The Similars (a.k.a. Los Parecidos) (2015) 1h 29m

My family didn't get cable until I was in high school.  Prior to that a majority of my sci-fi/fantasy watching were Brisco County Jr. and the random things you got on Saturday afternoon.  Mostly Xena and Hercules unless you got stuck with Cleopatra 2525 (which my husband just sang the theme song to me when I asked him if he remembered the name of it).  Once I had cable I had access to the Sci-Fi Channel (now just Syfy, I think) and their airings of Twilight Zone, especially the New Years marathons which became background staples at celebrations from high school on with friends.  My love of The Twilight Zone runs deep, so when I started watching The Similars I felt that I had found a long lost episode.

Over the course of a single night in 1968, eight individuals find themselves trapped inside of a bus station just outside of Mexico City.  Their small world descends into chaos as the two employees appear to be suffering from strange injuries and are claiming that one of the men there is the devil.  While this is going on we receive updates via radio that the rain outside isn't earthly and is part of some strange world wide weather phenomenon.  The people inside want out, they want answers, and when they get them it's not what they expect.

I loved this film.  It's colored with a grey tonality over it but as everything progresses the color fades from the film totally until the end.  The turns this movie takes are on par with anything I'd see Rod Serling pull.  We even get a narrator voice over at the beginning and end.  I really couldn't find anything bad about this film if I tried.

It does remind me of two specific episodes of The Twilight Zone though.  The first being The Eye of the Beholder (where a woman is getting surgery to become "normal" but it fails and although she looks beautiful to the viewer, her race doesn't look like that and she is the ugly one).  The other is It's a Good Life which I won't go into as it gives some of this film away.  If you're familiar with it then you already know.  And knowing is half the battle.  GO JOE!

I give The Similars 5 TV Guides with Rod Serling on the cover out of 5:

Honeymoon (2014) 1h 27m

Don't confuse this with Honeymoon (a.k.a Luna de miel) that I talked about on Rank & Vile last month.  This is the other movie named Honeymoon, or one of the maybe dozen films named Honeymoon.  I just have access to these two.  Truthfully, I got the better end of the deal with this film as opposed to what I subjected Quincy and Ryan to.

Honeymoon takes us to a lakeside cabin in the woods.  Just married, and looking to get away from the city, Bea and Paul plan to spend their honeymoon swimming in a lake and having tons of sex.  It's too cold to swim but Paul is apparently ready to go all the damn time.  Our couple has a strange encounter with a childhood friend of Bea's and the friend's wife warning our duet to get away from the area.  That evening Paul wakes to find a naked and sleepwalking Bea somewhere in the woods.  Bea's behavior becomes strange, Paul becomes paranoid, and this honeymoon has become a horror moon!!! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!  That's a terrible joke, I'm sorry.

 This film tries hard to pull an ace out of its sleeve, but in the process of doing so it fucks up and shows its hand too early.  I was taken in by the plot and the development of Bea's changes but as we get information everything starts to point toward one explanation.  I'm not gonna say it's aliens, but it's aliens.  I was hoping for some sort of lycanthrope or cryptozoological creature, but I got gross things I can only describe as cervical huggers.  Pretty much the whole third act of this film is a let down, or a beam down... am I right?  I'm not, I'm sorry again.

I give Honeymoon 2 Ancient Alien memes out of 5:

Hisss (2010) 1h 30m

No snakes were harmed in the making of this review.  I feel like I need to have that since this film felt the need to open with that notice as well as telling us that all the snakes were rubber or CGI.  I honestly didn't need that notice because they all looked fake a shit.  Definitely a higher quality rubber snake than you can get around Halloween but damn your shit is fake.  The snake woman however, rad as hell!

We have three main characters with Hisss:  The Nagin (a female snake goddess), a police officer, and a rich white American that has stage three brain cancer.  The American hears a story that if you take the Nagin's lover then you could hold it hostage for something, in this case some form of philosopher's stone.  The Police officer just wants to find out who or what is causing a rash of strange killings with puncture wounds and poison.  The Nagin wants her lover back and also stands up for women by killing rapists and men who beat their wives.  She is the heroine this world needs.

Rubber snakes and CGI aside, this film looked great. I felt like I was getting a real view of rural India as opposed to just the opulent upper-class areas we get in a lot of Bollywood films.  The story was a little iffy at times but I never got bored with it.  Once the Nagin became this sort of avenging/defending snake woman I was 100% behind her.  I did get a bit worried that the ending was going to pull some sort of magical fix but it was the most realistic ending I could ask for with a film involving a snake-woman-goddess.

I give Hisss 3 cobras in a top hat out of 5:

The Duplex (2015) 2h 38m

I'm going to be completely honest here.  If someone offered me a house for a super cheap price and I then found out it was haunted then I'd be okay with that.  I feel like after the 10th time of the ghost showing up to try and scare me and it would be one of those "OOOOOOO! Oh goddamnit! You're masturbating again!" moments then he'd just fuck right off.  Bustin' makes me feel good...

The Duplex is our first Nigerian horror film here on 30 Days of Plight.  A couple buys a home for an insanely cheap price only to have the pregnant wife repeatedly seeing some sort of specter move about their house.  Eventually the spirit causes the woman to miscarriage and it leaves with the baby.  This becomes the turning point for the man to see the ghost instead and then finally attempt to deal with the issue.  It's kind of dickish.

This film is rough around the edges.  The elements are all there but the script is just too long, the effects are behind (in comparison to U.S. films), and the plot needed some tightening up.  I did enjoy that the film brought in the idea of the entity being some form of "spiritual warfare" being waged by someone in the village.  We tend to assume that how people practice their faith is similar to what we know but there are variations everywhere because of exceptions that had to be made to integrate a new religion... other than swords, guns, and colonization.

If I had to sum up The Duplex then I'd say it was a roller coaster, but a shitty roller coaster.  I was all on board for it at the beginning but after two hours of the slow incline I began to wonder where the hell this was going and then suddenly it was over and I was told to exit the ride.  Then I get off the ride to find out someone stole my Motley Crue "mirror" I won in at the dart throwing game because people are scum!  That never happened but I'd cut a fucker for stealing my Motley Crue mirror if I had one.

 I give The Duplex 1.5 Bible Adventure cartridges out of 5:

The Charnel House (2016) 1h 30m

I try not to write reviews directly after watching a movie.  I want to be able to breathe and decide if a film was as good or as bad as my initial impression.  Unfortunately, for The Charnel House, I think I took too much time before writing this one because I had to force myself to recall it.  That's never a good sign, at least when I have to write a review... afterwards though, sure, I can use that space to remember more useless info like the frame data for Ryu in Street Fighter V.

When a mass of human remains are found in the basement of a meat packing factory, the owner jumps through the clock on the top floor while cradling his son.  The only thing is we see this twice, and the second time the son isn't with him, but hiding in a closet.  As the son is lead out by police he looks up at the broken clock to see himself staring down at him.  Skip to "present day" and a couple buys the abandoned factory to make the most bullshit bourgeois lofts ever.  I'm talking voice and iPhone activated everything bullshit.  The couple's daughter befriends a ghost boy that is present in the building and as I'm writing this I realized just how much I don't care about this film.

When it's all said and done, The Charnel House feels loose.  There's an A-to-B plot going on but there are so many subsections to A that when it all comes together the substance of this movie has slipped through the cracks.  I liked the concept they were attempting to go for but when the time came for the big reveal we already knew what was behind the curtain.

I give The Charnel House 1 Charnel (from Image Comics) out of 5:

House on Willow Street (2016) 1h 30m

There have been a few times that I've brought up my exhaustion for possessed teenage girls on here.  Partially because it's been done to death, partially because I'm one of those assholes that will bring up the fact that The Exorcist was based off of a boy that was possessed but they changed it for the film.  I address the latter because I point my finger solely at at Regan for why we have so many demonic ladies.  Now, the question is, does this film do anything new?

House on Willow Street has four individuals that are planning a kidnapping and ransom of the daughter of a diamond store owner.  This group has to be the most textbook looking criminal group ever.  If you asked a child to draw a group of bad people then it would probably look like this cast.  They spend six-weeks plotting and despite one of their characters being the harbinger of "you can't plan for everything," they finally make their move.  The house is unlocked, no power, and strange magick symbols are carved in the back of an armoire.  Kidnapping ensues and each of our group begins to have hallucinations of people that they are grieving.  After returning to the house to find the parents as well as two priests dead a few of the kidnappers find a tape explaining what happened and what they're up against.  They then spend the next hour ignoring the primary instruction of what they should do to get rid of the demon.

I'm on the fence with House on Willow Street.  It's not bad, but it didn't wow me.  There are some great jump scares in here with the use of the dead individuals and the demon takes control of other people via an intense french kiss, but it didn't help the lackluster plot.  The criminals each get a backstory which never really gets expanded on enough.  Especially when it comes to the surviving girl because we get a whole thing where her dead loved one actually helps her out but I don't know why.  I assume it's because they died accidentally and had a good relationship with them but that's me writing some sort of expanded fanfic universe for this film and I really don't need that in my life... just like I don't need any more possessed teenage girls.  Fucking enough already!

I give House on Willow Street 2.5 bad 3D rendered demons out of 5:

Scary Movie (2000) 1h 28m

 

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  Unfortunately the Scary Movie franchise has passed the point of flattery by milking the horror genre for at least five films.  By some divine fate, I rolled the original movie from way back in 2000.  I remember being home from college for a holiday break and renting this film.  It's weird to return to it nearly 18 years later and view it through a more mature lens, but not mature enough to pass up giggling at a dick or fart joke.

Scary Movie takes the plot of Scream and mixes it with a bit of I Know What You Did Last Summer. After blending these together they threw in a ton of awkward adolescent boy humor and that's the film.  There really isn't much to the plot if you've seen the original Scream and know that there's a masked killer murdering teenagers and focusing on a central girl (in this case, Cindy instead of Sidney).

Scary Movie falls under those awkward guilty pleasure films for me.  I'm a fan of the Scream franchise and I like how they spoofed it.  The things that kill this film for me now are the rampant running gay jokes and just how much this film relies on locker room humor to exist.  It dates this movie and makes it feel out of place in today's world.  Then they ran this idea into the ground by making multiple movies full of adolescent humor and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I give Scary Movie 2 weed leaves out of 5: