The Canal (2014) 1h 32m

Ireland.  All I really know about it, from the top of my head, is the following:  A history of strong political discord and activism, potatoes, the WWE wrestler Sheamus, and the stereotype of Boston police being Irish.  I'm sure there's more but right now I'm too lazy to attempt to recall additional info.  Why am I even rambling about Ireland right now?  It's because today's film comes from the Emerald Isles!

The Canal focuses on a family of three, at least until they become a family of two.  The husband, in the course of his archivist work, finds that their home has a history of strange murders in it.  In his paranoid husband work he finds his wife having an affair.  After stumbling into a toilet that makes Trainspotting blush, he sees a strange man attack his cheating wife.  Unable to save her, or stay conscious, he comes to and calls the police.  The cops assume it's him, he begins to think it's the ghost of a man that haunts his house, and his sanity seems to dangle from a thread.  Was it ghosts?  Was it his own cracking mental state?  Was it a ghost that flew up his ass and used him like a murder puppet?  This is where I would make a "C-anal" joke but I'm trying to avoid it.

 There's the old adage of "children should be seen and not heard," and when it comes to celluloid there are definitely some kids that I feel should not have been given the opportunity to be on film.  I bring this up because the child in The Canal has perfected his mumble-core acting at such a young age that it ruined scenes for me.  I didn't even have an issue with his accent, just his annunciation of words.  Plus he's one of those kids that his acting just doesn't seem to fit the emotion of the moment.  I feel bad for talking shit on him though because he's young so there's a lot of room for improvement over time.  Hang in there kid!

One thing that I did love about this film was the very ending of it.  I mention time and time again on here when a movie tips its hand and I see the ending coming early but the very end of this film caught me by surprised and I got super hyped on it.  Honestly.  It went down and I yelled "OOOOOOOO RAD!" at the TV, and then the movie was over.  This isn't the kind of film though where I could just tell you to watch the ending though because the whole is greater than some of its parts.  I'm not saying this is a perfect film, it reminded me a bit too much of the first season of American Horror Story, but I'm not going to write this one off.

I give The Canal 2.5 flags of Ireland out of 5:

The Disappointments Room (2016) 1h 25m

I like learning new things.  My mind is a collection of random and pretty much useless facts that exist for moments like this where I get to impart something I learned.  So here goes.  A "disappointments room" is a real architectural piece.  When someone, usually of affluence, would have a child that had some form of birth defect or a form of neruo-diversity that would cause them to pass as anything but a "regular" child then they could end up in one of these rooms for the rest of their life.  The family or possibly one staff member would help take care of them but they were hidden from the public.  While archaic, there have been recent cases of such things in Louisiana and Texas.  This film takes its influence from, of all things, and episode of an HGTV show where one of these rooms was shown.  The one in the show was actually made to look like a small home and still seemed  to have love with it as opposed to the one in this film.  But I'm getting ahead of myself...

The Disappointments Room has a family of three leaving their city life to move into a grotesquely large home in the country.  Abandoned for years, the building requires a lot of work and since the wife is an architect she has taken up the task of working on it.  When exploring the acting she finds a chest blocking a locked door.  The key is found and our leading lady opens the door. This is where things get weird because a lot of this is pointed at being ghosts of the original owners, but our woman is the only one that really has any direct interaction with these spirits.  There is one side character that ends up hanged in a tree by a grave which, now that I think of it, never gets dealt with.  Either way, the room causes something to happen.

If that last paragraph didn't point it out, I felt confused during this film.  We had scenes of horrific situations like a dog attack on their young son or a ghost attempting to smother the same kid, but they would be strange hallucinations or thoughts the mother was having.  There was also some sort of odd sexual tension between the mother and the side character but it really didn't need to exist and served no part of the story.  There was also an adorable fluffy cat that was killed off camera. If I haven't made it obvious in my time doing this blog, fuck that noise!

The ending of this film was also confusing.  Everyone just seems like "Okay, let's leave this place" and is totally fine with each other despite the big crazy ending.  Also, the door is taken off its hinges and put aside but I guess the ghosts fixed it so it could slam in the last shot?  Fuckin' handyghosts!  How does one summon those to fix things in the house because I need some electrical work done in our home?

I give The Disappointments Room 1 HGTV logo out of 5:

Oculus (2013) 1h 44m

I can't remember if I mentioned this on here before, but I used to have an irrational fear of mirrors growing up.  Mostly it was mirrors while in a dark room.  The entire concept of the "Bloody Mary" game was terrifying to me.  Now kids do stupid shit for YouTube.  Back in the day you just went into the bathroom with friends and turned the lights out!

Oculus puts Karen Gillan (Amy Pond from Dr. Who) up against some sort of evil mirror.  While Karen was a child, this mirror lead to the death of their parents and her younger brother being arrested as the mentally disturbed cause of their father's death.  She tracked the mirror down just as her brother is being released and the two attempt to prove the mirror is cursed and destroy it.  The problem is that the mirror has the ability to bend reality around them so that they lose track of what is real and what isn't.

What do we do with a problem like Oculus?  I was engaged with the film for a good part of until they did one too many flashback scenes for story development.  The juxtaposition of current events mirroring the same actions our characters took as children was a nice touch, and even having the past and present overlap in the same scene would rekindle my interest.  Oculus just spends too much time telling us what we already know.  The attention to detail is unnecessary.  The mirror is evil, your parents went crazy, give us some shots of how the mirror does it and the extent of crazy, death, then deal with the mirror now.

I liked the reality bending that the mirror would do and the siblings' attempts to combat it took some interesting turns but it was just too safe.  You have something here that opens up to unlimited possibilities, and it pushes some comfort levels, but I feel like it only toes the line of what it could do.  I also don't have a good understanding of the mirror itself.  Is it haunted?  Why does this woman exist with it?  Who made it?  Did I miss these things during a bored moment?  Because that's poor storytelling then.  Step up your game spooky mirror movie!

I give Oculus 2 Bloody Mary Halloween decorations out of 5:

Blood Glacier (a.k.a. Blutgletscher) (2013) 1h 37m

I think that, in some form, everything we do has our influences laced inside of it.  Imitation is yadda yadda yadda.  There is the issue of when we let too much of our influences bleed through and they're so easily recognized that it becomes a comparison.  I had that issue this week with The Lazarus Effect and, to a lesser degree, with today's film.

Think of Blood Glacier as The Thing and Jurassic Park getting ripped out of their minds and after a night of drunken passion this film shows up a few months later.  We have a team of scientists studying the repercussions of climate change on some melting Austrian mountain tops.  Two of the scientists notice a section of ice that looks like it is covered in blood, take samples, and are attacked by a strange creature which bites their dog.  The "blood" ends up being a single cell organism that has been preserved by the ice, but this organism mixes the DNA it comes in contact with it and brings forth new and horrible creatures.

Most of us are suckers for a cheesy monster film, and I'm no different.  While the bulk of Blood Glacier felt a bit too familiar, the monsters were all man-made and shot in hopes of you not noticing the low-grade.  One with a decent eye though can see through the quick pull away and shaky cam to see them as what they really are... masterpieces.  They may not be Del Toro film quality, but I loved each one in all of it's goofy splendor.  A bird with a wasp stinger, a pill bug with face melting abilities, an ibex and something else that I have no fucking clue what it was... all great.  The movie... meh.

I give Blood Glacier 2 Mr. DNAs out of 5 but only because of the creature creations:

The Lazarus Effect (2015) 1h 23m

Why does this movie poster have two taglines?  Why aren't Mark Duplass, Evan Peters, and Donald Glover listed on this poster as well?  Is she really possessed because I'm not sure if we ever get confirmation of that?  Why does this image remind me so much of the Resident Evil movies? So many questions, so few answers.  Just a red faced woman staring at my nightstand as I type this.  I think she's wondering if I'm ever going to finish all the books there with bookmarks in them (spoilers: probably not).

The Lazarus Effect introduces us to an odd mix of individuals working on an experiment to reanimate dead animals.  Finally the process works with a dog but shortly after their grant is cancelled and the lab and experiment are confiscated by big pharma.  In order to get their data back they break into the lab to recreate the experiment but Oliva Wilde is killed in the process.  Mark Duplass brings her back to life but upon her return things aren't entirely okay with Ms. Wilde.  Crazy brain functions, penchants for violence, psychic powers, and her soul possibly still residing in Hell lead to some crazy highjinks as this movie made me wish I was watching Flatliners.

I think that my big issue with The Lazarus Effect is that I can't really shit on it, but at the same time I wasn't impressed by it.  There are tons of these movies that come out each year backed by a huge budget and a good cast but they don't bring anything interesting to the table.  They're safe, and when it comes to horror I don't want safe.  I want a horror movie that keeps me up at night, that I can't watch alone in the dark.  I want new and terrifying things that I'm awed and frightened of.  Films like this are the equivalent of someone trying to scare you with a ghost costume made out of a bed sheet.

I give The Lazarus Effect 1 Lazarus Pit out of 5:

The Hatred (2017) 1h 30m

 

A couple of weeks ago I went to a local pro wrestling show.  On the card for that night was a "hardcore" match, which essentially means no disqualification, falls count anywhere, and weapons will be involved.  Mid-match, one of the wrestlers rolls out a shopping cart full of the traditional wrestling fare, but the other went the extra mile and pulled a kitchen sink out from under the ring.  We all get the joke but it's one you groan at.  Why am I mentioning this story?  Because this film pulled the kitchen sink out from under the apron.

Our introduction to The Hatred is its own short film.  We have a post World War 2 nazi hiding out in small town USA.  How a woman fell in love with and bore him a child is beyond me because this guy is just a prick.  One day he receives a package containing a personal artifact of Hitler's known as the Amulet of Hatred.  He cements this thing into his wall and it turns his crazy level up to 100 because he then murders his daughter and hides the body.  The mom knows what's up and kills him.  Then we go to modern time where some fresh-outta-college girls come up to help watch on of their professor's children for a weekend.  Too much crap happens.  Seriously, a lot of shit goes down,

If ever there were a film that was written based off of a bunch of Post-It notes stuck to a wall then it would be this one.  We have nazis, a magic French amulet the Germans had but was sent from Brazil, Japanese Grudge noises and growing black mold corners, some sort of creature thing, ghosts, creepy dolls, and the use of a creepy pasta (the one where the kid says there's something under their bed, and the person checks and it's the kid saying the thing on the bed isn't them).  It's like they had no idea where to go and instead of sticking with one direction they threw everything at it.

The one positive thing The Hatred does have would be the existence of one of my top five harbinger characters, ever.  The woman doesn't do much except act nervous, glances in the house, mumbles about it being evil, and then all but runs through the front yard.  It was awkward and hilarious and even the characters are weirded out by this display.  I just laughed my ass off.  This film should have embraced her and played Yakety Sax as she ran away and it would receive a higher rating from me. It doesn't, so fuck it.

The Hatred gets 1 Sgt. Hatred out of 5:

Secret of Evil (a.k.a. Secreto Matusita) (2014) 1h 17m

 

Alright, I either pissed in Netflix's corn flakes, or I pissed in my die's corn flakes.  The third option is that neither of those like corn flakes with their piss.  Whatever the case may be, I have my second "found footage" film for the week.  Get ready for some shit.

Secret of Evil (Secreto Matusita) takes place in a haunted house where we get two possible back stories only to find that the cause is a totally different story.  We start by interviewing a man in a mental hospital where he mentions the "owner" while he trashes the room.  Then we get our two stories.  One is about a Japanese family living there and the other being about a couple living upstairs, all of which end with murder.  Our Scooby crew eventually find a letter hidden in a wall with a dead baby and that gives us the true story.  It doesn't change the fact they all die and the ghosts eat their bodies or shove them up their ghost butts or something. If I had, to then I can sum this up as  pretty much the Blair Witch Project only they have a clairvoyant with them and much better tech... and bodies shoved up ghost butts.

I don't know how to talk about found footage movies anymore.  It's mostly a bunch of "what was that?" and "Ahhhhh I'm going crazy with all these ghosts up in here!"  The one thing Secret of Evil has going for it would be that it mainly uses practical effects and camera pans for the spooky elements.  As I mentioned above, this felt too much like Blair Witch to really be a wholly original idea.

I give Secret of Evil 1 El Terrible picture out of 5: