Christmas Disturbing Horror Giveaway!

Comment on this post with your favorite disturbing horror movie and I'll pick 1 winner to win a disturbing horror Christmas package! Here's mine:

This is one of my favorites. I bought it in college because I heard it was one of the most disturbing movies ever made, and I wanted to watch it. I didn't expect it to have any actual cinematic value. But I was surprised by Camille Keaton's performance in that it's actually very good and harrowing. The rape scene is indeed disturbing, and there's one scene with a phone call that never fails to make me jump and give me chills even after all these years. Someone once asked me why I would want to watch a movie that graphically and brutally depicts rape, and my response was that rape is both graphic and brutal, so if a movie is going to show those things, I want it to be realistic and true to life. "Descent" (not "The Descent" with the cave monsters which while it is a great movie is not about rape) is another one that depicts both male and female rape and is so disturbing in the end that it almost did me in. Brutal stuff, but cinematically honest.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #101: "Us (2019)"

One year not all that long ago, I was talking with a friend about horror movies, and we got onto the subject of the movie "Tales from the Hood." He said he liked it, but he thought it was racist against white people. I asked him why and he said it was because all the white people in the movie are racist. Now, it's not really true, although most of the people in that movie are despicable people because that's the point of the movie (bad people get what'scoming to them, like in Tales from the Crypt, but with actual black people in it) and i tried to explain this to him, and i told him that besides that point, he shouldn't take the only horror movie that either of us could name that had predominantly black people in it and say it's racist against white people. It's not a good look, bro. As someone who watches a LOT of horror movies, I've always lamented that most of them show a sea of white faces and almost never any black people, because it's annoying. There are black people in the world, so there should be black people in movies. I always tell people it's because black people are too smart to stay in the haunted house or get killed by the slasher (the movie "The Skeleton Key" makes a similar observation) but one thing I've started to appreciate about more recent horrormovies is that they have a more diverse cast of characters and not everyone is lily white anymore. Jordan Peele in particular has made some pretty bomb-ass movies that feature predominantly black characters, abd i must talk about this a lot, because when i bought this movie my friend the cashier told me i would like it because "it has a lot of black people in it." I'm hoping that i DO like it. Ive been looking forward to finally watching it for awhile now.

This movie is about a family who moves back to the same beachfront town where the wife, Adelaide, used to live when she was a little girl. Adelaide had a terrifying experience there when she was younger, and now she's nervous that something terrible is going to happen again. Her husband thinks she's overreacting at first, but soon he begins to realize that something strange is indeed going on when a strange family shows up in their driveway one night and refuses to leave. The masked family are giving serious "The Strangers" vibes, and they literally break into the house and force the family to defend themselves against these strange intruders. The masked people are scary enough on their own, but it's when the masks come off that things start to really get terrifying. Now the family is fighting for more than their lives, they're fighting for their very souls.

If i had an experience like the one Adelaide has in the opening sequence of this movie, there's no way in hell that i would ever go back to that place. Why do people in horrormovies always do stuff like this? At least she's afraid that something bad will happen, she's not totally oblivious like most horror movie moms are for way too long in movies like this. I don't want to give away too much of the plot like every other synopsis of this movie seems to do, but the part I don't want to spoil comes about 20 or 30 minutes into the movie, so it's not the end or anything, and I already knew it was going to happen before I even read the synopsis that spoiled the surprise, because someone told me what was going to happen. I guess they didn't think they were ruining anything because like Isaid, you do find out pretty early in the movie, but I'm still not going to tell you what happens. You'll have to dodge every other description of this movie if you want to keep it a surprise, though.

I'm glad I decided to watch this movie instead of going to bed like i almost did. Originally i was going to watch this movie and three others for my last four movies of the challenge, but this morning "A Haunting in Venice" showed up on Hulu and i just HAD TO watch that one instead of this one, but that one ended up being disappointing for me because it was more about Hercule Poirot's ego than anything else. I needed one more good scary movie this challenge, and this one is it. Lupito Nyong'o is great in this movie. She makes me care about her character even while she's simultaneously scaring the crap out of me. And the use of music is great in this movie too. I'll never be able to look at The Beach Boys the same way again. Or hear "Fuck the Police" without thinking of this movie. That's something "The Strangers" did, too. I'll always think of that movie when I hear the song "Mama Tried" by Merle Haggard, and I'll always think of "The Strangers 2" when i hear Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler. Good horror movies do that, they make you remember them.

And then just when I was saying I liked the husband, and he figured out that things were going wrong pretty quickly and did something about it, he had to go and be stupid like typical horror movie people always do. But it led to my favorite lines of the movie; "What are micro machines?" "What's Home Alone?" Trust me, when you see the movie, you'll get what I mean. The kids in this movie are great too. They don't waste time like kids in horror movies tend to do, dragging everybody down, they figure out what's going on and come up with some pretty creative ways to fight back. Until they mess up and put everyone back in danger again, but I can't really blame them for that, since this isn't a typical situation they find themselves in and I wouldn't know how to react either. Overall, everyone in the family is pretty likeable, which is a big switch from the majority of movies I've watched today where no one was likeable. Kudos to this movie for getting me to care about the characters and sustaining that through some pretty weird stuff. The movie does falter a bit near the end when it gets just a little too weird and over-explainy, but that's a small quibble when the rest of the movie us so good. Definitely check this one out. It's well worth the watch.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #100: "To Become One (2002)"

I've wanted to see this movie since before it came out. The director did a feature in Fangoria (a horror movie magazine) about guerrilla filmmaking on a shoestring budget with little to no money, and he used his film "To Become One" as an example. He said it was made for like, two thousand dollars, and everyone who saw it couldn'tbelieve it cost less than two million. His story made me want to go out and make a horror movie like whoa (I've had an idea for a horror movie for years, and I always wondered what it would be like to make a horror movie. The director of this movie, Neil Johnson, made it sound, not easy exactly, but doable, and that was a big inspiration for me. I still haven't made my movie, but filmmakers like him, who are willing to share their secrets, are a big help to indie filmmakers who dream of following in their footsteps. Plus the movie just sounded cool. It was a slasher, abd everyone knows how much I love slashers, and the still shots from the movie had creative kills that i really wanted to see. Unfortunately, this movie is notoriously hard to track down. I ended up borrowing the movie from my friend Maddie, who was kind enough to lend me the movie so I could watch it this Halloween and finally see what all the fuss is about. Here we go!

The plot of this movie sounds pretty simple. A year after her mother's death, a young woman and her friends become the victims of a maniacal killer who wears a gas mask. They get slashed in some pretty gnarly ways, and the trailer for the movie is mostly shots of the cast getting offed in increasingly gruesome ways. My kinda trailer! I wish i could link the trailer for you here, but if you go to Youtube and search for "to become one" you can probably watch it. I'll warn you, you might become obsessed like I did with seeing this movie, but then I like low budget slashers. Anyway, the young woman in this movie is forced to face some harsh truths about herself and her life and her family. I hate it when that happens. My family is certainly not perfect, but compared to the family in this movie I think they seem pretty normal, so kudos to this movie for portraying an even more screwed up family than any I've ever seen.

I won spoil this movie for you, like someone did for me. Someone on a message board once said "oh, that's the movie about the girl who..." and then they just dropped a plot twist that you're not supposed to find out until at least halfway through the movie. When I finally got to see the movie myself, i saw how the twist fit in with the rest of the movie, and i also discovered that the twist comes halfway through the movie and not at the end. I like how the movie basically spits on religious fanatics for an hour and a half. I love me a good movie that mocks religious nuts. I do have some complaints about this movie, though. None of the characters are very likeable, so there's really no one to root for. I suppose I wanted the main character to survive, but that's only because I hated the religious fanatic doctor so much that anybody would be better than him. The scenes with the patients in the hospital writhing and screaming with religious fervor are genuinely chilling, but that's mainly because I spent a lot of time in creepy pentecostal churches when I was younger. I still remember those days well and this movie rings truer because of that.For such a short movie, it shouldn't have seemed as long as it did. It's only an hour and thirty minutes, but it seemed much longer to me. Im still glad I finally got to see it, though.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #99: "Bathtub Shark Attack"

I've been impatiently waiting for this movie for years now. I had to wait for it to be shot, then edited, then go through post-production, then finally i got a copy of the DVD from my friend Maddie Deering, the director, in exchange for a review. Im stoked to finally be watching this movie today, and on Halloween too! It's perfect! This is supposed to be the gorriest shark movie of all time, or at least that was the goal upon making the movie, and that movie poster looks pretty gory to me. Now I know what you're probably thinking, "Bathtub shark attack? WTF?" And even before watching it, I can assure you that this movie wont be for everyone. If the title and the low-budgety look of the special effects make you look at me like I'm crazy for being excited to watch this movie, then the movie probably isn't for you. This is one of THOSE movies, like "Spirit Animal" or "Colonel Kill Motherfuckers," low budget shot on video for the fun and joy of making horror movies, these movies will either be a blast for you from start to finish, or you'll think I'm nuts for loving them. There's really no in-between here. I for one am excited to watch this movie and i can't wait to check it out.

A young couple, named Chad and Cindy, are down on their luck and looking for a place to live that's in their budget, which isn't much. One night, in a drunken stupor, Chad finds a flyer for an apartment that only costs $100 a week. It seems to be too good to be true, but they decide to go and check the place out anyway. As we savvy viewers have learned, a place that seems to be too good to be true usually is and will likely cost you your soul. Haven't these people ever seen a horror movie before? In the cold (and sober) light of day, Chad has doubts about whether he wants to take the apartment, but Cindy is tired of couch surfing among their friends and she insists that they rent the apartment, much to the delight of their new landlady Serena, who is excited about having some fresh new blood in the place. Soon they begin to regret their decision, however, when strange things start happening. Cindy seems to be obsessed with the bathtub in their new apartment (and we the viewers have already seen someone get attacked by a shark in the bathtub in the opening scene of the movie, so we know that it's dangerous). What will happen to Chad and Cindy? Will they be able to figure out the evil plot before it destroys them? Or will they fall victim to the shark creature that apparently lives in their pipes?

The plot of this movie makes me think of another movie called "The Sentinel" which is about a woman who moves into an apartment that seems too good to be true, and it turns out to be a portal to hell. Whoops. I think there are some people who would look at me crossways for saying this movie even has a plot, since it's ultra low-budget and mostly made as an homage to other horror movies. People made fun of me for saying "Spirit Animal" had a plot too, but it does. In this movie, the plot is mostly about being too poor to afford a good place to stay in this housing market, and how that affects people's decision making skills. i mean, do you think Chad and Cindy would have chosen to live in that creepy apartment if they could afford a better place? I remember not being able to afford an apartment and being homeless. It's more common than people think. Life is terrifying being poor, and that's what this movie is about, as much as it's about an evil shark creature that lives in the pipes and attacks people. One of my favorite quotes from the movie is:

Being pissed on makes me pissed off!

I had a blast with this movie, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to watch a fun little horror flick that doesn't take itself too seriously.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #98: "No One Will Save You"

I knew nothing about this movie before i watched it, except that everyone seemed to love it and think it was great, which of course made me want to watch it (I need to be more careful with that, has "Midsommar" taught me nothing?) I even saved this movie for the last day of the challenge, wanting to end on a high note. I do that a lot, and it's like diving headfirst into an empty swimming pool when i finally do get to see the movie and then i don't like it as much as everyone else did. Poo.

So this movie is about a young woman named Brynn who lives in a small town. She still resides in her childhood home, which is the first sign that she hasn't really moved on in her life. She leads a solitary existence because the people in the town don't seem to like her and thus they shun her. She is still mourning the loss of her mother, Sarah, and her best friend, Maude, and she copes with her difficult and solitary life by constructing and maintaining a model town in her living room. One night, she discovers an intruder in her home, and she finds out that it isn't a human being but is rathet an alien, and she fights with the alien and kills it with a broken piece of one of the buildings in her little model town. She duscovers that there's no electricity and her car doesn't work, so she escapes to town by bicycle. Upon finding that most of the people in town appear to be under alien control, she returns to her home and starts planning to try and fend off the aliens. Will she be able to save herself, or will the aliens take over?

That synopsis makes this movie sound really interesting, I know. And it should have been interesting. Unfortunately for me, it's too caught up in reveling in how clever it is for it to actually be clever. The movie is almost a sulent film. it only has five spoken words in its 93 minute runtume, and the rest of the time it's just us watching Brynn ne hated by the townspeople, living her solitary life, being attacked by aliens, trying to fend off the aliens, trying to gove her life meaning, that kind of thing. It's never clear why the people in the town hate her so much, since there's no dialogue, but eventually the movie shows us why the townspeople hate Brynn, and it just leaves me with more questions than answers. The aliens are supposed to be scary, but they kinda look like E.T. so i couldn't find myself being afraid of them. I was mostly possed wanting someone to talk and explain what was going on. Amd WTF is up with that ending?! What were they trying to accomplish with that? I think it's supposed to be a happy ending of sorts, but it's just weird and awkward, like the rest of the movie. If you want to check it out go ahead, most people seem to have liked it more than I did, but I was just bored and frustrated and disappointed.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #97: "A Haunting in Venice"

I saw so many ads for this movie while it was in theaters and i was obsessed with seeing it! I love Ghost stories, horror movies, and Agatha Christie, so this seemed to be the perfect combo of all 3 of those things! Agatha Christie mysteries are still great to read even now, years after her death. I'vebeen obsessed with her books ever since I read "And Then There Were None" when i was 10 years old. i saw the movie back then too, and it was great. It had that perfect twist ending that Agatha Christie was known for, and 10 year old me ate it up. I still remember my excitement when I got to the end of that book and read the twist. I really hope this movie lives up to the hype built for me by the commercials. The trailer was full of jump scares, which are crude but effective (I'm easily startled so it's not hard to make me jump) but I hope this movie has more to offer than just jump scares. I guess we'll see what happens.

In this movie, famous detective Hercule Poirot is retired and living in self-imposed exile in Venice, Italy. I suppose if you have to live in exile, Venice is the place to do it. A colleague of his comes to him one day asking for his help. You see, she is a mystery novelist, and she is also a skeptic, but she has seen something she can't explain; a woman who claims to be able to speak to ghosts, and while typically such a person would be labeled a charlatan or a fake, this one appears to be the real deal. Such a thing cannot be in Poirot's easily ordered world, so his friend Ariadne Oliver (played by Tina Fey) enlists his help to either discredit the woman or announce that what she says is true, she really can communicate with the dead. Poirot initially demurres, of course, but eventually he relents and agrees to go, expecting only to discredit the woman (played by Michelle Yeoh). Things get complicated, however, when a very real murder occurs during the supposedly fake seance. Poirot must investigate the murder and figure out what is going on and who has committed the murder before it's too late.

The problem with the great Hercule Poirot, as summed up well by Ariadne Oliver in this very movie, is that he's not just a man, he's an ego, and a big, giant one at that. He has stunning powers of observation, which he uses to solve mysteries in a way that no one else can quite do, and this power makes him arrogant. He's so sure of his superior intellect that when something happens, as it does in this movie, to shake his belief in his own genius, it throws him for a loop. He spends a lot of time fumbling throughout this movie, trying to find his footing and solve the mystery in front of him. Once it becomes clear WHY he's struggling so much, he's on firmer ground and he can use his great powers of observation to solve the mystery, but it takes him awhile to get there. This movie isn't bad, per se, it's just that Poirot tends to act as though other people are simply pawns in his game, and the same thing happens here that happens in all his movies: he solves the murder and gives a big speech explaining how smart he is. It would seem that he's wrong about the existence of ghosts; he's sure they don't exist but it certainly seems like one shows up in the end of the movie, and the little boy never wavers in his belief in ghosts, just as he insists that the fortune teller is indeed a fake, but not because ghosts don't exist, just because she lies about being able to see them. It's Poiro's ego that stands out most plainly in this movie, and that takes a lot of fun out of trying to figure out the mystery. Which is a shame, because this movie could have been a lot of fun if it featured someone like Miss Marple, who is just as observant and intelligent as Poirot is, without the huge ego the size of Rhode Island. Alas, we have to put up with Poirot in this movie, and that sucks all the fun out of it for me.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #96: "Stephen King's It (1990)"

Ive been a Stephen King fan for most of my life, but i only read the novel "It" when i was in college. waited a long time. And it was too bad, because I decided to watch the TV adaptation of Stephen King's "It" a year or so later. There's no way a movie, let alone a movie edited for TV, could live up to the gory spectacle of that book. So of course I compared the TV adaptation to the book and found it seriously lacking. It's really not fair to compare a movie directly with the book like that. It's never going to be able to live up to whatever you can imagine in your head while reading the book. Back then i was notoriously hard on movie adaptations of books. I watched the movie version of "The Color Purple" for a class, and I procrastinated reading the book until the night before I watched the movie, and I was so furious at everything that had been changed that I hated the movie for years. I can now appreciate the movie for what it is, but it took years for me to get to that point. since it's now b3en almost 20 years since I read the book, it's safer for me to watch the miniseries now, because I'll be able to take it in with fresh eyes and a fresh mind that isn't comparing every scene to what transpired in my head when I read the book. I repeat: send in the clowns.

Where have you been if you don't know what happened in "It" by now? Nevertheless, I will try to recap it for you. Back in 1960, in the little town of Derry, Maine, seven 12 year olds who are outcasts in school for various reasons, band together to fight an evil demonic force known simply as "It," that manifests itself most often as a creepy clown known as Pennywise the clown. The seven friends fight bravely and strongly as they can, and they think they have defeated It, but they make a pact that if they ever find out that It isn't really dead, they will come back to fight It and defeat it again once and for all. Thirty years later, six of them have left town and scattered around the world, but one of them remained back in town to keep watch over the town and alert the others if there's ever a sign that It has come back. A string of child disappearances and murders with Pennywis's signature signal to Mike, the one who stayed behind and became a librarian, that It is back and stronger than ever. Mike calls the rest, and most of them heed their promise to come back and fight It, but will they be able to defeat It or will the demonic force destroy them?

The new movie versions of "It" move the timeline up so the 12 year olds who fight It are in 1990 instead of 1960, because now it's been 30 years since the 90s (yes, I feel old). Those movies, with all their special effects, just fell flat for me and failed to capture the fear i felt while reading the novel "It." Of those movies, with their millions of dollars in their budgets, couldn't capture my imagination and scare me the way the book did, this movie doesn't stand a chance. I mean, while i was reading the book and i got to the part where one of the characters is walking across a bridge and It reaches up and grabs his foot, i was lying in bed and one of my blankets fell and touched my foot, and i almost had a heart attack. There's nothing in any of these films that can live up to that fear i felt back then, and it's really not fair to expect a movie to be able to do that, but there have been movies that have scared me as much as that moment with the blanket scared me, and this movie just isn't able to do that. The special effects aren't as special as I'd like them to be, but it's not even that, because the special effects in the new versions are full of big budget effects, and I still didn't like them.

Maybe it's just that nothing will ever live up to my expectations since the movie that played in my head while I read the book is so much scarier than anything will ever be onscreen. The actors do their best with the material they are given, and some of them turn in great performances (Annette O'toole in particular dies a great job as the adult Beverly) but I still found myself yawning and checking the clock. Tim Curry is always great in everything he does, even when I just don't like the movie (I'm looking at you, "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." Yes, I know, blasphemy, but I don't like that movie either, though I appreciate what it was trying to do, and I love Tim Curr's performance in it). As always, I appreciated what this movie was trying to do, but it just didn't scare me, and the giant spider at the end is absolutely ridiculous, with all due respect to the special effects team. The giant spiders in that terrible movie "Arachnia" look better than this. Overall, this movie still falls flat for me and ill never be able to recapture the fun the book brought me being scared. Poo. I'll say this; it's not as bad as i remember it being, but it's still a miss for me.