Kristy

At its core, this is a slasher movie about a girl who stays on campus over Thanksgiving break and finds herself stalked by 4 murdering psychopaths.  The psychopaths kill a couple security guards, and the only thing standing between our heroine and certain death are her own wits.

It's pretty standard slasher fare.  As far as standard slashers go, this was a pretty good one.  Yes, there were some pretty huge leaps in logic, but that's to be expected.  (People jump off tall buildings and are able to get up and run away all the time, right?)  There's also a fair about of slasher logic on display here, but it's a slasher.  I'm fine with it.

I believe that a slasher movie can really only be as good as its final girl, and we got a good one here.  Although the movie is called Kristy, our final girl is Justine (I'll get to that in a bit), and she's terrific, provided you don't really ask any questions about how she got the skills she shows off.  She's a likable character, but that kind of information takes a backseat to the real question: is she a fighter?  The answer is a resounding "yes."  She uses her knowledge of the campus to her advantage.  She turns the tables on her attackers.  When she's cornered, she doesn't panic.  Okay...she panics, but then she looks for a way out.

I liked all of that.  But there's another storyline running throughout the movie.  This group of murderers are part of a larger group.  This group has cells all over the country, and they all have one goal: "Kill Kristy."  They use Kristy as a code.  It basically stands for any rich white girl who appears to have a good life.  These groups stalk these "Kristys", kill them and carve a "K" into their faces.  They videotape the entire process and upload it to a central server.  All the videos of dead Kristys, all in one place.  They watch these videos on multiple TVs at the same time, like a moving murder quilt.

We see a lot of this before we even meet Justine.  The movie opens with the murder of a pretty girl in a field, then a whole lot of distorted dialogue across the network.  "Kill Kristy."  "Kristy is God.  Kill God."  Things like that.  

I didn't like any of that.  The idea that there was a larger group than these 4 killers wasn't bad, but the execution was terrible.  It was supposed to feel like this menacing presence, but it just annoyed me.  If they would have cut that stuff out of the beginning and had it as a big reveal at the end, I probably would have liked it better.  As it was, it was handled poorly in the beginning and I had a bad taste in my mouth for the first 20 minutes.

Also, all the killers wear masks made out of foil and do the whole, "tilt my head," move.  You know the one.

There it is

That's fine when it's Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees; after all, they're unstoppable killers who aren't even really human.  They tilt their heads because they truly don't understand what is going on, like a confused dog.  A regular person doing it doesn't really strike me as menacing, even with a mask.  It just comes off as forced.
Unless they're trying to emulate Myers and Voorhees.  In which case, you just look like you're trying too hard.  Get a new intimidation tactic, because this one isn't working.

As it stands, this is a perfectly decent slasher movie that reaches for heights it can't quite achieve.

Rating: 3/5

Notable actors: Haley Bennett (Hardcore Henry), Ashley Green (Twilight, The Apparition), Chris Coy (Banshee)

The Final Girls

I’m a sucker for a typical horror movie told from a different perspective.  Scream, Cabin in the Woods and Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon are a few of the more popular movies in this genre, but The Final Girls tends to lean more towards Midnight Movie or Camp Daze (aka Camp Slaughter) than those other options.

Let’s set this up: Max’s mother (Amanda) had a small role in an 80s slasher movie called Camp Bloodbath (it was basically Friday the 13th, much like Midnight Movie’s movie-within-a-movie was basically Texas Chain Saw Massacre).  Twenty-to-thirty years later, she was still trying to make it as an actress, but was hamstrung by her appearance in this campy horror film.  On her way back from yet another audition she likely wouldn't get the part for, she and Max get in a car accident and Amanda dies.

Three years later, Max is still dealing with her mother’s death.  The school she is attending is showing Camp Bloodbath on the big screen and Max is pressured into making an appearance.  During the movie, a fire breaks out in the theater, and Max – along with a handful of her friends – find the only escape is by cutting through the screen and going through a door in the back.  By doing this, they somehow find themselves having been pulled into the movie.  When Max comes across her mother, she is not actually Amanda; she is Nancy, her character in Camp Bloodbath.  Duncan – the movie geek – proclaims that they shouldn’t mess with the events of the movie, but to let everything play out exactly like it’s supposed to.  “Don’t think of them as people,” he says.  “Think of them as animals in a nature preserve.”  Of course, they find that is not necessarily the case.  (Duncan naturally knows all the lines in the movie, so he gleefully quotes lines these characters are saying in front of him and gets giddy at the prospect of their impending death.)

Since our characters are inside the movie, there is a lot of playing around with movie conventions (my personal favorite is the flashback scene).  There are a lot of laughs, as people from the modern age are forced to interact with horror movie stereotypes from the 80s (the conversations between Chris and Kurt absolutely killed me). 

But what really drew me in was the surprisingly strong emotional core.  Throughout the film, we see how the death of Amanda has absolutely devastated Max.  Now, Max has another chance to spend time with her mother (even though Nancy is not technically her mother; rather she is the character that her mother played in Camp Bloodbath).  From the scenes we saw of Max and Amanda, it seems like Max was the responsible one in that relationship.  That carries over here, but we also get a chance to see Nancy play a bit of a motherly role for Max.  It's remarkably sweet and heartbreaking.  Taissa Farmiga and Malin Akerman played their roles perfectly.  It never felt forced or manipulative.  It felt real.

The writing was great and the entire cast was tremendous.  With the exception of a couple of the characters in Camp Bloodbath, all of the characters here felt real (and those characters only lacked depth because they were playing one-note stereotypes in an 80s slasher film).  There was a depth behind them that I wasn't expecting.  That helped some of the jokes to land, but it also helped me to feel more connected to them.  When they die - and most of the do die - I was sad.  We pulled back the curtain of slasher films and found that maybe we shouldn't root so hard for some of the unlikable characters to die; maybe they aren't as terrible as they appear to be at first blush.

I had a few issues with this, but all of those issues are minimal compared to what I loved about it.  This movie was smart, hysterical and more emotional than I would have thought.

Rating: 5/5

Notable actors: Malin Akerman, Taissa Farmiga, Nina Dobrev, Thomas Middleditch, Alia Shawkat, Adam DeVine

It Follows: Surviving "The It"

This post will contain spoilers.  So, if you haven't seen It Follows, you should probably go see it immediately, then come back for this. 

I've been thinking about this movie non-stop since I've seen it.  One of the ideas I've been kicking around lately has been the best way to get rid of The It.  Paul driving around the ruins of Detroit trolling for cheap hookers seems like a pretty good idea at first blush (plus, his undercover knit cap was pretty killer).  That prostitute will likely have sex with another man within the day, thus getting two people between Paul and The It.
But there are a few problems with this.  For starters, neither the prostitute nor the john know anything about this sinister being stalking them.  You remember how quickly Greg - the Johnny Depp/Skeet Ulrich looking neighbor - was killed?  They will be killed at least that quickly, because they don't know what's coming for them.  So it buys time, but not a ton.  I've thought about the rules for this, and I like to think of it like a game of tag.  Let's take a look at the prostitute.  Once she has sex, she has passed it on.  It's not like she's a carrier and passes it on to every guy she has sex with.  You can only pass it on when you are “it”.  She'll transmit it to the first guy she has sex with, but then it's on him.
And who is this guy?  I don't know, but I can tell you this: he's not coming from out of town to sleep with a prostitute, so he's from Detroit, or somewhere in the surrounding area.  There's a safe bet that the guy paying money for a Detroit hooker isn't rolling in females, so he's not likely to pass it on anytime soon.  If he does, it's likely to be someone else in the area. 
My point is this: none of these people know something is after them, and none of them are leaving the area.  So The It will just be circling around in the Detroit area, knocking all these people off.  Perhaps The It will never be able to untangle the sex-web (sorry for saying "sex-web") to make its way back to Paul and Jay.  Maybe the prostitute just keeps having sex before The It kills her, and it never comes back to Paul.

"Hey pretty lady. What's your sign?"

Again, not a bad plan, but I believe there are better plans.  Here are the two I have come up with:

1. The same plan as Paul's, but with a slight twist.  Buy a ticket to Vegas and locate a prostitute.  There are people from all over the world looking for prostitutes in Vegas.  Have sex, and within 15 minutes of leaving The It has already moved to someone past the hooker (15 minutes is a rough estimate.  I really have no idea.  I assume the turnaround time for sex in Vegas is pretty short).  Unless it ends up landing on someone in the city of Detroit, it will likely never find its way back to Paul.  If this goes according to plan, there will be a string of infected people placed across the globe.  It may track down and kill someone in Florida, only to have to walk to Italy for the next one.  It's pretty cost-effective, too: I just checked and you can nab a nonstop flight from Detroit to Las Vegas that costs around $300.
For good measure, drive a couple hundred miles outside the city a day or two before your flight leaves.  This will ensure that you will not be a nervous wreck in the event of a delay in your flight.  You don’t want to be sitting there on the flight, only to see a naked family member shambling by your window.

2. Take to the road as nomads.  Put some space between you and The It and relax for a bit.
The average walking speed of an adult is 3.1 mph.  The It seemed to move slower than that, but that's what I'll use for my calculations.  Let's assume that the average speed in a car is 60 mph (I don't know if this is correct, but they'll be driving an older car, and this will help account for stops for food/bathroom, as well as highway construction).  This plan revolves around just taking off for a while.  The goal is to put as much distance between you and The It as you can, while still being responsible for your own mode of transportation.  No getting stuck on planes or boats or anything.  Everything is within your power this way.
I looked at some cities far from Detroit and saw how much time you could buy.  I didn't dig too in-depth, but I did look at a few.
I always loved Colorado, so my first stop was Denver.  Denver is 1,269 miles from Detroit.  Driving straight through, it would take 0.88 days, while walking would take 17.05 days.  So you could kick back in Denver for roughly 2 weeks before having to skip town.
What about something a bit more remote?  Carson City, Nevada looks really nice, and it's a town of only 55,000 people.  Why is this important?  The fewer people in a town, the less chance there is of The It blending in.  You could buy yourself 28 days in Carson City before The It came calling.
Let's go further west.  I've never been to California, but it looks lovely.  Carmel-by-the-Sea looks like an incredible city.  More importantly, the population is less than 4,000 people and you could buy yourself 31.85 days.  That's my pick.  Live in Carmel for a month.
There's a downside to this one, and it's obvious: money.  So much money.  You're essentially homeless for a month.  Maybe you could work out some kind of employment deal in Carmel.  "I'll work for an entire month, but then I'll be taking a month off."  That seems unlikely, and you're still paying for quite a bit of gas every month (rough estimates put that cost around $250 a month), as well as the constant threat of old rust bucket falling apart during one of your monthly excursions.
So, really, unless you have a ton of money, this isn't really feasible.  But it sure is a nice thought.

California dreamin'

For Paul?  I think option 1 is the way to go.  Sure, the knowledge that you will likely have killed numerous people will be on your conscience, but Paul has already determined that he's willing to make that call.
So, while option 2 is more noble, option 1 is slightly more permanent and much more manageable in terms of cost.  If The It is after you, you'll have to determine what you can afford and what your conscience can carry.

Do you have other ideas for how to survive?  Leave them in the comments.

While we're here in the spoiler zone...
I've read some people talking about how they didn't like the ending.  The more I think about it, the more I loved it, and the more I believe it's the only way they could have ended it.  The idea that you'll always have to look over your shoulder is a terrifying one.  Sure, Paul passed on the disease, but it could still come for him and Jay at any moment.  Is that person walking behind you The It, or just a harmless neighbor?  You'll never know, and you'll always be wondering.  That's how they live their life now: in constant fear.  Even a nice walk down the street could end in your demise.  It makes the mundane a source of constant terror.  Even though the movie had ended, their horror did not.  True horror is not in eluding the killer, but the knowledge that he could pop back up at any time.  Every moment in your life is plagued by this thought that something is after you.  That something is around the next corner.  If you become complacent, you die.  If you focus on it too much, it will consume you (like Laurie Strode in H20).  That’s the feeling the ending conveyed to me, and one of the main reasons I can’t stop thinking about this film.

Also, while I love the idea of Paul and Jay sharing this curse, I can't help but wondering how their relationship will hold up.  Jay never seemed completely into it.  Will she find herself feeling trapped in a loveless relationship merely because of this common experience?  "He can help keep me safe, so I guess I'll stay with him."  How long will that last?  A year?  Less?  At some point, bitterness will start to creep in and this It will threaten to tear them apart without ever being present.
To be clear, I don't want to see this movie.  I don't want a sequel that deals with their relationship issues.  But these characters felt so real, so I can't help but wondering what would happen to them after the credits rolled.

It Follows

I'm having a hard time organizing my thoughts for this movie, so I'm going to give you a mish-mash of unconnected thoughts.

- It’s hard to ignore the obvious Halloween references throughout the film.  All the wide shots from a steadicam.  The calm, tree-lined suburban streets with more than a hint of evil lurking.  The pulsing synth.  The fact that the supernatural killer is referred to as “The It” in interviews, which is pretty close to “The Shape”.  I kept waiting for Michael Myers to pop out from behind a row of shrubs.

 - With all the style – all the window dressing – it would be easy to miss the fact that this, at its heart, a slasher movie.  There is an unstoppable force heading right towards you at a slow pace.  It never runs.  It never wavers.  If it is shot, it falls down, gets back up and keeps coming.  Jay is our final girl.  Unlike the stereotypical final girl, she has had sex.  But, like the stereotypical final girl, she has the attention of the killer and does what she has to in order to survive.  The plot of the movie is summed up in the title: It Follows.  And, like our favorite killers, it never stops.

- I’ve heard a lot of talk about the unnecessary nudity in this.  It’s true that there is a decent helping of nudity in this, but I would not call it unnecessary.  None of the nudity is alluring.  It is all courtesy of The It, and it is all ugly.  It is all uncomfortable.  The It is, in essence, an STD, and it chooses (at times) to manifest itself in forms of twisted and ugly sexuality.

- I love the slasher aspect to this.  I also love the fact that it is always walking.  There’s never a fear that it’s going to be hiding in the closet, waiting to pop out at you.  It doesn’t try to hide.  There is no fear that it will suddenly be in hiding in the backseat of your car.  It doesn't work that way.  It doesn’t sneak around.  It just keeps coming.  Like a slasher or a zombie, it is relentless.  You need to sleep.  To rest.  To take a break.  It doesn’t need that.  While you’re sitting still, it’s getting closer.  And there’s nothing you can do about it.

- I like to think that they cast the actor who played Greg because he kind of looked like Johnny Depp, and they wanted a nod to Nightmare on Elm Street.

- I mentioned the soundtrack earlier, but I'd like to bring it up again here.  It was composed/performed by electronic artist Disasterpeace, and it sets a perfect tone.  It goes from minimal and creepy synth tones to full-blown noise explosions.  He draws a lot of comparisons to Carpenter's scores here (I have to believe a lot of that was at the behest of the director), but he is able to put his own spin on it.  I am currently listening to this.  It is storming outside and my back is to an open door.  I am looking over my shoulder every 30 seconds or so, just making sure The It isn't creeping ever closer.

- It was interesting how differently this thing was dealt with.  Hugh/Jeff (although I thought he looked more like a Ricky/Wesley) had sex with Jay and took off.  His thought process was solid, if a bit cold: if The It kills the person it is tracking, it will then go after the previous infected person.  (An added note: only those infected at some point can see The It.  So, if you haven't been infected, you will just watch your friend freak out, but you won't actually see anything.)  If he passed on The It to Jay and stuck around only to watch her die, he would be next on the list, and The It would have a very short trip to kill him.  For Hugh, the disease was one of isolation.
Jay and her friends took it another way.  They looked out for her, whether they actually knew what they were looking for or not.  A couple of them offered to have sex with her, in part because they were horny teenagers, but in part because they really did care about Jay.  For them, the disease brought them together.  I found it interesting the different ways these groups dealt with this killer stalking one of them.  I'm pretty sure it's some kind of "glass half full or half empty" thing, but with a disturbingly naked and placid killer slowly creeping closer to you.

I want to get deeper into this, but I can't really do that without doing some major spoilers, so I guess I'll refrain from doing that.  The hype for this movie has grown pretty large, but, just like The Babadook, I feel this movie is able to avoid being a victim of its own hype.  It's a terrific movie with a great style, a huge nod to the past and a pretty good sense of humor.  It's not quite the movie I thought it was going to be, but I'm perfectly okay with that.

Rating: 5/5

Wolf Creek 2

Description from Netflix: Backpackers Rutger and Katarina escape the city for an adventurous vacation in the Australian outback…but their dream trip turns into a nightmare when they run into a bloodthirsty serial killer with a penchant for sadistic games.

My thoughts:

I love slasher movies.  It’s a well-known fact about me.  And yet I didn’t love the original Wolf Creek.  It took me a while to figure out what I didn't like about it, but I think I finally nailed it down: it seemed like they were more interested in making the killer interesting than about fleshing out the people he was killing.  It seems lazy; like they’re skipping a step.  The great slashers – the icons – didn’t start as the focal point of the movies.  Michael Myers.  Freddy Krueger.  Jason Voorhees.  Leatherface.  The movies focused on their victims.  They made us care for the victims.  The idolization of the killers came after.  With Wolf Creek, it felt like they had built up this killer to be interesting and magnetizing, and forgot to make the victims people worth caring about.  If I don't care about the people on the other end of the knife (or machete, or chainsaw...), the movie loses some of its heart.  This is not necessarily true of sequels - when most teens are nothing more than cannon fodder - but it's true of the first in a series.  Wolf Creek failed at that most basic premise.

All that being said, I was still interested in the sequel.  I was curious to see where they would take it.  After all, the first movie was nothing if not simplistic: seemingly friendly bushman kidnaps, tortures and kills.  It's a basic slasher set-up, if in a different location than we're used to seeing.  Setting it in the vast expanse of Australia was the most interesting thing about the first movie.  Even when you escape, you don't necessarily have anywhere to run.  It lent an extra air of hopelessness to an already bleak situation.

That was present again here.  Australia makes for a beautiful setting, but also a terrifying one.  Unfortunately, the setting alone does not a good movie make.  Aside from the setting, this movie had very little going for it.

For starters, they decided to make Mick Taylor an even bigger presence in this movie.  It was as if they were actively trying to convince me that Mick Taylor deserved to be the next big slasher icon.  They did this by making him talk more.  Rattling off one-liners.  Saying "funny" things about the terrible deeds he was committing.  Perhaps this worked for some people, but it didn't do anything for me.  Freddy Krueger didn't go into full wise-cracking mode until his fourth movie (if you want to say it was his third, you'll get no argument from me), but he was on an entirely different level from Mick Taylor from the word "go".  They were going for "wacky and endearing," but all they got was "annoyingly over-the-top".

Writer/director Greg McLean has said that "[Mick Taylor was] the most interesting thing about the first movie."  That would explain the direction this one took.

I have already fallen into the same trap as the writers.  Thus far, I have only focused on Mick Taylor.  So let's talk about his victims for a second.

We start with German backpackers Rutger and Katarina (who sort of reminded me of Lizzy Caplan) hiking to Wolf Creek, camping along a trail, and getting attacked by Mick Taylor.  Rutger is killed and hacked up while trying to protect Katarina.  (This raises a question.  Mick has a house with a "workshop", so why does he hack-up Rutger out in the open?  It's dark, and the chances that someone would come across their path is minimal, but there's still a chance that someone could see the atrocities being committed, especially since Mick has the huge floodlights on his truck on.  Not hard to miss when you're surrounded by flat land.)  Katarina is able to escape and makes it to the road, where she is discovered by Paul, a handsome British tourist in a jeep.  Paul tries to drive off with Katarina, but Mick appears and shoots her.  And so, roughly 20 minutes into the movie, who we thought would be our two main characters are dead.  This aspect reminded me of 2009's Friday the 13th.

What followed was a series of scenes featuring Paul trying to get away from Mick.  Most of these were terrible.  An example: we have seen Paul driving his jeep off road a lot.  It has been established that his jeep can handle the Australian terrain.  And yet there is a long scene in which he is chased by Mick in a semi truck (which is definitely NOT an all-terrain vehicle), but for some reason decides to stick to the road.  If I haven't made myself clear, the road is the only place the semi can go.  And yet he stays on the road as Mick tries to kill him with a semi.  So, basically, it turned into The Hitcher for about 15 minutes.  (Maybe that's why they named one of the characters Rutger?)  “Just go off road,” I repeatedly screamed at the TV.  Paul never heard my cries.

During this chase scene, Mick hits/runs over a herd of crossing kangaroos.  As he did his, he was spouting off one-liners like John McClain (if John McClain killed kangaroos instead of terrorists).  This was supposed to be funny.  It most definitely was not. 

Again, this goes back to the lack of connection with Mick.  I don't really have any connection to the character, so why would I like when he runs down kangaroos and makes jokes about it?

There were also a fair number of standard slasher complaints.  "When you knock him out with a hammer, make sure to finish the job."  Things of that nature.  But, if you're a fan of slashers, you've become accustomed to overlooking this faulty logic, so I won’t dwell on them here.

That's not to say the movie was all bad.  The performance by Ryan Corr (as Paul) was tremendous.  There's a long scene of him being terrified, but also trying to humor Mick.  His face fluctuates seamlessly between laughter and pure terror.  It was the best scene in the movie, and Corr carried it.  (Fun fact: Corr had a very small part in Where The Wild Things Are.)

I also really liked Mick's lair.  It was filled with terrible tools to do terrible things.  It was a small, claustrophobic room that offered little chance of escape.  Because, even if you did escape out of the oh-so-tempting door, all you would run into would be a series of winding corridors filled with previous victims, bloodthirsty dogs, and booby-traps.  These corridors weren't on the level of House of 1000 Corpses, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 or True Detective, but they were still pretty creepy.

This wasn't a very good movie.  There were a few redeeming qualities, but not many.  If you liked the first one, you'll probably like this one.  The key to enjoying this movie hinges on one question: do you like Mick Taylor?  If you do, you'll like it.  If you don't, your views will probably be a lot like mine.

Rating: 1.5/5

Entrance

Description from Netflix:

After mysteriously losing her dog one evening, a Los Angeles barista questions her commitment to living in the city and decides to get out.  But when her going-away party takes an odd turn, she finds that the city just might not let her go so easily.

What I liked:

1. The acting was stellar.  I believe everyone involved had limited acting experience, yet they were all terrific.  For a slow movie to work, I have to feel invested in the characters, and it succeeded in doing that with some great acting.

Pictured: Acting 

2. The sense of paranoia and dread that slowly built throughout the movie.  There was one particular scene in which Suziey was walking down a road at night and was being followed by a car.  It was a long scene, but it was effective.  That was when the movie really seemed like it started to pick up.

3. The ending.  The last 20 minutes of this movie were terrific.  All of the paranoia and dread came to a head in terrifying and stressful fashion.  What had been a look inside the mind of a woman hitting a quarter-life crisis in a big city became a living, breathing nightmare for her and her friends.  This is when the movie turned from psychological thriller to slasher/home invasion.  The last 10 minutes or so is basically one unbroken shot, where the actress (Suziey Block) was actually tied up to make it more believable.  It's a tense and horrifying end to the movie, and the final scene is absolutely chilling. 

What I didn't like:

1. It opens extremely slowly.  Lots of scenes of Suziey going to work, talking to friends, and looking for her dog.  Short of the dog disappearing (which we don't even see), we're really just watching a girl go about her daily life, while getting ready to move.  It's really boring.  Beyond being really boring, it doesn't even seem like it's building towards anything for a long time.  It was about halfway through the movie before any tension started to build.  Which makes this movie feel an awful lot like Death Proof: lots of talking, not much happening.  It almost lost me in the first 20 minutes.  I'm glad I pushed through to the end, but, if I didn't know there was a good ending waiting for me, I probably would have hit stop before the 30 minute mark.

To recap: set in the city.  Slow start.  Lots of talking about nothing in particular for long portions of time.  A killer that shows up near the end and starts hacking.

Holy crap.  It's Jason Takes Manhattan.

Voorheesed! 

Rating: 2.5/5

Let's break this down a little further:

First 60 minutes: 1/5

Last 25 minutes: 5/5

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.

Halloween

One of my all-time favorite movies.  I end up watching this multiple times a year.  It's a beautifully shot movie, and the soundtrack is incredible.  I love the dialog.  I love how crazed Dr. Loomis is (and the look of joy on his face when he gets in his one good scare).  I love Laurie, Annie and Lynda.  I love Michael Myers dressing up like a ghost and putting on Bob's glasses.  I love everything about this movie.

You're Next

Description from Netflix:

When shy Erin joins her new boyfriend at a family reunion to commemorate his parents’ anniversary, the tense gathering is horrifically interrupted by a gang of masked invaders who brutalize the celebrants…until someone starts fighting back.

My thoughts:

Going to the dollar theater by yourself is always a ton of fun.  I highly recommend it.

I really liked this.  It had a cool 80s slasher vibe to it, due in no small part to the stellar synth soundtrack.  The soundtrack really set the mood for this movie.  The filmmakers also did a great job at using silence at times to ratchet up the tension. 

It would be easy to compare this to The Strangers, and I suppose there’s a bit of that in here, mainly because it’s a home invasion movie with masks.  But, as I pointed out above, it looks and feels more like an 80s slasher.  This really felt more like Friday the 13^th or Halloween than The Strangers.

But even that comparison isn’t overly accurate.  Erin was far more competent at fighting back than the majority of final girls in those movies.  Erin is a fighter.  She was raised as a survivalist.  She has no qualms with picking up a meat tenderizer and raining down holy hell on someone twice her size.  This movie won’t rank high on the list of best slashers ever, but Erin should rank pretty high on the list of all-time survivor girls.  She’s scrappy.  She’s nasty.  She’s resourceful.  And she’s responsible for one of the best kills I’ve seen in recent memory. 

Without getting too slap-sticky, this has a lot of really funny moments (provided the gruesome deaths of some main characters is something you find amusing, which I do).  It was never goofy, but there were quite a few laugh-out-loud funny moments.

One of those funny moments was seeing a man in a sheep mask walk around with a crossbow.  I’m not even sure it was supposed to be funny, but it killed me.

This was a really bloody slasher movie.  It earned its R rating.  And it had a terrific ending.  I’m already looking forward to watching it again.  It was a really fun time.

Also, Ti West is in this movie, and he gets killed off really early.  I could watch Ti West get killed a thousand times.  That’s how much I hated The Innkeepers. 

Rating: 5/5

The Orphan Killer

Description from IMDB:

Marcus Miller is a serial murderer hellbent on teaching his estranged sister Audrey what it means to have family loyalty. His lessons are taught in massive doses of vulgar and unimaginable pain. Throughout her brutal torture we learn that Marcus is not the only Miller with Killer in the bloodline as Audrey proves to be a formidable adversary.

Yet another movie I didn't know much about before I started it.  I knew it was a slasher.  And that's about all I knew.

Because of this, it took me a little while to settle in.  It's not a good movie in the traditional sense.  The lighting is terrible.  The acting is comically bad with most of the characters (I thought Diane Foster did a good job, but no one else stood out as particularly good).  The music is awful.  The story is decent, but nothing special.  I got the feeling that the filmmakers thought they were creating a great backstory of this killer, but it really just seemed like they were trying too hard.
The music was the main sticking point for me.  With very few exceptions, the soundtrack was just a bunch of terribly thrown-together metal songs.  There was no sense of setting a mood.  No sense of trying to match the music with the action on the screen.  It was as if the filmmakers just said, "There's a chase scene.  Throw on some metal.  He's killing someone.  Throw on some metal."  As I mentioned, it never fit with the scene, and it was usually louder than it had any reason to be.  It was incredibly distracting, and also seemed pretty lazy on the part of the filmmakers.
Some scenes also seemed to be ripped directly from Rob Zombie's Halloween films, but without any of the visual style that Zombie brought to those.

But, after a while, I settled in and found that I was enjoying it.  No, it wasn't good.  But, when viewing it as a kind of grindhouse movie, it made a lot more sense.  It was incredibly violent.  When there was blood (which was often), it spewed forth like a fountain.  It pooled on the floor.  It splattered on the camera (which made no sense, but whatever).  The blood splatter was inconsistent from scene-to-scene.
There was also some gratuitous nudity.
All of that just kind of added to the grindhouse charm of it.  I'm not sure if that's what the filmmakers were going for, but, if they were, they pulled it off pretty well.
I also really enjoyed seeing a psychopathic child wearing a mask.  That's always fun.

It wasn't a great movie, but it was a pretty fun movie.

Rating: 3.5/5

Curse of Chucky

Description from IMDB:

After her mother’s mysterious death, Nica begins to suspect that the talking, red-haired doll her visiting niece has been playing with may be the key to recent bloodshed and chaos.

Notable actors: Brad Dourif (of course), Fiona Dourif (his real-life daughter), Danielle Bisutti, A Martinez

My thoughts:

I did not go into this movie with high expectations.  While I enjoyed the previous films, a direct-to-video sequel that comes 9 years after the last installment doesn’t exactly scream “high quality”.  Still, I wasn’t looking for anything amazing, just something entertaining.  So, with my expectations cranked down to an acceptable level, I was ready to begin.

Let’s start with the things I liked about this.

Fiona Dourif was terrific as Nica, the wheelchair-bound protagonist who is suspicious of the Chucky doll from the moment he arrives at the house.  The acting in this movie was considerably below top-shelf, which only made Fiona’s performance stand out even more. 

The majority of this movie takes place in the old house where Nica and her recently deceased mother lived.  It looked fantastic.  It kind of had the vibe of an old castle, or a smaller version The Overlook Hotel.  Huge and spacious, but sparsely furnished and dimly lit.  It allowed the film to feel claustrophobic, while still allowing for a lot of shadows and corners for Chucky to hide in.  Even though we see much of the house throughout the course of the movie, I always felt there was another room I hadn’t seen yet.

Even though I liked the look and feel of the house, I still kind of had a problem with it.  The size of the house (combined with the sparse furnishings) was pretty distracting.  They never said why they were living in this house.  I figured there had to be a story behind it.  But, unless I missed it, there was no such story.  Maybe it’s not a big deal, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it.  Perhaps this isn’t a problem for everyone, but I found myself waiting for the bomb to drop.  I was waiting for the scene where they would talk about this house, and how them living in it was central to the plot somehow.  I felt like Dignan, screaming, “How did an asshole like Bob get such a nice kitchen?” 

There was a bit of showing the audience the weapons of the family’s destruction early on.  “Here’s a knife.  Here’s an axe.  Here’s some rat poison.”  And so on.  The Evil Dead remake did this extremely well, building up a level of anticipation for the promise of gore to come.  The same concept was at work here.  The same concept was at work here.  And, while it wasn’t done nearly as well as Evil Dead, it was still enjoyable.

I really love the delivery guy at the beginning of the movie.  It was like they cast him straight out of porn.  “Hey there, pretty lady.  I like your face.  Is your mother home?  Yes?  Too bad.  We could’ve had some fun.”  (This is a bit of an exaggeration, but not as much as you might think.)

He fixes the cable?

Now for the things I didn’t like.

The Chucky animation looked horrible.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen the other movies, so it’s possible that the animation in those is worse than I remember, but it was really cheesy here.  I wasn’t looking for it to be perfect, but it was distractingly bad.

There’s a trope that is common in movies with children, and I really dislike it.  It’s when the child is the only one who can hear the doll talking,  yet acts like everything is normal.  In this movie, the little girl kept saying, “Chucky told me this.”  At one point, she dropped the line, “Life’s a bitch and then you die, bleeding like a stuck pig.”  Which, while humorous, struck me as extremely odd.  What little girl says stuff like that?  Wouldn’t she think it was strange that Chucky told her such a thing?  She was young (they don’t mention her exact age, and I’m terrible with the ages of children, but I would say she was no older than 7).  Wouldn’t she be freaking out that this doll – which is almost the same size she is – is talking to her and saying things like that?  Sure, the Good Guys dolls talk, but it’s mostly benign chatter like, “I’m your friend to the end,” and “I like hugs.”  Not “Your whole family is going to die tonight.”  Unless we’re dealing with extremely stupid children, they would react differently than the children in these movies do.

There’s a scene where a wheelchair hits a full-grown-man, and he does a complete flip.  I don’t necessarily care that this flies in the face of Earth gravity so much as I care that it looks terrible.

There was a complete lack of understanding of how electronics work.  On multiple occasions the power was blinking in the house, and the screens of the laptops in use were also blinking (in one instance, the screen turned to static snow, like an old TV with bunny ears on a terrible connection).  Laptops have batteries.  If the power blinks, laptop screens do not blink.  And yet, over and over again, that’s exactly what happened here.

They worked very hard to work the story of this family in with the first Child’s Play movie.  While I enjoyed the idea behind it, the execution was terrible, and it resulted in entirely too many false endings.  It’s like they weren’t quite sure how to end it.  The first ending was fine, if a bit sudden and more than a little illogical (I won’t discuss those issues here, since it would include a pretty big spoiler).  But each one after that got a little more goofy.  I could almost see the filmmakers winking at me.  “See?  See?!  Get it?!”  It got to be a bit old by the end of it.  (The end of the last false ending before the credits was really terrible.  And then, of course, there’s a stinger after the credits.  Just thinking about it makes me tired.)

My main problem was this: this movie didn’t seem like it knew what it wanted to be.  It was pretty serious and dark for the most part.  But, eventually, it turned into dumb Chucky one-liners, while never changing the tone of the movie.  It’s like they wanted to mix the darker horror elements of the original with the goofiness of the latter movies, but it just didn’t work.  If there’s a happy medium between those, they didn’t find it.

All of this sounds like I hated it.  I didn’t hate it.  For the most part, I enjoyed watching it.  If nothing else, it’s worth watching for Fiona Dourif and the creepy spaciousness of the house.  If you’re a fan of the previous movies, you may not love this, but I’m sure you’ll find enough to enjoy to make it worth your while.

In summary: it wasn’t great, but it was more-or-less enjoyable.  A rousing review, I know.

Rating: 2/5