A man and his young daughter camp out in their back yard in a tent, just for fun. A bear attacks some time overnight, and mauls the man leaving him quite injured, but doesn’t touch the daughter. Some people find the man unconscious, and bring them both to their compound where they treat his wounds and bandage him up.
The people who rescued him are odd. Kinda hippy, one with nature, cultish sorta odd. Everybody smiling 100% of the time, everybody with the thousand mile stare 100% of the time.
The father is still kinda bashed up, but after a day or two, he’s able to eat and walk around. He quickly gets a vibe that all is not right at this commune, and in fact that he and his daughter might be in danger there. But try as he might, apparently there’s no escaping The Circle.
Something about birth and death, and rebirth and re-death. And mirrors. And mannequins and creepy masks.
The middle part gets even weirder, but stays creepy and scary. The ending bit goes way weird, too. We actually do get an ending in this one. I was fully expecting this one to just end right in the middle of a scene and give us no resolution at all, so that was nice. But getting there is a total headfuck. Definitely for fans of David Lynch.
And I suspect that it wasn’t a bear at the tent scene.
Four young women decide to make a girl’s weekend trip out to some rented house way out in the countryside. It seems they may have been good friends at one point, then some bad blood got between them or something, but now they’re generally on good terms. On their drive out, they learn of some pagan festival nearby. None of them seem all too interested in it.
But then they all get really stoned, and the local cute guy convinces them to go check it out. At the ceremony, they drink some more booze and get way more wasted. But, they have a good time and they make it back to the house unscathed.
Oh, I forgot to mention that in the prelude opening scene, there’s some really fucked up shit that’s happened at this house in the past. Will it happen again to these women? I suspect so.
Some creepy things start happening to all four of them. They all seem to chalk it up to smoking too much weed the day before. But the creepy things keep happening and they get worse and worse. And then they start having an attrition problem.
This is one of those ‘you must face your greatest fear’ movies. But it’s lame, because the thing that kills people in this movie aren’t the things that they fear. It’s always other things which aren’t even related to their fear.
It’s like if somebody said that their greatest fear was being eaten by a shark, and then they went swimming in the ocean, and they saw a shark that seemed to be targeting them, they wouldn’t get eaten by the shark, but in the process of running away from the shark, they would get killed by something totally unrelated to the shark. Like they’d come out of the ocean and slip and fall on a big fusebox with exposed wires and because they’re still all wet, they’d be electrocuted. But their fear wasn’t being electrocuted; their fear was the shark. So what does being electrocuted have to do with anything? Ugh. That’s how this movie goes.
An American reporter (super hot, young, female, because of course) goes to southern Mexico to do a story on some cave there. She apparently is from this region, but must’ve gone to the States when she was very young, because she speaks almost no Spanish.
Apparently, she didn’t heed the warnings of her cousin to stay away from that cave. And now that she went into the cave, the superstitious locals think she’s possessed by some demon, and now they must exorcise that demon, even if it means she ends up dead in the process.
OK, so this is bad news. You know how It Follows is just a 90 minute PSA about sexually transmitted diseases? And how The Faceless Man is just a PSA about hard drugs? This one is a PSA about heroin. Lame. Woulda been so much better if they lost that angle altogether and just made it a folk horror exorcism movie.
Which is really too bad. Because the color looks great, the lighting looks great, the cameras look great, the cinematography looks great, the music and sound design sound great, the actors are good. I just don’t need a damn moral to the story. I just need some brutal, vicious horror.
In fact, this one would probably be a good candidate for a fan edit. Somebody needs to simply cut out all the heroin scenes, and you’ll still have an intact movie, which probably wouldn’t be all too different than any of the spate of exorcism movies that have come out in the last decade and a half or so. But at least it wouldn’t have that ‘don’t do heroin, kids’ BS. Ya, we know not to do heroin. We don’t need your horror movie to tell us this.
I don’t know what the chicken is about. I don’t know what the goat milk is about. I don’t know what the little boy is about. Again, these are the symbolic things that make perfect sense to the writers and director whose meaning is simply not conveyed in the movie to the viewers.
Super hot, 30 year old genius scientist woman (is there any other kind?) is asked to go to some secret research lab in the Arctic Circle, 12 kilometers in the earth, to retrieve some samples of a virus that the scientists there have created, and which is killing them. This is not the type of thing she usually does, but she’s one of the country’s foremost experts on viruses and vaccines, and is promised many rewards if she is successful. She amasses a team of soldiers to accompany her.
This virus or fungus or disease or whatever it is that they find, is gross, vicious, and horrific. Which is really great to see in a horror movie. Borders on a gore flick.
This is essentially the same story as in The Thing. In fact, this one is barely a variation. The only difference is in Carpenter’s movie, when the Thing infects somebody, it eventually takes the form of that person, indistinguishable from the original, uninfected person. In this, the Thing just keeps adding people to its main corpus, getting bigger and grosser and more monstrous with each addition, resembling the Shunting in Society.
But lotsa of confusion in this one. Sense of place is impossible. We don’t know where they are most of the time. Are they on one of the upper levels? Or one of the lower levels? How close to the danger are they? Is it the lower levels where all the infected people are? Oh wait, so they’re in one of the elevators now? Or no wait, is this one of the medical labs? So they’re at some big metal doors now. They all seem to know that there’s something bad behind those doors, but how would they know? Have they been there before? Why is this level all frozen? They said something about some level being 200 degrees. I guess that’s not this level? Everything in this underground facility looks exactly like everything else, so we have no idea what anything is, where anything is, or what leads to what.
Also, sense of purpose is muddled. On one hand, they’re trying to not be killed by the infected people, but then they’re also trying to find some way to get to the surface. And whenever they start some action, put some plan into motion, I can’t tell what exactly they’re trying to accomplish.
The dialog is clunky. The English dubbed version that I watched is dubbed badly. (Is the original in Russian with subtitles? Or is this English version the official version, the only version?). All the actors sound like they were just a millimeter away from the mic when recording, when in the film they’re in some large room which would sound like a large room and not like they’re speaking directly into your ear at close range. They sound like video game voices and completely unnatural in the settings of the film.
The music and sound effects are way louder than the dialog, which has ben a problem for decades now. This one is fairly egregious.
As with so many movies like this, we don’t see nearly as much of the main creature as we would have liked. We get glimpses here and there, but never a total picture.
But if you can mentally get past all that stuff, it’s an OK movie.
Ridiculously fun and ridiculously violent sci-fi action monster movie (CGI sci-fi monster violence, not like Godfather violence). Totally a different movie, but shades of Starship Troopers, maybe even that John Carter movie that everybody hated at first but over time has gained quite a following, and deservedly so.
Milla Jovovich and her small crew of soldiers are forcibly transported to some alternate dimension, to an earth-like planet. And in this alternate dimension lives some very nasty creatures indeed. Same sorta deal as in The Mist, but instead of the monsters coming from their dimension to ours, Milla and her crew are sent to their dimension.
Even with their military training and big weapons, Milla and her crew are completely overmatched, outnumbered and overpowered. Many die. Milla is taken captive by a human. Eventually they both realize that they have bigger enemies than each other, so they work together, Enemy Mine style, to try and find some way to first survive, and then hopefully find some way to get Milla back to her proper dimension.
The monsters look absolutely amazing. The physics of the CGI look better in this than I’ve ever seen in any other movie. Better than Lord of the Rings, better than any Godzilla flick, better than any Star Wars flick. This is the standard by which all others should be judged for CGI physics.
As every reviewer on the internet has mentioned, this movie is LOUD. Fire up the subwoofers and shake the walls and let the entire neighborhood know what you’re watching.
The only downside is that nothing is resolved in the end. Very much intentionally so, so as to set up a sequel. Would have been nice (and would have been possible I think, with some editing) to have this all wrapped up on a single movie, but I guess there’s too much money to be made, so we’ll have to wait for the sequel. Although this one completely flopped at the box office, so I’m wondering if some of the executive types are questioning whether to fund a sequel or not. But at the same time, you can’t just end a movie on a massive cliffhanger like that. Time will tell.
Pakistani movie about a young woman, maybe 20 years old, who travels to the countryside to a friend’s unoccupied vacation getaway house, where she can get some rest and relaxation and work on her art.
They pulled out every artsy fartsy technique for this one- very long edits, slow movement, rack focus, slow motion, reverse footage, dream sequences, Dutch angle shots, blurry shots, strong blue and red neon lighting, grainy film look, double exposure shots, macro shots, dreamy landscapes, epic synth-rock for the soundtrack, extreme close ups of people’s faces when they’re just doing regular stuff like talking on the phone or eating breakfast.
So it takes this movie 50 minutes to do what any other movie would take care of in 15. It’s at that point, the 50 minute mark, where the story finally kicks in- something about a dead girl in a village and a cursed scarf. Then we get a tragic event (I think, not sure), then a music video. Then some more random scenes of random stuff, then another music video (Berzum?). Then some more random shots of stuff (alligators, hills, cows…) and a mysterious and somewhat threatening woman emerges from the lake. But she has no lines. She just writhes around in the water and in the mud. And then the movie ends. The script for this one was probably not more than four pages.
This screams of film school project. Good for them. They made a movie and I watched it. And even though I watched it, I have no idea what it was about.
My review of the first movie is here. I was quite impressed with that one, so I thought I’d check out the sequel.
One of the things that I really liked about the first one, and this one follows suit, is that it doesn’t take long for things to start going haywire. And by haywire I mean blood and guts and supernatural brutality.
And a common theme I’ve noticed with Indonesian horror- orphanages. And children who have been abused or neglected or mistreated. This one is that, and the story is a bit more far-fetched, a bit goofier than the first movie. It’s basically the same story as the first movie, but it’s not members of the main character’s family who are cursed, it’s a group of orphans who are cursed, now all about 20 years old, and need the main character from the first, Alfie, to break the curse, as she’s the only person who can break the curse because she lived through it in the first movie, or some mumbo jumbo like that.
But, sorry to say, sophomore jinx with this one. It’s just not as scary as the first. It tries and tries, but it doesn’t land like the first one. In fact, it’s about an hour and a half of mumbo jumbo, and the last 15 minutes are OK, but overall, it’s nothing special.
Brazilian gore flick. Combination of folk horror and slasher.
A cursed skull mask, centuries old, is unearthed by a construction crew in the Amazon rain forest and transported back to São Paulo by an archaeologist who plans to bring it straight to the museum first thing in the morning. She doesn’t quite make it, because as you see, this mask possesses people to go on murderous sprees of violence.
The cops try to figure out what’s going on, and the head of the museum, who seems to have done a lot of research on this mask in the past, and who also seems like he’s never really telling any of the cops the whole story or everything he knows about it, is also sorta helping out. And there’s a local priest who also seems to be pretty well-versed in this mask legend. In the meantime, bodies are piling up.
It’s a good flick, generally well done. There are a couple things which don’t add up, or is such a ridiculous coincidence that it would never happen in real life. The one big non-sequitur is that this femur bone is apparently supposed to be the key to something, yet it’s never explained. Plus, I didn’t really catch what the whole thing with the captive children was about. Was it gonna be some sort of ritual thing? I dunno. Maybe it’s some Brazilian cultural thing that all Brazilians know about but not somebody like me.
But ya, it’s a gore flick, so we have all sorts of hearts torn out and blood and guts and entrails strewn about.
So you know there’s something a little bit ‘off’ in this aristocratic family when members have names like August, December, June, Chance, Luck. And you know something is properly off when they talk about harvesting souls for the next 50 years. But, I’ll get to that.
Chance is the high-schooler daughter, a bit of a troublemaker, chip on her shoulder. But she knows she can get away with pretty much anything because her family is so rich. Her 18th birthday is approaching, and that’s always significant in movies, isn’t it?
The reason the family is so rich is because they’ve been a round a very long time. The reason they’ve been around a very long time is because they’re vampires.
Anyways, most of the movie shifts away from the daughter to focus on the deadly power struggle between her mother and her mother’s father who is currently the vampire in charge. And then there’s the chef and the coffee truck barista, innocent bystanders who are thrown into the middle of all this.
You know how sometimes when you’re watching a movie, and you kinda have to suffer through the first two thirds of it, but you know that last one third will be totally kick ass awesome and it will have been worth it to sit through all that first part? This movie is the reverse. It starts off a little bit intriguing, but then it shifts gears and goes to the power struggle thing. And I’m like, ok, so I guess this is the movie now, let’s see where it goes. Problem is that it goes downhill from there and gets ridiculous and almost goes in a comedy/horror direction when there wasn’t even a hint of that up until the final sequences.
Also, they left out a major bit of background info on one of the characters. Don’t wanna give any spoilers (*explanation and spoilers in the comments of this post, if you care to check out what I mean*), but it completely changes this one character and because it’s left out, it doesn’t make any sense.
And then there’s a second dimension where time and aging are on a different clock where they can just go to at will and the only reason that exists is so that one character can explain to another character (and thus us, the viewer) what in the hell is going on in this movie. And then there’s a bunch of plot twists and revelations at the end. One which is predictable. The others just seemed like they were just making up shit. So ya, this thing is a mess.
Also, it’s a weird thing, but the whole thing seems more like a tv show than a movie. Can’t put my finger on it.
So this one has all the hype these days, doesn’t it? Does it live up to that hype? Let’s see.
OK, first off, this isn’t a horror movie. Just because one person ends up murdered, no matter how graphic, that doesn’t make it a horror movie.
This is a drama. It’s about self-realization, it’s about religious fanaticism. It’s an examination of the thin line between religious piousness and self-brainwashing to the point of being delusional. It certainly shouldn’t be grouped in with any of the avalanche of exorcism movies that have come out in the past decade or so.
It’s definitely well done. The reason it’s getting all the hype is because it’s a very heavy, very serious subject, and everything about it is executed with the masterful touch of skillful and accomplished professionals.
So if you’re into that sort of thing, check it out. It’s not what I’m into.
B-movie Roundup 