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:

Ranbhool (2010) 1h 50m

Some people say that you can learn something from every experience you have.  I think that after watching this film the only thing I learned was to not trust dudes that wear tie dye and play guitar.  This isn't really new information for me.  I talk shit on hippies all the time.  So maybe this film didn't teach me anything, but rather just reaffirmed my dislike of hippies.

Ranbhool is an Indian film in which a man believes his music is essentially the music of god.  He is such a religious zealot over this thought that he has killed people that have prevented his music from getting out or say that they don't hear the message of god in it.  A teenage girl goes to her father's home with her younger sister and a friend and make contact with this crazy guy via the internet (as ya' do).  Using an Omegle style chat they view a video stream of him playing his music, but they miss him murdering his fiancé.  Everyone tracks everyone else down and it ends with hostages, a standoff, and someone's grandmother getting called in to stop all this shit!

This was not a film for me.  Pushing close to two hours is actually short for most of the Indian films I've watched but this one just kept drawing out scenes for too long.  We get a lot of our killer playing his music but it is literally just the same song over and over again with him jamming on some changes.  It's not even a good song!  I mean, maybe I'm missing the voice of god or whatever in it, but it was just sounded like shitty Phish, and I already hate Phish so imagine that!  I will say there is one moment I liked and it's right after he kills his fiancé and then he plays a guitar solo over her corpse.  That was one of the most metal things I've been privy to in a film.  Too bad it was a hippie solo!

I give Ranbhool 1 dirty hippy out of 5:

Cabin Fever (2016) 1h 39m

I didn't realize until the end of this film that I was watching a remake of the original movie.  They literally took the script from the Eli Roth original and did a re-shoot.  Was this really necessary?  I know I'm jumping into the shit talk on this way to early but for real?  It's not like you were rebooting the property or anything.  It's only made worse because I'm not really a fan of the original Cabin Fever to begin with.

If you're unfamiliar with the plot, a group of college kids rent a cabin in the country.  Early on we know that there is some sort of viral or bacterial outbreak based on an exploding dog named Pancakes.  After one of these college jag bags finds a gun at the cabin and accidentally shoots an infected man in the woods.  The man finds his way to their cabin where he vomits blood everywhere before being set on fire and runs off to dive into the local reservoir.  The disease begins to develop in our cabin kids and they all end up dead, one way or the other.

Neither this, nor the original are really scary as far as horror movies go.  They really get classified as body-horror for the squick feelings you get from seeing huge wet open sores or someone shaving their legs and literally shaving off strips of flesh.  The latter of which I don't remember seeing in this re-make.  I covered the prequel movie Cabin Fever 3: Patient Zero a while ago but it doesn't add much to the lore.  It just makes me wonder what Sean Astin needed the money for.

Here is my head cannon for why this film even exists: Travis Z tells Eli Roth he wants to direct a movie but doesn't have the background to do anything big.  Eli Roth figures that Cabin Fever was his big breakout so he gives Travis Z the script, says he'll produce it, and assumes that lightning will strike twice.  Instead it hit a small child off to the side and both Eli and Travis are labeled as witches and burned at the stake.  The End.

I give the 2016 remake of Cabin Fever 1 Eli Roth PETA ad out of 5:

Night of the Living Deb (2015) 1h 25m

Both on and off of this blog I've watched a lot of horror comedies.  Sometimes you want to be able to laugh while also seeing gore as opposed to laughing at the poorly done gore.  John Dies at the End, Tucker & Dale..., Shaun of the Dead, Deathgasm, all great examples of mixing hilarious comedy with fantastic horror.  So what happens when a horror comedy does neither their horror nor their comedy aspects well?

Night of the Living Deb doesn't have much going for it in the plot department.  Deb attempts to hit on a guy without knowing his fiancé is there and pissed at him.  They end up getting drunk and passing out back at his place.  The next morning is awkward but then so are the zombies that exist everywhere now due to water contamination by the water company owned by the guy's father.  That's about it.

There's an attempt at an awkward romantic angle here but the dialog feels really forced and disingenuous between our leading characters.  It's only made worse by 90% of the lines in this film attempting to be jokes.  I had a few laughs while watching this but to be bombarded with mediocre humor consistently made me dislike this film even more.

If I had to sum up Night of the Living Deb in a few words then I would say this is the equivalent of some college friends realizing one of them had a video camera and trying to make a zombie movie in a weekend.  Okay, that's more than a few, but we're not quite at "shit sandwich" level of bad with this film.

I give Night of the Living Deb 0 copies of Shaun of the Dead out of 5:

The Charnel House (2016) 1h 30m

I try not to write reviews directly after watching a movie.  I want to be able to breathe and decide if a film was as good or as bad as my initial impression.  Unfortunately, for The Charnel House, I think I took too much time before writing this one because I had to force myself to recall it.  That's never a good sign, at least when I have to write a review... afterwards though, sure, I can use that space to remember more useless info like the frame data for Ryu in Street Fighter V.

When a mass of human remains are found in the basement of a meat packing factory, the owner jumps through the clock on the top floor while cradling his son.  The only thing is we see this twice, and the second time the son isn't with him, but hiding in a closet.  As the son is lead out by police he looks up at the broken clock to see himself staring down at him.  Skip to "present day" and a couple buys the abandoned factory to make the most bullshit bourgeois lofts ever.  I'm talking voice and iPhone activated everything bullshit.  The couple's daughter befriends a ghost boy that is present in the building and as I'm writing this I realized just how much I don't care about this film.

When it's all said and done, The Charnel House feels loose.  There's an A-to-B plot going on but there are so many subsections to A that when it all comes together the substance of this movie has slipped through the cracks.  I liked the concept they were attempting to go for but when the time came for the big reveal we already knew what was behind the curtain.

I give The Charnel House 1 Charnel (from Image Comics) out of 5:

The Tortured (2010) 1h 19m

I've never really been a fan of "torture porn" style horror.  Sure, some of the Hostels were okay, the first one or two Saw movies had their moment, and a few others are definitely watchable but just not my thing.  However, this may be my first foray into what could be considered "revenge porn."

The Tortured begins with a couple dealing with the kidnapping, murder, and subsequent trial of the man that did this to their six year-old son.  After he gets 25-to-life as opposed to life without parole, the couple decide that the kidnapper needs to be punished, tortured, for his crimes.

This film is basically broken into two sections with small bridges in between.  You have the establishment of the agony of losing a child in such a terrible manner and how devastated the couple is.  It's mainly to allow themselves and the viewer to feel that this course of action is justified.  The other revolves around the torture of this man.  There are a combination of introspective moral moments and a questioning of the couple's actions.  We get handed some serious twists here and there, but what this comes down to is do the means justify the ends, vice versa, or, is there any real justice at all?

The saving grace of this film is the ending.  I really don't care about the guy's nipple being burnt with a soldiering iron or any of that other crap.  The couple has an odd catharsis to which only the viewer knows the truth and that made me run back through the film in my head.  So it makes me actually think of it when it's done, but honestly I'll probably forget about it in a month.

I give The Tortured 1 prison jumpsuit costume out of 5:

Stung (2015) 1h 27m

In nature, there are two kinds of assholes: Canadian geese, and wasps.  Everything else is super cool and safe and not a dick to you.  I didn't go to school for any kind of zoology or animal studies, so I'm absolutely the best authority on this kind of info.  Consummate pro-fucking-fessional here.

Stung has the most simple plot.  Wasps fucking hate WASPS... but not the band W.A.S.P. because they have some good songs.  Our setting is a mansion in the middle of wherever that is having a rich white person party to honor someone's father/husband.  On the property are some odd sized and brutal looking wasps that are the size of your hand.  They replicate by stinging something the shortly after that a new one explodes out of the host and is the same size as whatever body they were growing in.  So once people start getting stung then we get human sized wasp things.  They kind of look like Jeff Goldblum as the Fly, but in asshole form.

This movie actually tries and that's what hurts the most here.  Most of the acting is done well.  The giant wasps are good mix of puppets and CGI.  The directing is decent.  However, you're stuck watching a film about mutant wasps.  It's not even B-grade material anymore because these ideas were B-films back in the 50's as the drive-in double creature features.  Them, Attack of the Giant Gila Monster, Tarantula... it was done to death decades ago.

I give Stung 1 wolf pack era Sting out of 5 for trying:

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