And, right, the last movie on the docket? My hopes were dashed, it was not a sex- and drug-fueled teen massacre. Still, there at least was nudity; only once out of five different films in the genre is a little hard to believe. Not as hard as zero out of five would have been, though! Fertile Ground is a good old-fashioned possession ghost story, with a bit of a pregnancy twist. It rated really well on the tension scale, and decently well on the creepiness scale, and I was actually relieved that the lead actor who looked like Nathan Fillion wasn’t actually him; he would have been entirely too frightening[1], compared to this guy who was merely competent. But it had the same problem that most haunting stories have in modernity, which is that the characters stay in the range of the haunting past the point of all reason. Even though our heroine had an excuse in this particular case, it was only enough to carry her through the first two thirds of the movie. I cannot think of anyone I know in a similar circumstance who would have stayed for that last week or so.

Still, if Accepting the Premise were really a big problem, I could not enjoy this entire genre, so, y’know, no big. Plus, it had a valuable life lesson, which is that you should not turn around a blind corner while leading with a butcher knife. I just wish the ending had been as strong as the lesson.

[1] If you think I’m wrong, it’s because you maybe didn’t see his turn in the last season of Buffy, or have forgotten just how intense Malcom Reynolds is when angry. And he’s still a good guy then!

A thing I am forced to admit I didn’t care for in The Task is that it marked the continuation of a trend that remains unbroken by my viewing of the night’s other movie, Seconds Apart. Despite being 75% teenager-centric, not one of these movies has yet been filmed in the traditional slasher vein, full of stock characters who exist only to have pre-marital sex, drink illicit alcohol and/or consume still more illicit drugs and therefore demonstrate to some killer, supernatural or otherwise, that they deserve gruesome death over the course of a single, probably stormy, night.

And I feel a little guilty about that, because most of these movies have had something pretty compelling in them, and if there’s anything I should be happy about, it’s when people are making good horror movies. For instance, in this movie, they examined a truth that I feel is usually ignored in all the annals of cinema, and also in real life for that matter: identical twins are damned creepy. Sure, they can function in society and all, and many of them are probably quite nice, but all the same: creepy! They’re, like, nature’s clones and shit, am I right? And this is just the regular ones, much less ones that seem to be able to force other people into committing suicide as part of a personal, ongoing film project.

This would have been the best film of the weekend, if not for the fact that Orlando Jones'[1] investigating police detective spent so much time on his own (uninteresting) issues and backstory, instead of just acting as a stand-in for the audience. As it is, most of the movies have been about equivalent, and at fairly high quality water mark. Which is all well and good, but I still feel like I deserve a deliciously, hilariously bad horror movie in which the budget for gore outpaces the budget paid to the actors and the scriptwriter combined. Maybe tonight?

[1] You may, and by that I mean I did, remember him from his Sprite (or Seven-Up?) commercials in the ’90s. You do not remember him from his androgynous turn in the Jackson Lord of the Rings movies; that was someone else.

Last night, as foretold in prophecy, I saw a couple more of the AfterDark Originals films. (Horrorfest really was a much better name.) The first of these was The Task, which documents the production of a reality show set in an abandoned, blood-soaked prison. The generally unlikeable contestants must spend a stay through the night while performing various tasks centered around their previously professed greatest fears, in exchange for valuable cash prizes. Despite this rather distasteful premise[1], it turns out to have had quite a lot going for it!

Things of which I approved, in no particular order, were 1) the right proper evil backstory of the place, complete with abusive warden and suicidal prisoners, 2) the unrelenting tension and creepiness, 3) the believability of the characters despite that I’ve complained about this elsewhere, and especially 4) the probably best moment in the movie when the show’s producers decide that the guy who unexpectedly shows up in the prison to start screwing with their contestants that looks just like that prison warden and none of them seem to remember hiring is probably just a plant by the network to create an added level of “reality show” to the proceedings, this time with themselves as the victims of the premise.

S’pretty good!

[1] I believe the main cause of my distaste is how very plausible it seems that this show could (or indeed, already has?) pop up on my television someday. Well, that and how well-drawn the contestants were. You know, on the scale of reprehensibility.

Tonight’s second movie, Husk, had all the makings of an old-fashioned splatterfest: teens in a van (okay, it was a truck, but it had van-like qualities from the interior camera angles I saw) discussing how they will be finding the girls who played strip poker at last year’s lake house party as they drive past some creepy corn fields. Then, to my surprise, it immediately defied expectations by veering off into a spooky and atmospheric ghost story, one that managed to include a murderous scarecrow without being ridiculous.

So, and this clause constitutes a spoiler alert, one of the key plot elements is a Cain-and-Abel story. The reason I mention this is that there was a random crow hanging out on the porch of the creepy house (that inexplicably wasn’t the house from either incarnation of the Chainsaw series) throughout the second half of the movie. And whenever I would see him, I would try to find a way it would fit the story for him to somehow be Matthew the Raven. I never really managed it, but the fact that I was trying to see my way clear to it should indicate the relative quality of the film more easily than any more relevant positive I could toss out.

All in all, while I really had been looking for it to be a brain-numbingly horrible slasher pic punctuated throughout by gratuitousness of every flavor, you’ll never hear me complaining about a movie that is instead actually a little bit scary, and far less so about one that puts me in mind of The Sandman.