Tag Archives: Shudder

The Boy Behind the Door

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Unbelievably, I squoze in some time to watch a movie that was not podcast driven! The Boy Behind the Door is about the kidnapping of two boys. Six hours ago, they were practicing baseball and best friendship, but then they were grabbed and driven in the trunk to a remote house, where one of them is dragged away into the house and the other is left in the trunk.

What follows is 90 minutes of nearly real-time tension, usually on the right side of plausible, if usually only barely on the right side of plausible. Example: why didn’t the boy who escaped just go find the police? The overt reason, that he’s young enough to think their promise never to leave each other behind[1] is worth just getting caught again and helping nobody, is pretty believable of an 8 year old or whatever they are. The actual reason, that what if the cops don’t believe him and he really is leaving his friend to a dark fate, is… like I said, it’s plausible.

But I do have one real complaint. If you play the drinking game where every time someone leaves a weapon that they just used on the ground instead of a) continuing to use it to press your advantage, or at least b) saving it for later plus not leaving it in the hands of your enemies, if as I was saying every time that happens, you have to take a shot?

Good luck, buddy. Good luck.

[1] In a different context than kidnapping, but a promise they had just made

Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things

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I am really looking forward to when the podcast people watch a few movies in a row that I have already seen. I’m not saying I don’t like watching new things, but I am saying that I’m really trying to reduce the number of podcasts saved to my phone, and they[1] are not making it easy! This was filed under the scare of zombies and the style of bottle episode, which is insider baseball for “takes place all in a single location”. And then they had exactly six movies[2] that fit that bill, so they randomized one more time, to land on Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, from when horror movies that were not deep and thoughtful were explicitly b-movie rolls, and leaned very hard into that aesthetic. Probably for budgetary reasons?

The deal is this: a group of six college or so theater kids, led by a [seventh?] avant-garde performance artist director, except really all of those descriptors are secret code for “is an absolute asshole”, land in their sailboat on a graveyard island[3] in, I don’t know, the Caribbean maybe? Then they snipe at each other, while the one girl with bugged out eyes whose acting style is to intensely watch everyone else as they snipe at other occasionally declaims oracular doom.

NOTE: Interrupting my flow to warn that I’m not exactly concerned about spoilers in this review.

Which (the oracular doom from before I interrupted my flow, I mean) makes sense in context, when you consider that the asshole director guy’s main goal[4] is to cast a spell with infant blood as the ingredient and Satan as the patron, to raise the dead and take control of them to use as he will. So anyway, the sniping and the spellcasting and the bugged out eyes and a handful of extremely gay jump scares constitute 80 plus percent of the movie.

Later, well, I think you can guess what happens later.

I don’t think absolutely every character gets what they deserve, but boy does the movie attempt to make a case for it. Independently of all that, the ending is kind of bleak, at least if nautical training transcends mere death.

[1] in the fall of 2021, at least
[2] Not counting options such as Night of the Living Dead that they’d already seen.
[3] No idea if this is a real thing, but apparently the idea is, the locals come out and hold funerals here, and it’s used for nothing else, and over time they re-use the same places over and over as decomposition progresses, so the bodies may be buried atop one another layers deep? Seems made up to serve the plot, but what do I know?
[4] aside from exerting his authority over everyone else

Noroi

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Podcast movie! The scare was demons, and the style was found footage, and the movie was Noroi: The Curse.

Found footage can be silly. Why are these people recording everything? Why, having seen the things they are recording, do they not make different choices instead of just continuing to record? How did they get so good at filming things? This latter clearly doesn’t always apply. Sometimes, they lean into the “bad camera operator” angle. Sometimes, and thankfully this is one of those, they lean into the professional angle. Sometimes, both.[1]

So anyway, there’s this documentary filmmaker in Japan, and he catches wind of some strange goings on at a local apartment complex. I forget the instigating incident. But something weird happens with a little boy staring out of a window, and some inexplicable sounds on his footage, and he starts pulling on threads. A psychic girl here, a tinfoil clad conspiracy theorist there, dead pigeons everywhere you look, and before you know it there’s a mysterious name, a drowned village, and everyone involved in the documentary are dropping like flies.

Ah, you are saying, why didn’t he just quit? I don’t disagree, but I never felt like he made an inexplicable choice until the last ten minutes of the film, so, not too bad as such things go. Anyway, I’m surprised I missed this one. It was 2005, right around the time the whole J-horror thing got so big that their movies were being remade in Hollywood constantly for a year or two. And yet, not a clue it existed[2]. Which is a pity, as it hangs together very well and is pretty scary. Recommended.

[1] I’m looking at you, Blair Witch Project.
[2] haha oops. 2005 is when the documentary was made. This came out in 2017. No wonder I never heard of it, it’s new!

Kandisha (2020)

Based on a very narrow sample size of this movie from five years ago, I have to say that I am shocked by how casually racist French kids are with each other. This has nothing to do with the plot of the movie, nor particularly with the character development for that matter. It was just an adjustment I had to make. (Really, it’s probably like how mean girls in like Heathers or Mean Girls call each other bitch, and mean to be endearing. Of course, that doesn’t really sell itself as a solution either, if you give it more than a second’s thought.)

Again, not the point of the movie. So there are these French girls who I think all live in the same apartment building? They for sure go to the same school, or maybe more like used to go to and are now too old for that, but maybe not. Either way, not much schooling happening. And they’re surrounded by their boyfriends and baby daddies and exes and brothers and so on, and they are also spray paint taggers for some reason, with a secret gang tag all their own and everything. It’s very bonding.

Having established all that, two inciting incidents occur in close proximity. In the first, the white girl finds the name Kandisha tagged [by people not them] under some wallpaper, and the Muslim girl recognizes her as a Moroccan legendary figure who takes revenge on behalf of wronged women. Then they jokingly try to summon her, with no results. In the second incident, later that same night, the white girl is brutally attacked and attempted-raped by an ex-. Later still that same night while showering off the blood and detritus of the evening’s events, she tries to summon Kandisha again, with rather stronger results.

The catch is: you can’t really control a vengeance demon, and without almost any pause at all, the innocent[1] men in their lives are dropping like flies. If only there were some way to call her off altogether! Welp, good luck with that.

[1] At the least, more innocent.

Son (2021)

My giant list of Shudder movies to watch has gotten to where the new movies were coming out in 2021. Nice.

That said, man I’ve made a hash of this review. The problem is, I watched the movie over a week ago, then kind of forgot I had watched it, then watched another movie, then let more days pass because that review is going to be pretty easy, then glanced at my Shudder queue and realized my mistake.

So there’s this pregnant lady on the run, played by Laurie Strode’s granddaughter, and after she resentfully gives birth to the child during the prologue, we jump forward multiple years to her moderately free-wheeling single motherhood. That is, until she finds a horde of creepy people in her Son‘s bedroom, Rosemary’s Baby-style, and then he gets very sick. Downside is, there’s no evidence of the people and basically nobody believes her, except for this one Good Cop trope guy who keeps showing up whenever she has yet another evidence-free freakout, and before long, you can feel the chemistry between them starting to build.

That is, until her son finds a more successful cure than the doctors had as yet provided for his affliction, at the expense of the neighbor babysitter, and now they are forced to go on the run from both the law and her past, still unbelieved. But also, we slowly begin to realize… what if it really is all in her head? If that’s the case, just who is it leaving a string of bodies across flyover America? It’s like if You Might Be the Killer weren’t a comedy. I’m not saying I did not have a number of pretty shrewd guesses as to what was going on, but I am saying it was a fantastic slow burn of a movie that kept me guessing right up until the final scene, and you cannot ask for much more than that.

Vicious Fun

A difference between the movies of the 1980s and the movies of the 2020s is that, for the most part, we have a more enlightened view of the way people ought to behave. For example, if you were a judgmental nerd with a crazy hot roommate in 1983, the arc of your story would be to win the roommate as a prize for your many inappropriate behaviours, such as berating her for wanting to watch Falcon Crest with her friends, or tailing her (admittedly scuzzball) date to a Chinese restaurant on the edge of town and inserting yourself into his life.

Whereas in the 2020s when you are that same loser character in 1983 under the same circumstances, and you take all of the same actions… you know, ultimately what I did not like about this movie is that he was still the protagonist at all. So be prepared for that, even if his end state isn’t quite as thoroughly rewarded as it once would have been.

The plot twist is that, after getting way too sorry for himself drunk and passing out in a supply closet of said Chinese restaurant, he wakes up to a small motivational self-help group in the main room of the now closed location. Before very long at all, he deduces that they’re not alcoholics so much as they are serial killers, and he’d better hope he can blend in if he wants to survive the night, much less get back to winning the heart of his roommate.

The other thing that would have made me like the movie more [aside from the aforementioned more sympathetic protagonist] is if I had not just seen the same overall plot play out across season one of the Dexter revival. Which is in no way their fault, since the movie predates the TV season by five years. Anyway, Vicious Fun was maybe sufficiently vicious, but definitely not sufficiently fun. I wanted more comedy out of my horror comedy than I actually received. Alas.

An Unquiet Grave

Sometimes a movie is a lot more interesting than it is good.

This is not to say that An Unquiet Grave is bad, precisely. It’s short, especially by modern standards, and it clicks right along at a prodigious speed, but it still, in retrospect, feels a little too long somehow. The character beats and the acting were good, and I liked the plot, but I also think the plot was the problem. There just wasn’t really enough of it to fill 80ish minutes, even if you account for all the long shots of people looking sad.

See, it’s like this. There’s a guy whose wife died, and he has a plan to bring her back, with her twin sister’s help. That right there? It’s the whole movie. There are two actors, a lot of back and forth dialogue, a handful of events, and then the credits roll. I think I liked it, even despite the too long thing, but I also think what I liked about it was the interestingness of the premise and the tiny cast more than, you know, the movie itself. But also, the acting is staying with me. There’s a little bit of special effects, mostly make-up related, but the true horror of the movie is all conveyed in the acting choices, and I’m here for it.

I feel like I may be talking myself into liking it better than it deserves? Because it really isn’t anywhere near great, and I maintain that it’s more interesting than good. I guess I mean the parts that are good may actually be great, but they do not outweigh maintaining such a somber mood for such a long time relative to what actually occurs.

Speaking of interesting: I just learned that the female lead was also one of the writers. This makes me feel better about the brief nudity in the film, which felt otherwise more exploitative than I’m usually comfortable with. Well, wait, let me explain. Exploitative nudity in film is the bread and butter of what I am comfortable with, it’s practically a horror film food group. But this was emotionally exploitative, and while I fully understood the artistic choice behind it, it was uncomfortable all the same. But her also being a writer on the film really does smooth that over a bit, so hooray!

But also, the ending? Like, literally the last second of the movie? That part was brilliant.

Kolskaya sverhglubokaya

Back in the late ’90s and then ongoing for the next twenty or so years, off and on when he did not consider himself retired, I spent a lot of time listening to the Art Bell Show. Hell, I still listen to reruns, it’s a great soundtrack for falling asleep. One of the things I remember hearing about, back in those days, was the massively deep hole in Russia from which recording equipment heard screams and moans, like seven miles down, and had they found hell?! Other than the recording itself, which okay was a little disquieting but could have been produced by anyone from anywhere, I do not recall any compelling evidence being provided. But that’s kind of the point of Art Bell. He gives you cool hypotheticals and lets you feel spoopy, as the kids used to say, and then at the end of the episode the world is still pretty regular, no aliens or ghosts or bigfeet or nothin’.

I never did really hear anything else about that Superdeep hole. Until now, sort of?

Set just before the fall of the Soviet Union, a lady scientist with a dark past and a whole bunch of military dudes are sent to a miles-deep research facility in Siberia to figure out why things have gotten weird. It’s almost exclusively from her point of view, which results in really solid tension building as people head off to deal with this or that mysterious occurrence, and you might hear screaming or gunfire, but you don’t know what actually happened, and what they report back isn’t as useful as it could be at explaining things.

I was reminded a lot of that oil rig game I played last year, but with a serial numbers filed off Russian cast of Aliens. Effectively creepy, high stakes, and intense. Can recommend.

Raw (2016)

This week’s movie from Summer 2021 of the podcast was honestly kind of a spoiler as the scare and I forget what as the style, because man I’m bad at this. The downside of talking about Raw is that I’m going to have to jump into those spoilers, because it’s that kind of movie. But not yet!

So there’s this vegetarian chick from a vegetarian veterinarian family, and it’s almost time to go to vet school! But also, vet school is really weird. Source: the movie, but it apparently involves getting hazed by upperclassmen and even professors? Like, the whole incoming class gets Carried, and hell, probably with actual pig blood, why not? They sure have access to some! Plus weird all night mandatory raves and closet makeouts. It’s honestly a lot more like a mixed-gender fraternity than a professional medical school for animals. Er, about animals.

But the thing is, one of the hazings is to eat a pickled rabbit kidney. And kind of like being introduced to the new religious viewpoints (or political viewpoints, or sexual awakenings) that college brings to many people, it just stands to reason that if you give a confirmed lifelong vegetarian a hunk of meat, they’re gonna go all out with it, you know?

Spoilers below.

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Caveat (2020)

I saw one of those too clever mystery movies that is amazing if you let it wash you along, but as soon as you start to think about it, everything kind of falls apart. So there’s this scruffy, apparently partially amnesiac drifter who gets hired by his former landlord to watch the landlord’s niece for a few days out in the backwoods. See, the niece is mentally imbalanced, and the uncle is just, ugh, I can’t cope, but I’ll pay you to cope! There’s just this one little Caveat…

Okay, maybe two. The house is on an island, only reachable by boat, and the uncle intends to leave with the boat for the aforementioned few days, but mainly it’s that the drifter has to be locked into a harness with a long chain to allow him to wander some of but not all of the house, as the niece doesn’t want him to be able to get into her room, for example.

It’s a pretty interesting premise, on the face of it. What happened here? Why is the uncle being so weird? But if you think for too long, you’ll start asking other questions, like, why would anyone ever agree to this job? Why is there a lockable harness chained into the basement cement that can reach most of the house but not all of it? If the niece is unstable, why let her have a crossbow? Why is the spoiler in the basement untouched by the passage of time? And so on.

It’s not that it’s a bad movie, it’s just that maybe don’t trust it to have good answers to any of these questions, and enjoy the atmosphere instead. Because there’s definitely atmosphere out the wazoo. Not the least of which is the gratuitous screaming foxes.