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.

October Horror Challenge #6 "MST3K The incredibly Strange Creatures..."

Yeah, this movie is not about zombies.  Also the big black and white swirl effect gave me a migraine.  Poo on this movie.  Even with the snarky commentary, this was hard to watch.

October Horror Challenge #5 "Sorority House Massacre II"

Ugh, this movie was straight up terrible.  I know, was I expecting something different?  I like slashers, so I tend to enjoy them even if they're bad, but this is scraping the bottom of the barrel even for me.  The best thing I can say for this movie is that all the sorority sisters show their boobs at one point or another (while they're getting dressed in skimpy lingerie to run around in a cold dark abandoned house all night) so there's that.  Feel free to skip this one.

October Horror Challenge #4 "Texas Chainsaw 3D"

Ok, this franchise has had several sequels and reboots already, and I'm not a huge fan of any of them apart from the original, so I wasn't expecting much with this movie, and partly because of my low expectations, it was a lot better than I expected.  This movie throws out all the sequels and reboots as though they never happened (like I'm sure a lot of us wish they never had happened) and this story purports to start up right after the events of the original movie, incorporating footage from that movie as it builds its own premise, which was kind of cool.  A bunch of rednecks decide to dispense some "private justice" to a family of white trash killers in their town, and things go predictably badly and bloodily.  Fast forward 18 years or so, and a young girl learns she is descended from the family of white trash killers that were supposedly wiped out that day (whoops) and she has inherited an estate in Texas from her grandmother who recently died.  She and some friends go on a road trip to check out the house, bloody chainsaw mayhem ensues, and fun is had by all (well, all us viewers, I don't think the characters had much fun).  I like that this movie displays why taking the law into your own hands isn't a great idea, how "an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind," and "two wrongs don't make a right" and all that.  It's not the pinnacle of cinematic achievement or anything, but it has a halfway decent plot, a story that plays out well, some good gore, and a likable main character, so I dug it.

October Horror Challenge #3 "Absence"

This is one of those movies that I really like discovering during the horror challenge, a little independent movie that I might not otherwise have heard of, but gave a chance because I'm trying to cram an ungodly number of horror movies into my life this month.  This movie is about a married couple who are expecting their first child, and they are plunged into a nightmare when the nearly full-term pregnancy just disappears into thin air.  Police investigate it as a case of a missing child, doctors think the woman must have aborted the baby and is lying about it, and no one believes her story that the baby just vanished one day and she has no idea what happened.  The characters are likable, and while I guessed what was going on, it was still cool to see it play out.  I like found footage type movies like this, too, so all in all I really enjoyed this one.

October Horror Challenge #2 "Munger Road"

This movie starts out kinda rough, with perhaps not the best acting I've ever seen, and I'm annoyed with the group of teens who want to travel out to the train tracks in their town at night, sprinkle baby powder on their car, and then sit in it and see if ghosts move it and leave fingerprints.  If this isn't familiar to you, then you probably grew up in a town bigger than the one I grew up in, where there really wasn't much to do at night but sit in a car in the dark and wait for something to happen, so the ghost story aspect rang true for me, is what I'm saying, and I like the actor who plays the older cop, so I was willing to wait around.

I'm glad I gave the movie a chance, because halfway through, it starts to get better, and we abandon the ghost story premise to head straight into slashertown with dumb teens getting picked off while the cops take an unreasonable amount of time to figure out something is wrong.  I love slashers, so I liked this movie, and by the ending, I was really into the story, so I see that it has a sequel on the way and I'm interested to see where they take the story from there.

October Horror Challenge #1 " Cropsey "

 Ok, so every small town has a story about something scary that kids tell to terrify each other, right?  I mean,  when we were kids, my friend Danielle and I got a bunch of kids in our apartment complex believing there was a ring of Satan worshipers who kidnapped kids and sacrificed them in the woods by our apartment complex, so this tells you two things.  1. we were demented children, and 2. it's easy to scare kids with scary stories.  I was sold a bill of goods about this movie, that it was made by some filmmakers who investigated the legend of "Cropsey," a local legendary killer who supposedly kidnapped kids in their area (Staten Island) and killed the kids and if you go into the woods Cropsey will kill you, so obey your mom and dad, blah blah blah, you get the idea.  What no one told me was that this description is actually a load of shit, and what the movie REALLY does is start off with this supposed "legend of Cropsey," and then it takes a sharp right turn into assholeville and moves onto some local cases of kids who actually were abducted and killed or never seen again, and then the filmmakers try to staple these stories together to show that the man accused in these murders must have inspired the legend of Cropsey (which is really stretching things and feels gross and exploitative, since these were real kids with real families who really disappeared, and we're still acting like this is a fun campfire story). 

The filmmakers proceed to let this guy (the accused kidnapper/killer) manipulate them through letters, they give him more publicity, they talk to other people who helped search for the missing kids back in the day, one of whom seems really sincere, and one who spins a huge web of horseshit saying that there really is an army of underground Satanic cults but he can't go into detail about them or they will get him.  Come on, dude, you're not fooling me, I played the same game when I was ten, and that was many years ago and I like to think I've matured since then.  Satanic cults my ass.  Here's your 15 minutes of fame.  Hope it as worth it.

Anyway, so basically we get to see these filmmakers stumble around, interviewing people whose memories are over 20 years old and thus incredibly rusty, and we get to see a bunch of less than believable testimony offered at trial, and this old man is painted as a serial killer with next to no evidence.  I'm not saying he was a good guy, and I'm not saying that he DIDN'T have anything to do with the kidnappings and killings, but I AM saying that there is reasonable doubt up the ass here, and seeing a guy get railroaded with no evidence isn't my idea of fun.  And then the movie ends, after having gone nowhere and said nothing for an hour and a half of my life that I will never get back.  So no, I wasn't impressed, and I wanted to like this movie, too.