Reunion (2015)

"An unstable mental patient goes on an overnight rampage to terrorize an ex-rock star and his friends, only to discover she is linked to him in mysterious ways."

It's not often that I watch and review two indie horror screeners in a row. In previous years, I've tended to be more of a mainstream horror movie reviewer and would have preferred to keep things that way. Unfortunately, the theatrical horror releases this year have been fewer and further between than in the mid '90s, and like a lot of other bloggers, I found myself without anything to write about.

Instead of trying to compete with "zero day reviews" for movies in genres which I don't particularly care for, I've even been desperate enough to try reading books in my spare time (oh, the horror!), and I've now offered my services (dubious as they may be) to absolutely anyone who has a new horror movie to keep me entertained. I suppose it could be worse. At least I'm not watching any more sci-fi movies or comedies.

Unfortunately, for my review of the "Reunion" screener, I've only just finished reading Joe Hill's "Heart-Shaped Box" (2007), and ignoring the supernatural elements from that novel, I noticed more than a few coincidental similarities.

“Reunion” and “Heart-Shaped Box” both tell stories which feature a former rock star, contain scenes of domestic abuse fuelled by alcoholism, have characters with memories blotted out, exposition is revealed in flashbacks, and of course, their protagonists get stalked and sliced-up. There are other things, but I'm not allowed to say what they are at this time. My hands are tied, but I'm sure you'll finger it out... I mean figure it out for yourselves. Oops.

Although I've agreed not to give away any spoilers, some key elements also remind me of several of the late Richard Laymon's novels from my misspent youth, and I'll tentatively throw-in that there may also be some nods to "Halloween II" (1981), "Halloween" (2007), and ""Fright" (1971) as well. That being said, "Reunion" is far more modern and more in the realms of "extreme horror" than its precursors.

Lest I be misconstrued, I'm not saying that writer Bert Havird or director Shawn Chou consciously "borrowed" anything, especially as the movie adaptation of "Heart-Shaped Box" has been stalled for years, but "Reunion" is very much in the same vein and will definitely keep Joe Hill fans satiated. I know that I was.

With its non-linear storytelling and somewhat harrowing subject matter, "Reunion" might be a struggle for regular people to get through. There's a lot of shakycam for one thing, and there are several borderline arty moments which could put traditionalists off. If I wanted to be overcritical and harsh, I'd call the cinematography "pretentious and overambitious", but it's always better to be overambitious than to have no ambition at all, isn't it?

It's all very involved, and there's quite a lot (maybe too much) to keep track of. Even with a standard running time of just over an hour and a half, "Reunion" feels much longer and is emotionally draining to watch even for the most hardcore slasher aficionado. Underneath it all, however, you'll be pleased to know that the usual slasher tropes, character flaws, and stupid decisions abound. Yes, there's some fun stuff here too.

As I'm sworn to secrecy about the major plot points, I can't reveal anything more about “Reunion” other than it's a classy production with great performances and gallons of blood. I'm not sure if this movie is going to be as well received by the general horror fandom as something like “Starry Eyes” (2014), but it's likely to be very highly rated by millennial indie horror fans.

“Reunion” stars Maria Olsen, Jack Turner, Sarah Schreiber, Reign Morton, and Cara Santana. The supporting cast includes Ruth Reynolds, Arielle Brachfeld, Christopher Wolfe, Leif Gantvoort, and Matthew Jaeger.

For further details, please check out the official Facebook page.

Here's another teaser trailer:

Gore Orphanage (2015)

"Set in the depression era, Gore Orphanage shows that some things are worse than losing your family."

Sharing the title and same urban legend with an earlier low-budget horror movie from 1980 which I've never seen, "Gore Orphanage" adds to one of Ohio's most famous (albeit extremely fanciful) ghost stories by successfully slipping the motivation of real life English murderer Mary Bell into the mix.

Obviously, being British myself, I wouldn't have ever known about the Gore Orphanage urban legend, but I did know about Mary Bell who was all over the news in the early 1980s and caused another kerfuffle during the Tony Blair era when the government failed to prevent her (as a convicted murderer) from profitting financially through sales of her published story.

Of course, if you don't know or care about any of those things, it doesn't really matter. "Gore Orphanage" is a work of fiction whether you choose to read Emily Lapisardi's "Gore Orphanage: The Novel" right now or wait a few months longer to watch this movie which Emily Lapisardi has directed and co-written (with producer/actor Cody Knotts) when it's officially released in October. I've been one of the lucky few reviewers who was selected to see the screener, and I mostly enjoyed it.

"Gore Orphanage" stars Maria Olsen as a sadistic proprietor of a privately owned orphanage in a role reminiscent of the latest incarnation of prison governor Joan "The Freak" Ferguson from the Australian "Wentworth" TV series. Mrs. Pryor (Maria Olsen) is a nasty piece of work with mental health issues which may excuse but not condone any legal justification for her actions. You'll hate her, but you're supposed to. As usual, Maria looks attractive in some scenes and appropriately horrible in others, but either way, she can certainly act.

As a foil to Maria Olsen's character, Keri Maletto plays the younger and nicer Miss Lillian who also shows similarities to an early Joan Bennett from "Wentworth". I'm not saying that there are any borrowings as such here, just stereotypical and easily recognisable genre characters. I may have noticed them in "Wentworth" (the rebooted "Prisoner: Cell Block H") most recently, but such characters have been part of every prison and orphanage drama.

I don't know why Miss Lillian never takes her hat off when she's indoors.

Sharing the burden of looking after the orphanage is Bill Townsend playing Ernst the German janitor/handyman. I won't spoil it for you, but things may or may not be as they first appear with Ernst. There's certainly some good work there with the script and characterisation. More screen time for Ernst would have been nice, but maybe a little more depth would have wrecked his subplot too.

Since this story is set in an orphanage, the rest of the cast is mostly comprised of child actors including Emma Smith, Nora Hoyle, and Brandon Mangin Jr. I believe that this is their first movie, so I'm not going to judge any of them too harshly. Some of their performances are better than others (and some made me cringe), but generally, they do an acceptable job. None of them are up to the same standard as kids in movies such as "The Bad Seed" (1956) or "Stephen King's It" (1990), but they're as good as any Children's Film Foundation actors from back in the day.

If I had to pick one child actor out of all of them who looks like she will have a big future ahead of her, it would be little Nora Hoyle who plays Esther. She has some great expressions, is aware of the other actors, and makes her scenes convincing. I simply wasn't very impressed by Emma Smith in the lead role as Nellie, but she does have her moments.

To be brutally honest, the camerawork and the direction doesn't work in the favour of many of the children. Wrong angles, some bad framing, and keeping them on their marks tends to show through. In particular, faults are most apparent when the children are speaking to each other and eye contact isn't made at the right angle, and there are unnatural movements when these young actors have to walk or run to a certain point.

Again, I also have to make some allowances because this is Emily Lapisardi's debut feature and she still needs to learn her craft. Giving credit where it's due, she's done a lot better than I could ever do, but that's a redundant point since I'm not a filmmaker and have no desire to ever be one. I'm just an often overly critical viewer.

Mealtimes involve a lot of playing with food rather than eating it.

The cinematography by Nicholas Carrington is inconsistently but mostly competent. I prefer the scenes where he clearly used a tripod rather than the shaky handycam, but that's because I'm old-fashioned that way. The best of these is when Mrs. Pryor reads a passage from the Bible to the kids before they eat. Only in one scene near the end does the handycam accidentally make you think that you're watching a "killer's point-of-view", and this could possibly be stabilised more in post-production to remove that slight problem.

Editing is a laborious process for anyone, so I fully appreciate the effort which has gone into "Gore Orphanage", but even as a slow-burn murder/mystery/horror, it would benefit from being a bit tighter. The pacing is okay as it is, but... yeah, if I knew how to do it, I would swap a few scenes around and excise a couple of others. The soundtrack is also very basic and occasionally echoey as well. All these things are standard problems with low-budget productions, so you can take what I'm saying with the usual pinch or sackful of salt.

The 1930s depression era setting works well, and care has been taken with the various props, costumes, and location. "Gore Orphanage" is not quite as good in that respect as the movies which have inspired it, but it's noticeable that someone cared enough about attention to detail within the contraints of the budget.

Similar looking and themed movies such as "Flowers in the Attic" (1987), "The Others" (2001), "The Devil's Backbone" (2001), "House of Voices" (2004), "The Orphanage" (2007), "The Awakening" (2011), and ""The Secret pf Crickley Hall" (2012) do more or less the same thing, but "Gore Orphanage" doesn't have anywhere near the same budget as even the cheapest of those productions.

She still has that hat on!

One final (and very minor) gripe is that Chris "The Irate Gamer" Bores is listed in the credits but doesn't appear until after them. Apparently, he was in a cut scene which involved paranormal investigators. The only bit that remains is a post-credits bonus in which you only see him running away with three other people and have no idea who any of them are. Oh well, I guess that he won't be promoting this movie much on his YouTube channel now.

If you think from my critique so far that I hated a lot of this movie, you'd be wrong. In fact, I enjoyed the storytelling despite "Gore Orphanage" not being the supernatural or even bloody event which I initially thought that it was going to turn into. I truly enjoyed the acting, and I definitely got a kick out of the "twist" element. The wraparound scenes give that away more than I just have.

"Gore Orphanage" may not be brilliantly or slickly realised, and it's predictable for those of us who've seen too many movies, but it's generally okay. A little nod to "The Shining" doesn't become a cliché, and I totally respect and am grateful for the restraint shown there. I'm also grateful that no holds were barred when it came to the more taboo subject matter.

Having said that, I'm not entirely convinced that "Gore Orphanage" should be classed as a horror movie. It may be within the wider scope of the genre and contains a few slasher elements, but it's more of a drama and mystery than a "shit-yer-pants-scary" affair anyway.

For that reason, more than any other, I can only give "Gore Orphanage" a slightly below average rating as it stands at the moment. As much as I'm tempted to hypocritically gush about this movie and drop a marketing-friendly "quote" into my review to get a mention on the DVD sleeve, I just can't do it. "Gore Orphanage" isn't scary, and horror movies should be scary.

For more information about the DVD release, please check out the "Gore Orphanage" Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/goreorphanagethemovie.

Live-In Fear (2014)

"In the snowy Utah mountains, an ancient being terrorizes four friends as they try to survive."

There aren't many independent horror movies which I've waited over two years to see (or even cared about for that matter), but Brandon Scullion's "Live-In Fear" is one of them. In fact, it was way back on Friday, October 26th, 2012, that I first mentioned this movie, and earlier today, thanks to Maria Olsen from MOnsterworks66, I finally got to watch the HD screener.

Is "Live-In Fear" all that I expected it to be? Well, yes and no. I was mostly looking forward to the wintery setting, "The Shining"-style madness, and of course, the performances by Maria Olsen, Arielle Brachfeld, and the equally lovely Sarah Greyson. There's undoubtedly nothing to disappoint anyone too badly with these three actresses involved, but—and there's always a but with these things—the "cabin in the woods" (or rather "lodge in the snow") story itself is a tad confusing in places.

The good news is that this movie now exists and it won "Best Grindhouse Feature" at the 2014 Los Angeles RIP Horror Film Festival. Fans of Arielle Brachfeld (from "The Haunting of Whaley House") will also be pleased to learn that she won "Best Actress" for her role as Mallory at the same festival.

The bad news is that "Live-In Fear" is still another C-grade indie horror which isn't for everyone's tastes. You can't compare something like this with a multi-million dollar Hollywood blockbuster, and so I'm not going to be foolish enough to try. However, when despite the best efforts of everyone involved, the story ultimately doesn't make a whole lot of sense, there's always room for criticism.

Nice retro poster. It reminds me of the '70s.

I was fine with everything (sort of) for the first 53 minutes. "Scooby Doo"-style villains and "Cassanda" tropes aside, each of the characters has dark secrets which are revealed in due course. Coupled with the usual low-budget horror bloodshed, this makes for some decent entertainment overall.

Admittedly, I found myself distracted by the scenery and ogling Sarah Greyson (whom, I have recently been informed, was in the "Road Rules" TV show) as Becca with her Bettie Page hair, but the camerawork is competent enough for the most part, and the sound has some unnerving ambient additions which first made me wonder if there was something wrong with my speakers and then caused me to worry that I was hearing things which weren't supposed to be there. Trust me, you'll notice these things too, and many more.

Written and directed by Brandon Scullion, "Live-In Fear" is a co-production between Brandon's Iodine Sky Productions and Maria Olsen's MOnsterworks66.

Maria Olsen is very attractive in her earlier scenes (and a bit scary later) as Seth's mother, and she definitely gives the younger actresses a run for their money, even if the aforementioned Arielle Brachfeld as Mallory is the one who is meant to stand out the most. Aiding and abetting them is David Lautman as Seth and Chris Dorman as Eric, neither of whose characters I warmed to, and with good reason considering the reveals.

The supporting cast of Geoffrey Gould, Myles Cranford, Charlene Geisler, and Nancy Wolfe are okay-ish, but Nancy Wolfe (who played Susan Atkins in the original 1976 "Helter Skelter") is the obvious stand-out here. None of them have very much screen time.

Sadly, "Live-In Fear" isn't a very scary movie, and it kind of takes itself too seriously for what it is. I actually prefer the latter element in a horror genre movie rather than everything being played for laughs (although I know other people don't feel the same way), so that's another point in its favour.

There's some nice blood and gore in places, which we all like, but there could have been more. Practical effects of various qualities appear throughout, several of which are unintentionally comical, but I can't say any more without spoiling them for you.

Eric is not a very nice man.

The only thing which threw me right out of my willing suspension of disbelief was what can only be described as a "WTF moment" around the 54 minute mark. Something far too weird happens with a younger version of Mallory (played by Charlene Geisler) which had me puzzled for the 4 minute duration of the scene. It makes absolutely no sense even with a second viewing, so I'll generously put it down to padding. The scene could be excised with no great loss, although with a running time of only an hour and 20 minutes, "Live-In Fear" isn't a very long movie anyway. It also has, in my opinion, an unnecessary and unsatisfying "Epilogue".

"Live-In Fear" did not quite live up to my expections, and I highly doubt that it's truly "the most disturbing film you'll see in your lifetime" (as the voiceover in the trailer suggests), but it certainly left me shaking my head and wondering, "What the fuck did I just watch?"

I recommend "Live-In Fear" for fans of this subgenre of indie horror movies, but it isn't good for anyone with mainstream tastes. It's hardly "The Evil Dead" despite some superficial similarities, but then again, it doesn't try to be either.

Having said that, "Live-In Fear" is likely to be one of the best micro-budget indie horrors that you'll see this year. Give or take a plethora of unrealistic situations and responses (which abound in all horror movies), I enjoyed it.

Another Ten New Horror Movies I Didn't Make It Through

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.

An American Ghost Story (2012)

"When Paul, an unemployed writer, decides to rent and live in a house that's rumoured to be haunted, he puts his life and his relationships in grave danger as he obsessively attempts to get the story that will finally make his career."

Whenever a yet to be released horror movie which was made for under $10,000 achieves a 7.5 out of 10 rating on the IMDb, I smell shenanigans. Either not enough non-shills have found it and voted, or the "critics" who received screeners really did find it outstanding. The chances of the latter being true are invariably slim to none though.

Thus, as much as I didn't want to backtrack to another one of last year's movies—especially not one with a title change designed to cash-in on the success of FX's "American Horror Story" TV series—curiosity meant that I had no choice but to check out the ghost story formerly known as "Revenant". I'm pleased to say that I wasn't disappointed by my discoveries either. Although very little has improved since Derek Cole and Stephen Twardokus made "Human Behavior" (2006), at least this movie is in colour like something created in the 21st century should be.

Unfortunately, with annoying, atmosphere-killing background music throughout, "An American Ghost Story" fails to generate an ambience conducive to scares. Things improve enormously when silence reigns, but at its worst, the music sounds like a cat walking up and down a piano keyboard while a tone-deaf 5-year-old child practices chords next to it. Occasionally, it even overpowers the dialogue, and that's a real shame because the acting is fairly decent.

Stephen Twardokus is very good as Paul the obsessive ghost hunter who bites off more than he can chew, and natural beauty Liesel Kopp is ideal as his girlfriend Stella. Liesel Kopp has a lovely, expressive face with big, watery eyes that exude genuine fear in her nighttime scenes. It's a pity that Stella disappears from the movie after 30 minutes, but she's really only in it to represent the sane action which most people would choose when faced with living in a haunted house.

Even Paul's best friend Sam (Cain Clifton) is likeable, so I have to give credit where it's due for the casting choices and characterisation. Wendy Haines is a bit over the top as former resident Sue, and Jon Gale isn't quite so hot as Skip the house-owner, but they only have very small roles which don't add much to the story anyway. Both provide minimal exposition/confirmations about details which have already been said rather than falling into the "idiot lecture" trap.

So where does it all go wrong? Well, apart from the aforementioned awful background music which is only used properly in two action-packed places, "An American Ghost Story" is a very slow burn, and it's full of clichés and homages instead of originality.

There's absolutely nothing here that you haven't seen before, especially if you're a fan of haunted house movies. In particular, "An American Ghost Story" owes a lot to the "Paranormal Activity" series. You could even describe it as a conflation of all the jump scares from the "Paranormal Activity" movies without the camcorders and home security surveillance contrivances.

As much as I would love to praise the "old school" use of tripods and zooms to provide an easy film to watch, there are flaws with the cinematography. Some of the long shots never zoom in enough, and several others are poorly framed. One of this story's biggest contrivances is to have Paul investigating the house at night using a flashlight, which leads to scenes that are too dark to see properly. The intention may have been to cover-up a multitude of effects sins by using the darkness for cover, but it also makes Paul's actions moronic in a house with fully functional electric lights and no power outages!

The house itself is very modern, and amazingly neat and tidy inside. It may have a lot of mismatched wood going on—a mahogany dining table among light oak cupboards is the worst culprit—but it's not a sinister looking house at all. Apart from one of those Crosley Companion radios which is designed to look like an antique one, there's nothing creepy to see. The characters may keep saying how oppressive the atmosphere is, but the "Emperor's new clothes" technique doesn't work when the reality is so painfully obvious.

Even with its flaws, all but two of the jump scares work, but so they should since they've been done to death in other movies! Without spoiling things too much for you, I'll just mention that doors and cupboards open on their own, a basketball is predictably rolled towards Paul by an invisible being, the scary-looking radio switches itself on, and there's a chair-stacking homage to "Poltergeist" (1982) which made me groan. There are a lot of excessively loud bangs to catch you out, and one computer-based moment which I should have known better than to fall for (because I leaned in close to the screen) really works! All I'll say about it, after nearly soiling myself, is that I'm surprised that anyone still uses AOL mail... and you can't animate a jpg image! Well played, Derek Cole, you ass!

As you can see in the trailer, the big thing in "An American Ghost Story" is the use of "sheet ghosts" which, of course, also appear briefly in "Paranormal Activity 3" (2011). The last time I saw sheet ghosts before that was in The Avalanches' "Frontier Psychiatrist" music video. Sheet ghosts are traditionally used for comic effect as in "Beetlejuice" (1988) rather than being terrifying for anyone other than small children, but they work very well here. In its favour, "An American Ghost Story" seriously attempts to make sheet ghosts scary again!

What's my verdict then? All things considered, and with the wind blowing in the right direction, I don't think "An American Ghost Story" deserves its 7.5 out of 10 rating on the IMDb (note: it's now dropped to 6.2 and still falling), but I'm willing to give it a pass mark of 4.5 out of 10 simply because I was entertained. If "An American Ghost Story" was due to be released without any background music, it would be much stronger. It still wouldn't be more than a clone of other haunted house movies, but the sad truth is that the chances of ever seeing any groundbreaking originality in this subgenre is unlikely anyway.

"An American Ghost Story" is definitely worth a rental. If you aren't so enamoured by Katie Featherston that you've vowed never to watch another haunted house movie unless she's in it, you'll probably enjoy this a lot more.

33 horror movies from 2012 which I will never watch

Speaking as someone who tries to watch every horror movie from every subgenre as they become available, there comes a point when the amount left to see is so overwhelming that harsh decisions have to be made about whether they will ever be watched or not.

Sometimes it's the subject matter, sometimes it's the uninspiring artwork and blurb on the DVD—occasionally, it's merely the name of the movie—but every case is assessed individually before I invest my time and money. Due to many years of experience, I can often tell if a movie is going to be a crappy one without even putting the DVD in the player. Mistakes still happen, and some of the slew of shit manages to slip through, but at least they're confined to rentals because I never blind buy.

You can me "narrow minded" if you like, but you'd be wrong. I'm cynical, and I usually do a lot of research before parting with my money. I don't succumb to marketing or peer pressure, so all my movie watching choices are entirely my own. The following, however, are the titles which didn't interest me enough to give them a chance.

Please note that I'm going "old school" with this post. There are no trailers, no pretty pictures, and no Amazon links. I'm just going to write a couple of sentences about each movie to give you a brief insight into how I choose what is worth watching and what isn't. I haven't actually watched even a second of any of these movies, and I never will.


1. 23 Minutes to Sunrise (2012)
Despite having Eric Roberts in it, what looks like a low-budget crime drama set in a diner doesn't appeal to me. The title suggests a vampire movie, but it isn't. It's also a lot more than 23 minutes long.

2. 1920: Evil Returns (2012)
Tempting though it is to watch an Indian version of "The Exorcist", I've done that before with another Hindi movie which I can't remember the name of. It wasn't good. There's novelty value here and a very beautiful actress, but I'll pass.

3. American Horror House (2012)
The SyFy channel's attempt to cash-in on the name of "American Horror Story" suggests that it's about ghosts, but it looks like a TV-rated slasher centred around a University sorority. I suspect it to be yet another load of annoying teenage girls running around and screaming. No, thank you.

4. Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes (2012)
I have no interest in Bigfoot or fake found footage, so this is an easy one to skip. I can imagine that it's all shakycams, some guy in a hairy costume, and everybody will die at the end.

5. Black Forest (2012)
Tinsel Korey, the scarred werewolf-girl from the "Twilight" movies is in this, but so is Ben Cross, and it's another SyFy movie. The blurb says that it's a fantasy set in the Black Forest, Germany, and has something to do with fairytales. If it was about gâteau, I'd be more inclined to watch it.

6. The Caretaker (2012)
A low-budget Australian "cabin in the woods" movie with vampires. That's all the information I need. Vampire kangaroos would be a much better idea.

7. Cockneys vs Zombies (2012)
It's a comedy, so it doesn't matter how many well-known British actors have cameos in it. Also zombies. Ugh! If I was still living in England, and it was shown on a satellite TV channel, I'd probably give it a few minutes just to ogle Michelle Ryan.

8. Community (2012)
Reading between the lines, this may be a British shakycam version of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" set on a council housing estate. It has Jemma Dallender (the pretty star of the upcoming "I Spit on Your Grave 2") in it, but sadly, it's full of angry chavs as well.

9. Creep Van (2012)
Apparently, this is a low-budget slasher rather than the story of a possessed van. Either way, it sounds boring, and it's bound to look like a YouTube video.

10. Crowsnest (2012)
Canadian found footage about nomadic cannibals in an R.V. attacking a bunch of teenagers. Since it's Canadian, I imagine that the acting will be okay, but the plot will rip-off half a dozen more famous American cannibal movies and slashers.

11. The Dead Want Women (2012)
A Full Moon movie full of pretty girls and Eric Roberts. What could go wrong? I'll wait for it to appear on an Echo Bridge multipack, and then fast forward through it for the nudie bits. Not really.

12. Demon Hunter (2012)
There are so many movies like this in existence that I've probably already seen this under another name. Just different girls to see topless, more no-budget effects, and non-existent "acting" to spoil my day.

13. Donner Pass (2012)
This is bound to end up on Netflix. By not having the service anymore, I can ignore another bunch of pretty "teenagers" getting killed and eaten by cannibals. Strange title though. It makes me think of kebabs.

14. Fetish Dolls Die Laughing (2012)
With a title like that, it reeks of being a no-budget horror-comedy.

15. Freakshow Apocalypse: The Unholy Sideshow (2012)
It's one of those no-budget nasties which is directed by, written by, and stars the same person. I'll bet that it's about a bunch of weird-looking friends with more tattoos than teeth as they try to copy scenes from Rob Zombie videos. If I'm wrong, I don't care.

16. Ghoul (2012)
A made-for-TV clone of "The Goonies" and "The Monster Squad" maybe? Nope. I can't stand horror movies with little kids doing a load of investigating and their uncaring parents who don't believe them.

17. Girls Against Boys (2012)
A rape-revenge drama which might be good, but I've seen far too many rape-revenge dramas over the years. I'd be very surprised if it offers anything better than "I Spit on Your Grave" as it's probably a formulaic clone of the same thing.

18. Grave Encounters 2 (2012)
I didn't watch more than 5 minutes of the first one, so I'm not going to watch an obviously inferior sequel. I hate all those bullshit "Ghost Hunters" TV shows which this is supposed to look like anyway.

19. Haunted High (2012)
Another SyFy movie which I've had no interest in since learning that one of the morbidly obese movie reviewers from YouTube has a part in it. That, and the childish story itself, puts me right off wanting to see a couple of minutes of Charisma Carpenter.

20. Lizzie (2012)
Having seen the TV movie version, "The Legend of Lizzie Borden" (1975), I can't see any way that this could offer anything new.

21. Lost Woods (2012)
Because the title suggests a movie about erectile dysfunction on a porn set, I was intrigued for a few seconds. Finding out that it's about an alien creature, i.e. a guy wearing a bear costume and a "Predator" mask, who chases campers through a forest destroyed those hopes. It's clearly no-budget crap of the highest order.

22. Love Bite (2012)
Supposed to be a romantic-comedy version "The Inbetweeners" with a werewolf. Apart from Jessica Szohr, there doesn't appear to be any good reason to watch this low-budget "An American Werewolf in Paris" clone.

23. Monsters in the Woods (2012)
Yet another one of those "film crew shooting a movie" ones with boobs and blood but no-budget. Normally a good choice for a "Woeful Wednesday" post, but I have my limits.

24. The Mooring (2012)
"Every 40 seconds a person goes missing." And he's getting really sick of it now! It's a handycam "Friday the 13th" clone set in Idaho, so it's girls being chased through the woods by a psycho. Probably has potatoes in it too.

25. Night Claws (2012)
I wanted it to be a movie about cats, but it's another one about Bigfoot. It's distributed by Midnight Releasing, so it's got to be worse than something by The Asylum.

26. No Tell Motel (2012)
I have a horrible feeling that I've already seen this one... about 50 times over and made by other people! It's about a haunted motel, but it's not going to be as even half as good as "The Innkeepers". I was very disappointed by "The Innkeepers", by the way.

27. Parasitic (2012)
A Florida nightclub gets invaded by an alien parasite. Alrighty then, it's low-budget sci-fi/horror. Do not want!

28. Poe (2012)
Either a film about Edgar Allan Poe or something about toilets, right? No such luck. The blurb says it's about a serial-killing cannibal. In other words, this is no-budget Hannibal Lecter.

29. Rise of the Zombies (2012)
The SyFy channel does more zombies. Ethan Suplee (Randy from "My Name is Earl") is in this. I like him, but not more zombies! No more zombies ever!

30. Robin Hood: Ghosts of Sherwood 3D (2012)
Just look at the title! You can probably tell me all the reasons why I wouldn't want to watch this! It's got Tom Savini and Kane Hodder in it too, and we all know what fantastic actors they are.

31. The Sleeper (2012)
Supposedly a "throwback to the '80s"-style slasher where another sorority house is killed off. Why would anyone feel the need to make something like this in a market already saturated by no-budget slashers?

32. Snow White: A Deadly Summer (2012)
The girl on the coverart looks beautiful, but I don't think another movie with Eric Roberts in it is going to be all that great. Added to that, it's a modern interpretation of the famous fairytale, and those really don't work well.

33. Vampireland (AKA The 6th Extinction) (2012)
A no-budget version of "Stake Land". In every conceivable way, NO!


Since half the fun of being a horror movie reviewer is finding things which other people may not have heard of, if you've actually seen any of these movies, feel free to let me know if I did the right thing by not watching them.

Ten More New Horror Movies I Didn't Make It Through

Because I said that horror was dead two years ago, some people may think all these new horror movies form somewhat of a contradiction. The thing is, I never said that no new horror movies would ever be produced, I meant that horror was creatively dead as a genre. I stand by that, and the filmmakers have continued to prove it every day.

Obviously, horror movies are still being made, and the existence of this blog shows I've been attempting to watch as many as I can stomach. Unfortunately, here are another ten which are so bad that even a seasoned professional like myself could not make it through any of them.


1. Battlefield Death Tales (2012)

"3 interlocking stories from the dark days of World War 2. A soldier on a suicide mission. A troubled family with a monster in their bomb shelter. A supernatural investigator on her most dangerous assignment yet."

Also known as "Nazi Zombie Battleground", this is an English no-budget nasty which I only watched because I thought it might be in the same vein as "Frankenstein's Army". Well, it kind of is and it mostly isn't.

It's a cheap-looking but nicely shot and costumed anthology movie with a horror/war theme. You can tell it's a "film school student film" because of the camerawork, but there's a little bit of talent there struggling to be seen.

A couple of very pretty girls who are ruined by their lack of acting ability and pronounciation of the English language provide the eyecandy. They do the best they can for non-actors, but there are too many extra Rs in their words for my taste.

I lasted for all of 10 minutes before I hit fast-forward to look for the non-existent horror bits.


2. The Sigil (2012)

"Rockford Illinois. Local boy, Logan Lewis, is reported dead along with 41 others at a house in Los Angeles, CA. The government releases a statement blaming a undiscovered uranium mine nearby. The bodies, over-exposed to radiation, have been confiscated. The house ruined and destroyed. Shaken by her brother's death, Devan seeks answers."

Bizarrely, this is an American low-budget movie which only has a British DVD release. I have no idea why that is.

I nearly switched it off during the faux found footage introduction, but I was intrigued enough by the conspiracy theory story to give it a few more minutes. I should have trusted my instincts because everything is too drawn-out and boring.

While the acting isn't atrocious, it's still extremely amateur. The girls, particularly the brunette, have such horrible, childish voices with excessive amounts of vocal fry going on that they hurt my delicate little ears. When they started screaming, it was more than I could bear!

I'm not sure how far I got into this movie because I fell asleep due to some kind of trauma-induced catalepsy.


3. Black Rock (2012)

"Three childhood friends set aside their personal issues and reunite for a girls' weekend on a remote island off the coast of Maine. One wrong move turns their weekend getaway into a deadly fight for survival."

I have a feeling that this is actually a thriller rather than a horror movie, but it doesn't matter anyway because I switched it to fast-forward right after the opening credits.

The affected way the girls were talking to each other in the car during their voiceover at the beginning set my teeth on edge. When the view changed from a black background, and I could see how plain they were, I had no interest in seeing any more of them either.

This might be a good thriller or a generic one. It's definitely not the horror movie I expected, and I don't care.


4. Dead Souls (2012)

"Johnny Petrie learns on his 18th birthday that he was adopted after inheriting a farm in Maine. Eager to start a new life, Johnny leaves home so he can began afresh in this 'new' dwelling."

Seeing the "Chiller TV" logo at the start of a movie doesn't exactly inspire confidence, so it's no surprise that this is another TV movie with no swearing, nudity or gore that I know of. None of that matters since it's a generic ghost story, but such things are too kiddified for me.

I may come back to this one at a later date because, apart from some obviously handheld camerawork in places, it doesn't look horrible.

It's possible that the storytelling may be fairly decent, but I switched it off after 30 minutes because nothing scary was happening.


5. The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia (2013)

"A young family moves into an historic home in Georgia, only to learn they are not the house's only inhabitants. Soon they find themselves in the presence of a secret rising from underground and threatening to bring down anyone in its path."

I wanted to like this because the mother (played by Abigail Spencer) is kind of hot, but that's not a good enough reason to endure the boredom of the rest of it. As someone who can't abide children, I found her little girl to be irritating beyond belief.

Having not liked the Discovery Channel version of this story compared to their dramatisation of "A Haunting in Connecticut", it only took 40 minutes before I had to switch this off too for the sake of my own sanity.

I still can't get my head around why it wasn't just called "Ghosts of Georgia". Even with my lack of American geographical skills, I know that Georgia is a very long way from Connecticut!


6. Kiss of the Damned (2012)

"The vampire Djuna resists the advances of Paolo, but soon gives in to their passion. When her trouble-making sister unexpectedly comes to visit, Djuna's love is threatened, and the whole vampire community becomes endangered."

This was recommended by a friend of mine because I like "Twilight" and vampires. Unfortunately, I don't like movies which look this cheap, drag this slowly, and have the most unerotic scenes imaginable. Yes, it's even less erotic than "Twilight", and that's really saying something!

The girls are pretty in it and have sexy European accents, but none of them can act their way out of a coffin... if they even have one.

I watched big chunks of "Kiss of the Damned" but skipped others until it was over. I might return to it one day when I'm feeling as lethargic as the pace of the movie itself.


7. Portrait of a Zombie (2012)

"When son, Billy, becomes a zombie the family chooses to take care of him in the home much to the chagrin of the neighbours and the local crime boss."

Another low-budget zombie comedy? But Irish this time!

STRAIGHT OFF!

Sorry, I have no interest in listening to a load of people who can't say their THs properly, or zombies in any size, shape or form.

I've always hated "Shaun of the Dead" and its clones too.



8. 616: Paranormal Incident (2013)

"When Special Agent Watts and his Investigation Unit are called to the derelict Woodburrow Prison he thinks it's business as usual. But there's nothing usual about Woodburrow."

Beginning with some of the most amateur camerawork I've ever had the misfortune to see, coupled with the worst acting, "616: Paranormal Incident" was never likely hold my interest for long.

Even though the blonde mother looks a bit like Julia Roberts with a bigger, floppier mouth, she disappears from the movie before she gets to do anything, and it's all downhill from there.

As soon as the "Paranormal Investigations Unit" appeared, I couldn't stand it any longer. I'm estimating that I got around 5 or 6 minutes past the opening titles before it became too annoying to continue.


9. The Haunting of Helena (2012)

"A single mother moves into a new house with her daughter. Soon after the young girl has her first baby tooth fall off, she begins to recount that she is having nocturnal visits by a tooth fairy. It seems the house has a sinister history."

I might have liked this more if it hadn't shown "The Collective" and "Bloody-Disgusting" logos right at the beginning. That's all the warning I need, thank you very much. Once I've got that nasty taste in my mouth, there's no way I can possibly enjoy anything which follows.

Fortunately, this is just a cheap Italian movie (originally voiced in English rather than dubbed), so I gave it a chance.

It wasted that chance after 10 minutes because I felt like I was watching live-action prototypes for the cutscenes in a survival horror computer game.


10. Deranged (2012)

"Four young, attractive girls go on a bachelorette party weekend in a remote country house in Spain, owned by their friend looking for sun, sex and sangria. The private party takes a sinister turn for the worst as one by one, the guests are brutally murdered. The race is on to uncover the killers identity and either fight back or die."

Finally, proving that my hatred of crappy movies once again extends to my own country's feeble offerings, this British movie set in Spain is notable for starring Craig Fairbrass and a bunch of the plainest actresses you are ever likely to see in a low-budget slasher. One of the girls even looks like Myra Hindley!

I didn't even make it far enough in to see former-"Eastender" Craig Fairbrass in all his glory!

All things considered, I would rather watch "Spice World" than any more of this.


That's another ten complete wastes of time successfully tallyteered for "Woeful Wednesday". If you've seen anything worse, let me know below. This may be masochistic, but it's started to become a monthly challenge which I almost look forward to.

Ten New Horror Movies I Didn't Make It Through

Unlike Rex Reed, I'm not even going to pretend that I've seen these horror movies in their entirety. In some cases, I didn't even make it more than 5 minutes in without turning them off.

As far as I know, mutant space aliens could have appeared and disemboweled newborn babies left, right and centre with more gore than has ever been seen in a movie in the entire history of cinema. I highly doubt that they did or that such a thing would have saved these borefests, but if you watched any of them all the way through and it did happen, good for you.


1. A Field in England (2013)

"Fleeing for their lives, a small party abandon their Civil War confederates and escape through an overgrown field. Thinking only of what lay behind, they are ambushed by two dangerous men and made to search the field. Psychedelia, madness and chaotic forces slowly overtake the group as they question what treasure lies within the malignant field."

English Civil War soldiers swear like modern day Cockneys and (allegedly) eat mushrooms in black and white.

I switched it off after ten minutes.



2. The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh (2012)

"An antiques collector inherits a house from his estranged mother only to discover that she had been living in a shrine devoted to a mysterious cult. Soon, he comes to suspect that his mother's oppressive spirit still lingers within her home and is using items in the house to contact him with an urgent message."

Some guy wanders round a house full of African tribal art occasionally talking to people who are wise enough to stay off camera.

After an hour of nothing happening, off it went.



3. The Cloth (2013)

"A godless man is recruited by a secret organization who works to combat demonic possessions in order to prepare a new generation in the battle against evil forces."

Danny Trejo, Eric Roberts, and some other people try to be Constantine.

I didn't even get through the first scene because of the camerawork and sound. Apparently, it gets worse.



4. Dracula: Reborn (2012)

"A modernized, loosely based take on Bram Stoker's Dracula novel, taking place in Los Angeles, California, where a wealthy Dracula looks to purchase an abandoned building and pursue the wife of his realtor, Jonathan Harker."

It's Dracula... again! Plus a bunch of incredibly beautiful girls and cheap CGI.

I fast-forwarded through it to look at the girls.



5. Knight of the Dead (2013)

"Hunted by raiders, a band of crusading knights escort the Holy Grail through a valley of black death where they must hack and slash their way to freedom."

Knights fight zombies for the SyFy channel.

I watched it on fast-forward because it's painfully slow... and it still sucked.



6. Jug Face (2013)

"Jug Face tells the story of a pregnant teen trying to escape a backwoods community when she discovers that she may be sacrificed to a creature in a pit."

A clone of "The Wicker Man" where an ugly pregnant girl is due to get sacrificed by hillbillies.

As soon as I heard the accents, it was over. I skipped to the end to see what happened. Meh.



7. Apocalypse Z (aka Zombie Massacre) (2013)

"A bacteriological weapon developed by the US Government to create a super soldier - spreads an epidemic in a quiet little town in the middle of Eastern Europe. All citizens have been turned into infected zombies. The plan is to bring an atomic bomb into the city's nuclear plant to pretend a terrible accident occurred. No one has to know the truth. A team of mercenaries is hired to complete the mission."

Uwe Boll does zombies and renames his movie to compete with the Summer blockbuster.

Skimmed on fast-forward to see the terrible zombie masks. Not good.



8. Detention of the Dead (2012)

"A group of oddball high school students find themselves trapped in detention with their classmates having turned into a horde of zombies."

A comedy? With zombies! A zombedy?

OFF!



9. Lord of Darkness (aka Sawney: Flesh of Man) (2012)

"Scottish cannibal Sawney Bean and his murderous, inbred family are responsible for over a thousand murders over the centuries."

Scottish people speaking Scottish and doing typically Scottish things with no plot.

I gave it ten minutes. Nothing good happened.



10. Requiem for the Damned (2012)

"Edgar Allan Poe. For nearly two hundred years his stories of the macabre have shocked and terrified audiences. And now, inspired by five of Poe's most terrifying tales, five filmmakers have banded together to create the ultimate tribute to the master: Edgar Allan Poe's Requiem For The Damned - featuring adaptations of : The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Black Cat, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Murders in the Rue Morgue."

No-budget Edgar Allan Poe and a bad claymation cat.

Nope.



Just think of this post as my way of "tallyteering" the crap which I couldn't get through at this present time. I might return to a couple of these movies later to give them a full review, but I'm unlikely to have the patience to do so. I may watch a lot of crappy movies for this blog, but I have my limits.

Midnight Horror: 8 Movies

I have no idea when Echo Bridge Home Entertainment released this multipack other than sometime in 2012. I got it from my local pawn shop a little under a month ago although, as it turned out, I already had a sealed copy which I bought from Wal-mart last year. Ah well, these things happen when you're dealing with movie collections which are designed to confuse the buyer into purchasing the same movies over and over again.

The powers that be must really have it in for me though because I had to scan the cover of this "Midnight Horror" multipack too (and it blurred in the bottom left corner). On the plus side, once again there are no other reviews online and no listing on the official website so I now have my second exclusive in forever. Yay, me! I'd do the Snoopy dance if I even knew what that was.


Night of the Living Dead (1968)

"A brother and sister visit the gravesite of their deceased father... but the trip turns into a terrifying nightmare when darkness falls and zombies attack."

Really, Echo Bridge Home Entertainment, really? Do you think that there's anyone who hasn't got this famous Public Domain movie already? It's even come free inside packets of cereal in some places!

Whatever. I'm not reviewing it again.


Windcroft (2007)

"When his father dies, John inherits the family farm... and a dark and disturbing past."

Sounds like a bundle of laughs, doesn't it?

Actually, "Windcroft" is all very serious and rather dull in spite of having the best looking blonde that I've seen in any low-budget horror movie ever. She can even act a bit too. Her name? I have no idea without looking it up... but having done that, it's Vanessa Daniels. She hasn't done a lot of other stuff apart from being in a couple of episodes of "Law and Order", but based on her performance in "Windcroft", I wouldn't mind seeing her in another horror one day.

Having obviously skimmed the IMDb for the finer details, I noticed that a lot of the "reviewers" (I mean synopsis writers) were complaining about the acting. But what do they know anyway? The IMDb is full of 12-year-olds who can barely put one word after another let alone know what the terms they use mean. An "IMDb reviewer" complaining about "acting" usually means that he or she didn't like the characters. You'll rarely see one add an "-isation" to the word "character" either or mention "empathy". As far as the IMDb is concerned any actor/character over 30 is old and not somebody they can identify with anyway. But I digressed.

There's really nothing that wrong with the acting in "Windcroft". The script would have benefitted from having someone with better dialogue writing skills go through it and give it some polish, but the acting itself is fine. Given the subject matter (which I'm not going to spoil for you), a little bit of nudity wouldn't have harmed anything either.

The location is great (albeit far too clean for a working farm), and the camerawork is outstanding for this kind of movie. The only niggle I have with some of the shots is that the cameraman must be long-sighted. Short-sighted people make the best cameramen, just so you know, because they use the camera lens to compensate and get in closer. If you're aiming for an oppressive or claustrophic atmosphere, you can't have all that space and distance going on.

The two things which really let "Windcroft" down are the pacing and the really irritating "music" in it. I can almost allow the former because the slowness makes the movie slightly offbeat in a Lucky McKee or Angela Bettis way, but I can't forgive whoever thought it was a good idea to put that horrible cacophony in the background. All the way through, I wanted to turn down the backing track and enhance the vocals, but of course, there's no way to do that.

If someone were to re-release this movie with no "music" (I can't bring myself to remove the quotation marks because it's that bad!), some tighter editing, and whatever clever digital enhancement there is available to make it look more "filmy", "Windcroft" would be a real award winner rather than boasting ones from obscure festivals which nobody has ever heard of.

As it stands, "Windcroft" shows the potential of whoever made it, but it doesn't deliver the goods where it counts, i.e. to anyone watching it who expects either a horror movie or the "modern gothic" tale that I imagine it was meant to be.


Interview with a Serial Killer (1994)

"A well-known crime novelist has reason to believe that her new tenant is a serial killer who has brutally murdered more than a dozen women."

Also known as "White Angel", this is a low-budget/TV quality British crime drama which apparently failed to get a major distribution deal. In the UK, it can be found as a double-feature with "Urban Ghost Story" from the same company. Despite a little bit of brutality, blood, and a flash of boobs or two, it's hard to call this horror. For one thing, the kill scenes are more off camera than on.

There are real actors in this including Peter Firth and Don Henderson (in an extended cameo), but Harriet Robinson is clearly out of her depth in the lead role of Ellen Carter after only being in bit parts beforehand. I don't know if hairy-forearmed Harriet realised that she wasn't cut out for acting or if something more sinister happened, but she was never in anything else afterwards. From her accent, she's Canadian, not that it or her hirsuteness is important to the story in any way.

As a very dated character study with a twist, "Interview with a Serial Killer" isn't a bad role for Peter Firth, but the movie feels like it should be a TV episode of "Bulman" from the 1980s due to Don Henderson's occasional appearances. The late Ken Sharrock who was typecast as a policeman throughout his career makes a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance as a bank teller too.


Keepsake (2008)

"When a freak accident strands Janine on a deserted highway, a call for help soon becomes a fight for survival."

The first of the two DVDs in this collection ends with some below average torture porn in the form of "Keepsake".

In spite of a powerful start, good production values (apart from the cheaper practical effects and handheld camerawork which was trendy 5 years ago), and an actress with an unexpectedly attractive body which she doesn't mind showing, it's a real shame that a movie which promised so much goes into the realm of flashbacks and hallucinations instead of staying linear.

While it becomes obvious what the filmmakers were trying to do, the eventual twist doesn't work so well either and borders on contempt for the audience. On the plus side, at least this is a more contemporary horror movie even if it isn't a particularly memorable one.


Colour from the Dark (2008)

"A family accidentally frees something from the Earth's womb while drawing water from their well and now a sinister glow is seeping into their lives."

Debbie Rochon stars in this, but don't let that put you off. "Colour from the Dark" is the classiest thing that she's ever been in, and it's not her fault that the movie is boring. Debbie certainly doesn't mind getting naked for purely gratuitous reasons, and even though she's 40 years old here, she's still a very good looking woman.

The setting in World War 2 Italy is anachronistic but also looks the part, and the atmosphere starts off right. Unfortunately, it's the horribly slow pacing of the story (based on "The Colour Out of Space") which isn't conducive for excitement. A little bit of gore here and there tries to liven things up but without much success.

While I didn't completely hate this movie, I found it slightly confusing and very unfocused. Some very odd casting choices complicate matters unnecessarily by having quite a mix of nationalities with no explanation of how or why they are all in Italy.

Nobody has ever made a good adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story anyway, but filmmakers still keep churning out these overambitious low-budget attempts. I suppose it's better to be overambitious than to have no ambition though.


Final Remains (2005)

"Four college students, who think they are making a harmless midnight stop at the mortuary, are caught in the middle of a deadly and twisted encounter."

Originally named "Mortuary" to confuse people looking for Tobe Hooper's movie from the same year, "Final Remains" is absolute crap of the highest order. While obstensibly a satire of the "Halloween" movies, it's too ineptedly put together to be funny. Thus, even if you give it credit for recognising the slasher formulas, "Final Remains" is nothing but a z-grade copycat.

A couple of flashes of full frontal female nudity early on are just randomly placed teases and don't lead to more of the same, which is a shame considering that the lead actresses are very pretty indeed. Without them, this movie would be an even greater struggle to get through, but it's still quite an ordeal. The first half is such a mess that I was tempted to hit fast-forward myself.

At the end of the day, this isn't much of a step-up from the kind of hobby horror dreck that drunken friends make in their backyards after getting a camcorder for the first time. The camerawork is considerably better than any of those abominations, but the acting, unoriginality, and half-arsed kills are easily as bad.


My Sweet Killer (1999)

"An ex-mental patient becomes obsessed with the beautiful woman who committed suicide in his apartment."

The best way to describe "My Sweet Killer" is as a no-budget version of "Taxi Driver" but with less plot and a faux ghost story to pad the 77 minutes running time.

It's not horror but drama, and as a languid character study where you're supposed to empathise with the lead, Kirk Harris isn't interesting, charismatic, or a good enough actor to draw anyone in. There are lots of movies about mental illness like this including "Loving Walter", "May" and "Roman". The most famous is "The Machinist" (2004), but I don't think "My Sweet Killer" had any influence on it.

Since very little happens until the very end, eyecandy is provided by Stephanie Knight. Recognisable TV face Clifton Collins Jr. also makes a brief show-stealing appearance.


Dark Woods (2010)

"A couple moves to a secluded cabin to deal with the wife's terminal cancer... but an erratic young visitor forces the husband to make a deadly decision."

Finally, a movie which looks like a real movie... or at least a TV movie with decent production values and solid cinematography!

Acting-wise, "Dark Woods" is full of TV actors including Mary Kate Wiles, James Russo and Corey Mendell Parker so there's a certain level of quality throughout this which most movies in these "Midnight Horror" packs tend to lack. The leads, Tracy Coogan and John Muscarnero (who is also the writer/producer), are virtual unknowns however.

It's not all good news as the pacing is very slow and a lot of the interactions between the husband and the girl are clearly inspired by "The Crush" (1993) starring Alicia Silverstone. What makes it worse is that the name of Mary Kate Wiles' character is Alicia too!

Initially, I wouldn't call this horror as it's more of a tragic love story/psychological thriller with a lot of sexual temptation going on, but there's also a macabre twist which I'm not going to spoil for you. You can already guess that things do not end well.


It's nice to end this series of posts on a high note although I still wouldn't rate these movies together as more than average. Average is better than something which you want to take outside and set fire to though.

Unlike the other "Midnight Horror" collections, there's no subtitle or volume number this time. Another thing which used to bug me more than it should is how these packs don't form a real collection due to having so many changes in the style of artwork. In this case, I think it's meant to be an oval mirror in the middle, but it could be a wooden plaque. Who knows? I don't suppose it matters, and I no longer even care after turning my brain to mush with all these crappy movies in the last couple of weeks. I'll be glad to see the back of them.

Of course, if anyone wants to donate some money to my PayPal begging bowl (link on right), I'll happily trot off to Walmart or Kmart and rummage through their bargain bins for more. At the present time though, this is the final "Midnight Horror" pack that I own, and I won't be reviewing any more of them for a while. As awesome as I am, I can't sustain reviewing 8 crappy movies a day forever.

Next week, I'll write a couple of articles about the history of these multipack releases, but I'm not in any rush to buy the dozen or so packs which I haven't acquired.

Midnight Horror: Hatchets & Cleavers

Having looked all over the internet for a picture of this multipack before being forced to scan it myself, it looks like I might have an exclusive here for the first time in years. Despite being released last October, nobody else has reviewed "Hatchets & Cleavers" yet. There aren't even people complaining about it on Amazon!

Thus, it falls to me to break the bad news about this penultimate Echo Bridge Home Entertainment 8 movie pack. On the bright side, I only have one more of these collections to watch and write about before I'm done with them forever. Yay!


Loaded (1994)

"Seven young adults gather at a country home to shoot a horror movie. But they quickly learn that friendship, seduction and jealousy can be a very dangerous combination."

Originally called "Bloody Weekend", this is a BFI funded (and Miramax distributed) movie which stars Thandie Newton and a load of other Brits who no one has ever heard of. It's also as far from being a horror movie as possible so it makes no sense that it's part of a horror movie collection.

Basically, "Loaded" is a drama about emotionally immature art student types who alternate between poncing around while making a crappy handycam movie and talking about their relationships until, after an hour, they all get high on acid, have an accident, and go into low-rent "Shallow Grave" territory.

It's not a bad movie for what it is, and there are brief flashes of nudity, but it never really takes off. Good acting performances, and one character who sounds a lot like David Walliams, don't make up for the story being a whole lot of nothing which just fizzles out at the end. There are no scares either.


The Ridge (2005)

"A group of young adults head off to a vacation home in the mountains where they are joined by a legendary murderer known as The Ridge Runner."

Moving on from irritating British teenagers, "The Ridge" now presents a group of Americans with such a lack of communication skills that most people will turn these neurotic stuttery-gutses off in the first five minutes. If Vicky Pollard has an American equivalent, it's every character in this movie. Nothing they say makes any sense even within the internal logic of their own conversations.

Of course, what we have here is another batch of irksome cannon fodder all ready to be offed by an athletic serial killer in the most ungratifying offscreen ways that the low-budget will allow. Even for a generic slasher clone, this is an extraordinarily bad one.

Among all the lousy camerawork, improvised dialogue and non-acting, "The Ridge" is nothing but tropes, clichés and extremely alienating, pussified, teenage WASP behaviour. It also takes ages before it becomes anything other than a load of talk.


Animal Room (1995)

"When Arnold Mask is sentenced to isolation in a controversial program at his high school called 'The Animal Room', he is pushed to the brink by a gang of bullies."

"Animal Room" is another drama which doesn't belong in a horror collection. Just because it contains a brief discussion of "Night of the Living Dead" is too much of a stretch. By that token, it won't be long before "Juno" appears in a "Midnight Horror" multipack for mentioning "Suspiria" and "The Wizard of Gore".

Despite being almost as gritty as "Scum" (1979), "Animal Room" is very much a product of '90s America, a lot more punches are pulled, and it's hard to sympathise with any of the characters. Think "The Breakfast Club" with an R-rating and aspirations to be more "cult" than it really is. A home-invasion scene borrows so heavily from "A Clockwork Orange" that all claims to originality are lost at one fell swoop.

Once again, this isn't a bad film, but it probably only remains in print because it stars Matthew Lillard as a psychopathic bully and Neil Patrick Harris as his victim. There are some great performances (especially from Gabriel Olds as a half-way house looks-wise between Brandon Lee and James Franco), and a fair bit of violence and swearing. Unfortunately, it's all rather dated, uneven, and cringeworthy with it.

I enjoyed the novelty value of "Animal Room" being a movie that I'd never seen or heard of before, but it's not something I'd ever want to watch again. Although it's very brief and you don't see anything, the animal cruelty to a rabbit has no place in my entertainment.


Dirt Boy (2001)

"While reading the best-selling serial killer book 'Dirt Boy', Matty Matthews begins to make mysterious connections between the story and a small Cape Cod community."

I don't often do this, but I skipped most of this one on fast-forward because it's boring. Maybe I'll watch it one day after I've had my brain damaged by a stroke or something.

"Dirt Boy" is only a self-referential crime thriller with the gimmick of being a story within a story anyway, and it's not something that I could ever get into. Slow-moving, slightly comedic, murder-mystery movies starring uncharismatic leads simply aren't my cup of tea.


Hollywood Scarefest Premiere Edition (2010)

"A collection of award-winning shorts from the annual Hollywood Scarefest premiere."

Whenever I see this kind of short movie labelled as "award winning", it makes me wonder what exactly that award was for. In every case here, the award was presumably for being a crappy film school project.

The 6 shorts are:
"Vision" - a futuristic eye transplant with a criminal rehabilitation twist.
"Horla" - based loosely on the short story by Guy de Maupassant, an artist gets interfered with by some kind of succubus. (In black and white.)
"Recharge" - a dreary sci-fi about a quality inspector in a battery factory who kills people in gas masks for no apparent reason. (Also in black and white.)
"Cellular" - badly filmed images of people talking on cellphones which looks as if the camera was damaged when they made it. It turns into body horror as addiction causes the phones to embed themselves on the users' faces.
"Last Stop Station" - a tabloid photographer stops at a "gas station"... literally! Lots of dry ice and a couple of thieving Grim Reapers appear. (Black and white again.)
"The Suffering: Static" - a moderately attractive blonde falls asleep in front of the TV and sees herself getting murdered on it, but which side of the screen is reality?
"Fait D'hiver" - a Dutch horror with subtitles about a bald businessman stuck in traffic whose phonecall home reveals his wife to be having an affair. The twist reveals that he called the wrong number.

"Fait D'hiver" is a nicely reworked "Tales of the Unexpected" episode and is the best of a bad lot.


Green River (2008)

"Haunted by her sister's mysterious disappearance, Charisma and her friend Allison, return to Green River for answers."

The aerial shots of a car driving along a road during the opening credits look like an homage to "Burnt Offerings" or "The Shining", but that's as good as it gets. Everything goes downhill once the story begins.

Nothing happens for the first half of the movie other than a couple of uncomfortable-looking city girls get intimidated by the mere existence of hillbillies in a backwoods setting where much prettier girls have already disappeared. Red herrings, plot holes, and overuse of the "Chekhov's gun" trope abound, not that whoever made this movie understood how to use any of those devices properly anyway.

The camerawork is nice, and there's lots of scenery to look at, but all attempts at creating a tense atmosphere fall flat. From the constant expression of disgust on the stressy brunette Alison's face, blonde Charisma must have been farting next to her continuously out of spite. Sexier leads or some hot lesbian action might have made things more interesting. Hiking though woods and a failed bit of rock climbing provide a miniscule amount of characterisation but far more padding than is necessary.

Once the girls kidnap a suspicious game warden, the movie changes gear into the kind of "torture porn" that the Hallmark Channel would make if they did torture porn. I have to admit that Kristina Hughes' performance as an increasingly more horrible psycho-bitch is kind of entertaining, but her acting is still pretty bad.

I suppose there are worse ways of spending 90 minutes in front of the television, although I can't immediately say what they are without digressing far too much. The ending makes absolutely no sense at all.


Followed Home (2010)

"Four young adults witness a deadly attack during a weekend trip to the mountains. But the tragic experience continues as the killer follows them home."

As soon as the hot brunette during the prologue told whoever was on the other end of her phone, "the cabin down the street gets super loud" that was nearly the end for me. The correct word is "VERY' or "REALLY" not "SUPER" (ugh!) unless you are a Japanese marketing executive. Oh God, I hate this "super" nonsense that's crept into common usage via YouTubers from the West Coast in the last three years. Fortunately, the hot brunette then gets stabbed by a masked attacker so I was able to continue my appraisal of this low-budget crap with the satisfaction that someone else hated her grammar too.

But having suffered through another hour and a quarter of even poorer dialogue and lazier acting, I don't have anything good to say about this lacklustre slasher. The attack scenes are some of the worst that have ever been filmed, the jump scares aren't scary, and I really wish that I had switched "Followed Home" off when I initially wanted to. Five minutes showing one of the girls running round a park with terrible background music tested my patience beyond human endurance, and that's really saying something considering how drawn-out and tedious the rest of the movie is.

Apart from the first girl who makes a second appearance before allegedly dying in the hospital, there aren't even any pretty actresses (or actors, if you are that way inclined) to ogle in this. If I wanted to see girl-next-door types with highstreet tans, I could do that by going to McDonald's or sticking my head out of the window for free rather than buying a camcorder movie starring them.

There's an extra scene during the credits which will satisfy anyone who hates YouTubers (and an "outtake" at the very end), but frustratingly for anyone who cares, the identity and motivation of the killer is never revealed.


The Killing Mind (1991)

"A psychological profiler attempts to solve a case she witnessed as a child—the graphic murder of a woman dressed as a ballerina."

As much as I used to lust over Stephanie Zimbalist, this old PG-13 TV movie of hers isn't her finest hour. To be fair, nothing could ever compare with the level of fame she achieved during "Remington Steele" although I think she was at her most beautiful in "The Awakening" (1980).

While there's nothing fundamentally wrong with "The Killing Mind", and it's a chance to see Danielle Harris and Lee Tergesen in earlier roles, it's a cop movie not a horror. As far as TV movies go though, I found it dated but quite enjoyable.


One minor gripe about this collection is that the order of the titles printed from top to bottom on the two DVDs doesn't match up to their order from left to right on the menus. Since the movies are still on the same disc that they are meant to be, it doesn't make a lot of difference unless you are writing a review, but it's sloppy work.

From my most recent visit to Wal-mart, I can confirm that the $5 bargain bin has quite a few of these packs in it. Amazon, however, claims to only have one left in stock so be quick if you want a new one. You'd have to be very silly indeed to buy that with the best price for a second-hand one being only a penny (plus shipping), but some people are odd like that.

Not to be too negative about Echo Bridge Home Entertainment multipacks, but you do get what you pay for. If all you want is some below average horror entertainment, I wholeheartedly recommend "Hatchets & Cleavers" as the perfect example. The link is above if you need it. As usual, fans of good horror movies should look elsewhere.