TITLE & REVIEW
Christina Ricci
has a messed-up life.
She ends up left for dead on a roadside,
but she is taken in by a much older man (a Jedi Master from
Star Wars: Phantom Menace
) who wants to help her move on.
Sound familiar?
Well, this is not Black Snake Moan,
it is a supernatural suspense thriller with the same premise.
Ms Ricci wakes up on a mortician’s slab. The mortician himself (Liam Neeson - Star Wars: TPM ) tells her that she is merely a soul trapped in a dead body, and that she will be put to rest in a few days. Will she ever get to see her boyfriend (Justin Long - Drag Me To Hell ) again?
M Night Shyamalan in his hey-day would have done a much better job with this. However, it seems he has fallen prey to the vanity of the modern film-maker and (like most low-budget directors) considers himself an auteur.
Back in the 1970s, some English academics tried to make contact with a spirit from beyond the grave.
Unfortunately it all went wrong.
Sebastian Stan ( Captain America: Winter Soldier ) and Ashley Greene are a young couple who move into a new house. Strange things start to happen, so the husband installs CCTV. No, this is not a found footage film like Paranormal Activity , it is nowhere near that good. Despite apparently knowing in advance, Hubby did not bother to check his e-mails. His best buddy, parapsychologist Tom Felton ( Harry Potter ), sent him an expositionary video clip.
The evil spirit keeps breaking in and re-decorating. The girl is terrified, and insists on camping out in a tent in the back yard. That did not work out well for the Blair Witch Project team. Meanwhile, her husband knows exactly what the monster is but he chooses a baseball bat as his weapon to fight it with!
It turns out that hubby was once a parapsychologist too. He, Felton and Julianna Guill tried to contact the spirit five years previously, with predictable results. The only way to protect yourself seems to be to turn your home into a farraday cage, like the Moscow apartment in that recent Alien Invasion movie.
An American family move into a new home - a
Cabin in the Woods
. The teenage son befriends the creepy girl next door - Sam (
Liana Liberato
). She looks like a young
Megan Fox
, so the creepiness factor is easily offset by her looks.
The house is supposed to be haunted. The teenagers do not go into the cellar to transgress. No, they go into the attic instead! They discover a radio that can be used for talking to the dead.
It is quickly evident that the ghosts are real. This raises the usual question in all cliched ghost movies. Is the main ghost going to commit a murder-spree, or is it a death-omen of a non-ghostly killer about to go on a spree? After all, those are the two resolutions that these storylines have. Well, it turns out that there is a new one - sort of. Really, it makes no sense at all.
Sheriff Lance Hendricksen (
Millennium
) and his estranged son go for a hike in the woods.
However, Hendricksen gets injured.
Worse, something in the mist starts to harrass and attack the two men.
The story flips between three different views - the present-day reality, a series of flashbacks and what seem to be hallucinations. It all blends together, making an enormous unintelligible mess.
Hendricksen is listed as having worked on a dozen Feature films in 2014 that are due for release in 2015. The laws of supply and demand indicate that he is in high demand as a skilled and well-known actor, but also he must supply his services regardless of the quality or artistic merit of the project.
Emily is a night-nurse who gets paid to look after a terminal patient,
all alone in a creepy old house in the middle of nowhere.
Before long the lights go out,
and she is left to run around with a torch while creepy things happen.
If this all sounds familiar, this movie is pretty much a rehash of Dark House (2010) - even down to the steadicam setup. A far better version of the story is The Last Light (2010) .
Abigail Breslin
is stuck in a time loop, eternally reliving the same day over and over again.
She and her family live in a nice house in the suburbs.
One day they get a visit from a stranger - Stephen McHattie ( The Dark (1993) , the Canadian Lance Hendricksen).
This was directed by
Jan DeBont
, best known for big-budget action films.
It is based on The Haunting of Hell House,
credited as a book written by
Shirley Jackson
. This usually goes to
Richard Matheson
, so there has to be a story behind it.
The story starts with Nell ( Lilli Taylor ) grieving the death of her mother and facing eviction by her sister Jane ( Virgina Madsen ). She has nowhere else to go.
Dr David Marrow (Liam Neeson - Star Wars: TPM ) is looking for volunteers for a scientific study. He tells everyone it is to treat insomnia, but he is really researching fear responses. As a result he decided to hold it in a creepy old mansion. Nell is selected for the study.
Nell arrives at Hill House and meets the creepy caretaker (Bruce Dern - Silent Running ). It is actually his wife who gives the cliched doom-and-gloom speech, yet another example of this movie passing the Bechdel test. Then we meet the other test subjects - Theo ( Catherine Zeta-Jones ) and Luke (Owen Wilson - Shanghai Knights ). They add glamour and humour, and are both bigger names than Lilli Taylor. This may have been necessary for marketing reasons, but it still seems unfair that she virtually carries the entire movie and yet she only gets fourth billing. The others actually do very little, and yet cash a bigger pay cheque.
Emma Watson
, a 20-something English girl playing a teenage American,
claims to have been sexually assaulted.
A police detective (Ethan Hawke -
Gattacca
) and psychiatrist (
Dragonheart
) interrogate the suspect, a very impressionable man, under hypnotic regression.
He implicates someone else, and the whole thing snowballs from there.
The local Police officer (Aaron Ashmore - Smallville ) is a suspect. The victim's brother, Roy (Devon Bostick - The 100 ), gets called in as a witness. Julian Richings ( Supernatural ) also helps out.
This works on a number of levels. On the surface it is a straightforward police procedural, like Law & Order: Sexy Victims Unit. The detective uncovers rumours of a satanic conspiracy, which edges this into horror movie status. But the third level comes courtesy of the uniformed cops, who point out that the detective is selectively following cherry-picked information sources. All in all, this is a clear-cut case of Satanic Panic.
Ironically, for a film about a real-life puritanical witch-hunt the credited producers include Harvey Wankstain himself.
Sarah Michelle Gellar
, now a brunette, is a travelling saleswoman who visits a small town in rural Texas.
The place is so small that the only other recognisable actor is
Griff the mechanic, played by a well-disguised JC Mackenzie (
Dark Angel
).
Our Final Girl has visions concerning a woman's murder fifteen years previously. Are they memories, or is she being haunted? Perhaps she is hallucinating due to insanity brought on by being stalked by co-worker Adam Scott ( Hot Tub Time Machine 2 ).
This is a suspense thriller with a supernatural element. As a result it is slow-moving ... too much so, in fact. There is just not enough material in this story for it to fit a feature length format. It could have been a decent episode of a TV show like The Twilight Zone , but that is about it. That said, the film is well-shot with great cinematography in a couple of scenes, but that is certainly not enough to save it. Especially since the editing is not up to the same standard, and the ADR has failed since the lip-synch does not work.
What does this have to do with the original movie,
or with the state of Connecticut?
Well, nothing at all.
This is about completely different characters in a completely different state,
thousands of miles away.
A woman ( Abigail Spencer ) moves her family into an old house. Her sister ( Katee Sackhoff ) decides to stay there too, in a trailer parked in the grounds.
It turns out that Dixie-land has some bad history to it. Not that it is built on a bunch of ancient Native American burial grounds or anything, but there are the unsettled spirits of some former slaves to worry about.
This movie is apparently based on a true story. The surviving people portrayed in the film appear at the end credits for a group photo.
Dylan McDermott (
American Horror Story
) takes his wife (
Penelope Anne Miller
) and teenage daughter (
Kristen Stewart
) to live in a deserted old wooden farmhouse in the American mid-west.
The Real Estate agent (William B. Davis -
X-Files
) offers to buy them out,
but the father wants to settle the family in and collect the first harvest.
There is a ghostly presence in the house. Is it a murderous entity, or merely a death omen? The ghosts show themselves to the daughter, but her parents think she is merely hysterical. When she is physically injured by the ghosts, the parents think it is self-inflicted.
A stranger (John Corbett - The Visitor ) drops by the house, and gets hired as a farm labourer. He says he cannot see the ghosts either, but at least he offers to help the heroine.
The result is a decent supernatural suspense effort. Stewart is acceptable as a Final Girl, and the cast is not overshadowed by the special effects.
This is a prequel to the first Messengers film.
A farmer (Norman Reedus -
Walking Dead
) is having trouble with his creepy corn-field.
On the advice of his new white trash neighbour (Richard Riehle -
Texas Chanisaw 3-D
) he puts up an ugly scarecrow that is more reminiscent of
Jeepers Creepers 2
than it is of
The Wizard of Oz
.
Mysterious deaths start to happen. As the farmer is put under more and more stress by events, his family (including daughter Claire Holt ) think he is insane and distance themselves from him. Of course, we must ask ourselves: is this a monster movie, or is there a predictable untruthful narrator twist?
This is a low-budget Found Footage movie
that spawned five sequels,
so its importance in the film industry should not be underestimated.
Despite its lack of recognisable stars,
the simple story well told made it unbelievably successful.
A twenty-something couple in suburban San Diego, California, install security cameras around their home. The events captured by those cameras indicate that an invisible demonic entity is at work there.
A happy upper-middle-class family in California falls victim to a series of unfortunate events,
which are recorded on the house's CCTV system.
Naturally, since this is a sequel it has to be more extreme than the original.
This ties in with the original film in a surprising way, providing additional backstory to the demonic haunting occurance.
This starts in 2005,
with the two sisters that the first two movies centred on.
They discover some old VHS tapes that contain their home movies.
Yes, this is Found Footage story-within-a-story.
Back in 1988, the girls lived with their parents. In those days, video cameras were very expensive - so Found Footage does not fit in a domestic situation. After all, the original example - Cannibal Holocaust (1977) - featured a professional camera crew. Luckily the father was a professional wedding videographer, so he has all the equipment necessary to wire up his home.
The family had moved into a new home, and the sisters had no friends in the neighbourhood. To solve this problem, the younger girl made an imaginary friend. Well, she made friends with an invisible creature.
After the disappearance of key characters in the first two movies,
a woman and a young boy move into a house in suburban USA.
The protagonist is a teenage girl,
who (thanks to her BF) sets up webcams to watch everything in the house.
Unfortunately they never bother to watch any of the spooky footage,
or things might have ended differently.
Her mother is played by genre star Alexondra Lee , a fact that destroys suspension of disbelief built up by the Found Footage setup.
This is the fifth entry in the series.
Like the others, it is presented as found footage,
although the characters tend to record themselves at the most unusual times.
The story follows a pair of latino teenagers in a working class area. They suspect that their neighbour is a witch. This follows on from the previous film, where the demonic entity was linked to a coven.
A family move into a house in 2013,
and discover a 1980s camcorder among the previous owner's old stuff.
It has additional filters wired in,
which allow it to see paranormal entities that are invisible to the human eye.
Before long, people using the camcorder start to see weird things.
The camcorder contains a tape from 1988. When they play it back, they see events from the family in Paranormal Activity 3 , the prequel movie. The young girls on the tape seem to have precognitive powers, and it appears that they can see the people watching them on video.
Skyler ( Olivia Taylor Dudley ), a friend of the family, is into yoga and feng shui. She gives a bit of exposition about spirit photography. There is also a local priest who knows a bit about exorcisms. Will the victims actually have a chance of surviving this time?
A young woman (
) takes a geneaological DNA test,
and discovers that she is related to an Amish family.
They invite her to stay with them for a week,
so she brings along a couple of friends
to help her make a documentary about finding her lost family.
The trio of documentarians settle in for the week. Eventually they realise that there is something wrong with the community, centring around a mysterious boarded-up church in the woods.
The emphasis on the weepy heroine, with a couple of male companions for camera and sound work, makes this seem like a poor relation of Blair Witch Project . The story does not tie in with the rest of the Paranormal Activity series, so presumably the Producers just wanted to cash in with the title.
Craig T. Nelson (
) and his family move into a suburban house.
The wife (
JoBeth Williams
) discovers a supernatural presence in the new home.
It seems benign at first, but later becomes threatening -
especially towards the youngest daughter, Carol Ann.
They call in some parapsychologists, who in turn call in a psychic medium.
This time, the Magic Negro is actually a Magic Person-With-A-Disbility.
This was directed by Tobe Hooper , his big-budget SPFX-heavy effort after the success of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1976) . Spielberg, more experienced with SPFX, was the Producer - and there is a rumour that he stepped into the Director's shoes. However, there is no sign of Spielberg's trademark foreground/background style. For better or worse, this is Hooper's work.
There are a couple of creepy facts about this movie. One is that the eldest daughter is played by Dominique Dunne , whose role in V (1983) had to be re-cast with Blair Tefkin after Dunne was murdered half-way through filming. Another story about Poltergeist is that, rather than use plastic skeletons, the special effects crew used actual real-life human bone skeletons . This dis-proves the film's central thesis - that contact with human remains will lead to a mass haunting event.
Sam Rockwell (
Iron Man 2
) and his family move into a suburban house.
The young boy, afraid of everything,
gets stuck in the creepy attic room with the
and a cupboard full of creepy clown dolls.
This is almost as predictable a cliché as the bit when
the teenage babysitter goes exploring in the dark creepy basement by herself.
As with the rest of the ghost movies that have polluted our screens since Paranormal Activity appeared a few years ago, you can expect the Lewton Bus to be used when you most expect it.
Let us look at the state of the movie industry these days. Poltergeist has just come out, the most controversial thing on is Mad Max , and we are all looking forward to the next Star Wars and Terminator movies. Are we all trapped in the year 1981? Is there nothing to look forward to except yet more re-hashings of old favourites? On the bright side, there is now Jurassic World on the way. Let us hope Jurassic Park 4 is more original than Die Hard 4, Scary Movie 4, Mad Max 4 and any of the other recent fourth parts of a Trilogy!
The story starts with a well-lit, well-shot night sequence of Rose (
Radha Mitchell
) in search of her adopted daughter Sharon (
Jodelle Ferland
). The girl has been sleep-walking,
and may have self-destructive impulses linked to her early childhood.
Mother and adopted daughter go on a road-trip, in search of the girl's birth-parents. She was originally from a ghost-town in Appalachia, West Virginia, which has been abandoned due to a massive underground fire in the coal seam underneath. This is actually inspired by a real-life town in the USA, although the real-life town lacks the supernatural infestation.
Rose gets pulled over by a Police Officer ( Laurie Holden ), but does not want to have a brief conversation. Instead she commits Contempt of Cop - the worst crime imaginable - and drives off at full throttle towards the town. Naturally, the cop follows ...
Rose and the cop end up in Silent Hill - an empty, smoke-filled ghost-town. Sharon has gone missing, so they go in search of her. Instead they discover some homeless folk, led by a Matriarch ( Alice Krige ). The birth-mother turns out to be Deborah Kara Unger .
Meanwhile the husband (Sean Bean - Game of Thrones ) comes in search of his family. The Police Chief (Kim Coates - Sons of Anarchy) tells him to go home, but he naturally refuses.
A teenage girl (who looks like a young
Michelle Williams
) has nightmares about the horrific world of Silent Hill.
She wakes up in time for us to get exposition about how she and her father (Sean Bean from
Game of Thrones
- now pudgy and unshaven with an American accent)
are on the run from Satanic Cultists.
On her first day at her new school she befriends fellow Newbie, Kit Harrington (Bean's co-star from
Game of Thrones
).
The wicked Queen ( Carrie-Anne Moss ) and her minions need the girl to defeat a demon.
A family of Italian-Americans, the Montellis,
move into the haunted house in Amityville.
The father is middle-aged, and the teenagers have an incestuous vibe to them.
This appears to be a prequel, set before the events of the first film.
The family are a name-changed portrayal of the DeMeo family,
and the teenage boy is a version of Ron.
Presumably the names were changed so the film-makers could use artistic license
when it came to details of real peoples' lives,
whereas if it were just straight-up supernatural events without scientific verification
then they would be free to make things up as they pleased.
Ron hears a creepy demonic voice speak to him through his Walkman. Well, it was the decade of the Satanic Panic - when people thought that Heavy Metal music would convert their kids to satanism! This was due in part to movies like this, based on a supposedly true-life book brought out to cash in on the 1970s trend started by The Exorcist (1973) . Ironically, that trend also inspired the style adopted by rock and roll musicians when they created Heavy Metal itself. A case of life imitating art imitating life imitating art … a circle that could potentially continue forever.
The cellar contains a hidden door. Ron discovers that it hides a secret gateway to Hell, or something. He also gets some strange camera angles, to indicate that his mental state is fracturing. That is about as subtle as this movie gets.
The local Catholic priest knows that something bad is in the house. He even suggests to his boss that they arrange an exorcism. However, he still takes the weekend off so he can head off on a trip with his boyfriend (Andrew Prine - V: The Final Battle ).
Since this is based on a true story, it is all rather predictable. Was anyone surprised when when the ship sank at the end of Titanic ? However, the story keeps going. Ron is arrested on suspicion, because he is an incredibly suspicious-looking person. The priest gets permission to perform an exorcism. Unfortunately this requires taking the mass murderer to the church - no police escort, just a lone unarmed priest. What could possibly go wrong?
This was part of a slew of low-budget genre pictures released in the year 1983.
It has a lot in common with the others (
Jaws 3-D, Friday the 13th Part III
), and not just that it was the third part in a series. To compete with the likes of
Star Wars: Return of the Jedi
they decided to go style over substance.
As a result they used what now looks like cheap and nasty 3-D effects.
The first film in this series was based on the claims of the Lutz family. The second was a prequel, about the DeMeo family murders. This effort tells the story of a journalist who buys the house to debunk the claims of a haunting.
The only teenagers in the story are the journalist's daughter Lori Loughlin and her friend Meg Ryan .
The Amityville house is up for sale,
so a small army of Catholic priests descends on it for an exorcism.
One priest, Father Kibbler (Fredric Lehne -
Zero Dark Thirty
), is put into a coma by a lamp when the house fights back.
A little old lady buys the lamp at a yard sale, and sends it to her sister Alice Leacock ( Jane Wyatt ). The sister's grown-up daughter Nancy Evans ( Patty Duke ) and her teenage kids come to visit. The pets realise that something evil is present when the lamp is switched on, but of the humans only the youngest girl senses anything.
Nancy's son Brian (Aron Eisenberg - Star Trek: DS9 ) is of little account. However, Jessica Evans ( Brandy Gold ) - the youngest girl - has secret conversations with her dead father. Yes, this is a bit like a made-for-TV version of Sinister ... without the jarring genre shift, but still a much inferior version.
This was written and directed by Sandor Stern , based on a novel of the same title.
An architect named Jacob (Stephen Macht -
Galaxina
) returns home from visiting a suburban housing development he designed.
It is called Amityville Manors -
a supreme example of genre blindness,
because in the real world the name Amityville is so infamous
it was used to sell low-budget horror movies like this
annually for four decades!
The architect is greeted by his ex-girlfriend Andrea (
Shawn Weatherly
), who is babysitting his teenage daughter Lisa (
Megan Ward
). They make good fodder for the fem-jep (female jeopardy)
that this genre relies on.
Jacob may be set up as the hero, but he quickly ends up bed-bound with a dog bite. The doctor warns that his anti-biotics might result in mood swings, so nobody is surprised when he acts out of character. While Jacob mentally and physically deteriorates, like Regan in The Exorcist , Andrea is left in charge of the home ... and the storyline.
Ward was in her early twenties when this was made, playing a character in her mid teens. This was standard practice at the time, and allows the filmmakers to depict her in a sexualised way. First she has an encounter with an evil mirror image of herself, then she seems to be possessed by that version because she turns into a sexy femme fatale.
The plot centres around a clock salvaged from Amityville house. While in real life the DeMeo family were Italians with Mafia connections, in this version they are descended from a French necromancer named DeFeo. Somehow the clock got magical powers to control time, but nothing is really clear. Sometimes it seems to possess people, sometimes it only makes them halucinate, sometimes it makes the ground swallow people up - like a crappy low-budget low-creativity version of Under The Skin . There is even a pretty impressive death scene of the Final Destination type.
While the film itself is uneven, the casting at least is impressive. Macht worked with Dorothy Stratten , and was even the lead in a backdoor pilot for a spin-off of The Six Million Dollar Man . Weatherly may not have become as famous as Erika Eleniak or her replacement Pamela Anderson , but she was a regular in the first season of Baywatch. Ward was female lead in Dark Skies . An alternate casting might see Lee Majors as Jacob, Alexandra Paul as Andrea and Jeri Lynn Ryan as Lisa!
A middle-aged man and his second wife move their blended family into a newly-built house.
In the garden shed, the last thing remaining of the previous house on the site (other than the chimney),
they find a dollhouse that is an exact replica of the haunted house in Amityville.
It turns out that the man built the new house himself,
on the site of his childhood home which mysteriously burned down.
Hmm.
The blended family is the main source of conflict in the story. The man's son is the eldest child, and while he tries to get along with the stepmother's son he just spends most of his time hooking up with his girlfriend ( Lisa Robin Kelly ). In contrast, the stepmother's son is unhappy and complains at every opportunity.
As always, the demons' powers seem inconsistent. Sometimes they can magically control things, such as turning a car's ignition key so that the garage fills up with carbon monoxide. Mostly they just cause the family to halucinate, with a series of waking dreams and nightmares that exploit the family's dreams and fears. For example, the stepmother finds herself sexually fantasising about her tweenage stepson. Later, her deceased husband apparently comes back from the dead as a decomposing smart-zombie that wants his son to become a murderer. It turns out that the demons themselves have a corporeal form, and they exist in a Hell Dimension accessible through a gateway in the fireplace. How this helps them turn the car's ignition on is not explained.
