⭐️1/2
A patch of Florida swampland holds significance for the local tribe as a sacred spot where criminals were placed to face judgment. This brings a batch of students, looking to complete their thesis on Native American folklore, to the area. As usual, there are things in this world beyond our modern day science and now this group of youthful “scholars” are up against a supernatural force that could give two shits if these dinks believe in it. Cue some crap digital effects and the sinister spirits of the dead! The locals get tight lipped when the group of archaeologists mention their destination, one big dude offers to take them if their hearts are pure and because they’re just some silly white folks, they assure him they will be fine. Decades earlier a bunch of folks came to a messy end and the place has been off limits since then. This is why their guide won’t take them all the way. He also helpfully warns them to leave before sundown. They don’t even get the chance to ignore that warning. Setting up at an abandoned campground, the gaggle of Caucasians go about their business of setting themselves up to be victims. There’s plenty of exploring of the area and then the most dick-headed of the team comes across old film canisters belonging to the ill-fated campers from the 70s. Conveniently located next to an old projector. The footage (none of which should have survived being unprotected in the Florida swamps for decades) is disturbing and unbelievably features he and his colleagues among the era-appropriate idiots. He decides not to share this with anyone. Sacred sticks are found, canoes are sunk, ghostly voices are heard and past sins are answered for. It takes forever for all of this to go anywhere and it’s not really worth the wait. The cast is capable at least, it looks fine when it’s not experimenting with Se7en edits and there’s some bloody ends for our awful “heroes”. Still, there’s not much here to sink your teeth into and it only kind of cuts loose with like ten minutes left in the runtime. Just watch Death Curse of Tartu is you need a Florida swampland horror film involving dumb white folks getting got by Native American magic.
⭐️
A little kid wanders around the woods and talks to himself about being a YouTube star. At a dilapidated house, he comes across a severed finger and excitedly decides to film it with his phone. He looks around the place and finds a digital camera. Watching it, we follow the journey of a reporter named Lisa Adams who is tracking down a missing person. Nobody wants to talk to her about the missing man except a young dude who lets her know that the last time Chris Wells was seen, he was heading towards the infamous Paul Pry Road. Arriving in the dark, she and her cameraman wander down the forested road and right to the old barn where that little kid found the camera and the severed finger. I don’t think I have to spell this out for ya. According to the chatter, Paul Pry was a serial killer who brought his victims to the abandoned farm. Why they decided to name a road after him is anyone’s guess. That’s city hall for ya. The duo find a human skull and freak out. This discovery has them planning to get out and call the police but when they come across a man tied up to a chair, they stop to help. It is the missing man but the rescue is short-lived when Paul Pry arrives. It doesn’t end well for the cameraman. The kid finds more severed limbs and decides he should probably go back home. We jump back to Chris Wells heading to a comedy show and getting stood up by his girl. If I was his girl, I would have stood up his annoying ass too. Chris picks up his buddy and they smoke some weed while acting like idiots. I guess he’s performing at the show. I feel really sorry for the audience. They drive on for what feels like forever and ad-lib for the benefit of nobody. A local weirdo points them in the direction of Paul Pry Road when they attempt to get some gas and even though it’s not showing up on the GPS, they head out that way. The local warns them about the dangerous Paul Pry (who, I remind you, has a road named after him) and they laugh it off. They follow a woman in distress who has no idea why she’s wandering around the area. She runs off from them and right into the arms of Paul Pry. Chris complains about trying to help this woman and Paul Pry comes for him and his buddy. I should mention that Paul Pry is wearing a cheap Leatherface mask. Not like a knockoff mask either, it’s definitely copyright infringement but I doubt anybody who would give a damn is watching this. The annoying dopes get bludgeoned and caught but unfortunately still find the time to ad-lib. This ends and we jump back to Lisa getting assigned the story. Why it’s built like this, I have no fucking clue but it’s admirable that it needlessly complicated its own pacing for the hell of it. It all eventually catches up to itself and broke-ass Leatherface gets to murder the minimal cast. I appreciate the build on a local legend, even if none of it makes much sense but all of this just feels like an idea that was thrown in the oven but removed before the temperature was even set.
1/2
Paranormal investigators tackle a Chicago apartment building with a sinister past. Legend has it that The Devil occupies the upstairs tenement… at least that’s what the emo-girl psychic says. Her pube-stached teammates take her word for it and get to investigating. Psychic girl has a vision in black and white of the former tenant. There’s knocks coming from a drain and some dope trying his damndest to look concerned. There’s also a whole bunch of establishing shots you’d find in a student film and also a sunbathing cat… that’s probably the best this movie will get. Continuous “artsy” camerawork annoys and the dopey renter sits around in silence and ponders. Tedious haunted house shenanigans attempt to relieve the tedious life of our flashback protagonist but outside of cat footage there ain’t much interest. Unless you’re really into people reading and staring off into the distance, you may tap out. The dope goes crazy in a spectacularly unconvincing manner, the film shifts to color and he has a vision of his own suicide with a pair of scissors. This makes him want to sell the house which I thought was an apartment and then we get black and white footage of traffic and walls. There’s also a drawn out shot of a lightbulb shot from below. We jump back in with the adventures of the amateur ghost hunters and get another psychic flashback. This one is about a woman named Beth who is renting the apartment that was supposedly a house. This too is in black and white because of the past or whatever. Beth also has cats although they are the same cats and seems to enjoy sitting around and pondering just as much as the prior tenant or homeowner or whatever he was. She finds a note on the ground from the dope and she looks concerned. I guess she knew the guy which explains the cats. The note warns her about going in the basement, the dangers of a wooden figure and tells her to get the hell out of the house which is not an apartment but really seems like one. Beth walks around in silence and stares at her reflection. She also stares out a window. Man, I wish I had this much time to do fucking nothing but I’m the idiot watching this so that’s on me. We get to watch Beth smoke a cigarette in real time and I swear those scissors are looking like a good way out of watching this. Beth doesn’t leave and ends up in the basement. She really sucks at following directions. The sound of bells drives her crazy or causes an asthma attack. Emo psychic picks up on one last idiot (lookin’ like a Temu MJF) who came to the apartment or house or whatever and the movie drags itself to the finish line. Fuck me. Thank god there were some cats in this. An ambling waste of time and one more reason to avoid this pretentious fucking city. Go stare out a window instead.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Professor Humberto “El Maestro” Valdez is fired from his Chicano Studies position at the local college. He deals with shitty students and shittier neighbors on a regular basis but the loss of his job gets him sent to a crappy shrink and that quack puts a knife in the hands of a man who is attempting to deny a possible violence growing inside of him. The only student that gives a damn gifts him with a death mask she crafted in her art class and racism greets the poor guy at every turn. Knife + Mask x Environment = Slasher Time! Luckily, all the victims are garbage humans (with a trio of murderous bigots being the worst of the bunch). There’s a sympathetic sheriff tracking the murders and a Cinco de Mayo party in the middle of the woods that can only end badly. It’s cheap, it’s crass and it fits comfortably with those late 80s and early 90s SOV films I love so much. Bonus points added for All Night Long segments that pop up at a few points during the film hosted by the super bubbly Stacy Monroe.
⭐️⭐️1/2
Hurricane Irma reveals that a park was built over an African burial ground and a sorority and fraternity see it as a good spot to send their pledges to do some excavation. We then join some podcast called Hotep TV where Dr. Bryant goes on about the darker history of America and the African ancestral roots of Florida… where the graveyard was discovered. Bryant is the professor who came up with the idea to send students over there to investigate the important historical find. If you drink every time the words “ancestor” or “dead” is said… congrats, you have liver failure. This bit goes on for a while but at least Dr. Bryant is taking the time to give all the exposition you need as to who all these college kids are and why they’re going to be in the cemetery after dark. There’s two fraternities (one of them a Hip Hop fraternity) and two sororities (one of them a lesbian sorority) taking part in things. He also talks about an African slave who fought as a wrestler while enslaved who is buried there. That’s probably important. His name was Baba the African King. He tells the story of Baba and we’re treated to illustrations of the action as the narration awkwardly rambles on. He wins his freedom but is then forced back into slavery and gets falsely accused of rape by his owner’s daughter and a house slave. So he gets hung by the white folks and cursed by his own people. This is definitely important. We meet our victims-to-be and the gaggle of pledges with paper bags over their heads are thrown in a moving truck and brought out to the middle of the woods. Their assignment is to chart the burial land and figure out the identity of everyone who was buried there. The pledge masters have some pranks in the works to freak out the pledges but a spirit arrives in a flurry of silly digital smoke and he’s painted up like a skeleton (with a bone costume and everything). But that low-budget bliss is put to the side so all our pledges can ramble on about why their future house is the best and why they’re pledging. They then tell scary stories and sometimes we are treated to more no-quality animation. I’m all for it. While they’re telling their minimally entertaining stories with the talent of a squirrel who just learned English, that skeleton guy is screaming to the heavens and forcing a girl to dig. She frees Baba eventually. Like, after a loooooooong period of time has passed. This is uh, this is something? I hope the girls of Alpha Sigma Sigma make it out of this. The MS Paint circa ‘98 illustrations gracing the run time had me double checking the release date and the performances are exactly what one should find in your backyard horror. This shit is charming to high hell but I have a soft spot for anything that was obviously made with promises and good intentions and I also may have brain damage. But as much as I’ll fall in love with something this bare bones, I cannot deny how boring this shit is. The girls of ASS obviously tell a story about big booties which sadly does not receive any animation and Baba takes fuckin’ forever to get going and get slayin’. Night-for-night shooting brings on squinting and wind-damaged audio allows your ears to join in on the sense-straining fun. Scenes drag on forever and I’m kinda certain the script was a couple scribbled notes on a legal pad that was found under an IKEA futon. The special effects budget couldn’t even buy a value meal at Arby’s but that didn’t stop the dreamers who brought this garbage to life. And don’t you worry your cute little tush, Dr. Bryant returns to needlessly wrap up everything. I’m sorry, I really shouldn’t enjoy this damn thing as much as I do. At least I recognize that fact… right?
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The daughter of a powerful underworld boss is kidnapped by a small group of wannabe criminals and they hold her in an isolated mansion while they wait for a fifty million dollar ransom to be paid. The little ballerina is more than just a dangerous man’s daughter, and the group of ill-prepared kidnappers soon find out that they are trapped with a miniature monster with a rather large appetite. Things get rocky almost immediately with some amateur missteps and the realization of whose daughter they have causes tension in the group. The underworld boss is sort of an urban legend amongst criminals and cops and there’s a trail of massacred corpses in his wake. After one of the group gets his head torn off, the team decide to just cut their losses and get the hell out. That’s when they discover they’re sealed in tight and they’re all fucked. After some mind games with the most sympathetic of the group, Abigail reveals what she is and starts taking down the kidnappers one by one. The cast makes this good time even better, with the wonderful Dan Stevens and Kevin Durand stealing the show. Melissa Barrera is solid as the sympathetic criminal tasked with being the sole criminal communicating with the supposedly innocent child but overshadowed by the supporting players at every turn… which isn’t really her fault because everyone else is just that good. William Catlett puts in a memorable turn as an ex-soldier and the most professional of the batch, Kathryn Newton giving her best performance to date as a bored hacker looking for kicks, Angus McCloud is suitably annoying as the getaway driver with a screw loose and Giancarlo Esposito as the mystery man funding the endeavor makes the most of his small role. The comedy works because it recognizes the ridiculousness of the situation and has a group of actors that can deliver and Alisha Weir is having a complete blast playing the monstrous child who proves increasingly hard to kill. Just a fun fucking movie that even has a decent amount of splatter to offer.
aka Slash
⭐️⭐️
Sorority initiation forces seven girls (and one sorority sister) to stay overnight in a creepy old house which was at one time a brothel. Spooky scares have been set up to freak out the pledges by the frat house boyfriends of the sorority sisters but things go from fun to terrifying when some spectral whores begin to show themselves. Steamy glimpses of the past get some folks horny but the appearance of a lunatic not happy with the trespassers proves to be fatal for some of the gals. Roberta Findlay is responsible for this bad boy so if the plot sounds like there’s enough going down to keep ya thrilled… manage those expectations. That’s not say she never unleashed anything entertaining, quite the opposite, but there’s a knack she has for focusing on tedium when it really shouldn’t be present. We open up things in the past while the brothel is still in operation and the son of one of the ladies of the night is called a pervert by a classmate. He runs to the brothel and takes a shotgun to his mother and her customer. Thirteen years pass and we meet the lovely ladies pledging Kappa Gamma and spend a little time with ‘em as they party. Horny, excited, bored and annoyed; the girls run the gamut of emotions. An extended sex scene drags on for a bit (Findlay strikes again) as the sorority head discusses the plans of setting up scares with her boyfriend. She’s worried about someone getting hurt but whatever-his-name-is assures her all will be fine. The dopes set up the jump scares the next day and at least one of them is convinced the place is actually haunted but the initiation goes on. There’s a scavenger hunt the girls have to take part in and the sorority sister shares the history of the building with them before sending them off to wander around the supposedly haunted dark halls. Two girls find a diary and it shines a light on the awfulness which shut the place down. There’s more boring glimpses into the past and plenty of scenes featuring women walking around in the dark, getting spooked by local church quality haunted house goofs. I was shocked to find that only twenty minutes had passed as I was expecting to be a little more than halfway through. Not a good sign, Roberta. It’s not any better when ya make it to the 45 minute mark as not much has happened unless you’re really into boring sex and minimal spectral shenanigans. About an hour in, someone with a hunting knife finally starts stalking the girls but there will be another lull for “sexy” supernatural flashbacks before anybody dies. I could not tell ya the name of any character in this movie and that’s never a good sign when it’s populated with cuties in mortal danger. No sympathy means no stakes and without those there ain’t too many thrills. The cross-dressing killer could have used more time to shine even if his killing techniques ain’t all that exciting but at least he’s bringing some pulse to things (especially in the truly disturbing murder of the sorority sister). It’s not a complete waste but it comes close. The video box art is the best thing about this one.
