The Poughkeepsie Tapes

Synopsis:
Authorities find over 800 VHS tapes made by an elusive killer in and around Poughkeepsie, New York.  We the viewer – most of whom are absolutely not police or FBI agents – get to watch some of these and see what terrible things this killer did.  Awful things.  Twisted things.  Why did they let us watch these? 

My thoughts:
This wasn’t as much out-and-out scary as it was supremely unnerving.  I had to keep telling myself, “This isn’t real, this isn’t real.”  I believed myself for the most part, but a little part of me knew that I’m not a smart person and was probably lying.

This movie is 86 minutes long.  There is a whole lot of life-scarring material in this movie for it being so short.  There are things in this movie I will carry with me for years.  Maybe the rest of my life.  I may pass those things down to my children.  They don’t deserve this, man.

There is a lot of stuff going on here, but a decent portion of the movie deals with the kidnapping/torture of Cheryl Dempsey.  She was a teenager when she was abducted.  She was abused physically and mentally to a terrible extent.  We see the torture.  We see her mind cracking under the strain of it all.  It’s heartbreaking.
In a particularly chilling scene, the killer videotapes himself as he approaches Cheryl’s mom, offering to help find her child.  Eventually it dawns on her mother that she is talking to the man who took her daughter.  As she is paralyzed with fear, the killer laughs and walks off.  That scene broke me down.  Of all the things I saw him do over the course of this movie, that felt like one of the worst.  It felt like someone punching me in the gut.  The torture I can take.  But that?  That’s a bridge too far, fella.

But that wasn’t the worst.  Not really.  He did some, let’s call it “creative surgery,” that was horrifying.  Just horrifying.

Both his psychological and physical torture are next level sadistic.  If this man existed in real life and was anywhere close to my town, I would have picked up and moved a long time ago.  Maybe burned my house on my way out of town for good measure.

I feel like I’m really talking this movie up.  I liked it, but it wasn’t perfect.  There are some slow moments.  There are some scares that don’t really land.  But those are small moments and relatively easy to overlook.  Again, it’s a short movie, and those moments are in the minority.  For the most part, this is an extremely well-done movie.  It used the found footage genre to perfection.

If you’re looking for an unsettling serial killer movie, this is it.  It has had a troubled release history, so it’s not the easiest movie to track down, but you can find it if you search hard enough.  That aspect makes this a little creepier: it’s a movie about hours and hours of torture and murder, and it’s not easy to track down.  That aspect makes it feel a little more real.

Turn off the lights, check to make sure all your doors and windows are locked and throw this on.  You may find yourself staring at the screen as the credits roll, wondering what you have gotten yourself into.  Then checking all the closets in your house.  Just in cases, you know?

Rating: 5/5

Notable actors: Bobbi Sue Luther, a real serial killer (probably)

Creep

This is a found footage movie, and the set-up is simple: Aaron answers an ad placed by Josef, a man who is dying of cancer.  As a father-to-be, he wants someone to record a day in his life, so his son will be able to see the kind of man his father really was.  Josef even references the film My Life, in which Michael Keaton does pretty much the exact same thing.  I kind of chuckled, because I love the idea of someone taking life cues from a subpar Michael Keaton movie.  But I digress.

Listen guys, there's this movie called Game 6...

We all know where this is going.  We know that someone is the titular Creep, and we’re pretty sure that someone is Josef, mainly due to his penchant for jumping out at Aaron from hidden corners and wearing a cheap werewolf mask he calls “Peachfuzz”.  The clues are subtle, but I was able to pick up on them.

Pictured: Maybe a Creep. It's hard to tell for sure.

Eventually, Aaron picks up on these clues and decides to leave Josef, a grown man who thinks it’s acceptable to say “tubby time” in the presence of another human being.  I thought this would be the finale: a game of Peachfuzz and mouse in an empty house.  I was mistaken.  The movie went in a slightly different direction at that point, and I was happy that I did not have to sit through 30 minutes of seeing the camera look over a couch slowly, then run down the steps.  Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

For spoiler related reasons, I won’t get into where the movie went from there.  It was an interesting little twist, but it didn’t add much to the movie.  I understand that this was not an action-filled gore-fest, but there was a ton of dead time in this movie.  I feel like they thought it was creepier than it actually was.

This was an extremely small movie.  There are only two actors listed: Patrick Brice (Aaron) and Mark Duplass (Josef).  We actually hear a female voice over a phone at one point, but we never see her and the voice is uncredited.  To love a movie like this, you have to connect with the characters.  Or, at least, not actively loathe them.  That was a test this movie failed for me.  Mark Duplass was basically his same character from The League, only with eyes that were slightly more dead.  He still had that same smarmy look, and I couldn’t shake it.  He didn’t scare me.  He annoyed me.

*Adrian Peterson joke*

Aaron wasn’t much better.  After escaping the house, he had a number of moments where he is just talking to the camera, and he came off as a vlogger talking about what kind of dinner he was going to make that night, only with worse decision-making.

"Went to the store to buy parsley, but they were out. Hashtag parsley life."

I understand what is going on here.  In this era of sequels, remakes and reboots, we have a tendency to champion anything that is new.  Creep is a perfectly fine movie that grabbed a lot of hype for being small and original (or, at least, a new take on an old story).  There's nothing wrong with that.  Had I stumbled across this myself, I probably would have enjoyed it a little more than I did.  But, even then, I don't think it would have grabbed me as much as it seemed to grab others.  It's worth watching, but don't expect anything mind-blowing.

Rating: 2/5

Mini Review: Willow Creek

"Bobcat Goldthwait directed found footage Bigfoot movie."

That lovely bit of word soup is all I knew about this movie going in.  Since I had just visited the International Cryptozoology Museum, my interest in Bigfoot was at an all-time high.  My relationship with found footage has been a rocky one, but I was pretty excited about this. 

While I liked Kelly (Alexie Gilmore) pretty well, Jim (Bryce Johnson) really grated on my nerves.  One minute he's admonishing Kelly for not believing in Bigfoot and making fun of the town ("You don't believe?  You don't believe?  How could you not believe?  Believebelievebelieve?"), the next he's poking fun at a Bigfoot mural or jokingly interviewing a wooden Bigfoot or mocking a man who is singing a song about Bigfoot.  You can't have it both ways, fella. 

The movie was slow and riddled with plot holes/standard found footage complaints, but it was short (80 minutes) and provided a few good scares.  While it was ultimately disappointing, I thought it had enough going for it to offer a lukewarm recommendation.  Of course, that may just be my Bigfoot-mania talking.

Rating: 2.5/5

The Sacrament

Description from Netflix:

Using "found footage", this unnverving thriller recounts the tragic story of an exiled Christian cult and the grisly events that transpire after three journalists - one looking for his missing sister - arrive at the commune.

My thoughts:

Lisa and I had a rousing debate over the term "found footage".  In some movies, it's an accurate descriptor.  In others, not so much.  Because of that, I will refer to this movie as being in the "first person" subgenre of horror.  I'll try to remember to do this for all films in this subgenre going forward, but I make no promises.  Old habits die hard.

My thoughts on Ti West are pretty well known at this point.  I hated House of the Devil, The Innkeepers, and his segment in V/H/S.  I haven't seen Cabin Fever 2 in years, but I don't remember liking it.  I haven't seen his earliest work, mainly because I have no desire to see them.

With that being said, I kept an open mind going into this one.  As I said in my review of The Innkeepers, Ti West knows how to make a movie look good, so I figured this would be visually interesting if nothing else.

I also knew that this film was, at the very least, a nod to the events at Jonestown in 1978.  As is the case with any religious cult, those events have long interested and horrified me.  I even went so far as to listen to The Jonestown Death Tape (I do not recommend this).

What I found in The Sacrament was not so much a nod to the events of Jonestown as it was a modern day retelling.  Many events were exactly the same as those that occurred at Jonestown, right down to some very specific details.

It almost lost me in the early-going.  While it had a nice set-up that kicked off the film quickly, it also featured a number of common first person horror problems: camera shaking around, people repeatedly yelling, "Turn the camera off," etc.  I don't have a problem with first person movies: when done properly, they can be terrifying.  The audience doesn't have to find someone to identify with on screen, because they are essentially in the movie.  However, when done poorly, the problems are nearly impossible to ignore.  If these problems are a minor blip over the course of the movie, it's easy enough to gloss over.  But if it's a problem throughout, it drags the entire film down (looking at you, Hud, for repeatedly screaming "Rob!" in Cloverfield).  The annoyances at the beginning threatened to derail the film for me.  Thankfully, none of these lasted very long.

That's not to say no first-person problems reared their heads.  The one that really got me was the excessive dialog (this is the first time this complaint has come up about a Ti West film).  It's a downside of a first-person movie.  To make it feel like real people in a real scenario, characters are forced to react as normal people would.  That means lots of questions about what they're seeing, and talking about what they had just seen.  It's a realistic depiction of what would happen if I were in that situation, but it kind of suffocated the film.  We see some horrifying and confusing things.  Instead of laying back a little and letting the audience process what they have just witnessed, we are bombarded with questions from the characters.  "Did you just see that?  What was that?" then immediately answering those questions.  Every emotion was vocalized.  Every question answered before the audience has had time to fully process everything.

Again, I realize this is to make the events feel more realistic, but it really hurt the film as a whole.  They needed to let the movie breathe a little more.  Let the audience sit with what they have just seen.  This was my major problem with the film.  If you were to read my notes, you would see the phrase “LET IT BREATHE!” repeated ad nauseam.

There was also a pretty big (if nit-picky) problem later on, but it spoils a pretty major plot point, so I won't get into that here.

I also had a problem with our main protagonist (Sam) in the beginning.  As soon as he got to Eden Parish (the Jonestown-esque commune), he immediately started looking down on its inhabitants.  He was nice when trying to interview them, but, behind their backs, he was rolling his eyes.  It didn't get the character off on the right foot.  Thankfully, this didn't last too long.

There were a handful of moments that saw the plot (and paranoia of our characters) driven forward by some pretty large logic leaps.  The major offender was when Sam finally got a chance to sit down for an interview with Father (the Jim Jones of Eden Parish).  The interview is going well, if a bit odd, when Father suddenly asks if Sam loves his wife.  For no reason whatsoever, Sam is immediately rattled.  He's wearing a wedding ring, so it shouldn't be a shock that Father knows about his marital status.  Sam's reaction to that simple question shook me out of the scene a little, which is a shame. 

The interview is one of the best scenes in the movie.  It's the first time we get to see Father, and it’s a terrific introduction.  He isn't overly charismatic, but it's easy to see why he has as many followers as he does.  He's manipulative in a way that doesn't seem manipulative.  He deflects and redirects questions with ease; in doing so he assures himself of only answering questions that fit his agenda.  He's a kindly older gentleman who can lead with a smile and some words about fulfilling the will of God.  Father is played to perfection by Gene Jones.  It would have been easy to have made Father into an arm-waving tent revival preacher, but they wisely went with a more understated vibe.

At some point, we begin to realize the people are brainwashed.  (Personally, I assumed as much before the movie started even started.)  That was, indeed, the case.  As we meet the residents of Eden Parish, we get a better picture of how this happened.  The best way to brainwash is to find people at their lowest, gain their trust, and promise them something better.  That was the case with pretty much everyone who ended up at Eden Parish.  Caroline - a sister of one of the cameramen, and the reason they were able to gain entrance to Eden Parish - suffered with drug abuse for years.  Two brothers who grew up in a violent community.  An elderly widow who had nothing after her husband died.  These were people at their lowest, and Father preyed on that to build his idyllic community.   He convinced them to sell off all their worldly possessions to fund Eden Parish.  He cut his followers off from all communication with the outside world, so he could control the flow of information about the outside world.  Father’s paranoia became their very real fear.  These people saw a lack of communication with the outside world as freedom, when really it just allowed Father to create a prison for them.

To make things even more chilling, I don't believe Father was malicious.  I truly believe he was doing what he thought was right.  That makes him something worse than a con man: that makes him a monster.

It’s worth noting that all of this is in line with what Jim Jones did.  It may have made this film easier to watch if Father was a fictional character.  To know that there was a man and a place almost exactly like this made for a supremely unnerving viewing experience.

There were some creepy scenes scattered throughout the film (I kind of enjoyed the addition of the familiar "girl in the white dress and long hair" horror trope), but none of them were of the jump-scare variety.  They were born of the environment, not manufactured out of thin air.

The film moves along at a pretty good clip, dragging a creeping dread and paranoia around with it.  By the time everything came to a head in the final act, the madness that ensued was well-earned.

If you know anything about Jonestown, you have a pretty good idea of how this ends (even down to some very specific details).  It did not disappoint.  It was horrifying and off-putting.  There were a couple dumb character moments that threatened to overtake the ending, but, thankfully, they didn't. 

After the movie was over, I wasn't overly impressed.  "My favorite Ti West movie, not that it's saying too much," I grumbled to myself. 

But this one really stuck with me.  Certain scenes are impossible to get out of my head.  A couple days away from it, I think I really liked it.  As I mentioned above, Gene Jones was terrific as Father, and, after a rough opening, AJ Bowen turned in a terrific performance as Sam.

It's not a perfect film, but it's definitely worth watching.  Throw your preconceived notions about Ti West and first-person horror out the window and watch this for what it is: a horrifying portrait of darkness disguised as light and hope.  This is the worst of mankind, masquerading as the best.  This isn’t the monster in the closet or the zombie shambling down the street.  This is something that could be in your hometown.  This is Jones.  This is Koresh.  This is Heaven's Gate.  This is Solar Temple.  This is Manson.  This is Gacy.  This is Dahmer.  This is real life, and it’s one of the more unnerving films I have seen in recent memory.

Rating: 4/5

Frankenstein's Army

It's that time of year again.  The time when I try to watch as many horror movies as my little eyes can handle.  Instead of my usual, long-winded reviews, I'm going to just post a few thoughts about each movie I watch.  That means I will likely be posting about movies I've seen before.  So, for the next month, this blog will become my own personal viewing log.  You're welcome.

Description from Netflix:
As they push into Germany near the end of World War II, Russian troops discover that the Nazis have used the research scientist Victor Frankenstein to create monstrous new soldiers that are pieced together from body parts of the dead.

Here is a list of things I knew about this movie before I started it:
1. Good creature design
2. World War II

That's it.  That's the sum of my knowledge about this movie.  Which is good, I guess.  I didn't really have any expectations going in.

Here's something I didn't know that would have been useful.  It's a found footage movie.
I hoped this would be good.  I'm a sucker for horror movies set in different periods (at least, I think I am.  I often find that I like the idea of these movies better than I actually like the movie).  And I love good creature design.  This should have been right up my alley.

Sadly, it was not.  It was pretty boring, and I wasn't overly impressed with the creature effects.  They pretty much looked like rejects from Hellboy.  Some of them looked pretty cool, but, if they were planning on driving interest in the movie based on that, they failed horribly.

There really weren't any likable characters, either.  It's hard to really get too invested in a movie when there aren't any characters to sympathize with.

The first-person style was really distracting.  These kinds of movies are pretty hit-and-miss for me.  When done well, found footage movies can be really good, and the style can add a lot to the movie.  When done poorly, they're extremely distracting to the story.  This was the latter.
I normally don't get too tied up in the camera logic of these movies.  Whether a person is filming under strange circumstances makes very little difference to me.  But this one was really obnoxious.  There were a number of times when the cameraman was running from a monster, dropped the camera, and took time to pick it up, hold it back up to his face, and film as he ran.  I understand needing to do this to keep showing things, but it doesn't make any sense here.  Again, I normally don't have these issues, but it was impossible to ignore here.

This was a movie that started really slow, and, even when it picked up, never really held my interest.

Rating: 1.5/5

V/H/S/2

First things first.  I watched the first movie at some point last year and reviewed it.  You can read it here, or I can just sum it up for you: I didn’t like it very much.  I gave it 2/5, and I probably could’ve gone a little lower.  I don’t really have a desire to ever watch it again, if that tells you anything.

Needless to say, I wasn’t overly excited about watching this one.  But I’m a professional (like, an unpaid professional.  So I guess not really much of a professional at all), so I decided to put my head down and power through.

Let’s get right to it.

  

“Tape 49” [Directed by Simon Barrett]

We follow Larry (a private investigator) and Ayesha (his wife/girlfriend/P.I.C./whatever) as they investigate a missing college student.  They break into his house and find a very familiar sight (to us, at least): a bank of TVs and a stack of VHS tapes.  As the characters in this series are wont to do, Ayesha decided to start watching the tapes.

Like the first one, we catch glimpses of the house between the tapes.  The normal things happen.  We see a strange figure (presumably the missing student) moving in the doorways.  We see Ayesha being affected a little more by each tape.

As far as a wraparound story goes, it was pretty good.  There were even some genuinely creepy moments, which surprised me a little bit.  At the very least, it was a good set-up for the rest of the movies.

“Phase 1 Clinical Trials” [Directed by Adam Wingard (A Horrible Way to Die, V/H/S “Tape 56”)]

A man who lost his eye in an accident receives a robotic eye.  The person who installs it tells him that it’s new technology, and there are bound to be glitches.  He may see strange things.

Nope.  Everything seems fine so far.

Of course, he immediately begins seeing strange things, in the form of an undead man and little girl in his house.  Naturally, these are not glitches, and he soon finds himself hiding in his bathroom while they try to break the door down.

He ends up running across a woman who had a similar experience when they fixed her hearing.  She began hearing sounds of dead people.  She tells him “the more you interact with them, the more they can hurt you.”  When the dead show back up, they attempt to ignore them by focusing on each other.

With sexy results

Of course, the dead will not be ignored so easily.

Especially the fat dead

The verdict: I really liked this story.  There were quite a few jump scares, and most of them worked really well.  I was on edge for the majority of this story. 

I really liked how they worked the camera into this.  We see what he sees.  It was a creative way to work the camera into the story, and it was very effective for scares.

  

“A Ride in the Park” [Directed by Eduardo Sanchez (The Blair Witch Project, Lovely Molly) & Gregg Hale]

A man goes on a bike ride with a camera on his helmet.  Before long, he comes across a bloodied woman.  The biker finds figures slowly shambling in his direction.  He turns back to the woman only to find that she has been turned into a zombie.  She bites him.  He falls.  He dies.  He reanimates.  He attacks a pair of bikers.  He munches on them.  They die.  They reanimate.  The big happy group of them attack a children’s birthday party in the park.

Just what I wanted, Mommy.  Corpses!

The verdict: Needless to say, once I saw this was going to turn into a POV zombie movie, I was thrilled.  And it delivered.  This was my favorite story of the bunch.  It didn’t really have the scares/tension of the other movies in this collection (it was the funniest one in the bunch), but it was really well done.  I absolutely loved this one.

“Safe Haven” [Directed by Gareth Huw Evans (The Raid: Redemption) & Timo Tjahjanto (ABCs of Death “L isfor Libido”)]

A documentary crew is granted permission to go inside the compound of an Indonesian cult, headed up by a strange man who refers to himself as “The Father”.  Once inside, the crew realizes that there might be more going on than mind control and the possible rape of underage girls (not that those things aren’t horrible.  Because they are.  I cannot stress this enough).  “Father” becomes crazed, violent, and borderline incoherent.  And then it all goes to hell.

The verdict: Even though I really liked this one, I had a few problems with it.  Nothing that stopped me from loving it in the end, but they were big enough problems that I feel the need to talk about them.

1. It started out really slow.  I could tell pretty quickly where the set-up was leading, but it still took a long time to get there. 

2. There was some drama between members of the documentary crew, but it felt pretty tacked on.  It didn’t add anything to the story.  In fact, it seemed to drag it down a bit.  This could’ve easily been cut.

3. There were some really terrible effects at the end of this one.  Laughably bad. 

“Chip, I’m gonna come at you like a spider monkey.  With a box cutter.”

Again, I really liked it, but these were issues that I had a hard time overlooking.  Still, once everything starting going bonkers towards the end, I thought it was a lot of fun.  Insane and fun.

“Slumber Party Alien Abduction” [Directed by Jason Eisener (Hobo With a Shotgun, ABCs of Death “Y is for Youngbuck”)]

The title does a pretty good job of telling you exactly what this story is.  A group of elementary school/middle school boys are having a slumber party at the house of one of the boys.  His older sister is having a slumber party of her own, mainly involving lake partying and sexytime.  The brother torments his sister.  The sister torments her brother.  Then the aliens show up.

We want to party with youuuuuuuu…

[Slight SPOILER ALERT]

The dog dies.  You’ve been warned.

[END SPOILER]

The verdict: I liked this one a lot.  The only problem I had with this (besides the spoiler listed above) was the noise that hit when the aliens showed up.  It was a loud, long horn, and it was a bit much after the second time.

Still, that’s a minor issue.  Once the aliens show up, this story is relentless.

Here’s how I have ranked all the stories in this collection:

1. “A Ride in the Park”

2. “Safe Haven”

3. “Slumber Party Alien Abduction”

4. “Phase 1 Clinical Trials”

5. “Tape 49”

Overall, I loved this movie.  At first I thought I only liked it because I had lowered my expectations after the V/H/S, but that wasn’t the case at all.  This is a great collection of films.  Not a dud in the bunch.  And, thankfully, the only sharking we see is a short clip from the first movie.

For the most part, this was a collection that was pretty scary and tense throughout, with more than a little humor sprinkled in for good measure.  This was a tremendous anthology film.  Highly recommended.

Rating: 5/5

V/H/S

I have run into a recurring problem with found footage movies: they seem to start off pretty slow.  It’s a way to set the stage a little bit; to make it feel a bit more like real life.  The viewer gets to know the main characters a little better in the downtime.  Quarantine starts off with 10-15 minutes of Angela interviewing firemen.  It lulls you into a certain sense of security/boredom.  It also allows us to see Angela in her everyday life.  “She’s just like us.”  Well…not exactly like us, but you get the feeling that she’s a normal person.

The good found footage movies do this well, and use this device to their advantage.  You feel a better connection to the character.  You feel more invested in their well-being.  The first 15 minutes being a little slow doesn’t really matter in the long-run.

This is my main problem with V/H/S, an anthology movie featuring 4 short films inside of a wraparound story.  The entire movie clocks in at just under two hours, which would be fine if it were one story.  But it’s not.  It’s five stories.  And each one has the set-up that I just talked about.  Having an extended period of dead time to start your movie doesn’t kill it if it’s 90+ minutes long.  But, if you’re making a film of roughly 15 minutes, you can’t have 10 minutes of boring set-up.  That doesn’t make it interesting.  It just makes it boring.

There’s another thing that kind of kills this movie: there really aren’t any likable characters.  There are a handful of characters that I didn’t actively hate, but not too many.  I despised the vast majority of these characters.  I don’t mean that in a, “they were despicable and I couldn’t relate to them” kind of way.  I mean that in a “they grated on my nerves” kind of way.  That’s the major difference in the characters in this movie and the characters in Trick R Treat.  Trick R Treat was filled with terrible people, but they were at least tolerable.  I wanted to reach through the screen and punch most of the characters in V/H/S.

Let’s get to a short breakdown of each story, starting with the wraparound.

“Tape 56” [Director: Adam Wingard]

A few friends are hired by an unknown person to break into a house and steal a specific VHS tape from an old man.  We don’t know much about these guys, except for the fact that they make money by running around, lifting girl’s shirts up, filming it, and selling it to porn sites.  They also enjoy vandalism (shocking, I know).  Also, I hate all of them.

They go into the house and find that the owner is dead.  So they take their sweet time picking through his library of VHS tapes.  They watch some of the tapes to try to figure out which one they’re supposed to grab (as opposed to just taking all of them and sorting it out later, which would have made entirely too much sense).  The short films that we see are the VHS tapes that they are viewing.

We catch glimpses of weird things in the house between the films.  A couple of the guys disappear.  Something is moving around in the house.  The dead man disappears from the chair he was sitting in, only to reappear a little later.  And so on.

Why is there so much antiquated media/facial hair in this house?!

The verdict: I hated this.  The characters were all ridiculously obnoxious, and I was openly rooting for them to die.

“Amateur Night” [Director: David Bruckner]

Three guys (Shane, Patrick & Clint) hit the town in search of sex.  Lots of sex.  One of them (Clint) has glasses with a camera installed in them, so he can record all the events of the night.  (It’s worth noting that Clint looks like Ben Folds.)

Time to CRUSH the suburbs, brah

They go to bars, drink, meet girls, and get kicked out of said bars.  One of the women they meet is a strange girl named Lily.  She’s kind of cute, but extremely pale, and her eyes look a little too big for her face.  She’s a little skittish, but she keeps getting close to Clint’s face (thus, the camera) and mouthing the words “I like you.”

"I like you, too.  Please stop looking like a caged animal."

The three guys take two girls (Lisa and the aforementioned Lily) back to their room.  Clint was going to hook up with Lily, Shane was going to hook up with Lisa, and Patrick was going to sit on the couch in the hotel room and laugh like a hyena.  Lisa falls asleep, so Shane decides to hook up with Lily instead, because no one cares about Clint or his stupid feelings.

"I like...AIIIIIIEEEEEEE!!!!"

But, as we’ve already guessed, Lily is some kind of night creature.  A vampire, most likely.  A split-faced vampire.

The night takes a turn from there.

The no-pants-dance.  But with fangs.

The verdict: I didn’t love it.  The “twist” was telegraphed from very early on.  Also, I hated the three main characters.  I guess Clint wasn’t terrible, but Shane and Patrick were insufferable.

“Second Honeymoon”  [Director: Ti West]

A married couple (Sam and Stephanie) decide to take a road trip out West for their second honeymoon.  They seem happy and in love.  They see the sights. They have fun on their drives.  And so on.

They also get their fortunes told by an old-timey prospectin' machine

One night, in their hotel room, a woman comes to the door and asks them for a ride in the morning.  They decline.

Later that night, the camera turns on, and it’s obvious that it’s the woman from earlier.  She steals $100 from Sam’s wallet, opens a switchblade, and softly touches Stephanie with it.

Sam and Stephanie wake up the next morning none-the-wiser, except for Sam accusing Stephanie of stealing his money.

Smile for the camera

The verdict: There’s a little payoff at the end, but it’s entirely too small to make up for the rest of the film.  95% of this film is watching a happily married couple taking a road trip.  The ending (which wasn’t even that great) doesn’t make up for all the boring stuff.

“Tuesday the 17^th” [Director: Glenn McQuaid]

Four friends (Wendy, Joey, “Spider” & Samantha) head into the woods of Wendy’s hometown.  She says they’re going to a cabin she used to visit as a kid.  As they walk through the woods, Wendy tells them stories about a trip she took with friends, and the accidents they had.  As she tells them these stories, the camera has flashes that show dead bodies.  At some point during the walk, Wendy stops, looks into the camera, and says something to the effect of, “You’re all going to die.”

But she says it in a really adorable way

She tells them a story of a serial killer that stalked the woods, killing people.  How he killed her friends.  How he has supernatural powers that allow him to not show up on the camera.  How she brought all of them there as bait, because she was going to kill him.

And sure enough, he shows up and begins to pick them off.  And, true to the story, he only shows up on camera as a technical glitch.

There he is: all glitchy and not-at-all terrifying

The verdict: I didn’t really hate these characters, but there just wasn’t enough about them to like.  There was nothing to them.  And, as in the last film, the payoff just wasn’t worth it.  This wasn’t Jason stalking the teens of Camp Crystal Lake.  This was a blurry, tech-riddled blob shambling through the forest and killing college kids in a very quick and pretty non-interesting fashion. 

“The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger” [Director: Joe Swanberg]

Emily and James are dating, and they talk often over video chat.  He lives in another state, and is studying to be a doctor.  Their chats are centered around the strange bump on her arm, and the strange happenings in her apartment.  Footsteps by the door, bumps in the night, etc.  She’s convinced that her apartment is haunted.  While chatting one night, a ghost-like figure runs into the room and slams the door. 

So it definitely appears that her apartment is haunted.

And she still has this strange bump on her arm.

Ghost child!

During one of their chats, Emily begins digging into her arm with a knife, trying to get the bump out.  James is concerned, and tells her she needs to not do that anymore.

I can’t really go too much further without spoiling the ending.

The verdict: I liked it.  I didn’t love it, but it felt like a Twilight Zone episode.  Definitely the best film in this collection.

“10/31/98” [Director: Radio Silence]

Four friends (Chad, Matt, Tyler & Paul) head out for a Halloween party.  When they get there, they don’t find anyone in the house, but there are some weird things going on in the house.  They assume that the owner set it up as a haunted house attraction.

They hear chanting coming from the attic, so they go up and find a woman tied up and a group of men beating her.  They decide to rescue her, so they cut her down and run out of the house.  As they escape, the house gets stranger.  Hands grab at them from the walls.  Chairs and tables float in the air and fly towards the escapees.

They get the girl in the car and drive off.  But things are not quite as black and white as they had assumed.

The verdict: Not bad.  It moved along pretty quickly, but it never really drew me in.  Still, it was fairly enjoyable.

Here is my ranking, in order of how much I enjoyed them:

1. The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger
2. 10/31/98
3. Tuesday the 17^th
4. Tape 56
5. Amateur Night

Overall, I didn’t really like this.  It’s was pretty plodding and boring for the most part, and I didn’t like many of the characters.  And there weren’t nearly enough good parts to counteract the bad ones.  Even my favorite film was pretty boring for the most part.  It was just less boring than the other films.

I had one major issue with the film as a whole: as far as I know, this was supposed to take place in modern times.  At least, I don’t remember them saying when it took place (the only date I remember was in “10/31/98”).  So, if this did take place during modern times, why was everyone using VHS?  I get that it wouldn’t have the same feel if it was called iMovie or something, but the rampant use of VHS was baffling to me.

I also get that the ending didn’t really matter too much, but it still left me with questions.   Did they find the tape they were looking for?  How were they supposed to know if they found it?  None of them seemed to know anything beyond, “We need to find a tape,” so how would they know if they found it?  I go back to my earlier point: why not just grab all the tapes and leave?  Why stay in the house and watch all of them?  It makes no sense.  I guess I’ll just have to wait for V/H/S 2.

V/H/S II: Lost in Yonkers

I had a thought towards the end of the movie that helped me to explain the widespread use of VHS.  At least, it makes sense in my mind.

This movie does not take place in our world.  This movie takes place in an alternate reality.

Every film except “Second Honeymoon” involves supernatural events.  And not small supernatural events, either.  Yes, these could take place in our world, but that’s a pretty big leap.  To try to get me to believe in vampires, glitchy serial killers, and whatever-the-devil-happens in “The Sick Thing” is a pretty bold move.  And I believe in aliens and ghosts, so it’s not like I’m coming from some position of complete unbelief in the supernatural.

So perhaps this film takes place in an alternate universe.  A universe that, for one reason or another, technology didn’t advance quite as fast as it has here.  I realize it’s a leap, but believing that the events of this movie take place in our reality is also a pretty big leap.

Just a nice picture of non-dead friends

But that might not be accurate.  After all, they have glasses that record in “Amateur Night”.  So why do they record to VHS?  And why is the video chat of “The Strange Thing” on VHS?  Wouldn’t that all be digital?  Am I supposed to believe that someone converted a digital file to a VHS tape?  For what purpose?

As you can see, I have a lot of questions about the central tenent of this film.

One final note: when I was searching for pictures for this review, I found that the pictures made the movie look a lot better than it was.  Don’t be deceived by these pictures: the movie was not very good.

Rating: 2/5