Shudder Crud: The Dark, The Dead, and The Nighttime

Nightbreed

The story behind this movie is almost more interesting than the movie itself. Clive Barker directed this one himself but the studio butchered it, then someone found all the missing stuff decades later and stitched it back together to finally be watchable. 

It is watchable, but I still wouldn’t call it good. There’s great ideas here, and some really ugly, scary, freaky, fucky, and filthy monsters, but it’s too long, and the plot is retarded. I’ve seen it multiple times and i can’t tell you what happens at the end because i always zone out by the half way point. 

Basically it’s about this guy being framed for a bunch of murders by his serial killer psychologist who actually did the crimes. He then feels compelled to travel to a cemetery with a hidden community of monsters living underneath it. Then he gets bit by one and dies and goes back there and becomes one of them and his girlfriend goes to find him and the serial killer is running around in a scary mask killing people and then it just kinda trails off. Or I do.

The best scene is the girlfriend going around the place getting scared by all the ugly monsters. There’s a ton of horrible looking fucks that only Clive Barker could have concocted. What I hate about this movie is that it tries to make the monsters the good guys, which makes no fucking sense whatsoever. 

Apparently they were shapeshifters who were driven underground by the mean old humans, who persecuted them just for being different. Really? Just for being different? You don’t think it has something to do with the fact that the shapes they chose to assume were of hideous abominations from the darkest nightmares? Or that they seem to enjoy jumping out and scaring people at every opportunity? Or that they bite, and stalk, and are extremely rapey? You don’t think the mean, nasty normies might have been just a little bit justified in driving these horrible creatures underground?

I hate these freaks. They’re disgusting and deserve no sympathy. I can never remember what happens at the end because I’m always asleep by that point, but I hope the entire community gets nuked. 

Deadstream

This one’s about a shit-eating youtuber who livestreams a night in a haunted house. On paper it sounds like shit, but it autoplayed and I thought it was just a short film or a vignette of something, so I didn't move. I thought there’s no way such a lame, gimmicky premise can be for a feature length film, but it kept going, and as it kept going it started to endear itself to me. I ended up watching the whole thing, and it was pretty decent, to my chagrin.

The director, who also plays the main character, gives an authentic performance as a very specific kind of annoying shitbag. His mannerisms, speech patterns, general personality and stupid fucking face are eerily accurate to the million-sub club content-clones routinely staring at you from a thousand demonic thumbnails that you never click on because you’re neither 6 nor 76.

As the scary night progresses he sort of has a character arc, or I guess you’d call it that. There’s some backstory of him getting canceled for doing something stupid and making an apology video and blah blah. At one point he yells at his chat that he was forced to do that apology by threat of the mob ruining his life, and that they can all go fuck themselves. This is of course the morally correct stance to take, but later he “learns a lesson” and backtracks by apologizing again for real. 

I get what they were going for with this, but the conclusion is wrong. No, the mob does not deserve a groveling humiliation ritual apology, they never do. Fuck the public. He was actually right when he snapped at them, you can literally see throughout the entire movie that they’re just bloodthirsty cretins and don’t give a fuck about him, or anything. 

So the guy eventually getting humbled and lowering himself beneath them again might sound like positive character development to the stupid-minded, but It's actually not. Groveling before the fickle, feeble-minded masses as the culmination of the protagonist's journey is a ham-fisted and misguided moral.  

Nobody owes the audience anything, they are animals. Cruel and cannibalistic cretins who weaponize their own misery, and have no business moralizing to anyone. Redemption is a private affair, the peanut gallery deserves nothing. 

Dark Match

This is a wrestling movie so i was doomed to watch it. It's ugly and cheap looking like a truck stop bargain bin piece of crap. Filmed in ugly hotel rooms, soaked in a hideously aggressive red light that gives you a headache.

Not even Steven Ogg can make this worth sitting through. Chris Jericho is also in it, but i don’t even know if i made it far enough to see his character. I checked out of this snoozefest quick.

There are even crappier wrestling horror movies that are still somehow better than this. I’ve seen Wrestlers vs. Zombies 11 times, and I’d watch it a 12th time before putting this on again.

Never mind, I finished watching it after all, I guess it was alright.