Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness (1995) 1h 20m

Ever since I bought this film, I continually forget that I own it.  I wasn't even looking for it when I was searching for a film to watch, it just happened to be in the same binder as tomorrow's film and I found it first.  So what does that say about Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness, aside from that title is too long?

Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness (or Eko Eko as I'm going to call it from now on) opens with a satanic cult using magic to kill teenagers.  Their apparent goal is to take the lives of 13 innocent teens in order to bring Lucifer to Earth to do whatever.  This film is really vague on what the end goal is here so we get: Step 1: Kill Teens, Step 2: Summon Lucifer, Step 3: ????, Step 4: Profit!  At the end of their opening ritual they get a warning about a strong witch coming that they should not make an enemy of.  Enter Misa, said teenage witch that ends up trapped in the school with 13 other students and two perverted teachers.  Her goal is to find the head person behind the killings and prevent the rise of Lucifer as this is apparently all she does in each school she goes to.

I forgot this happened.

Eko Eko had this weird feeling to it, like it never sat quite right with me.  It looks like it was just a made-for-tv-movie and its short running time (at least compared to most J-horror films) only bolsters that sentiment.  The plot is relatively straight forward and some of the set-up and magick effects look okay but you can tell that this was most likely made for a PG-13 audience.  This isn't to say that films under an R rating are bad, just that in this case it all feels a bit immature.

Eko Eko was based off of a manga from the 70's and apparently spawned six fucking sequels and a short television series.  I don't know how I feel about that info.  I would like to go back and read the manga for a comparison just to see if they toned things down or if this was always as tame as I perceive it.  You know, because I perceive the magickal murder of teenagers in order to invoke the rising of Lucifer to be a mundane task.

I give Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness 2 I-no from Guilty Gear out of 5:

Demonic (2015) 1h 23m

I've mentioned before that I have a pretty large library of books in regards to magick, folklore, etc., so when this film introduced a sigil it referred to as the "circle of the left hand path" I was at a loss.  I had never seen this sigil before so I did a quick Google search only to find that the main places this image existed are in this film and some crazy spiritual warfare site that looks like it was copy/pasted from Geocities.  I can only assume that the person that runs that site saw this movie and took it to be a documentary.  The website also had all the sigils drawn in sharpie and scanned, which leads to a hilariously bad Cross of Leviathan.

Demonic takes place in a house where a series of ritual murders happened years prior.  Police are called out after a caretaker finds the lock broken on the home and they find a sole survivor among the bodies.  While the cops attempt to make sense of the scene, we get told most of the film in flashbacks.  Our survivor is the son of the only woman to escape the previous murders.  He, his girlfriend, and a group of semi-friends go to this home in a half-assed attempt at ghost hunting.  As the unexplained happens around them they decide to do a seance (because they're fucking idiots) and everything goes to hot fuck!

The ending reveal of this film was unexpected and I liked that.  What I didn't like was another one of these "Let's go to this haunted house and find spooky things!" movies.  Do you hear me film makers?!  No more of this Blair Witch/Grave Encounters shit!  It's been done, to death!  Fucking buried and in the grave, never to return!

I will say, in this film's defense, the meat of it was good.  The special effects and camera work were done well.  The set design was just that perfect mix of old house and creepy ritual site, and the acting was solid.  It's a shame the overall content of the plot couldn't have been worked out to be stronger.

I give Demonic 1 Dark Ritual MTG card out of 5:

P (2005) 1h 50m

I have no clue what "P" stands for or is short for.  I'm letting you know this up front because if you are looking for answers, I don't have them.  If you have answers though, then hit me up at 30daysofplight@gmail.com and let me know what the hell the "P" means.  I think that pretty much sets the tone for this review as well.

Coming to us from Thailand, P focuses on a young girl (Aaw, later Dau) that is being raised by her grandmother.  While she attends school like the other children, Aaw is an outcast because her grandmother is the local witch and has been training her granddaughter in the craft.  When the matriarch becomes very ill Aaw attempts to get rice and medicine for her but is told they owe too much money to the local merchant woman.  In order to pay for their needs Aaw is tricked into being a prostitute at a club in Bangkok.  To survive, and get what she wants, Aaw uses what her grandmother taught her, but eventually forsakes the two rules she was told to never break: 1) never take payment for magick done, 2) never eat raw meat.  Breaking these rules lets the evil in...

There's a bit of a disconnect between the home and Bangkok sections of this film.  I can't tell if it's an intentional break but it felt like the film was heading in one direction but suddenly spun the wheel and ended up eating a raw pork salad in the city and letting everything go to shit.  There are a few other disconnects I faced while watching this but I think that they're more of a cultural difference and a misunderstanding on my part so I won't go into those.

Suangporn Jaturaphut does a great job in the role of Aaw/Dau as well as when acting as the evil version of Dau.  It's the subtle evil you find common in J/C/K/T-Horror but it is effective here.

If black magick and foreign horror aren't your thing, then at least look up the scene where Dau uses her darker magick for the first time and a scum bag gets his dick bit off by a snake.  More scum bags need their dicks bit off by snakes, at least in my opinion.

I give P 2 snakes out of 5:

Ava's Possessions (2015) 1h 29m

Someone reviewed this film as "The Hangover but with a lot more demons."  It's up there on that poster.  If The Hangover has become the standard description for any film where someone has a loss of memory and tries to figure out what happened during that time then that sucks.  The Hangover was a terrible movie and aside from the point I just touched on is not relatable to this film at all.

Ava's Possessions starts with an exorcism.  Once cleansed, to avoid jail time from her month long demon possession, Ava agrees to go to a recovery group for people that were inhabited by a demon.  Much like a regular 12-steps recovery, Ava has to seek out the people that she wronged to apologize but also to put the pieces together from her lost time.

This film had some great casting. Wass Stevens (that I know from being Max in Daria) was the demon possession counselor, Deborah Rush (Strangers With Candy) played Ava's mother, and mother fucking Carol Kane (Adam's Family Values / The Princess Bride / Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt / a million other awesome things) as the magick shop owner all killed it in Ava's Possessions.  Also, after a ton of possessed girl movies, it was great to see one just treat the possession with a recovery program.  It feels like a much more "modern" view instead of bumbling attempts with religious archaism or an obsession with The Exorcist.

Also, I want to give a quick shout out to whomever the person was that had to do the research for the demonic possession spell portion of the movie.  It was kind of a hodgepodge of stuff but I recognized the parts that were (if I'm remembering these details right) a Hermetic spell to ask for the favor of a demon.  It looked as the sigil on the floor was either Goetic or Enochian.  So thumbs fucking up for that.

On the flip side to this praise, the things I liked in this movie were overshadowed by the fact that it felt more like I was watching this for three hours as opposed to an hour and a half.  There was always something going on but the pacing just felt off.  Which leads me to my other complaint of the third act of this film had its own third act where they pushed all these reveals and explanations to the last little bit.  It felt really wrapped up well but instead of letting it ride they threw more and more onto you.  You probably aren't going to make a sequel to this.  This isn't like when Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm street were made and you needed to add a scene on to make a franchise.  Just let it go!

I give Ava's Possessions 2 Regans 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:

Day 23: All Cheerleaders Die (2013) 1h 29min

Coming into this I was either going to love or hate this film.  I knew there would be no in between.  Luckily I was pleasantly surprised.

All Cheerleaders Die is actually a remake of a film with the same name from 2001.  I'm glad someone raided the vaults for this and brought back the ancient papyrus scrolls that made up this script to redo it.  I know I'm talking shit for something I just stated I liked, but the fact it was 12 years between the original and remake just seems too short.

The plot of ACD is the initial death of a cheerleader in a freak cheerleading accident leads to one girl wanting to get revenge on her now ex-boyfiend/absolute scum bag.  In the process of this guy being a shit he punches a girl, threatens tons of people, attempts to get with underage ladies, has a history of sexual assault, and eventually murders people.  Fuck this guy.  He really needs to explode but doesn't.

Our revenge girl joins the cheer squad to enact her plan and things go smoothly until her and three other cheerleaders die in a car crash.  Luckily her on/off lesbian lover is "wiccan" and brings them all back from the dead with crystals and blood.

I use Wiccan in quotes there because this was definitely someone that thought "wiccan" is just an updated and buzzword version of "witch."  It's not.  Not all witches fall under or identify as Wiccan.  In fact, most of what she does would be found questionable in the ethics of a Wiccan... especially what is basically considered necromancy here by reanimating her dead love, those cheerleaders, and a dead cat.  I care about the cat, not so much anyone else.

So this leads to the reanimated girls being some sort of blood requiring zombie/vampires/something where they suck people dry for sustenance.  Two of the girls have also switched bodies which also doesn't need to exist as a plot point.  Eventually douche strap kills one of the girls, takes out the crystal, and ingests it.  This gives him some sort of powers so he begins trying to get the rest.

Things spiral into a bunch of whatever as I just want this guy to be dead already.

This film was definitely remade for middle school/high school males.  Surprisingly though, after the initial 10 minutes the movie really does pick up and being fun to watch.  The cheerleading accident is horrifying when you first see it, and that was what made me start to pay attention.  My only complaints aside form the use of the word "wicca" inappropriately would be the fact that there are probably 3-4 of what my fiancé referred to as "mean girl movie" shots.  You know, where the girl(s) walk down a hallway in slow motion and everyone watches them.  This bugged me because at one point a guy wearing normal glasses responds to watching them go down the hall by lowering his glasses and looking without them.  You have glasses!  You need those to see!

Overall I give All Cheerleaders Die 3 pom poms out of 5: