Cult of Chucky (2017) 1h 31m

If you've been with us from early on then you'll know that I covered this film's predecessor, Curse of Chucky and was blown away by the franchise's return to being actual horror films.  I'm not sure why but when I saw that they made yet another Chucky (do we still refer to this as Child's Play?) film then there was some trepidation that Cult would not live up to Curse.  Luckily, I was not let down.

Cult of Chucky takes us a few years beyond the ending of Curse.  We find out that Nica was blamed for the murder of her family but her insistence on the actual murdering being the Chucky doll lands her in a maximum security psych hospital.  She is eventually deemed safe enough to be moved to a medium security space by her doctor.  At the same time, Andy (from the original Child's Play films) is all grown up but still tortured by his past.  He keeps a living Chucky head in a safe believing that this is the best chance to prevent him from doing anymore harm.  Unfortunately for both of them, Chucky learned a spell from VoodooForDummies.Com (yes, that's a quote) and with the help again of Tiffany, he tries to finish everything he started all while creating a true cult of Chucky.

I can't believe that I was blown away again by a Chucky film.  It's the perfect mix of meta humor and knowing when and how far they can take a joke.  Combine that with some gruesome kills and an overall solid story and this movie is near perfect.  Alex Vincent returns as to play the adult version of his childhood role of Andy, Jennifer Tilly is still on board, and Brad Dourif is doing Charles' voice again.  What more could you want?

I give Cult of Chucky 5 My Buddy dolls out of 5:

Gallowwalkers (2012) 1h 30m

Mother fucking Wesley Snipes!  Fuckin' Blade!  Mother fucking Simon Phoenix!  A man that has vanished from the public eye (except for the one time my friend was his Uber driver).  He's back!  Or at least he was back in 2012 with today's film.  Is my excitement warranted?  Does Snipes live up to my hype?  Does this film do him justice and vice versa?  Ehhhh......

Gallowwalkers (yes, all one word) takes us to the old west where a badass looking Mr. Snipes is hunting down a specific individual all while doing Sub Zero head-rip fatalities and being a rad cowboy.  We come to find that the man he's looking for is a strangely skinless person that steals the flesh from a young man and harasses a cult known as Enoch's Hammer.  His actions are all because he thinks that Mr. Snipes killed his son.  Wesley picks up a sidekick at some point and then everyone meets on the farm where our hero was raised for some final gun shooting and rock throwing.

Okay, real talk, as hyped as I have been sounding with this review, this film isn't that great.  Wesley Snipes looks cool but when he talks it feels lackluster for someone that is meant to be a shoot-first-growl-talk-later type of guy.  As a "presence" though, he kills it.

The plot and character design are what saves Gallowwalkers for me.  If this were just a bunch of jagoffs in cowboy hats shooting each other because of "reasons" then I would've counted this as a total loss.  Instead we have men that steal the skin of other men (and in one case, lizards), carrying around a crucified mummy, all while hunting down Wesley Snipes.  On the other side we have sick dreadlock and grey-in-the-right-places Wesley hunting them down in return and ripping people's heads and spines off to satisfy his own revenge, and counter the curse upon him.

I made this movie sound sick as hell again...

I give Gallowwalkers 3 Simon Phoenix's out of 5:

The Void (2016) 1h 30m

You know the beginning to the Outer Limits?  Where a monotone voice tells you to just sitting back and relaxing because "they" control your TV and are about to take you on an adventure?  That's pretty much what happened to me when I started watching this movie.  Rather than a descent into madness it was an ascension into it.  You go willingly as opposed to fighting tooth and nail.

The Void throws us right into it with two men attempting to kill everyone in a remote country house.  A survivor makes it onto the road where the local Sheriff notices him and transports our man to the closest hospital (20 minutes away, just to show that this is fuckall USA).  We're then given about an hour or so of insanity, Silent Hill-esq monsters, crazy cultists, and a doctor that read too much Lovecraft.

I really liked this film.  It felt like someone was turning up some sort of intensity knob slowly from the start, but paced it so well that when you reached the end everything was at its breaking point.  I could see the influences of Lovecraft but more so I saw the influence of the first two Hellraiser movies.  Nods to Frank, the labyrinth beast chasing Kirsty in the hospital, and the Leviathan are all present but not heavy handed.  It's tastefully done... you know, as hell creatures go.

I also like that "The Void" isn't just an arbitrary title.  There is a literal void which exists in a space between the folds of our perceived universe. Somewhere between life and death, somewhere with weird muscle monsters and giant triangles.  Actually I just made this sound like a gay club...

I give The Void 4.5 bloody Franks out of 5 (I'd watch it again, but I probably won't buy it unless the DVD has amazing extras):

Choice Cuts: The Ultimate Guide to Strange Cinema by Michael Vaughn (2017: Schiffer Publishing)

In high school my friends and I spent many a Friday night renting random VHS tapes. We were "those kids" that played in bands and watched bad movies because they were good.  It's the "Dio Effect," where something passes the threshold of terrible and cheesy to end up becoming amazing.  The one thing I wish we had back then was a book like this.  I could see one of us buying it but passing it around for weeks at a time as we read and digested each film inside before it stayed at our usual Friday night watch spot for reference.  This book needs to learn time travel...

The Ultimate Guide to Strange Cinema reads less as a "guide" and more as a checklist of films to work through before you die.  Every piece of celluloid tucked between the covers of this book comes with the author's personal description and feelings about it.  It feels genuine though as the second movie you encounter has Michael telling you that it's not a good film.  It's still strange, but just not his thing, and I can appreciate that honest approach.

Michael also does a great job of adding extras here and there.  Sometimes you get some trivia about a film, or a short interview with someone involved, or even a recommendation of what other movies you might want to pair with your selection.  Did you order the steak?  Then you'll want a red wine.  Do you watch The Apple?  Then try it with Phantom of the Paradise!

One thing to keep in mind with this book is that this is "The Ultimate Guide" and not "The Complete Guide."  Upon my acquisition of this book I quickly scanned it for some of my more obscure favorites but not everyone will have ever seen Cornman, although the lack of Six-String Samurai was disappointing as it is my favorite movie.  Luckily I did see other favorites such as Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, Yeti: A Gay Love Story, and Wild Zero gracing these pages.

The living tend to ignore the strange and unusual, but if you're strange and unusual or just like the strange and unusual then you should pick up a copy of this book.  Yes I just ripped off Beetlejuice to finish this review, but that's not important.  What is important is that you check out The Ultimate Guide to Strange Cinema.

I would like to thank Michael Vaughn and Schiffer Publishing for hooking me up with a copy of this book to review.  Also, as an FYI, I was not paid in anyway to write a good review for this book, it's legitimately good.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016) 1h 29m

Lily, the main character in this film, is from Altoona, PA.  I grew up about 20 minutes from Altoona so I'm going to give you some fun facts that I remember about that town:

1) Sheetz started there.  If you're not familiar with Sheetz, it started the whole Made To Order gas station food thing.  The main strip of Altoona has something like six Sheetz that you can all see from each other.  It's also Western PA's version of Wawa.

2) It's known for the Horseshoe Curve which is just a horseshoe shaped section of train track in the mountains.  I rode a train on it in fifth grade as a class trip.  It wasn't impressive.

3) Benzel's Pretzels started there.

4) It had a Chuck E Cheese's which had the arcade game Crossbow and my friend Dustin and I would go as adults and play the shit out of it.

5) There's a bowling alley there that I ordered a cheeseburger at in 1999 and since then it has remained the best burger I've ever eaten in my life.

It's pretty bad when I'm more interested in telling you about Altoona than talk about this movie.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is a Netflix original that I wish they wouldn't have made and put that money back in to doing another season of Sense 8.  Lily is a nurse/caretaker for the elderly and she has been sent to the North East to take care of an author nearing the end of her life.  From what I could gather there is a ghost that haunts the house named Polly.  Her body is hidden in the wall after her husband killed her in early 19XX or late 18XX.  I don't know for sure.  Time is really an illusion when it comes to this movie because we find out that Lily had been working there for a year at one point and I have no idea how that passage of time happened beyond three days.  The ghost starts fucking with Lily and it's dumb.

Most of this movie's exposition is done in voice over from Lily but it's done in that way where it seems like she's trying to seem more interesting than she is.  When she's reading one of the author's books it becomes even more apparent because the book is so well written in comparison to the dialog.  The writer (and director) of this movie wrote both things, why could they not see that one makes the other sound pretentious and annoying?

I think that this film was written with an "ABC" concept.  We have "A" with "B" and "C" is the outcome but everything in-between is filler.  Very dimly lit, monotone, and boring filler just oozing out of the cracks.

I give I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House 0 Casper comics out of 5:

Horror Story (2013) 1h 31m

I don't mind subtitles in films.  In fact, I would much rather have subtitles instead of a terrible dub where the context gets changed.  Like that episode of Pokemon where they're eating rice balls but keep calling them donuts because they assumed English speaking children wouldn't know what a rice ball was.  What's even worse though is when the character is speaking English but the subtitles say something different.  It's definitely one of those "you had one fucking job" moments that confuses the hell out of me, and it happened multiple times during my viewing of this.

Staying in India, Horror Story takes the always hard to believe plot of a group of friends out partying the night before one of them is about to move away.  I've moved multiple times in my life and you do not go out and fucking party the night before unless you have a moving service hired and someone is going to drive you where you're moving to. I'm getting off topic but I hate this plot line in horror.  Anyway, our group decides to go to a supposedly haunted hotel because trespassing and breaking and entering are always good ideas the night before someone is moving.  This hotel ends up not just being haunted, but super haunted as it was previously a mental hospital that had a violent patient that claimed to have married Satan in it.

Horror Story is really just a series of dumb decisions.  The bending of the space of the hotel was a nice touch but in truth it's nothing that really made me want to become engaged with this film.  I will say that the hotel "library" having an occult section meant that this was a classy establishment, and the final run with a hand full of fire was climactic, but the rest was a snoozeroo.

I give Horror Story 0 H.H. Holmes houses out of 5:

6-5=2 (2014)

Three days deep and we get our first "found footage" film of this Cut.  I wanted to rip into this movie right at the start of this review but I decided to take a moment and look into it a bit more.  This is really a bare bones production done on a shoe-string budget.  It's the director/producer's first film and there wasn't much of a crew.  I'm filling you in on this info because it's something that I'm taking into consideration.  I came into myself thanks in part to a very DIY punk scene in Pittsburgh, so I can respect this kind of lo-fi production.

6-5=2 is a film out of India where a group of friends go hiking on a random mountain path.  I'm having trouble remembering what their actual motivation is for this because I've had a lot of Indian found footage films I've ended up watching for this blog.  This movie turns into a bootleg version of the Blair Witch quickly (a film which was said to be the major influence) with faux graves appearing in the night, cameras catching weird behavior, and everyone being lost.

This isn't the best horror film I've ever seen, but it's also not the worst.  The Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity influence is far too heavy and feels more like copying than just an homage.  This is especially prevalent when they use an alternate Paranormal Activity ending where the remaining female walks up to the camera and cuts her throat in front of it.  The parts I liked were really more of things that maybe only I would enjoy.  For example, during one of the evenings a girl sits up and starts doing some sick thrash metal hair spins for about a minute.  I was waiting for some DRI or Municipal Waste to kick in, but it didn't.  The other thing I liked was a brief ghost appearance that lead to my note of "Oh shit! Special appearance by the Babadook!"  So as I said, only dumb stuff that got me excited.  As for the rest, they made a movie with what they had.  That's more than I can say for a lot of us.

I give 6-5=2 1 Suicidal Tendencies album out of 5: