Clinical (2017) 1h 44m

Netflix has entirely too much money.  Sometimes they put out great things, and sometimes they put out trash.  Sense 8, great.  Castlevania, great-levania.  However, having a shit ton of money burning a hole in your pocket means that you'll take risks.  Much as how I plan on going to the toy store later and I just got paid.  If I'm not careful I'll end up wasting some of that money on trash instead of putting it toward something good.  This was one of those times where the money was probably doled out by being drunk and making it rain only to realize later Netflix needed to pay rent or some shit.

Clinical is a mash-up of time jumps.  We start with a psychiatrist finding a female patient in her office with bloody hands and a shard of glass.  After attacking the psychiatrist the girl then cuts her own throat.  We find out later she survived.  How?  Well, this is the one thing I liked about this film and one of the weird things I picked up in random research.  When a person cuts their own throat they never complete the cut, you get about midway before the body enters shock and you pass out.  They stuck true to this and I applaud them for that.

Moving forward, after therapy of her own, our psychiatrist reopens her practice but avoids dealing with trauma cases because that's what her last patient was.  Eventually she gets a call from a man named Alex that says he was told she would be the only person to help him with his trauma.  She concedes and begins treating him.  He had a face transplant and his story was that there was a car accident he stopped to help and this lead to a mess of shit where his face got all kinds of jacked up.  That's a lie, he's actual the previous girl's father who was a fucking sick ass pervert and that was the girls trauma.  We'll leave it at that.

The girl begins showing up and you think it's either a ghost, flashbacks, or dream sequences but it ends up that she was released from the mental hospital she was kept in and just began fucking with the psychiatrist.  Lots of shit happens and it all leads to our protagonist pulling off the entire face transplant in one big ol' face pancake.  This makes no sense since it was a transplant from like a year ago and would have healed, but fuck science!  They spent it all on throat cutting research.

This review is way too long but there was a lot going on that was too confusing with establishing if it was past, present, or a dream.  I assumed that Alex was the girl's father early on and then they tipped their hand waaaay earlier than the reveal.  The acting and general cinematography were good but the directing and editing were kind of a wet fart.

I give Clinical 1 computer rendered clinic out of 5:

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Friday's Choice Cuts: Castlevania (2017: Netflix)

I've been a fan of Castlevania since I was a wee child.  In fact, from where I'm sitting right now, I can see my NES cartridges of Castlevania and Castlevania II, as well as my wall scroll of the box art of Castlevania hanging on my wall.  I've used this blog before to mention horror related video game things, but this time we get to talk about the animated series of Castlevania that Netflix has put out.

Spanning only four episodes (because they didn't want to take a risk on it and fail horribly), a majority of this "season" is mostly to establish plot and characters.  If you've ever played Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse for the NES then you're no stranger to most of the general things.  Trevor Belmont is your Belmont for this (although, I'm always partial to Simon), and along the way he picks up Sypha and the season ends with them acquiring Alucard to their party.  I don't think I've seen any signs of Grant Danasty yet, so they might just leave him out.

The setting is Wallachia, an area cursed by Dracula where, after returning from his travels, he finds the Church (capital C there) has burned his wife at the stake for witchcraft.  She was a woman of science and a healer but fear and superstition lead to her death.  After  giving the people one year to make their peace before the curse arrives, they instead ignore it with the thought the Church will protect them.  They're wrong and blood and gore ensue.  There were no tiny hunchbacks jumping around or floating Medusa heads...  I better see that shit!!

All in all, it's not 100% what I wanted, but it's still in the high 80%-ish range.  The writing is great thanks in part to Warren Ellis (whom I know for because of the Transmetropolitan comics).  It does a good job of bring the game into an action scenario.  Trevor uses a short sword, a whip, daggers, and at one points has holy water become a weapon.  The whip animation is awesome and there are parts where he does things like disarming someone by whipping off their finger or taking out their eye.  Which leads me to the next part, gore.  They seem to know the perfect ratio of having it look awesome but don't let it become overkill for shock's sake.

It's been picked up for a second season which is supposed to be twice as long so I'm looking forward to seeing where they're going with it.  As I mentioned earlier, four episodes of establishing why your characters get together was a long time to spend on that and it did leave me unfulfilled by the end of this season.

Plus... the only other thing we've ever really had was Simon Belmont on Captain N. *shudders*

Kristy (2014) 1h 26m

If modern horror movies have taught me anything, it's that the internet was created by the devil to do the devil's work.  This blog: the devil's, Netflix: the devil's, ordering pizza online: absolutely the devil!  With all this fiber optic satanism running rampant, it's obvious that fake 4Chan cults would pop up, right?

That's kind of the baseline of Kristy.  An online forum known as "/the fold/" hunts down "Kristys."  The women aren't actually named Kristy (well, some might be) but it's a general name used for a girl who has her shit together and is attractive.  They refer to them as "Kristy" by saying that it means "child of Christ" (or something along those lines) and that by killing them they are killing god.  Whatever, it's a cult created on the internet.  The point is this cult has sects around the U.S. and they do these murders while filming on their cell phone cameras and upload them to the site.  Cell phones are the super devil, who is stronger than the regular devil!!

One group decides to go after this girl Justine who is staying on her campus over Thanksgiving because she's an idiot and is taking college too seriously.  This cult sect of a woman in a hood and three guys with shitty duct tape/tin foil masks begin fucking shit up on the like three people that are still working on the campus, a dog, and try to wreck Justine.

This film wasn't really anything new as far as a slasher/survival horror film.  The internet thing made me think of the show Dark Net (which if you haven't seen, check that shit out).  I do like that Justine isn't just the typical "run up the stairs instead of out the front door" type of heroine.  There are a lot of times she outsmarts the killers and a few times she impressed with her survival skills.  There was a brief moment too where her boyfriend shows up and I was worried this film was going to take the "straight white male savior" route, but he exists to get killed and be the spark that ignites the real survival fire in Justine.

Survival Fire kind of sounds like a sweet band name...

I give Kristy 2 pilgrim turkeys out of 5:

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Evolution (2015) 1h 21m

Evolution is a movie.  I watched it.  That pretty much sums up how I felt after I finished this film.  It wasn't as if the content left me confused or that there was too much to process, it was just a thing that exists in this world.  Much how you come to see newspaper headlines that you see and know that exists but it doesn't effect you.  It's like strangers on the sidewalk.  Perhaps they acknowledge each other but for the most part brush right past each other and continue on.  Some other metaphor goes here to make it a trilogy.

Evolution is actually a foreign film.  The dialogue, all in French, is minimal.  This film seems to rely more on visual story telling.  A boy is swimming in the ocean and sees a dead body among the coral.  This appears to be the early catalyst to let the boy know that things aren't as they seem.  Ignoring the fact that everyone there is either a weird pale androgynous Tilda Swinton woman or a young boy that has to take medicine (yeah, every single boy) we're never quite sure if this is set on Earth or even in the present.  We just get a lot of life and death imagery laced with the color red and star symbolism to accent key moments.

This film once again toes the line of horror.  It's really more of a sci-fi/thriller type deal with one straight up nightmare fuel scene.  I can't go into it unfortunately because it gives away a lot of this movie and truthfully, while it didn't impact me that much, I don't want to disuade someone else from seeing it.  This just wasn't what I was looking for at the time and that probably colored it that way for me.  I might rewatch it at some point if someone says they want to watch it and I'm there, but all in all it was just a film I watched.

I give Evolution 2 starfish out of 5:

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Blood Valley: Seed's Revenge (a.k.a. Seed 2) (2014) 1h 18m

FUCCCCCKKKKK! It was too good to be true!  Such a strong start to this Cut and suddenly I'm faced with Blood Valley: Seed's Revenge.  I couldn't even find this film on IMDB until I did some research and found out that it's on there as Seed 2.  Is there a Seed 1?  I don't know.  I don't give a fuck.  Fuckin' baby's first horror movie here sucks hard enough for two!

BV:SR (which sounds much cooler in that format, like some anime with mechs) starts with the first huge ass credit being Uwe Boll!  If you're not familiar with him, he produced a bunch of terrible movies based on video game IPs with almost no fucking knowledge of the content of the games.  Blood Rayne, Alone in the Dark, Postal, House of the Dead, Far Cry... How did he make all of these?  He exploits a German tax credit so that if the film didn't recoup he gets to write off the film!  So he produced BV:SR.  Apparently he also did produce Seed which I just saw while looking up his IMDB.

BV:SR takes place in the Nevada desert where a bachelorette party gets stranded on their way back from Las Vegas.  They get attacked by rejects from The Hills Have Eyes and Taxes Chainsaw Massacre and it ends up the bride from the group betrayed them all from the start.  That's it.  Tons of fake blood, nudity, poor attempts at graphic shock, three uses of the same chest stab prosthetic, and every "violent" thing being a quick close-up shot of a wound following the initial action.

I wasn't kidding when I called this baby's first horror movie.  There's no style to it and a lot of the directing makes amateur mistakes while trying to prevent you from noticing other glaring problems.  It's also edited and put together out of sequence which makes it feel disjunct as opposed to thrilling or artistic.  Apparently BV:SR had a $1.2 million budget.  I don't know how unless they spent most of it on the RV because that shit was swank.  Seriously, 98% of this film takes place in the middle of the desert in fuck all USA.  I could've made this film with my cell phone, a couple of straws, two gallons of fake blood, and some pizzas to feed my friends while we fucked around in the desert.  I've taken shits that are more shocking and terrifying than this film could even imagine!

I give Blood Valley: Seed's Revenge (a.k.a. Seed 2) 0 copies of Iron Maiden's Powerslave out of 5:

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The Fly (1958) 1h 34m

I remember, as a kid, seeing parts of The Fly remake.  Where Jeff Goldblum mutates and vomits on things and then puts a shotgun muzzle to his fly head while begging for death and looking gross.  It's a far cry from his open shirt sexy lounging pose in Jurassic Park, or his weird alien acting in Earth Girls Are Easy.  But we're not talking about him anymore.  We're talking about the original with Vincent Price and some other people I might never care about.

If you're unfamiliar with it, The Fly is science gone wrong.  We start with a woman running from a body with the head and arm crushed in some sort of machine press.  She then calls Vincent Price (because who the fuck else would you call in this situation) to say she just murdered his brother/her husband.  We're then told the story leading up to that moment.

Her husband creates some a form of matter transfer and while testing it on himself a fly is also in the chamber and they swap some DNA.  The man becomes more fly-like, and the fly becomes more man-like.  We don't see this happen, instead our experimenter keeps his head under cloth and his arm hidden in his coat.  We eventually see the fly arm and then a reveal of the head where his wife somehow elicits the same scream of indiscriminate emotion over and over.  As he loses his rational mind to the fly part of him, he begs her to help with his suicide.  After he writes "love you" on a chalk board she seems to think that it's okay to then do this.  It's just one of those weird moments where you see the character rationalize it in their head in that moment.  It's awkward.

This movie has one of the most annoying kid actors I've ever seen in a film.  He had to have been a stage-trained actor because everything he said was slow, loud, and over enunciated.  He is also given a line in which he says "...you know how women are."  You're fucking eight!  You don't know how women are!  How much tail has this kid been getting on the sly to be able to say that shit?  You know how women are?  They'll fuckin' send you to your room and ground you for talkin' shit like that.

Also the husband/brother tested the machine on the family cat and it didn't succeed.  We just get cat meows from the air.  The moment he even looked at that cat I instantly wrote this guy off and was waiting for his death.  Fuck you fly man!  You got what you deserved for fucking with that cat!

I give The Fly a solid 3 pictures of Vincent Price from the Simpsons out of 5:

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5th Cut Begins! Almost Mercy (2015) 1h 25m

Welly welly well... here we are again.  Another six weeks, another 30 movies.  It seems like in the past few weeks that Netflix has made some updates to their system.  I've been getting my full selection of films and they also seem to have a much looser definition of what they're listing as "horror" now.  Fuckin'... rad...

Almost Mercy is one of those that toes the line of the "horror" heading.  This falls much more in the dark comedy/post-teen drama realm.  We're introduced to a duo of social outcasts, Emily and Jackson.  Emily also plays the role of our narrator for a majority of this film.  She fills in the gaps where needed and adds a relatively snarky commentary on things in the town.

Where Emily and Jackson live seems like any other small town USA.  It's a place where our duo just doesn't quite fit in.  Emily and Jackson bounce between general teen angst and being full blown sociopaths.  After the father of one of their fellow students commits a murder/suicide with his family we start to notice the cracks in the mask of this town.  The phrase "we're only as sick as our secrets" is the only way I can describe what eventually unravels with some of the towns folk.  What I thought was going to just lead to a school shooting plot (and almost does before Jackson chickens out) turns into something way crazier and way better.  This isn't to say that I would think a school shooting would be good.  The thought was a turn off, but the actual rampage that does happen in the film is awesome.

I could say a bunch more about Almost Mercy but you should probably check it out.  Bill Moseley is in it as the town pastor and fucking kills it as always.  The character of Emily is well done.  Nothing against Jackson, I liked him too, but Emily is the shining star here.  For once I get to start this blog out on a high note.  Fingers crossed for the next 29 films.

I give Almost Mercy 3.5 combat axes out of 5:

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