Friday Final Cut!

We did it!  After some rockiness a few months ago we got this cut started and finished!  I don't know if it was worth it because holy fuck were there a ton of zeros this time.

Actually, I do really like doing this.  Despite every piece of trash I slog through I did get some great ones.  The winner this time would probably be Beyond the Gates since I bought the damn movie.  The loser is whatever that fucking Indian horror movie was for 8-year-olds.  Fuck that shit.

I also want to say thanks for everyone that stuck with me while I got this rolling again; the occassional comment or message to help with the site, every like on Facebook.  All of that stuff.  Mostly though, thanks for reading the curse laiden posts which sprawl across this blog.  I'm not sure how the fuck the "views" thing works really but it says we passed 10,000 views in just over a year.

So please, share this with your friends, your family, people you want to make uncomfortable with swearing and talk of my penis, fellow horror fans, you know...

This will now be the down time between Cuts.  We'll start back up on Sunday, July 9th.  I'd do it sooner but I have a stack of DVDs and Blu-Rays I've purchased recently and would like to watch and not have to type about.  Don't forget you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter at 30daysofplight.

I'll be right back...

The Den (2013) 1h 21m

I thought that "found footage" films were going to be my worst film adversaries.  I completely forgot that there is a greater evil out there.  For I have seen the face of death, and it grinned at me while showing me one of those films that take place entirely on webcam/facetime.  Don't get me wrong.  I love when someone can take new technology and use it to make something cool.  But this... this is the devil committed to celluloid.  This is watching your own children die.  It's film genocide.

The Den is a website that might as well be Chatroulette.  Complete with pervs, dicks, trolls, and masturbaters.  Elizabeth gets a grant to spend a bunch of time on The Den in some form of shitty social experiment.  She starts to get cyber stalked for a bit before she ends up witnessing a murder on the site.  From there he friends and family begin to get attacked and murdered.  The whole thing ends up being some sort of weird network of violent murders that put the videos on some fucked up pay site.  Elizabeth ends up dead but only after she gets taken to some sort of underground murder space where people are kept to be murdered.

I wish this could have been scary.  It has the foundation of something realistic but rather than staying in the realm of everyday life it runs and jumps off the cliff of the absurd.  I'm not saying this isn't a possible scenario, it's just so intensely extreme that it makes it feel more unrealistic.  Although, now that I think about it, there have been a lot of news stories of large groups of people being freed from some crazy kidnapping shit.  Who knows?  Not this film, because its webcam/phone cam bullshit made this horrible to watch.  At least there was one cool sledgehammer kill.

I give The Den 0 dens out of 5:

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Dreamcatcher (2003) 2h 14m

It's been a long ass time since I've read a Stephen King book.  My husband has read a bunch though and told me that the movies are always bad versions of the books because they miss a lot of explanation.  Holy fuck does this movie have a lot that feels random and I just need to accept.  Dick biting lamprey creatures, the greys, psychic powers that might as well be the Shining, Morgan Freeman, Morgan Freeman's giant eyebrows, mind libraries, neurodiverse individuals with greater psychic powers, Jason Lee...

Dreamcatcher has a group of friends that all share some form of psychic connection.  We find out that these are gifted to them by Dudits, the neurodiverse boy they rescue from some teenage assholes in a really uncomfortable scene.  When the group is getting together for one of their planned Winter cabin bro-outs the animals all start running away and then a dick biting lamprey comes out of some stranger's butt.  From there we get more aliens, psychic crap, and then even weirder alien stuff all mixed with Morgan Freeman's crazy eyebrow extensions and covert military stuff.

Like I said, there was entirely too much going on in this film and not enough explanation.  It had a decent cast, acting, and effects (for 2003) but I still don't know why the fuck Morgan Freeman was so obsessed with this shit or ordered there.  Or why the fucking monsters went straight for the dick!  The ending was not bad but once again more fucking random alien shit and then it's just over.  Done.  Just like I am with this review.

I give Dreamcatcher 1 lamprey out of 5:

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Tank 432 (aka Belly of the Bulldog) (2015) 1h 28m

Everyone knows that one person that pulls the "Oh, look at how deep/crazy/etc" shit, but they push it rather than let it be natural.  You know, like the Hot Topic kids 10 - 15 years ago that were wearing t-shirts that said shit like "You laugh because I'm different, I laugh because you're all the same," or "I do what the voices tell me to."  I feel like Tank432 was written by one of those people that became an adult and still wanted to do that "Look at me!  Look at my art and how weird I can make it!"

A group of mercenaries have two hostages and are attempting to escape what seems like the woods behind someone's house.  We don't get an explanation of the hostages, the battle, or the mercenaries.  Instead we're dropped in balls deep in whatever this mess is.  The hostages look like Guantanamo Bay prisoners with orange jump suits and black hoods.  Once again, no explanation to their dress.  Oh, they also find some girl in a shipping crate that just screams.

The group eventually makes it to an old abandoned Bulldog tank in the middle of a field.  After the medic gives everyone a tranq to help them sleep they wake up to find out the door is jammed.  They have a few nightmare/dream scenes that are bad art school projects too.  While trapped in the tank they find some powder named "Kratos" (which is essentially Cheetos dust) and files on each of them.  Everyone's freaking out and then someone they left behind (due to a bad leg injury) shows up outside talking about crazy shit and dumping Kratos all over himself and in his nose.  They run him over with the tank because, why not?  Everyone ends up dead in the tank except for one guy but then a bunch of hazmat suit guys with flame throwers show up and torch the tank.

From there we hear a siren and a notice to clear the testing area because the next experiment is about to begin.  We then get a new soldier emerging from an underground shelter and looking real freaked out.

This movie tried so hard to be some sort of psychological thriller/horror deal but it was a bunch of "I don't give a fuck," with a twist ending that I couldn't be bothered with.  I get it.  You tried to be all "OOOOOOOO! Look at my movie ending!  Did you see that coming?!  How about that dream shit?  I'm so edgy!"  and to that I say *leans to the left and rips a loud fart*.

I give Tank 432 0 kawaii tanks out of 5:

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Most Likely to Die (2015) 1h 30m

I ended up going to see Wonder Woman before coming home and watching this.  That was a mistake.  Not seeing Wonder Woman.  That movie was awesome. But you can't have a steak and then be served bologna and expect it to be the same.

Most Likely to Die is a C-grade movie with D-list actors.  Seriously, Jake Busey?  Perez Hilton?  Get the fuck out with this shit.  The plot is that a bunch of old friends get together for their own celebration before their 10-year reunion.  I don't know what school they went to because the yearbook had all of the seniors listed as a "most likely too..."  We didn't have that.  I also went to a school in the fucking mountains.  I still don't know what kind of school they went to... but I digress... though not really.

Everyone starts dying based on what their "most likely" thing was.  Apparently everyone was a scumbag rich kid asshole and then continued to not quite measure up as an adult.  A murderer dressed in a cap and gown with a paper maché mask is your killer.  The only good thing about this guy is that the mortar board had some razors along the edge which made it like Oddjob's hat.  Between a sweet headbutt/throat slash and a Kung Lao fatality, that cap was the best thing in this film.  The killer was the class clown guy but more out of some psychotic personal guilt thing in relation to the person they bullied all through school.  Then after he's dead a mysterious person dressed in the same outfit steps up and takes the mask from joker's corpse and puts it on.

I hope there isn't a fucking sequel to this.  I would rather watch the Chipmunk movie sequels than another one of these films.  At least those have Jason Lee in them.  Fuckin' Jake Busey... all he does is creep around for like 10 minutes and then gets strangled!

I give Most Likely to Die 1 graduation cap out of 5 only because of the sweet graduation cap kills:

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Carnage Park (2016) 1h 30m

I feel like the person that wrote the description for this film was given a couple of blurry .jpgs and told to "figure it out."  It made it seem like this was going to be a mix of vigilante justice and survival instincts.  The actual movie was more of a broken wish for grindhouse goodness and a clown's tear in the lonely desert.  You figure out what that means because it just came to mind when thinking about this.

Carnage Park's main protagonist is a woman kidnapped during a bank robbery.  After a very Tarantino/Reservoir Dogs intro where one robber is driving the car and the other is shot in the backseat yelling about how he is about to die, they both end up dead.  The former is killed by a crazy most-dangerous-game-esq sniper.  The sniper then sets up the kidnapped girl to hunt her in the fuck-all California desert.

I seriously thought this film was over at three different occasions before it actually ended.  I found myself wishing that each time it would have.  They drop the grindhouse flow by the end of the first quarter of the film with only smatterings of it coming back.  They have the Tarantino beginning but then end it very Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  Add about an hour of just a woman wandering in the desert and that's all this film was.  I got up and dropped a deuce and just left the film playing because I knew I wouldn't missing anything of merit.

I give Carnage Park 0 Mr. Pinks out of 5:

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Friday's Choice Cuts: Nightmare (aka Atmosfear) (1991: A Couple 'A Cowboys/J.W. Spears & Sons)

image from Bloody-Disgusting.com

Since I mentioned it earlier this week while covering Beyond the Gates I figured today's Choice Cut would be the Nightmare VCR board game (or if you're in other parts of the world it might be known as Atmosfear... which is weird because I definitely remember commercials for both as a kid).

As far as the board game portion goes, your goal is simple:  Collect keys and then make it to the center.  In the center are pieces that each player wrote their own "nightmare" on and you have to pick one and hope it isn't yours.  If you do this, and accomplish it all before the VHS is done, you win.  You'll have cards to play at specific times too which will require you to yell or do something in order to gain an advantage.  The fate cards are like "chance" in Monopoly where it might be good or bad.  Each of your characters are taken from religious, folk, or actual history.  For example, you could play as the blood countess Elizabeth Bathory, or the king of the Ghede in Vodou, Baron Samedi.  Of course they just have their name and list them as "vampire," or "zombie" so it's not getting too in depth there.

Now for the tape part.  This is the golden portion of the board game.  With the first game you get a random guy in shitty lighting and a potato sack hood as the "Gatekeeper."  He will assign you to do things, banish you to the black hole, free you from the black hole, or just make you do weird stuff before continuing.  As you get in the last 10-15 minutes of the game he gets fucking bat shit crazy with making weird noises and saying crazy stuff.  I can see why, if you were a kid, and you played this in the dark with some friends, you might piss your TMNT undies with this guy popping up randomly and screaming at you.  As an adult it's just hilarious but you'd be surprised how quickly people get into it.  You can actually check out the video on YouTube, or just watch some of it now here:

There are supposedly two sequels to it with booster tapes and then a reboot of sorts that came out in 2004.  As I mentioned, I have the second game (or the first booster) but I haven't played it yet.  I have watched some of the tape and it's pretty much the same thing only this time with Baron Samedi as the gatekeeper.

I lucked out and found this for $3 at a thrift store around 10 years ago.  I'm sure it could be in others as well because who really owns a VCR any more?  However, you can play this just via YouTube and there are pictures of the board and rules online so you could basically do your own.  Although if you want you could just put the video on at a party or make it into a drinking game.