Cuckoo boasted a very strong trailer that exhibited all the hallmarks of A24-esque "high-art-horror." The film starts off strong with gorgeous cinematography that perfectly displayed the Bavarian Alps exteriors and warm wood-panneled hotel interiors. In addition I was initially intrigued by monster/antagonist. A creature capable of creating a time dilation loop via rhythmic screeching. Unfortunately, as the film progresses much of this initial promise starts to fizzle out. The horror sequences aren't very scary, the mystery is fairly predictable, and characters don't have much depth to be explored. While not fully to blame, Hunter Schafer's character Gretchen does a particularly poor job of anchoring the film. Her performance is not much to write home about. Worst yet, writer/director Tillman Singer has written Gretchen as a fairly unlikable character who seems to go out of their way to make the worst decision possible at every given opportunity. 4.5/10 Video review below 👇 https://youtu.be/vYIsNUEEddA

"Have you figured it out yet?" -Mr. Reed

Two young, Mormon missionaries visit the home of Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant) to give him more information on their Church. What starts as a theological discussion turns into a game of belief, disbelief, life, and death.

What Works:

I love the turn that Hugh Grant has made in his career. He's been playing strange and wild characters more often as of late. This is a role that is certainly against type for him, but it's obvious he had a blast in the role. For being the antagonist, Mr. Reed still manages to be a fun character and shines any time he is on screen.

Chloe East and Sophie Thatcher are no slouches either. They play the two Mormon missionaries and both of them do a great job. They play very different characters with surprisingly different perspectives considering that they are both missionaries. They have great rapport with Grant and their conversations are my favorite part of the film.

The dialogue is pretty on point in this movie, and I wouldn't exactly call it subtle, but that's fine. The first half of this movie is mostly just dialogue between the three main characters and they're having a theological discussion that turns scary. It's fascinating dialogue and I loved watching these characters just talk. Mr. Reed manages to become very scary in the first half, but it's mostly through his dialogue, not his actions. I found it all fascinating and I was thoroughly engrossed by the first half of the movie.

Finally, while the second half has a few problems, one thing it does very well is keeps you guessing. I had no idea where this movie was going to take us and how we were going to get there. It kept making me second guess myself as it went along and I found the conclusion of the movie satisfying.

What Sucks:

I do think the movie loses a bit of steam in the second half. Once they choose a door, we spend a lot of time in the first chamber the girls reach. I would argue that too much time is spent there and it hurt the pacing of the movie a bit.

Finally, I think the second half could have been longer. We spend a long time building up to the choice between doors and I think the movie could have done more exploring about what Mr. Reed has down there. There was the potential to do more that I think was missed.

Verdict:

Heretic is a genuinely thrilling movie with interesting dialogue, fantastic acting, and dynamic characters. The first half of the movie is absolutely wonderful. The second half has pacing issues and doesn't fully realize its potential, but the ending makes the journey absolutely worth it. Heretic has definitely got it going on.

8/10: Really Good

I usually hate shorts. I remember watching an award-winning short that was just a guy sitting around a campfire for 15 minutes and a big hairy goat’s leg stepping into frame just before credits. Screw off. That’s intentionally wasting my time.

And that’s not even the worst - I’ve seen seven-figure budget shorts just go “oh I can’t think of a satisfying ending so let’s roll credits just as something is about to happen.” It’s a common trope in shorts. They do it so often part of me thinks they’re being forced to by whoever decided every defused bomb must stop at 1 second.

But the V/H/S series is different: each movie is a Raatma of shorts that has a beginning, middle, and end, all in competition to be as shocking and memorable as possible.

So how does this one Raatma up?

V/H/S/94 (2021) (IMDB link) summary:

A police S.W.A.T. team investigate a mysterious VHS tape and discover a sinister cult that has pre-recorded material which uncovers a nightmarish conspiracy.

First we start with the framing device for the movie: police are storming what they think is a drug den, but is actually a place where the cursed video tapes in question are being played. They find many corpses of people who’ve gouged their own eyes out.

Then you have the greatest short ever made. Melting faces and black goo and the world’s best monster design, HAIL RAATMA.

Then a woman is trapped in a funeral home while a mangled corpse slowly comes back to life. It’s cozy and chill and gross in a very fun way.

Then, unwilling cyborg experiments vs a SWAT team. Friggin sweet.

Then some militia scumbags plan a terrorist attack using exploding vampire blood, and are about as intelligent about it as you might expect. Bang bang bang kaboom!

And then we kind of wrap up the police raid. Basically.

Lots of violence, action, gore, excitement, and Raatma times.

Should you see it? Meh, I don’t know of course you should see it what the Raatma are you doing reading this go watch it now! Cancel your dinner date, call in sick, skip out on chemo, and watch this!!

Or don’t, I’m not your mom. But everyone will enjoy this unless they just hate horror movies in general. You don’t hate horror do you? Comment “hail Raatma” if you’re a good little monster.

The Film A Day full playlist

Next up: Afflicted (2013) which is NOT about COVID so you can chill.

I’m 42 movies into a found footage film a day and this, by far, is the most polished one up to this point. It may not have Cloverfield money behind it but it definitely has talent.

But it doesn’t matter if a movie is “polished” or even “objectively good”. We’ve seen over and over in Film A Day professionally produced works that, on paper, seem flawless - and are completely forgettable.

So is this one of them?

The Houses October Built (2014) (IMDB link) summary:

Beneath the fake blood and cheap masks of countless haunted house attractions across the country, there are whispers of truly terrifying alternatives. Looking to find an authentic, blood-curdling good fright for Halloween, five friends set off on a road trip in an RV to track down these underground Haunts. Just when their search seems to reach a dead end, strange and disturbing things start happening and it becomes clear that the Haunt has come to them…

We follow a bunch of college aged folk drive around in an RV, go to bars, and visit big haunted house attractions. It’s comfy and casual for a long time, with the most interesting bits coming from interviews with real haunt actors.

But gradually the lines get blurred between safe spaces and “haunts”, things get a bit dangerous, and we build to one hell of a final act.

I know some people struggle with the first part of this movie - they keep waiting for something to happen while we lay the groundwork for what’s to come. Personally, it’s my favorite part, because it’s real. They’re visiting real haunted attractions and interviewing real scare actors.

Plus, the group doing some bar hopping took me back to my own drunken college year memories. Good times.

And nobody can really argue with the finale. It’s tense, unsettling, and overall fantastic - if a little disjointed.

Should you watch it? This is likely to become a personal favourite of yours as it is mine, but if you find you’re just too anxious to get to the super spooky stuff you can jump ahead to maybe the last half hour when things really ramp up. It’s a better movie if you don’t, but a slow burn isn’t for everyone.

The Film A Day playlist

Next up: V/H/S/94. Isn’t that the one I hated? Oh wait no that was “Viral”… so many of these… okay now I’m pumped! V! H! S! V! H! S!

I found this to be a mixed bag movie that I watched. The story is nothing too special with it being similar to The Hunger Games, with people having to survive in order to live. It's pretty predictable and doesn't do anything interesting in it. Also, it is run by three elderly people wearing aristocrats' clothes, which is both weird and didn't get it. The movie mostly characters to face off against each deadly clown and manage to defeat them one by one. I found the action scenes to be a mixed bag with some parts that are enjoyable to watch, while some of it is done pretty badly on how it was filmed. I found the dialogue to be overuse and obnoxious throughout. Also, the movie doesn't do a great job with character build-up, and some of them don't have a strong build-up to them. The way the movie ends is abrupt and disappointing. As I mentioned before, the characters lack any interesting traits to them and are one-dimensional. But there are some exceptions in it. The best character in the movie is Doom Head, who has a sinister tone with him at the opening. He gives off an unsettling vibe to him, and the performance by Richard Brake is the best performance in the movie. As for the special effects goes, it is mostly decent. The movie does contain graphics kills to be found in it and is brutal on how the clowns die in the movie. I also like the costume that the clowns wear in the movie that gives variety to each of them. But I wish there more variety to the maze since it mostly looks the same throughout.

31 has one cool villain and some decent effects, but the movie isn't that good or memorable to rewatch again.

Horror Roulette - Drag Me to Hell : First Viewing Video: https://youtu.be/nKaT8ZKgdu8?si=DHC9-QTyvLnbTy6w Skip to 2:45 for review

Below is the written script used for video. Some aspects have been changed for a more fluid delivery so if there are grammatical errors, go easy on me.

Review: So this was interesting. I’ll start by saying that going into this film, the extent of knowledge I had on Sam Raimi’ filmography began and ended with his marvel movies. Now his Spider-Man Trilogy is a favorite of mine, which is something I’m sure I’ll express in a future video, and I even appreciated his Doctor Strange Film for what it was. The horror elements he brings in his camerawork and directing is really impressive even if Disnified. Something I always appreciate about Raimis filmmaking is his movement with the camera and his directing style as a whole. The Spider-Man films set a precedent for superhero films and a lot of that is credit to Raimi, but before I let that tangent grow more than it should, my point being is I have yet to truly experience ‘Sam Raimi, the Horror director’. Now before the horror community crucifies me in the comments, I do think it's important to note that I’m waiting for Evil Dead to be selected in Horror Roulette, so I can give the most genuine reaction at the time. But what did I think of this PG-13 Horror flick? UHHHHHHH it’s um. Yanno there’s a lot to like about it. As previously mentioned, my biggest focus going in was this film as an inclusion in Raimi’s filmography. And with that I have to say he does continue to impress. I felt the biggest highlights was how Sam shot the horror sequences in particular. His camera movements and blocking in this film does a great job when building suspense and genuine terror at moments, or at least the direct threat of evil. There’s sequences like Christine being cursed in the parking garage by MrsGanush that I feel has genuinely great scares through the use of shadows and blocking and other super fun film buzzwords I’ll use to convince you I know what I'm talking about :) Or later during the curse when Christine has a vision of Mrs. Ganush appearing in her bed, really really creepy sequences, super effectively shot. Now to stay on the path of positive for just a bit, I also just think the overall premise of the film begins really strong. You have your main protagonist, a businesswoman trying to earn the respect of her boss, and by doing this is now the victim of some ancient gypsy curse. Pretty fucking rad if you ask me. Now… my tone is certainly gonna switch just a little but stay with me. I really enjoyed the film for about the first 1.5-2 acts. I think it starts strong with the ideas it brings and the horror begins being really effective, but then the ending kinda gets to the levels of bat-shit. And that’s fine, I mean I enjoy Halloween 6 from time to time, but I much more enjoyed the set up than the pay off for this one. I also think it’s important to note that this film has a ton of camp which is staple for Raimi to my understanding. This wasn’t an issue for me and I don’t want to credit that to the bat shitery I mentioned. No, the aspects of the film that I particularly found silly was just how the stakes in this film increase exponentially throughout the film, and the scares grow more and more out there with some of them being effective while others were not really. The majority of the horror sequences I didn’t enjoy in this, I can point to one particular reason as to why and thats the CGI. I try not to be the guy that complains about poor CGI but when you have sequences like the Mrs. Ganush’s arm in Christines throat I can’t go without at least saying it’s dated. It’s especially frustrating when this film HAS physical props and practical effects and are effective in their use. The overall story is also super messy, especially with the inclusion Rham Jas, a hole in the wall fortune teller played by Dileep Rao, who has all the knowledge of the curse and spiritual threats that Christine has to face, but tells the information to her in fragments and has connections to the demon bounty hunter woman from the beginning, who also just kinda has to get thrown in the the third act of this film for the climax. Yet even so, I can’t say I was ever checked out of this film except for one specific element that I think was the biggest distraction for me, and that was the entire subplot around Justin Long’s Character Clay. Clay is Christine’s successful, generationally wealthy, supportive boyfriend who begins not really understanding what Christine is going through but never really negative towards HER about it. He more so just wants to understand and what I would consider as supportive even if skeptic. They try to make him seem shitty by how skeptical and I guess you could say disrespectful he is during Christine’s Initial visit with Rham, but even so his character’s inclusion never bothered me. That is until one scene where Christine has an outburst as she’s being teased by the demon curse while at dinner with Clay’s family. Clay then kinda leave’s the picture for a while, as Christine further investigates and finds out she needs like $10,000 to reach the demon bounty hunter lady, sells all her possessions to go so, this movie get’s fucking wild, and i’m not even mentioning the fucking kitten thing. And when she’s about to give up because she just short of the money she needs, fuckin CLay swoops back in and is just like “here’s the money, oh btw I believe you.”

COOL GUY! But other than that element, I never officially checked myself out of this film even through it’s silliness. Other factors at play is there’s some stiff acting at play specifically from our lead, but there’s enough good scares in this and genuinely great and horrific scenes to make this one worth a revisit at some point. While on the topic I do intend on putting films from the first watch slice into the rewatch slice, after some time has passed of course. I think it could be fun to return to a film and catalog any changes in my opinions. The circumstances around this were nice too, I of course watched it with my girlfriend which is always nice. And while I don’t think she particularly loved it, I think it was a fun experience for the both of us. That final scene especially had us going, iykyk. But that’s about all I really gotta say about this film, I think it could be especially fun in a group setting, not a film that's gonna knock your socks off but a fun ride nonetheless. Grade: C

Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever (2009)

Rated R for strong bloody violence and gore, disturbing gross content, sexuality/nudity and pervasive language (unrated version reviewed)

Score: 2 out of 5

Before he became one of the most beloved horror filmmakers working today, Ti West was a young hotshot talent with a couple of indie horror flicks under his belt itching for his big break. And in 2009, he made two films that each promised to put him on the map. One of them, The House of the Devil, was widely acclaimed, and in hindsight not only marked him as a filmmaker to watch but foreshadowed the coming 2010s boom of "elevated horror" with its emphasis on slow-burn chills and throwbacks to '70s/'80s vintage Satanic Panic flicks. Then there's this, a sequel to Eli Roth's 2002 body horror splatterfest Cabin Fever, which at first glance might've looked like the sort of film -- a sequel to a well-received mainstream hit that helped put its own director on the map -- that would do more for West's career than another little indie, and I imagine that this was no small part of the reason why he signed on. Unfortunately, the experience of making it turned out to be so wretched, with much of the film being reshot and edited by the producers against West's wishes, that he tried to give it the Alan Smithee treatment and have his name removed from the credits, failing only because he wasn't yet a member of the Directors' Guild of America. To this day, he has disowned the film and regards it as a black spot on his filmography.

I'm telling this story because this is another one of those movies that I went into knowing it was gonna suck, and yet curious as to how bad it actually was. I rewatched the original Cabin Fever first, and it still holds up as the sort of movie it set out to be, a nihilistic, darkly comedic gorefest in which a bunch of jackasses get what they all have coming to them. Say what you will about Roth's tendencies as a filmmaker, but he knows how to make a flat-out sadist show and do it well. While this movie has moments that worked, from its icky gore effects to some of its more creative touches, and I don't doubt that West's vision was heavily tampered with by the studio, I also wonder if he was the right person to even direct this in the first place given that his tendencies making horror movies stand almost wholly opposed to Roth's. The film tries to replicate the black comedy feel and hate-sink characters of the original, but it also tries to make its protagonists likable enough for me to root for them, and fails on both counts by falling into a hazy middle ground where I couldn't bring myself to root for or against the people on screen. It doesn't have a story so much as it has a series of events, and while I get the tone it was going for in how it tried to convey this series of events with the same nihilistic glee that Roth brought to the first movie, it ultimately felt like it pulled its punches in all the wrong places even as it brought the gore. Ultimately, it's not completely irredeemable, but it's not something I can recommend, even if you're a fan of West or the first movie.

This film follows on right where the last one left off, with water from the lake contaminated by flesh-eating bacteria bottled and sold at a high school where the students are getting ready for prom. Right away, I tuned out about thirty minutes in once it became clear that all of these characters were one-note teen sex comedy stereotypes: the handsome but nerdy protagonist Jonathan, his horny best friend Alex, the "good girl" Cassie who the protagonist has a crush on, Cassie's rich and popular boyfriend Marc, the mean popular girl Sandy, the slutty girl Liz (who we later find out also works as a stripper), and the disapproving faculty. None of these characters were interesting, and even the ones I was supposed to like just came off as assholes, most notably John when he gives Cassie a big speech about how she's too good for that jerk Marc and really deserves a nice guy like him, a speech that felt like a bitter incel rant and yet we're supposed to agree with given how Marc is portrayed as a vile, jealous bully throughout the film. (It didn't help that, while none of the cast here was particularly great, Marc's actor gave a truly terrible performance, one of the least convincing bullies I've ever seen in a movie.) The film was trying to give its victims a bit more depth than the usual teen horror flick, but it did so by bringing in tired clichés from a different genre instead and doing nothing interesting with them that other, more straightforward teen sex comedies like American Pie and Superbad didn't do better.

And when it wasn't focusing on the kids, it was focusing on Winston the "party cop", the one returning character from the first movie (barring a brief cameo in the opening). As a minor supporting character who we only got in small doses, Winston in the first movie was tolerable and hilarious, a bumbling dumbass who feels like he became a cop so he could abuse the perks of his job to score drugs and get laid, thus explaining some of the terrible police response to the events of the first movie. Here, however, he's one of the heroes, suddenly gaining a burst of intelligence to put together the source of the deadly disease burning through the school and trying to warn his bosses and contain it... all while still otherwise being the same party-hard dumbass he was before. As a guy who we're supposed to root for to save the day, Winston wasn't funny or cool, but simply annoying, somebody who contributes nothing to the film and doesn't even do much to help, once again causing more problems than he solves for everyone else. He suffered from the same problem that the teenagers had, in that trying to give him more depth as a character paradoxically made me like him less, since a key part of what made the first movie work was that the characters were all a bunch of pieces of shit whose deaths would be no great loss. The subplot with the soldiers in gas masks and hazmat gear who lock down the school during prom had the potential to be interesting, but all they do is serve as menacing, faceless bad guys who explain why the remaining uninfected teenagers can't just leave the school.

I will give this movie credit for the brief moments that worked. As in the first film, the special effects were top-notch, giving viewers graphic scenes of human bodies decaying and falling apart. Highlights include the truck driver who starts dying in the middle of a restaurant, one kid who got infected through oral sex whose dick is now falling off, a graphic twist on the "prom baby" trope, and of course, the big obligatory homage to Carrie during the prom sequence where nearly everybody winds up infected by the tainted punch bowl. The soundtrack too was on-point (can't fault a horror movie using the theme to Prom Night), and there are lots of moments of visual flair that hint at the version of this movie that Ti West was trying to make, most notably the animated opening and closing credits sequences depicting how the infection spreads. Once the second half of the film drops the terrible attempts at making a teen comedy and turns into the sort of grim body horror flick that the first one was, I started having some actual fun with it as I shut off my brain and just enjoyed some gnarly carnage. This movie's better qualities beyond the gore feel like they came out of a different movie entirely, leaving me wondering just how far the reshoots went, especially given what West has said about his experience working on it. He's said in interviews that he was trying to make his own version of a John Waters movie, and occasionally, I could see that poke through, especially with the darkly comic ending at a strip club.

The Bottom Line

Ti West has disowned this movie for a reason. Even fans of his are advised to skip it, a deeply compromised film that feels like an insipid 2000s teen sex comedy mixed with a fairly forgettable splatter film. It wasn't outright terrible, but it's already a movie I'm forgetting I watched.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/10/review-cabin-fever-2-spring-fever-2009.html>

I’ve been thinking about the movie since i left the cinemas, it was an amazing experience, but damn…

Poor Skye.

The smile deity went soooo hard on her. It was toying with it’s other victims compared to what it did to her, practically having fun, taking its sweet time finishing kills.

But it was on a MISSION with Skye, she was literally being tortured out of her mind, the deity knew Skye was probably its only chance to do real damage, so it didn’t take any risks. It took complete control at first oppurtunity, on the third day after she met up with the nurse as it didn’t want the nurse interfering.

Her whole reality become an illusion after the third day while Joel was still concious on the sixth day.

It only briefly gave her back control on stage, to then completely break her. This MF needs an ass whooping on the third film!!

Smile 2 (2024)

Rated R for strong bloody violent content, grisly images, language throughout and drug use

Score: 5 out of 5

Smile 2 is the movie that the first Smile should've been. The scares are bigger, badder, and more effective, the central story is better written and more focused even as it dives much deeper into the idea that we can't trust what we're seeing on screen, the direction is far more stylish, kinetic, and exciting, and it's all anchored by what ought to be a career-making performance by Naomi Scott. The funny thing is, not only was this written and directed by the same guy who did the first movie, Parker Finn, but on the surface the two films hit most of the same story beats, and yet this sequel pulls them off far more effectively. It feels like Finn went back and took a close look at the first movie to see what worked and what didn't, and made a sequel that fixed all of its biggest problems while still keeping everything enjoyable about it, its more glamorous protagonist and setting doing nothing to detract from how raw it felt and in some ways making it feel even more intense. Even though, just from the premise and how the first movie played out, I was able to figure out exactly how this one was gonna end well in advance, that simply had me anticipating something grand rather than feeling like I'd spoiled the movie for myself. It's everything a great horror sequel should be, and a film that will probably make my list of the best films of 2024.

(Also, spoilers for the first Smile. You have been warned.)

The film starts right where its predecessor left off, to the point of opening with a "six days later" tag without any context, as if to say "hey, you've seen the first one, we don't need to tell you what's going on here." >!Joel, who at the end of the first movie became the new bearer of the curse after a possessed Rose killed herself in front of him, decides to kill two birds with one stone: not only pass on the curse, but pass it on to a genuine scumbag in the form of a murderous drug dealer by killing one of his fellow crooks right in front of him.!< The whole thing goes horribly wrong and ends with >!both Joel and the criminal!< dead, but he did manage to pass on the curse to one Lewis Fregoli, a guy who was at the dealer's place at the time to score some drugs. Lewis is himself a dealer -- and more specifically, the dealer for Skye Riley, a Grammy-winning pop superstar with a long history of substance abuse issues, including a pill addiction that she developed after being badly injured in a car accident that killed her actor boyfriend Paul Hudson and left her with scars and chronic pain ever since. A week later, when Skye goes to Lewis to score some Vicodin, a deranged Lewis kills himself right in front of her and makes her the entity's new target.

Unlike the first film, where the source of Rose's trauma felt like something that was tacked on to the point of becoming an unwelcome distraction, this one always knows exactly what Skye's problems are: addiction and the perils of stardom. Skye's life is miserable behind the scenes, in many ways because she's a rich and famous celebrity. She has a drug problem, she has body image issues, she has to deal with stalkers, her schedule is micromanaged by her momager Elizabeth, her relationship with her fellow celebrity Paul is shown to have been a mutually destructive one before he died, she has to watch her every move lest she face the wrath of a ravenous tabloid press, and the entity preys on all of this. If this movie has an overarching message, it's that fame and fortune are not worth it (with a side of "drugs are bad, m'kay?"), with the entity's torment of Skye framed from start to finish as a classic celebrity meltdown straight out of TMZ or Perez Hilton. She snaps at her mother and her assistants as she suspects the entity lurking everywhere around her, fan meet-and-greets and charity events turn into living nightmares as she veers wildly off-script, her dressing room is trashed, and in the third act, she gets sent to spend a night in a rehab center before her big concert. While Skye's fashions may have been inspired by Lady Gaga, her behavior will be unsettlingly familiar to anybody who remembers the 2000s and how celebrities like Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton were covered.

And they found an outstanding talent to convey this meltdown in the form of Naomi Scott. At every step of Skye's journey, I fully bought into Scott as a pop diva on the edge of a complete breakdown, to the point that the film barely even needed to show any supernatural occurrences in order to convey that she was not well. Much like last time, this movie is at its best when it's putting us in the shoes of somebody who feels like she's going insane, and just like Sosie Bacon, it wouldn't have worked without Scott. She had to do a lot of heavy lifting here in terms of acting and emotion, and she made it look easy. What's more, I didn't just buy Scott as a troubled heroine, I bought her as a pop star. Lots of movies about pop music feel as though they were made by people who are clueless about the genre, often settling into tired tropes while the music they have their main characters perform is often insipid garbage that would flop like Katy Perry or Justin Timberlake's last couple of albums if they tried to release it in real life. Here, however, I came away with the impression that, in another life, Scott (who has a background as a singer, including in the Disney Channel movie Lemonade Mouth and in the live-action version of Aladdin) could've become a pop star instead of an actress. There are multiple scenes dedicated just to Skye's music, all of it performed by Scott herself, and it is legitimately good, as are the performances she puts on at multiple points in the film, where she feels like she has the kind of star power that pop careers are made of. This is the kind of larger-than-life performance that makes stars out of actors, and while it's long been a cliché to say that horror never gets recognition from "professional" critics or award shows, I hope to the heavens that this isn't the case here, and that Scott gets some juicy roles after this.

The fact that the film's story was so on point in what it was satirizing and commenting on is all the more remarkable given how much more it leans into the idea that we can't trust what we're seeing on screen. Building on the first film having a protagonist who increasingly could not trust her own senses as the entity caused her to hallucinate, it's strongly hinted that many scenes in this movie, even outside of its more overt horror sequences, are not happening precisely as Skye and the viewers are perceiving them. I don't want to give much more away than that, but I can say that, once it became clear(ish) what was actually happening and what the entity was doing to Skye, I had to reevaluate large chunks of the wild events that took place before then. Amidst all the creeping dread, effective jump scares, shockingly potent gore effects, and the possibility that anybody around Skye might be the entity, this was the part of the film that freaked me out the most. Behind the camera, Parker Finn also shot the hell out of this, taking full advantage of the bigger budget to go wild with far more kinetic and stylish camera work. This was a damn fine-looking movie to watch, making use of long one-shot takes, sweeping shots, horror sequences that felt like the creepiest music videos this side of late-night '90s MTV (especially one bit in Skye's apartment that calls back to a scene of a dance rehearsal earlier in the film), and simply a level of production polish that indicates that everybody involved knew what they were doing and acted accordingly. It all builds to a hell of a climax that I saw coming the moment I learned this movie's premise, but which felt like exactly how it needed to go -- and which set up one hell of a Smile 3.

The Bottom Line

Smile 2 is a dream sequel, a movie that fixes every problem I had with its predecessor, keeps what worked about it, and ultimately winds up as one of the best movies of the year. Not much more to say than that. If you're even remotely in the mood for something scary this Halloween (or, frankly, at any other time of year), this should be near the top of your list of movies to watch.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/10/review-double-feature-smile-2022-and.html as part of a double feature with the first film>

I found this to be a pretty good killer spider movie that I watched. The story isn't the strongest, with people getting attacked by spiders that keep coming. But the movie is built up pretty well with including the characters and the spiders reproducing, and more spiders come out. While the opening seems similar to Arachnophobia with the spider coming from a different country and killing one guy, it's much different compared to that movie. If you have arachnophobia, then this is not a movie for you. I never like bugs at all, and I creep out on how much spiders you see throughout the movie. The movie becomes suspenseful with the characters trying to survive against these spiders and how they can show up anywhere in the building. There's also a quarantine that happened with the characters' lock inside the building, but it never explained well if these spiders cause a serious infection or what makes them so big in the first place. The climax itself isn't anything too big, but it is fine for the most part. The characters themselves aren't really that bad, but none of them are that outstanding. Most of them play one trait in the movie and are one-dimensional throughout. I do like how we see them before the spiders attack to show who they are and their relationship between them. The movie use a lot of spiders in it, and they executed really well. It shows how dangerous these spider are on how many are there, what happened if someone get bitten by it, and the sizes they grow into. I also like the setting of a rundown apartment on how gritty the atmosphere is and is not a safe place to be trapped in.

Infested is a pretty good killer spider movie that isn't the best, but it is a worth watch if you don't have arachnophobia.

Smile (2022)

Rated R for strong violent content and grisly images, and language

Score: 3 out of 5

Smile is a good movie, but one that I feel like I should've liked a lot more given how much it had been hyped up. It felt bloated in a lot of ways, and while it tried to tell a story about a woman who's never gotten over the childhood trauma caused by her terrible mother, it never gave that story the attention it needed, to the point that its focus in the third act felt almost like it came out of nowhere. That said, it's also a clear-cut example of how rock-solid technical craftsmanship can salvage a movie from an otherwise bad script. It's dripping in atmosphere and mood, it's filled with unsettling imagery and scary moments, it manages to create a feeling that one is slowly going insane, and the cast is excellent, particularly Sosie Bacon as its haunted heroine. It's a movie that other people seem to have liked a lot more than I did, but even with its problems, it was still enjoyable, a film that, even if it never quite manages to capture the depth of the "elevated horror" films it's clearly imitating, still manages to be a scary ride that nails their aesthetics, tone, and frights.

The film starts with Rose Cotter, a therapist at a psychiatric hospital, watching a patient named Laura Weaver freak out in front of her, talking about being stalked by a malevolent entity, before slitting her own throat. The scariest part: after the freakout, Laura suddenly developed a gigantic smile on her face that she held until the moment she died. What's more, Laura, a promising graduate student, had no history of mental health problems until about a week ago when she watched her professor kill himself right in front of her. And now, Rose is suddenly seeing the same entity that Laura described. Doing some digging with her detective ex-boyfriend Joel, Rose finds that Laura was just the latest in a chain of mysterious suicides that, as she soon realizes, are the result of a curse, one that is now coming for her.

Notice how nowhere in that plot description did I mention Rose's mother. The opening scene is a flashback to Rose as a young girl watching her mother, who had been an abusive, mentally ill drug addict, dying of an overdose, and the third act especially tries to bring Rose's relationship with her mother to the forefront of the story. And yet, from my perspective it felt far more minor than the film seemed to think it was. There's a message board I frequent where we have a running joke about a cliché that we've seen come up in a lot of modern horror movies: "TROWmah", the cause of all the protagonists' problems turning out to be trauma buried in their backstories, usually related to their families. There have been a lot of horror movies in the last ten years like The Babadook and Hereditary that have done this kind of drama well, but there are also many lesser films that have fumbled such, and this is one of the latter, feeling like it shoehorned in a traumatic backstory for Rose simply because that's what modern supernatural horror movies do. For much of the film, Rose's mother barely figures into the events. We're told by Laura that the entity stalking her can take the form of anyone, including people who have died, but only towards the end does it take the form of Rose's mother. The final confrontation taking place at Rose's dilapidated childhood home, her metaphorically confronting all of her bottled-up feelings about her mother, was visually exciting but felt unearned as a result.

The worst part is that there was a far better movie sitting right there under the surface, one that could've used the entity as a metaphor for a completely different problem in Rose's life that the first two acts do, in fact, very much establish. We're shown throughout the film that Rose is a workaholic, clocking in 70-hour weeks at the hospital, being nagged by her sister Holly because she's willing to miss her nephew's birthday to work weekends, and slowly driving away her fiancé Trevor and her family. Instead of childhood family trauma, this movie would've worked a lot better if the entity/curse had been a metaphor for Rose's adult trauma, specifically that of an overworked white-collar professional who has sacrificed everything for a career that doesn't love her back, subjecting her to the sight of one of her patients committing suicide right in front of her (which caused the curse to target her in the first place). Even the film's title would've lent itself to such a story, about somebody who has to show up for work every day and put on a happy face for the people whose mental health problems she's trying to heal even though she herself is crumbling inside, the sad kind of phony smile juxtaposed with the scary ones she encounters throughout the film. It's a story that anyone who feels worn down by their job could've related to, especially health care workers whose job description involves occasionally watching people die and having no way to save them (which, in 2022, would've been especially timely), and more importantly, it would've fit what this movie established about Rose a lot better than the story it did tell. When the time came for Rose to exorcise her demons both personal and literal, it shouldn't have been about learning to put her mother behind her even though the film was barely about her mother before then, it should've been about finding some work/life balance. I wonder if there were some major rewrites on this movie, or if it was a consequence of writer/director Parker Finn trying to stretch his 11-minute short film Laura Hasn't Slept out to feature length, because its attempts at exploring Rose's personal problems felt incoherent.

Fortunately, unlike Night Swim, another recent horror movie adapted from a short film, this manages to still be an effective horror movie in spite of itself thanks to Finn proving to be a better director than he is a writer. It's mostly supernatural horror boilerplate, but it's done well, with a mix of tried-and-true jump scares and deeper, more unsettling chills as Rose and the viewer are both thrust into scenarios where something is just wrong and we can't trust anything we see. While its attempts to tie Rose's problems to her childhood trauma fell flat, it did otherwise succeed in putting me in the headspace of somebody who's slowly going mad with nobody to help her, as with the exception of Joel, nearly everybody in her life abandons her in her darkest hour. As a metaphor for mental illness, it was chilling, and Sosie Bacon pulls off an incredible performance as Rose here, one that I can see taking her places in the future as more than just "Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick's daughter." Kyle Gallner, meanwhile, makes for a likable male lead as Joel, the only person who seems to believe Rose even despite their history together as he, in his capacity as a detective, uncovers the truth about what is happening to her. Finally, Rob Morgan only appears in a single scene scene as the one person who managed to beat the curse, at considerable cost to not only his psyche but also his physical circumstances, but his performance, clearly terrified of the entity and everything it represents, was enough on its own to considerably up the stakes for Rose in her journey.

And as for scares, this movie's got 'em. Again, there's not a lot here that's new, but this movie plays the hits well, not just with the obvious jump scares but also with the setup for them. We get moments where we just know that something is watching Rose from just off camera and are eagerly waiting for her to turn around and see it, a scene where Rose is with her therapist (more or less remade from the original short film) that establishes that she's not safe even with people she thinks she can trust, and plenty of other scenes that lend to the film's oppressive atmosphere, in which we feel that we're starting to lose our minds as much as Rose is. Towards the end, when the scares shift to Rose facing the entity head-on, it is represented as a genuinely chilling monster brought to life by some grotesque creature effects. The entity is a hell of a monster, used only sparingly but looking downright horrifying when it does show up. Between the scares, the perpetually gray New Jersey setting, and Rose's slide into what looks like madness, this movie carries a bleak, nihilistic tone all the way to the finish line, and refused to pull its punches.

The Bottom Line

Even with its derivative nature and bad script, Smile demonstrates how a horror movie can succeed purely on the strength of its direction, which manages to make the most of what it's given and deliver an effective little chiller.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/10/review-double-feature-smile-2022-and.html as part of a double feature with the second film>

Hey guys! First post here :)) I make quite a bit of horror related content - mostly in the form of creepypastas and storytelling.

Also on the path to 500 subs - I'd really appreciate you guys checking out my content :)) I am a variety youtuber

My reaction to the newest Horror movie trailers - Pls enjoy :))

https://youtu.be/cE8qPjWwCDQ

https://youtu.be/6XSaReaj_L4?feature=shared

https://youtu.be/9GR3X7IPUTY?si=BU3ysza4RCNkXOFn

Horror Roulette Ep.1

i watched this movie when it first came out and i definitely do not remember all the details but i remember walking out shocked between the different connections made in the film and the overall theme and the underlying message. i wondered if anyone else thought the same or what you guys thought? if i remember correctly it definitely was not everybody’s cup of tea but i really appreciated the messages in the film and the cinematography overall.

Deadstream (2022)

Not rated

Score: 4 out of 5

Deadstream is a movie I'd heard a lot about when it first came out, but never got around to watching until now. A found footage horror/comedy in which the main hook is that the protagonist is livestreaming everything for his fans, this film is largely a one-man show for Joseph Winter, who co-wrote and co-directed it with his wife Vanessa Winter. It is an often hilarious spoof of the culture surrounding YouTubers and livestreamers paired with a genuinely scary supernatural horror movie, one where the two sides come together to create the feel of a topsy-turvy Scooby-Doo episode, with ghostly frights and impressive creature effects paired with self-awareness and a moral parable out of The Twilight Zone. I did have a few nagging questions about some things, but other than that, this is perfect spooky season viewing for somebody who wants a movie that's actually scary but still fairly lighthearted.

Our protagonist Shawn Ruddy is an internet personality known for livestreams on a fictional site called LivVid in which he, a guy who's "afraid of everything," pulls dangerous and often illegal stunts with the stated purpose of overcoming his fears. In truth, however, it's all for the clicks and views, as evidenced when one stunt he pulled ended with a homeless man winding up in the hospital, forcing him to record an insincere apology video in order to salvage his career and reputation. Six months later, he's making his triumphant comeback to streaming with what he calls his most dangerous stunt yet: spending the night in Death Manor, a house in rural Utah where several people have died and which is reputed to be haunted. Sure enough, the place has ghosts up to the rafters, and naturally, they don't want him around. Unfortunately, as a self-imposed challenge to make sure he wouldn't back out and lose sponsors, he locked the door to the house and threw away the key, meaning that he's trapped in there for the night even though his life is now in clear danger.

The basic concept is ingenious, and a very modern twist on found footage for the age of livestreaming. The film is not subtle in its parodies of people like PewDiePie (who Shawn mentions by name) and MrBeast, aggressively mercenary and often unethical entertainers whose only qualms come from the possible legal or social consequences of their actions, not any sense of right and wrong. Everything we see of Shawn in the first act paints him as a deeply phony person who doesn't take the situation he's in seriously, but is pretending he does for the people watching. He aggressively watches his language (and bleeps it out when he does curse) to avoid saying any bad words that might get his videos demonetized, but he also built his career on doing things that should not make him a role model for children, the product of hyper-literal online moderation systems that fixate on dirty but otherwise harmless language and sexuality while letting genuinely toxic behavior slide. Whenever he grabs some of the energy drink that's sponsoring his show, he always knows to make sure the logo on the label is facing the camera so his viewers can see that he's enjoying a healthy, energizing can of Awaken Thunder. Once the actual ghosts come out, of course, this demeanor starts to crack as genuine fear enters his voice, culminating in a breakdown where he realizes what a terrible person he's been. It's still very much a comedy too, of course. Even during his big breakdown, Shawn still brings up, without any prompting, a racially-charged stunt he did in the past that he was criticized for in order to insist that he's not racist. Watching this, I got the sense that Joseph and Vanessa Winter have Thoughts about the crop of influencers who have risen up on sites like YouTube and Twitch, with Shawn serving as a symbol of everything that people find rotten about those sites and their personalities. Joseph's performance walks a fine line, making him enough of a jackass that I wanted to see him suffer but still lending him enough humanity that I wanted him to survive. Shawn is not exactly a likable guy, but he's not a one-dimensional caricature, and making him come across as an ignorant doofus instead of actively malicious oddly enough makes the satire sting harder. There is an actual person beneath the character he plays online, but the line between the real man and the character has been blurred by the pressures of online fame pushing him to go further and further in pursuit of the constant high.

Beyond Shawn, most of the living human characters we see are the people watching his stream, some of whom record videos in order to give him advice and let him know the house's history and that of the various ghosts within it, a fun use of the livestreaming conceit to let us know that Shawn's nightmare is being broadcasted to the world and that people are reacting to it with both horror and gallows humor. The only person Shawn actually meets face-to-face is Chrissy, a fan of his who followed him to the house and knows a lot more about what's actually happening than she lets on. I don't want to spoil anything except to say that I was able to figure out pretty quickly what her actual deal was, but I can say that Melanie Stone (who worked with the Winters again that same year on V/H/S/99 in one of that film's best segments) made Chrissy an exceptionally memorable character. From the moment we meet her, we see that she's kind of unhinged and clearly has a hidden agenda, one that Shawn is right to be suspicious of. She was an excellent companion for Shawn, her weirdness treading the line between hilarious and creepy and often managing to be both at the same time. Whenever Stone was on screen, I knew I was in for something good.

Finally, there are the scares. This was filmed in a house that's reputed to be haunted in real life, and the Winters exploited that to the fullest, making heavy use of its dark, dingy environments to make it feel like a place where Shawn would be in danger exploring even if there weren't any ghosts around. As for the ghosts themselves, all of them are realized with creative practical effects work that gives us a hint as to the awful ways in which they died. Mildred, the house's first occupant, gets the most screen time out of them and the most ways to torment Shawn. An heiress and failed poet in life who killed herself after her lover (who also published her poems) died, she turns out to have a number of uncanny similarities to Shawn, the both of them having pursued fame in their respective times to the point that Shawn even compares her to himself as an old-timey version of an influencer. She has a creepy look that the film makes the most of as she stalks and taunts Shawn, serving as a highly entertaining antagonist with a flair for the dramatic. The other ghosts, ranging from a young boy with his deformed conjoined twin growing out of him to a bloated woman to a 1950s cop to a man covered in moss, were all imposing presences with appearances that called to mind zombies more than ghosts. This did raise a few questions with how they were presented as corporeal presences in the house who Shawn is seemingly able to fight with normal weapons, even though Mildred is shown to require a special ritual to defeat her for good. That said, the vagueness felt like the point here, like Shawn had no idea what to do either and was just winging it as he fought to survive.

The Bottom Line

Deadstream was a lightweight but incredibly fun horror/comedy whose premise is golden in its simplicity, and which largely fulfills it thanks to a pair of great performances, cool ghosts, and its sense of humor. This is excellent spooky season viewing, and between this and their work on V/H/S/99, I'm excited to see whatever movie the Winters are working on next.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/10/review-deadstream-2022.html>

why didnt the shark get her on the rock

I saw Longlegs recently on opening night. And i still don’t know whether i liked this or not. This is the first time I’ve walked out of the cinema not knowing if i liked something or not. I can’t cut it down specifically without rewatching it, but i remember for the first 40 minutes being utterly bored, it kept dragging for the most part, waiting for something. I liked not knowing where it were heading. And would have liked to see more of Longlegs but the supernatural element just threw me out. Did anyone else like it? Or like me not know if they did?

Stream (2024)

Not rated

Score: 2 out of 5

Stream is a fairly forgettable, ho-hum movie, but one that would've made for a great video game. Specifically, it would've been a great modern-day remake of Manhunt, the classic and infamous 2003 survival horror game by Rockstar Games, the makers of the Grand Theft Auto series, in which you play as a death row inmate who is spared execution only to be forced into a snuff film operation. That, or it would've made for a great asymmetric multiplayer horror game in the mold of Dead by Daylight in which multiple people play as both the killers and their victims, with the former side scoring points by killing and the latter side doing so by surviving and escaping. It's rather appropriate, too, given that the film's basic premise concerns a shadowy criminal organization that has trapped a bunch of ordinary vacationers in a hotel to be hunted down by a group of masked slashers, the entire thing filmed and livestreamed for the enjoyment of sickos around the world. Not only is this quite similar to the plot of Manhunt, it also revolves heavily around the world of online streaming, something that is now part and parcel of video game culture, including one major character being an adolescent boy who streams himself playing video games.

And yet, despite this simple but golden premise, solid production values, sweet kills, cool killers, and Jeffrey Combs hamming it up as the villain, it just ultimately didn't come together as a good movie. The problems all came down to the story, which was overlong, took half the movie to get going, was so paper-thin with its satire of streaming that I can barely call it half-hearted in that regard, and was filled with throwaway characters who contributed nothing, existed only to die in creative ways, and had me muttering the Eight Deadly Words -- "I don't care what happens to these people" -- by the halfway point. This is a movie that people only paid any attention to in the first place because it was produced by Damien Leone and the rest of his crew from the Terrifier films, even though his creative involvement was limited to the admittedly cool special effects work. The best comparison I can think of is to the first film in The Purge series, a movie that had a very interesting premise that turned out to be ripe for a franchise but unfortunately blew the execution on the first go-around. I'd love to see a sequel that fixes all the problems that this film has, but I can't recommend it on its own merits.

Of the many characters we get among the people being hunted for sport, the only ones who get any focus beyond just serving as more bodies for the pile are the Keenan family, who serve as our protagonists, and Dave Burham, an older gentleman who turns out to be a detective investigating the people behind the carnage. Traveling through on their way to an amusement park, the Keenans consist of the father Roy, the mother Elaine, the rebellious teenage daughter Taylor, and the adolescent streamer son Kevin, and to be honest, I couldn't bring myself to care about any of them. Roy is a fairly flat hero, Kevin is little more than a prop, Elaine exists only to add another entry to the list of characters Danielle Harris has played in horror movies who get killed off brutally, and Taylor's motivations switch on a dime, at one point hating her parents and running away with a French guy she met at the hotel only to get cold feet and a sudden pang of "but I still love my family!" for no reason except to justify her returning to the film (and to create suspicion around the French guy that goes nowhere). As for Burham, he's blatantly telegraphed as a guy with a hidden agenda so early on that the big twist that he's actually part of the game not only wasn't a surprise, it ruined the film's attempts to create suspicion around the other people in the hotel. The actors were all acceptable, but they were saddled with such worthless nothing characters that their efforts were wasted.

What's more, the film asks me to spend an hour with these worthless nothings before it actually gets to the goods. I get what this movie was trying to go for here, focusing on the victims so that we care more about them once they start dropping. This was, after all, produced by the guys behind Terrifier, a series that only really came to life when the second film paired its memorable villain up with an equally memorable heroine to fight him. The thing is, Sienna Shaw was a legitimately great character in her own right, and the Keenans are not Sienna Shaw. They're depicted in the first half as a cliché of a suburban family that hates each other, and in the second half as bumbling idiots barring the brief moments when they get sudden, inexplicable bursts of hyper-competence (like, how did Roy know to take that opportunity presented by one of the hidden cameras being busted?). The movie was too dumb for too long to get me to care about its protagonists, which would've been acceptable had this movie gone for the requisite "twenty minutes with jerks" that horror movies usually use to give us the lay of the land before the mayhem starts, but not when its failed attempts at character development take up half the movie.

Where this film came alive was when it focused on the other half of the equation, the killers and the mysterious organization that's responsible for everything. Jeffrey Combs was clearly enjoying himself as Mr. Lockwood, the man who runs the whole operation and is clearly getting into it, at first posing as the hotel's owner to the guests before showing his true colors halfway in. A number of scenes in the first half revolved around Lockwood and his band of killers taking out the hotel's staff, rigging the place up for their murder spree, and facing a number of unforeseen problems that they have to work around, like one employee calling in sick and somebody else showing up in his place, or a drunken guest accidentally breaking one of their cameras. The killers themselves don't get to do much beyond wear cool masks and hack people up, but that is precisely what they do, and it is awesome. Each killer, identified only by a number, has a unique look, with Player 1 being a modern "hoodie" slasher, Player 2 channeling a lot of Art the Clown in his theatrics and body language (fitting, since he's played by David Howard Thornton under the mask), Player 3 being the token woman among them as a hot chick with a sadistic streak and a similar theatricality to 2 (who's shown to be her brother), and Player 4 being a hulking brute reminiscent of Jason Voorhees. The idea of a bunch of killers running around in a competition with each other, like a sick version of American Gladiators, was this film's big twist on the slasher formula, and it served as justification for a bunch of bloody and creative kills, the highlight being when Players 2 and 3 play a game of tic-tac-toe with a knife on some poor sucker's torso. They're winning extra points for style, you see, so simple stabbings just won't do. This movie should've focused on them, with the victims as merely supporting characters and minor antagonists, since the things it teased about the inner workings of this organization were far more interesting than the boring stories of the people they were hunting. The ending teased a whole ton of sequel ideas, as well as Tony Todd as another ringleader for this blood-soaked circus, all ideas that I think would've made a far better movie than the one we got.

The Bottom Line

Stream is a movie that doesn't know what its best qualities are. Instead of focusing on its cool killers and made-for-a-video-game concept, it spent way too long focusing on protagonists who were as dull as dishwater and who I couldn't wait to see meet their ends just to get them out of my face.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/10/review-stream-2024.html>

Terrifier 3 (2024)

Not rated

Score: 4 out of 5

With Terrifier 3, the little indie splatter horror franchise that could has entered "franchise mode". On top of its advertising, its merchandising, its tie-in single by Ice Nine Kills, and its staggering box-office success, the movie itself makes Art the Clown as much the main character as its returning heroine Sienna Shaw, with nearly every kill now a horrifying set piece of explosive carnage and Art's sidekick from the last movie, the ambiguously demonic Little Pale Girl, upgraded to a co-villain in her own right as she possesses somebody and joins in on the action herself. The best comparison I can think of is A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, though I'd argue that this is the better movie of the two by a wide margin, one that not only cleans up the biggest flaw that held back its predecessor but also manages to be a twisted, explosive celebration of practical effects work unbound by the MPA (as in, they just up and released this unrated knowing damn well it would've gotten an NC-17 the second they showed up at the MPA's offices). It's a big, swaggering splatterfest that's as bonkers as its killer clown villain, and while it does unfortunately introduce some new flaws that leave me wondering if Damien Leone, the writer, director, and main visionary behind this series, is getting lost in the weeds a bit with his creation, this is otherwise one hell of an experience.

Set five years after the events of the last movie, our protagonist Sienna Shaw, who has spent her time in and out of psychiatric care thanks to what she experienced in her last encounter with Art the Clown, has just left the hospital to live with her aunt Jess, uncle Greg, and little cousin Gabbie. The idea of a slasher sequel focusing on how traumatized the final girl has become is not a new idea (all the way back in the '90s, Scream 2 and Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later built their heroines' arcs around it), but this movie does it well, in its characteristic fashion. Lauren LaVera gets another great opportunity to play Sienna as more than just the "tough chick" horror heroine, somebody who can undoubtedly still kick Art's ass but has also been left a psychological wreck by all the things she's witnessed. She has visions of her dead friends blaming her for their deaths, the last movie's implications that she was going insane all but spelled out in the text now, and she recoils when Gabbie goes snooping in her diary and reads about some of the things she described in there. We get a flashback to Sienna's childhood, her father played by Jason Patric in a cameo, illustrating how she loved him and driving home how much his decline and ultimate death broke her. I find it amusing how the Terrifier films, with their in-your-face violence and lack of subtlety, are sometimes seen as a rejoinder to the "elevated horror" boom of the last ten years, particularly how many such films use their monsters and demons as metaphors for some trauma in the protagonists' pasts, because Sienna's arc in these movies treads very similar waters -- and, for my money, more or less pulls it off. In two movies, Sienna Shaw has become one of the all-time great horror heroines, and LaVera is central to why.

It also helps, of course, to have a real monster for your heroine to face off against. And here, we have not one, but two of them. I've already sung David Howard Thornton's praises for his performance as Art the Clown before, and he largely sticks to what worked in the past, combining great physical comedy with a mean streak a mile wide to make for a sick, sadistic villain who treats everything like one big joke and is clearly enjoying himself as he hunts and torments his victims. At times, Art feels almost like a silent slasher version of Deadpool, a guy who's in on the joke and feels like he wants to let everybody else in on it too. The Little Pale Girl also makes a return, in a sense, this time possessing the first film's lone survivor Victoria Hayes, who begins the film institutionalized after Art had mutilated her face and driven her insane only for Art to break her out. If Art is a slasher version of the Joker, then the possessed Victoria is his Harley Quinn, a female counterpart who is not only just as vicious and terrifying but also serves as his "voice" throughout the film, being the one who directly taunts people through words as opposed to just gestures. Samantha Scaffidi is playing a character almost wholly different from what she was in the first movie, unrecognizable both literally due to her mangled face and figuratively as she partakes in the violence rather than trying to survive it, and she turned out to be the film's secret weapon, somebody who kept the scares grounded even as Art takes the Freddy Krueger route of becoming a more overtly comedic killer. Victoria brought most of the film's genuine scares here versus Art's more cartoonish carnage, and she proved to be a very welcome addition to not only the lore but also, more importantly, the movie as a whole.

That's not to say that Art isn't scary anymore, though. As I've said when discussing the prior films, sheer visceral excess has a weight to it all its own, and when paired with the more comedic elements of his character, that lends him the feeling of a sick, degenerate troll for whom nothing actually matters except his own amusement. This is a movie that happily crosses lines that other slashers wouldn't dare tread near, a gross display of viscera that offers Leone another chance to show off his special effects craftsmanship with the kind of set piece kills that feel like they were concocted by a schoolyard full of kids in a contest to come up with the sickest ways to die. We get a guy getting the skin on his head ripped off, liquid nitrogen being used to freeze a man's flesh before it's smashed off with a hammer, live rats being shoved down a woman's throat and then eating their way out through her neck, a shower scene to rival the infamous bedroom scene from the second film (...who says that doesn't fit there?), beheadings, dismemberments, the works, as well as Art actually "going there" when it comes to one of horror's biggest taboos. These movies are being hyped up at this point as gauntlets for seasoned horror fans to run (and shock others with), and while the tone is too lighthearted for it to really hang with the grossest examples of splatter horror, make no mistake: the warnings that theaters are putting up for this are there for a reason.

The pacing is tighter this time around, showing that Leone has learned from one of the main criticisms of the last movie. It's still just over two hours long, but it moves a lot quicker than before, each hour respectively feeling like the first two acts of a movie that's setting up for a smashing finale but still delivering the goods where it matters. The plot builds on the second film's implications that there was something more cosmic going on than just a simple slasher story, explicitly naming the Little Pale Girl as a demon and strongly implying that Sienna too has an angel in her corner, ultimately ending on a cliffhanger and leaving a lot of open questions that the fourth movie promises to answer. The added lore did a lot to flesh out the story, put some fun twists on a lot of slasher tropes (the final girl, the killer coming back from the dead), and got me interested in seeing the next one. That said, not only does it create a risk of continuity lockout for people who haven't seen any of the other films, especially with how the opening hinges so much on characters and events from the second film, it also naturally means that this movie's own story is incomplete. A lot hinges on whether the fourth movie sticks the landing, and right now, all I can say is this: at least they didn't try to expand on Art's backstory the way the Nightmare sequels did Freddy's or the Halloween sequels did Michael Myers'. His whole deal boils down to the fact that he was such an evil fuckin' bastard in life (which, if you've seen any of these movies... yeah) that the forces of darkness took a liking to him and revived him as their champion to keep killing. It's a simple explanation that preserves his mystique and doesn't detract from what makes him so enjoyable to watch, the kind of thing you'd expect a slasher fan to come up with if they were asked to develop the lore around a slasher villain, and I appreciated it.

The Bottom Line

Terrifier 3 isn't without its flaws, but it's still the best film in the series thus far. If Art the Clown isn't a bona fide horror icon at this point, then it's only because he's still fairly new. Check it out if you've got the stomach.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/10/review-terrifier-3-2024.html >

Who Can Kill a Child? (¿Quién puede matar a un niño?) (1976)

Rated R

Score: 2 out of 5

Who Can Kill a Child? is a Spanish horror film with a daring premise that occasionally manages to live up to it, especially during its wild third act, but all too often finds itself mired in self-seriousness that felt like a poor man's George A. Romero, even though its best moments were the ones that ran headlong in the other direction from such. It's overly long, plodding, and beset by unlikable protagonists who constantly make stupid decisions, and while I got the social commentary it was going for, its attempts to convey such often dragged. This is a movie I'd love to see remade as a darkly satirical horror-comedy, as the basic conceit is one that still stings today, and the film's best moments were the ones that fully embraced the gonzo nature of that conceit and didn't pull their punches. As it stands, though, this doesn't really hold up beyond that.

The film gets off on the wrong foot almost immediately when it opens with a lengthy documentary montage of the history of how children have suffered in modern conflicts, from World War II to Korea to Biafra. I'll put aside the questions of whether or not this scene was in poor taste (it's pretty much of a kind with a lot of the "mondo" shockumentaries of the '60s and '70s) and instead focus on the fact that it came out of nowhere, contributed little, and was mostly rather boring. It was a ham-fisted way to convey this film's message, not through its actual story but by straight-up holding off on getting to the actual movie for several minutes so it can tell us. It felt like the filmmakers assumed that the audience was stupid and wouldn’t understand what was going on otherwise, especially since there were multiple moments when the film did and otherwise could’ve done this within the context of the story, from a scene where the characters are listening to a radio broadcast about violence in Southeast Asia to the climax where the kids explain exactly what they’re doing.

It doesn’t get much better in the rest of its first act. Our protagonists Tom and Evelyn, a young couple on vacation in Spain, are as dull as dishwater, with little characterization, fairly mediocre performances from the actors playing them, and lots of stupid decisions on their part once they get to the remote resort island where most of this film’s action takes place. They take far too long to realize that something is wrong once they get to the island and see no adults there, and even after they realize they’re not safe on the island, they don’t seem to act like it, whether it’s Tom failing to inform Evelyn (who doesn’t yet know what’s happening) what he saw the children doing to some poor schlub or a lone adult survivor they encountered abandoning all of his well-earned wariness around the island’s children when he runs into his own kid. I was able to buy the fact that the protagonists have a very difficult time bringing themselves to actually fight back against their attackers, because, as the title and one character helpfully inform us, who can kill a child? It was in these scenes where the characters know they’re in danger, try to act accordingly, but are held back from doing what they have to by the obvious moral dilemma involved that felt the most intense, as you knew that, either way, you were about to see something horrifying. Unfortunately, the adults’ poor decision-making went far beyond that, often feeling like it had been contrived for the sole purpose of advancing the story along to where the writers wanted it to go.

It was when the focus was put on the children themselves that I was the most intrigued. The basic premise is that somehow, the children on this island have come to develop both a psychic link and a virulent, murderous hatred of adults, seeking revenge for how they have no say in adults’ wars and conflicts and yet are usually the ones who suffer the most in such, a premise that, for my money, is evergreen and no less relevant today than it was in 1976. And when this movie is putting its focus on the children, it kicks ass. The thing that grabbed me is that these kids aren’t portrayed as the usual “creepy kids” you normally see in horror movies, acting in troubling, distinctly unchildlike ways to make them seem more off-putting immediately. No, these kids, as murderous as they are, still fundamentally act like kids and treat what they’re doing as a kind of play session, most notably when they string up a guy’s corpse and use him as a piñata (and a scythe as the stick to beat him with) while acting like they’re at a birthday party. It’s sick, it’s mean-spirited, it’s darkly hilarious, and it's a tone that I felt the whole movie should’ve leaned into. Instead of trying to take itself so seriously, it should’ve taken the South Park approach and leaned into satire and black comedy, depicting the idea of children suddenly turning against the adults around them and playing it for a ridiculousness that makes it that much wilder and more shocking. There were already elements of this in the final product, from the piñata scene to the ending where the police finally show up from the mainland and react to everything that has happened (and the children react to them in turn). More importantly, depicting the film’s setting as a sick, sad world that’s slowly going mad would’ve done a lot to alleviate the problem I had with the dumb adult characters. A little black comedy, I’ve noticed, can turn that into an asset, especially if the film is mocking its protagonists for their stupidity and presenting them as avatars of everything else it's mocking about the world as a whole.

The Bottom Line

Who Can Kill a Child? had an interesting premise but only really came together in its third act, and before then was a fairly boring film that thought itself more profound than it actually was to the point of insulting viewers' intelligence. It's only worth a watch for diehard aficionados of retro European horror.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/10/review-who-can-kill-child-1976.html>

The movie is about a woman gets trapped in the subway station with a unknown person down there. I do think the idea is creepy with being stuck in the subway station at night with someone down there stalking you. But the way the movie executed is poorly done. The story is badly done on how it feels like it was rushed because there's lack of build up in it and the suspense feels really weak throughout because things happened way too quickly. The movie also have problems with it pacing with scenes that happened too quick or too slow. Also the jump scares are rather predictable and isn't effective at all to be that creepy. One interesting thing is that there a abandoned medical facility underground that does illegal abortion, but that only appear later in the movie and never brought up again. Since the script isn't good, the characters aren't really that good or even that interesting. Even the villain isn't that memorable other than his backstory.

Creepy is a mediocre horror movie that I can see why this is over shadow by the other creep movie.

First time I watched it on Friday morning on Amazon Prime since I have Arrow Video and I was blown away with how disturbing it got.

The parts that really creeped me out the most were the beatdown sequences (Tsuda and Kojima) plus when Hizuru started with the piercing/body modification.

Not quite as disturbing as the first 2 Tetsuo films though.

4 out of 5

4 out of 5 stars
Booktubed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m_Z13Db0MA

A sci-fi horror book about a pretentious parasite that feels challenged by the presence of a feral parasite, both of which feeding on the same populations. It's interesting because it's from the point of view of the former, and their increasing humanization as they get cut off from the rest of the hive and get "infected" by the emotions of their host.

It's a great read and a triumph of body horror. While there are no characters that you can truly connect with, there are elements of various characters that you can identify with strongly enough to sort of care about them, at least enough to get an emotional handhold in the story and engage with the narrative.

On the surface, it's a story about parasites at war, but it's no coincidence that both parasites are the kind that burrow into the body and disappear beneath that surface. The story is actually about childhood sexual trauma. The abuse is examined at the macro level of the Institute itself, which dresses itself in these sugared lies about the greater good and protection of its poor, oblivious flock while it eats away at their bodies, keeps them crippled and small by draining their individual resources, and opts to sacrifice from its collection like chess pieces, rationalizing the away the loss with, "obviously, I wish I didn't have to lose these perfectly good bodies, but that's just the way things are sometimes." It even preys on the weak, the forgotten, the deformed, the abandoned. It mostly takes the sick and orphaned, in the same way serial killers target prostitutes on the assumption that no one will come looking for them.

And at the micro level, it's the literal sexual abuse that the baron's son inflicts on his mute houseboy. The kid is the last survivor of a nearly extinct Morlock subspecies, and incapable of speech. Again, someone incapable of fending for themselves, incapable of rejecting these advances, which were never requests anyway. No one is coming to save them, because there's no one left to save them. Small, orphaned, and without a voice.

Which makes the climactic, vaguely Shakespearean finale that much more satisfying. Shades of Billy Bob Thornton's "The Gift".

It's an immensely powerful piece, and a thorough exploration of a topic that's ordinarily too taboo to be discussed. And much like the parasites lurking in their hosts blood, or nestled behind their retina, the perpetrators get away with it by going unnoticed, because we're not looking hard enough. Leech is a cautionary tale, and a sort of call to arms. Look closer, and if you see the mass, no matter how much "good" it's done for you, no matter how many of your defects it has convinced you it has "cured", start cutting and don't stop until all of its tendrils are out of you.

And Soon the Darkness (1970)

Rated GP (now PG)

Score: 4 out of 5

And Soon the Darkness is a movie that made me never want to visit rural France. It's a thriller that starts by framing the land that its protagonists are traveling through as a picturesque locale out of a postcard or a tourism ad, but once the horror begins, it increasingly takes on an eerie feeling of a sort you'd sooner expect from a film like Deliverance set in the rural South, a forbidding place where the locals are off-putting and very clearly do not want you there while the beautiful natural scenery all around means that you're not gonna find help for miles. The characters, too, all kept me guessing, as everybody gave me reason to believe that they'd want our heroines dead for whatever reason, ultimately building to a very satisfying conclusion. It's a vintage British serial killer flick with a lot of old-school retro flair that still holds up today, its fairly flat direction and occasionally silly score aside.

Our protagonists, the sensible brunette Jane and the free-spirited blonde Cathy, are two English girls who are traveling across France by bicycle. When the two of them wind up in the middle of nowhere, they get into a spat that sees Jane run off into the nearest town. When she returns to where they split up, Cathy is gone, with evidence (her abandoned camera, for one, as well as the fact that we saw her attacked by an offscreen assailant while Jane was away) that she may be in danger, forcing Jane to turn to the townsfolk for help. However, there is reason to believe that any one of them -- the creepy farmers the Lassals, the detective Paul Salmon from out of town, the bumbling local cop, a British expat who hates tourists -- could be the one responsible for Cathy's disappearance, with no way for Jane to know who to trust.

The cast in this was impressive, with Pamela Franklin making for a likable heroine as Jane and the language gap between her and the townsfolk making for some tense situations as we know more than she does about what's going on. (Side note: the version I watched on Prime Video had all the French dialogue subtitled, but the original theatrical version left it all untranslated, putting you directly in Jane's shoes as the odd duck out.) The MVP in the cast, however, was Sandor Elès as Paul. A detective from Paris (or so he says) with a personal interest in both Cathy's disappearance and the murder of another young female tourist in the area a few years ago, Paul is presented almost from the get-go as a creep who Jane, and by extension the viewer, have very good reason to believe is lying about who he says he is. At the very least, he has absolutely no social skills, he misses important clues, he acts like a stalker towards Jane and Cathy, and his interest in what's happening, even if one is feeling charitable, is presented as that of an overeager amateur who's out of his depth and is going to get himself or somebody else hurt or worse. (You have to wonder why he's not off solving crimes in Paris.) Elès is almost too good at making me hate Paul, a guy who has so many "this is the killer" arrows pointing at him that you'd think he has to be a red herring, especially since other people in town are also acting suspicious... which only doubles back around and makes you wonder if this is exactly what the movie wants you to think.

The depiction of the town is a case in point when it comes to how this movie twists and subverts things. Initially, this is a portrait of "la France profonde" straight out of the imaginations of non-French who romanticize the country, with two girls riding down a scenic road lined with trees and farms into a village filled with tourists at a local eatery -- the image that France's tourism bureaus probably like to send of what the country looks like. We do get early shots of Paul taking an interest in the girls, but it's just one guy out of many. Once Cathy goes missing, however, those scenic vistas remain, but take on a much darker tone. Now, it feels like Jane has wandered into a place where nobody wants her around, the locals looking like the very deglamorized image of rural Midwesterners or Southerners except speaking a different language, the rusty Citroën 2CVs on the road evoking the same feeling as rusty '50s Ford trucks. It's a movie where the things that look inviting and exotic on the surface turn ugly and rotten once you actually have to spend time with them -- something that, as somebody who lived in Florida for more than ten years, I can definitely relate to.

The look of the setting wasn't the only thing that felt rough and rustic, though. This film was theatrically released, but the background of many of the people behind it was in '60s British television, and it often shows in what are generally pretty low production values. Director Robert Fuest manages to wring a lot of suspense out of it, to be sure, but it's still a very workmanlike film that moves rather slowly and doesn't really try to go above and beyond stylistically apart from letting the French scenery speak for itself. "Understated" is the word I'd use to describe this movie -- not dull by any stretch, but very much a showcase for the actors more than anything. The score could also occasionally be a bit too upbeat for its own good, especially when the end credits roll and the film's cheery opening theme is reprised to play over them after what had been a rather harrowing final showdown between Jane and the villain.

The Bottom Line

And Soon the Darkness is a hidden gem of vintage, non-Hammer British horror that, while a slow burn with some occasional late '60s/early '70s cheese, still has a lot to recommend about it for fans of this sort of thriller.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/10/review-and-soon-darkness-1970.html>

Hey folks

New member, and some great reviews being posted, but why such low engagement?

Is this sub just trounced by r/horror etc?

Any thoughts?

Mac

As a watcher of horror from 1987 and seen the original Salem’s lots the 2024 was excellent it wasn’t over the top and the main vampire resembled the original nosferatu movie vampire it was a fresh new take on salems lot that had action the entire movie and kept me interested it’s definitely a 8/10 must watch halloween movie.

Hellraiser (1987)

Rated R

Score: 4 out of 5

Hellraiser, written and directed by Clive Barker and based on his novella "The Hellbound Heart", is perhaps best described as an '80s version of a Hammer horror movie. On one hand, it's got gothic British atmosphere in spades, between its setting, its characters, its eroticism, and the twisted family drama at the center of its story, and on the other, it's got an archetypal final girl heroine and all the gnarly gore and creature effects of any proper '80s splatter flick. It's a movie that starts slow (though that could just have been me trying to watch it late at night when I was already getting tired) but closes strong, a journey into depravity that's filled with psychosexual overtones beneath its fleshy exterior while still leaving much to the imagination. The cast is stellar, the score by Christopher Young is perfect at setting the mood, and the makeup effects on its villains are grisly and grotesque, even if I do think it held off on showing off its now-iconic demons for too long. There's a reason why this is a classic, one of the (at least superficially) classier creature features of the '80s, and one that set a high bar that its many sequels were never able to match.

The film starts with a hedonistic degenerate named Frank Cotton purchasing a strange puzzle box at a bazaar in Morocco. Upon taking it back home, he solves the puzzle and winds up opening a portal to another dimension, where he is promptly taken and torn apart by monstrous, vaguely human-looking figures. Shortly after, Frank's brother Larry moves into his old house with his new wife Julia and his teenage daughter Kirsty in tow, and after injuring himself moving some furniture and bleeding all over the floor of the attic, accidentally brings Frank's soul back into our world and revives him, albeit in an incomplete manner (for instance, he's missing his skin). Julia, who it turns out had been having an affair with Frank behind Larry's back while he was still alive, discovers him in the attic and learns that he needs more flesh in order to regain his strength and stay one step ahead of the Cenobites, the demons and monsters who had tortured his soul beyond the grave and aren't too pleased that he escaped. Julia is understandably troubled by this, but she always did love Frank more than Larry, and so she, at first reluctantly but eventually quite enthusiastically, starts stalking bars and picking up various men looking for some loving in order to deliver them to Frank, who kills them and drains their life energy to rebuild his body. Julia can't keep her secret forever, though, especially once Kirsty catches her bringing a strange man into their home.

This is largely Clare Higgins' movie as she plays Julie, one half of its main villainous duo and the one who gets a lot of the heavy lifting in the story. Watching her, you can tell that what Frank is asking Julia to do for him is tearing her apart inside, as she feels sick to her stomach the first time she murders a man. However, each subsequent time sees it come easier and easier to her, causing her to slowly turn from a sympathetic adulterer to a classy villainess who comes to dominate the screen, losing her humanity piece by piece as she eventually realizes that she'll have to do something about Larry if she wants to be with her true love Frank. Frank himself, meanwhile, is not only a freakish special effects showcase between the horrifying scene of his resurrection (his body rematerializing, organ by organ and bone by bone, done completely practically) and his skinless appearance for most of the film, but Oliver Smith, who plays him for most of the movie (barring the prologue of him alive and in human form), also makes him a great corrupting presence slowly leading Julia down the road to becoming a killer in order to bring him back. Together, they feel like a wicked stepmother and her dark secret kept in the attic, a duo who I wanted to see get their justly deserved punishment. As for the rest of the cast, it was fun seeing Andrew Robinson, the Scorpio killer in Dirty Harry, play a good-hearted but clueless father who doesn't realize the danger he's in until it's too late, and while I would've liked to see Ashley Laurence's Kirsty a bit more earlier in the film, once she became the clear protagonist in the latter half she did a fantastic job.

And behind the camera, Barker proves that he's just as good a filmmaker as he is a novelist. This film endured a very troubled production that saw Barker stretch his budget to the breaking point, using every trick in the book to get the most out of what he had, and it paid off remarkably well. An old, creepy mansion is one of the oldest and most cliched horror settings possible, but Barker leaned into it by giving the film a creepy, gothic tone, updating classic Hammer horror iconography for the '80s with only minor changes to the aesthetics. He also injected the film with the kind of raw sexuality that Hammer was famous for, never showing actual nudity (though by all accounts Barker wanted to go further) but always making it very clear that, whether human or monster, these characters fuck. And when that got into the relationship between Frank and his niece Kirsty, or the design of the Cenobites that resembled bondage gear and gave very clear implications of what exactly they mean by "pain and pleasure," that only added an extra layer of "ick" atop the proceedings as it was obvious that the torture being inflicted on these characters was, in no small part, sexual in nature.

That brings me to the Cenobites, the trademark demons of this film (well, "demons to some, angels to others") and the series in general. You may notice that, as iconic as they are, I haven't really talked about them all that much, and that's because they're only minor characters, albeit important ones who have a key role in the plot behind the scenes. As with the rest of the effects here, their creature design is outstanding, resembling humans who have been badly mutilated but in a fairly artistic manner more reminiscent of extreme body modification than anything. The lead Cenobite, retroactively named Pinhead in later films, is the only one who gets much of any characterization, and Doug Bradley makes him a hell of a monster, a figure who speaks in an affect that manages to be both flat and brimming with emotion and whose lack of explicitly ill intent (he and his fellow Cenobites just want to "explore the outer reaches of experience") makes him that much creepier, like the Cenobites' concerns are so far above those of us mere mortals that our lives don't even matter to them except as part of a purely transactional arrangement. If there was one big problem I had with this movie, in fact, it's that we don't get enough of the Cenobites. They take over as the main antagonists in the third act, but while Frank discusses them earlier in the film, they barely have any presence in the film before they make their grand introduction to Kirsty. I would've done something more with the mysterious vagrant who's seen stalking Kirsty, revealing him early on to be working for the Cenobites instead of making that a big twist at the end and simply implying before then that he's up to no good, because while the final scene did work as a nice closer, the tonal shift from having Frank as the villain trying to kill Kirsty to having her and her boyfriend running away from the Cenobites was pretty sudden and jarring, like I'd started watching a completely different movie out of nowhere.

The Bottom Line

Hellraiser is a combination of old-school gothic chills and modern creature and gore effects that still holds up, a film dripping with creepiness and some great monsters of both the human and otherworldly sort. A must-see for fans of '80s horror -- and hey, fingers crossed, maybe the sequels aren't all terrible either.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/10/review-hellraiser-1987.html>

Terrifier 2 (2022)

Not rated

Score: 4 out of 5

All Hallows' Eve and Terrifier were flawed, but fun low-budget slashers that were both elevated by their villain Art the Clown, their grungy atmospheres, and a willingness to trample over every line of good taste with their kills, their writer/director Damien Leone putting his background as a special effects artist to great use in order to make movies that looked like they cost a lot more than the pittances they actually did. What they lacked, however, was in their stories and writing, the former film having been cobbled together from three short films Leone had made over the years and the latter being chiefly a special effects showcase with only the barest framework of a plot to hold it together. Here, Leone got something close to resembling an actual budget, along with plenty of time to think about the kind of sequel he wanted to make after Terrifier blew up, knowing that another round of plotless, gratuitous violence just wouldn't cut it -- and what he decided to make can only be described as a slasher epic, a film with a 138-minute runtime comparable to a Marvel movie that not only considerably fleshes out Art and the lore surrounding him but also gives him actual characters to hunt and kill, most notably its heroine Sienna Shaw. And for the most part, it worked. It probably could've stood to have a lot of scenes trimmed down, but Art is still one of the greatest villains of modern horror, Sienna is one of its best heroines, the production values have been beefed up considerably, the kills are some all-timers that make the previous movie look almost PG-13, and the story adds just enough to make things interesting without taking away the aura of mystery surrounding just who Art is and what exactly is going on. Having now seen all three films featuring Art the Clown, I would recommend this as one's entry point into the series, not just because it's altogether a more lighthearted and "fun" film than its predecessors (even with the increased gore) but also because it's simply a better one, and easily one of the best slasher movies in recent memory.

The film starts right where the first one left off, with Art the Clown waking up on the mortuary slab after killing himself at the end of the last movie, as puzzled as anyone as to how he's still alive. As it turns out, there's a supernatural force at work that brought him back from the dead, represented by a creepy little girl in a similar outfit and clown makeup to Art who wants him to keep killing, Art of course being happy to oblige. Right away, this was a creative solution to the question of how you flesh out a slasher villain in the sequels without ruining his mystique. It's a tricky tightrope to walk, one that the Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises both notoriously fumbled as they gave Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger increasingly convoluted backstories that took away the basic, simple hooks that their characters were originally built around. Here, Art the Clown is still just a guy who likes killing people, the added story elements all falling on the Little Pale Girl, as she's credited as. Played by Amelie McLain as a more child-like version of Art who never directly kills people but otherwise haunts them and helps Art do his dirty work, there are hints as to just who she actually is (or at least used to be) but nothing concrete beyond the fact that she's more than just a mere ghost. She was an injection of supernatural horror into what had been a fairly grounded slasher story on the last outing, a Devil figure of sorts guiding Art while occasionally appearing to the protagonists as well, and proved to be a very intriguing and creepy addition to the story hinting that there was a lot more going on here than just your usual tale of a slasher villain coming back from the dead for the sequel.

There's more to a great slasher movie than just a great killer, though. My biggest problem with the last movie was that there wasn't much to it beyond Art the Clown, and it's one that Leone went out of his way to try to solve here, putting a much greater focus on a singular protagonist fighting him. And I must say, Sienna Shaw is easily one of the best final girls I've seen in a long while. Initially presented as unconnected to Art, Sienna is a creative but troubled teenager with a passion for costume design whose father, who died of a brain tumor that turned a once-loving family man into an abusive bastard in his final year on Earth, still looms large over her life. Her mother is constantly on edge, and her younger brother Jonathan has developed an unhealthy interest in true crime and murderers, particularly the "Miles County Clown" case from the prior year. It turns out, however, that her father, implied to have been an artist of some sort, may have possibly been psychic and known about Art the Clown, and the fantasy drawings he left behind included detailed depictions of some of the events of the last movie before they happened -- as well as a drawing of Sienna defeating Art.

What grabbed me about Sienna right away was her actress, Lauren LaVera. She spends most of the film in a sexy, badass "warrior woman" outfit she made for Halloween, and she absolutely lives up to it, LaVera putting her background as a stunt performer and martial artist to great use as she battles Art during this film's lengthy climax. Leone originally designed the character as something more akin to the heroine of a fantasy story for a different movie he was working on that ultimately never got made, and that shows through in Sienna's grit and toughness under pressure. There's more to a great horror heroine than just being tough, though. There's a reason why the phrase "strong female character" is a running joke among media critics both feminist and otherwise, and that's because it's all too easy for poorly-written versions of such characters to turn into one-note hardasses, clearly trying to be Ellen Ripley or Sarah Connor but missing the humanity that made those characters work. Sienna, by contrast, spends most of the film's first two acts away from Art and the action, the problems she has to contend with being of the personal and psychological sort, and here, LaVera shines and delivers the kind of performance that makes careers. Sienna felt like a capable survivor, but one who had been thrust into a situation she was in no way ready for and wound up getting as good as she gave. There are implications that she's slowly going insane as the pressure of her father's death and the breakdown of her family starts to get to her, especially once she starts having strange, violent dreams about Art that seem to predict what's happening in real life. Her seemingly being tied to premonitions of the future was a plot decision that could've easily gone wrong, but the way it plays out here, especially given the new mystery surrounding Art and the Little Pale Girl, it only adds to the feeling that there's a lot more going on under the surface than just a simple slasher story.

The surface, though, is plenty thrilling enough. Leone felt like he was on a personal mission to top the last movie in the gore department, starting right away with a kill that one of my co-workers told me caused him to stop watching just ten minutes in. I think I know the one, and I can certainly say that it doesn't even register in the top five most brutal moments in this movie. The all-time highlight, the one that typically comes up whenever this movie is discussed, is one that, if Mortal Kombat ever decided to add Art the Clown to its character roster (as it's done with various other horror villains), would probably have to be cut down in order to make the cut as the most graphic fatality in the game. The thing about Art here is that he doesn't usually just go for the easy kill, he likes to follow it up with more and draw out his victims' suffering for as long as possible. He'll land the killing blow and knock a victim down for the count, then reach for a different weapon and go for style points. There's not a lot of real tension when Art is killing people, but sheer excess packs a punch all its own. Leone has said in interviews that he envisions Art as having a supernatural ability to keep his victims alive so he can torture them for longer, and while this is never implied in the film itself (the human body can take a lot, and I just assumed that's what was happening), I certainly buy it. All the while, Art's sick sense of humor is out in force, with David Howard Thornton once again making him feel like a silent Freddy Krueger between his prop comedy and his often bemused facial expressions.

The drawn-out nature of the kills is, unfortunately, also reflective of what is probably this movie's biggest problem. Leone made a slasher movie that is two hours and eighteen minutes long, and there were a lot of scenes that could've been cut for time. It did help with the character development to give the story more room to breathe, but there were also a lot of scenes that overstayed their welcome and slowed the pace of the story considerably. I can handle a long horror movie, but there are limits, and they come when it feels like scenes were left in less to serve the story and more because Leone couldn't bear to cut anything, no matter how minor. The subplot with Victoria, the lone survivor from the last movie, is a case in point. While I have no doubt it will come back into play for Terrifier 3, especially given the mid-credits scene, that was just the thing: it felt like it was building up for a sequel more than anything, putting the cart before the horse and being another similarity this has with a lot of blockbuster superhero movies. Furthermore, while LaVera and Thornton were both great as Sienna and Art, the rest of the cast was a mixed bag. Sienna and Jonathan's mother in particular frequently overacted and came just one step away from a character in a Saturday Night Live sketch, and a lot of the supporting cast didn't exactly shine either.

The Bottom Line

If you can handle over two hours of absolute fucking carnage, then Terrifier 2 is for you. It's a modern slasher classic with a lot to like for horror fans, and I can't wait to see how the next movie plays out.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/10/review-terrifier-2-2022.html>

The movie is about a group of people goes into a zombie infested area to get a bunch of money. Unfortunately, I already know that the plan does not go out as plan and is easily predictable that current characters get killed. But it's interesting on how the zombies act like tribe people and are somewhat different compared to other zombies out there. The strongest aspect are the action scenes which is both fun and suspense to watch throughout. It shows how the characters does a great job on surviving against the zombies and fighting against them. There are also some side plot that is completely worthless like Kate looking for Geeta because on the way it ends. The characters themselves are mostly a mixed bad with a couple of them have some depth to them, but some of them aren't that interesting. I do like the zombie makeup effects that looks pretty good and have some details onto them.

Army of the Dead is a decent zombie movie that is both fun and enjoyable, but has a flawed story with it.

6/10