I CAN BE A FUNNY HORROR MOVIE REVIEWER WHEN I WANNA, BUT I HAVE MOODS IN WHICH I CAN BE A TOTAL BITCH TOO, WHICH IS APPROPRIATE, BECAUSE THIS STUPID ASS MOVIE IS A TOTAL BITCH...

Crazy Ei8hts (2006)

I first feel compelled to apologize to Stephen King for thinking this was one of his creations - I should have known better. He DOES have a novel called From A Buick 8, which I believe is the last novel of his I've bought that <nervous chuckle>  I still haven't read.

This is pure B movie schlock - and not good schlock either. The acting is phoned in (They've got Traci Lords billed freaking first!), and the story is one of those where the beginning sounds like a good idea but it quickly turns to crap. And not good crap either.

We get a BS prefix of the movie synopsis: Between 1954 to 1976, nearly 600 children were voluntarily submitted for participation in a number of behavioral studies. These experimental facilities were privately funded and tucked away in secluded regions of the south. Families were paid a fee for their involvement and were told the studies were harmless. Most of the children were never heard from again.

The rest of the movie I'm gonna take pity on ya and try to keep it under 500 pages, 'cause it's not your fault I'm in a pissy mood so - we have eight kids who were stuck together as a group in an experimental facility 'cause hey, being experimented on is so much more fun when you have friends.

Twenty years later, they get a notice that one of their number has killed himself (smart move, guy). This would be Brax.

So a 20 year jump sees the introduction of characters we hope die really, really soon. They all are somewhat successful in their fields. Here's their names:

Jennifer

Lyle

Beth

Brent

Gina

Wayne

Since I know you can count, the other two are dead dudes; Brax of course and our mystery guest. Following the map Brax left, they find a ranch-like property with a barn. In the barn is a box. In the box under some of their childhood toys is a corpse. They find it within 20 minutes. Can we go home? No? DAMMIT... Who is it? Well...

The rest of the movie, I swear to God, are six seriously mentally challenged (I've used up my politically incorrect phrases for the week) people who wander around this property looking for clues and slowly finding them - and thankfully dying at the same time. Here's the death list:

Wayne (Dan DeLuca) breaks his leg almost immediately, but to be <heavy sarcasm here> clever, he doesn't die from that - he's decapitated by a window. 'Kay.

Beth (Gabrielle Anwar, who was great in the series Burn Notice, not so great here) is next because she's in a room by herself and the 'ghost girl' of whoever was in the trunk "helps" her tear her own jaw off. Which is impossible. Unless you're in a freaking dumbass movie. 'Kay.

Next is Brent (Frank Whaley), whose sole purpose in the movie was to make sure they would have an 'R' rating by swearing constantly. Unfortunately he dies off camera and we don't get to watch him suffer because he was a real whiny bitch. 'Kay.

Gina (Traci Lords) is first blinded by the light... sorry, she went to the bathroom and was 'persuaded' to gouge out her own eyes. Later she gets killed. Good... whoops, I mean 'Kay.

Lyle (George Newbern, a great voice-over actor whose best known appearance in movies was in both 'Father Of The Bride' movies) is next - before Gina died she accidentally stabs him (she can't see, so it's only 95% stupid). 'Kay.

The gist of the whole thing is that, as children, they were 'donated' for experimentation in ward C8 (Crazy Ei8hts - DUH). 

They all thought the doctor was their father and were given all kinds of tests and blah blah blah. For some reason they throw in the fact that Beth and Wayne had been brother and sister and had never known it. Could have been worse. Could've been married to each other... although I hear some states are turning a blind eye to that kind of thing...

As kids they decided to escape and put their toys in a trunk, hiding a kid named Karen because she was too frail to escape with them. They promised once they were free they would come and get her but they were too late and she suffocated. So she wants vengeance.

There is so much freaking DUH in this movie that if you're in a nasty mood, it's the perfect movie 'cause you can't get any madder than you already are...

So all but Jennifer (Dina Meyer, who like George Newbern got to be in the Saw movies - she was in the first four. She was also in Starship Troopers, as well as a whole page full of roles both on TV and in movies.) is dead but that's not good enough for Karen. Somehow Jennifer decides that the death of her friends wasn't good enough for this angry little spirit girl, so she gathers up the toys from the toy chest (and I'm getting pains in my chest from the idiocy of having to type this) and throws them in a wastebasket and burns them.

But that's still not enough for dead girl Karen (Karen Beriss). Jennifer has to kill herself. Our last scene (YAAAAAY!) is of Jennifer with a broken piece of glass ready to shove it in her gut and we hear the voice of the 'doctor'. I'll print it, but if you can understand this piece of @$&*((^%*$&%^# (sorry, cat jumped on the keyboard), you get a banana:

Two boxes are in front of who we assume is Jennifer. The doctor says, "One will be painful but lead to redemption. The other will only lead to more tests. Do you know what redemption is? Do you know what guilt is?" Then, as the scene fades away piece by piece we hear, "Choose." 

Here's my question: Do you know how pissed I can get having to watch an 80 minute piece of crap? Do you know that you have two choices: Either I can kill you slowly, or keep you alive for a week or two and THEN kill you? 

Choose...

HOLY CRAP THIS MOVIE WAS SO BAD THAT NETFLIX OWES ME AT LEAST A MONTH FREE BECAUSE IT'S GONNA TAKE A MONTH TO GET MY EYESIGHT (AND MY APPETITE) BACK...

Ahí Va El Diablo aka Here Comes The Devil (2012) Mexico

This movie was a Mexican-Spanish movie, dubbed into English. It was shot in Tijuana and Baja California, financed by the US, and released at the Toronto international Film Festival. Although it won several awards, this movie was again one of those things that people either absolutely hated, or they loved it.

I wasn't very enthusiastic about this film, which is why I passed it over several times. That and the fact that I would have to read the whole thing, which I usually don't mind as I always use close captioning anyway, but in this case I would have to pay very close attention since my Spanish is very poor – I am not bilingual, but can pick out most of a conversation when I hear it.

However, because this was a horror movie I was reviewing, I could not count on that. I had to read the whole thing. Unfortunately. The story started out interesting, went to stupid, then to WTH, back to interesting, back to stupid, and then to I really just don't care anymore. I think the main problem I have with this movie, just to give you a heads up, is it was like a person handed this director a script and said, 'this is an interesting story, make it'. 

But then that director tripped, and dropped the script into a lake. He fished it out and decided to use it anyway, although half of it was now gone, and a lot of the remaining pages were really smudged. That's what this movie feels like – you're only getting part of a story and it's not the good part. The more you watch, the more questions you have. And you're not going to get any answers so don't even hope for them.

We start with a gratuitous lesbian sex scene. I've used that phrase several times, so let me explain to you what I consider to be a gratuitous scene in case you think that I am prejudiced in some way. When something is gratuitous, what I'm trying to say is that the scene did not need to be in the movie, had nothing to do with the plot of the movie, or did not include main characters in the movie. 

It just so happens with movie makers lately that lesbian scenes (like found footage, hand held cameras and 3D) seems to be a 'thing' with them to try to make their movies more popular. This kind of scene is simply to titillate the audience without giving them any substance or story – just nudity.

So we have these two women who go unnamed. They hear a pounding on the door. One runs to answer it. This I also do not understand - why people think that when they hear pounding on their door they have to run to get it. The same goes for telephones. They practically kill themselves trying to answer it. Do these people not know about answering machines?

The one answering the door is met by a brute of a man. When her partner comes down the stairs, to her horror, she sees her girlfriend being beaten viciously, then having several of her fingers cut off. Her girlfriend somehow scares him off and he runs into the night. 

We then see (in full daylight) the man climbing a pile of rocks (get used to this, you're going to see it a lot), strip off his clothes, and paw the ground like an animal, dropping his box which is full of human fingers. 

Apparently he's been doing this for quite a while. Too bad that all the fingers look the same, meaning none have aged or are different colors, in fact, they all look like they came from the same hand - if that hand had thirty fingers.

We move on to our family of four. We have Barreiro and Caro, and their prepubescent children. The children are playing in the sand outside of what I guess it's supposed to be Tijuana. The parents are out having a picnic. Suddenly the boy comes running up, saying his sister has been injured. This is where we get our first WTH. They make a huge deal of the girl who apparently has experienced her first 'time of the month'. They take her to the nearest gas station (thanks a lot parents), to get the girl cleaned up. We get 'treated' to a precious scene of sand with a small pool of blood in sharp focus. Okay, we get it. You're gonna gross us out to make up for the script pages you lost.

While they're there, the mother notices a strange man watching them. That's what you get when leave the door open to a freaking public bathroom. They prepare to leave, but the children want to continue playing. So the two parents, being totally responsible adults and because Tijuana is a totally safe place for children to go off and play by themselves with no one around, let them. While the kids are gone, they do a little fooling around and fall asleep. They wake up and notice their children never came back.

They do a little searching, but find nothing. They call the police in a panic who tell them to stay at a nearby motel. This is nonsensical as the movie progresses, and you will see why, unfortunately, as I did. The parents sit there, basically yelling at each other for leaving their children unsupervised. 

Then they think of that weirdo that was looking in at their little girl and they think, hmmm. They stayed the night, and now they're not the cuddly little 'let's have some nooky in the car' people, they're the 'why didn't you watch the kids better' people. In the morning, basically hating each other, they get ready to go home. But miracle of miracles (I said, with massive sarcasm) the police show up with their two children, looking just fine. How nice. They claim to have gotten lost among the rocks in a cave.


So our happy family once again heads home. They show the mother with a large bruise on her side, but if you're expecting any kind of explanation as to what it is and how she got it – you haven't been paying attention. That was in that half of the script that still in the water or that got smeared when the director stumbled.

The other half of the script that the director still can read apparently says: Naked, naked, argue, argue, look scared, look scared, naked again, argue, argue, naked, naked, naked, a little bit of story.

Later, like it makes any difference now, the mother looks through the dirty clothes apparently trying to find her daughter's panties showing evidence of her first, umm, feminine experience. She can't find them. For whatever reason, this prompts her to take her young daughter to a gynecologist. She's informed that her daughter (I'm sorry but I had to watch it so you get to hear about it) does not have a hymen.

To get the story going again, I guess, the children need to see a psychiatrist. They draw pictures of a truck with a man. The father jumps to the conclusion that this is the strange man at the gas station who looked in the door and who acts like a creep even though he hasn't actually done anything. So I guess it doesn't matter what country you're in, if you don't look normal, you're evil.

This brilliant psychiatrist decides that the children have been through a traumatic event. Well, massive duh on that one doc. He also decides that this trauma included something sexual. The children also had signs of bruising. That's it. What, you expected an explanation for that? Why? Nothing else is been explained, has it? You sure want a lot, don't you? The father is past rage, now convinced that our not-normal-looking guy in the van did something to his children. 

So let's get this going a bit faster 'cause it's way too long now. The parents, convinced that this not normal looking man had something to do with their children being weird, drives the kids past this guy who is standing by his truck and they start to scream. Well, that's enough evidence for the mom and dad. Leaving their children with a babysitter, they go out for revenge. This law-abiding couple go out, find the guy, and murder him. I guess at this point, the director decided he needed to equal out the nudity with gore. 

This scene is almost a flinch-worthy one. First, the father takes his turn. He takes a knife, and threatens the dude with it. But when the wife conveniently finds her daughter's panties in one of the guy's cupboards, the father repeatedly stabs the man in the throat. This doesn't kill him yet, because the mother wants a turn, not because he would not have actually died in real life. So while the father hold onto this guys feet, the mother actually uses her hands to completely rip this man's throat out. I have to give them snaps here, because in this ho-hum movie, we have one scene of total, horrific gore.

But of course it gets ruined. Now we get a scene which they are trying to make sexy (I'm going to be sick) of the couple taking a shower together, lovingly washing the gore off of each other. The next morning they go home like nothing's happened. The babysitter is gone, her clothing, shredded on the couch. However, both of the children are peacefully asleep in their beds. The parents do not care about the shredded clothing, nor do they ask any questions. D freaking UH.

Just as a side note, because this movie is driving me crazy, this dictating software keeps wanting to capitalize Gore, so the makers must think that Al Gore is quite the psycho. It also must think I'm the worst English speaker in the world because it is trying to translate what I tell it into Klingon and as boring as this movie is, I am getting quite for Klimt inn shore kife. I don't know what that means, you figure it out. That's what it keeps doing to me.

All righty. If you have been paying attention to even a couple of my reviews, what comes up next will be no surprise to you. The mother discovers that the children have not been going to school. They've been getting dressed, their parents drop them off, but they do not go inside. Where do they go? Saaaay it… They go back to the cave. 

This is the part where the parents driving there and having to wait in a hotel completely knocks this movie from the odd come on to value know what I just don't care anymore category. DAMMIT SOFTWARE PAY ATTENTION! I SAID that this knocks the movie from an oh-come-on-now type of movie to one where I just don't care anymore. If these two small children can walk to this place, then 1. Why the hell do the parents have to drive there; and 2. Why did they have to stay in a motel?

The mother has been observing her kids' strange behaviors but, for some reason, she is not talking to her husband. What. A. Surprise. And now we have the detective on both their cases investigating the murdered not-normal-looking man because somebody spotted their car near his van the night he was killed. Don't pay too much attention to this part, because it's just a time filler and movie killer. 

She finally talks to the babysitter about what happened the night she disappeared, leaving her ripped up clothes behind. We see part of the scene where they were just sitting there when all of a sudden she blanks out as her eyes roll up in her head. Well, sort of. 

While she does not know how she lost her clothing (we get a nauseating and don't-watch-if-you're-epileptic scene of flashes of a multitude of objects, including nudity - and I have to say a painful looking set of nipple piercings), she does have a vague, disgusting memory of going to one of the children's room and, uhh, seeing a little bit too much love going on between the two of them. Don't worry, even this movie doesn't go quite that far. We just see her watching and hear, uh, instead of sex sounds, we definitely hear pigs squealing - ewww. The next thing she knew, she was home.


Finally, the mother decides to check out the cave. An extremely well-lit cave. An it-doesn't-matter-how-deep-the-hole-is-the-sun-still-shines kind of cave. As she gets near the opening she finds a ton of melted candles in a kind of shrine.

At the bottom of an awful short looking drop, are the dead bodies of her two children. Again, what a surprise. She runs out of the cave, and the cameraman, apparently being bored out of this freaking skull, decides to treat us with zooming in and out shots of different rocks around this cave. As if that were something to keep us occupied while she sits there and cries. So she goes home. Ha! Fooled you! 

She doesn't go home, she slowly crawls into the cave - again. This is so we can waste another five or ten minutes while AGAIN she searches for and finds AGAIN the bodies of her children - AGAIN. She figures somehow (and we get to see some sort of flashback) that the daughter fell and hit her head, and started to fall over this awfully small ravine. The brother, grabbing her hand, attempted to pull her up, but fell with her. Because this is a movie and they are apparently made of glass, they both die.

In other words, they've been dead for days. So now that we know the kids at home are actually dead, the movie starts to beat us over the head with the paranormal theme of every other movie made since the 1999 gee-I-wish-I-could-have-killed-them-first The Blair Witch Project. Every time her daughter screams, for whatever reason she's deciding to scream, the lights flicker. When the mother goes to her son's room, she finds him floating in the air. Just floating. That's it.

Now the director tries to save this movie by eking out a little bit of story after ringing out the script. There's been this gentleman (Identified only as Encargado gasolinera, or Charge Station which yes, I know is not a name) hanging out at the gas station throughout this whole movie and now that the mother knows that her children are dead, he approaches her. How nice. He says this mountain (which is not a mountain, it's a hill) has a weird energy and it is a place of demons. 

What? Oh no no no, you don't get an explanation, this is just a little exposition to get you to the end of the movie. The not-normal-looking dead man named Lucio thought he could control the evil by putting up the candles. That's why he always hung around the place. That's why he knew her children were dead. Apparently, Encard.... uh, the gentleman's daughter was the woman at the beginning of the movie. He says she was the last victim of the worst serial killer the area has ever had. 

But since she did not die, the police asked her for a description. She gave them one of which was not even close to who they were looking for. That is because he was from the mountain (the hill) and to her he looked like a demon. He then further explains for no apparent reason that when a demon is coming from the mountain/hill, there is a small earthquake, just like the one that happened the night her children disappeared.

Let's wrap this sorry mess up, shall we? The woman finally goes to her husband. She drags him into the cave and shows him their dead children. This is where it ended a little differently than what I had already written down. Just a little. My version had the children sneak up behind them and kill them. What actually happened made no sense whatsoever. 

When she tried to explain to her husband that their children were no longer really their children, he pulled a pistol from his briefcase and shot her in the head. What. The. Hell. We then get this nauseating camera work of zooming in and out of rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks until we hear a second gunshot.

Our final scene is of demon mom and demon dad (pffft) somberly getting into their car as a small earthquake tells the gentleman at the gas station that… What? The world is screwed? He needs to go around shooting all of these non-humans that he knows are about? Or should he just wait for the credits? I am so glad I did not see this in the theater because they felt the need to end this with an ear shattering piece of music that was horrible along with the credits.

Which, I guess, was appropriate, because this whole movie was just one big headache.

WHAT COULD YOU DO WITH $11,000?

The Invoking aka Sader Ridge (2013)

While working on They Saved Hitler's Brain I realized that I was seriously starting to burn out my own brain so that one is in the works and coming up but not right now. It's not that it's complicated, or even long, just very, very tiring. So I found, by pure chance, this movie and decided to give it a go, hoping for something to distract me from visions of Hitler's head in a glass jar.

Really subtle guys...

I have to confess that my very first thought when I found this that it was probably a knock-off of The Conjuring. Whenever I do a movie review, I find out a little about it first - that doesn't change my opinion one way or another but I get an idea of what I'm in for. It wasn't good. Words like 'boring', 'waste of time and money', and yes, 'tries to get viewers who watched The Conjuring' were knocked about - I was afraid of that. And you movie making guys, here's a little information because apparently you think we viewers are really, really stupid. One, nobody 'invoked' ANYTHING and two, THIS IS NOTHING LIKE THE HOUSE IN THE MOVIE. 'Kay?

Looking at the IMDb to find out where this was shot, I found out that the budget was $11,000, filmed by a company called Ruthless Pictures, produced by The October People. That's a pretty low amount - and yet this indie film made some good impressions and nominations at several festivals. Okay. I looked some more and found it was made as a result of a Kickstarter program. 

For those of you who haven't heard of them, Kickstarter is a great way to forward a project, whether it be something like a movie, or a product, book, whatever. You can look through projects that are local to your area, or search a particular subject you like.

Those circumstances caused me to prepare to excuse a lot of dumb and bad stuff - but I really didn't have to. This is truly a decent film.

Again, wrong house, nothing to do with movie...

The movie was first called Sader Ridge when it was presented at several festivals. Whoever decided to cash in on The Conjuring to push the film did it a disservice. It left the viewer expecting something they weren't going to get, which is probably why the negative comments listed above came about. Using ONE word from Fangoria's review didn't help them much either. Fangoria DID have some good things to say about this film, but using just one word makes it seem like that's all they said that was positive and that's not fair.


So putting everything aside, I decided to see just what $11,000 and some imagination can buy. As it turns out, quite a lot. I've seen low budget films before, some with as little as $5,000 to work with. That means you'll see amateur actors probably wearing their own clothes, driving their own cars, and if a house is involved, no doubt it probably belongs to someone in the film. And special effects will be at a minimum. Which makes horror movies extra hard 'cause unless it's not a slasher flick or paranormal piece of garbage...

But wait. For the price of what the crew of Paranormal Activity (pick any one of 'em) spent on coffee for the crew, this film maker managed to create something genuinely creepy. Not the outright BOO kind of scare, nobody gets gloriously gutted, and no damned cupboard or bedroom doors mysteriously open and shut for an hour and twenty minutes so there can be a five minute climax.




What you get with this movie is very competent photography, wonderfully directed and shot. This movie takes place on a farm on Sader Ridge (actually shot in California) and the location they chose (or could afford) was great. The house was a normal house that any family could have lived in, and the actors, while obviously being a little rough around the edges did a pretty good job with this different take on the paranormal theme (except for one female who overacted so badly I wanted her dead but we won't go into that). 




I was also impressed with the sound quality. I can't even count just how many movies, cheap or those with big money, that have horrible sound quality - echoes, bad dubbing, horrible or inappropriate background music and worse. This was good. It's too bad that big film companies can't be made to sit down and watch films like this and say 'See? This is how it's supposed to look/sound'.



The basic story in a nutshell: A woman named Samantha (Sam) inherits a farm from an aunt who had recently died. She finds out that this was her biological aunt, she was raised by adoptive parents.  She and her college friends check it out. It's a modest house on a good sized farm. Soon after arriving however, her friends start to act strange. Sam thinks she is imagining things but the longer they stay, the stranger things are becoming and Sam is getting flashes that she's been in this house before...



You do have to go through the irritating we're-driving-and-arguing-the-whole-way scenes that start so many of these things. Finally after a lengthy drive where they start to lose their cellular signal... as you know, cell phones are only useful for telling the audience that practically every horror movie takes place 'out of range'. The only other useful function they serve is as a makeshift flashlight. The hubby saw that being done on another show and asked 'Is she using her iPhone for a flashlight? Yup. We have dumb phones but guess what - WE HAVE FLASHLIGHTS THAT WORK GREAT! Smarten up people.




Strangely (they don't quite explain why) one of the guys has an old tape recorder on a shoulder strap - the one with cartridges and the little microphones? You have to hold down the play AND record buttons? Remember those? No? Then go to bed, you're up too late. For whatever reason during the trip he has been recording what he thinks are strange sounds - including some vibrations from a radio substation they pass. Why? Why not?



Anywho, the four arrive and are shown around by Eric, who her aunt had hired as a handyman. He's recently returned from a tour in Afghanistan and constantly messes with his tags like he's trying to remind the audience of this - or it's just a nervous habit. He tells Sam that they played together as children and she is shocked to find out that she lived there until she was five - she has no memory of it at all. She is even more shocked to find that it is actually the family farm and belonged to her parents named Sader before they died.

I think this next idea is a combination of original ideas mixed with low budget restrictions. Sam is hearing one friend recite prayers at night, she catches two of them messing around, at one point two look as if they're about to fight each other - Sam notices that when this happens, their voices are a bit different too but when she mentions all of this her friends just stare at her. 



They have no idea what she's talking about. If there is a character flaw in the Sam character it's that she shows a shocking lack of curiosity about what's going on. Now that may be from fear, or maybe her lack of acting experience, or the script. You'd think by now she'd at least be grilling Eric, who seems to remember a whole LOT of stuff just what happened in that house and why she was sent away.

Because Eric DOES know more than he lets on and there WAS a very good reason to send Sam away when she was five. I'm going to do something I don't usually do in my reviews - let you see the rest play out for yourself. If you want to.

Let's give you a bit of a hint: Eric tells Sam that her family, her father in particular, were not liked by the community for the way her father 'practiced his religion and raised his children'. Children? As in more than one? Sam has also had flashes of being burned with a cigarette and checks where she thinks the scar is. They don't show it, but from the look on her face...

The end is a good twist, with backstory being provided slowly but surely, building up to quite the finish. Not spectacular, not wonderful, but pretty darn good. And I don't say that very often.

https://www.facebook.com/dumbandboringmovies

MOVIES THAT COULD HAVE BEEN GREAT BUT GET MUCKED UP


Slasher House (2012) UK

Surprise surprise - we've got a pretty good movie from the UK that is very VERY low budget (5,000£ or $8219.50) but with solid performances, great saturated color (that makes most of the movie) of mostly reds and greens and at 85 minutes it's just right for a trip back into the world of the pure slasher film. 

BUT then they try to stuff to much into it and we get something too complicated - if they had left it alone, it would have almost been perfect. And the ending... whoa. WTH is a mild way of putting how they slap an ending together to finish the film. And there's a sequel ready to go in 2014 but we'll get to that.

The catch phrase is 'One Girl. Four Killers... Welcome Home'. That's - a bit misleading. This contains spoilers but the movie would still be a good view for those who are tired of the same old paranormal BS and wish there were a movie that goes back to the good ole' slasher routine (and not about a bunch of teenagers getting whacked one by one).

We start with a girl with impossible red hair (but I loved it - I'd have it in a second if I could) and heavy makeup lying naked in a cell. Just the way you want your slasher film to start. We only know her as 'Red' for obvious reasons. She finds a red dress and puts it on. She looks more like a doll than a person. Red was played by Eleanor James (who I first erroneously identified as Nikki Webster, sorry about that and thanks to MJ Dixon of MYCHO.CO.UK who pointed it out), who did quite well in this movie. I just wish they would have stopped meddling with it... but that's later.

The building is supposed to be an abandoned madhouse, which I guess is the UK term for abandoned mental asylum. She wanders through and as she does, she finds clues, weapons and other items by seeing red arrows on the walls and other objects, leading her through the place. Trouble is, she has no idea who she is, or why she is there. 

But others are there and they do, at least for themselves. And there is where is starts to bog down, although the slash scenes are well done and finally we get some real gore for the slasher film lover. And whoever did the color for this film, bravo. It is intense, surreal and makes this film even more interesting.

Somebody, somewhere is controlling things as randomly a loud alarm sounds which usually means doors have been opened or closed - and most probably another killer has been let loose. But this doesn't really start until almost an hour into the movie - that's a whole lot of 'What am I doing here?' to have to wade through before getting to the (forgive me for this one) meaty part of the movie.

Three were obvious and the movie tried to give a short backstory on each but that just bogged down the movie and was puzzling because it told you nothing about the why and where and how they got to Slasher House. Red teams up with a normal looking guy named Nathan and she finds there were 'files' on each of them - except for her. 

Nathan found his file but it was empty. The first to be 'let loose' is a killer clown they name Cleaver and they show a brief scene of him snatching up a kid into an ice cream truck in the middle of the night (?!?) and he is sufficiently creepy and scary - the scariest clown I've seen since Stephen King's It. He is right in character as he hunts the two down - only to meet his demise.

We then meet one who simply tells them (he wears a baseball cap low, you really never see his face) that they don't want to know him and they're right - they show the backstory for 'Corben' for a couple of seconds and soon he has them captive and strapped to operating tables. He had captured the clown and... like I said, there is gore aplenty in this film. 

But even he is not evil enough... when Nathan screams as he gets a saw to the head our final baddie is released from his cage - he had sat there sobbing like a child but a cage comes from above with his, uh, persona in it. He is Thorn, and when his mask is on, he is one big badass (and instantly gets his own sequel called 'Legacy Of Thorn' coming in 2014 - Red will also be there). Corben gets distracted from his torture of Nathan and Red and they escape as Corben is ripped to pieces by Thorn.

Aaaand the movie bogs down again. See, they have to have some kind of explanation for this and some kind of ending and their time is getting short so things seem really rushed. Nathan turns out to be not an innocent at all, but some kind of... I dunno... schizo character who can't control his 'evil' side I guess. So the three of them kind of go around for a while and soon Red is running from both of them as Nathan's 'evil' side keeps taking over.

Who wins? Well that's kind of obvious but the why is where they REALLY went waaaay to complicated. Red set it up. Why didn't she remember? Dunno... just know that her family were the victims of a serial killer and since then she has dedicated her life to executing all serial killers. In the media world she is known as the 'Red Angel' and we see her going after assorted baddies with a Katana blade. Uh huh.

So even though it appears that Thorn was defeated by Red in this movie, apparently the movie maker liked him so much ('cause there wasn't enough time for this to be a decision by audience approval) that they immediately made a sequel to this movie. Let's hope for less backstory, more gore and please keep that color scheme! It was both gorgeous and disturbing. But the idea of caging up a bunch of serial killers and letting them have at it with each other? Brilliant.

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LET'S SEE... NO CHAINSAW PSYCHO, NO 'PARANORMAL' STUFF, NO CREATURE, NO EVIL PRESENCE... WHY IS THIS A HORROR MOVIE EXACTLY?

Dawning (2009)

'Takes place at a Northern Minnesota lake cabin where a brother and sister visit their father and step-mom. As the first night unfolds with uncomfortable small-talk and tension, tragedy strikes.' That, dear friends, is the extent of the description according to the IMDb. Because that's it. What's the tragedy? That you spend 82 minutes watching people torture themselves over NOTHING AT ALL. And I DO mean NOTHING. I mean look at the movie poster - they didn't even have anything to put on it so they made it look like one of those freaky Japanese weirdos with the long black slimy hair.

This non-movie basically goes like this:

OOH WATCH OUT! I thought I saw something in the road. No? Let's go.

AW DAMMIT! I don't want to spend time with my step-mother - okay okay I will.

WHAT WAS THAT? Something attacked the dog. What? I. Don't. Know. Well, we gotta shoot it.

WHAT WAS THAT AGAIN? A bloody man shows up. Takes the dad's rifle. Nothing happens.

WHAT DID HE SAY? We're all gonna die. Oh, okay.

WHAT DID YOU SAY? I didn't say anything sheesh get off my case.

WHAT WAS THAT? What was what? There's nothing out there or in here. Dad's drinking again.

WHAT DID YOU DO? Nothing, what's your problem? Don't go outside, we're all gonna die.

WHY ARE WE GONNA DIE? Dunno. Oh. Let's look out the window for <looks at watch> another half hour or so.

DAD DON'T STAY OUTSIDE! He's dead. Well, I told him.

STEPMOM DON'T! She's dead. Didn't like her anyway.

WAIT STRANGER! I'll show you... BLAM! HA! Shot you for nothing!

LET'S GET OUT OF HERE! Bro and sis take car and drive really fast in movie duh style, meaning they promptly crash and flip the car. Bro is dead - sis walks back to the house.

WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE. I am alone now. The end.

Did I miss anything? Ummm, nope, that was it.

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