The Damned (2013) 1h 27m

I've learned a lot of odd things from horror film logic.  One of them is the following:  If you come across someone locked/chained up in basement, then don't jump to conclusions as they might be there for a legitimate reason.  The odds of me ever having to apply this lesson are pretty slim but it's definitely something that I will keep in mind should I come across such a situation.  You know, for safety reasons.

Set in Columbia, The Damned follows a man/father, his second wife, the daughter from the first wife, and two other young persons.  After getting caught in a landslide they survive and come to an old inn.  The old man living there refuses them entry until he finds out the daughter is injured and her father is trying to get her help.  Once inside the inn some of the group find a young girl locked in the basement.  They let her out only to later discover that she is possessed by the spirit of a Bruja that was killed by old descendants from the village.  Everyone is fucked.

I want to like this movie more than I do.  I thought that the spirit's backstory was flushed out well enough.  The the spirit could never "die" because if you killed the body hosting it then the spirit jumped to your body.  This is only a step above Horror 101 but I can look past this because of how well it fit the film.  There are some good practical effects present here as well, like the woman cutting her face with the knife or the hands in the fake stomach.

On the flip side, The Damned took a page from the "shit I'm tired of seeing done poorly in horror" book by letting a majority of this film exist in a blue-grey tonality.  Yes, it's raining.  Yes, this film is spooky.  You can do these things for atmosphere but when you're not offering me anything as a visual juxtaposition it just makes me feel bored.  These are colors we associate with sadness and melancholy more than we associate them with horror.  Even the blood in this film was incredibly dark in color.  So I ask myself, would I watch this again?  Nah.  I've got better things to do.  Like lock people up in my basement...

I give The Damned 1 copy of The Damned's s/t album 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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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: