Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness (1995) 1h 20m

Ever since I bought this film, I continually forget that I own it.  I wasn't even looking for it when I was searching for a film to watch, it just happened to be in the same binder as tomorrow's film and I found it first.  So what does that say about Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness, aside from that title is too long?

Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness (or Eko Eko as I'm going to call it from now on) opens with a satanic cult using magic to kill teenagers.  Their apparent goal is to take the lives of 13 innocent teens in order to bring Lucifer to Earth to do whatever.  This film is really vague on what the end goal is here so we get: Step 1: Kill Teens, Step 2: Summon Lucifer, Step 3: ????, Step 4: Profit!  At the end of their opening ritual they get a warning about a strong witch coming that they should not make an enemy of.  Enter Misa, said teenage witch that ends up trapped in the school with 13 other students and two perverted teachers.  Her goal is to find the head person behind the killings and prevent the rise of Lucifer as this is apparently all she does in each school she goes to.

I forgot this happened.

Eko Eko had this weird feeling to it, like it never sat quite right with me.  It looks like it was just a made-for-tv-movie and its short running time (at least compared to most J-horror films) only bolsters that sentiment.  The plot is relatively straight forward and some of the set-up and magick effects look okay but you can tell that this was most likely made for a PG-13 audience.  This isn't to say that films under an R rating are bad, just that in this case it all feels a bit immature.

Eko Eko was based off of a manga from the 70's and apparently spawned six fucking sequels and a short television series.  I don't know how I feel about that info.  I would like to go back and read the manga for a comparison just to see if they toned things down or if this was always as tame as I perceive it.  You know, because I perceive the magickal murder of teenagers in order to invoke the rising of Lucifer to be a mundane task.

I give Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness 2 I-no from Guilty Gear out of 5:

Friend Request (2016) 1h 32m

Okay, based on the name of this movie and the tag line on that poster I bet you're expecting me to just up and talk mad shit on this film.  The moment the I saw the title of this film I let out an audible groan of displeasure (and that poster really didn't help) but not all things are as they seem and sometimes you need to peel back the skin to get to the sweet sweet fruit inside.

Friend Request opens with a professor telling his class that a fellow student (Marina) had killed herself.  After some blasé reactions from most of the class, one of them asks if it was true that a video of the suicide was posted on the school website.  Flashback now to when our main girl, Laura, ends up meeting and befriending Marina.  Laura becomes Marina's Fakebook friend but after Marina feels her friendship was betrayed by Laura she practically attacks her before running off and her eventual suicide.  The suicide though is a ritual in which Marina becomes a ghost in the machine.  Through controlling Laura's Fakebook, Marina begins to turn people against Laura all while using the modern black mirrors of laptop and smartphone screens to kill her closest friends so that Laura knows what it really feels like to be "alone."

My overall opinion of this film is indifferent, but I think that's because I watch most of these horror movies by myself.  Once my viewing was complete I had the feeling that this would work much better as a Friday night with friends type of film.  It's made for a crowd to react to it and each other as opposed to one dude sitting on his couch, but I can recognize that and give it credit where it's due.

The concept feels a little bit immature to me, but I'm also long past being a college student, and even when I was, I wasn't a social butterfly so I don't have a frame of reference for this.  Friend Request did have one moment that I popped for and that was that early on we're told Marina has Trichotillomania (a hair pulling disorder).  Later in the film we are shown her bald spot it has become this creepy wasp nest and there was a flash of "Oh shit! someone took some time to think of that and it really pays off!"  There's also the black mirrors existing in technology as one of those techno-pagan things I never thought of but its inclusion only helped this film.

So overall, watch this with friends.  Order pizza, have some snacks, get caffeinated or inebriated, and have a good time.

I give Friend Request 2.5 Japanese Giant Hornets out of 5:

P (2005) 1h 50m

I have no clue what "P" stands for or is short for.  I'm letting you know this up front because if you are looking for answers, I don't have them.  If you have answers though, then hit me up at 30daysofplight@gmail.com and let me know what the hell the "P" means.  I think that pretty much sets the tone for this review as well.

Coming to us from Thailand, P focuses on a young girl (Aaw, later Dau) that is being raised by her grandmother.  While she attends school like the other children, Aaw is an outcast because her grandmother is the local witch and has been training her granddaughter in the craft.  When the matriarch becomes very ill Aaw attempts to get rice and medicine for her but is told they owe too much money to the local merchant woman.  In order to pay for their needs Aaw is tricked into being a prostitute at a club in Bangkok.  To survive, and get what she wants, Aaw uses what her grandmother taught her, but eventually forsakes the two rules she was told to never break: 1) never take payment for magick done, 2) never eat raw meat.  Breaking these rules lets the evil in...

There's a bit of a disconnect between the home and Bangkok sections of this film.  I can't tell if it's an intentional break but it felt like the film was heading in one direction but suddenly spun the wheel and ended up eating a raw pork salad in the city and letting everything go to shit.  There are a few other disconnects I faced while watching this but I think that they're more of a cultural difference and a misunderstanding on my part so I won't go into those.

Suangporn Jaturaphut does a great job in the role of Aaw/Dau as well as when acting as the evil version of Dau.  It's the subtle evil you find common in J/C/K/T-Horror but it is effective here.

If black magick and foreign horror aren't your thing, then at least look up the scene where Dau uses her darker magick for the first time and a scum bag gets his dick bit off by a snake.  More scum bags need their dicks bit off by snakes, at least in my opinion.

I give P 2 snakes out of 5:

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:

Day 3: Mercy (2014) 1h 19m

Finally, 30 Days of Plight has come back to the United States for 2014's Mercy.  I feel like at this point in my life I should know that when I see either A) a star-studded cast, or B) "based on a work by Stephen King," then great fuckery is afoot.  Also, why is Mark Duplass seemingly cast as a creep and/or jerk so much?  Is it typecasting for how he is in real life?  I want to think Mark Duplass is a cool guy in real life. #Iwanttobelieve

Mercy is based off the Stephen King short story "Gramma" which I have never read.  Although, it's now added to my list of things that I say I kind of want to read but probably never will if I'm being honest with myself.  This movie starts out pretty strong with a man walking into a room with an axe, spinning it around in his hand, and promptly splitting his own skull with it, all in front of his wife.  This movie could have ended here and I would sing it's accolades from the highest of mountain tops.  Too bad there was still another hour and 17 minutes to go.

Our main character is George (Chandler Riggs of The Walking Dead fame and "hey Carl" memes).  His grandmother has a seizure and is put in a home.  Then, a year later, she has a stroke and George and his brother and mother return to fake West Virginia to take care of their ailing family member.  We meet George's creepy asshole uncle (Mark Duplass) and this married friend of George's mom that both George and his brother state they have no problem if this dude (Dylan McDermott) and their mom banged.  I feel like Dylan McDermott hasn't changed his look since the first season of American Horror Story and everyone is afraid to tell him to with each passing film.  To pull this back to the film, the long and short of it is that the in her youth the grandmother found this made-up witchcraft item known as a "weeping book" where if you cry on the pages while thinking of your wish it will make the ink appear.  She made some agreement with a demon named Hastur and had triplets.  The beginning scene with the axe was her and her husband.  Now Hastur has come to apparently try to use her body to possess George.  I'm kind of confused on the whole Hastur thing here, especially since I know that name from the Cthulhu mythos, and when they show him he looks nothing like the rad drawing of him they showed earlier.  He looks more like a dark variant of Moss-Man from the He-Man toys.  George defeats Hatsur by being brave and crying on the book while stating that he loved his grandma.  For real, the big "saves the day" thing is that weak.

Mercy was very good visually and talent wise, but I feel that the storytelling of it could have been done much better.  What it lacked in substance it tried to make up for with suspense-by-omission.  In this case it came off as poor writing, at least to me.  I can't really damn this film just because I didn't really like it all that much, but technically I can as this is a horror film review blog... so, suck it, Mercy!

I give Mercy 1 Dylan McDermott ass shot out of 5: