It has been two long weeks since my last review. I’m sure you’ve all been protesting in the streets. Well, calm down, everything is okay now. Because I’m back! Even though I really didn’t go anywhere, I was just too lazy to go to the theater to see anything.
Usually when Hank is away, that means the children get to play. But this time I mostly did nothing but binge watch Nailed It on Netflix.
There just hasn’t been much I’ve felt like reviewing.
There are of course the Netflix original movies like Father of the Year and Extinction but it seems like nowadays the only things I review are either Marvel superhero movies or Netflix original movies. That can get pretty damn boring, so the search continued. I wanted to do Sorry to Bother You, but of course the only theaters that were showing it had it playing at weird times, either super early in the morning or really late at night. So as much as I wanted to see it, I had to find an alternative. And as much as I really enjoyed Extinction on Netflix, it had way too many twists in it that I’d have to spoil for you if I were to review it.
So again, the search continued.
Along the way, I did however buy this amazing collector’s edition of Turbo Kid. You can get just the standard special edition or you can spring for the awesome as hell boxset edition which includes a kick ass t-shirt, poster and a pin you can put on your jacket, which I did and it looks great. I would suggest getting the boxset, I paid maybe a bit more than I should have since I got it on eBay, but I didn’t realize they were selling it half off on the film’s webpage. But with shipping I’m sure it would have all added up to about the same anyways.
Aside from buying a bunch of shit I don’t need and of course binge watching Nailed It, I also found myself oddly fascinated with dark web mystery box opening videos on YouTube. I’m not completely sure how real they are, I mean, most of them are all the same, just a random collection of whatever the sender found around the house with the added bonus of a creepy note and maybe a strange pill or two.
I thought with this added new interest might get me to check out the Unfriended sequel. But then I remember how much of a piece of shit the first one was, so I instead binge watched another anime series.
Another thing that quickly caught my interest on YouTube or I should say was so goddamn stupid that it made me angry was this homunculus thing. So this dude claims in his video that he is an alchemist who was able to create a new lifeform by adding his sperm into a chicken egg. In his trial videos after he injects the chicken eggs with his sperm he then incubates them. The end result is this alien creature thing. It’s ridiculous, right? No one would believe this. As he films their progress they like grow tongues and spit acid, even I think at one point gains the ability to shoot electricity. It’s fucking stupid and yet people believe it. Because people are stupid.
Now the fact people are stupid is not new to me, but if you paid just a tiny bit of attention during science class in high school you’d know why this whole jizz in a chicken egg is impossible. I mean, why bother with the egg part and just skip right to fucking the chicken? Same logic, right?
There’s actually people trying to recreate this guy’s videos. There’s a dude whose main channel is to just jerk off into eggs and incubate them so he can hope to grow some kind of half human half chicken hybrid monster. And of course the only results he ever gets are rotten eggs. You’d think something this moronic would get a ton of comments calling him out as an idiot. You do, but mostly it’s because they think he isn’t using the right kind of eggs.
And I’ve officially given up. People are now jizzing in eggs. That’s where we are now. So that pissed me off for a good while. I of course wanted to reply to these videos but I’ve learned my lesson when I commented on a video on how to bathe in bleach as to get rid of your imaginary disease that I can’t remember the name of. It’s something bored housewives think they get. Basically it’s the film Bug with Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon. Of course calling that out, saying instead of soaking your body in fucking bleach for an imaginary disease they don’t have, maybe get some therapy. But my motto now is, let stupid assholes be stupid assholes. You wanna believe the earth is flat, go right on ahead, dipshit. As soon as you’re forced to argue that the earth isn’t flat or in this case that injecting sperm into chicken eggs won’t result in hybrid monster babies, you’ve already lost the argument.
Okay, now let’s talk about Ghost Stories! A film I really didn’t care much for.
Why did I finally land on doing this movie? Well, mainly because it has been getting a lot of good buzz about it. It was one I was saving for horror month, now if you don’t know what horror month is, it’s where I watch nothing but horror movies for the month of October. But seeing as October is still a few months away, I thought I might watch it now.
This film sucks.
That’s the only thing I could think while watching this.
Now before I start, I want to ask you what you think the biggest cliché is for a horror film to use for its twist ending. Just think about it while I continue the rest of this review.
Ghost Stories is an anthology film of sorts. There are three separate stories but they are all loosely connected. I’m not the biggest fan of anthology films. I can tolerate ones like V/H/S and… I’m drawing a blank on any others I actually like. I’m sure some of you are saying what about Trick ‘r Treat? Well easy, I didn’t like Trick ‘r Treat.
Most of the time you get maybe one good segment while the rest are pretty terrible. Or it can be like XX, where all the short stories are terrible. Then there is The ABCs of Death where the segments are so short they can cram as many shitty shorts in there as they want. Another anthology film series I can’t stand by the way. Though I do have a loose connection to one of the ABC’s of Death sequels.
The only anthology film off the top of my head that I absolutely adore is this aussie horror film called Body Melt. I stumbled across this masterpiece when I was going through my aussie horror phase. And trust me, I’d much rather be talking about that movie instead. But since this is a review on Ghost Stories, I’ll move on.
The plot to Ghost Stories is this, a professor named Professor Goodman is a skeptic who has his own tv series where he catches frauds and debunks the supernatural, psychics and alike. His hero growing up was a paranormal investigator named Charles Cameron. The strange thing though was that he disappeared years ago without a trace.
He was believed dead, until one day Professor Goodman receives a tape from Cameron, requesting a visit.
It seems like Charles Cameron has been hiding out in this crappy mobile home. He seems to be on his last legs, living on borrowed time. He asks Professor Goodman to look into three cases that have completely perplexed him.
So Professor Goodman takes up the cases, hoping to prove his hero wrong that the supernatural doesn’t exist.
The first on the list is a night watchman named Tony Matthews. For some reason he is stationed at this abandoned rundown facility that looks like it is about to fall down at any minute. While there the power keeps cutting out and he has to stop what he’s doing and plug the fuses back in. And this happens many 4 times. Just him sitting in his booth, power cuts out, he goes and plugs the fuses back in. That’s mostly what happens until he gives up and decides to walk around. There he runs into a ghost and they hug. The story cuts out after that and we move on to the next story.
That’s one thing that really bothered me about these stories, the “victim” is the one telling the story, meaning we know nothing of consequence ever really happens to them. Oh no, I saw a thing, the end. Either that or the story cuts off and we move on to the next story, like the second story in the bunch.
Story two involves a teen named Simon Rifkind. When Professor Goodman gets to the teen’s house, immediately he notices how unusual everyone is. I also want to point out that the professor has also been seeing flashes of what seems to be a person in a hoody.
Simon tells his story where he was driving late at night when he ran into something. It seemed to be an animal but can’t be sure, as he drives away, his car cuts out and is now being hunted by something in the woods. He is then attacked by… I’m not sure, British bigfoot? I don’t know, it jumps into the car and tells him not to leave, chasing him out into the woods where a tree comes to life and grabs him. The end. What happened after that? No clue. Nothing I guess since he’s telling the story.
Now on to the third and final story, Mike Priddle played by the only actor I recognized in this Martin Freeman. He plays a businessman whose wife and soon to be child was rushed to the hospital due to complications. As Mike Priddle is telling his story, he is taking the professor on a little hiking trip to retrieve some hunting rifles.
His story goes like this. As Mike is waiting at home since his wife and child are at the hospital, a ghost tosses around some baby toys. Then he sees the spirit of his wife, who I assume died giving birth. The end, Mike then finishes telling his story by shooting himself in the head with the shotgun. Finally something of consequence happened to one of the people involved with these stories.
So as Professor Goodman wraps up his investigation, he visits Charles Cameron once again with his findings only to reveal that none of this was real. Charles Cameron rips away his latex old man mask to reveal himself to actually be… Martin Freeman!
Now this film has two twist endings, this one sucks but is still better than how they actually ended it. So Martin Freeman leads the professor down memory lane, where we are lead to believe that the professor is dead and the hooded figure is death. Now this isn’t the cliché ending I was talking about, though it is up there.
Martin Freeman shows the professor a time when he was a young boy getting picked on by a pair of bullies. The bullying was cut short because the local slow kid arrived and the bullies decide to pick on him instead. They trick him into going into a dark tunnel where he… I guess has an asthma attack and dies. Goodman left him there to rot.
And you think now he is going to hell for his crimes… well, that’s when the true ending reveals itself to be… did you guess it yet? The cliché of cliché endings? It was all a dream. Or more like he was in a coma after a failed suicide attempt. But still a dream. All the people telling the stories are people working at the hospital. The night watchman was a janitor, the teen was his nurse and Martin Freeman is his doctor.
Yawn.
This film didn’t have a single scare in it. You didn’t care about a single one of these characters as you spend zero time with them, not to mention Professor Goodman who is a bit of a twat. Before the big plot reveal we are lead to believe it’s just about trying to disprove these stories, yet the stories themselves are kind of lame. And like I mentioned, we know they make it out fine by the end since they are there telling the story.
The actual end also kind of undercuts the message I thought this film was going for as well, debunking the debunker. You thought ghosts aren’t real, turns out you were a ghost this whole time. Nope, just a dream.
The real head scratcher for me was when they choose to end the film playing Monster Mash over the credits. What was the relevance to that? It might have made sense if it was a callback to a later scene or something but no, it’s just added just because. It’s so weird.
For anthology films go, this one was pretty bad. Usually there’s at least one good story like I mentioned but this didn’t have any. Maybe the first story if I had to choose, though it was mostly repetitive then it ends.
Like this review. SKIP IT.
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