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:

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:

The Houses October Built (2014) 1h 31m

That poster looks like it's from one of those hidden object game pack CD-Roms you find at Wal-Mart for $10.  I know about these because my obsession with Paranormal State caused me to track down their game on one of those... and something like five Wal-Marts in a 30-mile radius.  DON'T JUDGE ME!  Instead, judge this "found footage" film, because that shit has been done to fucking death.

The Houses October Built crew consists of some 20-somethings that get the idea that they want to go on a road-trip to find an "extreme" haunted house.  This road trip is only six days and they pretty much stay in Texas until they catch wind of a place known as "Blue Skeleton."  Think of it as the speakeasy of haunted houses where you have to get a weird invite in a creepy way and then go somewhere to meet someone.  Along their voyage they stop at a few different actual haunted houses and, usually the guy with the beard, ends up doing something asshole-ish and pissing off the workers.

They get followed and creeped on by all kind of crazy haunted house workers until they are picked up by the skeleton crew.  Then they're buried alive after being fucked with in some creepy house in the swamp/woods.  Whatever.  Fuck 'em.

I had actually seen parts of this film before because my husband (P.S.  I got married before this cut started) watched it and I was probably sitting on my laptop while he did that.  It didn't keep my interest much then and this time it started okay before my interest waned again.  I also, for the life of me, don't know where in the hell they found an alley off Bourbon St.  I saw there were doors so I assume it was a private drive-way or something.  Seriously, the Quarter is dolphin's butthole tight with their blocks.

I give The Houses October Built 1 supposedly real haunted house out of 5:

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30 Days of Plight Special Halloween Post!

30 Days of Plight on Werewolf Ambulance!!

Hello to any Werewolf EMTs that made their way over after listening to the latest Werewolf Ambulance podcast.

As I mentioned earlier, I joined Katie and Allen to record an episode focusing on one of my favorite horror-comedy films, Murder Party.  The episode is officially out and you can find it on iTunes under the Werewolf Ambulance podcast or go to werewolfambulance.libsyn.com to listen to this and previous episodes of their podcast.

Just a reminder, despite being on break between Cuts right now I will be doing a special Halloween post next week.

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See you in a week!