Beyond the Gates (2016) 1h 24m

Netflix was broken for some reason and only loaded 27 movies when I looked up the horror section.  This sucks because I rolled 113 as far as what film to watch.  Being the resourceful person I deny being but really am, I chose one that looked the most 80's: Beyond the Gates.

Are you old enough to remember VHS board games?  Ones like Atmosfear/Nightmare?  If you weren't then what it consisted of was a board, pieces, and a VHS movie you interacted with while playing.  I own Nightmare, and thanks to a friend burning the VHS to a DVD for me I've played it dozens of times.  I also have the sequel but haven't played it out of laziness.  A majority of the time is just rolling the dice and moving your piece while collecting things, but every so often you would get screamed at by some old guy in shitty make-up about calling him "Gatekeeper" or being banished to the black hole.  You know, stuff you pay people on the internet to do now.

So why am I bringing up weird nostalgia you don't care about?  Beyond the Gates is a horror film based around a VHS game with the same name.  After their father goes missing for months, two brothers are left with emptying and closing down the family video store.  They end up finding the game in the locked office and the tape in the VCR.  The brothers watch the start of the tape but then bring it home to show one of the brother's girlfriend-wife-person-thing.  The woman on the tape tells them that the only way to save their dad's soul is to play the game.  So the game ensues...

This was a fucking rad movie.  I still had 15 minutes left and I was already on Amazon buying the blu-ray of it.  It has its b-movie moments but I feel like they knew what they were making.  Nods to the 80's, including some sweet synth score work, combined with a well thought out plot and some great gore and kills.... fucking stellar.  Also, I didn't realize this while choosing it, but the cast has some clout (at least to me).  One of the brothers is Chase Williamson who plays Dave in John Dies at the End, David Bruckner who directed V/H/S and Southbound has an appearance, and Jesse Merlin who does the voice of Fang in Street Fighter V (okay, less horror, more geek related) has a small roll.

I give Beyond the Gates 5 mac n' cheese spiral boxes out of 5 (because I ate too much of it while watching this:

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Dead Silence (2007) 1h 29m

I swear that there is an 80's horror film that has this same poster.  At first I thought it was Silent Night Deadly Night 5 but that just looks like a terrible X-mas card you get from some relatives you forgot with their shit kid on it.  Then I thought it might have been Dolls but that's just a baby doll holding her own eyes.  The only thing I can narrow it down to is the Goosebumps book Night of the Living Dummy.  I also thought this was a remake of said imaginary 80's film that I fucking swear I remember seeing on the shelf in Phar-Mor's shitty video section!!  Why do you haunt my life?!

Dead Silence must've taken every single horror thing they could think of and whipped it at the wall.  Whatever stuck became the plot of this movie.  Buckle the fuck up because here we go: Jamie (the actor that plays Jason Stackhouse in True Blood, I'm not looking up his name again) gets a weird ventriloquist dummy in the mail from an unknown sender.

I'm stopping this already to say that if you get a fucking ventriloquist dummy in the mail and you didn't order that shit, burn the fuck out of it!  Burn it and then pee pee on the ashes!  If you did order the ventriloquist dummy then you are a terrible person and I should pee pee on you.

So this dummy shows up and murders Jamie's wife by having her jaw distended and tongue cut out.  We later find out that this is actually a common for people in the town.  Apparently there was a famous female ventriloquist that murdered a child and had he tongue cut out by the family and some other towns people.  Here spirit haunted her 101 (yes, fucking 101) dummies (which were all buried in coffins around her) and when one of the dolls showed up the ghost killed. OOOOOoooooooo spooky.  Oh, also, she only kills you if you scream.  You can do anything you want, but if you scream then you're dead.

There are a ton of times I wanted people to just burn something and be done with it.  Old house/performance hall that was her home: don't look around in it, burn that shit to the ground.  Dummy that probably killed your wife: torch it.  Random pond you have to cross to get to the house/hall: dump oil in it, burn it.  Light that shit up like Lake Erie in '69!  Dead Silence: eh... maybe wave a lighter under it and if it burns up then it burns up.  No big loss.

I give Dead Silence 1 piece of nightmare fuel out of 5:

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The Pack (2015) 1h 30m

Australia is well known as one of those places where everything that can kill you pretty much lives there.  Land, sea, air, nowhere is safe.  So when people from Australia make a horror movie about packs of wild dogs then I assume they must have some insane steroid laced dogs using bath salts mixed with meth on their continent.

Unfortunately, The Pack doesn't go any further than a home invasion movie with dogs.  In addition to that, dogs are shit actors.  I'm pretty sure I mentioned this when I covered Cujo but you can't have a scary dog when the dog's posture is happy or submissive.  Just because you taught it to snarl doesn't change other dog behavior.

Also, this film isn't frightening in the least.  As i mentioned above, maybe in Australia it is but I was just bored through this.  Also, the daughter sucks in this.  She doesn't play any kind of major role but all she does is complain that she's stuck there and why can't she move to the city.  Mother fucker!  They're foreclosing on your house!  That's why you can't!  You need a job that doesn't rely on your parents or your parents' shit!  Maybe Millennials are the true horror... or whatever generation this girl counts for.  The fuckin' worst generation.  Damn, I'm old...

I give The Pack 0 adorable fluffy puppies out of 5:

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Friday's Choice Cuts: VHS Massacre: Cult Films and the Decline of Physical Media (2016) 1h 20m

I've made it no secret that I'm a fan of Troma Films.  So recently I was on their website looking through the sale items and I noticed this gem:  VHS Massacre: Cult films and the Decline of Physical Media.

I'm old enough to remember the mom and pop video store.  Originally our local pharmacy had a small video rental section.  After that we had a place called Video and Sound where you could rent Beta and VHS tapes.  It eventually evolved to VHS and game rentals.  Our local grocery store opened their Iggle Video which was a full sized video store in one corner.  I remember turning 18 and getting cards for both of these places as well as the Blockbuster which eventually came to our town.  As of now all these places are closed.

VHS Massacre examines how VHS rentals, and especially mom and pop stores, helped independent film companies during its boom.  I still remember seeing VHS sleeve art like House or Critters and being scared of it as a tiny child, but those stuck in my mind.  Having that availability and visual presence helped to culminate that era of cult film.

This documentary gives us a decent history lesson, bringing up studios, films, actors/actresses, and even personal memories which I had forgotten about.  It also goes into detail about how corporate structures made it hard then, and make it hard now, for the indie companies to get things out or even keep up.  At the same time they tackle how people view things like torrents, where some use the term "piracy" but, in the case of Lloyd Kaufman, he uses the term "file sharing" and claims it has been helpful for people to see the films they put out.

The climax of the film is the actual VHS Massacre which was a competition where the people involved had to find VHS tapes where they would watch any random five-minute section of it to find the worst one.  The winner is well deserved.

All in all, this is a definite watch for anyone that is a fan of cult film.  The people in this film are very passionate about how they fit into this world.  It presents a ton of info that I never even considered and gave me a bunch of directions to pursue to not only expand my knowledge but to find some great movies I would be missing out on otherwise.

"Never give up the fight for truly independent cinema!"

Hellions (2015) 1h 20m

Canada is a mysterious land.  Even though I have visited you many times I will never quite understand the mystical north.  This film has made you even more of a quandary as to what the everlasting fuck are you?!?

Hellions is a mess of a film with pink gels on all the lights.  It opens with the most romantic things teenagers can do which is blow smoke in each other's faces while the other person is talking.  The girl has to leave to go to the clinic where she finds out she's preggo.  Seventeen and up the duff from the town's local badass teen.  She returns home and turns down trick-or-treating with her mom and younger brother because teens are too cool for that shit.  Only smoking, baths, and pregnancy for this girl!

Since she stays home she hands candy out to the children that come.  They don't live in any kind of neighborhood so the fact that someone even walks into the middle of nowhere Canada for candy says a lot about the quality of their candy.  The kids end up being part of a weird harvest ritual where they want the baby.  This fetus grows at an alarming rate and the kids keep killing people.  The last half hour is basically an acid trip in pink.  It's film effects, cgi exploding pumpkin patches, repeated scenes of kids in weird masks... I can't even describe all of it aside from the fact she wakes up in the hospital and had the baby.  Dumb harvest baby.  Shit movie.  Fuckin' home of Nickleback.  CLOSE THE BORDERS!

I give Hellions 0 fart men out of 5:

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The Unborn (2009) 1h 28m

One of the taglines for this film is "It wants to be born."  Fuck that noise.  I want to abort this movie before it even existed.  I will invent time travel for the sole purpose of erasing this film from ever being released.

The Unborn goes all over the goddamn place.  What is initially just a girl being haunted by the ghost of a boy that wants to be born jumps those rails and crashes into a pile of everything.  Apparently the ghost is meant to be her twin brother that died in the womb.  But then we find out that thanks to Nazi's and their occult/medical experiments on twins they caused a dybbuk to return in the body of the great-uncle of our protagonist.  Her grandmother killed her twin/dybbuk which then attempted to come back in the twin brother that died.  Now he's haunting our girl in order to take over her body.

There is seriously just way too much going on here.  Twins, suicides, Jewish mysticism, Nazis, the occult, a dog wearing a mask, people and things with upside down heads, suddenly being in a Silent Hill bathroom, Gary Oldman... just too much.  There was a hilarious jump scare where our protagonist opens her medicine cabinet and the boy is inside there and kind of screams at her.  I laughed really hard at that but the rest of this was absurd trash with a few good visual effects.

I give The Unborn 1 smoking fish chicken (which came up when I image searched dybbuk) out of 5:

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A Christmas Horror Story (2015) 1h 39m

I'm not a fan of Christmas.  I haven't been since I was a teenager and as I aged into adulthood I liked it even less.  The only movie I readily acknowledge as a Christmas movie is Die Hard and fuck the rest.  So finding out I was about to watch A Christmas Horror Story meant that I was prepared to zone out over the next hour and a half.  However, as the song goes... you better watch out!

A Christmas Horror Story is an anthology of four different story lines that all share small intersections.  We have one where a zombie plague spreads through Santa's elves and Santa fucks some shit up with a sharpened staff.  Another involves three maybe high school or early college kids as they go to film in an old convent where some mysterious murders took place a year ago.  Number three has a nuclear family facing off against Krampus.  The final one is a boy and his parents going out to get a Christmas tree from way out in the boonies off of someone's property and the son suddenly goes missing.

That's all I'm giving you as far as this film because it was honestly fun to watch.  The story lines all interweave as far as what you're watching so it's less of a Tales from the Crypt style and more of a cohesive movie.  They do a great job of what I can only refer to as horror edging because they will build up to an exciting point in one story and back you off by switching to another and building again.  My greatest complaint though was that I only liked two of the four endings (Santa's story and the Krampus story).  This doesn't make the other two stories bad, just not what I would've enjoyed as a climax.

Other randomness from this film includes William Shatner as "Dangerous Dan" the radio DJ who fucking loves Christmas and Jesus.  He has a great line of "You know who saw that?  Jesus! And his dad!" when someone shows him a sign that says "FUCK CHRISTMAS." David Hayter was an executive producer.  You might know him as the voice of Solid Snake in the US versions of almost all of the Metal Gear Solid games (except for the last few where Kiefer Sutherland took over).  Finally, and this is more of a personal observation, the singing over the opening credits sounds like it was done by the same program they use for Hatsune Miku.  That's more of my nerdy shit though.

I give A Christmas Horror Story 4 copies of King Diamond's No Presents for Christmas out of 5:

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