The Void (2016) 1h 30m

You know the beginning to the Outer Limits?  Where a monotone voice tells you to just sitting back and relaxing because "they" control your TV and are about to take you on an adventure?  That's pretty much what happened to me when I started watching this movie.  Rather than a descent into madness it was an ascension into it.  You go willingly as opposed to fighting tooth and nail.

The Void throws us right into it with two men attempting to kill everyone in a remote country house.  A survivor makes it onto the road where the local Sheriff notices him and transports our man to the closest hospital (20 minutes away, just to show that this is fuckall USA).  We're then given about an hour or so of insanity, Silent Hill-esq monsters, crazy cultists, and a doctor that read too much Lovecraft.

I really liked this film.  It felt like someone was turning up some sort of intensity knob slowly from the start, but paced it so well that when you reached the end everything was at its breaking point.  I could see the influences of Lovecraft but more so I saw the influence of the first two Hellraiser movies.  Nods to Frank, the labyrinth beast chasing Kirsty in the hospital, and the Leviathan are all present but not heavy handed.  It's tastefully done... you know, as hell creatures go.

I also like that "The Void" isn't just an arbitrary title.  There is a literal void which exists in a space between the folds of our perceived universe. Somewhere between life and death, somewhere with weird muscle monsters and giant triangles.  Actually I just made this sound like a gay club...

I give The Void 4.5 bloody Franks out of 5 (I'd watch it again, but I probably won't buy it unless the DVD has amazing extras):

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 Unborn (2009) 1h 28m

One of the taglines for this film is "It wants to be born."  Fuck that noise.  I want to abort this movie before it even existed.  I will invent time travel for the sole purpose of erasing this film from ever being released.

The Unborn goes all over the goddamn place.  What is initially just a girl being haunted by the ghost of a boy that wants to be born jumps those rails and crashes into a pile of everything.  Apparently the ghost is meant to be her twin brother that died in the womb.  But then we find out that thanks to Nazi's and their occult/medical experiments on twins they caused a dybbuk to return in the body of the great-uncle of our protagonist.  Her grandmother killed her twin/dybbuk which then attempted to come back in the twin brother that died.  Now he's haunting our girl in order to take over her body.

There is seriously just way too much going on here.  Twins, suicides, Jewish mysticism, Nazis, the occult, a dog wearing a mask, people and things with upside down heads, suddenly being in a Silent Hill bathroom, Gary Oldman... just too much.  There was a hilarious jump scare where our protagonist opens her medicine cabinet and the boy is inside there and kind of screams at her.  I laughed really hard at that but the rest of this was absurd trash with a few good visual effects.

I give The Unborn 1 smoking fish chicken (which came up when I image searched dybbuk) out of 5:

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Friday's Choice Cuts: Yakuza Demon Killers (IDW Publishing)

Keeping with the new format, Fridays are going to be a kind of grab-bag day for me to keep myself from getting too swamped with bad films.  Hence, Friday's Choice Cuts, where I going to cover something I like that's horror related.  So for our first entry in the FCCs I'm presenting the comic series Yakuza Demon Killers; written by Amit Chauhan, with the artist Eli Powell, and published by IDW Publishing.

Currently spanning four loose issues (with a hardback version of these on the way), Yakuza Demon Killers ties Eldritch horror with modern day Japan and throws in a sprinkle of Silent Hill-esq character design.  The art style reminds me of the earlier Walking Dead comics but more frantic.  Its sketchy moments add to action of the panels and helps to add a certain sense of "edge" reminiscent of the small publisher comics of the 90's.  Story wise, it's pretty solid.  If they never make a 5th issue then I wouldn't really be too torn up because I always like a good "the villain wins" reveal.  I know that's kind of a spoiler, but without the story you have no clue who I'm talking about anyway.

I bought all four issues at once solely based on the name, covers, and a quick flip through an issue.  I can say that I am definitely not disappointed with my purchase.  I recommend checking it out or at least waiting until the hard bound version comes out because I'm sure it'll have some extra stuff thrown in as well.


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Day 7: Baskin (2015) 1h 37m

There are times in life where you will make horrible mistakes.  While not my worst mistake, writing this film off early was certainly a lack in judgement on my part.  What started off as a slow crawl turned into one of the most insane things I've ever watched.  It's the kind of horror that is in line with the Silent Hill video games where things are so grotesque and twisted you're not sure exactly what you're looking at.

Based off of the short film bearing the same title, the Turkish film Baskin (which translates to "police raid") focuses on what becomes the most surreal night for a group of police officers.  After acting more like a biker gang than cops at a late night restaurant, they receive a call for back-up at a location not far from them.  Along the way a series of strange occurrences happen, such as seeing a naked man run past and something unseen hitting their van and leaving symbols scratched in it.  Then their van hits a bloody man in the road and veers into a deep creek.

This is where we have the first of many dream realm scenes between the rookie and the "boss" of the officers.  We also find that they both see a cloaked man just beyond the door of the room these scenes exist in.  The rookie is pulled from the water and we briefly meet a group of Romani that give them directions to the site they were called to.  This is the point where things began to descend into madness and I became hyper focused on Baskin.

They arrive at a large building to find a single cop inside hitting his head off of a wall.  After he points to a door our cops decide to split up.  Then they enter Hell.  Literally.  As soon as I finished this film I begin extensively looking things up on it.  They don't enter a Dante's Inferno hell, or a fire and brimstone hell, but rather a cultish human-extremes version of hell.  It's an overly sexualized, bloody, grotesque, absolutely insane portrayal of hell.  To top it all off, their leader was this guy:

Mehmet Cerrahoglu

That is not make-up, he has a rare condition.  All they did was slowly add tattoos to his body as time passed.  This is also the only film he has ever been in and he was fucking amazing!  His voice and delivery and his actions kept me rapt on the entire ending of this film.  You are the fuckin' man, Mr. Cerrahoglu!

Watch this movie.  Trust me, it'll be slow to start but when it gets going it really gets going.  I didn't even go into the full details of the insanity because you need to experience it.  When my fiancé and I woke up this morning I instantly started rattling on about the craziness of this film.  Most people just wake up with a kiss and then shower, I gush about satanic cults.

I give Baskin 4 hellmouths out of 5:

photo of Mehmet Cerrahoglu from twitter.com/ellifdagg