MISS MURDER'S REPORTED DEMISE HAS BEEN A BIT PREMATURE BUT SHE AT LEAST SHE JOINS QUITE A SELECT PARTY...






Yes, The Horror Movie Shaming Is Continuing...

Hello, hello, hello my droogies! Yes, faithful ones, Miss Murder realizes that the new year has a whole two weeks used up (or three, she don't count so good) without a single horrible movie review. 

Now Miss Murder could go into paragraph after paragraph of what's been going on with her health, but since you are faithful droogies, you already know. Miss Murder has basically been somewhat of a potato gone rotten lately. And no, that is not a Val Kilmer joke, although it could very easily be.

Let's just say she won't be
doing this anytime soon...

Let's just say, even though Miss Murder said she would not go on about her health, these past few weeks have seen her worse than usual, to the point where her faithful hubby has had to wheel her drooling, disgusting self between the bed and the computer so that at least she would have some material for future posts, even if she hasn't finished the ones she's been promising for weeks.

Oh droogies - the movies she's seen! Including one that insults you (the main character talks to you like you're scum for watching him) and uses the phrase 'oh my brothers' waaaay too much which is what got Miss Murder into her Clockwork Orange mood.

Now if you find some words in this particular column that don't sound like real words, it is because Miss Murder is back to using her wonderful dictation program. Things have gotten so bad that apparently that she had to retrain the program to recognize her voice as apparently her voice had changed. And not for the better, dear droogies. So. What HAS Miss Murder been doing?

Wait a minute... that guy on the right
looks familiar... ah hell,
he's a regular on the SyFy show Haven!

Well, young ones, besides working on the promised Kane/Jacob Goodnight/Soska sisters saga, she has once again strayed from the Netflix fold because it seems that their horror selection has been a little stale lately. 

Although when looking up the "WWE" site to read up on the background of the wrestler "Kane" Miss Murder "laughed" so "hard" she couldn't "continue" (don't worry Weird Al, these are not quotations for emphasis, it's just that so much of their drama is "staged" they have to use "quotations" in place of saying wink-wink-nudge-nudge-say-no-more when they're mixing fiction with rea - I mean manly gymnastics.)

Now Miss Murder is not saying Netflix doesn't have lots of horrorfilms (Since when is that one word - damned dictation program - oh well, that's kind of horrorshow, right droogies?), but it gets pretty bad when she can index them from A-Z, and at a glance see what she has seen, what she has not seen, and what she does not want to see.

Unfortunately, this isn't John Dies At The End...

She's not going to say exactly where she's been watching most of her movies (*cough* Hulu *cough*) but she's been surprised to find some not so typically awful horror, and some movies even worth reviews of their own. Now, apparently, some places have quite a catalog of horror movies and surprisingly there's not a lot of 'doubling' comparing their lists to Netflix.

This particular place seems to have a lot of Gravitas Ventures, which scream cheap and sleazy and worthy of a review once in a while.

Not quite this bad, but you
get the pic - oh no wait, no you don't...

And most of them are available free without subscribing. This isn't a suggestion, just an observation. You can forget about the other frigging worthless service (*cough* Crackle *cough* *cough*) that has commercials that stream perfectly, but movies you develop a stutter after watching because the streaming sucks rocks.

But she has seen her share of interesting movies. She's actually seen an abandoned asylum movie with a slightly different ending, total pieces of garbage that she was able to grab a nugget or two of gold from, and a quote or two.

Am I?

So far her favorite quote has been when a man who was old enough to know better was confronted with the ghost of Charlie Manson's daughter. He said, "Manson? The singer? I thought he was gay."

She's also seen the much anticipated (for whatever reason) Annabelle - and all she can say right now is HOLY CRAP! HOW DID YOU EXPECT AN INNOCENT BABY TO SLEEP WITH THAT DEMONIC PIECE OF CERAMIC HELL YOU ACTUALLY 'SEARCHED' FOR JUST TO PUT ON HER SHELF? Seriously, somebody needed to call Social Services on those idiots.

Oh, and the movie sucked too.

Corey Feldman wasn't one of them...

So she has a whole lot of movies that she has made notes on tape for, most of them, terrible. One was almost watchable, and 'paranormal' wasn't even part of it. One. Movie. How sad is that? And do you know how many movies she was suckered into watching because the top billed star was someone she wanted to see... only to discover they are in the movie somewhere between two and ten minutes before they're killed off or just collect their check and go home.

Don't get excited, this is the only
movement in the entire movie...

Of course, there were a few surprises and actually a movie or two in the huge messy bundle that she has been watching in stutters that might be worth a peek. Please be patient and she will get things up to speed just as soon as she is able.

Miss Murder now needs to wipe the drool from her chin. Where is that hubby?

                        

WHAT THE BLOODY HELL DID I JUST SEE AND HOW THE HELL DID THEY AFFORD ALL THOSE DRUGS???

The Ganzfeld Haunting (2014)

This movie, which tries to keep your attention by having the word 'haunting' in the title is really not about a haunting. This movie advertises itself as a ghost film, but is actually a rather bad, no wait, really, really horrible film about what might or might not have been a paranormal experience. I vote not.



And it was not called the Ganzfeld Haunting, it was called the Ganzfeld Experiment. AND every movie synopsis I found couldn't even correctly count the number of students involved. They said five, there are only four. Since this movie was so incredibly stupid, we might as well learn a little history. Ganzfeld is simply German for 'entire field'. Basically, it is the study of parapsychology or, if you want to keep it short and sweet, crap. 

Whaaa?

They tried to enhance the subjects' abilities of perception by lack of stimulation such as sight and sound. Supposedly, this would enable the subjects to acquire telepathy. According to wiki, a typical experiment of this type involves placing a person in a room in a comfortable chair with something over their eyes and ears so they cannot see or hear. 

Through the headphones, the subject hears white noise, or static. They are left this way for up to half an hour. The experimenters observe a randomly chosen picture such as a number or a shape, and try to pass this information on to the test subject by thought. The results are recorded by the experimenters, either by tape or by taking notes. The results are then judged, and the determination of whether a person has ESP or not is supposedly confirmed.






So again we are talking about FOUR college students, not FIVE as all the descriptions state. Now the experiment (according to the movie - the actual experiments just need the subject to be isolated) has to be performed in a neutral place. This neutral place happens to be a house that belongs to the parents of one of the students. It has been abandoned for years. 

As soon as that was said, my horror movie worksheet (patent pending) was pretty much filled. A house belonging to the family of one of the students that they can't sell and has stood empty for years. That's neutral? What do you think? Of course, something must have happened there that will surely mess this up, you can bank on it.

There are a lot of drugs in this movie. Any stupid experiment, whether real or pseudo-science is going to be screwed up by a bunch of coked-up kids in an abandoned house.

This film reminded me of another film called The Men Who Stare At Goats. It's not that much worse. It's absolutely horrible, but not that much worse. In fact, please do not go to see the movie The Men Who Stare At Goats. It's completely embarrassing to believe that Americans would perform this incredibly stupid type of experiment with government money and drugs, supposedly for years.

Especially since anything to do with parapsychology has long been considered a pseudo-science. It has failed to produce any kind of solid results and/or proof in over 100 years of study. Parents, if you are paying for this 'cause your kid says this is the course they're taking, you are probably more likely paying for your child's new car, drugs and alcohol. Wise up.

I love how the supporters of parapsychology say they 'only' explore the 'serious' paranormal events. This apparently does NOT include Astrology, UFO's, Bigfoot, Paganism, Vampires, Alchemy, or Witchcraft. Oh, that makes soooo much more sense!

But here we are talking about college students. That's right parents, that's what this movie wants you to believe. You are spending your hard-earned cash on your children so that they can perform dangerous experiments with their minds. Oh yeah - and drugs. Drugs and ESP experiments. You should be proud.

What's that you say? The University Of Arizona offers courses still? Okay... well, check it out first. You'll find they have LECTURES or courses but you're not going to get a certificate (unless you print it yourself) or degree because, as it is said, it is a field with tons of experts and no evidence or funds.

Let's talk about the drugs for a second. This is supposed to be cocaine, like this is the 80's or something. One small problem, however. The drug is a powder, cut by credit cards just like in all the movies. I guess that's required. They roll up dollar bills in order to snort it. This is where the problem comes in, or should I say the stupidness takes over. 

Apparently, since of course they did not want them to really take drugs, they filmed the snort scenes in reverse. How do I know this? Because the dollar bill is at least an inch away from the powder which miraculously comes off the surface into the rolled up bill and into their nose. Now, unless this is some magic powder, which I doubt, this is physically impossible. But it was briefly entertaining.



This movie was so terrible, that it tried to keep the attention of teenage boys at least, by having a totally unnecessary lesbian scene in the middle. I'm not trying to make a statement about sexuality. I'm making a statement about using what moviemakers apparently think is a substitute for story, substance, pacing, or acting - by having two chicks make out. That should be insulting to anyone.

If I had one more big problem with this movie, and believe me I had many, many problems with this movie, it would be the sound. What is it about moviemakers that they think that their viewers are so incredibly stupid that they can not identify when a set is actually inside a soundstage, as opposed to an actual room. 

Do they think that we do not notice the echoes, the increase and decrease of volume, and the general suckiness of what we are hearing? At one point, the sound becomes so incredibly bad that it actually sounds as if someone is on the phone talking to a radio station and they have their radio turned up too loud. The echo is just that bad. And then the soundtrack of the version I was watching went off about two seconds - so that's a double piss off.




Of course, immediately the actual experiments start to go bad. And that is no surprise to anyone. Especially me. While they are trying to use simple symbols such as playing cards and shapes, what the students watching the monitors see are strange scenes of violence, taking place in the very house they are in right now. 

These scenes seem to involve children. These brain-dead - oh I'm sorry - these college students notice that this is not what they were expecting. Despite the pounds of coke they have already ingested, they still have enough brain cells left to see that this is a little bit strange.

One of the test subjects sees images of his dead father but only from about the nose down to the neck. He is babbling about something but I really wasn't listening. I hadn't looked at the list of actors and actresses in this movie, but one look at those lips, and I knew his father was being played by Billy Zane. I know my lips. When the girl whose parents owned the abandoned house is in the hot seat, she sees a child being murdered. She believes it to be her sister. She didn't mention having a murdered sister in the beginning of the movie, but all of a sudden she has one now.






In one particularly stupid paranormal-like scene, the coked out students look in on their equipment and find it all broken apart and on the floor. Yet not five minutes later, when they returned to the room, all of their equipment is now back where it was before and the mess is never mentioned again.

Now paranoia starts in. Oh, now I get it - this is a paranoiamal movie. Actually, with as much drugs as they have ingested, it probably started way before this. They are convinced someone else is in the house. The two guys take a fireplace poker. Why is there a fireplace poker in an abandoned house? Do we really care? 

Point being, they are just killing time now because there is nothing else in this movie for them to do. They've shown the drugs, the lesbian interaction, the pseudo-experiment that has gone terribly wrong, and thus the only thing left is for them to die a horrible death. We hope.

In an attempted stab (no pun intended) at a paranormal theme one person opens a closet door and finds a knife buried in the floor with blood dripping down the walls, just like in The Shining, except since this is really really cheap, there's only a little blood, and only a little closet.

Speaking of blood, the amount of coke taken by a two of the students has apparently been so massive that they are now bleeding from the nose, but don't seem to care. They don't even use a Kleenex. The blood stays on their upper lips for the rest of the movie. This is not to scare us, this is just lazy.



Eventually, we see that the so-called paranormal entity in the house is a girl about their own age. She's in a dress and wearing a fur. What the hell? Is she from the 40's? We eventually find out that the dead father had kidnapped children and brought them to this house, murdering at least one of them. He then committed suicide. So, not only was this house not a neutral place to use, but two of the students knew each other when they were small children. And we don't care. I could have told you that about 50 minutes ago. 

But wait, there's more. In a further reveal, now the movie says that the father did not kill the small girl, but during a 'play date' his son, one of the test subjects, did. This caused his father for whatever reason to commit suicide. Unfortunately, this does not mean the end of the movie yet.

So you know what's going to happen now, right? The girl whose sister was killed in this house by the son of the guy appearing on the monitor is going to take that knife that was given to her conveniently by the mystery girl with the fur and stab the college kid who, as a child, killed her sister. <Takes a deep breath> So who is the girl in the fur?

At this point it is my belief that the moviemakers have probably snorted as much, if not more, cocaine than it shows the students doing in the movie. Why? After the male student is stabbed in the stomach by the older sister of the dead girl, the dead mystery girl appears and is apparently the ghost of her sister, all grown up. Gee, I didn't know ghosts grew up. That's a new one on me. 

She also says something very bizarre. Please don't take my word for this as being 100% accurate, because by now I am so tired of this freaking movie that she could have tap danced in the nude and I probably wouldn't have noticed. What she says, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. She tells her living sister that there is no afterlife, that what comes after death is oblivion. Umm what? She is a ghost of a little girl that grew up as a ghost, but there is no afterlife. Where the hell did she come from?

You know what? I just don't care. We now see the house owner's daughter sitting in the bathtub with water running over her feet calling 911. You know, for a house that has been abandoned for years, it has electricity, water, working fixtures, and a nice brand-new shower curtain on the bathtub. Massive DUH.




The film cuts away and we see that it is now morning. Examining the house, the police find massive quantities of cigarette butts, soda cans, empty alcohol bottles and a small empty glass vial. Uh, what? These guys snorted massive amounts of cocaine out of plastic baggies and yet they find one small glass vial? Uh-huh. These pseudo-police officers also obviously do not know how to preserve a crime scene. If that is what this is. 

They tramp through the house. One of them even scoops some of the cocaine and snorts it before saying you've got to love kids and their crack. Those words aren't exact, but good enough. And you do not snort crack.

The police look through the house - not very well - and not very fast. They find three bodies and the fourth body who is the girl still in the bathtub. She is foaming at the mouth, but alive. The boy she supposedly stabbed over and over, has not a drop of blood on him. 

In fact, since there seems to be no violent activity that has taken place, the police conclude that this must have been a suicide pact. Which gives us the questions. Did these kids kill themselves with their minds? Did they all just die because of too many drugs? Did any of this movie happen at all? And the most important question of all, why me, Lord?

https://www.facebook.com/dumbandboringmovies

WAIT A MINUTE - WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN IT'S 'RETRO'???

The Mad (2007)

Sometimes, a bad movie can be fun. Especially if the movie is about cows treated with a secret chemical that makes the meat tainted (and move!) and turns people into ravenous zombies. Oh yes, and if it has Billy Zane, you definitely have a watchable movie. The movie poster is really funny in itself as it presents this movie as a really dark, nasty piece of work about the undead. Pfffft. This is a piece of fluff you watch just for the occasional laugh and the silly work of Billy Zane.

He plays a beleaguered father of a teenage girl. They're on vacation with his new girlfriend and his daughter's boyfriend, so tension is really high. He is wearing 80's retro clothes (oh that hurts to say) because his girlfriend likes him that way - the way he dressed in high school (ouch again) where he played in a band called The Mad.

The movie description says they are at a truck stop but actually they stop for a backwater festival complete with lots of hay bales and yee haws all around. They also say he's a doctor but he was only CALLED a doctor (why? I have no idea). After checking into the motel, they decide to eat at the diner. The special is a burger made with meat from a local farm (if I remember right it was about $12 too - ouch!). They order that but of course, the diner has just run out so they are forced to eat something else. All around them people are stuffing these burgers in their face in typical open mouth chewing style to make them really look backward.

Suddenly people start to choke and convulse. Billy's girlfriend (Shauna MacDonald) is the first casualty as a ravenous bumpkin takes a bite out of her... or two or three, I don't precisely remember. The boyfriend gets a nasty leg wound but Billy and his daughter (Maggie Castle) are safe - for now.
After talking to the cook they find out that the last raw burger he had saved for his step-daughter has 'disappeared'. After looking around they discover it moving like a cockroach around the kitchen. Now knowing the source of the problem, they find out which farm the beef comes from and decide to make a mad dash through the mess of zombies to try to get to the farm and... what? Stop them from selling beef? Couldn't they go to the police and let them do it? Or a hospital for the boyfriend... oops, too late he's dead now.




It is absolutely impossible to take this movie at all seriously. Billy and his daughter, both having lost the ones they loved seem absolutely unaffected, almost shrug it off as a nuisance and continue on. After reaching the farm, they find the farmer is pretty much near zombified himself, with his dumb dumb son being only, well, dumb. A few silly confrontation scenes and an almost-funny scene where Billy and his daughter are carrying on a conversation while bashing in the heads of zombies without missing a beat keep the movie going - very slowly.

Finally out of nowhere a cop shows up and finding that the dad and son were consumed by their own beef, offers Billy and his daughter a ride to town. Before letting them in the car he stops, looks off into the distance at nothing, quickly draws his gun and fires several times. Why? You tell me 'cause I have absolutely no clue. Of course, a rogue piece of meat finds its way into the car and the last scene shows the car slowly crashing into a tree. Awww, that's a darn shame. I think.

But this movie was mildly amusing and if nothing else is on, worth a look just for the heck of it.

                     

CHARACTER ACTORS YOU'VE PROBABLY SEEN A LOT OF BUT DON'T REALIZE IT:









Billy Zane

If anyone is going to get your heart pumping when you see him, it's probably the great character actor Billy Zane.

You've seen his face in many movies and probably not realized it. Sometimes the reason for that is he's made to wear a hair piece, which looks really unnatural on him. He's bald and he's beautiful.

Billy is probably best known for his roles as Hughie in Dead Calm, Caledon Hockley in Titanic, The Phantom from The Phantom, John Wheeler in Twin Peaks and Mr. E in CQ.

But he's been in much, much more. I'm gonna have to watch Back To The Future 1 and 2 just to see where he is in it. His filmography is so long that Googling his page is probably the best way to go... as you look through the list you'll probably say 'oh right, I remember that!'

In a totally silly mad cow disease/zombie flick The Mad, Zane plays a beleaguered father who's girlfriend wants him to dress in 80's retro. Ouch. Having my generation referred to as 'retro' was bad enough, having him claim to have graduated the same year I did really stung - I had assumed he was a lot older than me. Nope, he's younger. Ouch again.

But I can't fault him for his youth (darn him!) 'cause he's just so enjoyable to watch. He can be the heavy, the funny guy, the everyday man. Watching himin Bloodrayne was pretty funny (horror movies are, remember?) and I've enjoyed everything he's ever been in. 

The first time I saw him was in a long forgotten film, 1995's Demon Knight, a silly movie-length Tales Of The Crypt story. His hilarious over-the-top presentation as a nasty as anything demon was so funny, I started looking for other stuff he'd done. Haven't gotten through the list yet, but I'm enjoying the ride.