Anyway (and in addition)

So I'm watching the movie "Frozen" for the first time right now. My cousin bought a subscription to Disney+, and she wanted to share the magic with me, so she gave me her password, and this is the first thing I thought of watching . I've watched almost the entire movie through with clips and previews,  but I've never just sat down and watched the entire thing from beginning to end, and a lot if things struck me.

First, it must be terrifying to be like Elsa, to have powers that you don't understand. Everything she touches freezes. That must he horrible. She is taught she can create beautiful things, like snow covered frozen trees and fields. These are beautiful.  But also she can hurt those she loves the most. She can freeze them and effectively freeze them to death, kill everything she touches. Conceal your powers. Don't feel the pain, learn to control it.

And what does she get? An empty existence where everything around her is cold and frozen, but she's gotten used to it, and the cold never bothered her anyway. So what has she lost? Nothing, if she really had nothing to begin with.

Last week I tried to talk to some people in my church. I tried to make them understand why people like me, broken people,  might be afraid of church, might be hesitant to go to church at all, because we've only seen the worst that the world has to offer, and we know nothing of grace and the beauty it could bring to the world. It went badly,  I'll say. I didn't say it right, and I don't think they understood.  Sometimes I think I don't understand either. I know abuse and fear and timidity and pain, but not much that gives me hope.

So if you'll remember, a million years ago, I  started writing about a writer called Robert Dunbar and his books, and how though they're full of horrible things, they give me hope, because they point toward something bigger than my fear and my horror,  something good, something worth fighting for.

My cousins and I, we know of fear and horror and bad things. We know of all the bad the world has to offer, but we used to play together in the fear and the muck when we were kids, and we would always hope for something better. I remember once wading through a swamp with my cousins Nikki and Derek and Tommy and having a long conversation about how so many things were horrible in our lives, but as we stepped on leeches and snakes and rotten things, we hoped to come out on the other side and find something better. Something better than we ever hoped we could find in our worlds of darkness and poverty and pain.

So now, as a 30...almost 40 something, this movie means more than it ever would have meant to 10 year old me, who could never hope for anything bigger than the tiny world I had known. Today my cousin told me about how she felt hopelessness as a kid, but when she met me she learned to hope for more than she could see, because I had a whole imaginary world I played in where anything was possible, and she said that thanks to me, she viewed something she couldn't see before, some future and some hope.

Jeremiah 29:11 is a promise that God has a plan for our lives, a plan to give us a future and a hope. At one point in my life, I remember lying naked on a floor in the dark, and I had nothing, literally nothing to live for, and I couldn't even pray, because all I could see was darkness, and I couldn't find any words to say, but I remembered Jeremiah 29:11 and a future and a hope, so I said that, over and over, rocking back and forth and hugging my knees to my chest.

I want to write more about these experiences, but before I can even do that, I feel like I have to lay the foundation for why it's so important to me. Horror movies and books and stories have always resonated with me,  because I knew so much dark and evil, but in those stories, people would try to fight the evil with whatever they had. Maybe they lost, but at least they tried. I've been given so much crap all my life for loving horror movies. I've even been told that in my heart I know Jesus doesn't want me to watch those movies, and I try to make excuses because I don't really love him.

First of all, fuck you. Second of all, did it ever occur to anyone that sometimes people like horror movies because their life experiences look more like a horror movie than anything else? Maybe we need to see that people can fight evil. No one is saying everyone has to like horror,  or even understand it, but it would be nice if people didn't shit all over the only thing that has helped me through the darkest times in my life. Even before I had words to explain why, I loved seeing people fight monsters. It gave me hope that I could fight them, too.

When I was little I did that, I created worlds in my mind where people were strong and where people stood up against evil and won, because that's what I hoped would happen, that people would fight the evil and win. I had to believe there was a parting between me and the evil, that there could be a way out. I saw the evil, the bad things I could do, that we all could do, and it made me afraid, but I had to believe there was a possibility that I could do good too, or there was no hope, and I should give up now.

So when Elsa sang this,  I felt it in my heart:

The snow glows white on the mountain tonight
Not a footprint to be seen
A kingdom of isolation
And it looks like I'm the queen

The wind is howling like this swirling storm inside
Couldn't keep it in, heaven knows I've tried
Don't let them in, don't let them see
Be the good girl you always have to be
Conceal, don't feel, don't let them know
Well, now they know

Let it go, let it go
Can't hold it back anymore
Let it go, let it go
Turn away and slam the door
I don't care what they're going to say
Let the storm rage on
The cold never bothered me anyway

Let it go, let it go
Can't hold it back anymore
Let it go, let it go
Turn away and slam the door

Let it go (go, go, go go, go go, go go, go, go, go go)

Let it go

Let it go

Let it go

It's funny how some distance makes everything seem small
And the fears that once controlled me can't get to me at all
It's time to see what I can do
To test the limits and break through
No right, no wrong, no rules for me
I'm free

Let it go, let it go
I am one with the wind and sky
Let it go, let it go
You'll never see me cry
Here I stand and here I stay
Let the storm rage on

My power flurries through the air into the ground
My soul is spiraling in frozen fractals all around
And one thought crystallizes like an icy blast
I'm never going back, the past is in the past

Let it go
The cold never bothered me anyway
Let it go, let it go
And I'll rise like the break of dawn
Let it go, let it go
That perfect girl is gone
Here I stand in the light of day
Let the storm rage on

The cold never bothered me anyway...


Girl, tell me about it! I got so used to the cold at some point that I'm sure these could have been my words. And those who should nurture and protect me had gotten so used to the cold that they saw nothing wrong with providing me gear to survive the cold instead of trying to make it warmer...

See, in therapy we hear the warnings about this. Trying to learn to like the cold instead of trying to warm things up.  See. The abused people try to learn to like the cold as it is, instead of trying to make it be warmer. We try to learn to adapt to the cold around us instead of trying to change it. It's a whole big thing, learning to identify in our lives things that need to change instead of letting them stay awful and being stuck in our past patterns of abuse and horror. So anyway, I've heard this song before, how I should learn to use who I am to get me through the bad, instead of letting who I am make me stronger and protect me for whatever is to come to change the bad and make it better.


It's scary, leaping into the unknown and trusting that who you are will guide you through, no matter what happens.

So Robert Dunbar (remember him?) Wrote this whole long story across three books that I'll hope you follow me through to read about, because it's horrifying and yet beautiful in its horifyingness, but one thing that it says above all else is that sometimes horrible things happen, and we are hurt, but we can find beauty in the brokenness. This is why I see a pattern between all the frozen brokenness and all the good that can come after,  when all the broken pieces put themselves together and people can weather what remains of the storm together.

I know, I'm nuts. But I've lived 38 years with this broken beautifulness, and if I've learned anything, it's that God is bigger than me,  and he can shine his truth though the darkest night. That's probably a messed-up thing to draw as a conclusion between myself and the unknown, but I'm trusting that god is bigger than me, and that God can reach through the darkness and find light where I don't see any light. He's good at doing that. So let us trust God,  the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and Eileen and Robert Dunbar,  and all of us. The God that is bigger than us is capable of everything, so let us trust that  And read and write, and not be afraid.

Amen.

October Horror Challenge 2019 #101: "The Invoking V: Phantoms"

Don't ask me how, but for some reason, an overlong and ultimately unsuccessful psychological horror movie from 2013 became a halfway decent collection of horror anthology movies. Yeah, I'm just as surprised as you are, but these movies are creepy fun. Not always the best when you look at the stories as a whole, but there's always at least one standout story, so they're worth checking out, at least for me.

As always, the stories here don't really have a connection to each other, but short, sweet, and for the most part scary. The first story is really  creepy,  and I hate it when my neighbors knock on my door too, so I can totally relate. To my surprise,  I actually liked the second story too, about a repressed housewife haunted by something in her house. There's also a couple of college students living together who get a creepy old book (I love books, but even I would take a pass on this one), then terrible things start happening. I get the message, books are bad, right? This story is actually gory and kind of cool.

The last story deals with the end of the world, another apocalypse predicted, with references to other reports of the apocalypse that have happened in past years. The protagonist is a guy who is sick of these reports, and sick of life in general, as he finds out that there might be more truth to this report of the end of the world. This is actually a pretty darkly comedic episode. Definitely more sophisticated than I expected it to be. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. This whole collection was good, there wasn't one story I didn't like. It's way better than any movie with the number 5 after its title has any right to be.

October Horror Challenge 2019 #100: "The Invoking IV: Halloween Nights"

As you can see, my internet searches revealed that there is indeed a 4th "Invoking" movie, and look, it's called "Halloween Nights"! Perfect to watch on Halloween! Like the second and third movies in this series, it has nothing to do with the first movie, and is instead a collection of spooky short movies that don't look like they're connected to each other, except that they all have something paranormal about them.

This movie opens with a bang. The first story is about a little girl who hears something scary in her closet. The acting is a little rough at times, but it's still pretty cool. The second story again is more of a scary scene than a whole story, but it was still cool and showed one of the scariest things about going on a road trip and pulling over because you have to pee where it's all secluded and there is no bathroom. Yikes!

There's a story that shows us a desperate pregnant woman who probably shouldn't have cheated on her husband (but can you blame her? He's creepy as hell). I have to give credit to one of the stories for being extremely creepy and fucked up. It's gory and gross, and probably close to the worst thing you could watch if you were pregnant. Good lord. I give it credit though for being willing to go so far and show so much. It's definitely the best story in the collection for me. The last one took me forever to realize what was going on, and then once I did, I rolled my eyes into the next century. There's some cool gore, but the actors all sound like they're reading their lines, and after the awesome story that came before,  there's no way this will measure up. The first four stories are good, though, so I still ended up enjoying this movie.

October Horror Challenge 2019 #99: "The Invoking III: Poltergeist Dimensions"

"The Invoking 3," otherwise known as "WTF, they made another sequel to that movie?!" Seriously, I did a search and parts 4 and 5 popped up, too. If they're not joking, that might mean "The Invoking" series is going to become a dumping ground for low-budget horror flicks that won't get released any other way, because the sequels don't have anything to do with each other or with the first "invoking" movie. Sheesh. Let's hope this movie is at least worth watching.

Like  the second movie,  thisis a collection of short horror movies that don't have anything to do with each other or with the first "Invoking" movie. Well, I guess the stories in "The Invoking 2" all had some element of the paranormal, so there's that connection. The stories in part 3 all have an element of the paranormal as well (though not a poltergeist, as the title would have you believe...it's not a generic word for ghost, it's a specific kind of spirit, come on guys, words mean things).

As with the second movie,  the stories in this movie are all short, so they don't have too much time to get annoying before they're over. I really loved the first story, a found footage style story that takes place in some dark caves being explored by an archeology student and his friends. That's actually my favorite story in this movie. The rest of them don't feel like stories, because there aren't enough details for them to be considered stories. They're more like just scenes of something creepy, not a story that has a beginning,  a middle, and an end.

I know my chief complaint about the first "Invoking" movie was that it dragged, but these stories could still stand to have been longer without dragging too much. The one about the girl who always notices something creepy in the photos she tries to take with her phone is probably the best of the rest. This is still better than the first movie, though, so I guess that's a win.

October Horror Challenge 2019 #98: "The Invoking II"

Second verse, same as the first, only, hopefully better, not worse! That's right, I'm finally checking out the sequel to the low-budget horror movie "The Invoking." I gotta say, when I was typing this review, autocorrect tried to change that sentence to "low-end movie The Invoking," and that's mean, but kinda accurate. The first movie was a bunch of atmosphere that never gels into a coherent movie. I'm hoping this sequel is better (hey, don't look at me like that, sometimes sequels are better than the originals, it could happen!)

Apparently, this is a sequel in name only, which might be a good thing, considering how irritated I was by the original. This is supposed to be a collection of stories about people being touched (and often destroyed) by evil. It happens. It's not a regular anthology style horror movie, where we get a story that bookends all the short stories, like someone sitting down to read a collection of horror stories, and then each story is one of the short films in the movie. That helps ground those movies, but this movie just starts, and one story plays after the other with no connection between them and no indication of when we're switching from one story to another. That's kind of annoying. I mean, there's a little title card at the beginning of each new story, but I still wish they were connected somehow.

It might be a good thing that each of these stories is short, because my biggest problem with the original movie was that it dragged and dragged forever without ever getting to the point, and since they're short, these stories don't have time to do that. The first one is good, but a little too short to be called a "story." The others are cool, too. One has some good ghost effects, there's someone struggling with hallucinations that are a little too real, someone trying to run from justice (a bad idea in these kinds of movies), some friends goon a doomed cabin retreat (aren't all cabin retreats doomed in these movies), and a woman is stalked by a masked killer.

The stories are supposedly a collection of short films that producers found that weren't meant to be part of a collection. It's a cool idea, because short movies aren't likely to be released on their own, and if putting them together is more likely to get them seen, I'm all for that. This movie isn't anything original or groundbreaking, but the stories are still kinda cool, and I definitely liked this better than the first movie.

October Horror Challenge 2019 #97: "The Invoking"

I don't know much about this movie. Like for instance, I didn't know it was also released under the title "Sader Ridge," but both of the movie posters are pretty cool. Honestly, I only knew that it was a horror movie and it had Josh Truax in it, and I like him as an actor, so I wanted to watch the movie. Unfortunately I also promptly forgot about it, and it wasn't until I saw a movie poster for "The Invoking II" that I remembered it again. Gotta watch this movie before I check out the sequel  yo.


So this movie is about some college friends who are on a road trip. One of the girls, Sam, was raised by adoptive parents, and while she's in college she's contacted by a lawyer who informs her that she has an aunt who died and left her a house and several acres of land in a rural area. Since her adoptive parents are sensitive about her asking questions regarding her birth family, she doesn't tell them about the lawyer and instead heads out to explore the house and property with three of her friends. She has no memory of the place, even though she lived there for the first five years of her life, but once she's in the house she starts seeing things and hearing things, and soon she and her friends are driven to the brink of madness by some force they don't understand.


Ok, why do people in these movies always go on trips with their ex boyfriend or girlfriend? It keeps happening in these movies, and I don't get it, especially when the relationship had some dark secrets, and they're dating someone new who doesn't want them going on a trip with their ex (no shit, seriously, I wouldn't want them to do it either). There's enough tension going on a trip to some creepy place in the dark and digging up past memories that might be painful without adding a heaping dose of relationship drama on top of that.


People online have written lots of bitchy reviews complaining about the acting in this movie, but I don't think it's that bad. I've seen worse. Hell, I've seen worse acting in movies I've watched TODAY. Maybe everyone should try watching 100 horror movies in October. It definitely gives you a better perspective on what "bad acting" truly is. And I like the characters in this movie. Along with Sam and her ex, we have another guy and girl who seem to have some romantic tension between them, even though they're not dating (see, again, I wouldn't want to go on a road trip with the person I have a crush on who doesn't like me back, that seems like a recipe for a nightmare even if there aren't evil ghosts attacking us). But the characters have history, so it was entertaining watching them interact. There's also a young man staying on the property who is a caretaker for the house and grounds, and it turns out that he and Sam played together as kids, though she doesn't remember it.


Because of the kind of movie this is, haunted people in a place haunted by memories (if not ghosts) there's a lot of scenes of people bickering, staring off into space, and looking tormented by memories. I get that it has to happen to set the scene, but I think these scenes are a big part of why people call this movie boring. I will agree that the movie drags a lot more than it should. The scenes Sam sees in her head that play out in the rooms of the house like they're real but turn out to be like, waking nightmares or something, they're interesting, but not interesting enough to carry a whole movie. There's way too much space where just nothing is happening, and the characters start to get really annoying. They're always fighting. and the caretaker guy is hiding something, so it's frustrating when no one will just come out and tell the truth about whatever the hell is going on. It's less an "introspective thriller" and more a boring, confusing, jumbled mess. I hate to say it, because I really wanted to like this movie, but I understand now why everyone was so bitchy about it. It has potential, but it never realizes that potential. And now I'm bitchy. Thanks a lot, movie.

October Horror Challenge 2019 #96: "Waxwork"

This movie always lurks at the edges of my consciousness. Amazon and Netflix both recommend it to me every year, and I once had a roommate who loved this movie and its sequel. I'm finally sitting down to watch it after all these years and I hope it's as good as everyone has said.

This movie is billed as an "episodic" horror movie, which is a bunch of mini horror stories in one. This movie is different from other episodic horror movies though, because it's not a bunch of different stories introduced separately into a collection. The movie 8s about a mysterious waxwork museum that opens in the rich area of a town, and a group of college students are invited to come to a private showing one night at midnight. As each of them wanders off to look at different exhibits, they get sucked into the world that the scene represents. That's such a cool idea! Then each "episode" is just the kids trying to survive whichever scene they find themselves in.

This movie definitely makes me never want to go to a waxwork museum, even if it's not owned by a creepy guy who wants to unleash evil into the world. I think I was supposed to like the characters, especially the young rich man we meet at the beginning who defies his materialistic mother by daring to spend time with the hired help. I get that's supposed to make him sympathetic, but with his money and influence he could do more to help them than he does, and he's still a cocky little jerk who thinks he's a lot cooler than he is.

Call me crazy, but if my friends disappeared after we all visited a creepy wax museum one night, and I had a ton of money and a well-connected family, I'd do more than call a few cops and knock on the door and kindly ask to see the museum again (of course, I would have never left the damn museum in the first place after they disappeared, because I actually give a crap about my friends, but whatever).

There's some cool gore, and I liked watching the scenes play out. Vampires and werewolves are cool! So are mummies! Gotta love the classic monsters. And we get to see a guy ripped apart, and a midnight snack of bloody flesh that actually turned my stomach (I like rare steak, but eeeew). The characters do the typically dumb horror movie stuff (hey, let's go into this creepy wax museum alone at night after a bunch of people have disappeared here!) But without stupid moves like this, the movie would be five minutes long. I like the backstory of the museum owner and why he's doing these evil things. What an evil jerk, seriously. I guess you have to use your talents in life, but come ON, dude. Overall this was a really fun movie, and I'm glad I finally watched it.

October Horror Challenge 2019 #95: "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920)"

I never really thought about this until I was watching this movie tonight, but Dr. Jekyll is a rich doctor who operates a free clinic that treats people who can't afford a doctor. Holy crap, Dr. Jekyll is a socialist! And he appears to be a good guy, but he's mocked by his friends because they believe he's only good because he's repressing his true nature. Some friends. Unfortunately, it appears to be true, and when Dr. Jekyll develops a potion that he believes will split him into two people, one containing all the good inside him, and one containing all the bad, he ends up releasing all his inhibitions into one man, the evil Dr. Jekyll.

It's said that when Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the original book "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," it terrified his wife so much that he destroyed the manuscript, but ended up writing it again and publishing it. It's a classic story because of how it deals with good vs. evil and how all of us have the capacity within ourselves to do good and evil, so no one is really a "good guy" or a "bad guy," but we're all capable of being both good or evil, and if we repress the evil inside us, it can escape and turn into something monstrous.

This movie is an interesting analysis of this concept, though I think most of us will have an easier time reconciling the good and evil within us if we don't try to drink a potion that will separate us into two people, one only capable of being good and one only capable of being evil. It will also possibly help of we don't surround ourselves with assholes who mock us every time we try to do good. This movie is another cool little classic that's fun to watch this time of year. The Dr. Jekyll in this movie is a disheveled, hairy guy with long hair who leers at the world through a crooked grin and probably looks like a guy you'd meet at a gas station at 2 AM. This would be a fun movie to watch with little kids who might not be ready for graphic horror yet.

October Horror Challenge 2019 #94: "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari"

This is another one of my favorites that I try to watch every year. I had it in my mind one year, I think it was last year, that I was going to analyze it carefully and dissect it and understand what it was "really about," but I think that might he missing the point. I think a lot of the imagery in this movie is creepy, and the more you try to distill what's creepy about it, the less scary it gets. 

The movie is about a doctor who uses a somnambulist (a hypnotized man walking in his sleep) in a sideshow. He claims the man can predict the future, but the man predicts crimes which then come true, making him the prime suspect. Upon further investigation, however, it becomes clear that the doctor is behind the plot, using the hypnotized man to do his bidding. Creepy,  right?

There are a lot of twists and turns in the story that I don't want to spoil, but clearly, nothing is as it seems in the movie. There's a lot of twisted imagery, shadow and light, and the town in the story is presented with lots of slanted lines and twisted passageways that make it seem very nightmarish. The plot is a story within a story within yet another story, and there's an unreliable narrator telling the story, so everything is presented through his skewed view of events. Whether you try to pick it apart or not, it stands as a great example of experimental cinema, and a good movie to revisit on a dark and stormy night.

October Horror Challenge 2019 #93: "Nosferatu"

This is one of my favorite horror movies.  I try to watch it every year. I love the eerie music and the images of Nosferatu creeping in the shadows stalking his victims are haunting. These are some of my favorite posters from the movie.

October Horror Challenge 2019 #92: "Amityville: It's About Time"

Isnt that second movie poster cool? The first one is really generic, but I think the second one has character and actually makes it look like the movie might be good. This is the sixth Amityville horror movie. I enjoyed the first two (the second one has a stupid ending, last 30 minutes or so, but it's good up to that point) I still need to see the third one, the fourth one is terrible (and yet I own it and have watched it twice, so take that with a grain of salt, I guess) and I think the fifth one is "Amityville: Dollhouse," which is horrible but has a cool doll house going for it. I kind of want to see all these movies in the series, because they're terrible but the Amityville house is creepy, and I like ghost stories, and movies about families that are falling apart when an evil of some kind takes hold. Plus I'm a glutton for punishment, obviously.

So in this movie, a dad named Jacob brings home an antique clock from the Amityville house, not knowing that it's cursed by evil. The dad is kind of an absent parent, always off on trips, and his ex girlfriend has been staying with his two teenage kids to keep an eye on them while he's gone. Um...guess that relationship ended well. Weird. His teenage daughter is naive, and his teenage son is a troublemaker, so his family has obvious issues. Soon after he returns home with the cursed clock, things get strange. The clock seems to be able to control time, sending the house back into the past and then forward to the present again. Soon Jacob suffers an injury, so his ex girlfriend moves into the house to help take care of him (there's no way I would do this much for an ex, and she's supposed to be seeing someone else, too). Things begin to spiral out of control, and the family has to figure out how to stop the evil before it's too late.

I'm not a big fan of Jacob. He's very self-centered, expecting his ex girlfriend to drop everything and do what he wants her to do (though she totally bangs him right when he gets home, so I agree that she's sending him, um, "mixed signals." The teenage kids are annoying. The daughter is totally oblivious to everything, while the son spouts off at every opportunity like he thinks he knows everything about every subject. Oh to be a teenager again.

The movie drags a lot more than it should. I think it's supposed to be building character, but I don't like the characters much, so it's kind of annoying. Well, I guess the teenage daughter and ex girlfriend are ok. They're the most likable characters, at least, but the dad is a jerk and the teenage son is annoying. Plus the scares are few and far between. There's an animal attack, a ghost that climbs in bed with someone (but it turns out to be a dream) and the dad acting all obsessed and weird, but again, I feel like that's just his character. You're no Jack Nicholson, dude, so stop acting like you're in "The Shining."

The movie also seems like it doesn't know what it wants to do. It introduces this cool idea that the clock might be able to control time, then does almost nothing with that idea except make someone late for dinner once. The house does annoying things like make weird noises and set fire to someone's bushes, but not much else. Plus, I don't really like the ex girlfriend's new boyfriend much (he likes to go on rants about how Jacob is trying to control her life, while he's trying to control her life too...damn, does she ever have a type). So basically we have two annoying jealous guys having annoying testosterone-fueled arguments, everyone acting crazy, A bunch of ideas that go nowhere, and the music being really loud as if it's trying to convince us something scary is always happening when the scariest thing is that this movie drags so much it seems like it's five hours long when it tops off at an hour and a half. Boo, creepy.

I will say this, though. I think the ending of the movie is great. Not the ending as in the whole last 30 minutes, when the script finally decides to do some stuff with the "clock controlling time" idea, but it's all so stupid and ridiculous you wish you could go back to when the movie didn't even try to gave a plot, because that was easier to sit through.  No, I mean the very last scene, the final five minutes, are pretty awesome, and there's a great line that almost makes sitting through the whole movie worth the pain. Almost, but not quite. So just watch the last five minutes and thank me later.

October Horror Challenge 2019 #91: "The Sand (AKA Blood Sand, 2015)"

I remember seeing a skeezy VHS movie cover in video stores back in the day with a beach apparently eating a bikini clad woman. That movie was called "Blood Beach," and it's hard to find of late, but I still kinda want to see it. Come one, a beach that eats people? How awesome is that? People make fun of me because five year old me thought "The Hills Have Eyes" was about hills that ate people, but there's a movie about a beach that eats people? Dude.

This movie is about a group of 20-somethings on Spring Break who have a wild night of partying on the beach, then wake up hungover to something weird happening. Their friends have disappeared, leaving behind bloody sleeping bags. Soon it becomes clear that the sand on the beach is eating people alive (that totally sucks).

The plot of this movie kind of reminds me of the Stephen King short story "The Raft" which was adapted into a short film as part of the anthology horror movie "Creepshow 2." In that story, it was a mysterious dark spot on the water that sucked people in and ate them, so not exactly the same, but there are a lot of similarities.Trapped by some mysterious force that sucks them down and devours them, horny young adults stranded, trying to stay alive. The creature is similar too in that it feeds on their weaknesses. A small bit of skin touches the sand and that's all it takes for the thing to suck you in.

There's some really cool gore here. One guy whose stomach barely touches the sand has a nasty, gruesome reaction. I also wound up liking the characters too. At first they're all hungover idiots fighting and starting drama with each other and I wanted to stab them, but they do a good job pulling together when it really matters. I'll be honest, I expected this movie to really suck, I was just looking for something to pass the time and not use too much brain power, but I ended up enjoying this movie a lot. It's tense and icky and a lot better than I thought it would be.

October Horror Challenge 2019 #90: "Missle to the Moon"

This movie is about some escaped convicts who hide out on a spaceship to escape from the cops. Unfortunately, they're discovered by an astronaut who wants them to help him travel to the moon. Oh yeah, that's a good idea. So anyway, they decide to take up the offer (WTF?!) and they fly to the moon, which they find is populated by evil alien women who want to take over the world. Just as I always suspected.

So I was trying to watch some lighter fare after giving myself permanent psychological damage with some of the movies I watched yesterday, but this movie is pretty ridiculous. I like the giant spider creature, but the blue moon women aliens are a bit much, and they spend most of the movie fighting amongst each other, which is really annoying,  especially since wer they're fighting for the right to rule a planet that is dangerous and is full of dangers that could kill them. I think their goal is to hijack the spaceship and travel to earth and take over it, but I don't get how they expect to do that when they can't even agree with each other for five minutes. In the end, this movie is really silly, so I guess it served its purpose of not being too serious and heavy. I wish it were more entertaining, though.

October Horror Challenge 2019 #89: "Santa Claus (1959)"

I vaguely remembered a movie about Santa Claus fighting the devil from sometime in my childhood. It turns out I wasn't just imagining that, but this weird little creepy movie actually exists. It's about how Santa Claus is a force of good, and he lives in heaven, and he uses magic to help him travel around the world every Christmas eve and deliver toys to all the good boys and girls in the world. Because the devil is as force of evil, he tries to stop Santa every year, coming into children's dreams and talking to them, trying to convince them to turn evil and do bad things.

That's extremely freaky, and I have to wonder who thought this was a good idea for a movie and what kinds of parents thought it was a good idea to let their kids watch it. This is even creepier than that Santa Claus movie from the 80s that I also watched when I was a kid. Yikes. Don't inflict this movie on your kids, please.

October Horror Challenge 2019 #88: "The Indestructible Man"

You know that whole "two wrongs don't make a right" thing? Movies like this operate under that universal rule by introducing a bad guy who does bad things, but gets his revenge on people who are even worse. It's cool to see bad guys get what is coming to them. A thousand Tales from the Crypt stories were launched under thos principle, so movies like this are usually fun in that sort of way.

In this movie, a man is sentenced to death for robbery and murder. He was betrayed by two guys who worked with him then turned states's evidence in exchange for their freedom after testifying against him. He was also double crossed by a slimy lawyer who set him up. Even though he's about to be executed, he refuses to give up the location of the money he stole, and he threatens to kill everyone who's double crossed him. Unluckily for them, and scientist bribes people to get access to the killer's body do to experiments on it after he's executed. Even more unluckily, the experiments revive the guy's body back to life and make him almost impossible to kill. Soon he's getting revenge on everyone who's wronged him. Uh oh.

This movie isn't great by any means, but it's fun to watch the bad guy kill the even badder guys.

October Horror Challenge 2019 #87: "The Flying Serpent"

After giving myself permanent psychological damage with some of the movies I watched today, I needed something lighter, so I turned to this old creature flick from 1846 about an ancient prehistoric creature that an archeologist uses to protect some ancient Aztec treasure.My main takeaways from this movie is that archeologists can be badass, and I want a flying serpent I can use to guard my apartment and eat anyone who annoys me. This isn't a great movie,  but I still had fun with it.

October Horror Challenge 2019 #86: "H8RZ"

When this movie came out,  people compared it to the movie "Unfriended," and they probably meant it as an insult, but I actually liked "Unfriended," so I wanted to see this movie even more because of the comparison. Funny how that works. I will say though that this movie isn't anything like "Unfriended." It's got it's own thing going on.

So in this movie, a group of students are caught cheating on a test, and they all fail, so they team up and develop a plan to expunge the records of their bad grades. The plan works, but soon it's clear that someone knows what they did, because they start receiving messages from someone claiming to be a student who committed suicide a year before. Soon the students are being blackmailed to do what the messages tell them or their cheating will be exposed.

The premise is a little far fetched, and it's kinda hard to believe the students thought they would get away with this (and I have a hard time believing it would work, but whatever). The acting is good, though, so it has that going for it. The way the movie unfolds is cool, too. It begins with a huge terrible event, and then the students are questioned about what happened, and that's how we learn the story of their cheating and blackmail. It kind of reminds me of a movie called "Evidence," which has a similar plot, or even "The Usual Suspects," which is the first movie I saw where we learn the story of what happened in a movie by hearing interviews with the characters after the fact. It's a cool technique for building suspense.

This movie is really more of a thriller or a mystery than a horror movie,  but I think it just barely skates by. It was fun seeing some of my favorite character actors show up in this movie, like Carey Elwes and Jeremy Sisto. Plus even with the plot holes and inconsistencies, the movie is compelling enough once it gets going that I was too engrossed to care. I've probably seen too many movies to he fooled by all the twists in this one, but I still enjoyed going along for the ride.

October Horror Challenge 2019 #85: "The Children"

I love kids. They're way more honest than adults, and it's a fun and amazing experience watching them learn and grow and experience life. That being said, kids can also be extremely creepy.  Something about their wide eyed innocence when it's corrupted by something evil, it gets under my skin for sure. For this reason, horror movies that feature kids can be scarier than almost anything else. I've been meaning to watch this movie, since everyone raved about it when it came out, so I have high hopes for this one. Plus dude, those posters are amazing.

This movie is about two families that go off on a holiday together, and when combined, they have 5 kids and only 4 adults, which is a bad ratio. Especially when the parents are as distracted as these ones are. Plus they have an angsty teenager along for the trip who would rather be at a party with her friends. Funtimes. Soon, one of the kids becomes ill (which all parents know means sickness is about to spread through the rest of the kids like the plague). The parents banish the kids off to their upstairs rooms so they can play with their cousins while the adults hang out and drink (some of my best childhood memories are from times like these with my own cousins). Since this is a horror movie, very bad things soon begin to happen. At first the kids seem just moody and whiney, but their behavior gets increasingly worse until it becomes sinister and violent.

I love how the tension builds in this movie. The adults are too wrapped up in their own drama to notice much about how the kids are acting. There are old wounds under the surface, and perhaps not the best of relations between the teenager and the other adults, so mild irritations become worse as time goes on, and it's honestly hard to tell at first whether the kids are just being regular bratty kids or whether it's something else. I want to be pissed that the adults didn't realize something was wrong sooner, but kids can be weird sometimes, and I honestly can't blame the adults because no one's mind automatically jumps to "damn, the kids are whining, they must be turning evil."

When something horrific first does happen, it's not what I expected, and again, I can't blame the adults or the teen for losing it and not holding everything together. I would have been freaking out too. Everything after that is just a slow trickling down of everything starting to fall apart at once.

The atmosphere is great in this movie. If you weren't creeped out by little kids at the beginning of this movie, you might reconsider that position by the end. The kids in this movie do an amazing job being quietly menacing and terrifying. I really felt disoriented and didn't know what was going on, and that chilled me almost more than anything else. There's some great gore here, but the filmmakers also show a good amount of restraint. They let us see enough to know what's happening without showing so much that the young actors will be traumatized for the rest of their lives, and that's difficult to do.

Now the movie isn't perfect. I don't care how incompetent your police are, there is no way the timeline of this movie is in any way realistic. They should have had someone take the phones so no one could call the police. It's a little unbelievable, but still better than what this movie is asking us to believe. I also have a hard time buying that people would be as horrible as some of these adults are. I know that when you're hurt and terrified you can start to fall apart, but movies like this always piss me off when people start turning on the teenagers and blaming them for everything bad that happens.

There, I said it. It pissed me off when it happened. in "The Witch," and it pisses me off here, for many of the same reasons. At one point in my life I was the teenage girl that got dumped on and blamed for everything that went wrong in my family. I remember how isolating and terrifying that was, because when you're a teenager you're not a little kid anymore, but you're not an adult either, and when the people who are supposed to protect and take care of you are ganging up on you and you fear for your life and suddenly have to protect yourself from them...that's terrifying.

That feeling is scarier than anything in a movie could ever be, and yet even after years and years, these movies reach those memories and that place in me, and it hurts. But at the same time, wounds don't heal if you cover them up and let them fester. You have to rip the bandages off sometimes and expose the wounds to air before they can be cleaned and healed. And movies like this do that. This is why I'll always be grateful for these movies.

So in conclusion, this movie isn't perfect, but it's pretty close. And as much as I love kids, I'm glad I won't have to take mine to a playground after watching this movie. As Casey so eloquently says at the beginning of this movie, before anything bad has happened, "Did you ever hear of contraception?" Amen, sister.

October Horror Challenge 2019 #84: "The Haunting of La Llorana"

This is probably a cheap knockoff movie made to cash in on the sudden popularity of the legend of La Llorana that's come up since the movie "The Curse of La Llorana" came out recently, but I figure that the La Llorana legend is scary, and ghost and possession movies freak me out, so if the movie is even halfway decent, I'll enjoy watching it. I like to live dangerously.

So the legend of La Llorana actually has a long history in Latin folklore. Supposedly, she was a woman abandoned by her husband to raise her kids alone, but instead she drowned them because she was overwhelmed with grief and anger. Now she is cursed to wander the earth weeping until she can find the bodies of her sons. Creepy, right? The legend says if you hear her crying, you should run away, because she is always looking to kidnap children to replace the ones she killed. That's a great way to scare your kids into not staying out too late.

Most movies that utilize this legend really only touch briefly on the details of the legend, and just use the name recognition from the story to promote a generic horror flick that doesn't have much to do with the legend, but this movie at least actually has a connection to the legend, in that it opens with a woman who is trying to find her missing daughter, when she encounters a weeping spirit that messes with her mind. Soon other people in the neighborhood are experiencing ghostly activity, and they have to figure out what's going on and stop it before it kills them.

The ghost effects aren't great, since this movie had a really low budget, but there's some good stuff here, and the music is creepy. There's a connecting thread running throughout the movie of women who feel used, abused, and abandoned, seeking revenge for how they have been treated. There's a local priest who at first seems like a good guy, but who might be hiding some dark secrets. There's a homeless woman named Tiffany who saves the life of a local woman who's being attacked in an alley by a man, and the woman, Cassandra, asks Tiffany to come stay with her while her husband is away driving a truck for a living. it seems that Cassandra's house is haunted, and Tiffany suggests they ask the priest to bless the house and get rid of the ghost.

The acting isn't the best, but I can tell the actors are at least trying. The Priest has the biggest problem with sounding like he's reading his lines, which is really annoying, but I like the two women, so they mostly make up for his shortcomings. The actor who plays the husband is ok. His character is a jerk, but he does a good job playing the jerk. Plus he gets better. So ultimately, with the freaky imagery working and the characters I actually kinda liked, this movie isn't horrible. It's not the best, but it was a fun little ghostly revenge flick.

October Horror Challenge 2019 #83: "The Giant Spider Invasion"

This is one of the giant creature movies that I've never seen before,  so I was hoping to watch it and have some fun. It follows the typical creature feature plot. A meteor crashes in a small town, causing lots of radioactive issues. Scientists come to investigate the site of the crash. Meanwhile, the people who own the land where the meteor crashes go looking and find a bunch of cattle butchered by some unknown creature. Soon they discover that the meteor caused giant radioactive spiders to ascend from the depths of the earth and start killing people. I hate it when that happens.

This movie starts off seeming like an early attempt at a spoof of giant creature movies. The characters almost seem like they're winking at us because they're in on the joke. It actually grated on my nerves a bit, but once the movie gets going and gets past its awkward beginning,  it starts to be more fun.

The main characters are a married couple who own the farm where the meteor crashed, and the scientists who investigate the crash. The married couple are trapped in a loveless marriage,  so they spend the movie sniping at each other, which gets annoying. The scientists are a middle aged man and woman who experience a love connection (which happens in a lot of these movies). I like them better than Mr. And Mrs. Angrypants at least.

This movie is really sleazy. Everyone is cheating on everyone else, a bunch of older men want to have sex with a local teenage girl, and there's a preacher who is holding a revival preaching about fire and brimstone, while I'm sitting here thinking if there ever was a town where people deserved to be eaten by giant spiders, this would be it. Luckily there's some cool gore, and the spiders are creepy,  and pretty much all the skeezy people get eaten by spiders, so I managed to have a good time with this movie.

October Horror Challenge 2019 #82: "The Day the Earth Froze"

This is one of those scary movies aimed at kids. It's based on a fairy tale from Finland about an evil witch who steals the sun, plunging the world into freezing darkness. The people band together to fight the witch and get the sun back and save the world. I'm sure this works better as a story you tell your kids than as s movie. Most fairy tales and campfire stories do work better than way. They're meant to be passed along that way, so when people try to make them into movies they look silly and weird.

An army marching to a witches castle and playing harps until the music puts the guards to sleep and let the warriors break in probably sounds cool in a story, but it looks weird in a movie. The whole movie comes across as silly and weird, and not in a good way. It's a shame, because I was hoping this movie would be fun, but I'll instead it just made me think I was high. Maybe you're supposed to watch this movie when you're high. It might make more sense that way.

October Horror Challenge 2019 #81: "The Investigation: A Haunting in Sherwood"

I used to really love found footage style horror movies. For awhile there, I wateced every one I could find, and I liked pretty much every one I saw. Something about movies that looked like someone's actual home movies or surveillance,  but showed actual ghosts or demons or things that go bump in the night...they got under my skin and scared me because they seemed real. At some point though, I reached critical mass, and I think I watched one too many found footage movies, and I got sick of them. I try to only watch one or two from now on, so I don't get burnt out, and this one came highly recommended, so I decided to check it out.

This movie is about a private investigator named Gareth Williams who catches people in the act pretending to be injured. He films evidence that proves they're lying and gives it to whoever hired him to use against them in court. His new case is a little different though. There's a tenant at an apartment building whose landlord keeps getting noise complaints. The landlord hires Williams to prove that the tenant is making all the noise. William's hacks into the apartment's security system so he can do his surveillance from home. Spon he starts seeing very strange things that indicate a supernatural force might be at work.

In a movie like this, its success really lies on the shoulders of the actors. If you don't like Williams or the guy who plays the tenant, you won't like the movie, since it's pretty much all footage of them. Luckily, I did like both actors, so I cared what happened to them, and the movie worked for me on that level.

The creepy, ghostly voice that keeps calling and tormenting the tenant on the phone is actually really creepy. Those calls definitely worked. All the "ghostly activity" is mostly doors opening by themselves or strange banging noises, and it could be silly, but the actors definitely sell it and help make it scary. I had a real sense of dread waiting to see what would happen as the movie built to its climax. Ultimately, if you hate found footage style horror flicks, you probably won't like this movie, but it's definitely worth checking out for fans of the subgenre.

October Horror Challenge 2019 #80: "The Giant Spider (2013)"

Since I've been checking out some of the giant creature features of yesteryear, I figured I should check this out as well. This movie was made in 2013, and it's a throwback to those old creature features. It's made iui n the style if those movies, but still a spoof.

Now spoofs can go either way, but I tend not to like them if they stray too far into the territory of mocking people who like those movies. Yes, I know that these movies are silly, but liking them doesn't make me an idiot. Christopher Mihm, the guy who made this movie,  is supposed to be a fan of these types of films, so I was hopeful his movie could poke fun at them without mocking them or the people who enjoy them. Hope springs eternal.

So this movie opens with a little boy playing in the woods, fighting imaginary spacemen, when he sees a giant spider crawling around. Soon scientists from the local college and a reporter from the local newspaper are trying to figure out how to stop the spider before it eats everyone in the town.

I actually really like the opening scene with the little boy. I used to play like that in the woods too, so it rang true for me. Some of the dialogue is ridiculous. I get that it's supposed to be this way, but it does teeter on the edge of being annoying instead of funny. There are some great moments though, with a deeply sexist army guy who won't listen to information unless it's given by a man and not the woman.

There's also a scene where the reporter is trying to get some townspeople to clear out of the spider's path, but they won't believe him until he tells them they're being attacked by aliens. That actually made me chuckle. Well done. Overall,  this movie is silly, but it's a lot of fun, so I dug it.