Here it is…
(And don’t forget to check out Week 2!)
Dark Harvest – This was the one I was most excited for after watching the trailer. Which could only mean one thing: it was bound to let me down. There is some really good stuff in this; the gore is fantastic, it looks good, and it’s messy and fun. The creature design is also really well done. Even the premise is great about a town that most sends its kids out on Halloween night to stop a monster called Sawtooth Jack, who is filled with candy. To get the teens riled up, they lock them in a room for 3 days and starve them, siccing them after our monster. The issue, however, starts to bleed in about midway, as the editing gets weird and the plot moves too quickly, which means a lot of downtime is going to just be characters sitting around and talking. And that’s exactly what happens. And then, by the third act, the whole movie just falls apart. But it still has enough going for it that I’ll give it a RENT.
Dear David – Buzzfeed made a horror movie. Can you guess how it turned out? Top 10 Reasons Why Dear David Sucks Balls! Is Buzzfeed still around? You know, the site that just does stupid top 10 lists. I honestly couldn’t pin down what this wanted to be, was it a spoof? A comedy? Was it genuinely trying to be a scary ghost movie like The Ring or The Grudge? If so, they failed miserably. It’s kind of laughable this was even made. It looked cheap, it bored me to tears, the acting is dreadful, the characters are unlikable trash… I could go on and on. This is a SKIP.
Outpost – The type of horror I hate the most are ones where the main character is clearly insane and it takes the movie two hours to reveal… yeah, the character is insane. Wow, you mean the crazy lady was actually crazy this whole time? What a twist! I guess maybe technically there’s more going on—possibly being possessed by ghosts—but it’s very unclear, and by the time she starts killing folks, I’ve already checked out. I do, however, think that someone with more patients could get more out of this and enjoy it more, but I have other things to watch that hopefully will be better. SKIP.
The Mill – Shudder isn’t the only one with exclusive horror films, as Hulu has a batch of their own. The first I checked out was The Mill, a contained horror thriller that takes place in a futuristic world where an AI-run corporation sends its employees who are slacking on the job to a prison-like facility where you must push an old-school mill from biblical times. If you don’t hit your quota, you die. I’ve seen a lot of movies like this, with maybe one or two characters; some of these movies are bad and some of them are good. This was one of the good ones. By the third act, I wasn’t really sure where else they could have taken things, as it seemed like they wrote themselves into a hole. But they, in my opinion, managed to pull it off. This is a solid RENT.
Saw X – This hit streaming, so I was finally able to catch it. Let’s start with how boring this entry into the franchise is. I don’t think I’ve ever said that about any Saw movie before, not even Spiral. Okay, maybe Spiral. It’s so boring, they had to include a fake-out torture scene just to keep everyone’s attention. Take that in, a Saw movie needed to do a fantasy kill. It’s even the one so prominently shown in the trailer and on the poster, and it never actually happened. Another big issue I had was with Jigsaw himself, who is now our hero of the story. They pulled a Don’t Breathe 2 and made our serial killer into the one we root for. Then there’s the ending. Spoilers, our main villain, the one who tricked and took Jigsaw’s money, gets away. In a normal movie, that’s what you’d want, but remember, they are the bad guys and Jigsaw is the good guy, so the villain wins and gets away with it. Her trap or game was that she had to kill her lover, whom she was most likely going to kill anyway. That’s it. She sticks her head through a hole to breathe when a room they get trapped in is filled with chemicals. One dude who was just the nurse had to cut his own brain out, and she was the one in charge of the whole scam operation. Another thing that didn’t work is that I know this is meant to be set between the first and second films; however, those films came out like 18 years ago, so when our legacy characters show up, it looks like they aged 18 years. This is really pushing a SKIP, but because of the gory bits, maybe a light RENT. Better than Jigsaw and Spiral, but man, I think this well they keep trying to pull from has officially run dry. Time to hit the restart button, guys.
Natty Knocks – From the director of Halloween 4 and Free Willy 2, we have one of the worst movies I’ve seen this month. The whole Natty Knocks thing doesn’t really come into the story whatsoever. It’s basically just Bill Moseley creeping around in the dark, doing nothing. The plot meanders off course almost immediately, making the whole opening sequence of Natty Knocks becoming a vengeful spirit utterly pointless to anything else that is going on for the rest of the movie. It’s mostly about stolen copper wire and two asshole kids who witness a murder and do nothing about it. Unfocused as hell, terrible acting, terrible dialogue, flat, uninteresting direction—the whole movie was pointless and boring as hell. I have no idea why I kept watching after the 20-minute mark; I knew this wasn’t going to get any better. This is a HARD SKIP.
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