Here's the deal...

So I've been doing this for blog for just over a year.  While I've tried to maintain as close as I can to a 30-day run, I've dropped the ball heavily with this cut... which started back in December.  On top of that, I've been getting away from doing my actual Netflix watching and doing other horror films to fill the gap.  While I don't mind doing an extra or special one now and then I feel that I've strayed from what I initially wanted this to be.

So what does this mean?

What this means is that I'm going to end this cut now, and then I'm going to take this blog back to the lab and work out what I want to do with this.  So I'm not quitting this idea, I'm looking to see what I need to do so I get more consistent content, and what content do I want to put on here.  Horror is definite.  That will never change.  I just have some ideas I would like to kind of bring into this and see what works best.

I'm not going to take too long.  Probably two months (so back around May) at most to figure this out.  So bare with me during this time.  I hope you'll come back once I start posting again.  You can follow the blog on Facebook where I'll be letting people know that we're up and running again.

Thanks for understanding (hopefully).

- 30 Days of Plight

Day 16 (A PSA): Rings (2017) 1h 47m

If this movie were a table then I would flip it in disgust.  Have you ever been in a movie theater where you could feel how bored everyone else was around you?  I just have and holy shit was it bad.  I've labeled this as a PSA because under no circumstances should you see this movie.  As a fan of the Ringu series, I implore you to avoid this.  I think that the warning on the poster is in regards to this film, not the stupid fucking video.

Typical ring story:  Watch the video, phone call, die in seven days.  Samara will give you a stupid death face.  We switch out flies for cicadas.  Find her body... again?  Apparently one of the Big Bang Theory guys is a college professor who gets students to watch the tape, then have another watch a copy so the curse gets passed on and the first person lives... repeat.  The dumb thing is there are no attempts at a real explanation as to why you can't just cycle back and forth between people aside from the tedium it would bring.  Holt (unfortunately not Steve Holt) is Julia's boyfriend who vanishes for a bit after watching the tape.  She goes to find him, then she watches the tape to save his life.  Shit goes down.

By shit going down, I mean it goes down the fucking toilet.  This movie front-loaded anything of interest and then drags you through the remainder.  Not only is it dragging you, but it is very obviously showing you things only for one of the characters to have the realization 20 minutes later.  There's a part where Julia looks up at a bell and I thought "Oh, the ring, something is below the ground there."  Fucking 20 minutes later Julia suddenly had this realization and I lost my shit.  It is just moments of that over and over.  The priest, the ring, the mark on the hand, etc. etc.

I have never left a movie theater as angry as I was after Rings.  I want my fucking money back.  I not only want my money back, but I want my fiancé to get his money back for the snacks we bought and whatever my gas money was to drive there.  I want money for emotional damage caused by how bad this film is.  I want the other people in the theater to get their money back.  In fact, I want them to pay the money back to people that went to see other films out of pure shame for this movie even being in a theater.  Fuck this noise!  Rings fucking sucks.  Put that on your blu-ray box as a quote you turds!

I give Rings negative 5 copies of Ringu.

Day 15: Shelley (2016) 1h 32m

Sometimes in life we're given something, told it's one thing, but feel like it's something else.  For example, right now I'm eating some leftover Chinese food which is supposedly chicken, but I think this is pork.  This movie was listed under horror, had the subheading of thriller, but in reality it was neither of those... and also crap.

Shelley follows a Danish hippy couple where the wife is infertile.  They hire a maid to help around the home but eventually ask her to be a surrogate.  During the course of the pregnancy the surrogate experiences what she considers strange reactions to the fetus.  It causes her pain, strange aversions, sleepwalking, sickness, etc.  There is also an older hippy that does some reiki and pulls an angry dog out of the maid's head space.  Yeah, it was really as random as I made that seem.

The rest of the film isn't worth going into.  I will say that the baby doesn't really seem to be evil and I'm confused by the whole thing.  The pace of this movie was so slow that when you got a small piece of the plot you would forget it 15 minutes later when the next sliver of plot was introduced.  Then we're just stuck with hippies in a cabin for a long time.  I've been tempted to look up an in-depth plot analysis but I quickly realize that would serve no purpose as I'm not really invested in ever remembering this movie after I hit "publish."

In keeping with most of the films I've watched this cut, I give Shelley 0 stupid babies out of 5:

Day 14: Ludo (2015) 1h 30m

I can't recall the last time I've had a fever dream.  Thankfully, I rolled Ludo which might as well have been some sickness induced dream spiral that unleashes some strange darkness that dwells in the innermost working of the human soul!  Either that, or a mess of crap which makes no sense.

I can only sum up Ludo as such:  Oh, these young people are going out for a night on the town.  When did they start playing this game.  Wait, are those zombies, cannibals, vampires, or ghosts?  What is going on?  Why is there suddenly a sexual assault attempt?  Who the fuck are these people?!  Wait, this is based on some board game Jumanji shit?  Ohhhhh, that's who those people are.  Wait, who is this person that sucks on the flute?  Is the last half of this film just trying to explain the first half?  Is this over yet?

The real underlying plot is that there is a forbidden game known as Ludo (which is a real game based on Pachisi)  Apparently an alchemist had it locked up in a safe where the key was a flute and his son and (maybe daughter) son's girlfriend unlock the safe and play the game.  The alchemist finds them and curses them before killing himself and spraying them with his blood.  The game then makes them hunger eternally but mainly for blood.  These kids just get caught up in the bullshit.

Ludo did a poor job of story telling in an attempt to either seem artsy or just to add more mystery to the film.  While it would have large sections of consecutive time, there would be these broken up sections shown in flashes or quick time jumps where you would have no idea what was really going on.  I found it hard to follow and it made me loose interest.  When I did get the explanation of the plot it was so lengthy, absurd, and full of these quick jumps that I just didn't care.

I give Ludo 0 Pachisi games out of 5:

Day 13: :SPECIAL EDITION: Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2017) 1h 46m

Taking a break from our regularly unscheduled program, I'm actually going to review a film that just came out.  As usual, I have to do a full disclosure:  My entire day was planned around Resident Evil stuff.  Earlier in the day my fiancé and I went out to buy Resident Evil: Biohazard (a.k.a. Resident Evil 7) and then went to an afternoon showing of Resident Evil: The Final Chapter on its opening day.  After that we came home and played Resident Evil 7.  I am, by no means, a stranger to either the film or the Capcom franchise, and I am a fan of both.  So at the end of this I'm going to give it two review scores: one as a fan, and one as an illegitimate critic that has a blog about crap and talks shit while referencing his penis.

The sixth and final film in the Resident Evil franchise, The Final Chapter picks up at the end of the prior film with the Red Queen contacting Alice and telling here she needs to return to the Hive because there is a cure to the T-Virus.  From there we follow Milla Jovovich as she kicks ass from DC to Raccoon City.  Seriously, she kills a bunch of dudes while suspended upside down in a snare trap something like 10 minutes in.  It's rad as fuck!  I'm going to avoid spoilers here as this just came out but there are a ton of action scenes through this whole film.  So much so that my fiancé and I both came home with headaches from them.  That's how action packed this is.  It kicked our asses to the point of being concussed!


With the fanboy section out of the way, I will say that some of The Final Chapter was hilariously over-the-top.  Don't get me wrong, I loved it, but there was such a sense of "excess" that if you saw this film with no prior knowledge you would be asking "what the fuck?!"  Case in point: Alice has a shotgun with three barrels, or a flash light that is four flashlights taped together or some shit, or there's a scene involving a flaming gasoline waterfall taking out zombies.  It looks cool if you remind yourself that these films are (loosely) based on a video game franchise, or if you're an absurd action film fan, but to anyone else it might seem a bit much.

I'm glad that this film was the final one.  Not because I have grown tired of them (which I obviously haven't) but because Paul Anderson did a good job of wrapping everything up and not letting it get stale.  Milla kicked the fuck out of tons of stuff and was super rad, so kudos to her.  Actually, while I mention both of them, before the film started they both came on the screen and thanked the audience for seeing the film and the series.  It was kind of cool.  So you're welcome Paul and Milla.  Hopefully this review makes it okay I use your first names here.

As a fan I give Resident Evil: The Final Chapter 4 out of 5 Umbrella Corp logos:

Looking at this as a sofa critic, I give it 3 out of 5:

Day 12: #Horror (2015) 1h 41m

I'm just old enough that when I was young I still got to enjoy the tail end of after school specials.  I wasn't old enough though to really understand them.  At four they're less "after school" and more "background noise while playing He-Man."  With this film I didn't know if it was trying to be more of an after school special or one of those ill informed films for paranoid parents.

#Horror follows a group of spoiled tween girls while they basically Instagram their dumb time hanging out with each other.  Some real life in-group bullying happens, then it kind of goes online (although everyone is still pretty much together) until one of the girls is kicked out of the house and she wanders the wilderness like some fucking wild animal.  Her dad comes after a phone message and scares the shit out of all the girls.  Then the girls begin to get killed while all being live streamed or having photos of their corpse uploaded.

This movie was trash.  It felt like it was done by someone so disconnected from the use of social media that they made a lot of choices based solely on what they thought tween/teens did with social media. They keep trying to throw in assumed elements of social media on the screen but it just looks like some sort of "my first Geocities page: circa 1993."  Also, for a film using a hashtag in its title, it would misuse them when putting them on the screen.  A hashtag is not quotation marks, you don't put #killer#!!  That doesn't work!  Seriously!  It's like someone's unhip mom went to Wal-mart and bought the bin full of emoji pillows for their child because their kid texts a lot.

I give #Horror 0 poop emojis out of 5:

Day 11: What We Become (2015) 1h 25m

When I think of the general Norway/Sweden/Denmark area of Europe I tend to think about black metal, and ABBA, but mostly black metal.  So when I rolled the Danish film What We Become and saw this poster image I was hoping it was going to be bloody with satan and cool shit.  What I got was a 28 Days Later knock off.  So what I became was bored.

What We Become starts with a viral outbreak in a small city area.  It quickly becomes a militarized zone where those that turn are pulled out and taken somewhere to be killed and the survivors have to live just on small rations.  Shit goes down hard thanks to our "teenage" jagbag, Gustav, sneaking out and basically leading to things getting out of control way faster than normal time would allow.

These characters were lame.  The teens are oversexed and the parents appear absurdly laid back at times.  Gustav sucked so hard as a person that the greatest monster in this film is his sheer existence.  The course this film takes is just a slow crawl of what 28 Days... did much better.

Apparently this is the first "post-apocalyptic zombie" film to come from Denmark.  While I'd say this were more early-apocalypse than post-apocalyptic, I wish it would have been more inventive.  There were some good visual elements but at one point the windows to the outside world get blacked out and I assume that this was put in as a plot point only because they couldn't keep filming with the background showing people doing their normal life things and breaking the immersion.  I could be wrong, but it felt like that was the reason.

I give What We Become 1 copy of 28 Days Later out of 5: