Strayed (a.k.a. Perdidos) (2014) 1h 33m

So close.  So close to finishing this Cut without having to deal with another "found footage" film and instead one more has to sneak in at the zero hour.  My husband and I had a long discussion last night about this subgenre of horror and what has and hasn't worked.  Blair Witch played on the fact that everyone grew up with some sort of urban legend.  Paranormal Activity brought the fright into our homes.  Grave Encounters took the phenomena of ghost hunting shows and had their own twist on the absurdity of them as well as pushing horror to be a bit more extreme.  Most generic found footage just keep taking a group of 20-somethings and putting them in a haunted space.  You know what else had that plot?  Scooby Doo!  And the fucking Scooby gang is way more entertaining!

Strayed (Perdidos) does this same dead horse style plot.  A group of 20-somethings go into a supposedly haunted building to record ghosts.  They vanish and this is the footage found.  The twist here is that we know a Rabbi had to do an exorcism in this building.  The Rabbi also left a Dybbuk just chillin' in that space, which I feel you wouldn't want to leave hanging out for just anyone to find.  Spooky scares happen and I can't read Hebrew to save my life so I have no idea what half of that stuff says.  I couldn't even translate whats on that poster and I spent a good 20 minutes trying and just gave up assuming its one of the 72 names of god.

Surprisingly, Strayed was one of the better found footage films I've watched.  The quick pans gliding by shadowy figures are decently scary but what this movie does that I really like is that the spirit has the ability to manipulate physical space.  People find themselves in hallways that end up looping themselves, rooms will change at any point, and impossible space becomes possible.  In the end though, these weren't enough to save the film from long periods of nothing and poor character interactions.  I would have liked this better if it were a 20-30 minute short film.  This way you get all killer/no filler.

I give Strayed (Perdidos) 1 rabbi clip art out of 5:

The Unborn (2009) 1h 28m

One of the taglines for this film is "It wants to be born."  Fuck that noise.  I want to abort this movie before it even existed.  I will invent time travel for the sole purpose of erasing this film from ever being released.

The Unborn goes all over the goddamn place.  What is initially just a girl being haunted by the ghost of a boy that wants to be born jumps those rails and crashes into a pile of everything.  Apparently the ghost is meant to be her twin brother that died in the womb.  But then we find out that thanks to Nazi's and their occult/medical experiments on twins they caused a dybbuk to return in the body of the great-uncle of our protagonist.  Her grandmother killed her twin/dybbuk which then attempted to come back in the twin brother that died.  Now he's haunting our girl in order to take over her body.

There is seriously just way too much going on here.  Twins, suicides, Jewish mysticism, Nazis, the occult, a dog wearing a mask, people and things with upside down heads, suddenly being in a Silent Hill bathroom, Gary Oldman... just too much.  There was a hilarious jump scare where our protagonist opens her medicine cabinet and the boy is inside there and kind of screams at her.  I laughed really hard at that but the rest of this was absurd trash with a few good visual effects.

I give The Unborn 1 smoking fish chicken (which came up when I image searched dybbuk) out of 5:

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