Day 7: Baskin (2015) 1h 37m

There are times in life where you will make horrible mistakes.  While not my worst mistake, writing this film off early was certainly a lack in judgement on my part.  What started off as a slow crawl turned into one of the most insane things I've ever watched.  It's the kind of horror that is in line with the Silent Hill video games where things are so grotesque and twisted you're not sure exactly what you're looking at.

Based off of the short film bearing the same title, the Turkish film Baskin (which translates to "police raid") focuses on what becomes the most surreal night for a group of police officers.  After acting more like a biker gang than cops at a late night restaurant, they receive a call for back-up at a location not far from them.  Along the way a series of strange occurrences happen, such as seeing a naked man run past and something unseen hitting their van and leaving symbols scratched in it.  Then their van hits a bloody man in the road and veers into a deep creek.

This is where we have the first of many dream realm scenes between the rookie and the "boss" of the officers.  We also find that they both see a cloaked man just beyond the door of the room these scenes exist in.  The rookie is pulled from the water and we briefly meet a group of Romani that give them directions to the site they were called to.  This is the point where things began to descend into madness and I became hyper focused on Baskin.

They arrive at a large building to find a single cop inside hitting his head off of a wall.  After he points to a door our cops decide to split up.  Then they enter Hell.  Literally.  As soon as I finished this film I begin extensively looking things up on it.  They don't enter a Dante's Inferno hell, or a fire and brimstone hell, but rather a cultish human-extremes version of hell.  It's an overly sexualized, bloody, grotesque, absolutely insane portrayal of hell.  To top it all off, their leader was this guy:

Mehmet Cerrahoglu

That is not make-up, he has a rare condition.  All they did was slowly add tattoos to his body as time passed.  This is also the only film he has ever been in and he was fucking amazing!  His voice and delivery and his actions kept me rapt on the entire ending of this film.  You are the fuckin' man, Mr. Cerrahoglu!

Watch this movie.  Trust me, it'll be slow to start but when it gets going it really gets going.  I didn't even go into the full details of the insanity because you need to experience it.  When my fiancé and I woke up this morning I instantly started rattling on about the craziness of this film.  Most people just wake up with a kiss and then shower, I gush about satanic cults.

I give Baskin 4 hellmouths out of 5:

photo of Mehmet Cerrahoglu from twitter.com/ellifdagg

Day 6: Splatter (2009) 29m

I feel like Netflix was fucking with me on this one.  When I saw a 29 minute running time and Corey Feldman's face I assumed this was some sort of short film.  Nothing against Mr. Feldman, as he has been in many movies I like, but he hasn't been horror relevant since the first Lost Boys film (and this includes the late addition sequels they made where he did a reprise of his Edgar Frog role).

Splatter was a web series created for Netflix.  It was meant to be an interactive show where the next person killed would be chosen by the viewers.  I assume that what I watched was either the pilot or maybe the first episode as almost everyone was killed during it.

It starts with Corey Feldman's character Johnny Splatter committing suicide on camera after spouting a fake vodou spell.  Five people from his career then show up for his wake (I'm not sure what it is, maybe a shitty funeral at night).  These people are his two former band mates, his manager, his producer, and a groupie.  The whole thing is filmed at what I'm pretty sure was the castle house from a season of Flavor of Love.  A video of the suicide shows up but then runs in reverse to where Corey Feldman is telling them his will.

I don't get the video segments.  We see Corey in person and he's a zombie but on the videos he's normal and the videos correspond in relation to events and deaths that happen just seconds before.  So I have no clue what the time logic is here or if he just had his revenge planned this tightly.

After the first death our cast finds a journal in the empty coffin.  It's written entirely in a different language, but don't worry!  The groupie spent time in an African country and she "picks up dialects quickly," so she can read it.  Yes, the logic is that she can pick up spoken languages quickly and can therefore read this journal.  Fuck this character.  She should have died first... preferably on the way to the wake/funeral.

The journal contains a ritual to stop Johnny; body parts from those murdered, collected and burned while an incantation is done.  Come the end there is only one person still alive is, Johnny's manager.  Bee tee dubbs, his fucking manager is CANDYMAN!  Of course not in the role of Candyman, but still the same actor.  He starts the ritual but rather than finishing it he and Johnny make a deal to do a comeback tour.  As a fuckin' nasty zombie, Johnny Splatter reunion tour.  Also Johnny brings his murdered bassist back to life because he needs a bassist.

You know, I kind of thought this was goofy fun when I watched it, but recounting this pilot (or whatever) has made me kind of angry at it.  Also, there were no other episodes of it on Netflix which is what confused me to begin with.  IMDB says there were 10 episodes but apparently only three aired.  They probably got pissed like me after telling someone about it and realized it wasn't as good as they initially thought.

I give Splatter 2 sweet Frog Brothers shirt designs out of 5:

Day 5: Hangar 10 (2014) 1h 23m

This movie was The Blair Witch Project with the military and aliens instead of a witch.  That's it.  "Found" footage, getting lost in the woods, weird events, losing one of your members and finding them in the place where the big bad is; it's all there.  The only thing that was kind of interesting was the military helicopter doing sick air burnouts before it explodes and crashes.

I'm not wasting time writing more because I checked the fuck out mid-way through this movie and it just became background noise.

Hangar 10 gets 0 stupid alien clipart pics out of 5:

Day 4: Cam2Cam (2014) 1h 31m

If this film had balls I would fucking punt them sooooo hard just because I wouldn't want it to spawn any offspring.  Having that image firmly planted in your mind, know that this wasn't the worst film I've ever seen.  I just disliked it so much that I want to cause permanent bodily damage to it in order to preserve hope for our future.

Here's the rundown: An American girl, in Bangkok, thinks she's having webcam hanky panky with another female friend.  She realizes that something is up and then the person on the other end comes to her place, kills her, and cuts off her head.  Enter her sister coming to basically find her sister's head and what happened to her.  There's a series of bullshit and fake murder that leads her to find out that a group of people in the same apartment building as her sister.  They were doing some webcam hack/scam type deal and one of them took it too far and became a serial killer.  This guy gets killed half way through the damn movie by jumping in front of a truck.  The rest is just the lame unraveling of what happened, who was involved, and a bunch of severed lady heads underwater.  It's not worth explaining the actually workings of this plot or film.

The director of this film has some terrible back credits.  It's mostly sequels of sequels of horror movies past their prime.  In fact, the only thing he did I give a shit about was being a producer on Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.  Back to this bogus shit stain though, there is an over abundance of forced lesbianism in this film and it feels injected into the story.  It has the sense of "we're an independent film and this is artsy" pretentiousness to it.  Also, the chat language in this was absolute bullshit.  Nobdy typs lke this 4 n ntre cnvrsatn.  It's old people trying to be hip on what the kids do, even though these people are in their 20's and probably type like normal adults.

I felt like I was being dragged through this entire film.  The only smart line of dialogue was the one guy telling the sister "you traveled across the fucking planet for a head," which is true.  She's an idiot and your closure is bullshit.  Although, she got a box at the end of the film that I'm pretty sure was her sister's fish gnawed skull.  Fuck it.

I give Cam2Cam zero.  It doesn't even warrant me finding some image and making a rating scale for it.  It just gets a fucking zero.

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:

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:

Cut 3 begins! Day 1: The Vampire's Coffin (El ataúd del Vampiro) (1958) 1h 20m

With our feet planted firmly on the soil of this Mexican vampire movie, we're back for our third cut!  Also, much like our previous reviews, we ended up getting what I'm assuming is a sequel to the 1957 Mexican vampire film "The Vampire," and if not the story telling is really fucked up.

The quick sum up is this:  A doctor and his girlfriend/wife apparently encountered a vampire while on a vacation that is only spoken about in this film.  She is under her boyfriend/husband's care at the laziest hospital I've ever seen.  Another doctor our hero works with is studying something to do with skin mutations (I can't remember) and hires a goon to go steal the body of the vampire from his tomb so it can be studied.  The goon sees the token vampire amulet on our vampire and sneaks back in to steal it, but in doing so he has to remove the stake.  This brings the vampire back to life (stick with me here...no pun intended) and the vampire hypnotizes the goon to become his man servant in what I assumed was going to become more homoerotic but I'm glad it didn't.  Our vampire finds the girlfriend/wife and keeps trying to put her under his power.  The whole thing leads up to a face off in the shittiest wax museum in the history of forever and the vampire gets speared to a wall.

That wasn't as quick as it could have been.

Overall, this film was a mess.  Being in black and white meant that a lot of the on screen acting was "stage acting" with over dramatic facial expressions by characters not speaking.  Also, they had the effect where the vampire faded away multiple times, but rather than use that each time they chose the turn the camera off, get into place, turn it back on method more often.  The bat was a rubber bat on wires, which I'm fine with, but they would play seagull noises the entire time the bat flew.  There's also a scene where the vampire changes directions in his coffin.

Worst of all though is the broken lore they try to pull with the vampire's reflection.  Every time they show the vampire in a mirror you just see his skeleton.  My fiancé tried to rationalize this point to me by saying that maybe it was showing his current form, since each time he was "dead" in the coffin.  It gets explained to us though as the UV light doesn't reflect off the skin so it doesn't have a reflection... but his bones do?  I feel like this person watched Dracula once, but then tried to remember how the vampire worked in that film and filled in the gaps with gibberish.  GIBBERISH I SAY!

I give The Vampire's Coffin 1 tacky vampire medal out of 5: