Category: Film

Last weekend, as has become something of a tradition, I watched a movie. This time around, it was a pull from my way-too-long Netflix queue (and people complain that there isn’t enough on Netflix). It was called As Above, So Below and was sold to me as a spooky adventure into the tunnels of Hell. Or something like that. Here’s the Netflix synopsis:

A beautiful tomb raider and her crew hunt for treasure in the catacombs of Paris and find themselves in a hellish underworld.

First off: the “tomb raider” isn’t beautiful. She’s cute, sure, but not like, stop-and-stare gorgeous.

Secondly, the movie was kinda boring. It was one of those movies where the main character keeps doing stuff while people are constantly telling her not to, because it’s either illegal or everyone else who has tried has either disappeared or wound up dead. Which is fine in an adventure movie or a comedy, but in a horror film like this, you just don’t sympathize when horrible things start to happen. It’s impossible to feel bad for over-entitled millennials.

It’s also a POV film. Not “found footage” necessarily, because (spoiler) several characters survive. But it’s still all shot from a combination of a handicam and GoPros. The question of how the footage was recovered from some of said GoPros when they were visibly destroyed, we’ll just have to handwave away. Regardless, I’m not really into the whole POV thing. Sometimes it works, and sometimes (like this time) it’s just annoying.

The plot follows Ms Not-Lara Croft in search of the Philosopher’s Stone. Yes. Despite having like seventeen degrees, she’s a firm believer in alchemy. So she assembles a rag-tag group of friends and French spelunkers, and they begin their journey down into the catacombs of France. On the way, they pass a cult of topless women chanting what are surely completely innocent incantations. You might think that this is an important plot point while viewing the film, but these busty ladies never make another appearance.

One thing the film did very well was evoke a sense of claustrophobia. It does this well in general by being set in tight underground tunnels, but there is one very long and very excruciating scene where a character is briefly stuck in a tight passage and starts freaking out. It was very difficult to watch, and had me squirming in my seat the whole time. I’m not exactly claustrophobic myself, but I definitely have some degree of cleithrophobia, as I have had nightmares of getting trapped in tight places for as long as I can remember.

So, what do we watch horror movies for? The kills, of course. They’re… kinda blah here. The first girl to go gets her face bashed in by a possessed mole-man. Another guy falls down a well and goes splat. Then the head French-guy gets sucked into a burning car which promptly implodes and somehow leaves him buried underground with just his feet sticking out. And that was it. The other three characters survive. Though one of them gets his jugular torn out by a gargoyle demon, he is saved by the healing powers of a magic kiss.

What did I tell you already? This movie isn’t very good.

And that’s really too bad, because it seems like a decent premise and the build-up is interesting enough. But in the end it was a bit of a let down. Not “Gah! I’ve wasted my time!” bad, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. If you want to see some good spelunking-gone-wrong movies, try The Descent or… I can’t think of any others. What about Sanctum? Was Sanctum good? I can’t remember anything about it, so probably not.

I have spent nearly six months with the video file of The Babadook on my computer, and yet I have not watched it. I wanted to watch it, but after doing a Google search and being terrified for weeks upon weeks by the images it produced, I could not bear to watch the movie.

But last weekend, I finally did it. I was actually settling in to watch a different movie, but then I was like “you know what, I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna watch The Babadook.”

Turns out, it wasn’t nearly as scary as I thought, and I would up absolutely loving it.

In fact, I liked it so much that I’ve been strongly considering watching it again. Maybe a third time. Maybe it’ll become my favourite movie.

Now, don’t get me wrong. The Babadook is still pretty terrifying. Just not in the way that I’d imagined. It’s more of a self-reflective, thoughtful kind of horror. Which may not make a lot of sense if you haven’t seen the film. I can’t even relate it to anything because it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I got the same feeling of dread from it as I did from It Follows, but really the only other thing the two films have in common is that they’re great.

I really don’t want to say much else about it, because it’s definitely worth watching. Just thinking about it makes me wish I could be watching it again right now. Maybe I will…

I’ve watched a lot of Netflix Original shows, and most of them have been very good. Some not-so-great, but for the most part, it’s been above average. I watched my very first Netflix Original movie last week. It was… hmmm, what’s the best way to describe it… awful.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House sounds an awful lot like the kind of movie that I would like from its description. Have a gander:

A nervous nurse who scares easily finds herself caring for an ailing horror novelist while living in a house with hidden secrets.

Sure, it’s a bit generic, but they wouldn’t want to spoil anything, right? Well, the thing is that there’s not a whole lot to spoil. The entire plot is about a girl who is afraid of ghost stories reading a ghost story, and then learning that it’s actually true and the ghost lives in the house she’s currently occupying. Maybe I’m being a little reductive with that summary, but that’s the gist of it.

The hugest thing I disliked about the film is that it is nearly 90% voice-over narration. Though I guess it can’t be helped when your movie has a grand total of three characters, and one has dementia and another is on screen for about four minutes total. But yeah, too much narration drives me bonkers. It’s just so boring to watch something while a disembodied voice tells you what you’re watching.

Anyway, the story is a very slow burn, and there is basically zero payoff. The climax comes out of nowhere and is over so quickly that you’re just like “wait, this is what I’ve been waiting for?” and then you have to sit through another seven minutes of epilogue in sheer frustration.

Do you want to know what happens? The girl hears a mysterious knocking inside the house, goes downstairs to investigate, and then dies of fright upon seeing -that’s right, just seeing– a ghost. A ghost that, by all intents and purposes, she should know is in the house. It is literally spelled out for her over the course of the film. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m terrified of ghosts, but I can’t imagine that I would keel over if I were to simply catch a glimpse of one. I’d be pretty amazed, actually, because ghosts aren’t real.

Also in this scene is a very bad digital effect of the ghost marching across the kitchen. What makes it so terrible is that due to plot, her legs are on backwards, and this gives the illusion that she’s a marionette or something, gambolling along so unnaturally. This could be frightening, maybe, if they had done it right (though I can’t quite conceive of how that would be done). But the net result here is that it looks like something out of a children’s program, and completely dissolves any tension that maybe have existed, further reducing the effectiveness of that big, final “scare.”

Do I regret watching this movie? It’s hard to say. I do love watching terrible movies, but this one was mostly just boring. I can’t get excited about any of its terribleness. There was nothing so corny that made me giggle. It’s the kind of bad movie that How Did This Get Made? would pass on. So, yeah. Maybe I would like to have my 87 minutes back, but on the other hand, I now have this little gem in my pocket as a short conversation piece.

I watched The Witch on Netflix the other night, which was not the first spooky movie that I’ve watched this fall, but easily the best so far.

Before we move on any farther, I’d like to note that the title is stylized as “The VVitch” in most promotional materials. As a result, I always pronounce it “The Va-Vitch” when I say it out loud, and find it hilarious every time. Honestly I decided to write this entire post just to share that tidbit.

An unusually good modern horror movie, The Witch is not scary, but it is horrifying. There is a scene near the beginning wherein a baby is stolen and… you know what? Let’s not spoil it. The point here is that the scene was gruesome (though mostly off-camera) and truly shocking and I couldn’t do anything but stare, unblinking and slack-jawed, for the five minutes or so that it was happening.

Once that is over, things even out for a while. The story takes place in, oh, I think probably the Days of Yore? It’s about a religious family that abandons their church because of the father’s pride, and attempts to run their own little secluded farm to get by. Things go horribly askew and the farm produces only garbage crops. The children are all getting into assorted kinds of trouble, and also there’s the baby-napping. These are not good times.

Our main character is the eldest daughter, Thomasin, who is a budding young lady and happened to be watching the baby when it was yoinked. This creates oodles of tension between her and her mother, and things just keep escalating as she gets blamed for more and more unfortunate events. Right up until the end where it all comes to a head (literally).

The other characters are as follows: The aforementioned parents, who are struggling to make it in the big city middle of nowhere. The tween brother that is constantly salivating over Thomasin’s rack. A set of super annoying twins who may or may not have made a pact with Satan. A black goat named Phillip. A rabbit that shows up mysteriously here and there. With this hodgepodge cast, obviously things are going to go amiss.

I don’t really want to say much more about The Witch, because you should definitely go and watch it yourself. It’s a coming-of-age story that really doesn’t have very much in common at all with any other coming-of-age stories that I am aware of. Also it’s not that kind of horror movie. The titular Witch is real, but she never ever once jump-scares you. It’s much more frightening in the sense of seeing the events unfolding around this family and how awful life must have been back on those days. Especially for women. Sure, the supernatural elements might not exactly hit, but there’s plenty of other unsettling stuff in there that folks could easily relate to.

If there’s one gaping flaw with the film, it’s that it is so very incredibly hard to make out what anyone was saying. The dialects and accents are so thick that I had to turn on subtitles ten minutes in because I simply could not make heads or tails of the dialogue.

On the whole, though? Super good movie. It was not at all what I was expecting when I turned it on, and I’m so glad that I watched it. I’ll likely be telling people about this one for the duration of the 2016 Halloween season. Maybe even longer.

Here’s one little spoiley, because I need to type out this sentence: Someone literally gets ground into paste. But I won’t say who. *wink*