Worst of 2014

My plan was to combine my Best and Worst onto one list.  But then I got to writing and it got a little too long.  So we’ll roll with Worst right now.

I couldn’t find 10 films I really disliked, but it’s because I avoided a lot of movies that probably would have ended up on that list.  Jessabelle, Ouija, Paranormal Activities: The Marked Ones.  All of these were left unseen by me.  I thought about throwing them at the bottom of the list, but that seems cruel.  One day I’ll watch them and rant about them then.  I don’t want to ruin all that fun just yet.  I gotta pace myself, you see.

9. Zombeavers
It’s not that it was terrible.  It’s more what it represents, combined with the fact that it just wasn’t very good.  What it represents is the new SyFy movie trend of making an obviously bad movie, with the plan of making it so ridiculous (and making the title ridiculous) that people will love it for those reasons.  It’s a way to get people to love something ironically, without actually ever trying to make a movie that would stand on its own merits.  SyFy has been making movies for a while, and, while they’ve been pretty ridiculous, they didn’t always fit this bill.  I would tell you how many times I’ve seen Frankenfish, Minotaur, Yeti, Ice Spiders and Sabretooth, but I don’t need your judgement right now.  The wife and I once made sure we were both home to watchOdysseus: Voyage to the Underworld, starring one Arnold “Imhotep” Vosloo.  They were also behind some really quality movies, like Splinter.  They weren’t cheesy all creature-features.  Then the giant shark movies started showing up, and it all went to hell.  “What if we made nothing but stupid, over-the-top movies?”  It’s hard to fault them, really: I’m sure the Sharknado series has drawn in more viewers/money than Battlestar Galactica ever did.
I’m getting on an old-man rant, so it’s time to pull myself out.
That brings us to Zombeavers.  There was no plan in place to make this a good movie.  The idea started and ended with, “What if there were zombie beavers?”  It wasn’t funny.  It wasn’t clever.  It was just a loud, obnoxious movie about zombie beavers attacking sex-addicted college students in a remote cabin.  There were a couple funny moments, but, for the most part, it was really painful.  An unfunny idea that was turned into a movie without much thought put into it.  I didn’t hate it, but it wasn’t good, and it’s just the latest example of a trend that has gone too far.
If it tells you anything, my favorite part of the movie was watching the outtakes with Bill Burr and John Mayer ad-libbing while driving around in a truck.

8. Willow Creek
This is on here because I wanted it to be good.  It’s a found footage Bigfoot movie directed by Bobcat Golthwait.  I’m a fan of Bigfoot, and, seeing as how I had just visited the International Cryptozoology Museum, I was really looking forward to this.
It was really boring, and seemed to steal scenes directly from The Blair Witch Project (Golthwait says he’s never seen Blair Witch, so I guess it’s just some sort of terrible coincidence).  There were a few decent scenes, but I couldn’t stand the main guy, and that really hurt the movie.  It wasn’t terrible, but it just wasn’t very good.
My original review.

7. The Quiet Ones
I’m a fan of Hammer films.  I love the classics, and I’m a huge fan of The Woman in Black.  This has a great cast and a pretty cool story (well, the story this was loosely based on was good.  This version left quite a bit to be desired), but it didn’t really go anywhere.  The writing wasn’t very good, and the characters were barely characters at all.  Like Willow Creek, this wasn’t terrible, but it was really boring and just kind of a slog to get through.

6. The Purge: Anarchy
I really disliked the first Purge movie.  One of my main complaints was that it didn’t show enough of the wider carnage.  All we got was the inside of one house, and the family we were stuck with was terrible.
I got my wish here.  We saw a bigger view of the city.  We got more people involved.  It was exactly what I wanted.  Until I realized that it wasn’t.  Outside of the main character (who was more an action movie stereotype than a character), there wasn’t another likable character to be found.  I think there were a couple good scenes, but I can’t seem to remember them, so maybe it was part of a fever dream.
They tried hard to up their political statement game with this one, and they failed horribly.  It wasn’t smart enough to really say anything; just a string of failed concepts.  How is this only sitting at 6?

5. ABCs of Death 2
Oh.  Right.  Because other movies came out this year that were quite a bit worse.
I didn’t care for the first ABCs of Death, so I wasn’t looking forward to this one.  But I started watching it anyway, because I hate myself.  I say “started”, because I didn’t finish this.  I don’t know that I even made it halfway through.  I had planned to watch the whole thing under the premise of, “If I don’t like what’s on my screen right now, I’ll just wait 5 minutes and a new short will be on.”  But then I remembered I would be doing that for 2 hours, and I just couldn’t do that to myself.  I think I watched 6-7 segments (maybe more), and I didn’t like any of them.  Had I finished this, it would probably be higher on this list.  Or I would be dead.  Either way, I guess.

4. Wolf Creek 2
In what seems to be a theme on this list, I didn’t love the first Wolf Creek.  It wasn’t bad, but there just wasn’t much to it.
For this one, they decided to make Mick Taylor – the killer – more of a personality.  Tell some jokes.  Yuk it up.  Make him more of a wisecracking ne’er-do-well/serial killer.  The people love to laugh with the guy who is brutally murdering and torturing innocent humans, right?
Maybe the thought process was that many people do cheer for the killers in slashers.  But that’s a little different than this.  People cheer for Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers because they’re known entities, and the victims are purposefully vapid.  “Who cares if they die?  They’re not doing the world any good, anyway.”
You could counter my Mick Taylor argument with, “Freddy Krueger cracks jokes,” but those movies were different than this.  By the time Freddy was cracking jokes (“Soul food, nyuk nyuk nyuk.”), those movies had long since veered into the ridiculous.  So far, the Wolf Creek films are still trying to be grounded in reality.  Sure, Mick Taylor may laugh and make jokes as he’s running over a herd of kangaroos (nyuk nyuk nyuk), but they’re still supposed to feel real (they have to, or the ugly torture scenes would be for naught).  This took what I disliked about the first one and made it uglier.
My original review.

3. Alien Abduction
I had high hopes for this.  Something about a found footage alien movie sounded cool.  It sounded like something I could get down with.  But the family we followed were boring/awful, and the movie just dragged.  It was basically the “Slumber Party Alien Abduction” segment fromV/H/S/2 stretched out over 85 minutes.
Hey!  Speaking of V/H/S…

2. V/H/S/: Viral
I didn’t like V/H/S, but I thought part 2 was a huge step up.  I didn’t have high hopes for this, but I did think it would be somewhat enjoyable.  I wasn’t expecting something amazing, just something halfway decent.
I didn’t get that.  I didn’t get that at all.
The second segment – “Parallel Monsters” – wasn’t bad.  It was a decent idea, but it drug on for a bit too long.  Still, a decent enough segment.
The rest was terrible.  The segment with the magician and the magic coat was laughable, and didn’t seem to fit at all within the found footage of the rest of the films.  I honestly thought it was a joke, but I was mistaken.  The skateboarder segment was entirely too long, and the characters were insufferable.  The wraparound story was amazingly confusing.  The entire movie was littered with terrible effects of limbs being chopped off.  This was a terrible, terrible movie.  I know anthology films can be a mixed bag, but there was very little to like here.  “Parallel Monsters” wasn’t even good enough to warrant a rewatch.
And the only reason it wasn’t the worst movie I saw this year…

1. Leprechaun: Origins
I like the original Leprechaun series.  I don’t love it, and I certainly don’t think they’re good movies, but I enjoy them for what they are: ridiculous slasher movies about a killer Leprechaun.  Even if I’m not necessarily in the mood for that kind of thing, they’re pretty good movies to put on in the background while I’m doing something else.  I look up from making dinner, see the Leprechaun killing a guy by jumping on him with a pogo stick, smile, and go back to dinner.
I had prepared myself for something different with this movie.  Something darker.  I was looking forward to it.  The original Leprechaun was kind of played out.  With Warwick Davis being replaced by WWE’s Hornswoggle, I was perfectly fine with a change of direction.
But not like this.  Never like this.
The writing was terrible.  The actual origin story was all told by a 4 minute info dump in a basement.  The only likable character was Sophie, but she was only likable because she was set up as our proxy.  None of the characters had much in the way of an actual character.  Sophie and her boyfriend were having issues, but they did nothing to add to the story or the characters.
And the Leprechaun?  They say it was Hornswoggle, but who could know for sure?  Underneath the Galaxy Invader-esque rubber suit, it could have been anyone.  It could have been the kid fromSmall Wonder for all I knew.
There was not a single redeeming factor in this movie.  I thought I would at least find something to have fun with.  “So good it’s bad.”  I didn’t find that.  Maybe I needed to watch it with a big group of people, but I don’t even know if that would’ve helped.  This was a terrible movie.  Please don’t watch it.  Even if you like the Leprechaun series, don’t watch it.  Please.  I beg you.
My original review.

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.

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

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

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