It's that time again!
No, it's not the time of the month when I menstruate or turn into a werewolf—neither thing is possible in my case—but when I round up another batch of nasty crap which I found to be unwatchable.
I know it's only been three weeks since I last posted one of these lists, and I should have waited, but as I intend to step up my game and only watch good movies from the beginning of September through to the end of October, I need to get the remaining junk out of the way once and for all.
As usual, this list is an eclectic mix of no-budget dreck plus a couple of bigger horror titles which should never have been distributed in the first place.
1. Night of the Tentacles (2013)
"In this obscene Faustian tale, a young artist sells his soul to Satan for the new heart he so desperately needs. The only catch is that the heart is a tentacled monstrosity with a hunger for human flesh!"
This no-budget horror/sex-comedy has nothing new to offer. The acting is atrocious, and it's not horrific, sexy or funny.
Although I was initially amused, I only made it up to Dave's heart attack before I had to hit fast-forward just to find a good view of the object of his affection. Once I saw that Esther was another one of those self-harmers with a bull-ring through her snout and all that other nastiness, off it went.
2. Exorcist Chronicles (2013)
"Across the world, demonic possessions are on the increase. Two specialists are brought in and uncover a dark and terrifying worldwide plot."
Proving once again that I'm not biased in favour of movies from my own country, this student film lost me the moment anyone spoke—not that I could tell what a lot of them were saying at times anyway because the sound quality is pretty awful.
Overuse of a fish-eye lens for the faux found footage also does not endear me to something like this. I switched it to fast-forward after 10 minutes and didn't see anything worth pausing for apart from a couple of not very attractive women going topless.
3. Nobody Gets Out Alive (2013)
"A group of college students escape their troubled lives but only to find themselves fighting for their lives from a revenge seeking mad man."
You've guessed it, "Nobody Gets Out Alive" (aka "Punishment") is another low-budget slasher. Yawn!
It's all been done better in every "Friday the 13th" clone that precedes this slowly-paced turd. While I'll admit that a couple of the kills are creative, the extremely poor effects and camerawork ruins them.
I wanted to switch this off during the first couple of minutes because of how cheap it looked, but I kept going until I was bored out of my mind with the bickering teenagers making stupid decisions.
I didn't see the end and don't care. Despite a running time of only 77 minutes, it still felt too long.
4. Germ Z (2013)
"The military's attempt to shoot down an orbiting satellite unleashes a space-borne epidemic on a remote, small town."
Another lacklustre "Fangoria Presents" title which, of course, has to be about zombies because of the "Z".
I was so confused by all the jumps between times and places in the first 5 minutes that I gave up on it.
As a low-budget zombie movie, it didn't look like something which would interest me anyway.
5. 9 Days (2013)
"The saying goes that love means never having to say you're sorry... This is especially true when you're being held in a religious madman's basement with your neck chained to a wooden post."
Since I couldn't tell if this was meant to be a comedy or something which was going to make clever use of "Dante's Inferno", I gave it a chance.
I probably would have watched the whole thing if it had been made 6 years ago and had turned up in a "Pendulum Pictures" multipack, but it's too low-budget, dated and boring for me now.
The plot is nothing new, so the drama relies on the chemistry and acting between the two leads which, quite frankly, isn't very good.
I skipped through most of it to see the "torture" and nudity. Neither is worth mentioning.
6. Dark Feed (2013)
"A film crew moves into an abandoned psychiatric hospital with a shadowy past to shoot a low budget horror movie."
"Dark Feed" looks like a lot of better movies because it uses the same locations, but it plays out like 20 really bad movies with nothing to gel them together. If there's any story to this, I still don't know what it is.
We all know that Lionsgate will release any old crap nowadays instead of their hoarded back catalogue of decent movies, but this is dreadful even for them.
There are too many characters and subplots to keep track of, so after 45 minutes of head-scratching, off it went.
7. A Haunting at Silver Falls (2013)
"A small town is haunted by the twin daughters of a wrongfully convicted man. Young Jordan is sent down the path to who the real killer is only to find the killer is very close to her."
Decent production values, and Alix Elizabeth Gitter is an extremely charismatic lead, but "Silver Falls" lost me somewhere in the first half an hour due to being too "teenage" and lacking in scares.
It's got a good TV movie quality to it, and I will return to this at a later date because I like ghost stories. Thus, I'm not writing it off completely yet, even though I don't think it's going to reveal anything which I haven't seen before.
8. The Wicked (2013)
"A group of teenagers test the legend of an immortal witch and get more than they bargained for."
It's not rated, but I suspect "The Wicked" is meant to be a PG-13 or an MA-14 on TV at most. Either way, it's too clichéd and kiddified for me. The witch is too much of a "Hallowe'en costume" character to take seriously, and the teens are all cookie-cutter TV actors from Nickelodeon, "90210", and that kind of thing.
If "The Wicked" turns up in a multipack one day, it'll be on there as the "slightly below average" one which sells it, but I couldn't get more than 10 minutes in before I hit fast-forward until just before the end.
9. Infected (2013)
"A blood virus infects a small group of hunters turning a father & son trip into a fight for survival."
Michael Madsen, Christy Romano, William Forsythe and some other people who I don't know the names of are besieged by virus-carrying zombies who attack their cabin in the woods.
And that's all I really needed to know before switching it off after Tracey Sheldon gratuitously flashed her boobs around 13 minutes in.
NO MORE ZOMBIES!
10. Animus (2013)
"Hoping to find proof of the paranormal, five film students set out to document the legendary Copper Queen Hospital. But as the sun goes down, they experience something far worse than they ever could have imagined and they find themselves pursued by a blood thirsty maniac."
I might not expect anything good from Midnight Releasing, but hasn't this plot about film crews biting of more than they can chew been done to death already? Off the top of my head, we've had "The Blair Witch Project" and its clones, "Grave Encounters" and its sequel, "Monsters in the Woods", "Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes", "Devil's Pass", and possibly "Dark Feed" (above).
Having skipped through the padding to the cheap-looking gory stuff at the end, I probably should have watched more of this movie because the pretty girls are great screamers. Oh, well, it's too late now. I don't think I missed out on anything important.
Now that I'm up-to-date with everything available, I'm going to take a short break before concentrating on more articles and reviews of classic horror.
Give or take any new releases, I'm pleased to say that this is the end of writing about bad horror movies for me.
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