The Black Torment (1964) 1h 25m

I don't know what was wrong with me in the past, but I definitely have made some questionable purchases in my life.  Case in point, today's film The Black Torment.  I think I acquired this under the assumption it was something else entirely and the $1 price tag from the used store ended up sealing the deal.  In truth, I feel as though I made a pact with the shitty movie devil.

The Black Torment is sent in Powdered Wig Era with Richard returning home from London with his new wife.  Upon his return a ton of people are dicks to him and there are strange rumors that he never left.  When he begins to see the ghost of his deceased first wife running the grounds and riding his horse, Richard finds himself torn between madness and the truth before all is revealed!

It is I!  You!  Now in blue!

One of my earliest notes for this film is that this is "period music and trumpets the movie."  There are some really long establishing shorts early on and they probably only exist to pad this movie to pass the hour mark.  The story isn't that bad, but in the 54 years since The Black Torment's release, the plot device and resolution is the Occam's razor standard for such a film.

This movie did lead to me learning something interesting though.  Richard's father had a stoke and would communicate through sign language.  Being curious as to if this was period appropriate I found that the first published book of sign language was released in 1620.  That's your interesting facts caused by shitty movies moment!

Unless you have a weird boner for slow period piece horror films, avoid The Black Torment.  The only thing that could've possibly saved this would've been if Richard was played by Vincent Price.  It wasn't and as such this film suffered.

I give The Black Torment 1/2 a White Zombie Black Sunshine single out of 5:

Veronica (2017) 1h 45m

A few years back I used to work at a witchcraft store here in New Orleans.  People had no problem picking up statues of Goetic demons or objects meant to curse, but the moment they saw a spirit board/Ouija board they refused to touch it.  It's amazing how fearful people have become of press board with a decal on it and a plastic planchette.  I mention this because today's film is loosely based on a woman named Estefanía Gutiérrez Lázaro that supposedly ran afoul of a spirit board and it lead to her death.  To this day it's Spain's only officially documented police record with a focus on supernatural and the unexplained.  You can find all that info online so I won't go into it.  What I will go into is our review!!

Veronica is a Spanish film where our title character and her two friends attempt to hold a seance during an eclipse with hopes of contacting passed loved ones.  They make contact with something but in the process it seems that the spirit has latched itself to Veronica.  She and her siblings become threatened by the spirit, shadow people roam the house, and strange stains begin to appear on under their beds.  Not even the blind nun nicknamed Sister Death can help Veronica as she is told her only hope is to be able to outrun the entity surrounding her.

I've noticed that the more horror films I watch for this website, the more grizzled I become.  My skin is much thicker than it was say 10 years ago.  With that in mind, I think the younger version of myself would've been way more into this movie than I was.  There are some really decent visual effects involving hands coming out of the bed and grabbing people and shadows moving inside of the apartment.  I liked the overall story telling, it's supernatural gonzo-fiction but that's what makes it a movie and not a documentary.  My only complaint (once again) is this weird mix of magickal practices contained inside of the literature that accompanies the board.  I know, it's not meant to be some sort of "official" anything and is just this weird hodgepodge of info, but I'm pushing a pair of glasses up the bridge of my nose and scoffing like a douche at it.

I give Veronica 2.5 haunted paintings out of 5:

Nails (2017) 1h 25m

I've recently been trying to get back into shape.  I was never ripped but I played ice hockey from the age of 5 up until I moved to the deep South... where ice exists only rarely and when it does the entire city shuts down.  Why am I sharing this info with you?  Because if I take nothing else away from this film, it's that you can try to be as healthy as you want but you can still get wrecked as fuck by something beyond your control.

Dana is a track coach going through her usual yoga/morning run routine when she is hit by a car.  The driver immediately leaves the scene and only through sheer luck does Dana end up in the local hospital.  When Dana comes to she has the feeling that she's being watched by an unseen figure at night time.  During her recover she finds that the hospital had an orderly that acted as an "angel of mercy" to five sick children before he was found out.  His nickname was Nails, due to his habit of keeping fingernail clippings from the children in envelopes.

This is another film that would've worked out much better if it were a thirty-minute short.  There's a sub plot of Dana's husband having an affair that serves no real purpose aside from the ghost showing Dana a weird video of it.  We also get a large amount of time spent showing that the hospital is poor and practically in disrepair.  It's filler that did nothing to further the main plot and only padded the movie out.

The final act of this film jumps the rails completely.  In fact, it doesn't just jump the rails, it jumps to another rail, grinds that into a combo and finds a secret tape hidden there.  We become established with why Nails wants to kill Dana but now he's just killing anyone and everyone in the hospital.  It's one of those moments where you ask yourself why he didn't just do that shit in the first place.  You're a ghost with ghost powers, use them!  Ghost it up!

I give Nails 2 weed leaf nails out of 5:

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016) 1h 29m

Lily, the main character in this film, is from Altoona, PA.  I grew up about 20 minutes from Altoona so I'm going to give you some fun facts that I remember about that town:

1) Sheetz started there.  If you're not familiar with Sheetz, it started the whole Made To Order gas station food thing.  The main strip of Altoona has something like six Sheetz that you can all see from each other.  It's also Western PA's version of Wawa.

2) It's known for the Horseshoe Curve which is just a horseshoe shaped section of train track in the mountains.  I rode a train on it in fifth grade as a class trip.  It wasn't impressive.

3) Benzel's Pretzels started there.

4) It had a Chuck E Cheese's which had the arcade game Crossbow and my friend Dustin and I would go as adults and play the shit out of it.

5) There's a bowling alley there that I ordered a cheeseburger at in 1999 and since then it has remained the best burger I've ever eaten in my life.

It's pretty bad when I'm more interested in telling you about Altoona than talk about this movie.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is a Netflix original that I wish they wouldn't have made and put that money back in to doing another season of Sense 8.  Lily is a nurse/caretaker for the elderly and she has been sent to the North East to take care of an author nearing the end of her life.  From what I could gather there is a ghost that haunts the house named Polly.  Her body is hidden in the wall after her husband killed her in early 19XX or late 18XX.  I don't know for sure.  Time is really an illusion when it comes to this movie because we find out that Lily had been working there for a year at one point and I have no idea how that passage of time happened beyond three days.  The ghost starts fucking with Lily and it's dumb.

Most of this movie's exposition is done in voice over from Lily but it's done in that way where it seems like she's trying to seem more interesting than she is.  When she's reading one of the author's books it becomes even more apparent because the book is so well written in comparison to the dialog.  The writer (and director) of this movie wrote both things, why could they not see that one makes the other sound pretentious and annoying?

I think that this film was written with an "ABC" concept.  We have "A" with "B" and "C" is the outcome but everything in-between is filler.  Very dimly lit, monotone, and boring filler just oozing out of the cracks.

I give I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House 0 Casper comics out of 5:

Temple (2017) 1h 18m

Horror films have taught me many things over the course of my life.  One thing is that children are most likely all ghosts or the devil.  Just because that creature was "born" doesn't make up for the fact that there were a solid nine months where you had no idea what it was really doing in there.  I've seen sonogram images that look like that thing is summing all the powers of the dark lord into him!  Seriously! Do you have multiple children?  Well then one is a ghost and one is Satan, or they're both the ghost of Satan, I don't know.  I don't have kids!

The Temple takes us to Japan where white people act like entitled assholes and can't take "no" or "not for sale" for an answer.  A woman finds an old journal in a used book store but when she attempts to buy it the shop owner tells her that the book is cursed, not for sale, and kicks them out and closes up shop.  If this isn't a sign of "don't fuck with that book," I don't know what is.  Of course, one of the men with her goes back to find a small boy in the shop and buys the book from him (red flag #2).  He stops at a ramen stand where he is told by the chef and the other patron to not go to the temple in the journal (red flags #3 & 4), but one of them still tells him where the temple is.  So guess where these people all go the next day?  This plot is trash.

I was really hoping for something great when this film started but it took me down a long and lonely road of boredom.  I held no sympathy for any of these people because they're all trash and multiple levels.  It's the deepest trash I've ever seen.  An ocean of trash.  The only thing that caught my attention was maybe three to five seconds long and it was the guardian spirit of the temple coming to life and attacking one of the men.  The rest of this film can be shot into the sun for all I care.

I give Temple 0 dumpsters out of 5:

Ghost House (2017) 1h 29m

At some point soon I would like to write a book that's an "everything I needed to know about life I learned from horror movies" type thing.  In it I plan on having a section on foreign travel because holy fuck do white tourists just do the dumbest shit!  Agreeing to ride out to the country in a foreign land with people you just met, yeah, fucking stupid!  Taking an object from something called a "ghost house," you're an idiot!  Basically being a tourist, you're probably an asshole, and I say that living in a city that is a tourist wonderland.

Ghost House sets us up with a couple on vacation in Thailand. On their first day they befriend two other tourists that are staying in their hotel.  After an evening of drinks and strippers our couple is convinced to go out to a remote spot because the fiancé is jealous of her man friend having lipstick on his face and she is told that she could get some cool pictures out there.  The other couple tricks them so that a spirit possessing their friend will possess our cranky lady.  Now, with the help of their tour driver (Gogo) our man seeks out all kinds of shaman and mystics to save his betrothed.  He has three days to do so before her soul is taken into the abyss.

This film had a really sharp reverse bell curve.  It started out strong, despite relying heavily on jump scares, but there were about 15-20 minutes where it just couldn't keep my interest.  By the end of the film it came back around and I want to create an award just to give to the actress that played the witch at the end (or whatever she might be called, my occult knowledge doesn't extend too far into Asiatic countries).  She by far has the best "fuck you I did it!" laugh I've ever heard.

As for our ghost woman, except for the very end she is shown in quick and jerky shots.  We get a few close-ups which end up disappointing because the facial appliance looks a bit rough.  I don't know if it's what they molded it out of, or the paint job, but it looks a bit too Halloween mask for me.  I've also been rewatching Syfy's FaceOff from the beginning and I'm finding myself more critical of stuff like that.  Curse you Glenn Hetrick!

I give Ghost House 2 ghost houses out of 5:

Dark Signal (2016) 1h 38m

My husband hates when I tell stories.  Despite the fact that I write summaries on this blog, when it comes to telling an actual story I feel the need to make sure all my bases are covered.  So instead of a simple "the cat farted today" I tend to add in extra details to set up the situation.  It usually kills the story.  This movie though, it made my story telling seem like the greatest oral literature ever.

Dark Signal is like someone took a bunch of speed and then audio recorded their ramblings to write down later.  Then, instead of editing, they just went with it.  I'm going to try to keep this short.  There's a serial killer named the Wedding Band killer because he cuts his victim's ring finger off (although, later he seems to just take any finger).  Laurie, our main character, needs money for her and her wheelchair using son.  The son is the only person we know nothing about even though he has a demon voice for a bit, and even that gets ignored as far as an explanation.  Laurie has an online friend named Ben who works at a radio station that has just been bought out and so the host is doing her last show.  There's a stupid amount of back story for this radio host for no reason except to tie her to the killer of this film.   Also, they have a psychic medium on as a guest (for some reason) and they contact a ghost which is telling them about a possible victim of the murderer.  Back to Laurie and her boyfriend that offers her a cut of the cash if she helps him rob a house.  They go to the house but it ends up that the killer is also in the house.  A ton of unnecessary story telling and explanations happen, the killer is revealed, I wanted to flip my coffee table in disgust.

"The spirit of a murdered girl returns with a message for the staff of a local radio station" was the summary I was given for Dark Signal.  I thought I was going to get some sort of Pontypool with ghosts instead of zombies.  This film is seriously four different movie plots they crammed together.  We have Laurie and the robbery, the radio station, the ghost the psychic contacts, and the serial killer.   Calm the fuck down and pick one, maybe two, and go with it!  You don't need all of this!  Aside from a telegraphed jump scare there isn't anything else to complain about with Dark Signal, but I can't let this slide.  Don't watch this.  It's not worth the loss of what precious time we have on this Earth.  I took this bullet for you, you owe me a life debt.  Expect a call from me at some point requesting a pizza.

I give Dark Signal 0 danger signs 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 Canal (2014) 1h 32m

Ireland.  All I really know about it, from the top of my head, is the following:  A history of strong political discord and activism, potatoes, the WWE wrestler Sheamus, and the stereotype of Boston police being Irish.  I'm sure there's more but right now I'm too lazy to attempt to recall additional info.  Why am I even rambling about Ireland right now?  It's because today's film comes from the Emerald Isles!

The Canal focuses on a family of three, at least until they become a family of two.  The husband, in the course of his archivist work, finds that their home has a history of strange murders in it.  In his paranoid husband work he finds his wife having an affair.  After stumbling into a toilet that makes Trainspotting blush, he sees a strange man attack his cheating wife.  Unable to save her, or stay conscious, he comes to and calls the police.  The cops assume it's him, he begins to think it's the ghost of a man that haunts his house, and his sanity seems to dangle from a thread.  Was it ghosts?  Was it his own cracking mental state?  Was it a ghost that flew up his ass and used him like a murder puppet?  This is where I would make a "C-anal" joke but I'm trying to avoid it.

 There's the old adage of "children should be seen and not heard," and when it comes to celluloid there are definitely some kids that I feel should not have been given the opportunity to be on film.  I bring this up because the child in The Canal has perfected his mumble-core acting at such a young age that it ruined scenes for me.  I didn't even have an issue with his accent, just his annunciation of words.  Plus he's one of those kids that his acting just doesn't seem to fit the emotion of the moment.  I feel bad for talking shit on him though because he's young so there's a lot of room for improvement over time.  Hang in there kid!

One thing that I did love about this film was the very ending of it.  I mention time and time again on here when a movie tips its hand and I see the ending coming early but the very end of this film caught me by surprised and I got super hyped on it.  Honestly.  It went down and I yelled "OOOOOOOO RAD!" at the TV, and then the movie was over.  This isn't the kind of film though where I could just tell you to watch the ending though because the whole is greater than some of its parts.  I'm not saying this is a perfect film, it reminded me a bit too much of the first season of American Horror Story, but I'm not going to write this one off.

I give The Canal 2.5 flags of Ireland out of 5:

Secret of Evil (a.k.a. Secreto Matusita) (2014) 1h 17m

 

Alright, I either pissed in Netflix's corn flakes, or I pissed in my die's corn flakes.  The third option is that neither of those like corn flakes with their piss.  Whatever the case may be, I have my second "found footage" film for the week.  Get ready for some shit.

Secret of Evil (Secreto Matusita) takes place in a haunted house where we get two possible back stories only to find that the cause is a totally different story.  We start by interviewing a man in a mental hospital where he mentions the "owner" while he trashes the room.  Then we get our two stories.  One is about a Japanese family living there and the other being about a couple living upstairs, all of which end with murder.  Our Scooby crew eventually find a letter hidden in a wall with a dead baby and that gives us the true story.  It doesn't change the fact they all die and the ghosts eat their bodies or shove them up their ghost butts or something. If I had, to then I can sum this up as  pretty much the Blair Witch Project only they have a clairvoyant with them and much better tech... and bodies shoved up ghost butts.

I don't know how to talk about found footage movies anymore.  It's mostly a bunch of "what was that?" and "Ahhhhh I'm going crazy with all these ghosts up in here!"  The one thing Secret of Evil has going for it would be that it mainly uses practical effects and camera pans for the spooky elements.  As I mentioned above, this felt too much like Blair Witch to really be a wholly original idea.

I give Secret of Evil 1 El Terrible picture 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:

The Damned (2013) 1h 27m

I've learned a lot of odd things from horror film logic.  One of them is the following:  If you come across someone locked/chained up in basement, then don't jump to conclusions as they might be there for a legitimate reason.  The odds of me ever having to apply this lesson are pretty slim but it's definitely something that I will keep in mind should I come across such a situation.  You know, for safety reasons.

Set in Columbia, The Damned follows a man/father, his second wife, the daughter from the first wife, and two other young persons.  After getting caught in a landslide they survive and come to an old inn.  The old man living there refuses them entry until he finds out the daughter is injured and her father is trying to get her help.  Once inside the inn some of the group find a young girl locked in the basement.  They let her out only to later discover that she is possessed by the spirit of a Bruja that was killed by old descendants from the village.  Everyone is fucked.

I want to like this movie more than I do.  I thought that the spirit's backstory was flushed out well enough.  The the spirit could never "die" because if you killed the body hosting it then the spirit jumped to your body.  This is only a step above Horror 101 but I can look past this because of how well it fit the film.  There are some good practical effects present here as well, like the woman cutting her face with the knife or the hands in the fake stomach.

On the flip side, The Damned took a page from the "shit I'm tired of seeing done poorly in horror" book by letting a majority of this film exist in a blue-grey tonality.  Yes, it's raining.  Yes, this film is spooky.  You can do these things for atmosphere but when you're not offering me anything as a visual juxtaposition it just makes me feel bored.  These are colors we associate with sadness and melancholy more than we associate them with horror.  Even the blood in this film was incredibly dark in color.  So I ask myself, would I watch this again?  Nah.  I've got better things to do.  Like lock people up in my basement...

I give The Damned 1 copy of The Damned's s/t album out of 5:

Bleed (2016) 1h 22m

You know that part in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when Indy and those Nazis get to the grail room and they have to chose the Holy Grail?  The lady Nazi hands the one guy a cup and he says "it certainly is the cup of the King of Kings" and then fills it and drinks from it?  You remember that?  He fucking died super hard from that because he had chosen... poorly.  That's kind of how I feel with today's film.  I rolled a movie that I had already watched.  When that happens I try to go with the film before or after it then.  Upon reading that this was a bunch of people ghost hunting in a burned down prison I figured it would be good enough.  That's only a tiny bit of the plot and I felt this movie age me.  Not to dust, but enough that I'm not sure if my penis will ever work again...

Bleed focuses on a couple that just bought a house in southern fuck-all USA.  Our female protagonist has a strange crescent moon birthmark on her neck and is also eight or nine months pregnant.  These two things are related as the movie progresses.  Friends come to visit the couple and the woman's Burning Man burnout brother and his girlfriend convince almost everyone to go to a supposedly Satanic burned down prison to ghost hunt.  The ghost of Rob Zombie past appears, a bunch of pointless backstory and unnecessary character development happens, and the towns folk are a cult that want the baby for reasons never really defined.

This movie would've done well as a short film.  All killer, no filler, and we'd be just fine.  Unfortunately we have a rag tag cult with a religion thrown together based on no research other than "ummm... blood... babies... satan but not satan... Rob Zombie."  We get two thirds of the way through and a girl suddenly discloses that she was schizophrenic since she was a child and that's why she keeps taking pills.  This reveal has nothing to do with anything!  Ever!  Even the fact it's a prison is kind of worthless as it's just used as a building where Rob Zombie in Rasputin form could be chained up.  They could've used a spooky old shack for that.  It was just a dart board full of ideas and whatever they hit they tried to fit in and make it work.

On the plus side though, the acting was decent.  The accents were a bit thick on some of the locals but otherwise not too bad.  Camera work and sound were all good.  The score used a lot of cool instrumentation where I could tell it was metal bowls with water in them or doing slides on a violin or cello string.  I'm not knocking things like Carpenter's Halloween score here, but I would like horror to work more on atmosphere like that rather than traditional music.  Overall though, I think Bleed bled out, leaving a husk of a film on the floor.

I give Bleed 1 copy of Alice Cooper's Only Women Bleed out of 5:

Last Shift (2014) 1h 30m

If your first shift at a new job is guarding a building that after that night they're not going to use anymore then that shit is haunted.  There is no doubt in my mind that it's haunted.  There's no doubt in the ghost's mind that it's haunted.

Last Shift is set in an old police station where Officer Laren is starting her first shift.  All she has to do is watch the building and at some point a clean-up crew is coming through to get some stuff from the evidence room.  What starts where her hearing some strange noises turns into a full-fledged haunting from the spirits of cult members.

I really got into this film.  It reminded me a lot of the Silent Hill video games because there were seemingly two worlds. Officer Laren would blink or turn away and her surroundings would change in that moment.  It made me feel like when you see something out of the corner of your eye, but turn and it's gone.  Last Shift also had some of the most frightening foley I've heard this side of J-Horror.  I haven't cringed from a horror movie in a while but this one made my shoulders tighten up.

My only complaint is that this film was done in 2014 and Officer Laren still had a flip phone.  Honestly, get with the fucking times girl!  No wonder ghosts are calling you, that's like have a Victrola strapped to your hip for your music!

I give Last Shift 3 police shields out of 5:

The Poltergeist of Borley Forest (a.k.a. American Poltergeist 2; a.k.a. You Will Love Me) (2013)

Fun fact:  American Poltergeist 1 came out in 2015, two years after this film was released.  If nothing else then this should give you an idea of what we're in for.  The joy of Hollywood is that they'll sometimes put out films that already exist under another moniker in hopes that being related to something else will help them sell.  A great example of this are some of the later Hellraiser films where they were completed scripts without any of the Cenobites or Hellraiser related items.  The studio said they needed to add those things to the script and then they'd make the movie because it was already a bad movie which they knew they couldn't sell.  There's also Dark Harvest 2: The Maize which was a film made by Bill Cowell because I had just bought a new camera and wanted to test it out.  He wrote a shitty script and had his family and friends act in it and for some reason Lion's Gate got a copy of it and said they'd give him money for it and put it out as DH2.  I've seen it, it is awful.

Back to the matter at hand though, American Poltergeist 2 is about a 17 year-old girl that parties in the wrong woods and finds a tree with the remains of a lynching rope still hanging from it.  She touches the rope and then begins to see and sometimes be attacked by a spirit.  After seeking out a professor in paranormal studies, and the girl's family experiences a violent encounter, they have to find the tree again to defeat the spirit.

Over the last few reviews I've mentioned things being "trash," but this transcends trash and becomes a new form of disgusting waste.  It's raw sewage, filled with the stench of poo poo and pee pee!  Using adult words to describe this film is too good for it!  The camera shots lack any dynamic.  It's either straight on or slightly off to the side so a character can look forward and not stare into the camera.  The audio engineer was fucking terrible as well.  If a scene was in public then it sounded like they recorded without a wind screen on the mic and pushed the EQ so it was all high end.  There was a scene of the girl walking outside with one of her friends which was almost inaudible.  It sounded like when you hit your head really hard and voices sound distant despite being right next to you.

The ending of this film tried to pull a "We killed the wrong ghost twin!" thing as a surprise reveal but you saw it coming from the other side of town.  Crap plot, crap acting, crap sound, crap camera... all crap!  Also, if you do watch this, look for the bright orange extension cord running through the grass to the light rig after the one character realizes their car batter is totally dead.  It was in the fucking shot the whole time!  You could see it under his arm!  Fuck you American Poltergeist 2, or whatever your real name is!

I give the movie with many titles 0 extension cords out of 5:

Haunt (2014) 1h 25m

Uuuuuuuuuuuugggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh!  There's nothing worse than seeing a film where it does a good job with its reveal, and then watching another film that has a similar reveal and it's just this fucking puddle of cold jizz you accidentally stepped in.  Dudes, you know you've done that on accident.  Ladies, if this has happened to you then on behalf of men, I apologize.  I am the spokesperson for all of manhood, after all...

Haunt follows a typical horror film premise.  A family moves into a house that is said to be haunted because most of the previous family died in mysterious ways.  The neighbor girl and the teen-ish boy of the family meet and start messing with an actually cool looking spirit radio receiver.  This brings about a gnarly looking female ghost that we mostly see in quick cuts.  Then the movie suddenly has the entire reveal of stuff at once and ends.

I left some stuff out but it's not important here.  I had resigned to possibly fall asleep during this film but suddenly it was all "Oh shit! I'm about to blow my story load" and literally ended in less than ten minutes.  The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth.  It wasn't because there wasn't a "happy ending," I've mentioned before that I root for the bad guy, but it was the longest hour and ten minutes just to get to this fucking nasty wad of story blown directly in your eyes.  Whatever.  I was let down by this.  If not for the cool spirit radio and ghost lady I would have probably typed out three paragraphs of fart jokes and a picture of my scrote done in ASCII art.

I give Haunt 1 issue of Image Comic's Haunt out of 5:

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Dead Silence (2007) 1h 29m

I swear that there is an 80's horror film that has this same poster.  At first I thought it was Silent Night Deadly Night 5 but that just looks like a terrible X-mas card you get from some relatives you forgot with their shit kid on it.  Then I thought it might have been Dolls but that's just a baby doll holding her own eyes.  The only thing I can narrow it down to is the Goosebumps book Night of the Living Dummy.  I also thought this was a remake of said imaginary 80's film that I fucking swear I remember seeing on the shelf in Phar-Mor's shitty video section!!  Why do you haunt my life?!

Dead Silence must've taken every single horror thing they could think of and whipped it at the wall.  Whatever stuck became the plot of this movie.  Buckle the fuck up because here we go: Jamie (the actor that plays Jason Stackhouse in True Blood, I'm not looking up his name again) gets a weird ventriloquist dummy in the mail from an unknown sender.

I'm stopping this already to say that if you get a fucking ventriloquist dummy in the mail and you didn't order that shit, burn the fuck out of it!  Burn it and then pee pee on the ashes!  If you did order the ventriloquist dummy then you are a terrible person and I should pee pee on you.

So this dummy shows up and murders Jamie's wife by having her jaw distended and tongue cut out.  We later find out that this is actually a common for people in the town.  Apparently there was a famous female ventriloquist that murdered a child and had he tongue cut out by the family and some other towns people.  Here spirit haunted her 101 (yes, fucking 101) dummies (which were all buried in coffins around her) and when one of the dolls showed up the ghost killed. OOOOOoooooooo spooky.  Oh, also, she only kills you if you scream.  You can do anything you want, but if you scream then you're dead.

There are a ton of times I wanted people to just burn something and be done with it.  Old house/performance hall that was her home: don't look around in it, burn that shit to the ground.  Dummy that probably killed your wife: torch it.  Random pond you have to cross to get to the house/hall: dump oil in it, burn it.  Light that shit up like Lake Erie in '69!  Dead Silence: eh... maybe wave a lighter under it and if it burns up then it burns up.  No big loss.

I give Dead Silence 1 piece of nightmare fuel out of 5:

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The Dead Room (2015) 1h 20m

"Hey guys!  I have access to this empty house for the weekend, do you want to make a movie?"
"Sure, whatever."
"We'll call it 'The Dead Room' and it will have minimal explanation for what happens!"

And that's the story of how The Dead room was made... or at least how I assume it was made.  I'm sure this had a budget in the sum of money I will never see at one time in my entire life, but I honestly have no clue what was really going on at the end.

Two paranormal investigators and a psychic come to a house in the middle of fuck all New Zealand after being called by a family we never see.  The house is haunted by the ghost of a "giant" man.  Initially they think that he is trying to attack them to get them to leave but they discover that he is trying to get them to leave in order to save them.  Save them from what, you ask yourself (or you don't.  Whatever.  I don't blame you).  Save them from the mummified woman that is chained up in a secret basement under the house that you have to bust through the dry wall which you only know because of a ghost hand print on a thermal image scan.  That's a long sentence.  It took a long time for this movie to get up to this point when watching it.

Cops are called, the body is gone, and they realize the ghost was trying to save them from the Mummies Alive!  Everybody dies super fast and the ghost/mummy/witch/whatever moves at the camera quickly and we're done.

This movie sucked.  I was briefly excited at the prospect of this weird corpse in the basement but it's like they've been edging this whole time just to fucking shoot their spooky load in the last 10 minutes.  While I'm complaining about this movie (as it's pretty much what I do on this blog), the choice to have a cage of birds in this film was a poor one.  First off, the birds don't care when they get fed after supposedly not eating for a few days.  I've seen pigeons pull a knife on other pigeons for french fries after having just ate one.  Goddamn pigeons and their adorable switchblades!  Second, these birds are horrible actors as they don't react to anything the people are.  Third, their cage gets thrown across the room at our group of losers and in the next shot the cage apparently righted itself and the birds are totally ready to just nap.  Like the ghost was like "Oh shit! Sorry birds!  Let me fix that for you."  Birds fucking suck as actors.  Kick them out of SAG.

I give The Dead Room 1 parakeet out of 5, and this is only because of a mummy woman being chained in the basement and that was briefly cool:

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Day 20: The Diabolical (2015) 1h 26m

The funny thing about rolling dice to pick what movie I'm going to watch is that sometimes you get something good, and sometimes you come up craps.  After watching the movie I previously reviewed (High Lane) I was hoping to get a decent pallet cleanser.  This time, lady luck was on my side.

The Diabolical focuses on a single mom and her two children.  An entity of some sort randomly appears in their home and causes all kinds of fear and havoc.  One of the kids believes that it might be the spirit of their deceased father.  Over time more and more of the plot unravels including a laboratory that wants to buy/threatens to foreclose on their home and someone close to them is tied in as well.  I'm not going to plot heavy on this one because aside from the sci-fi section at the end, this movie was pretty good.

A lot of the visual effects were great.  The figure that keeps appearing through the house looks frightening as fuck.  There's an early scene where we first see him and there's just a featureless face that he suddenly rips into and tears a film away to show the real face underneath.  It went from "Oh, that guy is rad looking," to "holy fuck!" that fast.  Every time he appears in his grotesque form it's always a good creep out.  My personal favorite being the one involving the dryer.

The "twist" part of the ending you see coming a little bit before the reveal if you know what to look for.  Also, as I said above, the sci-fi tie in element toward the end elicits more of a groan than a gasp.  Overall, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, so I do recommend The Diabolical.

I give The Diabolical a solid 3 fake ghost photos out of 5:

Day 20: Dark Summer (2015) 1h 21m

Few things are weirder than watching a movie set around a guy that is on house arrest for cyber stalking and realizing the actor kind of resembles your ex.  Well, not your ex, my ex.  Which wouldn't be weird for you, unless you knew him too.  It makes it weirder because I wonder if he could cyber stalk someone... oh god!  He could be doing it right now! WooooOOOOOOOOoooooo!  That should be read as a spooky ghost noise, not some sort of cheer.

Dark Summer follows Daniel on his post cyber crime/ankle bracelet probation.  After getting his friends to bury a router in the neighbors yard (which, fuck you, that wouldn't work) he ends up getting a Skype call from the girl he was stalking and she kills herself on camera.  From here Daniel begins to have these episodes which could be chalked up to craziness, but you actually find out it's because the girl cast a love spell on him which caused the start of his obsession.  This entire film is a set-up for the spirit of the girl trying to come back to be with Daniel.

That's probably the easiest and shortest description of an entire film I've ever done, but that's it.  There's nothing too interesting.  The ghost related scenes aren't super great and the spellwork was dumb.  The only thing that made me have any feelings during this movie was when the best-friend/secret crush of Daniel gave him a jar full of 1000 paper stars and the ghost breaks it.  Fuck that ghost girl.  Fuck Daniel.  Fuck this movie.

I give Dark Summer 1 jar of stars out of 5: