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:

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:

Stitches (2012) 1h 26m

I don't like clowns.  I'm not afraid of them, I just think that they use their shtick to violate my personal space and it makes me want to punch them.  Y'all mother fuckers can still do the same shit a good two feet away and I'll enjoy it much more then having you creep all up on me like we're in the club.  Like Bozo, he knew not to creep up on people and he gave children prizes for playing with balls... wait a minute...

Stitches is a horror comedy where a terrible clown deals with horrible children at a party, or maybe that's just how kids and clowns are in Ireland.  The kids take their pranks too far and they cause Stitches the Clown to trip and fall on a carving knife... twice.  Well, technically the second time it falls on him.  The birthday boy, Tom, goes to visit the clown's grave and stumbles upon a satanic coven of clowns where he finds out that a clown that doesn't finish a party can never rest.  It's dumb but they need a reason for this clown to come back for revenge six years later.

I have actually watched Stitches previously because my husband has an odd inclination toward clown horror films.  The first time around I wasn't a fan of it.  I expected more and it wasn't what a wanted.  Going into it this time though I knew that while the plot line is something straight out of a B-film, the work here really isn't.  In fact, if you like practical effects with a lot of fake blood then this could be just for you.  There are a ton of blood splatters, decapitations by punt or by explosion, severed arms, ears, genitalia, and just a touch of CGI when things like the umbrella spear wouldn't have worked well live.

The humor is like a low-grade Beetlejuice and the character development is kind of weak.  It's also high school kids so it's mostly tropes or just shitty teenagers.  I can't fault it too much.  I'm not expecting some sort of epic backstory development from a movie about a clown that returns from the dead.  This second watch-through did cause it to rise up a bit in my internal head rating.  I won't have it on my shelf, but it's probably background at a party good.

I give Stitches 2 clown horns out of 5:

The Hallow (2015) 1h 37m

When the opening production credits have four production companies, one co-production company, and one "in association with" listed, I begin to question the credibility of the film I'm about to watch.  In this case though, it seems that this meeting of the Euros worked out in this movie's favor.

The Hallow is an Irish film that brought together a bit of science with a lot of folklore and made it work well.  We have our typical family of Adam, Clare, baby Finn, and a dog which I could never understand what Adam was calling it.  Iggy?  Digby?  Biggy?  (credit spoilers: it's Iggy... which wasn't even the dog's real name so that explains why it didn't listen to him, ever.)  Adam is surveying a patch of forest for a lumber company when he comes across some strange mold on a dead horse in an abandoned house.  That is about as dumb as that sentence sounds.

The neighbor man keeps coming around saying he and Adam need to talk and that the forest belongs to the Hallow.  His daughter was apparently taken by them.  This is pretty much the set-up for this film.  They bring in classic folk practices like using iron to keep evil/spirits away, there's the introduction of kidnapping a baby and replacing them with a changeling, and they even go as far as to add a vampire-based element with light, especially sunlight, harming the creatures or those infected.

As with any film I enjoyed I'm not going to spoil it on here.  I will say that a good part of this film felt a bit middle-of-the-road for a while but the last section really turned it around for me.  There's a flaming scythe, some good CGI and practical make-up/effects, a rad beheading, and a section of stop-motion that looks like it should be from a Tool video from the mid-90's.

I give The Hallow a solid 3.5 copies of Irish folk tales out of 5:

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