Dead Men Walk (1943) 1h 4m

I chose today's film based solely on the fact that it is just over an hour and because I'm coming down with something and feel like death myself.  The disc itself is from a cheap 10-film pack which is supposed to be zombie themed movies but for a $5 set I doubt anyone was quality checking the content specificity with these choices.  That said, let's dig into today's film!

Less vampire, more sadpire.

Dead Men Walk features George Zucco playing the roles of both Dr. Lloyd Clayton and Dr. Elwyn Clayton.  Llody is a man of science and a medical doctor while Elwyn studies the occult and, by the description on the box, is a wizard.  We open at Elwyn's funeral when it is interrupted by our Deus Ex Kate.  I don't know how she knows what she knows, but she knows way too much.  Elwyn's body is collected by his servant and Elwyn rises from the grave.  He then visits his brother and tells him he is going to wreck his life.  The rest of this film is pretty much Dracula except that Elwyn is targeting his niece and Lloyd has to be the doctor and Van Helsing.

I really liked Dead Men Walk.  I thought it was going to be a very 40's matinee film but it was fun to watch.  The pacing is really weird as they squeezed a lot into such a short time.  It's essentially death, but I'm alive, Gayle is to be married, now she's sick, a vampire?! etc. etc.

What I appreciated the most with this film was the dialog.  It felt like someone reading literature to you.  It began and end with semi-poetic verse and there wasn't much in the way of filler, just advancing the story.  I think that my biggest complaint with Dead Men Walk would be that there are no roads.  It's constantly people running through the woods, in the dark, to get to their location.  Elwyn I can write off as he is a vampire, but everyone else must have cat eyes or something.

I give Dead Men Walk 3 copies of Chuck Tingle's Vampire Night Bus Pounds My Butt out of 5:

Hypersomnia (a.k.a. Hipersomnia) (2016) 1h 30m

I was going to start this by saying "I'm not a fan of films with human trafficking," but then I don't really think any sane person is a fan of films with human trafficking in the plot.  Although, people really like CSI:SVU and that show was nothing but terrible crimes happening to people.  I've seen some crazy shit on that show.

With all of that in mind, let's move on to Hypersomnia.  An Argentinian film that reminded me a lot of Black Swan, just without the whole dancer thing.  Our protagonist is an actress that begins to have issues with feeling as if she's slipping between two lives.  There is her regular life, and then there is the life of a woman being held and sex trafficked by some members of a criminal group.  A client, known only as The Gardener, is apparently an enforcer as well as a torturous asshole.  We do get a glimpse of him wearing a mask and apron.  The mask reminds me of a mix of Jason's potato sack mask, Scarecrow from Batman the Animated Series, and Decker's mask from Nightbreed.

For the most part we're left trying to guess which is the real world and which is a dream state, or are both real?  Spoilers: They're both real and she has a twin that she sometimes jumps into.  After putting the pieces together she tracks down the warehouse building where this shit is going down and she and her boyfriend attempt to liberate the girls.  The girls had a plan of their own and enact it at this time and begin to wreck shit.  The Gardener ends up being the one person they thought was their friend the whole time that just happens to have some form of multiple personality disorder.  They escape with only the loss of the actress' boyfriend who dies by The Gardener's hands.

Honestly, this film didn't keep my interest.  The use of The Gardener seemed like an unnecessary foil to the actual twins.  The jumping back and forth was done in a manner that felt a bit too chaotic in the editing.  This lack of smooth transitions really take away from any flow this movie could have acquired.  Also, the actress went through crazy conditions to do a play that seemed like it was going to be shit.

I want to give this a 0, but I'm going to give Hypersomnia 1 set of Siamese twins out of 5.  Just because the acting in it was pretty good:

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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 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: