A MOVIE SO AWFUL I'M GIVING YOU A BREAK AND SHOWING YOU THE ONLY GOOD PART OF IT... WHICH HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE ACTUAL MOVIE. YOU'RE WELCOME...

1,2,3... Scream aka End Of The Road (2011)

There is nothing more frustrating (okay, there's a lot of things but this is a pisser too) than seeing a bunch of names attached to a movie that makes you want to see it, just to find out that those people either are in it for a fraction of time, a voice-over, or get killed before the beginning credits stop. This was one of those movies so here's your warning:





This movie is about a couple of guys (cameraman and soundman) who finish up with a film by Robert Picardo and are on their way to Idaho to shoot the first episode of a new reality paranormal series called 'Spirit Seekers' with actual psychic (pffft) Randolph (played by Doug Jones, well-known contortionist and sci fi actor, recently of John Dies At The End). The buildup is supposed to be that, of course, they piss off whatever supernatural force has started this mess in the first place. The punchline is, that it is all a practical joke - played by Robert Picardo. There, you just saved yourself roughly 90 minutes. You're welcome. For a treat, this is the only part of the movie worth watching (and that's stretching it a bit):

Oh, and Zack said this himself in this movie, so here you go my fave redheaded Canadian dude, you are now a meme:

AN INTERESTING ADDITION TO NETFLIX THAT MAY CATCH YOUR INTEREST

Flesh For The Beast: Tsukiko's Curse (TV Miniseries 2013)

Well despite the fact that nothing is working for me right now, I'm awake so I might as well let you in on an interesting short series currently running on Netflix. I first heard of this when it was a movie - the preview for it looked good but I could never find it. The preview was also one of many included on my Zombie Ass: Toilet Of The Dead DVD so I really thought it might be interesting.


The basic premise is a parapsychology team of a male skeptic (Patrick Smith) and a female believer (Charlotte Pines) who accept Tsukiko (Maho Honda) into their little group to kind of play a paranormal style of Scooby Doo type mysteries. I've just watched the first one - interesting, not terrific, but interesting.

The first episode involved the little-known practice of post-mortem weddings. That's right folks, some people want to marry dead people. It happens. I shit you not.

Oh and my droogies I apologize for the third person blog entry from yesterday. Apparently I had my dictation equipment on 'smug bitch' mode and, well, you know.

Sorry this is short and sweet but the better I get things together, the better blogs I can put here. Thank you all so much for the continuing rise in readership - that's just way too cool for words.

UPDATE: After watching all seven shows, this promising looking series just sunk into a pit of diarrhea, murder, devil worship, anything anyone would consider offensive. It then left the viewer hanging with unanswered questions, missing characters (Charlotte Pines), and *SPOILER* the main character (Patrick Smith) getting the 'taffy pull' treatment and dying, while Tsukiko (Maho Honda) just skips merrily through a park.

Meh.

                        

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY DUH REGARDLESS OF RACE, COLOR OR NATIONALITY


Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014)

A major bed malfunction (see next entry) means I haven't had time to get my stuff together enough to get it up here despite having great dictating software now. I don't mind editing it for misspellings and punctuation either - it kind of soothes the Grammar Nazi in me.

I have a duel for worst movie seen this year so far between two very duh movies coming up that I will be reviewing with Miss Mayhem (her knees are shaking but she wants to try, so be nice), but I was being lazy yesterday (4/5) afternoon, so I picked this one out of all the bad movies I have a list of because I figured I could just watch it and not even bother to review it.

When this movie came out, the previews stated that this was a Paranormal Activity movie for Hispanics. I thought that was a pretty racist statement. Nevertheless, I decided to give it a look. You know what? We got ripped off. No, seriously, we all get the short end of the stick on this one. I've sat through PA 1 through 1,000 and they were so incredibly boring with their endless camera pan views through rooms of houses, just to have a brief flurry of activity within the last 10 minutes.

This particular movie not only had a story, it had action, interesting ideas, and a lot better special effects. What the hell? Did these people just make a halfway decent movie, get frustrated because they couldn't find a market for it, and so lumped in with all the other Paranormal Activity movies just to get an audience?

To add insult to injury, they do not consider this movie to be part of the Paranormal Activity series. They call this film a spin-off of the Paranormal Activity movies. What a crock! This used some of the same elements as the other PA movies, such as the basic premise of a coven gathering children, particularly firstborn sons, even though none of the movies have really explained what the hell they are collecting them for, and what the hell they're doing with them.

So. We start with a high school graduation in 2012. We see the class valedictorian Oscar give a speech, and we see a boy named Jesse being congratulated by his family on his graduation day. As it is a prerequisite for any of these handheld camera movies, Jesse is given a video camera for his graduation present.

Jesse, as is a tradition with many cultures, lives in a multi-generation household. His mother died giving birth to him, so he lives in an apartment with his father and his grandmother. Directly below him lives a strange woman named Anna. The whole neighborhood makes fun of her because she is so strange, having visitors at all hours, and keeping her windows covered in newspapers. Through the vent system. Jesse can hear moans, screams, and other things going on which he assumes to be something of a sexual nature.

One day he notices valedictorian Oscar visit Anna. Shortly after, Anna is found murdered and the police have no idea who did it. Pretty much the whole neighborhood saw Oscar leave her apartment and so know that he is most likely the culprit, yet not one of them is willing to speak to the police. Curious because I guess he has nothing better to do, Jesse breaks into Anna's apartment to take a look around. 

Together with his friend Hector, they look around her apartment and discover very strange items. Among those items are things obviously used in black magic rituals, as well as pictures of Jessie himself, one current, one as a child, and even a picture of his mother when she was pregnant with him. Understandably, this freaks them out. But they still keep looking. They open up a closet and find a ton of videotapes. Now if you have watched any of the PA movies, you're probably groaning about now because you know exactly what's going to happen.

In previous movies, in case you haven't wasted your time watching these, you know that on these tapes are pieces of the previous movies because this is just one big puzzle, or at least the filmmakers want you to think so. But fortunately, that is let alone. They find a journal. It seems to be filled with weird and mystical things, so they steal it because the duh stuff cannot happen until they start messing around with the supernatural.

Jesse has a girlfriend who helps him and Hector understand some of what is in the spell book. And of course, then they decide to mess around with it. His girlfriend spray paints the mirror black for some reason – she claims it's because it creates a portal from one world to the next – and the three of them sit around this mirror, chant some weird shit, but nothing happens.

If I went through this movie blow-by-blow would be way too long. So let me try to sum things up as they happen. Jesse finds a bite on his arm for no good reason. He finds Oscar hiding in Anna's apartment - there's a convenient trap door that Oscar pops up and comes out. By now his eyes are two black marks (very easy CGI work, not very impressive), and he grabs Jesse telling him that both are marked and Jesse must kill himself before he hurts someone. Oscar runs off, Jesse chases him, Oscar disappears. As Jesse tries to get help, Oscar apparently has jumped off of the roof of a church onto a car and is now dead.

Jesse suddenly gets weird. Actually, since he's a teenage boy, that's kind of hard to tell. Throughout the movie, unfortunately, there are some things that are very stereotypical and not very enlightened. One of those things is, that in Spanish neighborhoods, it is very dangerous to walk about in because of all the street gangs. I don't think they're any more dangerous than any other neighborhood. Jesse meets up with one of those gangs while with Hector. They want his backpack for whatever reason. Why they don't go after the camera – well, how else are they gonna shoot the rest of the movie?

When two of the tough guys attack Jesse, pummeling him while he's on the ground, all of a sudden one flies into a vending machine that sitting out in the middle of nowhere for some reason, and the other practically goes a block as he flies through the air. Hector asks Jesse what he did and Jesse says he barely touched them. This is the beginning of the 'gee isn't possession fun' part where they show that messing with the supernatural is harmless, and can be beneficial. I'm being sarcastic of course.

At least they didn't have one of those stupid Ouija board scenes where they play with it and then tell each other to stop playing with it after they told each other they have to play with it. No, for this one we get a Simon Says game. When they ask it questions, it will flash green for yes, and red for no. I am not kidding. Jesse continues to show supernatural abilities such as being able to do the 'Smooth Criminal' move better than Michael Jackson and his wires, and blowing up air mattresses with one breath.

As I said, this movie is dissed by it's being referred to as a spin-off rather than as part of the series. Especially since they incorporate this movie into the others. In one scene, Jesse suddenly runs into the black-eyed versions of Katie and Kristi, who of course were abducted in a previous PA movie. Suddenly Jesse sees something extremely scary, but before he can get away it attacks him, knocks him down, and completely possesses them.

At this point, Jesse is becoming violent and mean, because of course I guess one goes with the other, and Oscar tries to find help by contacting a woman named Ali. For some reason, she's the big time expert on demons. And this is getting a lot longer than I planned. So skip ahead, skip ahead - despite Oscar trying to help Jesse, Jesse is kidnapped anyway, by this supposed coven that's been the theme running through all of the PA movies. 

Here they called them 'The Midwives'. Why? I have no freaking idea. The two end up at the house seen in the last PA movie when the grandmother of two girls (already seen earlier) and a boy held her supposed coven meetings. The house is now empty, but just in case, Hector gets help from two more friends. Although they bring a 9mm gun plus a semi-automatic shotgun, they are no match for the women who suddenly come at them in droves.

Despite killing several of them, the coven gets the better of them, and it comes down to Hector all by himself. Jesse, now fully possessed, comes after his former best friend. Hector finds himself in a closet and sees markings of the covens triangular symbol that we have seen through all of these PA movies. Jesse manages to smash his way with his fist into the door and Hector runs. Running away through a doorway, Hector now finds himself in a completely different house. 

This is the house of the two little girls that he is already seen, whose parents have apparently also been taken by demons. Although when we saw the movie they were appeared to have been murdered. I'm getting a bit fuzzy on that. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, as the father tries to attack Hector, the mother kills the father and Hector gets away for some unknown reason. And Jesse is still chasing him. 

The ending is a big letdown. Now we knew from the beginning that Hector was not going to survive so this is not a surprise. However, the ending occurs off camera, which is a bit of a cheat because now we only see this freaking handheld camera shaking everywhere, lots of static interference, Hector screaming, Jesse roaring, and then finally the camera just falls to the ground and everything is quiet. Our last scene is one of the little girls leaning over the camera and pushing the stop button.

Now the reason I decided to do a review of this movie, despite hating the PA series with a passion, was because it had a whole lot more action, and a lot better special effects than all of the PA movies put together. That's what I mean when I said that we got the short end of the stick. 

One particular scene that I was very impressed with, although it did have technical problems, was when Hector, Jesse's grandmother, and his girlfriend tried to exorcise Jesse, but failed. The apartment shakes as if there is an earthquake, the lights go out, and by the time Hector can find the infamous night vision button, we're in total darkness. Hector flashes the camera back and forth, which isn't very exciting, but when he flashes back to the living room, still in night mode, we see the corner of the living room start to suck in on itself, à la Poltergeist. That was pretty cool. 

That particular effect was made even better when all of a sudden the lights come back on, and there is Jesse floating in the air shooting towards them, and destroying the living room by throwing everything around him and then disappearing.

My only problem with this particular effect, although it was the best effect of the movie, was that the lights came back on, but the camera was still able to catch Jesse and the destruction of the living room. The camera was in night vision mode. When the lights came back on, there should have been no picture on that camera at all, just white. But that was a small thing. I say again that this was the best PA movie made thus far, and that I really feel that this should be considered as part of the series and not just dismissed as a spin-off.

https://www.facebook.com/dumbandboringmovies

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

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

OKAY I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE, BUT DID YOU HAVE TO MAKE US WAIT TWO FREAKING YEARS?


Insidious: Chapters 1 and 2 Mashup (2013)

I dunno, maybe I'm losing my ability to appreciate a good, scary horror movie. Show me one and let's see - 'cause this ain't it. This will be a very unpopular opinion (most of mine are) because from what I've read, people think that James Wan walks on water and is the best thing since Sam Raimi. Okay one, that's blasphemy. Two, before you get hooked on a director who uses cheap tricks to force a scare (see below) and lots of twists, lets remember a similar director who nobody seems to want to work with anymore. Does the name M. Night Shyamalan ring any bells?

In 2011 Insidious came out and I reluctantly reviewed it on 10/10/12. To me, that movie was so full of unanswered questions, half plots and just plain WTH? moments it was impossible NOT to tear it completely apart. I called the movie out because it ripped off ideas from every other movie of its type. AND it claimed to be scarier than the Exorcist. 

Can you make this quick? I've
got three other houses to buy...

You know what was scary about the first and second Insidious? I'll tell you. The dialogue and whatever's going on is done softly, almost mumbling in spots so (if you're watching it at home) you have to turn the volume WAAAAY up to understand what's going on (especially if there's no CC available).

Then, since there's really no scares, they ramp it up by BLARING MUSIC AT TOP VOLUME!!! Damn thing just about blew out my woofer each time it did that. I can just imagine what it sounded like in a theater. THAT was scary. The movies were not. I mean just look at the movie poster. Duh. 

Remember waaaay back in the days of dial up modems that joke you played on your email buddies by sending them the 'ghost car commercial' joke? That gem shows a car driving around a road in the country and you were supposed to look reeeeal closely...

The most infuriating part is that this second movie which kind of explains the first wasn't even planned. OH NO YOU DON'T I CALL BULLSTUFF ON THAT ONE!!! I believed that at first, but consider this: the character of Elise Rainier, the medium who wears the most hilarious getup during her sceances was played in the first movie by Lin Shaye. At the end of the first movie she is killed. So the second movie backs up to explain what happened with the family way back when and Elise is alive and played by... Lin Shaye. 

THAT means that obviously something was planned to follow the first movie, otherwise why make her character look older if not so she can play her younger self in the second movie? AND she is to play that same character in the third, currently in pre-production? Huh? Huh? Yeah, thought so.

Hey! Heeeeeey! Remember me?
How come I'm not in this movie? Huh? Huh?

Nice mind-screw Mr. Wan. Just one small problem with your eeeeeevil little plan: Seeing them TWO YEARS apart would be worthless to the average moviegoer, considering they would have seen dozens of movies in between and so who memorizes movies for that long anyway? For the purpose of this review I actually watched the first movie again (don't say I never suffer for my readers) before watching the second.

I tried to think of a way to present this movie as an explanation to the first but as I said, there were two years between these films. SO I am going to attempt what may be impossible - give you the story by combining both movies. If you can't understand a bloody thing that's happening, that's perfectly okay. It just means you're in good company with others scratching their heads and wondering why they wasted money in the theaters just to have a soundtrack by Joseph Bishara blow out their eardrums. So here we go:

Dammit I'm dead and I'm still in this stupid movie...

We have a seemingly normal family called the Lamberts who live in a huge house because, as a school teacher, Mr. Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson, who is also in The Conjuring and seriously in danger of pigeonholing himself into roles in dumbass paranormal movies) is practically a millionaire. One day their son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) has a spill and goes into a coma. He has no injuries or brain damage, but won't wake up. And the movie is over.

What? Okay, okay. He won't wake up so eventually they move him, hospital bed, tubes and gunk, back home. And weird things start to happen. Don't expect anything original. We're talking doors banging, opening by themselves, and the requirement of every paranormal movie: the kitchen furniture makes a big pile because we all know that ghosts are just frustrated interior decorators who want things a certain way. 

Grandma?

Josh (the millionaire teacher) has a mother (Barbara Hershey) who knows just what's going on but didn't bother to warn him. Thanks mom. Josh Lambert packs up his family and moves to a new huge house. And things get worse - much worse. Josh's mom finds family portraits and is freaked that Josh is in them because he can't have his photo taken - it steals his soul. 

Sigh, you guys aren't going to let me have ANY fun, are you? There is a small reveal that since Josh was small, every time she took his picture there was a ghostly figure of a woman near him and with each picture it got closer so she called a medium (I thought she was a small myself) named Elise who determined that Josh has the power of astral projection.

Who am I and why am I in this movie?
<sings> I'm not going to tell you...

Umm what? He's got the OBEs? That's out of body experience BTW SMH. He thinks he's been dreaming but he's been wandering Through The Never... oops, sorry, that's a Metallica song. He's been in what Elise calls (and she's the only medium here so she calls it anything she wants) The Further. You got your sad spirits, your mad spirits, your parasites (huh?), and your downright eeeevil ones. This woman she calls a parasite and says the way to protect Josh is to hypnotize him to forget he ever could do whatever she thinks he can do. So they do.

Back in the present his mother decides it's time for Elise to butt in again with her opinions. She tells the family it's not the houses - it's Dalton. Remember, this is a mashup of both movies so if you only saw the first one and are thinking WTH it's because you need to rush out and rent the second one okay? Or not.

Apparently they never pay their light bills in The Further...

Elise and her two assistants set up a sort of seance and this was so funny to me I had to watch it in sections 'cause I kept laughing too hard to hear what was going on. If I had been in a theater they would have thrown me out. They sit at the table and Elise... wait, let me put away all sharp objects and carbonated beverages. 

Elise brings out what looks to be a WWI gas mask with a long hose and an earphone at the end. Supposedly she's supposed to communicate but can't be heard by normal means <pfffffft> so she talks in the mask and the guy <choke> and the guy <choke> and the guy writes down what's going down on a pad of ppppppp... on a pad of paper. Whew. At first it's normal but of course it gets nasty really fast and she ends up screaming and passing out like every other medium.

Sorry, there's a three nightmare limit in this bedroom...

Dalton is in big trouble. Mostly because he has a horrible agent and he's stuck in this movie. Elise says there's a horrible thing keeping him in the Further and he's lost. Josh has to go get him. She and his mother confess to his previous trips twisting, turning, through the never. You heard what I said. 

So Dalton, whose condition has nothing to do with having his picture taken, is being pursued by Darth Maul - umm I mean an entity that is a cartoon demon - the only thing he was missing was a trident. I can't take credit for the Darth Maul reference either - somebody else said it, I just don't remember who. 

Excuse me ma'am? Sir? Grandma?

Josh finds Dalton and they both go Through The Never... sorry, The Further and wake up. Everybody's happy - for a couple of seconds. Then Elise notices Josh's hands are dirty and like claws. He is now the old woman who chased him as a boy. She takes his picture quickly before he kills her. The wife finds it and as she sees it he comes up behind her. He kills her and the whole thing's over.

Ah c'mon, do you really want this to continue - 'cause I didn't. Sheesh. He doesn't kill her, he just goes on with the rest to a second movie. Renai is suspicious of Josh but he's acting all nice and stuff so everybody moves in with Josh's mom until the police are done with their investigation of Elise's murder. And strange things happen - AGAIN. Doors open by themselves, something sets off the alarms (THAT was freaking annoying - can't hear them anyway and now this piercing noise) and the piano keeps playing by itself. Badly. 

But Josh has had enough of the boogeyman, he wants everybody to just shut up - for a very good reason. Want me to tell you why? Tough. What happened to Darth Maul? Apparently he went back to the Star War's set 'cause he conveniently is dropped in this movie.

Oh, a small continuity error and boo boo in one - Renai had been knocked unconscious by a ghostie and Josh finds her and places her on the couch. As he does you can see her pull her feet back so her knees are bent. Kind of hard to do when you're supposed to be knocked out. Also he places her with her face straight up toward the ceiling but when it cuts away for a second and back, her head is cranked all the way to the right.

Just to make things more... confusing, the deceased Elise's assistants go into her house trying to find... I have no freaking idea. But they do find a tape with Josh's name on it and observe the little boy and the session where they made him forget everything. They digitize the tape and lighten it up. Standing in the corner in back of the kid is the grown up version of Josh. Oookay. Something is amiss. Mostly that you spent anywhere from twenty bucks on up to see this. They then go see Elise's friend Carl for more fun.

Wait.. is mortis allowed in Scrabble?

Carl's version of a Ouija board (since they seem to be determined not to have one in these two movies) is playing Boggle. No, really I'm serious. He has a bunch of 'dice' with letters in a cup. He shakes them up, asks a question and throws them on the table. What, no Magic 8 ball? What's wrong with these people? After a couple of false starts they get an answer to go to an abandoned hospital conveniently open when Josh's mom was a nurse. Oh. No. We've gone from slightly interesting with a two movie mashup right back down to paranormal hand held camera crap in an abandoned hospital. Mr. Wan you SUCK!

They find the ICU and Lorraine remembers a patient called Parker Crane, there because he attempted to castrate himself. The last time she saw him he was in the elevator with her and got off on a different floor. She asked the admitting desk why he was up and was told he had died by suicide the day before. Conveniently because otherwise this movie will be four hours long they immediately find his records in the abandoned record room (geez, that would be an identity thief's treasure trove - all those names, social security numbers, etc.) and find out where he lived. Oh yes, we're hunting wabbits now.

The Church Of The Perpetual Plot Fail

Parker's house is not only still conveniently standing, but unoccupied. They break in and find a secret room that has pews like a church and the dessicated corpses of dozens of women, all in wedding dresses. Parker had been a serial killer who kept clippings of all his crimes (he was called The Bride In Black) 'cause of his mother. The living discover Elise didn't send them here, Parker's mother did, and not because she wanted to be nice. 

Just to keep things nice and confusing, Josh (the real one in The Further) finds Elise (why is she there?) and they try to figure a way to find the woman who killed Elise. She suggests they ask the one person who would know - Josh the child. Oh geez, now we're doing time travel in The Further. He asks the Josh who's still under hypnosis where to find the woman and Josh stands up and points at his bedroom. They go to the door and open it. This was shown on the tape in the first movie with absolutely no explanation. Now you know. Happy?

Tell me again why you couldn't CGI this?

Meanwhile among the living - Josh's mother rushes home and tells the wife and kids to get out and that Josh is not Josh. Duh. The three men surround Josh who by now is becoming ill for... I don't know, cause he's not really Josh? I don't really care. Three strong men cannot subdue Josh. This is not even the BIGGEST duh of the whole movie but it came close since they made a big deal of Josh starting to fall apart and becoming ill and THREE men can't hold him? Sigh. This movie is 105 minutes long. That's 105 minutes more than it needed.

The family gets the okay to come home and of course get ambushed by Josh/not Josh. So now we have The Shining going on as a crazed Josh/not Josh hunts down the family. They end up down in the basement and Dalton gets the bright idea of twisting, turning, Through The Never... sigh. I mean he goes into The Further to get his dad. So what, two people are going to be in this body now?

Son? Daughter? Grandma?

Nope, apparently it's one per customer. Dalton finds his dad and Elise and Carl (the Boggle guy) and they make their way to get out of there - well not Elise, she's dead. On the way they discover the reason the woman's been following Josh - it's not a woman, it's the serial killer. As a boy he was forced to live as a girl and so hates all women and kills... you know what? I really don't care.

Everybody gets out, all go to the right bodies, and we have another happy moment that's surely going to go to hell any moment. That is, as soon as Mr. Wan gets another freaking script and maybe another two years go by...

What's that Mr. Wan? I get a five movie contract?

Our epilogue is the two assistants who seek out those who need help with 'parasite spirits'. Oh. Brother. They show up at a family's house, telling them when their daughter, currently in a sort of vegetative state, was resuscitated, she brought something bad back with her. Unseen by everyone except the youngest daughter is the spirit of Elise, who decides to tag along in astral form I'm assuming, to help the two with their, uh, endeavors. 

Our last scene (THANK YOU!) is Elise staring at the afflicted girl, then at the corner where, I'm assuming there is something really nasty. She yells 'Oh my God' like anybody's going to hear her and the movie's over. And Mr. Wan has more money. And a setup for another freaking movie. And I have a freaking headache. You're welcome.

https://www.facebook.com/dumbandboringmovies