Grave Encounters (2011)

Hi guys, and welcome to the first installment of a new series on this blog called “Movies Rob Wants to Watch.” He has sent me an email with three more MRWTW and they are all pretty much the same movie as this one so buckle up babies—this shit’s about to get paranormal!

I was bothered by something while watching the Canadian horror production Grave Encounters: the lead actor looked SO familiar to me but I could not place him. My cousin Vicky is an occupational therapist which is practically a doctor and she says that everyone Googling everything on their smartphones all the time instead of trying to remember things is going to give us all Alzheimer’s so I didn’t look it up and instead just racked my brain trying to figure out where I knew him from. I had just about decided that he was just a thinner, Canadian, cut-rate version of Dean from 'Supernatural' when around the 23-minute mark I remembered what I knew him from: GRAVE ENCOUNTERS. I had seen this before.

Have you done this before? I mean, seen a movie so unmemorable that it took a significant portion of the film to actually trigger the memory of having seen it already? If so, please post the movie in the comments-- I am interested to see what movies are so dull they couldn't even stick in your brain. This is actually the second time I’ve déjà vu-ed a crappy horror film; the first one was a real shitshow on OnDemand called Grave Dancers and I honestly didn’t remember it until ten minutes before the end when they trotted out a pyromaniac child dancing in a room of fire. Either I watch way too many terrible movies or I already have a memory disorder as per Dr. Vicky’s prediction.

Anyway, Grave Encounters. This is a movie about a paranormal investigation television show gone terribly wrong inside an abandoned psychiatric hospital. Like 99% of horror filmed in 2011, it is found-footage style which makes me want to put a Dramamine patch behind my ear because I’m your grandma.

A cast and crew of four men and one woman are locked inside the hospital overnight after a tour of the supposedly haunted facilities. They set up a bunch of steady cams and then walk around doing various paranormal activity testing to try to stir up some ghostly moments. Eventually some scary-ish stuff happens, then the caretaker doesn’t come back to let them out as planned, then more scary-ish stuff happens, then they break through the front door and instead of finding the outside, they find another hallway.

First, certainly the abandoned psychiatric hospital scenario has been played out on a number of occasions, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t still a lot that can be done with it. It’s a terrifying concept but Grave Encounters really falls flat with it. Like, just parade out a variety of crazed ghosts and sadistic doctors and I’ll probably be scared. Don’t try to convince me that it’s a portal for Canadian demons, and definitely don’t do both of those things. And MOST DEFINITELY don’t do both those things AND have someone’s death occur via a disappearance into a mysterious fog AND have the building have the ability to shapeshift AND have no one die until like the 70^th minute.

I feel like the writing/directing duo of Grave Encounters (the Vicious Brothers—not brothers, questionably vicious, definitely Canadian)wrote everything they knew about horror movies onto slips of paper and threw them into a hat, then instead of picking out random pieces they just dumped them onto the floor and used them all. Here are some highlights:

      Every good movie using a psychiatric hospital has to have a room with writing all over the wall, right? This one has it, and it has in big letters:

That is actually what it says. In the movie. These are definitely Metallica lyrics, right? Like post-rehab-James-Hetfield Metallica lyrics? 

At one point, a member of the crew wakes up with words scratched into the skin on her back. Kinda spooky, and at first I thought it said “HELP” like, “help me, I am a patient in this hospital and am living in terrible conditions and these doctors want to stick a needle in my eye!” Nope. It seriously says “HELLO.” ‘Sup, buddy?

I am desperately trying to remember actual physical threats to the characters in this movie. There are a few scenes where demon-like creatures come at them (but don’t seem to do any damage?) and of course the aforementioned scene where someone is just whisked away in a cloud of smoke but otherwise, they are few and far between. For instance, in one scene a bunch of hands inexplicably come through the ceiling (15 feet above the characters’ heads) and that’s about it. Again, ‘sup?

Obviously this movie is fairly unmemorable, since I didn't remember it.

I’d be remiss without pointing out some enjoyable parts of this one: the changing building scared me in a claustrophobic way…in the third act, our intrepid crew believes they have found roof access but the stairwell ends in a completely sealed wall, and that kind of gave me the shivers. The ‘medium’ character is a decent comic relief. There is a scene where a ghost doctor gives a ghost patient a lobotomy which caused me to remember a phrase that my Uncle Frank always used to say: “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy” and I said that to Rob like I’d made it up so he thought I was really funny and I liked that (Uncle Frank didn’t make it up either). So, you know, that’s something.

Lucky you guys though, at the top of the list of MRWTW is Grave Encounters 2! I am like 99% sure I have not seen that (and 99% sure that no one else has, either). 

Jug Face (2013)

After the last two movies which I basically raved about, I thought I should throw you a stinker from Netflix: Jug Face.

This movie clocks in at only an hour and twelve minutes and it still took me three sittings to get through. I would like to tell you that breaking it into chunks took away some of the tension but I feel pretty confident in saying that there’s truly no tension to speak of. It generally follows the horror movie trope of “throw a bunch of weird shit at the viewer and slowly reveal what it means”, which is fine! Except that none of the weird shit is particularly good shit.

Let me start with the Netflix short description: “A pregnant teen tries to flee her backwoods community when she learns she's to be sacrificed to a monstrous beast that lives in a pit near her town.” Okay, that actually sounds promising! A beast in a pit! Sacrificing children! These are things I can get right behind. I am wholeheartedly willing to suspend my disbelief at the fact that this rural insular community is worshipping a hole in the ground—and not even a massive gaping fissure in the earth, just a lil hole, about four feet across and six feet deep with some brown water in the bottom.

)

Okay, fine, disbelief suspended. So this community worships the pit, and sometimes the pit demands sacrifices. If the pit does not receive the sacrifice of the person it selects, it will then kill at will until it gets the specific person it has requested. How do the townspeople determine who to sacrifice? Well you see, the pit speaks to a mentally handicapped man whose name I believed to be Dwayne but according to the internet, it was actually Dawai. Everyone had terrible southern accents in this movie—or more accurately, they had them about 80% of the time except when they forgot and dropped them—so you can forgive my error. The pit tells Dawai who to sacrifice and then he (in a daze? I guess?) makes clay jugs with the sacrificial lamb’s face upon them. Hence Jug Face. I will admit it was difficult for me to keep a straight face when our protagonist, pregnant teen Ada, tells her grandfather, “I think I’m the next Jug Face!”

This seems to have been a problem for the props department on this film, because the jug does kind of look like Ada, but it also looks a lot like everyone else in the movie. In one scene, as part of an effort to protect Ada from being sacrificed, Dawai makes a jug of another member of the community: an overweight guy in his early-to-mid-twenties. That one looks like Ada too. When he reveals it to the community, they all gasped because it told them who would be sacrificed but I was like, “wait, who is that supposed to be?”

Whatever. I have written about 500 words on this movie so far and have yet to mention that Ada is pregnant courtesy of her brother Jessaby (JESSABY!) and that Netflix lied, there is no monstrous beast in the pit. When people are killed by the pit, we never actually see it—the camera just kind of twirls around and you hear shouting and then see their innards scattered about.

Oh! There’s also a boy that Ada calls “the shunned boy” and he seems to appear only to her, and might be dead? I think he’s dead. He may also be an agent of the pit, but I can’t be sure. He appears only to deliver scintillating dialogue like this.
                Ada: What if I don’t want to die, though?
                Boy: You must.

I wrote that in my notes with the word “lol” immediately underneath. In fact, rather than trying to piece together anything in this movie, I’m just going to transcribe portions of my notes below.

•           I feel like it’s a bad sign when every person who worked on the movie is credited in the opening sequence.
•           Why would you bone standing up in the woods? There’s…grass everywhere.
•           This guy (Dawai) looks like he should be an extra in a movie about the founding of Apple, Inc.
•           Apparently even weird religious zealot backwoodsers drink moonshine. They’re…just like us?
•           Should I rewind this to figure out if this girl is boning her brother?
•           Oh, yup, boning her brother.
•           I actually hate everyone in this movie and don’t care if they die.

In the Netflix good or garbage category, this one is solidly

You're Next (2011)

On the topic of growing pains (we weren’t talking about growing pains, I know. This is how you write an opening sentence; writing majors can feel free to take notes), I was talking to my friend Rob about my frustration with what I want to do with this blog. I’m not reviewing, or recapping, or even rating horror movies, so what am I doing? I feel like I’m basically just saying HEY CHECK IT OUT THIS HAPPENED AND I DREW IT IN A RUDIMENTARY MANNER USING FREE SOFTWARE THAT CAME WITH YOUR PC OKAY BYE! and that’s not really all that fulfilling for me, and I can’t imagine that it is that exciting to look at either. Rob said to me, “the thing with horror movies is discerning the good ones from the straight-to-DVD-or-Netflix shit ones” which I thought was a really great point. The world, particularly the Netflix world, is just teeming with terrible horror movies and I feel like I could be a valuable resource to you in sussing them out. That means, however, that this blog is just going to have to have spoilers from time to time, and you can just

DEAL WITH IT
(my GOD am I good at the internet!)

The other night, I had the pleasure of watching You’re Next with my excellent lady friends Tara and Kelly (and excellent lady friend dog, Penny). You’re Next is a slasher that falls a bit in the vein of The Strangers but with more deaths and more comedy that takes place in a family’s isolated mountain home. Tara had previously described the plot to me while we were staying at her family’s isolated mountain home—I  will never return there, thank you—and said that she basically had her fingers over her eyes for a large portion of the film. And for good reason! This movie has a number of really good jump scares that get you even though you know goddamn well they are going to get you, and they come as soon as the opening scene. They definitely got Kelly, anyway.

The setup is simple: really wealthy parents buy a vacation home and invite their three sons, one daughter and each of the kids’ significant others to spend a weekend there for the parents’ 35^th wedding anniversary. This is ideal because with ten characters at its disposal, a movie can really get the body count up there quickly. The children have stereotypically bougie names (one of the—intentionally? I can’t be sure—funniest moments in the movie is at the very beginning, when our protagonist son accidentally frightens his father and the father exclaims, “Crispin!!” to reveal his name for the first time. CRISPIN. Actually, I just Googled it and it looks like his name is actually Crispian. I can’t abide by that weird extra A, so it’s gotta go. “Crispin!”) They are all dressed appropriately as “wealthy people”; I imagine that the working title of this film was Rich People Wear a lot of Collars.

One by one, we meet each of the couples and prepare to watch them die. I feel basically nothing towards them at this point so, you know, let the bloodshed begin. One death comes via crossbow, which I feel is a totally underutilized weapon in horror films. (At one point, a character refers to crossbow ammunition as an arrow and Tara audibly scoffed and said, "it's a BOLT." Ladies who play D&D...we know what we're talking about.)



 You are supposed to feel some kinship towards Crispin’s girlfriend Erin, but she’s a tall, thin, beautiful Australian woman so, no, we don't have a ton in common. Anyway, the killers roll up to the house dressed in animal masks, which I absolutely LOVE. This really got me in The Strangers, too—killers wearing blank-faced masks instantly increase the creepiness.

You see, that’s a lamb. I feel real, actual shame at the amount of time I spent on that compared to how it looks…maybe I should stick with drawing Glenn.

Incidentally, that same mask is totally worn by WWE wrestler Erick Rowan of the Wyatt Family, whom I saw live at the Royal Rumble in Pittsburgh this year. Pro wrestling, D&D, horror...with interests as cool and fascinating and feminine as mine, it’s a wonder the boys aren’t kicking down my door. Guys back off, I’m married, okay?

You’re Next is gross and jumpy and engaging, but on top of all that, it’s actually really funny. It has to be, since the characters are wildly unsympathetic and the premise itself is fairly unoriginal. I sometimes have a problem with the horror-comedy genre because I like to know whether something is supposed to be funny or if I’m actually just laughing at a filmmaker’s expense, and You’re Next kind of toes that line. The tall thin beautiful Australian woman, as it turns out, is an extremely capable killer and manages to fight back against the home invaders, beating one to death and concocting traps to maim others in a grotesque Home Alone-style scenario. When asked how she’s able to do all this, she tosses off a line about being raised on a survivalist compound in Australia and you’re supposed to be like, “oh yeah totally, it’s Australia…anything is possible…?” Things like that are so blatantly dumb that I have to assume that is intentional, right?

Anyway, to address the Netflix “good or garbage?” question, this one definitely falls under good. It’s fairly scary, fairly gory, fairly funny and all-around fun. Would watch again. 

Insidious (2011)

It’s taken me awhile to write this review of Insidious (2011) because I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not. Actually, I’m still not sure. It’s a generic concept—a happy family moves into new home and all hell breaks loose (optional: something baaad has happened in the past that they are trying to escape) with a particular focus around the mother who is far too svelte for having birthed three children in seemingly six years. Okay, I guess I can get behind that, plus I really like the word ‘insidious.’

The central plot of the film is that one of the three aforementioned children falls into an unexplained coma and does not wake up for months upon months. Doctors, naturally, are stumped. Then strange things begin to happen in the house because why wouldn’t they? Time to call in the psychics! This particular set of psychics and ghosthunters inform the family that their son has astral projected into a place called “the Further”—which, let’s be honest, is a terrible name for another realm of scary shit—and someone has to go get him back. What lives in the darkness that is “the Further”? If you guessed (spoiler alert) pinup girls with shotguns…well, 10 horror movie points for you.

You know, the great philosopher of our time Harvey Danger once said, “well, if you’re bored then you’re boring.” I decided that since I am bored just writing this up, this movie must have been boring. There were some good jump scares in it and the twist at the end is okay, though it’s a really obvious plot device to set up a sequel (see also: Friday the 13^th, Halloween, and every other horror movie that has ever existed in series form). I can’t even get excited about drawing it because I can hardly remember a memorable scene. 

Well uh, I guess that's that. I feel like I've barely had any horror-watching this month and the day after tomorrow is Halloween. I'm thinking I'll review a couple classics over the next week or two instead of venturing into Netflix territory, particularly because my friend Mike argued SO PASSIONATELY that I need to watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 that he stepped off a curb directly into traffic and nearly lost his life. So, you know, I guess I owe him that much!

Bong of the Dead (2011)

For months, Bong of the Dead (2011) has been at the top of my “recommended for Katie” list on Netflix. What does this say about me?

In all honesty, I love horror comedy. I mean, everyone loves the Evil Dead series, but I would even lump two of my all-time favorite films—Beetlejuice and Monster Squad—into this category.  I like stoner comedy: Cheech & Chong were childhood staples; Half Baked was a college staple. My band even once recorded the theme song for a Comedy Central pilot called “Stoners with a Time Machine”—all twelve seconds of it, and you can find it here.

So truthfully, by all accounts Netflix had it right. The straight-to-video classic Bong of the Dead was my destiny. 

(Also, the tagline “There will be bud” is good. I admit it, it is.)

The film opens with a ten minute sequence depicting a meteor falling to earth, I think, and then this old guy puts his hand into the crater, I guess, and pulls out some gelatinous muck that causes him to become a zombie, it would seem. He eats his wife and then she becomes a zombie and they eat each other. There is no dialogue in this sequence, only grunts.

I turned to Rob and asked, “What the hell are we watching?”
“I think it’s a Soundgarden* video.”
“Oh.”

Cue the opening credits, and then we are introduced to our two stoner protagonists. I did not catch either of their names, just that one of them is wearing a “Team Weed” shirt. Then they started talking. Listen, I get it. Stoned people stereotypically speak a certain way. There is a way to do this well—Rory Cochrane as Slater in Dazed & Confused, Jason Segel in basically every episode of “Freaks & Geeks”, and so on. 

Then there are these guys.

No. Just…just no. I didn’t even make it through their introductory scene that consisted of waving around a glass jar filled with a substance that looked like slime from “You Can’t Do That on Television” that had…something to do with the zombies? I think it was maybe a mashup of...their brains? I couldn’t even tell you. I was out.

The Netflix time counter says we made it through 15 minutes. It felt like a goddamn hour. I guess there will not be bud.

*I know that this is the second reference to Soundgarden in under a month and I seriously don’t even care. 

The Bay (2012)

I should start this post by saying that I went into The Bay (2012) with extremely low expectations, which I do think helped it out a lot. It started when I told Rob that he could pick a movie on Netflix. In our house, “picking a movie on Netflix” actually means “selecting two movies and giving the other person a choice because neither of us is capable of making an actual decision or accepting responsibility for anything.” Rob picked The Bay and something else that sounded so bad, I can’t even remember. Because I am a baby, I balked at both choices and he was like, “but we’ve watched everything on Netflix that’s good already! And this is less than an hour and a half!”

Infallible argument.

Then I noticed that The Bay was directed by Barry Levinson, who has directed a few movies I actually like, such as Sleepers and Rain Man (if only because I use the phrase “I…I’m an excellent driver” at least twice a month) and he was very recently the executive producer of the excellent BBC America television drama “Copper” which was just cancelled at the end of the second season and I am terribly bummed about it. So okay, this might have potential but I was not holding my proverbial breath. 

Capitalizing on the ‘found footage’ trend—which I generally sort of dislike because shaky camera work makes me feel nauseated and I’m old, so like, just make me a movie and make me like it, okay?—The Bay is narrated by a young woman named Donna Thompson who is recounting the horrific events of a 4^th of July town celebration in a seaside Maryland town along the Chesapeake Bay. It splices together scenes of Donna reporting as an intern for the local TV news station and a few other footage sources: an ER doctor who tries valiantly to clean up the mess, the CDC who are basically bureaucratic jerks (obviously) and then personal footage from a handful of other sources: a teen girl who is FaceTiming her friend, the camera from inside a police car, the personal footage from a young couple with a baby who are sailing to the town and have no idea what has happened there. We also see clips from a duo of oceanographers who had been researching the bay and were found dead months before the July 4 debacle.

The town thrives on seaside tourism and the poultry farming industry but lo and behold, the chicken farmers had been allowing runoff to roll into the bay, tainting the water supply. Suddenly, at the 4^th of July festivities, people start breaking out into these disgusting skin boils and blisters, as though their flesh was eating itself from the inside. The entire town is swept into chaos and the hospital is overfilled. Bodies begin to litter the streets. We don’t yet know what’s causing the symptoms, but there are a bunch of excellently gross flesh-eating shots.

At this time I was really involved in dipping olives into hummus (only god can judge me) and actually started feeling pretty queasy, to Marley the fattest cat in the world's benefit.

Long story short, the environment! And corporate greed! And government coverups! Eventually, through the research of the late oceanographers, we find out that the culprit is not a flesh-eating bacteria caused by the toxicity of the water but in fact, GIANT ISOPODS. Isopods have really come into their own over the last few years thanks to internet memes, and I’m glad to see them getting their due as the horrifying and disgusting creatures they are.

Original here.

The big question is: how can these isopods grow to be such giant fucking monsters? And the answer is: steroids from the chicken farming runoff. They are growing so fast, they are like little crustaceous pro wrestlers. At this point, we start to see giant, juiced-up isopods EMERGING FROM THE LESIONS IN PEOPLE’S SKIN WHY, WHY IS THIS A THING? 

Ultimately, most of the town is wiped out by the isopod invasion and the government covers it up with a story about unseasonably warm water temperatures or something.

While The Bay was less horror and more “eco-documentary/warning-The-Happening-without-Marky-Mark’s-muscles-or-M.-Night-Shamalama’s-poor-storytelling”, it was still pretty sicknasty and a decent way to spend less than an hour and a half. As long as Netflix can keep movies that meet my low low expectations rolling in, I feel that my $17/month is well spent.