aka The Wound Wood
⭐️⭐️
An arborist and her son journey to the remote estate of a reclusive weirdo to fell some trees. Ellie is currently shaken over the loss of her baby daughter a year prior. The kind of shaky that has her throwing booze in her water bottle in a poor attempt to hide her shame from her son. Her son Wyatt seems a bit troubled thanks to hallucinations of some sort of creature, which he was having before the baby girl’s death but grief helps nothing heal if it’s just festering. This grief could explain his erratic behavior (again, he was seeing something before the death) and him being a prick (but he is a teenage boy and they’re moody pricks anyways) but the property owner would not be out of place wearing a flashing neon sign that reads “ULTERIOR MOTIVES” when it comes to the task he has put in front of the mother and son team. I’d be suspicious clearing out the sinisterly named Wound Woods. Said task causes something supernatural to stir and a very old tragedy to be unearthed that links everyone together. Ellie begins to question just why someone in her profession was necessary to tear down some perfectly healthy trees and it’s further unsettling because the spot was once an open-air children’s theater. Fuck that noise. Wyatt is dead set on his belief that something supernatural murdered his sister while Ellie is growing more frustrated with his inability to accept the reality, no matter how sudden an unfair, of his sister’s death. She’s not really one to talk when it comes to grief management as noted earlier, most doctor’s since the seventies have not prescribed alcoholism to deal with a case of the glums. Needless to say, there’s plenty of brooding from everyone as the paranormal aspect plays around the periphery and may all be in Wyatt’s troubled noggin. Wyatt runs off and Ellie finally gets some answers. The cast is fine and the setting works for whatever spookiness they’re going for but the burn is very slow and not really worth the payoff. It’s a bit more on the unintentionally silly part than scary ghost chills is aiming for. We’ve also seen similar material handled better elsewhere. The two-person crew here is just like the abatement crew from Session 9 in that they really take their sweet-ass time and are easily distracted for someone with a looming deadline dangling above their heads. No great shakes but at least it tried… and then kept trying… and then got sillier… and then just wouldn’t end.
aka Stone Boy
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I’m not sure how many toys you had growing up but I was fortunate enough to have an older brother I wasn’t too far behind in age. We were also into a lot of the same shit which meant I got just as much joy out of the army men, dinosaurs and He-man toys my brother relished. He’d get into sports, I’d fall deep in love with monsters and those toys were key pieces in various adventures concocted in my monster kid skull. Godzilla would take on Spider-Man, Skeletor rode Gamera into battle and the Real Ghostbusters would find themselves in mortal combat with the giant ants from Them! (which haunted my nightmares for longer than I’d care to admit). Linear storylines and plot development meant exactly nothing, I just wanted the things I loved to exist together in the same world. I have a feeling the angels behind The Boy God were in the same headspace. They’re my kindred spirits and they made one hell of a psychotic cocktail of comic book fun, a dash of Filipino folklore, an odd mix of Roman and Greek mythology and some monster movie hijinks. It shouldn’t work and by normal cinematic standards it does not... thank the old Gods we aren’t about that here. An immortal materializes on the front porch of a human he has the hots for and because gods are often selfish pieces of crap, he has his way with the poor woman while invisible. Don’t worry, the mortal and the immortal will both pay for his crime later thanks to the others of his kind frowning upon relations with lowly humans. Nine months fly by and out pops Rocco. He’s delivered by his no-nonsense grandma and right after he is brought into the world (unbreakable umbilical cord and all), trouble arrives for his mother and her husband. Enraged with jealousy and also just being a complete dickhole, the dastardly Robbie shows up and guns down Rocco’s poor parents. Grandma flees into the cover of night with the baby and manages to escape. They return to the town several years later, Rocco is now a pudgy young boy who shares an odd resemblance to Winnie Cooper. Rocco also has superpowers. Thanks to his rapist father, he is somewhat indestructible. His granny explains to him that he is like a limestone. He gets hard when he gets heated (what?) but when he gets soaked he begins to dissolve (what?). So, much like Bruce Willis, his one weakness is water. As the film progresses you’ll come to realize that Rocco must have some sort of death wish ingrained in him with how much he finds himself submerged in that good old agua. Anyways, it would seem Rocco has returned at the right moment because the small village could desperately use the help of a hero... no matter how pudgy and inexperienced he is. Three witches who turn into werewolves are up to no good and are creating some vampires of the bat/human hybrid variety. Adding to the issues, that bastard Robbie is still being a dick under the employ of a mad scientist we will later find out is the nefarious Dr. Mengele and I believe he is supposed to be THAT Dr. Mengele (portrayed by a chunky Filipino man in a neckerchief) who has plans to create a master race. There’s an army doctor in the village looking into the poisoned water in the area which the mad scientist is behind. This research will put the army doctor on the same heroic path as Rocco... at least to a point. About half way through the film, the witches and vampires are taken care of and Rocco’s story takes a more mythical turn. After falling into a large body of water when he loses his grip on the feet of a flying bat-human (yes, you read that correctly), Rocco wakes up in a cave in the company of an elderly blind man. Turns out he is also an immortal and luckily for Rocco he doesn’t have the same thing on his mind his father had. He lets Rocco know that there is a chance he can free his parents from their purgatory-like punishment and become the true hero he is destined to be. He must travel to the land of immortals and pass a few trials, Rocco agrees without even thinking it over. Decked out in some tiny armor, he teams up with a tribe of dwarves to take down a cyclops (it involves Rocco becoming a human projectile), teaming up with a super hot warrior woman to take out some evil twins who can attach to each other and have faces on the back of their heads and death himself who has the ability to shoot lasers out of his eyes. By this point, you may be ready to put down your tea and inspect it for LSD. Fear not, your significant other has not drugged you, this is all happening. Rocco eventually makes it back to the land of mortals and takes care of those evil bastards Mengele and Robbie. After accomplishing these final goals on earth, his parents are free and he has a happy reunion with his mother and her rapist. Yay? I know it may sound like the end stages of syphilis have finally eaten away at my brain but I guarantee you all that this crazy shit went down. I didn’t even mention the fully naked Rocco (vegetation carefully covering his ding dong) being brushed with water by one of the witches in preparation to be barbecued or the mad doctor’s prize creation, a box he imprisons people in which zaps them with lightning and turns them into smoldering ash. I probably didn’t need to. It’s all done on the cheap but any lack of budget is more than made up for by an over abundance of enthusiasm. This is the kind of lunacy I could watch till the world explodes... hopefully Rocco won’t let that happen.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Lo-fi tackling of a mummy’s curse comes off like an ode to Skinamarink but way more focused and intriguing than that plodding piece of wasted time. A bad ass opening features a deep, malicious narration sharing the history of an Egyptian evil over the image of the kind of mummy you’d see gracing the cover of a Goosebumps book. So… it fucking rocks. Henry is an asshole. He’s pretty much tanked his conservative podcast he has with his girlfriend Brittany by cheating on her with a wealthy journalist named Dorothy. But they’re on the outs too because, as I said, Henry is an asshole. Dorothy left a priceless necklace at Henry’s home which he returns to her in the mail along with a strongly worded letter admonishing her. He’s that kind of guy. Henry’s home is broken into by someone covered in dirty rags and this has him releasing a recording of audio his microphone managed catch. After claiming he would have done something if he hadn’t been suffering sleep paralysis, he discovers (thanks to a comment on his posting) that the voice is Arabic and it’s saying something about a necklace. He thinks Dorothy was behind it, and after making a threatening phone call, he gets sick and has to back out of the podcast recording. Brittany is annoyed with him but says she’ll do it. Henry goes from feverish to deathly ill, throwing up blood and fucking up his eyeball. The necklace ties deep into Egyptian history, dangerous gods, a serial killer and a curse that looks be set in motion for our vile “protagonist”. The issue with anything that holds Skinamarink as an inspiration is that it’s going to remind me of Skinamarink, which I consider one the most overrated films to ever hit the horror scene. And even at just a minute over an hour, there’s drag. But whereas Skinamarink felt like nothing but drag around ten minutes of semi-solid terror, Adipocere at least holds more interest by giving me a glimpse at a deteriorating character who has fallen into a completely horrifying situation well outside any realm of expected karma. It’s a matter of having someone to invest in as opposed to two whispering nothings that leave no impact. It’s a flawed film, but it’s way better than its micro-budget should have allowed for. Especially considering the subject matter it decided to tackle.
aka Operation Pink Squad II
⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
A sting operation set up in a haunted apartment complex gets real goofy real fast when when a pissed-off female ghost manages to escape an exorcism. Four women posing as money forgers look to bust a crime boss but their top cop’s wiener husband gets it in his head that his wife is having an affair with the police chief and he decides to crash what he believes to be a cuckolding session. After some merry mixup hijinks ensue, our heroes begin fleeing for their lives from the specter. They manage to chop off her head but that just serves to get them pursued by a decapitated corpse and a flying noggin. Our spirit’s main goal is to open the doorway to hell that all her exorcised buddies were placed behind but the cops keep mucking things up and the exorcist returns to the building to get that final ghost out of there. Scatterbrained fun doesn’t have a serious bone in its body so be prepared for idiocy and the usual Hong Kong perversion (in this case it’s way more tame than most) along with some wacky-ass action.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
I’m sure there’s other things happening but I find it hard to focus on anything else but the creepy-ass Ginny Weasley and the chemistry void that is her growing relationship with our hero Harry. Enough bourbon and I can finally look beyond it. The amazing plot contrivance that is a horcrux gives our heroes objects to seek out and destroy, so they can finally put an end to ol’ Morty Vold and his stupid snake face. Of course, there’s still two more outings in this franchise so them horcruxes are gonna take a little bit of effort to uncover. The main chunk of the film deals with a dastardly plot that’s been placed in the reluctant hands of Draco Malfoy and a promise made by Snape to guarantee its success. New potions teacher Horace Slughorn (fuck me, Jim Broadbent is a national treasure no matter what nation he calls home) makes a habit of “collecting” famous and powerful students (not like as a villain, just as like an old British dude who enjoys name dropping) so of course he’s eager to get Potter on his good side, which is exactly what Dumbledore wants because Slughorn has a secret that will give them a leg up in the oncoming war. Weiner king Ron Weasley gets a girlfriend, Hermione Granger gets upset and Harry Potter gets placed in excessively horrifying situations. Rickman gives a brilliant performance as his predicament begins to force his hand and a major turning of the tide knocks the wind out of ya.
aka Cypress Creek/A Haunting at Cypress Creek
⭐️
A weekend getaway for four irritating chickadees takes a southbound turn when they feel a little adventurous and break into an abandoned cabin. A creepy doll watches them and they come across a tape recorder which goes into detail about the various evils calling the cabin home. At first, they dismiss it as bullshit but it doesn’t take long for the malicious presence to show itself. Have you seen any of the Evil Dead films? Well, it’s that but with a cast made up of charmless assholes and a seeming disdain for excitement. There’s jittery ghosts, awkward performances, bloody footprints, wretched audio, possession, a chubby demon, some memorable bits of violence, multiple monsters, blood drenched babes, an incredibly stupid scene involving a ghost girl that looks like a music video by an Evanescence knockoff band who has seen The Ring way too many times, the last act appearance of some dude who looks like he should be playing in a rockabilly band and some weak-ass demon POV that just makes you miss Sam Raimi. Extended scenes of pure pointlessness are accompanied by an endless butt-metal guitar riff and sometimes play out in slow motion for some reason. The opening is just a long stretch of nothing, scored by the soundtrack of bitchy girls picking on each other or complaining. Luckily (if that’s the word to use), I watched the “sequel” to this first and since that is one complete shit stain of a film, I could at least say that the original was way better than the movie that followed. That’s faint praise. Getting an impromptu prostate exam from your best friend Lindo’s pet lobster is more enjoyable than Lake Fear 2: The Swamp… which takes place about 1300 miles away from the cabin in this one. I also don’t think there was a lake in this movie and that may be the only connection this has to its sequel. I would recommend it over the second one but I still wouldn’t recommend it… I hope that makes sense.
⭐️1/2
Three filmmakers looking for a story and filming their exploits run afoul a Minnesota legend and get the usual found footage comeuppance. The opening text warns that this is footage from a recently discovered vhs master presented in its original form but then right after they throw the standard poorly-acted Blair Witch apology in your face, opening credits completely negate any suspension of disbelief. Great job. Gateway Township has a history of ghost sightings, missing hitchhikers and strange noises and it all comes back to the notorious Satan worshipper Jasper Hagan and I guess it’s intriguing enough to get the small crew out there following an email from a local. Of course, old creepy Jasper had some property in the woods and of course our gaggle of dimwits will be heading out to the isolated forest. There’s more camera shots that defy the reality they’re going for and you can’t technically call anyone actors because I’m sure that would be considered libel. Brenda, a motor-mouthed Minnesotan gal, takes them on a tour of the woods but doesn’t want to stay there too long. Inverted crosses get the director/host/producer (probably) Chuck really excited and he refuses to listen to reason because he smells himself a ticket to big bucks city. He and his cameraman head to some abandoned cabins where bad shit went down and the girls are left behind in the car to ramble on about shit and get spooked. There’s an out-of-focus POV shot to represent the evil force, a satanic journal that was probably crafted during a study period and a distorted noise to go along with the POV. Things pick up when it drops the broke-ass Blair Witch angle and hits us with a broke-ass Evil Dead one. Is it good? No. No, no, no, no. Is it entertaining? Also, no but it did happen and I can’t deny that.
