Cold Cream Manor (2003)

Cold Cream Manor (what? Why are you looking at me like that? Isn't that the name of the movie?) is a 2003 film about a family that flees the city after a terrifying experience, only to move into the boondocks in a small town, where they find out that small towns can be even more terrifying in their own ways (which I or anyone else who's ever lived in a small town could have told them without them having to move if they'd ever bothered to ask). The movie is definitely not as bad as everyone says it is. I expected the worst movie ever made from the pissy, whiny reviews everyone gave it after it came out, so I was pleasantly surprised when I finally got around to watching it. The biggest problem is that it was marketed as a horror movie and it's not even close. Don't mess with horror fans like that. Don't lie to us to lure us into the theater under false pretenses, thinking we'll appreciate the artistic merit of your movie once we get over the non-horrorness of it. We never get over anything. We die in the grip of a terrible rage and crawl out from under the covers on your bed and drag your ass to hell if you piss us off.

There are NO ghosts in this movie (not even half-assed "oh there are some strange events and we'll never know if they were really ghostly or not" kind of ghosts, there's nothing supernatural at ALL in the movie, contrary to how it was marketed, and that probably pissed a lot of people off). There's some creepy and unexplained stuff going on with the young son of the family in the movie, and I thought that they were going to try and make it into a supernatural kind of subplot, but it never happened (maybe they meant to do that and just forgot, I dunno, the filmmakers were really busy doing other stuff while shooting the film...) There is also a lot of everyday human evil in this movie. I mean, the scariest thing about the movie is the theme music they played for every "scary" scene, which sounds like they produced it by throwing a piano down a flight of stairs and recording the noise it made (you think I'm joking. Just watch it and see) but some of the townspeople in this movie are pretty fucking creepy. Dude, don't fuck with redneck hicks...we'll kill you and stash your body where no one will ever find it, even if it's a common place that every damn person in the town knows about, they'll be too lazy to ever look there once you disappear, so we'll totally get away with your murder (if it weren't for those meddling kids...)

Ok, I'll stop mocking the movie now. It seriously wasn't as bad as I'm making fun of it to be. I enjoyed all 600 hours of it (seriously, why did it have to be this goddamn long?) and even though the mother and father of the family who move into the old house are really two of the dumbest movie characters I've ever encountered (and that's saying something coming from a person who regularly views films with such titles as "A Night to Dismember" and "Avia: Vampire Hunter") I still rooted for them to win in the end...if only they could stop fighting about stupid shit long enough to actually investigate the mysterious house they bought without checking the grounds first (and then they merrily send their kids off to play in unexplored woods that could contain bears or wolves or a rusty junkyard full of deadly sharp shit for all they fucking know, since they didn't bother to even ASK what was in the woods before they let their kids run free there). Actually, if they'd have bothered to talk to their damn kids, that would have solved the "big mystery" of the movie in the first fifteen minutes. Ahem. Yeah, it's really not as bad as people said it would be, but don't go in expecting too much, either, or you might hunt me down and stab me in the face for recommending you watch it.