Week four is out the door!
Don’t forget, each week I’ll give a quick rundown of what I watched and thought of them, usually on Sunday is when I post those. But if you don’t want to wait a week, I’ll also be posting my thoughts in tweet form over at: https://x.com/CPeachfuzz
(And check out Week Three.)
Rippy: For a movie about an undead giant killer kangaroo, this sure does take itself way too seriously. It’s filled with eye rolling and outright boring family melodrama that I assure you, you will care nothing about. When the kangaroo does actually attack, it’s very mixed. At first you see very little. The attack itself but also the aftermath. But as things finally start to ramp up, we do get more scene of the kangaroo attacking people. The CGI isn’t great, but it’s passable. The real highlight however is the fact it stars Michael Biehn, you know from Terminator and Aliens. But man, the tension gets cut right in half as soon as the main lead starts talking about her dead hero cop dad. It happens at the most inconvenient times; it will have you yelling at the screen for her to just shut up! Our lead, pretty as she is, is a terrible main character as she does nothing but screw up, resulting in so many people getting killed. It’s like they wanted to make Jaws, not realizing it was Sharknado. RENT.
Seven Cemeteries: A campy, fun horror movie that knows exactly what it is and has fun with it. The trailers looked good; it had a cool concept. Seven Samurai but they’re undead. My only issue with the film is we don’t get a whole lot of this ragtag crew of badass undead really doing much. The first half was gathering them as a team. Then there’s a tiny incursion when the bad guys attack the farm, but after that, the undead crew does nothing but run away, sacrificing themselves in a tunnel. It just felt lame and ultimately pointless. I still had fun with it, so this gets a RENT.
Carved: I knew going into this movie from the start that it would be bad. I’ve watched a handful of these Huluween Hulu original films that they do every year and every year they get worse and worse. My only hope was maybe this one could be campy enough to make it watchable. I was wrong. The only thing it has going for it is the abundance of gore and kills. However almost everything else is really bad. The acting is bad, the writing is bad, the editing is bad, the pacing is bad, the humor is soooo bad. I did like the use of practical effects and when they used CGI, it wasn’t all that terrible. DJ Qualls is also in this, who I feel I haven’t seen in years. I’m debating what rating to give this. It felt like a TV movie, but it had some okay kills, but also it was terrible in almost every other way… fine. RENT.
Bagman: I was going to check out another movie, but then I saw this listed under new releases on Amazon, so I thought I’d give it a shot. The trailer seemed interesting. Clearly it had a budget behind it, as this wasn’t some low budget crap like I’m used to seeing like Spin the Bottle. It had a Stephen King vibe to it, like this could easily be taking place a town over from where Pennywise haunts. Aside from the cold open, not a whole lot really happens in this movie. And the things that do get pretty repetitive as it’s the same thing over and over. It is a movie that takes its time, I honestly think maybe it would have been better if it didn’t have that cold open, so you aren’t aware of the threat stalking our lead and his kid. Making it more of a mystery might have been better. This also gets a RENT.
Outside: I’ve been wanting to check this one out on Netflix for a while now, but this movie’s runtime, 2 hours and 22 minutes is a lot to handle. I really wanted to see it before Horror Month ends, so I made the time and started it early. I’m glad I watched it. I wasn’t blown away by it, but this is a very good movie regardless. It’s a Filipino zombie movie, but more of a family thriller melodrama. The movie is about a dad and his family escape to his estrange parent’s house in the country, hoping it might be a safe place from the zombie plague that has wiped out everything. The mother wants to go north, while the dad wants to stay at the house. If the zombie apocalypse wasn’t enough, the dad just learned his eldest son isn’t his, but his brother’s. Yikes! So, you have this strange family dynamic where the mom is hard on the youngest because he is the dad’s kid, while the dad is hard on the eldest because he isn’t his. As things start to get better with the zombies outside, the dad starts to isolate his family inside to keep them together as a family, kind of losing his mind in the processes. The gore effects were great, not particularly scary but what zombie movie is? But the film goes places I didn’t think it would go, so to stick with the theme here, I’ll give it a RENT.
The Coffee Table: Oh boy. I wanted to check this one out based on RLM’s recent horror movie recommendations video and wow. This is played like a dark comedy, but the subject matter was just way too dark. So, I guess I’ll spoil it, I don’t know. Stop reading if you think you might check this one out. So, the movie is basically about a family celebrating their newborn. They just bought a new glass coffee table, but a screw was missing, so he leaves it incomplete with the glass section propped upward. While the mom goes shopping for the guests coming over the dad looks after the baby, accidentally dropping him and cutting his head off on the glass. Then the rest of the movie is just him cleaning up, trying to figure out what to do next and how to break it to the mom. This works really well as a short film. A feature, I don’t know. It seems like maybe it was a short, and they just added in a bunch of random stuff to pad it out. Like the subplot of the 12-year-old girl who thinks she’s in love with the dad. And the whole thing involving the salesman who sold them the table. I’m not sure what to rate this other than a solid RENT. It just felt too thin of a concept and too dark of one to really enjoy.
Frankie Freako: I had a ton of hope for this one as it is by one of the most unique filmmakers making movies these days. His last film was Psycho Goreman, an over the top splatterfest that kind of paid homage to silly action Japanese TV children shows that we in the US know as Power Rangers. But re imagined if we followed one of the monsters of the week instead of the heroes. It was a crazy, gory movie with a ton of really fun practical effects. Frankie Freako however is very light in a few of these places. This time it holds back the gore, and the over-the-top nature of Psycho Goreman and instead is an almost made for kids’ movie, like you’d see in the late 80’s and early 90’s that were knocking off Gremlins. This isn’t Gremlins, but instead one of the cheesy ripoff films like Munchies. This is a hard one to rate since it is trying to be bad, it just wasn’t interesting enough. RENT.
We Are Zombies: After Outside I was itching for another zombie movie, and I remembered this was one I have been sitting out that looked good. I really enjoyed the world they built, where the dead come back, but they aren’t hostile, they just shuffle around. The newly dead are basically normal people, while the older more decayed zombies are treated mostly like the homeless. I think my issue with the movie is there are too many subplots going on. We have the story of the crew who hijack zombies to sell to this weirdo artist who makes illegal art out of them, and we get the plot of their grandmother getting kidnapped and we get the plot of this corporation trying to turn zombies hostile, there was just too much going on. I also didn’t care too much for our leads, as they are pretty unlikable from the start. The gore was pretty good, the pacing was fine, it was a perfectly OK watch, so RENT.
Don’t Turn Out the Lights: I really wanted to end Horror Month with something good, but I don’t really have much left to see. And the ones I do have left I have very little hope of them being anything worth mentioning, much like this movie. This movie is bad, but there are moments where it could work. But the writing is terrible. The characters are obnoxious. The dialogue is cringy and outright embarrassing at times. No one acts like a normal person in this. And the plot, the plot makes no sense. They take a crappy RV camper to some music concert, where they run into rednecks, they want to rape a bunch of girls out in the open during the day, get chased down a public highway with them taking shots at them, then the RV of annoying dickheads get lost, run into even more rednecks and for no reason their RV breaks down. And of course something is out in the woods. They never do explain what is going on. There’s this thrown in plot about satanic rituals… we never see what is outside the RV or what is trying to get it. The movie also for some reason spends a lot of time on characters not believing what is going on, thinking it is just a prank. We the audience already know this isn’t a prank, so why are they wasting so much time on this? Like a good 10 to 15 minutes is spent with them thinking it is a prank and what they should do to get back at them. No, I can’t end Horror Month like this, I need to do this right and find something proper to end on. Anyway, SKIP!
Smile 2: I couldn’t end Horror Month with that stinker, so I went and saw Smile 2! I loved the first film, with it really taking me by surprise with how well it was acted, directed, I rarely take notice of the score but even that was haunting. The sequel, well it’s the same thing over again but they amped up the gore. This thing gets really gruesome. However, it just rehashed the first film, doing almost the exact same scenes that were in the first. The first five minutes of the film though are fantastic! It had me hyped for what was going to come next. Sadly, the rest of the film couldn’t live up to the start of the movie. It directly connects to the first, now following the cop character who was trying to help the doctor. He goes to a rundown house taken over by a bunch of drug dealers. His goal is to do what was suggested to get free of the smile curse monster. And that is to murder someone as you make the other person watch. And it leaves you and jumps to them. However, there was a gun fight that leads to the witness getting killed. There was still one other witness, not the one he intended to curse. The rest of the drug dealer’s crew shows up and comes after him, just barely making it out alive as a car careens into him. Such a great start to the movie. Then we get introduced to our real main character, a I guess Miley Cyrus clone. I’m just glad it wasn’t M. Night Shyamalan’s daughter from Trap. The vanity project he created to highlight his daughter’s music career. Unlike M. Night Shyamalan’s daughter, the actress in Smile 2 was pretty damn good. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen her in anything before. Oh wait, she was in the shitty Power Rangers movie, the shitty live-action Aladdin movie and the shitty Charlie’s Angels reboot. Not a great track record, but she’s great here. I really wanted to see something different this time, I don’t know what, but something new. Everything they did here, we have already seen. It does tend to get a bit trippier at times, and those scenes were fun. The ending I enjoyed a lot. This was when they stopped copying the first film and started doing something new, introducing a character that claims he can stop the creature by killing her, only briefly. I liked how you never knew what was just a giant mindfuck and what if anything is real. I did laugh a bit at the backup dancing she finds smiling at her in her room. It was very… what’s that terrible movie Climax, it was like that but less French. I’m not really sure where else this movie can go from here. I’m now not so sure It Follows can pull something off better off with their sequel, but we’ll see. As for Smile 2, I ‘ll give it a RENT. Heightened gore but weaker story.
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