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)

Severance

A terrific British horror-comedy.  It sets a slasher film during a staff retreat.  On top of hitting all the familiar slasher beats, there is also a healthy amount of gore involved.  Lots of blood.  Some terrible carving.  But it injects a perfect amount of humor to the mix.

Trick R Treat

I've written about this movie in the past (here), so I'll keep this short.  This has become essential viewing every year around Halloween.  It always puts me in the Halloween mood.  It has a great feel and atmosphere to it.  I love this movie.

If you haven't seen these vintage pictures of people in Halloween outfits, you really need to.  The schoolbus scene in this movie reminds me a lot of these.  Some freaky, freaky stuff.

American Zombie

Description from Netflix:

Part mockumentary, part unabashed gore-fest, this film follows two documentarians as they infiltrate a Los Angeles zombie community.

My thoughts:

First of all, the “unabashed gore-fest” is completely misleading.  There was very little blood in this movie.  And, what little blood there was (mostly at the end) could not be considered a “gore-fest”.

And I’m pretty sure a mockumentary is supposed to be interesting.  Or funny.  Or show the genre in a different light. 

This movie had none of that.

This film had 3 classifications of zombies:

Feral – Your common, everyday zombies.  They roam and bite.  That’s the assumption, anyway.  We don’t see much of them.

Low-functioning – A step above feral, but not capable of thought.  They don’t roam and bite, and are actually able to join the workforce.  The ones we see are working on an assembly line.  Think the zombies putting away shopping carts in Shaun of the Dead or the collared zombies in Fido.

High-functioning – Pretty much like humans.  But undead.  They can pass on the zombie virus, but most choose not to.

 This movie focuses almost entirely on the high-functioning zombies (and when I say “almost entirely” I mean “we see maybe 30 seconds of the other 2 classifications”).  And that’s a shame.  Had they included the other classes a bit more, perhaps this movie would’ve been interesting.  But they didn’t, and it wasn’t.

Through the eyes of our two main documentarians (Grace & John), we meet a handful of these zombies.  To me, the most interesting of these was Joel, a zombie rights activist who headed up the group Z.A.G. (Zombie Advocacy Group).  Through him, I thought I could see where this film was going.  Heading back to Romero (especially Dawn of the Dead), zombie movies have been closely tied to holding the mirror up to society.  With all the talk in this movie about equal rights, I thought they would be making a statement about same-sex marriage or something along those lines.

Sadly, I was very much mistaken, and gave this movie entirely too much credit. 

[SPOILER ALERT]

At the end of this movie, we find out that even the high-functioning zombies are, indeed, still zombies, and their end goal is to take over.  Even Joel becomes violent and screams things like, “Your day is done!  We will rise!” 

So, unless the message was “homosexuals are evil and will try to take over the world as soon as they are able to marry” – and I really hope it wasn’t – there was no message to this movie.  Which means it was pointless.

[END SPOILER]

About halfway through the movie, we find that all the zombies are planning on attending an event called “Live Dead”.  Basically, it’s a place for zombies to gather, talk about zombie things, buy zombie things, do zombie drugs, make sweet zombie love (as best as they can, anyway), and listen to zombie music.  Like Burning Man, but with zombies.  John was convinced that terrible things happened there (he kept asking all the zombies if they ate human flesh), so he had Grace work hard to try to get them in.

Which she did.

Of course, once it looked like stuff was starting to head towards the crazy zombie stuff, our documentary crew was kicked out.  And, even though they were able to film some of the events, they were far away and didn’t get a very clear picture of what happened.

And that’s pretty much it.

I had a number of problems with this film.

The biggest problem I had was that it was amazingly boring.  As I mentioned, we spend pretty much all of our time with 4 high-functioning zombies.  The make-up wasn’t great, to say the least.  Most of these zombies were nothing more but normal looking people with a little bit of grey painted on their necks.  They showed a bit more of the wounds in a few scenes, but not very much, and it didn’t look great when they did show it.

What we were left with was a group of documentarians talking to people who looked and acted almost exactly like normal people.  And most of them were pretty boring.  They would talk about their zombie experiences, but they weren’t very interesting.

Much like Mimesis, this was a great concept, but terrible execution.  It could’ve been really good, but it wasn’t even mildly interesting.  A boring, pointless movie.  No wonder I never had anyone recommend it to me.

Also, John (one of our main documentarians) was an entirely unlikable person.

Rating: 1/5

Zombie Talk:

As I mentioned earlier, there were three classifications of zombies in this film.  I spelled out the specifics on them at that point, so I don’t feel the need to go over them again.

I would assume they could be killed by a blow to the head, but it wasn’t really discussed.  There was a scene where they interview a PI.  After tracking down some family members, he was then asked to “take care of them” if they had been turned into zombies.  He then demonstrated how he did this, by hacking up various mannequins in a parking lot.  While he did seem to focus on the head (beating it in with a baseball bat, driving it over it with a car, severing the head with a shovel, etc.), he also spent some time bashing in the stomach and severing various appendages.  Still, I was left with the impression that destroying the brain would kill the zombie.

I would also like to talk about the life-span of a zombie.  According to the Zombie Survival Guide, the average life-span of a zombie is 3-5 years [pg.10].  That seems a little long to me, but I’ll defer to Brooks on this matter.  Since we’re discussing intelligent zombies, there’s a chance they would have found something that would allow them to extend this period.  They didn’t say anything about it in the movie, so I doubt anything like that had been developed.

Even so, over the years, each zombie would be steadily decomposing.  Month-to-month, they would begin to look noticeably worse.  By the end of your first zombified year, you would start to look pretty bad.  Towards the end, there wouldn’t be much left of your body.  Just a crawling, chomping skeleton (and not even much crawling or chomping, as most of the muscles would be gone).

Yet, in this movie, you would never know most of these people were zombies.  Some of them have been dead for several years, yet, aside from a slightly grey neck and some yellowing teeth, there’s no real evidence of being dead.  At one point, we meet the founder/emcee of Live Dead, who tells us that he has been a zombie for 7 years.  And yet he looked like a normal person. 

I know zombie movies are not founded in reality, but at least try to make a little bit of sense.

Last but not least, I’d like to talk about the origin of the zombie outbreak.  In this film, people were turned into zombies if they died “a violent death”.  Like a gunshot wound or something like that.  They could also be turned if bitten by a zombie, but, apparently, the outbreak started by violent deaths.  Like ghosts.

Looking past the rampant stupidity of that method, and I was still left with one main question: why now?  People have been dying violent deaths since the beginning of time.  Why is it that people are just now being turned into zombies?  What changed?  Why did Abel not become a zombie when killed by Cain? 

I don’t demand that an origin be given.  But, if you are going to give the virus an origin, at least give it one that makes some kind of sense.

Freddy vs. Jason

Description from Netflix:
Fusing slasher franchises, this hybrid of horror pits nightmarish Freddy Krueger against serial killer Jason Voorhees in the ultimate showdown after Freddy - stuck in hell - revives Jason as part of a plan to revisit the dreams of Elm Street teens.  But Freddy's demonic scheme spins out of control when the maniacal Jason begins his own campaign of terror.

Notable actors: Robert Englund, Monica Keena, Katherine Isabelle, Lochlyn Munro, Zach Ward, Kelly Rowland, Chris Marquette, Brendan Fletcher
Also, apparently there was an uncredited appearance by a young Evangeline Lilly in this movie.  She played "School Student - Next to Locker".  Not sure how I missed her.

My thoughts:
It's quite a jolt going from New Nightmare to this.  Where New Nightmare was a fantastic, well-written addition to the series, Freddy vs. Jason is exactly what you think it will be: more action-horror than anything.  It was made as a fun movie, not necessarily to be a good one.
But there's nothing wrong with that.  It's not an amazing movie, but it's enjoyable.  I had fun watching it.

I enjoyed what they did with this.  They were able to successfully blend elements of the Nightmare on Elm Street series and the Friday the 13th series.  There were the creepy dream scenes from Nightmare, and the brutal slash-and-kill scenes from the Friday the 13th series.  This is especially obvious early in the movie, before Freddy is involved with the killing, and it feels like a Friday the 13th movie that just happens to be taking place on Elm Street.

Then Freddy shows up, gets mad when Jason keeps killing (taking the victims he worked so hard for), and it's on.  They fight in Freddy's dream world.  They fight at Camp Crystal Lake.  They fight, they fight, they fight.

Contrary to the title, there are more people involved than just Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees.  A group of high school students (and a cop) are terrorized by Freddy and Jason (imagine that) and try to find a way to defeat them.  As central as that is to the plot, the real draw here is the final event: Freddy vs. Jason.  A battle of two heavyweights of 80s horror.  And it doesn't disappoint.

Of course, I had particular interest in a couple of the characters.  The main girl - Lori Campbell - was played by Monica Keena.  I have a soft spot in my heart for her from watching Undeclared.  Also, she apparently knows her way around a machete, which is tremendous.

The cop who ends up helping the teens - Officer Stubbs - was played by Lochlyn Munro.  He has been in quite a few things at this point, but, to me, he'll always be Cliff, brother of Joe.  He had him some crack.  He wants him some hoes.  Say yeah.

Again, this was not a great movie.  But it was an extremely fun movie.  I enjoyed it.  As with New Nightmare, you don't have to watch the entire Nightmare (or Friday the 13th) series to enjoy this, but I'm glad I did.

Rating: 4/5

Trick R Treat

Description from Netflix:
In writer-director Michael Dougherty's fright fest, Halloween's usually boisterous traditions turn deadly, and everyone in a small town tries to survive one night in pure hell, but who will still be alive in the morning?  Several stories weave together, including a loner fending off a demented trick-of-treater's attacks; kids uncovering a freaky secret; a school principal -- who moonlights as a serial killer - poisoning his candy; and more.

Notable actors: Anna Paquin, Brian Cox, Dylan Baker, Tahmoh Penikett, Leslie Bibb

My thoughts:
I've written about this movie in the past (here and here), so I won't waste many words here.  I love this movie.  It has a great atmosphere to it.  I make sure to watch this at least once every year in the week leading up to Halloween.  It's not a scary movie by any means, but it has a spooky feel throughout.  If you haven't seen this yet, you definitely need to.

Rating: 5/5

The Amityville Horror

Description from Netflix:
This hair-raising remake of the 1979 horror hit depicts the ordeal of the Lutz family, whose new home has a gory past and a legacy of demons.  Before long, dad George is being haunted by nightmares and daughter Chelsea is seeing phantoms.

Notable actors: Ryan Reynolds, Melissa George, Rachel Nichols, Philip Baker Hall, Chloe Grace Moretz

My thoughts:
I love this movie.  It's one of my favorite modern horror movies.  Ryan Reynolds gives a great performance as George Lutz; a man who is slowly being taken over by the demons in the house.  He alternates between threatening and annoyed.  One minute he's making his step-son hold up wood while he chops ("We're friends, aren't we?  We're having fun.").  The next minute he's sneering at a touching moment between mother and father.  ("What's wrong with this family?")  The next minute he's trying to kill his entire family.  I can understand.  I've had bad days, too.

It's creepy.  It's funny.  It moves at a good pace.  After the first viewing, the jump-scares aren't scary, but they still work well within the movie.  Nothing really feels cheap or cheesy.  (Okay, maybe the very last scene does, but that's it.)

It's a good haunted house movie.  If you haven't seen it yet, definitely check it out.

Rating: 5/5

What I'm Watching: 10/9/12

Description from Netflix:
An American in Tokyo uncovers a horrific curse that is claiming the lives of all who enter a mysterious house.  A creepy spirit with a tragic past is spreading the deadly evil force in this English-language remake of the Japanese horror film Ju-On.

Notable actors: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Bill Pullman, Clea DuVall, Ted Raimi, Matthew Mapother

My thoughts:
I had never seen this movie before.  Combine that with my love of Sarah Michelle Gellar - and the fact that I saw The Grudge 2 in the theater - and I figured I was due.

I thought it was okay.  Not great.  Maybe I'm just watching it too late.  Perhaps it would have been terrifying if I had seen it back in 2004.  But, by this point, I've seen a lot of movies in this vein, and they're all roughly the same.  There were a few unsettling moments in this movie (the girl climbing all herky-jerky down the stairs creeped me out a little bit), but, for the most part, it didn't really draw me in.  I never really felt like I was on the edge of my seat.
I remember watching The Ring for the first time and being utterly terrified.  Would I have felt that way about this movie when it came out?  It's impossible to say.  Although I do plan on rewatching The Ring in the not-too-distant future, so we'll see how I feel about that one now.

It wasn't bad, but I wouldn't rank this as a "don't miss" movie or anything like that.  Of course, I don't seem to remember anyone telling me that it was a "don't miss" movie, so maybe I just thought it was going to be better than it was.
It was better than Dark Water.  I don't know what that's worth, but it was definitely better than Dark Water.

Rating: 3/5

Death Tunnel

I watched Death Tunnel because it was filmed at Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville, KY.  Waverly Hills is famous for being one of the most haunted places in the United States (or, at the very least, in the Eastern region of the United States).  Living in Lexington, KY, this intrigued me.  I hadn’t heard great things about the movie, but how often do you get to see a movie filmed in a haunted building in your very own state?  (Since that is an oddly specific set of criteria, I would guess the answer is “not very often”.)

Waverly Hills Sanatorium 

The set-up was cool enough.  They took a cue from the actual history of Waverly Hills and tweaked it to make it more sinister.  Here is the basic story of Waverly Hills: it was used in the early 1900s to treat a massive outbreak of tuberculosis.  A 500 foot tunnel was built underneath the building as a way to easily bring in supplies.  They weren’t able to treat the tuberculosis, so a lot of patients died (at its peak, they estimate one patient death every other day).  In an attempt to keep the morale up (apparently seeing dead bodies being rolled out a few times every week didn’t do much to keep spirits up), they used the supply tunnel as a way to discreetly remove dead bodies from the building.  And there is the (very) abridged history of Waverly Hills Sanatorium.

The "death tunnel"

For Death Tunnel, the name has been changed to Vanguard Sanatorium, named after Richard J. Vanguard, who opened the sanatorium and worked there as a doctor.  As I said, they keep the same basic history (used for tuberculosis patients, used the tunnel to remove the dead, etc.), but they add some stuff.  For instance, Richard Vanguard experimented on the patients, so the death count was significantly higher.  The tunnel was used more as a way to hide the number of deaths from the outside world, instead of boosting morale.  And so on.  Bottom line: Richard Vanguard was an evil man.

So that’s the set-up.  That doesn’t sound too bad, right?  The pieces are in place for a pretty good movie.

The story isn’t terrible.  Five college girls (required to wear “provocative nighttime attire”) end up participating in an initiation called “Truth or Scare”.  They have hoods placed on their heads, and they’re all placed in separate rooms (well, two of them share a room, but whatever).  The repeated mantra is, “Five girls, five floors, five hours.”  The first one to make it out wins.  (It’s never quite clear what they win.  It’s not entrance to a sorority.  As near as I could tell, they win an invitation to a party house.)  They are also told that they will be encountering “five ghosts”.  There are cameras all over the house.  It’s a set-up.  A prank.  A way for a couple guys to see five scantily clad girls run around for a few hours. 

And what a plan it was

But then the ghosts show up, and people start dying (the mantra changes with each death, of course.  “Four girls…”).  They discover that each girl who was chosen had a connection to the sanatorium (their relatives were patients or nurses, mainly).  They begin assuming the lives and memories of their relatives, and we find out a little more about the sanatorium with each girl.  There’s also a guy involved: his name is Richie, he’s one of the guys who set up Truth or Scare, and he’s the love interest of final girl.

And Richie is NOT happy to be there

It should be noted that one of the ghosts is a large figure in a gas mask who pushes around a gurney, wears a rubber apron, and speaks in a muffled, gravely voice.  He carts off the dead bodies, which brought to mind the hearse driver in Dead End.

Time to collect the bodies...

So, basically, girls try to escape.  Girls get possessed.  Girls die.  And one girl gets naked and takes a shower for no real reason.  Because, when you find yourself in a haunted sanatorium, the first thing you should do is take a shower.

Who could've guessed it would turn into a haunted blood shower?

None of that looks terrible. 

But here’s the thing: it absolutely was.

There were so many things wrong with this movie, I’m not quite sure where to start.  From time to time, there would be a random flash-forward that accomplished nothing but confusion.  They pulled me out of the movie, spun me around, and put me back in.  There was no rhyme or reason to these.  And they happened pretty often.

This is how the movie started.  Before we met her, we saw her kill face

The motivation of the characters never made sense.  Why did they participate in this?  Was it seriously just to be able to frequent a college party house? 

The acting was terrible.  It might have been some of the worst acting I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen Galaxy Invader countless times).  As near as I could tell, they just grabbed a random assortment of beautiful(ish) people off the streets and said, “Can you go to this haunted hospital and read these words?  Thanks!”

Beyond the fact that these actors were terrible, most of them were asked to play two parts.  “Can you play a normal college kid AND an insane suicidal nurse?”  That’s a recipe for disaster right there.

Krazee-Eyez Tori

The writing was laughably bad.  I jotted down a couple of my favorite lines.  But, for every line I noted, there were a dozen that were nearly as good.

-          “That’s where who died?”  “MEEEEEE!”

-          “ You make me sick.  Now I make you sick.”  (This was pretty much delivered exactly the same as, “You don’t bring me down.  I bring me down,” from Jerry McGuire.  Except this was all muffled because it was said by the gas mask guy.  So, basically, it sounded like a less jolly Bane.)

-          “Something in this place remembers.  And it’s f***ing pissed off!”

-          “Vanguard said the only way out was death.  The only way out is the death tunnel.”

And so on, and so forth.

The “ghosts” were pretty ridiculous.  Two pale naked chicks just kinda roaming the halls.  A girl who just wanted to play catch with a ball.  The evil, scene-chomping Richard Vanguard.  They didn’t have many special effects, which was good, because the ones they did have were awful.

What I’m saying is, this movie was awful.  But it was awful in an entertaining way.  I can see myself watching this again if the setting is right (with a group of like-minded individuals and beer).  If you’re looking for a good movie, you’re out of luck.  But, if you’re looking for an entertaining movie, you could do worse than this.

Rating (quality): 1/5

Rating (entertainment value): 3.5/5

Just for fun, here are the girls: Devon, Elizabeth, Ashley, Tori and Heather.  (Their first initials spell “death”.  Get it?!)

Devon

Elizabeth

Ashley

Tori

Heather

Martyrs

Where do I even start with this review?  It’s such a complex and twisty movie that there’s no simple way to synopsize it.  So I’ll start at the beginning and we’ll see what happens.

Martyrs starts with a young girl (Lucie) running down the road in a tank-top and her underwear.  She had been held captive and tortured for quite a while (although they make a point to say that she was not raped).  She ends up in a mental institution, where she is befriended by her roommate (Anna).  Lucie is tormented by an emaciated, scarred, contorted woman who shows up occasionally to attack her.

Give us a kiss

We pick up with Lucie and Anna 15 years later.  Lucie enters the house of a seemingly normal family, and proceeds to kill everyone in the house with a shotgun.  She calls Anna, telling her that she has found the people who tortured her.  According to Anna, it was only supposed to be a surveillance mission, but Lucie couldn’t help herself. 

Before Anna can get to the house, Lucie is attacked by the scarred woman.  Lucie says something to the effect of, “I killed them all.  You’re free now,” which leads us to believe that this woman went through the same ordeal as Lucie, and that they were connected somehow.

Anna shows up and helps Lucie clean up the mess.  Eventually the scarred woman shows up and we find out what we assume all along: that this woman is only in Lucie’s head.

From there, the movie takes a number of shifts that I can’t really get into without ruining anything.  It’s kind of amazing how many times this movie completely shifts, and yet it’s completely cohesive.  Throughout the course of the movie, this could be described with these plot points: revenge, torture, sci-fi, religious, psychological thriller and probably a few more that I’m forgetting about.  Some of these blend between genres, but there are also 2-3 massive shifts that completely change the course of the movie.  I can honestly say I’ve never really seen anything quite like it.  From Dusk Till Dawn is the easy comparison, but there’s only 1 major shift in that movie.  It would be like if From Dusk Till Dawn went from robbery movie to vampire movie to slasher movie to buddy comedy, and made it all look seamless.

All that being said, I wasn’t a huge fan of this movie.  Looking back on it, I can certainly appreciate what they did.  It was a unique movie, and it was done very well.  But, while I was watching it, I just felt kind of ill.  It was a dark and brutal movie.  There was a lot of pretty graphic violence against women.  I have seen a lot of movies.  I have a pretty strong stomach for violence and blood.  But this one pushed me to my limit.  After it was over, the only thing I wanted to do was watch a comedy and take a shower.

There were also a couple moments that just left me shaking my head.  Lucie killed an entire family with a shotgun.  Sure, they seemed to be out in the country a bit, but a shotgun is loud.  Wasn’t there a chance that someone heard the noise?  Even if they didn’t hear the noise, isn’t there a threat of an unannounced visitor stopping by? 

My point is, after you kill an entire family, you would think “getting out of the house” would be a pretty good move, right?  Not according to Lucie and Anna.  I don’t know that they ever explicitly say how long they’re in the house, but I have to assume they’re in the house for at least a day.  With blood and dead bodies everywhere.  Even later, when Anna makes a disturbing discovery about the house (one that would lead anyone to believe that there was either someone in the house), she still doesn’t get out.  In the face of all logic and warning signs, Lucie and Anna stay in the house, practically begging to get caught.  I kept saying, “Don’t stay overnight!  Get out of the house!”  They never listen to me.

Overall, I didn’t love this movie.  As I’ve said, I can appreciate it, but I never want to watch it again. 

Rating: 3/5

I'll end with a series of posters, because I came across some pretty cool posters for this film.