November 24th, 2015 - Shrooms (2007)

Confession: I've never done mushrooms. If I ever do (even though at age 35 my "trying new substances" days are almost over), I hope there isn't some ghost/beast thing running around trying to kill me after I take them. That would suck. And I guess that's pretty much the story of Shrooms.

It's worth noting that Shrooms is NOT a comedy. I expected it to be an Evil Bong-ish silly drug misadventure (the likes of which are generally painfully unfunny), but Shrooms is far from it. It plays more like a grim n' gritty slasher than anything. Not a particularly good one, mind you, but still a step up from your average drug comedy.

November 20th, 2015 - Treehouse (2014)

Treehouse is good enough to be disappointing. That counts for something, right? It's got a really strong first act, which does an excellent job establishing the relationship of our hero brothers (Crawford and his younger brother Killian) and the world they live in. For the first half, Treehouse reminded me (in a good way) a lot of the coming of age movies I grew up with in the 80's - it's a world where adults are present, but are very peripheral. We experience everything through the brother's eyes, and during the setup of the film it works very well.

Anyways: It's the night of the big town fair (or something). But we find out (actually we see, in the pre-credit sequence) that a teenage girl and her young brother have gone missing, taken by some unseen force. The sheriff says something along the lines of "the disappearances have started again" and is acting all cryptic, so the festival gets cancelled. Crawford and Killian are bummed, but they aren't going to let that ruin their night. So they go out into the woods to party, but when their friends don't show they say "eff-it" and light off some fireworks on their own. But one firework illuminates a treehouse high above the forest floor, and being rascals, they have to go check it out.

October 30th, 2015 - Lucifer's Angels (2015)

Lucifer's Angels is an effective microbudgeted ($3,000 if you believe imdb) indie that plays to its strengths and hides its weaknesses well. It manages to deliver some decent tension, has a good creepy vibe, and has enough going on story-wise that it moves by pretty quickly - you never have the chance to get too bored over the 60-some minute runtime.

There are quite a few moving parts to the film, but it's far from confusing. It starts out many years ago in a mental institution, where four doctors are arguing over their most violent patients. Several staff members have been killed, and the doctors are trying to find a way to deal with these maniacs. Flash forward to the present day. Four friends head out to the mountains for a camping trip - they manage to get some good partying in, but at one point a local boy stops by and tells them a campfire ghost story about the the large number of people that have disappeared in these very woods, how they may be haunted, and so on. The boy's Pop shows up and tells him to "Git!" but the seed has been planted. But it's cool - Pops likes to drink too, so the party continues.

May 21st, 2015 - Night of the Flesh Eaters (2008)

Occasionally, I'll end up watching movies in chunks. As much as I'd like to take in all of these films in one sitting, it's sometimes just not possible. (Damned work and sleep.) In the case of Night of the Flesh Eaters, I started it just after midnight on Thursday 5/21, watched about 50 minutes, and then went to bed. I watched the last half-hour after work that evening. Normally, I don't think splitting a movie does all that much - I can usually get back into the flow of things relatively easily. It's not the best way to do it, but you do what you gotta do.

That being said, I think it may be the best way to watch something like Night of the Flesh Eaters. It's a mostly fun but really dumb and poorly acted low-budget indie that has a good sense of humor about itself. But it also has kind of a one-joke feel to it, so splitting it in two chunks made it go down a little easier. Even though I liked the one-joke, it probably would have been difficult to sit through 80-minutes of it.