The Damned (2013) 1h 27m

I've learned a lot of odd things from horror film logic.  One of them is the following:  If you come across someone locked/chained up in basement, then don't jump to conclusions as they might be there for a legitimate reason.  The odds of me ever having to apply this lesson are pretty slim but it's definitely something that I will keep in mind should I come across such a situation.  You know, for safety reasons.

Set in Columbia, The Damned follows a man/father, his second wife, the daughter from the first wife, and two other young persons.  After getting caught in a landslide they survive and come to an old inn.  The old man living there refuses them entry until he finds out the daughter is injured and her father is trying to get her help.  Once inside the inn some of the group find a young girl locked in the basement.  They let her out only to later discover that she is possessed by the spirit of a Bruja that was killed by old descendants from the village.  Everyone is fucked.

I want to like this movie more than I do.  I thought that the spirit's backstory was flushed out well enough.  The the spirit could never "die" because if you killed the body hosting it then the spirit jumped to your body.  This is only a step above Horror 101 but I can look past this because of how well it fit the film.  There are some good practical effects present here as well, like the woman cutting her face with the knife or the hands in the fake stomach.

On the flip side, The Damned took a page from the "shit I'm tired of seeing done poorly in horror" book by letting a majority of this film exist in a blue-grey tonality.  Yes, it's raining.  Yes, this film is spooky.  You can do these things for atmosphere but when you're not offering me anything as a visual juxtaposition it just makes me feel bored.  These are colors we associate with sadness and melancholy more than we associate them with horror.  Even the blood in this film was incredibly dark in color.  So I ask myself, would I watch this again?  Nah.  I've got better things to do.  Like lock people up in my basement...

I give The Damned 1 copy of The Damned's s/t album out of 5:

Stitches (2012) 1h 26m

I don't like clowns.  I'm not afraid of them, I just think that they use their shtick to violate my personal space and it makes me want to punch them.  Y'all mother fuckers can still do the same shit a good two feet away and I'll enjoy it much more then having you creep all up on me like we're in the club.  Like Bozo, he knew not to creep up on people and he gave children prizes for playing with balls... wait a minute...

Stitches is a horror comedy where a terrible clown deals with horrible children at a party, or maybe that's just how kids and clowns are in Ireland.  The kids take their pranks too far and they cause Stitches the Clown to trip and fall on a carving knife... twice.  Well, technically the second time it falls on him.  The birthday boy, Tom, goes to visit the clown's grave and stumbles upon a satanic coven of clowns where he finds out that a clown that doesn't finish a party can never rest.  It's dumb but they need a reason for this clown to come back for revenge six years later.

I have actually watched Stitches previously because my husband has an odd inclination toward clown horror films.  The first time around I wasn't a fan of it.  I expected more and it wasn't what a wanted.  Going into it this time though I knew that while the plot line is something straight out of a B-film, the work here really isn't.  In fact, if you like practical effects with a lot of fake blood then this could be just for you.  There are a ton of blood splatters, decapitations by punt or by explosion, severed arms, ears, genitalia, and just a touch of CGI when things like the umbrella spear wouldn't have worked well live.

The humor is like a low-grade Beetlejuice and the character development is kind of weak.  It's also high school kids so it's mostly tropes or just shitty teenagers.  I can't fault it too much.  I'm not expecting some sort of epic backstory development from a movie about a clown that returns from the dead.  This second watch-through did cause it to rise up a bit in my internal head rating.  I won't have it on my shelf, but it's probably background at a party good.

I give Stitches 2 clown horns out of 5:

Bleed (2016) 1h 22m

You know that part in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when Indy and those Nazis get to the grail room and they have to chose the Holy Grail?  The lady Nazi hands the one guy a cup and he says "it certainly is the cup of the King of Kings" and then fills it and drinks from it?  You remember that?  He fucking died super hard from that because he had chosen... poorly.  That's kind of how I feel with today's film.  I rolled a movie that I had already watched.  When that happens I try to go with the film before or after it then.  Upon reading that this was a bunch of people ghost hunting in a burned down prison I figured it would be good enough.  That's only a tiny bit of the plot and I felt this movie age me.  Not to dust, but enough that I'm not sure if my penis will ever work again...

Bleed focuses on a couple that just bought a house in southern fuck-all USA.  Our female protagonist has a strange crescent moon birthmark on her neck and is also eight or nine months pregnant.  These two things are related as the movie progresses.  Friends come to visit the couple and the woman's Burning Man burnout brother and his girlfriend convince almost everyone to go to a supposedly Satanic burned down prison to ghost hunt.  The ghost of Rob Zombie past appears, a bunch of pointless backstory and unnecessary character development happens, and the towns folk are a cult that want the baby for reasons never really defined.

This movie would've done well as a short film.  All killer, no filler, and we'd be just fine.  Unfortunately we have a rag tag cult with a religion thrown together based on no research other than "ummm... blood... babies... satan but not satan... Rob Zombie."  We get two thirds of the way through and a girl suddenly discloses that she was schizophrenic since she was a child and that's why she keeps taking pills.  This reveal has nothing to do with anything!  Ever!  Even the fact it's a prison is kind of worthless as it's just used as a building where Rob Zombie in Rasputin form could be chained up.  They could've used a spooky old shack for that.  It was just a dart board full of ideas and whatever they hit they tried to fit in and make it work.

On the plus side though, the acting was decent.  The accents were a bit thick on some of the locals but otherwise not too bad.  Camera work and sound were all good.  The score used a lot of cool instrumentation where I could tell it was metal bowls with water in them or doing slides on a violin or cello string.  I'm not knocking things like Carpenter's Halloween score here, but I would like horror to work more on atmosphere like that rather than traditional music.  Overall though, I think Bleed bled out, leaving a husk of a film on the floor.

I give Bleed 1 copy of Alice Cooper's Only Women Bleed out of 5:

Viral (2016) 1h 25m

While I was watching this film there was a part of me that really wished this would've come out in the 80's and been one of those films that used a metaphor to demonstrate the AIDS epidemic.  I know, that's an absurd way to start this review or even think while watching a movie but all the signs were there.  My point doesn't really get backed up either when the poster is up there with an earthworm sticking out of a girl's mouth.  Let's see if you can understand where I'm coming from here.

Viral is the lil' zombie movie that isn't really a zombie movie.  There are stories of an outbreak existing outside of the U.S. where the symptoms are increased hunger, seizures, a sickly look, and a cough with a bloody discharge.  I forget our main girls' names but they're twins.  One of their friends shows signs of infection only to hurl blood into another student's face.  This leads to the town being put on an intense quarantine and eventually martial law.  Teens gonna teen and they have a party in a semi-built home. An infected individual shows up all zombied out and one of the twins contracts the "virus," only it's not a virus...

I have an irrational fear of an area I'm living in being put under martial law.  It's mainly because I don't know how I would react to it.  It's like those old Frosted Mini Wheats commercials where the adult side of me wants to stay safe in my home, but the teenage punk rock me wants to test the shit out of the boundaries.  I would especially test those if it meant being able to go get dumb shit like energy drinks or cupcakes.  Regardless, it tapped into a weird fear of mine.

I will say that I felt old when the teens were having their party and my rational adult mind lost it's shit and couldn't understand why those kids would do that in this situation.  As far as this film goes, I'm truthfully surprised that I liked it.  I think that this being a variation of a zombie movie is what made Viral great.  I don't think that's what they were going for, but it's what I got out of it and it works for me.  My only big complaint is that when the bombs fall, that's the shittiest bombing for an outbreak situation I've seen.  They drop four or five bombs to destroy the outbreak and it's like they hit three houses and a 7-11 then called it a day.

I give Viral 3 earthworms out of 5:

Residue (2017) 1h 22m

There's so much going on in that poster.  Just take a second and really look at it.  You have some demon thing, a bug woman, Max Headroom, the Smoking Man from X-files, and some strange lighting from the late 70's early 80's.  This poster looks like Pagemaster on PCP.  In a way, this film kind of was.

Residue focuses around a journal of partially unknown origins.  Being that it's a journal you have some info but the book itself is a descent into madness.  After a theft and botched hand-off of a "package" our main character comes home to find out he was delivering this book.  He makes the mistake of starting to read it and only after someone completes reading the book does the supernatural shit around them end.  By "around them" I'm talking the entire apartment complex and people living in it.   It is rare that someone lives to finish the book.  The actual "residue" the film gets its title from is a black slime that exists on and in some of the journal.

I don't know how I feel about Residue.  It attempts to do a Neo-Noir style thing with the character narration combined with some advanced tech but then leans more into a serious version of John Dies at the End.  The latter of these two should not be attempted in a serious manner because the humor is what makes that a good film.  There were some background moments you had to catch at the right time or you would miss them and I love when films do that well.  I don't have any legitimate complaints other than the supernatural elements became a bit too disjunct from the journal and what we knew of it, but I'm still not totally sold on it.

I give Residue a 2 Journal 3's out of 5:

Drifter (2016) 1h 26m

There's nothing worse than buckling in for what you think is going to be a wild ride only to have things just jump the tracks.  I sat down, started this up, had some orange juice with me, a cat on my lap, hit play, things started off great.  Then...well... let's get into it.

Drifter follows two brothers as they're attempting to track down the man that killed their father.  They're driving across the desert in hopes that they're on the trail of the murderer.  After a few tough run-ins one of the brothers needs medical attention and they stop at the first town-ish/trailer park thing they come across.  From there everything goes south.

This film has one of my greatest complaints which is unnecessary or unfinished plot points.  You can leave a plot point open ended if done well, but the first quarter to half of this film is focused on the brothers getting revenge.  About 10 minutes into them being in this town that plot line is completely abandoned.  I'm also not sure what the setting for this world is.  Everytime someone comes across them they ask how they have a working car.  Yet the person they're chasing is supposed to be in a car.  So is it just that in this desert region of nothing cars became scarce or is this some form of post apocalyptic world?  Finally, I assume that the one writer/director are a fan of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and House of 1000 Corpses because once the town "family" gets introduced then it's the crazy eccentric cannibals!  It's like you took the Firefly family from ...1000 Corpses and told them to be poorer quality versions of themselves.

The high points of this film are everything up to them arriving in the town and the score.  The score is simple but coated in a sense of pending danger.  It's louder than some scores but it doesn't overpower the scene.  The viewer has an auditory dread of "what's coming" while watching.

As I mentioned earlier, I wish that plot line A (revenge) would have tied into plot line B (the town) better.  Once B is wrapped up we're just left wandering that same wasteland of a desert without a decent sense of accomplishment for the characters or even just us.  It tries to make that jump that ...1000 Corpses does but it's not absurd enough.  They don't have the horror experience that Rob Zombie had at that time, and in the end, it set Drifter into a ditch to die.

I give Drifter 1.5 car pancakes out of 5:

13 Cameras (a.k.a. Slumlord) (2015) 1h 27m

When you're on tour with a band you spend a lot of time creating jokes, voices, whatever to pass the time in the van.  Years ago I was on tour with a band I was in and someone created a gravel voiced landlord that made creepy statements about how good the shower is and that there may be cameras in the house to watch the person being the role of the renter.  Back then it was creepy and hilarious to the nine of us in a van (yes, the band had a lot of people in it).  This film takes anything we ever joked about to a whole new level.  It made me feel filthy just for watching it!

In 13 Cameras we have the above pictured creeper, looking like Alton Brown and Malcolm McDowell had a child that just gave the fuck up, renting a house out to a young couple.  The home is outfitted with tons of fiber optic cameras and a tiny basement the landlord originally says is an "owner's closet."  This movie is essentially every single person's fear if you live in a rental property, plus some needless character personal drama.

Neville Archambault as the landlord fucking kills it.  He never blinks.  His presence makes not only the people on screen but the viewer feel uncomfortable with the social interactions.  Early on they establish a grotesque smell about him and just his movement and visual presence conjures up that smell in your head.  Everyone else in this movie I don't really give a shit about.  The husband is having an affair with his assistant which really only exists so the landlord has a reason to sneak into the house and make the basement a "prisoner" area.

This film gave me chills.  Honestly.  At some point in your life you've dealt with an individual similar to this and it was not a pleasant moment.  Then to see him put cameras in toilets and showers and just ewwwwwgghhhhh!  I can't.  I just cringed while typing about this.

I give 13 Cameras 3.5 Creepers from Minecraft out of 5: