October Horror Challenge #13 "Insidious Chapter 2"

October Horror Challenge #12 "Appollo 18"

I really REALLY hate writing reviews for movies like this.  The thing is, everyone who saw this movie when it came out warned me that it wasn't good, but I couldn't recall what they'd said was wrong with it until halfway through the movie when my brain had melted and was leaking out my ear and I was so fucking bored that I wished I could paint a wall just to watch it dry because THAT would be more interesting than the movie.  that's when I suddenly remembered "Oh yeah...everyone said it was boring."  I seriously thought at one point I had fallen asleep, but was dismayed to learn that I was indeed awake and simply staring at a screen where nothing was happening.  Ugh.

Then the last 20 minutes of the movie came, and suddenly stuff was happening, and there was an actual plot, and I was kind of intrigued...and then it ended, and I'm left trying to write about what happened in the movie, but if I talk about those final 20 minutes the movie will sound way more interesting than it was, and you all will go see it and then track me down and stab me for putting you through such boredom (plus I'll be a dick for giving away the end of the movie).  Either that, or I'll try to explain why the first hour of the movie is so boring, and you will snottily conclude that I just don't have the attention span to deal with a "slow building plot" or something, and fuck you.  I happen to be able to recognize when a movie is taking a long time to set up a plot, and that's not what this movie looks like it's doing.

It looks like literally nothing is happening, and then one character starts to freak out and be an asshole to everyone else, and by the end of the movie I realized why, but at the time it just looks like the guy is a dick and I got annoyed with him yelling all the time (and the movie managed to still be boring and lull me to sleep even with all that shouting going on...that takes talent).  I know that I'm being really vague, but I can't say much without spoiling the only thing that actually happens in the movie, and that would be rude, so I'll just say this.  Three astronauts travel to space in a top secret mission, and they find something that they'd never thought possible.  If you can stick around until the last 20 minutes of the movie, and you don't wander off to watch paint dry, you might enjoy the experience.  I'm glad I watched it, but I still think it took waaaayyyy too long to get to its point.

October Horror Challenge #11 "Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia"

It just so happens  that when my brother and I were little kids, my mom told us stories about the "Underground Railroad," a system in place during times of slavery in the US where people who didn't agree with slavery would host safe houses and hiding places for slaves who were trying to escape slavery and reach freedom.  My brother and I thought this was a really cool part of history, because we always hear "well the government is corrupt, and there's nothing we can do to change it, so we have to wait until the old system is gone and new progressive people are in place, blah blah, but the thing is, there have always been people who fought against the system when the system was wrong, and change isn't ever going to happen until enough people want to change, right?  It seemed to make sense to an idealistic kid, and that spirit and those stories have stuck with me, and I only bring that up because it's just a fact of my life that I will always appreciate a movie more if it has some connection to something that's always meant a lot to me.  This movie isn't great or anything, and in fact it has a lot of flaws, but including the Underground Railroad in the plot ensured that I would be intrigued and would like the movie more than I might have under other circumstances.

This movie has nothing to do with "A Haunting in Connecticut," so calling it part 2 of that movie makes no damn sense and they should have just called it "Ghosts of Georgia," except not as many people would have seen it then because of the lack of name recognition.  The movie tells the story of a husband, wife, and young daughter who move into a house in a rural area in Georgia, and the daughter starts seeing and talking to "imaginary friends."  In the beginning of the movie, we see the wife dealing with visions of ghosts, so we know these aren't imaginary friends and are probably ghosts the daughter is seeing because she has the gift to communicate with ghosts like her mother.  The family discovers that their new home was once a stop on the Underground Railroad, and that many years ago, a brutal crime happened on the property, which might be the source of the ghostly activity.  There's more than meets the eye going on though, of course, and the mystery unravels as we watch the family start to fall apart.

The movie isn't bad, and some of the special effects are really cool, but the movie relies way too heavily on jump scares.  I say that because I usually jump at every jump scare, especially when I'm engrossed in the movie, but after awhile I just sat in stony silence glaring at the movie, wanting it to get on with the stupid plot instead of stopping every five minutes to throw something at the screen and yell "boo!"  If I stop jumping at your jump scares, you're using too many and they're not effective, so cut that shit out.  Plus while the acting is good, the characters do some of the stupidest things I've ever seen characters do in a horror movie, just to advance the plot, and improbable things happen, like the daughter is attacked and the wife has to go help her while the dad is off in Timbuktu or something because he disappears for no reason other than that it's convenient to the plot.  That grates on my nerves.  There's some cool effects and storytelling at the climax of the film though, and the denouement wraps everything up and reveals what happened to the "real people" this story was supposedly based on, so that was cool.  Overall this movie wasn't that great, but it held my interest and I wound up enjoying this anyway.

October Horror Challenge #10 "Alien Abduction"

Easily the best movie I've watched yet this challenge so far.  This is another "found footage" type movie, but the filmmakers actually bother to give us a reason for someone to be taping all the time.  The main character is a boy who's somewhere on the Autism spectrum, and viewing the world through a camera lens helps him focus.  Here he's filming during his family's camping trip in the mountains one fall (I assume it's fall, since the leaves are changing colors and falling from the trees, though why none of the kids are in school is a mystery to me).  But the camping trip seems like fun and the family is pretty likable, so I cared when they seem to take a wrong turn one day while driving from one campsite to another, and suddenly they're low on gas, its raining, their GPS is malfunctioning, and they don't know where they are.

Here's the thing.  I've been on camping trips where I've seen strange things, I've been on road trips where we ran into car trouble and the GPS took us the wrong way, I've lived these stressful situations, so I was totally on board with the characters as everything started to go wrong.  Part of why I like "found footage" type movies in the first place is because they feel more real to me, I can see myself in those situations, and that puts me in the movie, which is creepy to me.  This movie shows just enough of what's behind the strange happenings to be creepy without lingering too long and exposing bad special effects from a small budget.  The jump scares had me jumping, and I was cowering in my seat, waiting to see what happened next.  I love that feeling, and I love this movie.

October Horror Challenge #9 "The Prophecy: Forsaken"

Ok, everyone needs to calm their tits.  This movie pretty much has nothing but negative reviews, and while it's hokey and kind of silly, and some of the characters are dumb, it's not that bad.  I've seen much worse.  The plot is kinda thin (a secret biblical text reveals the name of the Antichrist, and all the angels want to find said Antichrist and kill him dead as a beef, but they have to get the name from the woman who has been entrusted to guard the secret, so they make a bunch of plots to get to her, which keep failing and pissing them off (which when you think about it, why do they want to kill her?  Presumably if she's dead she can't tell them where she's hidden the important text, so DUH, killing her is stupid, but who cares about sense?  ONWARD!)  Though the plot is kinda dumb, it's still not bad to watch, and the acting is decent.  Again, I've seen much worse.

October Horror Challenge #8 "The Prophecy II"

Angels can be kind of dicks.  I think we all know this if we've watched the show Supernatural, and movies like the first "The Prophecy" and "Legion" serve to strengthen my conviction.  It's just so much fun to watch Christopher Walken be a cool evil angel dude though, and Jennifer Beals is good here, and so is Brittany Murphy (R.I.P.) so I really just dig watching this movie (I must, since I think I watched it last year, too).

October Horror Challenge #7 "7 Below"

You know how a lot of times when everyone else says a movie is bad, I'll watch the movie and like it?  I was SURE that was going to happen this time.  The movie starts off well, with some less than stellar acting, but nothing unforgivable, and up until I'd say halfway through or more, I was intrigued and engaged in the story, and I was ready to write a review and say that I liked this movie even though everyone else hated it.  Then something stupid happened, then that was followed by something that made no sense, then more stupid things occurred, and slowly the movie just fell apart in a huge mishmash of psychobabble and spiritual hokum.  It was seriously annoying.  This movie couldn't decide if it wanted to be a ghost story, or a demonic possession story, or  slasher, so it tried to mash all those things together into something horrible.  Ving Rhames, you are better than this.  So are you, Val Kilmer.  Fire your agents.