The Devil's Dolls (2016) 1h 25m

Netflix didn't even spell the name of this film right.  That's how little they cared about The Devil's Dolls.  When you have an image with the correct spelling for reference and you just completely ignore that to fuck right off and do your own thing, you really don't give a shit.  Kudos to taking that shit to an all new level, Netflix.

The Devil's Dolls are literally small dolls made out of coffin nails, string, and fabric.  After tracking down and shooting a serial killer, a police officer has them as evidence.  Like a true professional he just puts the box of them in the back of his car for his daughter to find.  She thinks that they are for making jewelry.

This child is not the brightest bulb in the bunch.  I have some coffin nails and they're heavy.  You wouldn't want to make a necklace out of dolls made from them.  She does though, and since they're imbued with the essence of Satan, the farts of a demon, or were up a donkey's ass, they have evil power which causes the person possessing them to snap and kill people and do sick graffiti in the blood.  The daughter has an episode while holding on to one and it's enough to get sympathy from those that see, so they end up buying the other necklaces.  Let this go to show that children are the tools of the devil, to work their child trickery, and make you get possessed by rejected Etsy arts n' crafts!

We find out that the daughter will most likely die from her exposure unless the dolls are collected and given to this film's "magical negro" character.  Never, in my entire life, have I seen someone take that trope so literally as they have a woman of color that is a straight up hoodoo/root worker trying to save the day with magick.  P.S.  the cause of this entire film... this woman right here.  She set this shit in motion by being a dumbass.  She does have a good fire-run into the swamp towards the end.  Speaking of which, I don't know where this film is set or I just didn't care.  I assume the South, probably Louisiana with the swamp and root worker and racism of that character.  Whatever.  It's on the fucking North Pole for all I care.

When I looked this film up on IMDB I noticed that there's a section for plot keywords.  For some reason there are "tied up while barefoot" and "tied feet" as two of the seven keywords.  I don't know who the fuck fapped to this film, but you're already on the internet.  You can find much better foot fetish porn without having to waste your time watching a shit movie for a freeze frame to do a five-knuckle shuffle.  Google that porn shit.  I'm not judging your fetish, I'm judging you for putting this shit film in your spank bank.  Close that account and open one up somewhere else.

I give The Devil's Dolls 1 Ebay haunted doll listing out of 5:

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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006) 1h 30m

One of the things I've always liked about our iconic monsters was the fact that we were given a quick back-story but had the assumption that these characters were different and evil to begin with.  Jason had deformities.  He was picked on and eventually murdered at summer camp.  Freddy was a child molester and murderer that was then hunted down and burned alive.  Leatherface came from a bunch of weird rednecks that were cannibals and he was based on the killer Ed Gein.

At some point in the mid-to-late 00's horror films felt the need to humanize these characters more, to further develop their backstory.  It's something I feel was unnecessary because every gap we filled in with our imagination was most likely scarier than anything that ended up coming out.  I want my monsters to be monsters, not humans.

So why this rant?  TCH:TB gave what was probably the dumbest set of scenes to set up Leatherface's background.  It starts with a meat inspector in a slaughterhouse going into labor/dying on the work floor while newborn Leatherface climbs out of her lady parts.  The baby is ugly so he's wrapped in meat paper and then thrown in the dumpsters out back.  He's later found by Mama who is going through trash for raw meat scraps to eat.  She takes him home and they keep him.

That's it.  Ugly meat baby adopted from dumpster.

Anyway, our protagonists are two couples where one brother is reenlisting and the other is drafted for Vietnam.  They end up in a wreck while someone I can only describe as Sarah Connor chases them down to rob them.  Maybe the cow they hit was sent back by Skynet to stop Matt Bomer from reenlisting.  The "father" of the family, now posing as a police officer, comes upon them, kills Sarah Connor which sets up Doomsday since she can't give birth to Edward Furlong now.  You can guess what really happens.  It's not like this varies much from the formula.

Now, the Vietnam war lasted from about '54/'55 until '75.  This movie has the feeling of wanting to be set in the 70's but is very obviously being made in 2000's.  It's so bad that even with the period pieces I couldn't buy it wasn't modern.  Couple this with the shit-ass back story and this movie was a hot turd.  There are some shining moments in this film.  First, some of the gore is great.  One of the girls gets pulled out of a moving vehicle by Leatherface sticking a meat hook in her shoulder and yanking her out.  It was one of those scenes you tense because you can feel it as you see it.  There's also a post-kill with the chainsaw where our boy Leatherface just swings the chainsaw so the body on it slides off and thuds into a wall.  It sounds simple but the shot is great.

Overall, despite liking some of the reboots or remakes, I wish my monsters were still just monsters...  not dumpster fuglies.

I give The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning 2 dumpsters out of 5:

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Midnight Meat Train (2008) 1h 40m

For years my mom kept talking up how good Midnight Meat Train was.  Previously I had watched about a half-hour of the film before falling asleep or doing something else.  You know, man stuff!  I find it fitting though that when I'm coming back in and really making a serious attempt at keeping up with this blog, the movie I would end up rolling would be this one.  I started this blog shortly after she passed away, partially out of our shared love of horror.  So this one is for you mom. *cue "Crossroads" by Bone Thugs n' Harmony*

Midnight Meat Train focuses around a photographer named Leon (Bradley Cooper).  After realizing a woman he photographed on the subway has disappeared he becomes obsessed with a series of missing person cases.  His obsession leads him to discover an underground cabal of murder in order to maintain a balance between the known and unknown world.

I think I might have made this movie sound way better than it actually is (sorry, mom).  Somehow a short story was adapted to an hour and forty minute movie (of course, Hellraiser was based on a short story too).  Mostly they did this by padding it with scenes of the train murders, which was probably smart.  Some of these kills were great and the CGI stuff of eyes popping out and arterial sprays made this much more interesting.  There were talks of Barker making this into a trilogy but, despite being a Clive Barker fan, I wouldn't watch this again, let alone two more films.  I've got man shit to do!

I give Midnight Meat Train 2 hotdog trains out of 5:

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Updates from the lab...

Hello from the 30 Days of Plight lab!  So, much like Herbert West, I'm looking to reanimate this blog.  I have come up with a new and more structured set-up.  So here's how it's going to run:

Sunday thru Thursday will continue the typical 30 Days of Plight structure with the random movies from Netflix and reviews from that.

Friday is going to be kind of a grab-bag day.  I plan to use it for reviews on films I may have seen in the theatre or at a film festival, books I've read related to horror, horror themed toys, horror video games, things like that.  I hope this will keep me from breaking up the regular posts but also give me that decent break to talk about something else horror related.  This also gives me a day at the end of a cut to do a recap.

Saturdays are going to be nothing.  I scheduled a day off.  I'm my own boss!

So right now I'm in the process of doing small graphical updates that will be up and running by the time the 30DoP 2.0 launches which will most likely be May 7, 2017.  It's then because I know I have to travel in the next month and I don't want a shitty break in the middle of things.

So with that dear readers, I'll see you in just over a month!

Here's the deal...

So I've been doing this for blog for just over a year.  While I've tried to maintain as close as I can to a 30-day run, I've dropped the ball heavily with this cut... which started back in December.  On top of that, I've been getting away from doing my actual Netflix watching and doing other horror films to fill the gap.  While I don't mind doing an extra or special one now and then I feel that I've strayed from what I initially wanted this to be.

So what does this mean?

What this means is that I'm going to end this cut now, and then I'm going to take this blog back to the lab and work out what I want to do with this.  So I'm not quitting this idea, I'm looking to see what I need to do so I get more consistent content, and what content do I want to put on here.  Horror is definite.  That will never change.  I just have some ideas I would like to kind of bring into this and see what works best.

I'm not going to take too long.  Probably two months (so back around May) at most to figure this out.  So bare with me during this time.  I hope you'll come back once I start posting again.  You can follow the blog on Facebook where I'll be letting people know that we're up and running again.

Thanks for understanding (hopefully).

- 30 Days of Plight

Day 16 (A PSA): Rings (2017) 1h 47m

If this movie were a table then I would flip it in disgust.  Have you ever been in a movie theater where you could feel how bored everyone else was around you?  I just have and holy shit was it bad.  I've labeled this as a PSA because under no circumstances should you see this movie.  As a fan of the Ringu series, I implore you to avoid this.  I think that the warning on the poster is in regards to this film, not the stupid fucking video.

Typical ring story:  Watch the video, phone call, die in seven days.  Samara will give you a stupid death face.  We switch out flies for cicadas.  Find her body... again?  Apparently one of the Big Bang Theory guys is a college professor who gets students to watch the tape, then have another watch a copy so the curse gets passed on and the first person lives... repeat.  The dumb thing is there are no attempts at a real explanation as to why you can't just cycle back and forth between people aside from the tedium it would bring.  Holt (unfortunately not Steve Holt) is Julia's boyfriend who vanishes for a bit after watching the tape.  She goes to find him, then she watches the tape to save his life.  Shit goes down.

By shit going down, I mean it goes down the fucking toilet.  This movie front-loaded anything of interest and then drags you through the remainder.  Not only is it dragging you, but it is very obviously showing you things only for one of the characters to have the realization 20 minutes later.  There's a part where Julia looks up at a bell and I thought "Oh, the ring, something is below the ground there."  Fucking 20 minutes later Julia suddenly had this realization and I lost my shit.  It is just moments of that over and over.  The priest, the ring, the mark on the hand, etc. etc.

I have never left a movie theater as angry as I was after Rings.  I want my fucking money back.  I not only want my money back, but I want my fiancé to get his money back for the snacks we bought and whatever my gas money was to drive there.  I want money for emotional damage caused by how bad this film is.  I want the other people in the theater to get their money back.  In fact, I want them to pay the money back to people that went to see other films out of pure shame for this movie even being in a theater.  Fuck this noise!  Rings fucking sucks.  Put that on your blu-ray box as a quote you turds!

I give Rings negative 5 copies of Ringu.

Day 15: Shelley (2016) 1h 32m

Sometimes in life we're given something, told it's one thing, but feel like it's something else.  For example, right now I'm eating some leftover Chinese food which is supposedly chicken, but I think this is pork.  This movie was listed under horror, had the subheading of thriller, but in reality it was neither of those... and also crap.

Shelley follows a Danish hippy couple where the wife is infertile.  They hire a maid to help around the home but eventually ask her to be a surrogate.  During the course of the pregnancy the surrogate experiences what she considers strange reactions to the fetus.  It causes her pain, strange aversions, sleepwalking, sickness, etc.  There is also an older hippy that does some reiki and pulls an angry dog out of the maid's head space.  Yeah, it was really as random as I made that seem.

The rest of the film isn't worth going into.  I will say that the baby doesn't really seem to be evil and I'm confused by the whole thing.  The pace of this movie was so slow that when you got a small piece of the plot you would forget it 15 minutes later when the next sliver of plot was introduced.  Then we're just stuck with hippies in a cabin for a long time.  I've been tempted to look up an in-depth plot analysis but I quickly realize that would serve no purpose as I'm not really invested in ever remembering this movie after I hit "publish."

In keeping with most of the films I've watched this cut, I give Shelley 0 stupid babies out of 5: