Day 12: 12 Days of Terror (2004) 1h 26m

You know what was an awesome and under appreciated TV show?  Sliders.  It was one of Jerry O'Connell's great TV works before his acting career took off (aside from My Secret Identity, and not counting Stand By Me).  He isn't in this movie, but John Rhys-Davies who played Arturo is in it!

Speaking of TV, 2004's 12 Days of Terror was a made for TV movie about a shark attack on the Jersey Shore in 1916.  Think of it as old-timey Jaws with less of a budget... and a worse script... and some take-it-or-leave-it acting.  I'm personally to the point where I wish I could go back in time to see how people acted in certain time periods.  This film made everything seem so forced to be from 1916.

There wasn't even 12 solid days of terror, I think there were two shark attacks and then 12 days later some other ones.  This movie also pushes the idea that it was a baby great white that did the attacks but apparently the real shark or sharks were never identified.

This film did have one great scene though which I felt exemplified America, even to this day.  There was a shark attack in a creek (or "crick" as Rhys-Davies keeps yelling) and men and women just lined the edge of the creek firing guns into the water.  There wasn't even a sign of the shark there, they were just shooting guns into the water.

Someone on IMDB reviewed this movie and said that it should be Oscar worthy.  I feel more like it's bad, but not even bad enough for a Razzie.  That makes it the worst kind of movie.  Where you can't have fun with it, but you can't enjoy it either.

I give 12 Days of Terror 1 squeaky shark out of 5:

Day 11: Kill Zombie! (2012) 1h 30m

Don't be distracted by the hand throwing up the Dio horns on the poster.  I feel like there should be another hand next to it making an asterisk.  I don't know how, but it is that other hand's responsibility to figure it out!  People need to know that this movie isn't as rock n' roll as they hope.

Kill Zombie! comes to us from the Netherlands.  It's mostly with subtitles except for the Russian (which might have just been Russian sounding gibberish) and the few sentences in English.  While I'm mentioning the English, words like "zombie," "bitch," and "fuck/motherfucker," haven't been translated to Dutch.  So a lot of the time when you know they're saying something else, the subtitles were something entirely different.  Also, as a native English speaker (although my writing may not always reflect that) I'm kind of disappointed that the use of "bitch" as a negative term for another person has been adopted by other languages.  'Tis a dark day for our vernacular history...

Back to the matter at hand,  Kill Zombie! is a poor man's combination of Shaun of the Dead with a bit of Scott Pilgrim.  A few survivors attempt to survive with a bunch of meh jokes.  One of them wants to go save his "girlfriend" and on the way zombie hijinks ensue.  Suddenly, vampires!  The end.

There wasn't much substance here and it's hard to be a zombie horror comedy with something like Shaun of the Dead having done it so well.

I give Kill Zombie! 2 bowling ball hands 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:

Day 9: The Fog (2005) 1h 40m

John Carpenter has made some great films.  Unfortunately I never saw the original of this film so I can't comment on his version, but I'll assume it was probably good.  This remake I have renamed The Fart.

Quick sum up: Town founders were dick bags, plundered and murdered a ship full of people, then covered it up.  Now it's the present day and people are celebrating the founding of the town, but the ghosts of those on the ship come for revenge! In the form of a giant fart cloud!

Seriously, don't make your "fog" have a green tinge a bunch of the time.  Also, you go crazy on the CGI fog effect but use an overly obvious fog machine in other parts, and it looks like shit.  The ghosts were kind of cool looking, some of the deaths were cool, but I spent more time making fun of this film than taking it seriously.  Honestly, it was kind of hard to when they have the flashback at the beginning end with Fallout Boy's Sugar We're Goin' Down blasting as the transition.

As a personal annoyance (and because this is my blog) don't use the first chorus of a song and then have your DJ start talking right after it.  I heard what you did there!  I know where you live!

This remake might have been good for 2005, but in 2016 I found it to be more of a high school kid type movie more than anything.  You know, where a group of kids go and make fun of it, or where a couple go on a date and make out through most of it because the film wasn't interesting.  That's how babies are made, kids!  Teenage necking during boring film remakes!  BABIES!

I give The Fog 1 Shutterstock fart cloud out of 5:

Day 8: Convergence (2015) 1h 40m

I feel like Convergence was Netflix letting me know not to let my guard down.  I made my mistake yesterday with Baskin and assuming it wasn't going to be good, but it showed me wrong.  For Convergence I thought it was starting out really well and then it just suddenly shit the bed for me.

Don't get me wrong, I love a good crazy God-cult bad guy and realms existing between the worlds.  My issue comes when they felt the need to take what has been a really good concept with the movie and suddenly introduce the "real world" and do so with ghost hunters.  It's such a fuck you to the whole battle between "good" and "perceived good" that exists in this purgatory realm.  It cheapened it for me.

I had a much longer review for this film all typed up and ready to go but I deleted it to write this.  Why?  Because this film doesn't deserve any form of recap.  You don't need to describe a turd to someone to get the picture.  We all know a piece of shit when we see it.

I give Convergence 2 abandoned hospitals out of 5:

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: