or something.  Oh god, that'd be the worst.

I give When Animals Dream 1 t-shirt of wolves howling at the moon out of 5:

Day 15: Shelley (2016) 1h 32m

Sometimes in life we're given something, told it's one thing, but feel like it's something else.  For example, right now I'm eating some leftover Chinese food which is supposedly chicken, but I think this is pork.  This movie was listed under horror, had the subheading of thriller, but in reality it was neither of those... and also crap.

Shelley follows a Danish hippy couple where the wife is infertile.  They hire a maid to help around the home but eventually ask her to be a surrogate.  During the course of the pregnancy the surrogate experiences what she considers strange reactions to the fetus.  It causes her pain, strange aversions, sleepwalking, sickness, etc.  There is also an older hippy that does some reiki and pulls an angry dog out of the maid's head space.  Yeah, it was really as random as I made that seem.

The rest of the film isn't worth going into.  I will say that the baby doesn't really seem to be evil and I'm confused by the whole thing.  The pace of this movie was so slow that when you got a small piece of the plot you would forget it 15 minutes later when the next sliver of plot was introduced.  Then we're just stuck with hippies in a cabin for a long time.  I've been tempted to look up an in-depth plot analysis but I quickly realize that would serve no purpose as I'm not really invested in ever remembering this movie after I hit "publish."

In keeping with most of the films I've watched this cut, I give Shelley 0 stupid babies 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: