Day 7: Late Phases (2014) 1h 35m

That poster is a fucking lie!  Look at it!  Seriously, take a moment to look at that poster.  So with that name and that image you assume you're looking at a werewolf movie, and you'd be right.  However, that wolf looks a billion times better than what we get.  I'm getting ahead of myself though...

Late Phases holds a double meaning here.  It's not just a reference to the moon, but also to our main character.  He's a Vietnam vet that is being moved into a retirement community.  The kicker here is that he is blind.  This doesn't hold him back though as he is incredibly independent and his military training allowed him to adapt his other senses so he's kind of a badass.

On his first night his neighbor is killed by a werewolf who then tries to kill him and his guide dog.  The guide dog doesn't make it so fuck this werewolf in his wolf ass for mortally wounding the dog.  From there our protagonist pieces things together to realize it's a werewolf and who the werewolf is.  Training and hijinx ensue.

I very rarely look at other reviews of films after I watch them/before I blog about them.  This time though I came across someone comparing this to Bubba Ho-Tep and I had the same feeling early on.  The main differences would be that Bubba Ho-Tep has Bruce Campbell and it is a much better film.

I liked the plot here, but not the execution.  I'm not going to fault the actors or the director (as this was his first English speaking film), but just the film itself.  When they moved the chains it just came up short of the first down.

Getting back to my earlier complaint about the werewolf... holy fuck, where do I begin?  First, I have never laughed so hard at a monster reveal as I did while watching Late Phases.  It was just a man in a shitty fur suit and mask.  And when I say a "man" I mean that they spent no time in giving this werewolf any wolf features aside from claws, a poorly designed wolf face, and weird thin and long fur.  The transformation scene was also really cheesy aside from having the guy tear his skin off to have the wolf under it growing.  Maybe I'm being a snob, but when you have the transformation from American Werewolf in London looking as good as it did in 1981, and you come at me with this fucking 2014 shitshow you can suck a wet fart.

I give Late Phases 1 copy of Dog Man out of 5:

Day 10: Dementia (2015) 1h 30m

I have a little game I play with myself anytime I watch a horror movie.  It's "can I figure out who the bad guy is before the reveal?"  The problem with playing that while watching Dementia is that you find out that everyone is absolute trash in this film!

The premise is simple: a Vietnam War vet suffers a stroke and that begins the onset of dementia.  His son and granddaughter come to help him get set-up with a live-in nurse.  The live-in nurse is someone out for revenge on the Vietnam War vet.

So here's a rundown on why everyone is trash:

War vet - he was in a P.O.W. camp and tortured because a member of his platoon gave them up.  He was angry the wife of that man was granted her husband's purple heart upon death so he possibly sexually assaulted but definitely killed her.  Her daughter saw him from a hiding place.  He was also one of those drunk and abusive husbands after returning from the war.

"Nurse" - Not a real nurse, the daughter of the mother and traitor soldier, dedicated her life to finding this guy and getting revenge.  Also killed the vet's cat and blamed it on him.  He should've extracted revenge on her for the death of his cat there and saved us the rest of the film..

granddaughter - stealing from her grandfather's house but also realizes the nurse isn't what she seems.

son - doesn't trust his dad because of the father's past abusive actions.  Seems to just want to push him off on someone else so he doesn't have to deal with him.  Lots of unresolved anger and resentment issues with his father.

This wasn't anything new at its core.  This was the first film in this run that I've definitely considered shutting it off and chalking it up as crap.  I let it go as if it would maybe get better, and it definitely didn't.

I give Dementia 0 trash bags out of 5: