February 28th, 2015 - Aberration (1997)

I was pleasantly surprised by Aberration. I generally like to go into movies with an open mind, but you hear "killer lizard movie" and adjust your expectations accordingly. But I dug it - it's a pretty small-feeling film (small cast, not a lot of locations... even small monsters actually), but it wisely invests in building interesting characters as well as creature feature action.

It's about a young woman named Amy (Pamela Gidley) who has just moved into her family's small cabiny-house in an isolated, quiet town. (I was guessing somewhere in Alaska, but I don't think it's ever mentioned specifically. Maybe northern Minnesota, as one guy has on a University of Minnesota shirt. Regardless, it's snowy and very cold.) It's clear that she's trying to escape from her past - it's not revealed what she's running from until the third act, but whatever happened she has a fanny-pack full of cash with her. (It's not a shocking reveal, but the Netflix synopsis spoils it.) Unfortunately, once she gets to the house it appears as though she has a pest problem that her cat Frankie cannot control. She runs to the general store to pick up some mouse traps, and meets townie/field biologist Marshall (Simon Bossell). He's small town charming and a little bit weird, but when Amy's car won't start she accepts his offer of a ride home. When Marshall hears about her pest problem, he offers to help. When it becomes clear that Amy has more than a mouse problem (if her disemboweled kitty is any indication), Marshall uses his convenient biological science expertise to help her get rid of her pests, which turn out to be these guys:

February 27th, 2015 - The Werewolf of Washington (1972)

Or the "Weerwolf" of Washington, since that's how it's said most of the time here. Even though Werewolf of Washington predates An American Werewolf in London by almost 10 years, it goes for the same horror/comedy vibe. I'm not sure why werewolf + place = horror/comedy, but whatever. Werewolf of Washington is only vaguely funny and is not scary at all - it's just a little too goofy for it's own good. It's a little interesting in the respect that it got made at all (I have *no* idea who exactly the audience is supposed to be for this thing), but it's too ambling and unfocused to win you over.

It's about a DC journalist named Jack Whittier (Dean Stockwell!) who is in a relationship with the President's daughter. He wants out of the relationship with as little drama as possible, so he does the natural thing and asks for a transfer to Bulgaria. While he's there, the President decides he *must* have Jack on his team working with his press secretary. It's too good of an opportunity for Jack to pass up, so he plans to go back to DC. Unfortunately, on his way to the airport in Bulgaria, he runs across a group of nomads who make him crash his car - and one of them is a werewolf. He manages to fight and kill the manimal - apparently, it's a weak strain of lycanthropy. I like Dean Stockwell as an actor - I don't like him in a fight against a werewolf. But Jack is bitten during the scuffle, so is now cursed and turns into a killing machine every full moon.

February 26th, 2015 - Donner Pass (2012)

It's kind of weird how closely Donner Pass resembled yesterday's film (Legend of Sorrow Creek). Four kids, isolated in a remote wilderness home, looking for a good time, run afoul of some evil and start getting killed. I mean, that probably describes about 20% of horror movies, but still - I'm having a bit of a tough time keeping them separate in my head. The big difference is that Legend was more supernatural-based and Donner Pass is more psycho-cannibal-guy-in-the-woods based, with a little dash of the supernatural thrown in the mix. I mean, the *big* difference is that Legend was mostly enjoyable, and Donner Pass really isn't.

Donner Pass stars with a quick and liberally-interpreted retelling of the infamous Donner Party story. (In the 1840's, a group of pioneers was traveling through the Sierra Nevada mountains, ran afoul of some bad weather, were stranded and out of supplies, and resorted to eating members of their party who had died of natural causes.) Here though, one guy is crazy and kills people; eating them alive in a very zombie/gut-munching style. It's kind of gory, really.

February 25th, 2015 - Legend of Sorrow Creek (2007)

The last movie I watched from one of my Echo Bridge budget packs (Disturbed) was a big indie stinker, so I was a little hesitant about The Legend of Sorrow Creek. My fears intensified early on in the film when we have a scene where a cop and an anthropologist are roaming through the "deep woods." It's likely just a neighborhood park - you can see traffic moving in the background. It's got a pretty poor shot-on-video look too. But once we get to our main story, I was actually kind of impressed. Despite it's obvious cheapness, The Legend of Sorrow Creek is decently acted and manages to be unsettling at times. It won't win over anyone who is on a steady diet of slickly-produced studio fare, but to me it was a pleasant surprise.

We get not one but two prologues. In our first, we're way back in the olden days, if the sepia-toned picture is any indication. It's annoyingly dark most of the time - as in most of it is just audio with a black screen. Maybe they shot it normally (there are glimpses of footage there), but it didn't look convincing enough... Anyways, you hear a woman creepily saying bible verses and it becomes apparent that she is going mad. She hangs herself while her husband knocks on the door and yells frantically. He bursts in, just yelling "my wife! my wife!" in case we couldn't figure it out.

February 24th, 2015 - Dark Vision (2015)

I like watching found footage movies on my iPad. There is a certain immediacy/intimacy when watching them on a tablet... like you're just reviewing footage rather than sitting back in a comfy chair to watch a film. It sort of enhances the experience for me.

Boring story short, I had to watch today's movie on the iPad. So I cruised through my options on the amazon app, and stopped on Dark Vision. Not just one, but *five* teams of paranormal investigators compete to win their own show in the "Dark Vision Competition!" I could be getting five crappy ghost hunting movies for the price of one! (Against my better judgement, I love the damned things.) Well, the synopsis is pretty misleading - we only follow around one team as they investigate the basement/cave-like tunnels beneath "one of Britain's most haunted locations." The other four teams are only hinted at using text onscreen, and have next-to-nothing to do with the story. But I was still pleasantly surprised with Dark Vision - it's a pretty entertaining film that is moderately successful as a horror film, and probably even more successful as a comedy.

February 23rd, 2015 - The Living Dead Girl (1982)

I'm not super familiar with director Jean Rollin's films, other than the fact that they are usually pretty surreal, lush-looking, uh... French, and not afraid of the nudity. And The Living Dead Girl fits right in with that (rudimentary) understanding of the man's work. And now, I'd probably add disturbingly gory in a low-fi way to that list. But it all comes together really well here.

The Living Dead Girl kicks off with a couple of shady fellows trying to stash some barrels of chemical waste in an underground chamber. They must moonlight as grave robbers as well, because one of them knows that a wealthy mother and her daughter are there - not buried though, their coffins are just sitting in an adjoining room. So they break into the graves and begin stealing riches from the bejeweled corpses. Then a tremor knocks over a barrel of waste (with a convenient tap on the side), which starts to leak out. Unfortunately for the grave robbers, it's the kind of chemical waste that brings the dead back to life! Only the daughter however - she's in her 20s and is strangely un-decomposed, considering she's been dead for a couple of years. She can't really talk or anything - she just wanders around with a blank stare and kills people (her zombie powers allow her to just jam her fingers into people's flesh). She makes quick work of the grave robbers and begins to wander back to the nearby castle where she grew up.

February 22nd, 2015 - All Cheerleaders Die (2013)

I wanted to like All Cheerleaders Die way more than I actually did. I'm a big fan of director Lucky McKee - May is awesome in so many ways and The Woman is one of my favorites of the last few years. Even though Cheerleaders is a co-directed film (McKee and Chris Sivertson), I was pretty excited to see something new from him. His films are usually pretty upfront and deft about exploring gender/sexuality issues in really interesting ways, as well as subverting genre conventions. It seemed like the high school setting of Cheerleaders would be fertile ground for a filmmaker of his skills and style. I also knew that McKee & Sivertson were revisiting a short they made 10+ years earlier, so I assume they must have had good reason to go back to the well. Unfortunately, it just didn't do it for me. There's a pretty fine line between mocking negative genre conventions and outright embracing them - and I felt like Cheerleaders was pretty inconsistent and veered a little to closely to the latter.

February 21st, 2015 - Everyone Must Die! (2012)

Everyone Must Die is a little confusing at first. Okay, it's a lot confusing at first. You can tell right off the bat that it's a very indie production ("it looks like a home movie," my wife said), but it seems like it's trying to be serious. A masked killer, all in black, is chasing a bunch of people out of a house. It's just so poorly edited that you can't really tell what the hell is going on - is he actually killing people? He strangles a woman for like 3 seconds, but then I guess she's dead? Is the non-masked dude stabbing the killer or the woman? It's all very unclear. But then the "hero" gets out the lawn mower and runs the killer over, starting a trend of people dying off screen with blood flying up everywhere.

Later, the law gets involved, and you start to wonder how serious this is all supposed to be. The acting and dialogue is super cheesy, but that's just how these things go, right?  Then, the next batch of victims is four people camping, and you begin to realize that Everyone Must Die! is meant to be a joke. Sort of winking at the camera and saying "hey guys, we're making a stupid horror movie!" And as far as those sorts of things go... it still isn't very good - but it could be worse.

February 20th, 2015 - The Battery (2012)

I remember hearing a lot about The Battery when it first came out in 2012. Zombie fever was at an all time (obnoxious) high. Zombies had hit the mainstream in a big way, and movie after movie after movie was coming out with very little new or exciting to offer. The Battery works so well because it's a decidedly different take on the zombie apocalypse - it's much more of a character-driven film. There isn't much by way of gut-munching or head splodin' action. Instead, you get an up close and personal look at two people who are dealing with the loneliness and isolation that comes from being two of the last people on earth. The Battery is more concerned with the tension that comes from that mental strain, rather than your typical "we're trapped and zombies are everywhere!" scenario. And because of that, it's much more relatable, and to me, more realistic - everyone has felt alone or hopeless at sometime, right?

Ben (writer-director Jeremy Gardner) and Mickey (Adam Cronheim) are two survivors of an unseen (and mostly undiscussed) zombie apocalypse. You never really figure out just what happened, but you know that these two are amongst the very last non-infected people on the planet. Their plan is to keep moving through the countryside - they figure they are less likely to get attacked if they stay on the move. Ben takes a more proactive approach, playing the alpha of the pair - he's a survivalist type who seems to enjoy foraging for food/supplies and smashing skulls in. Mickey is the more sensitive of the two, and is having trouble adjusting to this new world - he mostly just further isolates himself by listening to his discman and sulking.

February 19th, 2015 - One Frightened Night (1935)

My birthday movie! I was thinking about watching something I knew I would (probably) like, or something I really wanted to see. But since the ultimate plan was to watch the MST3k Pumaman, I decided to just take it easy and make it short. And One Frightened Night certainly had that going for it, at least. 65 minutes I think?

And honestly, that's being unnecessarily harsh - it isn't a bad movie by any means. It's just tough for a 1935 screwball murder mystery to resonate much with me 80 years later. (But in an "interesting" coincidence that I just now realized, it's from 1935 and I turned 35 today! Crazy!)

One Frightened Night is about a cantankerous old rich man that gathers a bunch of his "friends" on a dark and stormy night. I say "friends" because he seems to be really mean to them. But at least it's usually in an amusing way. Apparently, a new inheritance tax will come into law at midnight, and he wants to get rid of his fortune before then. Since he cannot track down his only living relative (a granddaughter from his estranged daughter), he promises to give each of his six (or so) friends one million dollars! So I guess it's okay that he's kind of a dick. Everybody is obviously pretty stoked, but then who should show up at the door - his missing granddaughter! The friends' joy turns to disappointment. Then a few minutes later a second woman shows up, also claiming to be the granddaughter! Then *someone* murders the first granddaughter! Everyone is a suspect... who is the killer? Who is the real granddaughter? Tune in to find out!

February 18th, 2015 (Trip Day 12) - Werewolf in a Girls Dormitory (1961)

Trip Day 12.

February 17th, 2015 (Trip Day 11) - Vengeance of the Zombies (1973)

Trip Day 11.

February 16th, 2015 (Trip Day 10) - Terrified (1963)

Trip Day 10.

February 15th, 2015 (Trip Day 9) - It Happened at Nightmare Inn (1973)

Trip Day 9.

February 14th, 2015 (Trip Day 8) - Memorial Valley Massacre (1989)

Trip Day 8.

February 13th, 2015 (Trip Day 7) - The Appearing (2014)

Trip Day 7.

February 12th, 2015 (Trip Day 6) - Disturbed (2009)

Trip Day 6.

February 11th, 2015 (Trip Day 5) - The Ghost (1963)

Trip Day 5.

February 10th, 2015 (Trip Day 4) - Sound of Horror (1966)

Trip Day 4.

February 9th, 2015 (Trip Day 3) - Blood Mania (1970)

Trip Day 3.

February 8th, 2015 (Trip Day 2) - Starry Eyes (2014)

Trip Day 2.

February 7th, 2015 (Trip Day 1) - Voodoo Man (1944)

Trip Day 1.

On February 7th, my wife and I went on a trip to sunny California. We started in LA, visiting a friend for a couple of days, and over the next week slowly drove up the coast to finish things up in San Francisco. It was rad! But, it made watching a movie every day/writing about it quite difficult. As committed as I am to this thing, I can't justify missing out on a potentially once-in-a-lifetime trip to blog about a terrible indie-slasher, you know? Plus, I think it's wise to occasionally do things with your spouse.

February 6th, 2015 - Bigfoot Wars (2014)

Nope!

This movie sucks. I know that will come as a shock to a lot of you who expected a movie called Bigfoot Wars to reinvigorate the horror genre, but nope! It's really, really bad, and not in an entertaining way either.

I watched this the night prior to a big vacation, so maybe my mind wasn't totally in it. And it was in less than ideal circumstances - I bought a little portable DVD player so I could watch movies on the trip, and the sound is just *terrible*.  Trying to write about it now (more than 2 weeks later - the vacation threw me for a loop), I can't remember too much of anything. So sorry for the brevity of this entry. But here's what I've got:

February 5th, 2015 - Scourge (2008)

Scourge is probably the first movie I've come across since starting this little project that I knew I probably shouldn't like but really did anyways. I mean, there isn't a lot of acclaim for it (the 4.2 on imbd was higher than I expected) - and to be honest it doesn't really deserve it. There are far too may conveniences with the plot, an overly CGI'd monster, and a lack of anything too original or inventive. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a really good time with it. Scourge has some good actors/characters that were really easy to get behind, some good humor (I laughed out loud and rewound/rewatched one scene - a rarity for me), and a story that was easy to follow and didn't try too hard. It's definitely a simple story - really, it feels like a SyFy film done right.

Scourge is about a little worm-creature/virus thing that escapes from it's ancient holding cell in an old church in Harbortown, Washington (via Canada) when the church burns down. Basically, it infects a person, makes them act all weird and makes chunks of their flesh fall off, and eventually bursts out of them and into another person, via their belly button.

February 4th, 2015 - Craze (1974)

Like I would suspect of a lot of people my age (35 for the record), my introduction to Jack Palance was through his Oscar-winning role as Curly in the 1991 comedy City Slickers.  It was a fun role, but it's kind of hard for me not to imprint that on him when I see him as a younger man. Perhaps it's being introduced to an actor as an older person? At any rate, 1974 Palance was a lot of fun in Craze, once I got could get past seeing young Curly drugging people, engaging in witchcraft, and jamming a ladies' face into a fire.

In Craze, Palance plays Neal Mottram, an antiques dealer in London who dabbles in witchcraft and black magic. In the opening scene, we see Neal leading a ceremony where a young woman dances in a frenzy in front of an African Idol. Neal gives her a knife and she cuts open her stomach... just enough to bleed a bit and maybe leave a scar - she doesn't die. This is presented by Neal as a blood sacrifice to the idol/God Chuku.

February 3rd, 2015 - Man With Two Lives (1942)

Man With Two Lives is another one from the Mill Creek Budget Pack "50 Tales of Terror." And like other recent entries from that set, it's a film that's more from a non-horror genre with just a bit of horror sprinkled into the mix. ("Terror" would be a strong word, but there is enough here to make Mill Creek vaguely justified in adding it to the set.) Our genre here? Mob/Crime Thriller, with a little bit of body-switching.

The story centers on Phillip Bennett (Edward Norris), a young man who seemingly has it all - he's from a wealthy family, is engaged to be married, and is leading a pretty happy life. Then one night, he's killed in a car accident. Luckily, his well-connected dad's best friend is a doctor/mad-scientist type (the good kind), who happens to be experimenting with bringing the dead back to life. Double luckily, his body was completely unharmed in the crash, as he died of shock and not, you know, the crash (?). Unluckily for Phillip, a notorious crime-boss killer named Panino (who we learn is "driven by a pathological need to kill") happened to be getting executed at the EXACT same time Phillip is being reanimated. Double unluckily, Panino's soul ends up in Phil's body! So Phil/Panino tries to get back into the old mob business, while trying to fool Phil's family into thinking he's still good old Phil. Good times!

February 2nd, 2015 - The Crying Dead (2011)

Or, the one where the ghosts use The Force. Because that's pretty much the only new thing the ghost-hunting/mockumentary The Crying Dead brings to the table. Rather than a character getting dragged away from the camera, they get flung across the room as if by an angry Jedi. I mean, don't worry - you'll still get your 'person getting dragged away from the camera' fix (apparently a requirement in this sort of thing), but you get to see some people fly too. Stick around, and you'll see not one but two kinds of infrared cameras and some shitty ghosts too.

I guess They Crying Dead is a *little* different in that our characters are filming the pilot episode of a ghost-hunting show. So the characters don't really have any established personal dynamics... i.e. who's the leader, how they should interact with each other, etc. Although that does work as a convenient excuse to cover up as why none of them seem to have any chemistry, or why they seem unsure in front of the camera. It kind of makes me wonder if they even had a script for this thing, as there is very little connective tissue from one scene to the next (other than "oh no, so-and-so is missing, we should keep filming"). The Crying Dead kind of reeks of script by bullet point - on the one hand, it (theoretically) makes our actors sound more natural, but on the other hand, it just makes things feel kind of unfocused.

February 1st, 2015 - Scared to Death (1947)

Even with the presence of Bela Lugosi, Scared to Death was pretty difficult to sit through. It's the first time I've ever had such a short runtime (65 minutes) feel so damned long. When I pop in a disc from the 50 Tales of Terror box set, I don't necessarily expect a screwball comedy... and unlike A Walking Nightmare from a week or so ago, Scared to Death was *not* a pleasant surprise. It just sucked.

Scared to Death opens in a morgue, where a couple of morticians bemoan their task, because "one hates to perform an autopsy on such a beautiful woman." As opposed to all of the ugly people they love opening up. The police want to know the cause of death ASAP... guess how she died? "Lucky" for us, the corpse can talk to the audience, and we spend the movie watching the events that led to her death.