Showing posts with label trigger warning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trigger warning. Show all posts

Sunday, October 15, 2017

6th Cut Begins!: Come Back to Me (2014) 1h 30m


Netflix had to have this movie come up as a joke.  It is some strange sentient being and it knew I was ready to start our 6th Cut with 30 Days of Plight and wanted the most ironic film title to come up.  Not only is it an ironic title, but it belongs to one of those movies where I wonder why I do this to myself.  It's the first film this time and I'm already questioning my personal sanity and thinking of better things to do with my time.  Do you know how much pornography there is on the internet?!  I could be looking at all of the pornographies!!  ALL OF IT!

Come Back to Me is like being forced to sit on a metal folding chair during an hour and a half lecture.  At first you're okay with then, then it's uncomfortable and you squirm a bit, and by the time you should feel relief that it's over your ass is already numb and you don't care.  Our primary characters are a married couple that want to have a baby but the husband finds out he is infertile, and a creepy neighbor boy that can afford a nice house while his only job appears to be bagging groceries.

The married woman begins to have a series of blackouts where she would loose large chunks of time with no memory of what happened.  A few times she wakes up with some sign of trauma, such as blood in her hair, but no wounds.  Eventually she finds out that she is pregnant but this is after we find out the husband has been firing blanks the whole time.  I'm not sure why but the term "firing blanks" caused me to get an image in my head of intercourse being a man and woman dressed in Western clothing and dancing while the guy shoots his gun in the air.  For some people that might be sex.  I don't know.  Different strokes for cowboy folks I guess...

The creepy neighbor boy develops an obsession with the married woman after meeting her.  I need to back up a second and mention that this kid is partially creepy because he has an insane background of living in a meth lab home where his father was violently abusive with the boy's mother.  It escalates until one day the father slices the mother so badly that she dies.  It just so happens this time the boy called the cops.  It also happens to be the first instance where we get a hint of the supernatural.

As the movie progresses we find out that our married woman's blackouts are caused to her being raped and murdered.  The creeper has the ability to bring people back from the dead simply by breathing into them and saying "Come back to me," so he attacks the woman every chance he gets.  It's not only that, but we put together that he has done this to others as well.  In fact, the ending of the film goes on to show a lot of his victims.

In truth, the introduction of the supernatural element gave a renewed interest to this film, but it was far overshadowed by the sexual assault.  When the addition of an Oedipal Complex came in, I checked the fuck out.  It was one of those unfortunate cases of the primary idea of a boy with this power was a really good one, but then they wanted to add "shock" or "edge" and the film became mess.  I'm not trying to say that pushing the limits of film, especially in horror, is a bad thing.  What I'm trying to say is that people need to find the individual limit for a film, and then keep from taking that extra step over the edge.  Get right up to it, maybe hock a loogie over it or throw a rock down, but don't take a running leap and think you'll be okay.

I give Come Back to Me 1 picture of Oedipus out of 5:


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Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Demon Inside (a.k.a. Espectro) (2013) 1h 33m


Instead of an intro here I'm giving more of a trigger warning.  If you are uncomfortable with scenes of sexual assault/rape then avoid this film.  I'm not saying I'm okay with it but the film pretty much started with a really long and uncomfortable scene of this.  In truth, this film could have skipped it or done it differently to still have this tiny part of the plot happen.

Demon Inside is a Mexican film where our main character is a psychic/tarot card reader that focuses on helping people with her gifts.  After a violent sexual assault, her trauma leads to her being admitted to a facility.  Upon her release she is afraid to leave her home.  It doesn't help that her neighbor is an insane and possibly murderous woman.  We also find out that the man that attacked her was cleared of the charges.

Our psychic begins to see visions of a bloody woman in her home.  After some research she discovers that there was a murder in her building and assumes the person is reaching out for help.  In truth, they're visions of her own future, but you don't find this out until the end.

For most of this film I felt lost.  It wasn't just the subtitles (which were sub-par and occasionally word-for-word translations as opposed to contextual translations), but it was also the story telling.  The whole film was meant to build up a bunch of info that only gets sewn together at our main character's realization that the woman she had been seeing was herself.  They're lucky that I made it that far without falling asleep.

I give Demon Inside 1 bad looking Illustrator demon out of 5:


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Sunday, July 3, 2016

Day 23: Kidnapped (Secuestrados) (2010) 1h 25m


I feel as though something were translated poorly as the Spanish (as in from Spain) film Kidnapped didn't actually have a kidnapping happen in it.  There's a weird beginning scene that doesn't tie into the rest of the film, and that guy may have been kidnapped, but as for the rest of it there was no kidnapping.

Kidnapped is actually a home invasion film with a group of rich people I couldn't be arsed to care about and a weird trio of criminals.  There's the all business criminal, the criminal that is looking out for the family, and the hyper-violent criminal.  They're all still dicks, but like I said, so is the family.  I initially thought that the family was chosen because the father could have been involved in some sort of shady business, but it seems that they were just chosen because they were loaded.  Most of the film is either the daughter and the wife in the house while the hyper-violent and the compassionate criminals watch them, or the all business and the father driving around while the bank accounts get emptied at ATMs.

IMDB says that this film was apparently done in 12 long shots without cuts.  I could see that.  It would explain why it was so damn boring too.  You can pull of interesting long shots as a director, but this film had no real direction with it.  The script must have been "rich family moves in house, people break into house, draw this shit out as long as possible, kill everyone."

I give Kidnapped 1 Spider-man ski mask out of 5: