Horror Marathon Recap 1 - The Worst Horror Movies Of The Marathon

[philosoraptor42]

So, the horror marathon is finally over, so that's thirty-one horror movie reviews to cross-post. To make this a little more interesting, I've decided to repost the movies in order of enjoyment, counting down to the top spot and starting with the worst movie of the entire marathon at number 31.

The worst film of the bunch was "Critters 3". Normally I'm a fan of horror comedies, but I'm also a fan of decent characterisation and dramatic tension. The gags in Critters 3 were dire, the characters were cheesy and unengaging and the movie seems to think that the Critters are at their most menacing when they are being messy eaters while clearing out the leftovers in an abandoned kitchen.

31. Critters 3 (1991)


Unless you count a random appearance from Charlie, who just comes off like a crazy person in order to fill in any remaining newcomers on what Critters are, there are none of the bounty hunters in this movie....

Instead we have a whole new set of really boring characters, we have the lamest attempts at comedy ever, we have a scene where we seem to be expected to be shocked by Critters eating ordinary food messily in a kitchen rather than posing a real threat, and we have some pretty crummy effects work. Basically this is a massive fall from grace after the goodwill I felt after Critters 2. I'd much rather they'd based the film around Charlie. This film is absolutely dire and, to be quite frank, there are no good things.

U+ (In exams a "U" grade pretty much means "you managed to spell your name correctly". In my movie ratings it means "I can barely call this a movie".)


30. The Last House On The Left (1972)


Slogans for this movie included:
- "It rests on 13 acres of earth over the very centre of hell!"
This first slogan is completely misleading. There's nothing supernatural in this film whatsoever for a start.

- "To avoid fainting keep repeating "it's only a movie ...only a movie ...only a movie ... only a movie ...only a movie."
While a lot of the violence is hard to handle, this isn't a film like "The Exorcist" where a clear atmosphere builds over the course of the runtime. Naturally the slogan is over-egging things, but even the suggestion that there is going to be that horror build-up typical of even the lowest budget horror flicks is misleading.

- "The original nightmare from the director of Scream"
This was a more reliable slogan. "Scream" was a movie which, like it or hate it, never took itself entirely seriously. The same is true here. I guess you could call "Last House On The Left" a nightmare based on its depiction of horrible violence and mistreatment of the two central girls.

I'm not sure I can do a sweet and sour section for this review because, to be quite frank, anything 'sweet' about this movie is generally tainted by all the 'sour'. I suppose I could have a sweet section which just mentions the presence of a chainsaw. The chainsaw was kind of cool I guess. Okay, so here's the problem here. This is a movie filled with jokes and absolutely lacking any kind of atmosphere. The fugitives who make up the central bad guys are often shown as bumbling idiots, so even the bad guys are meant to be a source of amusement.

There's also a running gag of the police failing to show up to stop the bad guys. This begins with the police rushing out to stop the fugitives, getting part way down the road before the car splutters to a stop. "The car stopped working" says one policeman. "You didn't fill up the gas!" responds the other. "Gas?" says the first policeman in a (supposedly) comically dumb voice. Having the policemen portrayed this way is kind of painful and in fact the movie is littered with gags like this. Right near the beginning we hear one of the two girls who make up the central protagonists talking to the other girl's parents. She is asked what her parents do for a living. She answers "oh they're in the iron and steel business." "Both iron AND steel? That's unusual." reply the parents. "Well they work as a partnership, my mum irons and my dad steals!" Boom! Boom! (That's your cue to groan btw.)

In the end without a horror atmosphere this is more of a crime thriller than a horror movie. However, I'd argue that with the amount of lame jokes littering this film, it is mainly just the most tasteless comedy I have ever seen. Even the horrific climax in this movie just feels like a joke - and that's not a matter of me being jaded and desensitised. Far from it. I was every bit as horrified as you'd expect by the violence in this film. It's just that I never got the impression that the filmmakers truly recognised the horror of what they were portraying. Not only does the film fail to build up an atmosphere, but the comical tone of the film fails to take violent content seriously.

Before I finish I should probably give a quick plot synopsis. It's pretty basic though. Two girls decide to go to what one of the girls' parents considers the "bad part of town". However, before they even reach the gig they'd been planning on seeing, they find themselves being held captive by a bunch of fugitives who'd been featuring prominently in recent news reports. The fugitives decide to kidnap the two girls, taking them along with them as they ride out to escape the authorities. However, the fugitives' car breaks down in what seems like the middle of nowhere, but is actually right where that one girl's disapproving parents lives. What happens to the girls? What happens to the convicts? What happens when the girl's parents get involved? Do the police ever show up? All of these questions are probably answered in more typical synopses, but what I've written is pretty much the first half of the movie so I'm revealing no more (just in case people want to actually watch this garbage).

If anyone actually watched the original "Last House On The Left" and enjoyed it, please let me know. Personally though I found it just felt like the worst of both worlds, seeming unnecessarily sick in its combination of horrific violence with cheap laughs on the one hand, and seemingly entirely lacking in atmosphere on the other. I have no idea why anyone would refer to this film as either a "classic" or as "important to the horror genre", though I am happy to be enlightened on this topic.

(Please note that though I haven't felt the need to mention it explicitly, this film DOES include sexual assault. I suspect most people knew this already, but I'm placing this warning here just in case.)

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29. White Noise (2005)


Plot Synopsis: A recent widower (played by Michael Keaton) is confronted with the concept of EVP. Basically it's the idea that the dead can be contacted through the white noise that comes through tv and radio. Occasionally voices and images come through (presumably not from actual tv and radio stations) that exactly resemble the recently deceased. But not all of those who have pased on are 'nice'.
The Sweet: Um... I guess it's nice to see Michael Keaton in something? I wish it were something good though...
The Sour: So the ghosts can only contact the living through messages in white noise, yeah? Then how come they can also (relatively early on) knock large tvs onto people? And if they can do that whenever they want, why wait? And what's the point?

Some atmosphere would be nice. Also we could do with less wholly predictable and irritating jump-scares. And a plot that was remotely convincing. Basically I'd have been better off watching a different movie. This was rubbish.

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28. Insidious (2010)

It turns out that the director of "Saw" was not involved in any of the sequels. I found the first "Saw" movie relatively enjoyable, in spite of being basically a knock-off of "Se7en", because it had a cheesy fun feel to it. It turns out that James Wan has since released a number of varying horror titles (such as "Dead Silence" and "Death Sentence"), but "Insidious" was clearly the one that made the most impact. Responses had been somewhat mixed and I was keen to see what the fuss was about. As part of my attempt to educate myself about ghost movies, these seemed like an important title to consider.
Plot Synopsis: A family are moving into a new house, but some of the children aren't happy with their new rooms. There's something creepy about this place. Shortly after banging his head when falling off a ladder in the attic, one of the young boys inexplicably enters a coma, apparently unrelated to any kind of head injury. Scary phenomena in the house escalates and the mother of the family insists that they need to move out of there. Unfortunately when they move house, the phenomena appears to have followed them there and so they decide to bring in external help to solve the problem.
The Sweet: Y'know, seeing as there was so much wrong with this film, it'll probably be easier to list the things I liked about the film than to reel off the endless things I didn't like. Here's the list:
1) The monster crawling across the wall was a nice effect.
2) The geeky paranormal investigators were quite fun.
3) Doing a seance while wearing a gas mask had an eerie effect which I haven't seen before.
4) The sharpening claws bit was a nice homage to Freddy from A Nightmare On Elm Street.
The Sour: While there were lots of creepy elements, none of them seemed to be used enough to properly build up an atmosphere. I've hears some people say they didn't like the ending, but it didn't seem any dafter to me than the rest of the film. This film uses non-stop lazy jump scares rather than bothering to build up fear through the actual content of the movie. For example there is one scene where three people are sitting around a table talking when suddenly the camera looks at one of them there's a loud musical note and: ZOMG THERE'S A DEMON BEHIND YOU! RIGHT THERE! SCREAM SCREAM SCREAM! Not only did this have practically no build-up, relying entirely on the jump-scare from the musical note, but putting your main bad guy on the screen like that in broad daylight is pretty much breaking the number one rule when it comes to building up tension around a central monster. Once you show the monster, that lessens how much the tension can build. That was absolutely the case here.

Insidious is lazy and boring. I can't believe this couldn't manage to even be more impressive than shoestring budget video nasties. Pathetic.

E-

27. Nightmares In A Damaged Brain (1981)


Plot synopsis: Um... a guy with mental issues is being treated in a psychiatric institution. He has nightmares about murder and is taking pills to treat the condition. However, when he goes missing it turns out that he's not cured yet. This is another video nasty.
The Sweet: Well initially I thought this was going to be quite an interesting film. We first see the mental health patient wake up from abstract dream imagery to see a dismembered body in a pool of blood at the end of his bed with the eyes staring at him. He then wakes up again, once again screaming in terror, this time wearing a straight jacket. This opener was then followed by a seemingly unrelated scene in a house with a babysitter who gets scared out of her wits by a grinning prankster child. The way this scene unfolds felt somewhat unreal and it ends with the same mental patient waking up screaming, so I presumed this was going to be like an anthology movie with all the stories turning out to be nightmares of this one guy. However, unfortunately that was not to be...
The Sour: The acting is awful, particularly the child acting (of which there is a fair bit). The guy goes around acting weird and, on occasion, killing people. It's very hard to get involved in the story since it unfolds in such a disjointed fashion and there's little emotional payoff. The backing music admittedly helps to further the tension of the movie, but most of the content of the film is so banal that it's all for nothing in the end. I was ridiculously bored by this horrible film.

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26. Psalm 21 (2009)


A friend lent me this and the box made it look utterly ridiculous with a quote on the back seemingly providing damning praise saying: "if you liked Priest and The Rite, you'll love Psalm 21!" Then I heard that the reason my friend hadn't watched it was because the film was in Swedish and they hadn't been in the mood for subtitles at the time. So I decided to give it a go.

The sweet: I thought I was onto a winner to begin with. Our protagonist is a priest who is quite jovial and preaches to his congregation that there is no hell. However, back home it turns out that he is divorced and his son is no longer interested in him, seemingly having completely transferred his attention to his ex-wife's new boyfriend. What's more, as his ex-wife and her boyfriend come to collect the boy and he watches his son run excitedly out with the boyfriend, the phone rings. It's a call from the coroner to say that his father is dead. Seriously, things are not going great for this priest, but he feels like a very real character at this point. He decides to drive straight out to see the coroner, distraught at the news of his father's death. His father was a priest too, it seems. On the way there his car breaks down and he has to walk seven miles to reach the destination. When he arrives he's met by a very shifty family and it's from that point that the film seems to lose all semblance of a plot.

There's a big speech at the end which sort of says a few things I agree with, but it just comes out of nowhere. I'll come to that in a bit.
The sour: The bizarre family contains one member who was clearly a big fan of the protagonist's father but did not successfully complete his ordination into the priesthood. He decides to argue with our protagonist that hell is real. He also tells him that the father-figure in this bizarre family murdered the protagonist's father. Finally he argues that the more wrathful elements of the Bible suggest that the punishment for murdering a 'man of God' ought to be a revenge killing (and the same passage seems to say that the man's family should not be spared either) and eventually even manages to get the protagonist in front of them handling an axe looking fully like he's going to go through with it. Still before we reach that stage, the protagonist long seems to be going absolutely loopy, seeing CG effects on people's faces that make them look like their faces are decomposing and seeing visions of his father and mother with this effect. He also imagines that he's having sex with the daughter in the bizarre family, but not before a local woman tells him how wonderful his father's "fire and brimstone" preaching was and how a local harlot had been trying to turn him astray. In spite of how ridiculously cryptic all this madness and vision stuff was, the filmmakers still seem to think that "the old dead priest was sexually abusing children and that's why someone ended up killing him" was a shocking twist. (Seriously, the local woman talks about a 'harlot leading the old priest astray' within the half hour of the film, I do not consider it a spoiler.)

So what's this big speech at the end about? Well the priest decides he's an atheist now. (That came as a surprise.) And that hell is a method of controlling the faithful. And he interestingly notes (though this isn't something he learnt during the course of the film) that when it was decided that believers no longer be preached hell, it was said that there would still need to be "a peasant hell". Okay, all very interesting, but I'm afraid nothing in that speech follows on from what happened in the film. Also it seems that the CG effects on people's faces meant very very little.

To be quite frank, in spite of some promise right at the start, this was a stupid stupid film.

E-

25. The Rite (2011)


A disbelieving priest-in-training is told that he can either leave the priesthood and be stuck with a massive tuition bill that he cannot possibly hope to pay, or he can go on the unpopular "exorcism course" in Rome. The whole seems like a ridiculous waste of time for a man who is barely sure he believes in God, never mind in demonic possession.
The sweet: Initially had me kind of intrigued. The students on the exorcism course do not refrain from bringing up issues with exorcism. We are told that exorcists are expected to insist that the subject is checked for psychiatric illness by an expert first, but there are other issues. What if the subject only believes they are possessed and acts as they think a possessed person would as a result? When Anthony Hopkins, playing an experienced exorcist, turns up later, he gives the analogy of a thief and says "a thief doesn't want you to know that he's robbing your house", but the protagonist right notes that it's a bit dodgy to pose a lack of evidence of possession as a reason to believe in possession.

Anthony Hopkins is by far the best thing in this film. He starts off as quite a quirky figure and it's funny when we see this slightly eccentric but polite man transition from welcoming in his latest subject to 'exorcising' her. And yes, later on he gets to sort of do the Hannibal Lecter thing again, but there's problems with that.
The sour: My annoyance with ghost films comes back again here because demons are precisely what I often find so annoying about ghosts. Apparently the demons have these incredible powers, but the extent to which they are able to use them seems inconsistent. Also, perhaps even worse than with ghost films, there's no good reason WHY the demons do what they do. The first subject of an exorcism we see starts spitting out nails. It's suggested that the girl might have swallowed them earlier as some kind of misguided abortion attempt (seriously?), but why the hell does the demon want to vomit nails anyway?

Surprise surprise, Anthony Hopkins gets possessed (unless you've seen the poster in which case you knew before entering the film). Prior to this the protagonist starts having bizarre visions and believes he might be going mad, so in the light of all the scepticial-type stuff he's said before we'd expect him to go to a psychiatrist, right? Nope, instead he goes to one of the previous exorcism subjects and asks them about some random comment they made predicting that someone would die. (Yeah, coz that just PROVES exorcism is real, doesn't it? Forget about spitting out nails or magically understanding foreign languages. A random comment about an imminent death is just the proof you need. *groans*)

I'm going to spoil the climax because (1) it's the most ridiculously stupid part of the film and (2) seriously, I'm doing you a favour. Okay so here goes. *SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER*

So it ends as follows. The demon who has possessed Anthony Hopkins tries to convince the protagonist to believe in the devil. In the end he says "okay now I believe in the devil, so that means I believe in God too". The devil goes "oh dear I hadn't thought of that" and after having "in the name of Christ" shouted at him a few times he reveals his name (by shouting it loudly in an unintentional comedy moment) and can be easily exorcised.

*END OF SPOILERS.*

The biggest question I felt was raised by this movie was why there are Catholics out there who don't find the whole thing a colossal embarrassment.

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