The Snorkel (1958) 1h 14m

Could there be a dumber name for a movie?  The Snorkel.  Fuck you!  You can snorkel this dick!  I'm not even sure what that means but that's how frustrated I am with yet another film coming to us from the cheap as fuck Hammer Films set I got at a Wal-Mart.  You know, the land of bottomless $5 DVD bins and overpriced animated films.  DROP THE FUCKING PRICE ON HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 1 & 2 ALREADY YOU BASTARDS!

You have me confused with that guy
from Are You Being Served?

Unlike our other Hammer Films, The Snorkel doesn't start with a creeper in the bushes but the creeper is already in the house!  A man has drugged his wife to make her pass out and then tapes up the entire room (doors, windows, etc) in order to blow out the gas lamps and have her die as an apparent suicide.  Why he didn't just drug her and make it seem like that was the suicide is beyond me.  He has hooked up a mask and snorkel to outside pipes and hides in the floor to complete his elaborate faked suicide plot.  When she is found everyone assumes she did kill herself.  Everyone except for her teenage daughter who is apparently Nancy fucking Drew because she puts everything together pretty quick and then it's the step-daughter vs. the murderer for who will come out on top.

While a much dumber premise than anything I've watched recently, I was invested for no reason other than I wanted to see how the hell the girl put everything together.  She never figures out the hiding in the floor but it is given away to her at the end.  Speaking of which, always have a fucking back door, or at least an axe or something in case you get stuck.  You know, since you're hiding in floors all the time.

All in all, The Snorkel is a big bag of meh.  Once again, solid acting performance from all involved, and this film has my favorite opening credit now which is "John Holmes dog "Flush" as "Toto" because that dog deserves a fucking credit!

I give The Snorkel 1 hunky scuba diver out of 5:

Play Dead (2009) 1h 28m

Play Dead came on a DVD as an extra film with Last of the Living (which I also haven't watched).  By association I assumed that Play Dead would be a horror film, but it came across as more of a thriller comedy.  The latter of those descriptors it looses relatively quick.  In truth, this is the an awkward teenager of a movie where it wants to fit in somewhere but it really isn't sure where it does so the whole thing tries to fit into a bunch of different cliques.  I could make a "horror because of Fred Durst" joke, but I'll be up front and say that he does a decent job.

Our main character in Play Dead is Ronnie.  He's an actor best known for his work in a show that wasn't quite a Power Rangers rip off, but not quite as bad as Big Bad Beetle Borgs.  So let's say a VR Troopers knock off.  After his stint as the blue one, his promising career went nowhere.  He has a breakdown after a casting interview and drives until his car dies.  He finds himself in the middle of nowhere when he meets Ledge (Durst) and is given a ride into town.  He then finds himself on the wrong side of the local drug dealer and calls in his old hero team in an effort to save himself and the town.

Y'all cast the wrong member of Limp Bizkit.

As I mentioned above, this film doesn't know what it wants to be.  The beginning has a lot of poorly written comedy scenes in it, including that Durst's character is a small town simple creep which they try to turn around to make Ledge an exploited victim of the situation.  It's a poor transition from someone that has a dead DEA agent in their bathtub to unlikely hero/sidekick.  Jake Busey is here as well, looking like the most redneck version of Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age) I've ever seen.

As a whole, Play Dead can just be labeled as "competent."  Everything that makes this a movie it does well enough, but it just reaches that bare minimum.  There are definitely better and worse films out there.  If you're looking for something that's horror though, this isn't it.

I give Play Dead 1/2 a opossum playing dead out of 5:

Abattoir (2016) 1h 38m

Abattoir (noun) - Slaughterhouse

I never learned this word while I was studying French in college so I'm let down it didn't mean something cooler.  I don't know what I wanted but I feel like "slaughterhouse" doesn't really fit.  I get what they were going for, and Abattoir is much better, but suck my ass with this being "slaughterhouse."

Abattoir starts with a Henry David Thoreau quote and a narrator.  Don't let this over pretentiousness turn you off though because the plot is kind of rad.  Julia, a reality reporter (which is a thing I guess) gets a call from a man that says he just murdered her sister and the sister's family.  After the funerals Julia, with her cop "friend" Declan, go back to her sister's house to find answers.  They find the room where the murder happened completely missing from the house.  Using her reality knowledge and reporter skills Julia finds that similar occurrences have been happening for around 50 years and trace back to Jebediah Crone as well as the town the sisters were born.

For the first two acts of Abattoir everything happens at high speed.  It's paced well, but when the time comes for the third act everything screeches to a halt in order for you to get a guided tour of the payoff you've been waiting for.  If they trimmed it by 5 or 10 minutes then it would've been just right.  They didn't, it made my interest wain.  Luckily, by the very end, this film got its shit together and I was all in.  It helps that this movie has one of my favorite things: the bad guy wins.

I want a sequel to Abattoir.  Don't do the same town or Jebediah again, but the plot of everything can go much further now that we have a foundation.  Make it!  Make it happen!  Appease me!

I give Abattoir 4 copies of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five out of 5:

Sacrifice (2016) 1h 31m

I've never been to Europe but, keeping with things I've learned from horror films, here's a list of things you shouldn't do:

1) stay in a hostel, because rich murder people will kidnap you
2) visit castles the locals tell you to stay away from, even if you have a contract with "The Count" or whomever owns that shit
3) be disrespectful to the Romani/Roma because that's just good travel etiquette and you shouldn't be a prick when abroad
4) visit random small inhabited islands, because cult murder people might kidnap you

Sacrifice breaks rule #4 because after having another miscarriage a doctor goes with her husband to the small Scottish island where he grew up.  They plan to adopt a child from the hospital/orphanage on the next island over.  However, the woman finds remains from a ritual killing buried on their land and this sets her on the path to finding out the truth about the island's inhabitants.

This isn't really a horror film.  At least not by my assumed guidelines of horror.  Aside from a few dull chase scenes there isn't any true sense of danger.  Some of the sets were really elaborate and well done.  I liked what I assume was a "ritual room" in the house.  My big question is why do you need to have engraved plates above the runed branding irons?  I would assume that you wouldn't need to label that as you should just know.  Kudos on the use of the Futhark rune set though, even if they did just make up a rune for "sacrifice."  Also, the pictures on the wall of fathers with adopted sons makes it seem like a creepy NAMBLA club. Come to think of it, they don't really ever give us a proper explanation of the group either and the dad makes some really misogynistic comments to our heroine...

I think my biggest complaint about Sacrifice is that it becomes so focused on the action and the escape toward the end that they get sloppy with continuity and execution.  For example, they're watching the woman run from room to room on a security camera, but despite someone standing there and still watching the cameras they don't see her and her husband start to escape with a third person?  Then he's watching security camera footage of a fight that is obviously just regular footage they threw an effect on because, A) a security camera facing some piping is pointless, B) the shot is perfectly framing the actors, and C) the camera sways with the action.  If I'm yelling at the TV about your slapdash fucking work then you fucked up hard.  Fucking sacrifice this movie to the devil in hopes you get a better movie or, like, an ice cream sandwich.

I give Sacrifice 1 bagpipe out of 5 only because I like cults in movies:

Scherzo Diabolico (2015) 1h 31m

When we watch a film, most of the time we're engaged in some form that allows us to feel part of it.  Jump scares, the moment of cringe when we get a close up of a needle going in, or the relief you can feel from someone escaping death, these connect us to the screen.  With Scherzo Diabolico, I felt less personally engaged and more like I was a voyeur to our main character's life.  Spying on him while he has his breakdown and develops his subsequent plot.  It felt perverse at moments to see his planning and begin to have that become my engagement with the film.  Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here...

Scherzo Diabolico is a film out of Mexico where we follow Aram, an accountant that, despite his hard work, is under compensated by his manager.  Aram formulates a plot to kidnap his boss' daughter and let the mental breakdown of his higher up lead to the manager's removal so Aram can move into his position.  It works, but the emotional trauma to the girl leads to her finally being triggered and she seeks out revenge.

This film falls under the "thriller" umbrella much more than horror but it was a good watch regardless.  Each character is defined well in their role.  Aram himself is done in such a manner that even if you wanted to celebrate him getting his due recognition you can't because of the layer of scum that surrounds him.  It's not just a greasy film that encircles him, but it's revealed that he is covered in it as the movie progresses.

When I started this review I mentioned that I felt more of a voyeur.  I saw a review on IMDB where someone complained about this movie being non-engaging.  I think it just depends on how you watch this film as to what your engagement really becomes.  I enjoyed it, but odds are I'll probably never watch it again.

I give Scherzo Diabolico 2 day of the dead masks out of 5:

White Coffin (a.k.a. Ataud Blanco: El Juego Diabólico) (2016) 1h 15m

You should be familiar with the analogy of something having layers like an onion.  While it makes sense, I've never spent time peeling an onion for anything.  I don't think that I know anyone that has actually been cooking and thought "I need to peel this onion to use it."  With this film though, I finally had a real understanding of what it means to have layers skinned away to reveal the new.

White Coffin takes us on an insane adventure.  Virginia's daughter is kidnapped (after she has already kind of kidnapped her own daughter) by some sort of strange cult.  While in chase with the initial kidnapper our heroine is run off the road by an ambulance and killed in a car crash.  Her body is resurrected from her coffin and thus begins a twisted game of riddles, a white coffin, and multiple women attempting to save their children from this murder cult.

When I read the description of this film I wasn't too into it.  The moment Virginia is resurrected then I was ready for whatever.  This movie had so much going on, but it paced itself well and each reveal became more intense until the finale.   Then the ending became a series of madness upon madness.  I loved this film.  It's one of those movies that I will pull out when I want to have rad discussions with friends after it's done.

I give White Coffin 4 cult members out of 5:

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Anguish (2015) 1h 31m

Here is a list of things I did in the course of watching this film:

1) went to my car to get out upholstery cleaner from the trunk
2) spot cleaned the couch (from rust from the pull out bed part... you perv)
3) cleaned the living room
4) made some mac n' cheese
5) questioned my life choices in regards to what lead me to "watch" this film

Anguish is not a horror film.  It falls under a heavy psychological thriller heading with about five minutes of forced horror.  Our story starts with a teenage girl being a teenager and getting hit and killed by a pick-up for her shitty angst.  Another teenage girl begins to have weird episodes of seeing things or having supernatural occurrences.  It's initially chalked up to mental illness until a priest visits and begins to assume it's possession.  We end up finding out it's the spirit of death-by-angst and then there are some awkward moments with the mothers of the teenage girls while our living girl is possessed by the dead girl.  Shoehorn in a brief moment where our living girl is briefly possessed by something else because, why not?  Then I think the living girl gets her spirit back and the movie just ends with some boyfriend making out and whatever.

Even when I was in the room and facing the TV I wasn't into this film.  It was boring and much like a lot of the films I've been watching, slow as fuck.  The fact that this wasn't a real "horror" film probably hurt it more in regards to my attention span.  I'm going to blame the script here because while I roll the plot over in my mind I think its foundation holds promise.  The execution however became the executioner for this film and instead of heads rolling it was my eyes at how listless this movie made me.

I give Anguish 0 copies of Teen Angst out of 5:

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Evolution (2015) 1h 21m

Evolution is a movie.  I watched it.  That pretty much sums up how I felt after I finished this film.  It wasn't as if the content left me confused or that there was too much to process, it was just a thing that exists in this world.  Much how you come to see newspaper headlines that you see and know that exists but it doesn't effect you.  It's like strangers on the sidewalk.  Perhaps they acknowledge each other but for the most part brush right past each other and continue on.  Some other metaphor goes here to make it a trilogy.

Evolution is actually a foreign film.  The dialogue, all in French, is minimal.  This film seems to rely more on visual story telling.  A boy is swimming in the ocean and sees a dead body among the coral.  This appears to be the early catalyst to let the boy know that things aren't as they seem.  Ignoring the fact that everyone there is either a weird pale androgynous Tilda Swinton woman or a young boy that has to take medicine (yeah, every single boy) we're never quite sure if this is set on Earth or even in the present.  We just get a lot of life and death imagery laced with the color red and star symbolism to accent key moments.

This film once again toes the line of horror.  It's really more of a sci-fi/thriller type deal with one straight up nightmare fuel scene.  I can't go into it unfortunately because it gives away a lot of this movie and truthfully, while it didn't impact me that much, I don't want to disuade someone else from seeing it.  This just wasn't what I was looking for at the time and that probably colored it that way for me.  I might rewatch it at some point if someone says they want to watch it and I'm there, but all in all it was just a film I watched.

I give Evolution 2 starfish out of 5:

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Tank 432 (aka Belly of the Bulldog) (2015) 1h 28m

Everyone knows that one person that pulls the "Oh, look at how deep/crazy/etc" shit, but they push it rather than let it be natural.  You know, like the Hot Topic kids 10 - 15 years ago that were wearing t-shirts that said shit like "You laugh because I'm different, I laugh because you're all the same," or "I do what the voices tell me to."  I feel like Tank432 was written by one of those people that became an adult and still wanted to do that "Look at me!  Look at my art and how weird I can make it!"

A group of mercenaries have two hostages and are attempting to escape what seems like the woods behind someone's house.  We don't get an explanation of the hostages, the battle, or the mercenaries.  Instead we're dropped in balls deep in whatever this mess is.  The hostages look like Guantanamo Bay prisoners with orange jump suits and black hoods.  Once again, no explanation to their dress.  Oh, they also find some girl in a shipping crate that just screams.

The group eventually makes it to an old abandoned Bulldog tank in the middle of a field.  After the medic gives everyone a tranq to help them sleep they wake up to find out the door is jammed.  They have a few nightmare/dream scenes that are bad art school projects too.  While trapped in the tank they find some powder named "Kratos" (which is essentially Cheetos dust) and files on each of them.  Everyone's freaking out and then someone they left behind (due to a bad leg injury) shows up outside talking about crazy shit and dumping Kratos all over himself and in his nose.  They run him over with the tank because, why not?  Everyone ends up dead in the tank except for one guy but then a bunch of hazmat suit guys with flame throwers show up and torch the tank.

From there we hear a siren and a notice to clear the testing area because the next experiment is about to begin.  We then get a new soldier emerging from an underground shelter and looking real freaked out.

This movie tried so hard to be some sort of psychological thriller/horror deal but it was a bunch of "I don't give a fuck," with a twist ending that I couldn't be bothered with.  I get it.  You tried to be all "OOOOOOOO! Look at my movie ending!  Did you see that coming?!  How about that dream shit?  I'm so edgy!"  and to that I say *leans to the left and rips a loud fart*.

I give Tank 432 0 kawaii tanks out of 5:

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Kill or Be Killed (2015) 1h 43m

You can't outrun the washing machine is more like it.  For the 1900's, these people all have impeccably clean clothes.  Even the prisoner chain gain building the railroad at the beginning were taken away by Calgon.  I guess that just matches their well trimmed or shaved facial hair and perfect coifs, but they did put some dirt on their faces (just not their hands).  Oh, also, this isn't a fucking horror movie Netflix!  Get your shit together!

Kill or Be Killed follows a group of bandits in search of a hidden stash of money from a previous heist.  They start the journey by robbing a church and shooting their way out.  In the process they kill two priests.  This is important for the end, otherwise... you know... whatever.  Their journey west (or further west...) ends each night with one of the members dying in growing violent fashions.  Each body has a strange circular symbol on their arm.

As the nights progress. their leader continues to hear a bell ding in the darkness and every day he loses his mind greater and greater.  In the end he is the only one left.  He fakes his own death which leads to a boy walking out of the tall grass.  He then marks the man's arm as he jumps up from the ground and tussles with the kid.  Eventually he breaks the boy's neck and staggers until he finds the treasure.  He passes out from exhaustion to find the boy watching him.  He is left for dead by the kid who ends up being the brother of the other boy that was just killed and the son of one of the priests killed in the beginning.  See, that shit comes back!  But in that uncomfortable way... like herpes... except you can't just turn off or rate herpes with a thumbs down in hopes of getting less herpes.

So, not a horror film.  Maybe a thriller-ish type thing?  Barely a western.  Horses, revolvers, and racist terms for Native Americans don't make westerns... wait... maybe they did.  That's all John Wayne films were, right?  I always cared more about the Eastwood Dollars trilogy.

I give Kill or Be Killed 0 adorable pictures I found when Google image searching "cowboy ghost" out of 5:

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Day 15: Shelley (2016) 1h 32m

Sometimes in life we're given something, told it's one thing, but feel like it's something else.  For example, right now I'm eating some leftover Chinese food which is supposedly chicken, but I think this is pork.  This movie was listed under horror, had the subheading of thriller, but in reality it was neither of those... and also crap.

Shelley follows a Danish hippy couple where the wife is infertile.  They hire a maid to help around the home but eventually ask her to be a surrogate.  During the course of the pregnancy the surrogate experiences what she considers strange reactions to the fetus.  It causes her pain, strange aversions, sleepwalking, sickness, etc.  There is also an older hippy that does some reiki and pulls an angry dog out of the maid's head space.  Yeah, it was really as random as I made that seem.

The rest of the film isn't worth going into.  I will say that the baby doesn't really seem to be evil and I'm confused by the whole thing.  The pace of this movie was so slow that when you got a small piece of the plot you would forget it 15 minutes later when the next sliver of plot was introduced.  Then we're just stuck with hippies in a cabin for a long time.  I've been tempted to look up an in-depth plot analysis but I quickly realize that would serve no purpose as I'm not really invested in ever remembering this movie after I hit "publish."

In keeping with most of the films I've watched this cut, I give Shelley 0 stupid babies out of 5:

Day 9: The Girl in the Photographs (2015) 1h 35m

I don't know so much about this being a "brutal thriller" any more that I could assume that Wes Craven would have been proud of this (this was the last film he had any involvement in prior to his death).  I, however, don't really find this to be "brutal."  I feel like people that use this term in cases like this don't listen to metal.  Although, that quote is from Fangoria... so maybe they listen to some weird metal I don't know about that specifically sings about white guys having henchman that are bald, refuse to wear a shirt or underwear, don't speak, and live in a weird basement room where he apparently didn't find enough woods porn to cover more than a small section of the concrete wall.  Actually, that does sound kind of brutal...

The Girl in the Photographs revolves around a woman that has a stalker but doesn't know it.  She only knows that there's something fucked up happening because she keeps finding photos of murdered females that the killer leaves specifically for her to find.  He is also posing his "models" in similar poses as a famous photographer that came from their town.  This photographer (Kumar from Harold and Kumar) decides to return home to find the photos and do a shoot for inspiration.  He's a total dick sandwich with mayo, questionable mayo.

This is pretty much the whole film.  I was bored as fuck.  The ending was actually decent for TGitP but, in this case, the ends do not justify the means.  If that were the case then this should've been done in a short film format and then I could go back to playing Dark Souls III.

I give The Girl in the Photographs 1 woods porn mag out of 5:

Day 4: The Stranger (2015) 1h 33m

To some of us, the "stranger" is known as a masturbatory technique where you cut off circulation to your hand just long enough to numb it up and then you jerk yourself off with it.  The idea is that since you've lessened the feeling in your hand then it feels like someone else is giving you a handy.  In truth, the "stranger" and The Stranger share something in common... both are a bit different than the norm, but in the end it's still just jerking off the same cock.

The Stranger takes place in bad neck tattoo, U.S.A. where a man returns after 16 years and is looking for his wife. Upon finding she is dead he promptly gets beaten, stabbed, and peed on but the shittiest antagonist and his circle jerk crew.  The 16 year old boy who told him that his wife was dead (sure, you can do that math real quick) sees the attack and tells a police officer about it.  The shitagonist is the cop's son and they attempt to dump the body.  Our boy brings the barely alive man home and this establishes the base for this film.

To be short and to the point, this is a vampire movie.  The stranger is a vampire that only refers to his vampirism as having a curse or a disease.  The one creative take on stale vampire lore is that vampire blood can be used to heal, but it will only heal properly if it is blessed first.  We see this take place when his son is badly burned and performs the ritual and the application.  If it isn't blessed first, and it comes in contact with a wound of any kind, it only heals but doesn't restore and it will pass the vampirism on to the patient.  I don't recall seeing or reading anything like this before.  I've seen the healing with vampire blood or spit before, but I like the idea of taking something impure like that and imbuing it with some form of sanctity for healing.

In the end, this film felt like a slog.  I wasn't super impressed with it but I wasn't totally put off by it either.  However, to put this film in the middle of the road means you might like it and you might not.  I already passed on the only interesting bit of info you can glean from this film so take that and run with it.  Run away from The Stranger!!!

I give The Stranger 2 stranger danger images out of 5:

Day 2: Bound to Vengeance (2015) 1h 33m

I don't know how to start this post, let alone talk about this film.  It's not as if I was floored by it.  Far from it.  If I write the basic plot on here then it sounds like an interesting concept.  The issue is that Bound to Vengeance doesn't execute it well.

Bound to Vengeance follows Eve, a woman that was kidnapped but she turned the tide on her captor and has the chance to escape.  While going through the house she's in she comes across photos of other girls that are kept around town.  She forces her captor to lead her to the other kidnapped women in an attempt to free them.

See?  That sounds like a decent plot.  It's not even an issue of acting or directing as everyone plays their part well and some of the shots are really well done.  The issue comes with the overall script and presentation.  I find myself not caring after the second of the freed girls is found.  It tries to out-twist itself and, rather than keeping my interest, it goes off the rails in that horrible train wreck form... a train that was carrying orphan babies. TRAIN BABIES!  TRABABIES!!

I give Bound to Vengeance 1 bound erotic Tarzan out of 5:

Day 25: Hush (2016) 1h 21m

I hope that when I die my tombstone says "Died Fighting."  Even if I die from having a heart attack while masturbating I want people to know I died fighting. "He died fighting his one-eyed monster."  Yeah, dying like I lived...

Hush's plot is a relatively simple one with a well played twist.  Our main character is Maddie, an author who happens to be deaf and she is trying to survive some psycho that is attempting to break into her house.  The fact that the killer has the ability to move around and sneak up on Maddie leads to some tense visuals and experiences with his character.  They also don't over inundate you with Maddie's disadvantage and balance out the film by making it very dark.  This lack of lighting during Hush, at least to me, made me feel that the loss of sight was a greater issue to deal with than the lack of hearing.

I'll admit that this movie felt a bit slow at first.  There are characters introduced in name or picture only that are never brought into the film, but at least give you a stronger emotional connection with Maddie.  This helped me a lot with getting into Hush.  I don't know if other people do this, but sometimes in these films when something happens and the protagonist gets the advantage I get excited and yell "YES!" at the TV as if the Pens have just scored an overtime goal to go to the Stanley Cup.  I did that twice during Hush.  I'm sure my neighbors thought I was having some sort of weird angry orgasm.

I give Hush 5 pictures of the cat from this movie out of 5:

Day 24: Odd Thomas (2013) 1h 37m

First off, RIP Anton Yelchin.  It's kind of a shame that you'll be known more as Chekov in the Star Trek reboots than anything else.  Not that I'm saying Odd Thomas should be the number one thing he's known for, but he should get recognition for this.  It was a fun horror comedy.

Odd Thomas (which is literally his name) has psychic abilities as well as the ability to see ghosts and demon-like entities that thrive on feeding off evil, chaos, and death.  After noticing a large group of these demons following "Fungus Bob" around, Odd begins to uncover an insane mass murder plot for the devil.  Not that the devil asked for it, but some fake "satanic" stuff gets thrown in and the plan is to do it for Satan and then probably some sort of honor.  This sounds really random but it's because I don't want to give too much away.  Why?  Because you should see it.

I'm not sure how true it is to the Dean Koontz book of the same name as I've never read any Koontz.  For some reason, despite him being a contemporary of Stephen King, I never see a Koontz books and think of supernatural thrillers.  King's son Joe Hill?  Sure.  Brian Keene?  Yes, Dean Koontz? Idkwtfbbq.

Regardless of the source material and your knowledge of or inexperience with it, Odd Thomas made me think of films like John Dies at the End (which I mention on here a lot) and Shawn of the Dead.  I'm not saying it's as good as those films in overall humor, but it's not far off.

I give Odd Thomas 4 unrelated but sweet lizard men images out of 5:

Day 14: Para Elisa (2012) 1h 15m

Have you ever heard the Patton Oswalt bit about his TiVO?  I feel that way with some of the movies Netflix puts in their horror listing when I'm counting to the number I rolled.  It seems that since I enjoyed some of the foreign horror films I've watched on this blog that Netflix has the idea that I must like all foreign horror.  "But you like the horsee shows! NO TiVO! BAD TiVO!"  Bad Netflix!

Para Elisa comes to us from Spain and revolves around a spoiled shit of a college girl whose mom won't lend her 1000 Euros for a trip with her friends because the mother had just paid for her to take a trip to London.  Her drug dealer boyfriend sees a poster for a babysitting job, calls the number, and hands her the phone.  She eventually goes to find out that the girl she is supposed to baby sit is a grown ass woman that the mother has completely fucked up in the head.  After being drugged, our leading lady wakes up to realize that she is not meant to babysit, but to become a living doll for the daughter to play house with.

This movie wasn't for a horror fan.  This is more for the vanilla movie watcher that wanted to watch something scary.  Yes, the premise is kind of fucked up and the mother/daughter relationship is bizarre but it really didn't keep me invested in the film.  In addition, a leading character that I instantly did not like (as obvious above) really gave me no one to root for.  Plus, you see the ending coming way to early.  I know that's a constant complaint I bring up on here, but I want to be surprised.  Just once.

I give Para Elisa 1 creepy doll out of 5:

Day 2: Necrophobia (Necrofobia) (2014) 1h 15m

 
This movie wasn't really horror in a new dimension.  It's more of a horror/thriller in a dimension of things I've seen done before, just in Spanish! Think Fight Club, but instead of fighting it's a man having a nervous breakdown... AND MURDER! MUAHAHAHAHA!

Our guy, Dante, found his brother dead of an overdose.  From there he spirals into this odd mixture of time anomalies and dealing with a man in a black coat and hat he thinks is his dead brother.  During the course of this film Dante's (separated) wife is murdered and this sets the deaths in motion.  Dante runs around like an ass and eventually has a real confrontation with the man in black.  It's actually a part of him buried inside (not surprised) and the film pretty much starts over with him in the know.

This film isn't really worth watching.  It wasn't bad.  It just wasn't that interesting.  I can't even make jokes because this shit was just bland.  Fuckin' mayo on white bread boring.

I give Necrophobia 0 pairs of Guy Fieri looking scissors out of 5:

Day 28: The Invitation (2015) 1h 40m

There are moments when I watch a film and I can identify with a main character.  Spending most of a party having one of those "something is going on that I'm not down with" feeling is definitely something I've done more than once.  Luckily, none of those parties involved anybody in a weird death cult that plans to kill their old friends.

The Invitation is a literal invitation to a dinner party.  A couple had returned to LA after being away for a few years after the death of a child and the end of a marriage.  While they were away they had apparently found a strange cult that embraces death.  Our main character, Will, is the ex-husband of the female in the cult couple and the father of the child that died.

Pretty much from the start Will keeps noticing little things that seem off.  His continued paranoid outbursts keep upsetting his friends and his girlfriend.  Truth be told, if someone had the doors locked and made me watch some cult recruitment video I'd be loosing my mind as well.  Will has a major freak out after he hears a voicemail from a friend that said he was at the party but hadn't been there all night.  The timing is just right for this friend to show up and Will kind of breaks down and accepts he has been winding up about nothing all night.

Then everything clicks for him...

During the toast he suddenly realizes the drinks are dosed and starts slapping drinks out of people's hands before they can drink.  A girl that was just a friend of the couple gets up and starts screaming that Will has ruined everything and attempts to attack him.  It's also noticed that one woman did drink and she is dead and foaming at the mouth.  The couple and the friends of the couple then begin trying to pick everyone off one by one.

The best part of the film was the very end when Will notices a red lamp lit outside the house, and then sees others lit outside a dozen other homes on the hillside.  It sent a definite chill down my spine at the thought of these bizarre cult murder suicides.

I was a teen when the Heaven's Gate group all killed themselves and had their purple sheets and Nike shoes to go on the Hale Bopp comet.  The fact that I remember all of those details and more is probably want triggered that chill.  That the death cult idea really isn't crazy enough to not exist...

I give The Invitation 3 Hale Bopp comets out of 5:

Day 25: Final Girl (2015) 1h 30m

I get the feeling that someone watched A Clockwork Orange, decided they wanted to make some bastardized update of it, and then have Alex and his droogs lose and die while out for a bit of the ol' ultraviolence.  I wish I could kick them in the yarbles for that...


In truth, Final Girl was a pretty okay film.  It wasn't a horror movie at all though, definitely more along the thriller lines with some slight horror elements.  Our primary characters are Wes Bentley (American Beauty/the Hunger Games) and Abigail Breslin.  Abigail you may remember as Little Rock from the 2009 film Zombieland, or as the little girl with glasses that dances to "Super Freak" in Little Miss Sunshine.  After finding that tidbit out I can no longer pull parts of this film up in my mind without thinking about that.

Apparently Abigail's parents were killed and she ended up in Wes' care.  Wes then trains her to be some sort of weird spy without the actual spying but all of the cool subterfuge and killing abilities.  He does so because he says that someone killed his wife and child and I think he was trying to find them.  I'm not sure, it really had nothing to do with the plot aside from bringing them together and then was abandoned.

Her first real solo mission is to kill this group of four guys that have been taking girls out into the woods and "hunting" them.  A majority of these scenes seemed like something that would be in a The Killers video.  It's her with blond hair and a red dress in the dark woods while four guys in tuxedos try to find her.  The fact that she dosed three of the guys with DMT and they're having crazy hallucinations helps this idea too.  You could just see Brandon Flowers suddenly popping up and singing with that old timey villain mustache he has sometimes.  Just a girl trying to kill guys in tuxedos and then suddenly "SOMEBODY TOLD ME! THAT YOU HAD A BOYFRIEND!..."  The Killers are a pretty good band.  Much better than this film was.

I know that above I described this film as "pretty okay," and using that as a descriptor typically means that it was shit and I don't want to just don't want to say it.  This film had moxie though.  While it brought together a lot of things I like, it was middle of the road for me.  This isn't to say that if, in conversation, the discussion of films comes up that I might not recommend it, but it's a movie, I saw it, and it was it.

I give Final Girl 2 The Killers albums out of 5: