Horror We, How's By You? Movies I've Watched.

I'm bored and I didn't know what to post about. I was looking at the list of movies I've watched since March, 20th and something struck me: I watch a lot of miserable crap. And I've always meant to do some short reviews outside of the Tear Them Apart Podcast. So, here's my thoughts on a batch of movies I watched online, mostly on Tubi, Plex, Youtube and Amazon Prime. Meaning you should be able to find most if not all of these things if you so choose to indulge. There's more than this on my list, because I've been drawing (albeit slowly, wrist update: waiting for a referral for the pain management doctor, might get steroid shots, wheee, I'll be a Hulk!) in front of some movies as well as just sitting around with Winky the Pirate Cat late at night, winding down and wondering where my life went wrong.

(Image above: The Evil Within, 2017)

In order of watching, after March 20th, 2024:

Zeta: When the Dead Awaken (2019, Indonesia) - Slipshod, uninspired zombie virus outbreak on a budget. With extra sentimentality. You don't need to see this. I didn't need to see this.

The Devil's Doorway (2018, N. Ireland) - In 1960, the Vatican sends two priests with a motion picture camera to a home for wayward woman to investigate a purported miracle. I remember liking the acting and characters, but by the end it devolves into the usual found footage shenanigans of people waltzing around lost while the camera wobbles all around. Maybe the movie losing it's way is a metaphor for the older priest's arc. Would be interesting paired with the much better

The Bridge Curse: Ritual (2023 , Taiwan) - Sequel to The Bridge Curse which was eh, and this is even more eh.

The Rope Curse (2018, Taiwan) - Unfocused, pretty dull supernatural story. It's a rope curse about a cursed rope and people get hung and it's a pretty drab, sub-par slog short on ideas.

Curse of Aurore (2020) - Low budget found footage, Americans in rural, wintry Canada exploring a local legend. It has moments and kind of sets things up okay, but like most found footage, as things progress, things fall apart and the narrative flails around to fill up time with people walking around and being confused by things. One character has to do some dumb shit via lazy writing to keep the plot moving. In the end it doesn't amount to anything, it flattens out and you're already many steps ahead of the increasingly clueless characters.

The Last Exorcism (2010) - I was surprised at how much I liked this -- for a good while --because it's found footage and exorcism stuff, two subgenres that by and large give me the eyerolls. The gimmick here is we have an evangelical minister who has lost his faith and is working with a small film crew on documenting the fakery involved in exorcisms. But of course there's something actually going on at the farmhouse they're investigating. So we have a different entry point than usual, and also, solid acting and decent characterization and moments. Unfortunately, it starts spinning its wheels when the overt horror stuff starts kicking in. Characters start going in all directions and things lose focus as the twists start hitting and the ending, for me at least, sent the movie right off the rails. I get the choices but didn't care for them. When the movie's small and creepy and focused on the household and the investigation, it really worked for me. But it had to go bigger and start tossing the obligatory multiple twists in, and it actually becomes more mundane in doing so. Some folks like the ending, it's apparently a ripe subject for fan debate, so, your mileage may vary and all that.

An English Haunting (2020, UK) - Indie supernatural story that takes advantage of the fact that the UK has a lot of great, big, old creepy houses. The location is the most interesting thing here and you can just google big, old creepy UK houses and make up your own story. It will be more satisfying than this plodding affair. I laughed during a supposedly tense scene at the end.

Body Puzzle (1992, Italy) - Giallo-adjacent horsecrap from Lamberto Bava. Convoluted plot, ridiculous killer motivation, inept characters and some terrible ideas make a for a good bad time if that's how you roll. Some good unintentional laughs throughout, but it's no Pieces.

The Curse of the Screaming Dead (1982) - Patience-testing no-budget regional disaster from Maryland. Some young adult dinguses go deer hunting and unwittingly cause ridiculous-looking confederate soldier zombies to rise from their graves and attack them. Amateur hour. And a half. Most people will turn this junk off, I see these things through while drawing stuff.

The Ghost Station (2022, S. Korea) - Cursed location/ghost stuff tropes set around, you guessed it, a haunted train station. A few okay bits and pieces, but overall pretty standard, cliched, forgettable stuff.

The Dunwich Horror (2009) - I'm not saying I'm a Cthulhu Mythos movie completist but, well, y'know. I keep trying them, usually just to see how they miss the point of the material or just use it as a springboard to have fish people doing shit and some cultist doofus mispronounce "Necronomicon". Anyway, this particular mess was a must-endure for me because of it's fannish self-awareness, if nothing else. It pulls in an aged Dean Stockwell to play Henry Armitage, because he played Wilbur Whately in the 1970 version of the Lovecraft story. Playing Whately is Jeffrey Coombs, long associated with Lovecraft through his work in Stuart Gordon's Reanimator and From Beyond. Unfortunately, a trudging, sluggish, semi-articulate Jeffrey Coombs is not a fun Jeffrey Coombs. We ant intense Jeffrey Coombs, or at least articulate. Not that it matters, because it's all garbage and it's sad to see Coombs trudging through this cringery, it's actually a relief when he's removed from the proceedings. Most of this T.V. movie is spent following an irritating pair of wooden investigators who go through various moronic motions to get to a very funny, poorly-executed finale featuring some near-Birdemic special effects. This is a very weird, terrible, embarrassing movie that I guess I can recommend to Mythos movie completists who can stand staring into the vast abyss of shitty Mythos adaptations.

All Night Long (1962, UK) - Jazz-infused take on Othello, a melodrama/neo-noir that might play well with The Sweet Smell of Success due to the black and white photography and other tangential elements. Jazz fans get Dave Brubeck, Charles Mingus and other real personalities playing on screen throughout. Anglophiles get Richard Attenborough and an intense, fidgety, weed-smoking Patrick McGoohan as a scheming jazz drummer with a not so great American accent. McGoohan learned to play for the movie, and while he's overdubbed on the soundtrack, they don't shy away from showing him play, and there's a joy in watching John Drake behind a kit. Betsy Blair (best known for Marty) is very good in a crucial supporting role as McGoohan's wife. Some issues, but definitely worth seeing for various reasons.

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) - I've been meaning to see this thriller/mystery -- about a one-armed man stopping in a dusty hole in the middle of nowhere and encountering some very unhelpful locals -- ever since I saw the description in the TV Guide as a kid. Almost fifty years later and it didn't disappoint, at least not in any serious ways. The cast is absolutely killer, Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan, Anne Francis, Walter Brennan, Dean Jagger, Ernest Borgnine, Russell Collins and an especially sinister Lee Marvin. The outdoor photography is gorgeous, sprawling landscapes and skies you just can't capture as well in CGI than in life. To my eyes, at least. You know things are there. This is a movie, if you get me.

Don't Go Near the Park (1979) - A cheap mess about prehistoric cannibals who eat people to remain immortal or something like that. The two ding-dong immortals squeeze guts out of people while Aldo Ray walks around confused and 70s TV kid actor Meeno Peluce hangs around near the park you're not supposed to go near. I wasn't sure if I had already watched this unreal piece of crap. Turns out I had, but it was funny enough for me to sit through again. Stay for the exciting stupid climax, which includes a dog and scratch-on-the-film eyeball laser beams. A real head shaker. Kind of remarkable.

Spasms (1983) - Oliver Reed has a psychic link with a "gigantic" tropical snake that killed his brother. Other people get bit and have spasms. I barely remember it. I had to look it up on IMDB to be reminded that Peter Fonda was in it. Some gore and some silly effects. Boring.

3 Demons (2022) - I vaguely remember it being super irritating, repetitive and very unsatisfying. One of those low-budget mind-fuckery things where the protagonist can't tell what's real or not, and, of course, he has a hidden secret that's being trotted out to him by the supernatural beings. Or something. A cop is ordered to guard a body found in a circle of stones until the family can come out to identify it. The corpse goes waltzing around and there's things in the woods and it fills time with typical low-budget time-wasting hallucinatory crap. It's nowhere near as fascinating as the filmmakers think it is, and it's badly written from the get-go -- it becomes hard to differentiate reality and illusion from ineptitude. Once the cop starts toughing everything on the scene you want to throw things at the screen, after that everything seems to be presented in bad faith. Skip it.

Stigma (aka Estigma, 1980 Spain/Italy) - Sebastien's dad dies and he gets psychic powers that kill people he's mad at and he gets bloody rashes and he has a thing for his mother and hates her new boyfriend and he has some connection to another man's past that involved an incestual relationship with his sister and, oh, he's also infatuated with his older brother's girlfriend and he's got some rock posters on his wall and he broods a lot and is kind of insufferable. Things happen and people are killed. It's a slow burn but it never steps on any narrative gas, the more you learn the more it just sort of piles up. Some atmosphere but no great set pieces. I don't recommend it. I think the word's "stigmata", not stigma.

Bloody Sect (aka Secta Sinestra (1982, Spain) - Holy shit, this is the kind of wild mess I can get into. A mercenary is blinded by his insane wife and then tries to conceive a baby with his girlfriend, who ends up impregnated by Satan's sperm so she can carry the Anti-Christ. Two satanists -- one of them a sort of poor man's Coffin Joe -- track down the couples who aborted their Anti-Christs to exact bloody revenge. A satanic nurse is placed in the main couple's household to make sure baby Anti-Christ arrives safely. The insane wife breaks out of jail. And there's a scrappy kid who the nurse tries to kill! There's a ton of violence and Exorcist/Omen crap and gore and at times I thought Hausu was about to break out. I don't know what the fuck these people set out to do. Is this a comedy? I kept looking for obvious signs of it being a comedy, but it never winks. Nothing I could find said anything about this being a horror comedy. It's manic and ridiculous. You should see this, it's pure WTF entertainment.

Luz (2018, Germany) - Interesting, stagey high concept possession horror that didn't work for me overall. Held my attention and interest for the first half but the gimmick runs out of steam and things just kind of crept to the finishing line . You'll probably figure some things out before the movie wants you to, but the wonky presentation is the main thing. Might work for you.

Scarab (1983, Spain/US) - Embarrassingly funny trainwreck that could have served as blackmail material for Rip Torn if he gave a damn. Robert Ginty from The Exterminator is an irritating reporter/Dollar Store hero tracking down former Nazi Torn, who's using some Egyptian hokum to do something something to gain world power or something. He does gain power over a bunch of topless women that dance like druggies while he scoots around feeling them up and acting like a fifth-rate Batman 66 villain. This thing had to have been some sort of cocaine deal or a money laundering scheme or something like that. It's absolute garbage in every way, and hilarious. Look for the dude who makes explosions while pointing at our shitty hero, confusing passerby on the streets of Spain. Party night movie.

Dragons Forever (1988, Hong Kong) - Decided to rewatch some old HK flicks I remembered liking back in the day. This one was just kind of okay, at least compared to the other Jackie Chan-Sammo Hung-Yuen Biao team-ups. It's fatal flaw is putting all three stars in atypical and ill-advised roles -- Chan as an opportunistic corporate lawyer, Sammo as a cocky arms dealer (?), and Biao as a possibly mentally ill paranoiac. There's too much plot and comedy relief and most of the humor falls flat. The action's solid when it happens and there's recognizable faces in the mix, but nothing feels exceptional. The ending fight feels awkward in some of the pacing, and feels flat after Biao and Sammo are sidelined. The terrible dubbing in the version I watched provided some unintentional laughs, especially Sammo's character. Definitely worth seeing, but not the best way for the team to go out.

The Evil Within (2017) - I'd never heard of this movie before stumbling upon it on Tubi. The story behind the movie is something in itself -- begun in 2002 by an heir to the Getty fortune, it wasn't released until 2017, two years after the director died of complications from his meth addiction. Inspired by his own childhood nightmares and elements of the Son of Sam killings, Andrew Getty mostly funded the film himself and shot much of it in his own mansion. he converted one room into a production facility, made his own sets, camera rigs and worked with a crew to create multiple animatronic creatures for the film. Conflicts with the cast (which changed over time), a lawsuit brought by a studio assistant (the crew changed out over time) and funding issues led to the production starting and stopping over the course of several years. When shooting was finally completed, Getty kept tinkering with the film to try and perfect it. After his death, producer Michael Lucer -- also the editor and the only other crew member to be involved with the production since it began -- finished the film.

So, how's the actual film? It's pretty fascinating, actually. It's very uneven, and has a lot of problems, but it's definitely worth seeing. There's a ton of impressive practical effects and camera tricks, elevating a traditional story of a cursed mirror and demonic possession. Or maybe it's a psychological horror story about a disturbed and troubled young man. It leads to tragedy either way. There are some recognizable faces in the cast, and genre icon Michael Berryman has an effective role as the demonic entity. I'd watch it again for its ingenuity and visual flourishes. It can feel piecemeal in places, especially in the final third, but overall it's pretty surprising and enjoyable, flaws and all. If nothing else it makes you wonder what a second film by Getty would have looked like.

Pontypool (2008, Canada) - Rewatched for an upcoming episode of the Tear Them Apart podcast. Recommended, in case you were wondering.

Impulse (1984) - I'm surprised I hadn't heard of this one before, a less exploitative but higher budgeted take on The Crazies. Of main interest is the cast: Tim Matheson, Meg Tilly, Hume Cronyn, Bill Paxton, John Karlan and a small bit by John Carpenter regular Peter Jason. The film starts very nicely and builds well as Tilly's hometown is plagued by mystifying acts of violence perpetrated by normally well-behaved locals. Things get out of hand as the townspeople start going apeshit, there's a fairly remarkable shooting of a small boy by the sheriff in the town square. Everyone acts on impulse, see? Although it's amazing how they all have this one overriding impulse to do something that would make for an interesting violent crime. Burning, shooting, fighting, breaking. No one just starts eating eggs like a maniac or stays in bed or decides to move out of the joint. Some conspiracy stuff crops up so no one can leave town and we can have a farly simple reason for a town called malice. Unfortunately, when things really get going, the movie runs out of ideas and set-ups that work. A weird subplots falls into place just to make something happen, no one in the town reflects on or seems to acknowledge what's been going on, the one late scene showing the town erupting into violence comes off more like the Festival episode of Star Trek than a full-blown calamity. The decision to have Matheson become one of the afflicted leads to some very routine and extended attack and chase stuff, and the reveal at the end is pretty dull. There's some good scenes sprinkled throughout, and a few that don't quite work (the arson kids, in particular), and one very disturbing scene that doesn't have any violence or extreme behavior in it. Overall, it falls apart, but it's worth seeing as a semi-budgeted 80s oddity.

Brothers Five (1970, Hong Kong) - Solid Shaw Brothers martial arts action about long-lost siblings being reunited to fight an utter bastard and his minions. Lots of different weapons and specialties on display, lots of fighting, not much plot. Lo Lieh is in here as a brother with a whip specialty, Sammo Hung has a small but nifty good guy role with some nice spotlight action. It has a repetitive structure with characters continually returning to a main location for set pieces, but it didn't bother me as long as everyone was pulling out crazy weapons and going at it. In order to defeat Mr. Utter Bastard the five brothers learn to form a kind of contrived human Voltron, which doesn't look like it accomplishes anything useful at all, but logic isn't exactly what I'm looking for here. It's fun as hell.

Mr. Vampire III (1987, Hong Kong) - I forgot how fun and inventive this action horror comedy was. The early fight in the woods is especially good. Ching-Ying Lam is terrific throughout as always. There's maybe a few too many characters and the main comedy relief can be annoying, but this and the first Mr. Vampire are just such good comfort movies. Recommended.

Giallo (2009, Italy) - Maaama mia. As a recovered Dario Argento hater and a OCD nerd completist I've sworn to watch everything he's directed, despite knowing it's slow death to watch pretty much everything after, what -- Phenomena? The embarrassments on display here include Adrian Brody's off-kilter lead performance as a ridiculously contrived police expert on serial killers, lead actress Emmanuelle Signer's wooden acting as a victim's sister who's constantly hammered-into-the-plot, and one of the more ridiculous and laughable serial killers in the subgenre, which is saying something. The police are almost always inept in these things, but when your main focus is on a detective who's supposed to be brilliant, well, if I remember correctly someone should've checked taxi licenses and plates earlier, for fuck's sake. Maybe I got that wrong, I'm not going back to doublecheck. Dull, awful, artless and floundering -- but at least you're spared Asia Argento getting assaulted in this one, so, that's something to be thankful for. Woof.

Creepy Crawly (aka The One Hundred, 2022, Thailand) - A group of people, mostly obnoxious, are quarantined in a hotel during a viral outbreak. It's pretty convoluted, and doesn't make much sense, and the characters do dumb things. Anyway, the main thing is, there's centipedes. A lot of CGI ones. Lots and lots of centipedes. And they get bigger. And somehow this evolves into a shape-shifting situation where there's a main enemy centipede villain thingie, so there's a Who Goes There?/The Thing angle. And then there's some superpowered kind of fighting at the end...I don't remember how all this happens. They keep things going, and it's all over the place but somehow it always feels run of the mill. The CGI effects are pretty fakey but mostly fun, but because the direction is pretty perfunctory it's just ends up as a lot of noise and screaming and CGI. The horror is almost completely subsumed by SF spectacle. Let me put it this way, I'm intensely scared of centipedes, and this movie didn't make me squirm once.

Anguish (2015) - Well-meaning, non-exploitative teen possession film. It has some decent ideas, some okay acting and small town atmosphere, but the script and direction doesn't give it enough support. Despite a slow pace, some things feel rushed, and there's more melodrama than drama. All blunted by the overall execution. I don't mind a horror film that isn't out to really scare, but this one needed more effective scenes to bolster its emotional theme. Also, enough with the "surprise" "shock" scene where someone get hit by a car that rushes out of "nowhere".

Ghoul (2015, Czech) - Some stock found footage characters want to make a documentary about the Holodomar, or Ukrainian Famine, which was a a forced starvation orchestrated by Stalin that led to millions of deaths as well as cases of cannibalism. Or more exactly, the fictional filmmakers want to make a documentary about the cannibalism, so that Ghoul can have a high concept. Their filmmaking plans seem unfocused, incoherent and completely contrived. It's always a bad sign when the reason for the camera shtick seems unbelievable (one of many problems I had with The Taking of Deborah Logan, I never believed the documentary filmmakers knew what the hell they were doing). Anyway, the characters make some stereotypically poor decisions and end up in a creepy, isolated cabin owned by an old guy named Boris so they can interview him. Because he supposedly ate his neighbor during the famine. They bring a psychic with them who seems unhinged from the get-go, and when Boris fails to show up they decide to stick it out. I think their car is eventually tinkered with. I would have walked, but you know how these things go. There's some more bad decisions and arguing and drinking to pad out the time, and then there's Ouija board shenanigans and if I have this right, they evoke the demonic spirit of real-life Russian-Ukrainian serial killer, Andrei Chikatilo, aka The Butcher of Rostov. So, not one, but two horrific tragedies are being exploited for this spookfest. Personally, I'm not a fan of using actual serial killers as a direct basis for a horror movie, I won't watch anything about the ghosts of Richard Speck or John Wayne Gacy coming back to kill people (both courtesy of the geniuses at The Asylum). It's cheap heat and just super vulgar. This one kind of sidesteps the moral debate by being so bad that you forget what the hell the characters were talking about or trying to do. It's just the usual found footage garbage with a roomful of dimwits screaming at one another and then screaming "What was that?" and/or "What the fuck is going on?" and then screaming at generic demon/spirit effects and finally screaming as they die and the camera falls on the floor. Waste of time, they don't even use the locations well, which is usually one positive for a foreign horror film. Even the worst have some nice touristy things that I enjoy looking at. Different woods, mountains, convenience stores. This has a messy shack. I can look around my studio and see that.

Seekers (2003, Germany) - Found footage with a group of German friends going to Poland woodlands for a geocaching trip. Decent springboard, geocaching offers a good reason to get victims into the wild, but the plot possibilities are mostly wasted, and in the end all you get is the usual lousy, lazy, limping along in the woods slog.

The Seekers (2003) - Cheap, shoddy shot on video nonsense about a cursed videotape. Doesn't have an iota of cheap shoddy charm some of these things can have. I sat through it so you don't have to. Tough going.

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That's all for now! As you can see, I mostly watch crap. If you enjoyed this, let me know in the comments and I'll write up the rest of April's filmic mishaps. April's been one mishap after another, so why shouldn't the films I watch be any good?

More. Later. Soon.