aka The Spider’s Nest/Cursed Labyrinth: Labyrinth in the Dark
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Professor Alan Whitmore is sent to Budapest to locate the reclusive Professor Roth. The young man helped coordinate the secretive Intextus project (research into an ancient and forgotten religion which seemed to be practiced worldwide by all sorts of groups) with Roth as one of many researchers. Unlike the other partners, Roth seemed to be gaining traction but suddenly stopped communicating with the university funding the project. Whitmore finds Roth easily and is slipped a black journal by the paranoid man. He is also given a warning as to how dangerous the research has become. When Roth is found dead, Professor Whitmore must navigate the dangerous terrain of a world full of eldritch horrors and madness. It will be no easy journey as he has to deal with suspicious locals, a sinister sect with a world domination endgame in the works, a murderous witch and an arachnid terror that predates most religions. Sure, there are a few issues with the film (some weak effects and a somewhat lame protagonist) but it is still an intriguing Italian horror flick from the waning days of the genre and a successful realization of a Lovecraftian nightmare.
aka The Woods
⭐️⭐️⭐️
When a standard shaky-cam video is uploaded onto the old interwebs, James believes it contains footage of his long missing sister Heather (she that journeyed where one should not in the original The Blair Witch Project). James, his filmmaker friend Lisa (she’s filming a documentary for her class and decides their journey will be perfect) his buddy Peter and Peter’s girlfriend Ashley head out to that familiar patch of forest in Burkittsville, Maryland to look for his sis. They meet up with the odd duo who uploaded the video and they promise to show them where they found it only if they’re allowed to tag along. Reluctantly agreeing, the six of ‘em head out into Black Hills Forest and the shit is set up to hit the fan. Familiar ground is tread but there’s a larger budget so we actually get to see some awfulness. Quick flashes of a horrifically deformed woman (said to be Heather and not the Blair Witch), supernaturally weaponized trees, and queasy injuries slap ya in the face. There’s an amazingly atmospheric underground tunnel system our heroine is forced to crawl through and a neat idea of time getting warped. Even though it was ruined in the trailer, the doll snap scene is still effective. This should have been a failure but was luckily entrusted to Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett (You’re Next, The Guest) who are more than capable of pulling off a successful found footage nightmare.
⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
I believed that Cold Moon was in trouble right off the bat. As much as I would like to separate myself from whatever came before (be it prior installments in a series, the original version of a remake or the book a film is based on), I'm still only human and can't help but look at the starting point. Cold Moon is based on the book Cold Moon Over Babylon by one of the most overlooked authors in horror fiction. Michael McDowell only had a handful of novels to his name. Most were pretty damn good (Gilded Needles, The Blackwater Saga) but two were bonafide masterpieces (The Elementals and one of my top three favorite novels ever written Cold Moon Over Babylon). McDowell eventually focused his talents on screenplays and is behind the first drafts of Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas. He would pass away in 1999 from an AIDS related illness and leave behind a hell of a legacy for adventurous horror fans. With all this mind, I was a bit hesitant to watch Cold Moon. Does it live up to my expectations? Hell no! Nothing could, but it's still a decent flick with a few saving graces and being a fan of the book also allowed me to fill in some missing pieces. A big old spoonful of tragedy is coming the way of the Larkin family. Foreclosure looms on their blueberry farm and it doesn't look like this season is going to provide a fruitful yield. Monetary worries aside, something far worse has happened. Sixteen-year-old Margaret Larkin has disappeared. She rode into town on her bicycle to assist one of her teachers and never returned. Grandma Evelyn is losing her mind due to worry and her brother Jerry is trying to remain calm as the hours tick by. It seems the worry was well-placed as a few days later her body is found in the nearby Styx River. She was tied to her bicycle and drowned and after an examination by the coroner, it's discovered she was four months pregnant. With the heavy shit storm hitting the Larkin family, Evelyn has a vision and becomes convinced she knows who was responsible for the death of her granddaughter. She begins pointing the finger at Nathan Redfield. Nathan is part of the richest family in the small town of Babylon, Florida and is running the town bank. He's good friends with the town sheriff and is a bit of a public figure. He also sees nothing but dollar signs when he looks at the Larkin property and is eager to seize control of the land thanks to unpaid loans. But is he a murderer? I'll leave that for you to figure out, just know Nathan is played by Josh Stewart (The Collector and its sequel The Collection) who is at his slimy southern best, so even if he didn't kill anybody, you're going to be rooting for his downfall. The murder mystery isn't all that is going on either. A horrible apparition has emerged from the muddy and rattlesnake-filled Styx and is slowly haunting its killer. The timid town sheriff is attempting to figure out what the hell is going on and the surviving Larkins seem to be getting closer to the facts. By the time the dust settles, there will be more than just one waterlogged corpse. As I said earlier, it's a bit easy for me to fill in some of the missing pieces of the plot. Now if I hadn't read the book, the movie would seem a bit rushed. It skips over a few things and leaves some other plot points severely underdeveloped. Some of the acting is weak and there are a few moments of lackluster effects work but the darkness of the film does well to hide it. On the plus side, the acting from Josh Stewart is excellent and Christopher Lloyd shows up as his cantankerous father who doesn't really care for him. There are also a few beautifully realized spooky images pertaining to the movement of the vengeance-seeking spirit. There's also a lovely little nod to Beetlejuice which brought a smile to my face. All in all, I enjoyed Cold Moon but would recommend reading the novel over the flick. The novel is a must, you could probably skip the film.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Spoilers will be coming fast and strong, so if you want to go in as blindly as I did just stop reading and see the damn the movie. If you're a fan of found footage (I am) I will assure you that this flick kicks major ass and is one of the best found footage flicks I've ever seen (and I've seen a shit-ton). If you can't get past the shaky cam and usual FF hijinks ya may just want to avoid this little gem. In January of 1976 two journalists head to the French/Swiss border in hopes of striking it famous (at least French television famous) by covering a sensational story happening in the mountains. Livestock has gone missing, a strange biological agent has been found present in the soil and an unexplainable temperature drop has a team of biologists scratching their heads. There has also been a horse found mutilated in the middle of the woods with its internal and sexual organs missing. They arrive in a nearby town and are greeted by a professor who is part of the research project tracking the anomalies up in the mountains. Sadly, he has lost radio contact with the researchers up at the mountain base and they have yet to make their scheduled return. A small team will be leaving tomorrow to check on the missing group consisting of their French guide, an English animal biologist and an investigator from Colorado who had been looking into similar animal mutilations in the United States. The journalists decide to tag along and document the journey. The elements do what they do but the small crew manage to get by thanks to their guide's expertise and all of them generally getting along. Things begin to unsettle when they hear strange shrieks in the night and find butchered animal carcasses near wherever they set up camp. When mutilated human remains pop up, they realize that they need to get their asses to the mountain campsite before night falls again. An avalanche takes out their guide and injures our camera operator and when they get to the camp they find it completely destroyed. They stumble across the skinned body of one of the researchers and immediately discover what has been causing havoc in the Swiss Alps. Up until this point they have been guiding the viewer down the path of surgery-happy aliens being the culprit with all their animal mutilation talk and bent tree discoveries but it's not aliens at all. It's a pack of fucking werewolf-like creatures! Fucking werewolves!!!! It's a hell of a slight of hand and put a huge smile on my face. Now I don't know if they are exactly werewolves as there's no transformation sequence and they may just be man-like wolf creatures but I'm sure as hell not complaining. After they strike it eventually gets down to the two journalists trying to get out of the woods in one piece but it looks less and less likely there will be any survivors. There's still a discovery to be made in an underground cave which sets up a sequel/prequel that I eagerly await. Filmed on location in the Swiss Alps, you can feel the cold in your bones. The small cast is likable and not one of them gets on the nerves and there are bursts of surprising violence (a foot amputation had me squirming). The usual excuses are made for the continued filming (this time around, it’s thanks to a jammed lamp which only works when the camera is on) and there's some fine shaking going on. I believe the monsters are of the man-in-the-suite variety and any cgi is perfectly hidden by the quality of film. I loved this movie and can't recommend it enough.
aka The Roger Project
⭐️⭐️
Opening search and rescue footage comes to a close when a man pops up missing his eyes and eventually slicing his own throat. A hairy young man talks to the camera, expressing his frustration over the local police department declaring his missing sister a cold case. His starting point is where the search ended and the disturbing footage went down. Off into the woods Roger marches to get some answers about his missing sibling Kaylee. He films the whole thing, talking to us about how much bullshit is going down. The dude wants answers and he wants us to have those answers along with him. His main suspect is Kaylee’s boyfriend who has also vanished but he never trusted the guy. Roger is super serious and a little too intense for his own good but he’s got a solid look… like a cryptid hunter who was once called “really cool” on My Space and just let that sort of shape his personality for the rest of his life. Into the dark woods Roger goes, well off the main trail and right into danger. He comes across a camping father and son. The son tries freaking him out by wandering around in a clown mask and the father warns him about how weird and dangerous the area is. Yeah, I wouldn’t accept the invite to camp down with them for the night either. Roger knows his sister was an experienced outdoorsman and he just can’t wrap his head around how she could have made a mistake out there in the forest. He talks more and more and pieces us is on different tidbits of information which I’m guessing will be important. Some goth kids came out to the area to summon a witch and went missing. Does that have anything to do with anything? Roger thinks it might. That night after settling down he hears what sounds like a baby crying, investigates a little, talks about hating these woods and then calls it a day and wakes up disheveled in the middle of nowhere. He’s not sure how he got there or where his things are. His hat is also missing which is of upmost concern to him. He has a hard time navigating back because his compass is going all wonky and not giving him any sense of direction. He watches the footage he shot before he woke up and it’s him wandering. He finds an abandoned camp site which looks like it belonged to those goth kids he talked about earlier. The last thing on the camera is his sister’s boyfriend coming up behind him. Now he’s sure the dude is guilty and he’s gonna find him. Oh yeah, he finds his hat too. So, small victories. He ends up back at the goth camp and finds a camera which allows him to watch the footage the goobers shot of their summoning ritual. It involves a Ouija board, candles and a gas mask. It ends in possession, a spooky witch appearing and death. Typical. Roger dismisses it as film school bullshit but he still decides to boot the fuck out of the woods after his viewing of it. In his exit, he comes across Kaylee’s tent and supplies and it all shockingly looks like it was recently used. He finds out the third member of their hiking/camping trip (that guy who slit his own throat in the opening) filmed the whole expedition… so we get to watch that. He watches as the woods go all Blair Witch with time, terrain and logic going all wonky. Kaylee’s boyfriend panics and becomes an insufferable asshole and that bug-eyed witch pops up again. Roger wakes up covered in blood that isn’t his own and confusion precedes murder which is followed by guilt. Our hero talks a lot and smokes cigarettes like he’s three bourbons deep. It kind of endeared him to me because he just reminded me of multiple dudes I grew up with. Granted, I don’t miss them being in my life but we all grow up and apart eventually. Ya know… “Endeared” is way too strong a word. Let’s say I wasn’t as annoyed by him as much as I should have been. I mean, he kinda grunt-talks like Vin Diesel and his dramatic battle cry involved quoting The Devil Went Down to Georgia so I’m not going to say “endeared”. If the witch is not rocking a rubber mask then somebody managed to master makeup work that comes pretty damn close to the Spirit Halloween discount rack. There’s also zombies so… what? To quote the shockingly not late and not that great Roger; “Fuck these woods.”
aka The Nesting 2 - Amityville Asylum
⭐️⭐️1/2
Thrilled to land a job, Lisa Templeton is at first happy to be hired on as a janitor at a mental institution in Amityville, Long Island. Nailing the job even after sneezing directly on the institution head during her interview. Unfortunately for the sneezy young woman, that town ain’t been right since Ronnie DeFeo murdered his family due to demonic voices whispering in his ear and as nice as recently opened High Hopes Hospital may seem, that satanic stain ain’t coming out with some elbow grease and good intentions. The amount of folks with European accents in Long Island that aren’t Italian is quite impressive. The chemical and janitorial tutorial is interesting if you’ve ever wondered about the custodial field. I’ve known a few janitors in my life and all of them were pretty good drinking buddies. Lisa is shocked to find out they have a secret lower level where the criminally insane are kept and the Irish/Russian/Serbian janitor gives her a breakdown on some of the dangerous folks locked behind the doors. Cannibal, witches and murderers… the usual. Most importantly is a John Doe who was found six months ago wandering the grounds and was thrown in seclusion after he attacked a doctor. During some late night cleaning, Lisa comes across a little girl who wants to play with her and the head janitor lets her know that there’s no children in the building. They tell the orderly and his surly ass thinks she’s mistaken. He’s also pretty annoyed. There’s another orderly who is a scummy asshole and looks like Dave Grohl if Dave Grohl was addicted to meth and rape. A non-verbal and supposedly dead patient warns her that she’s going to die and she’s unable to get any proof that weird shit is going down. Disturbing nightmares and the talkative creeps in Ward X begin to weigh on our hero. Is Lisa cracking? Is evil at work? Is the building really built on the land where the infamous Amityville house once stood? Will there be philosophizing between janitors? Is everyone’s accent going to eventually slip? Will a bunch of important exposition and plot points be delivered via internet search? The answer is mostly “yes”. You don’t have to be American to jump on the Amityville bandwagon and here we have the Brits giving it a go. I personally think the abuse of the town name is wonderful, even if the majority of films utilizing an inability to copyright a location are pure garbage. But hey, it’s moved on from demon-pigs and haunted objects to vampires, werewolves, scarecrows and vibrators… that makes it all even out in my stupid head. Hell, according to the German alternate title this one not only attempted to play the Amityville card but tried to come off as a sequel to the 1981 snoozer The Nesting. Good for you, microbudget horror film. There’s very little money available for bells and whistles (melodrama and graphic violence feel a bit unnecessary when they pop up) but Sophia Del Pizzo is incredibly likable in the lead role and everybody else is giving their all and at least coming off as distinct characters. Assuredly not for everyone (or much of anyone) but as far as quiet no-budget horror goes, I was a fan.
⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
A young woman feels the need to confront her past by returning to the island she escaped after her parents were murdered in a voodoo sacrifice. She was raised in the way of the natives and has a strong connection to their customs and dark rituals. She was “rescued” by her uncle and sent to the Americas to join high society but a piece of her has never left the strangeness of the island. She brings her daughter, her daughter’s nanny and her husband’s gorgeous secretary (Fay Wray) along with her. The murder of the plantation supervisor just before he can share some info with the husband causes some anxiety. Her uncle is unhappy about her presence and fears the natives have some sinister plans for his niece. She tells him they’ll leave on the next boat out but she lies much to the anger of her uncle. Fay Wray sends her employer Mr. Lane a message that he needs to come to the island… his wife ain’t happy about it. The nanny meets her end by being tossed into a lava pit and uncle finally shares his concerns with Mr. Lane. Looks like the natives see Mrs. Lane as some sort of goddess and she’s so mentally broken that she believes it herself. This places her family in grave danger as the natives grow restless and the intruders run out of time. Shockingly thrilling and atmospheric pre-code horror doesn’t really putz around all that much and has some stunning visuals bringing about fond recollections of Val Lewton. The racism is there, so you pretty much have to treat it like that out-of-touch elderly relative that’s mumbling to themselves at every family party. So you may be able to tell yourself it’s a victim to its own time but you’ll still be squirming.
