Review – Forget Me Not

Given how often vengeful spirits return for payback, I’m surprised witless teenagers bother killing anyone at all. So this is that. Production values are okay. Most of the actors have professional headshots on IMDb. But the story is strictly leftovers, and even the shocks that work get old after awhile. See if desperate

Review – The Closet

Eh, it’s not the worst ghost story I’ve ever seen. Ghost kids have their pluses (creepy) and their minuses (often not all that menacing), which is very much the case for this elaborate Korean rework of Poltergeist. Mildly amusing

Review – The Painted

This movie has two things in common with an average episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery series: it’s a supernatural thriller that centers around paintings, and it packed enough plot for around 20 minutes. Sadly, it’s feature length. The digital liquid effects are fun when evil spirits emerge from or return to their canvases. Otherwise this is a mostly dreary ghost story with some awkward anti-porn subtext. Mildly amusing

Review – Brooklyn 45

The combination of the single room setting and dreadful dialogue make this production reek of a sophomore-level playwriting assignment. I was intrigued by the notion of a seance dredging up supernatural fallout from war crimes, but the premise is swiftly buried under a mountain of ill-conceived character motivations and a relentless stream of bickering. The inattention to detail is also nettlesome. For example, one of the characters committed an atrocity in Berlin during the war, but the US Army didn’t enter that city until after the war in Europe ended. The incident could easily have been located somewhere else in Germany, which showcases the sloppy approach to storytelling here. And though the cast is populated with some semi-familiar faces, almost all the actors are too old to have recently done military service. Maybe if it had been Brooklyn 65 instead? See if desperate

Review – The Deep House

I understand why guy-with-a-camcorder movies tend to suck. If you’re spending next to nothing to create your magnum opus, you don’t have much incentive to make anything that audiences might actually enjoy. But this isn’t guy-with-a-camcorder drivel. This is a story about a pair of social media producers who scuba dive down to a submerged house, remove a crucifix from the basement door and suffer the consequences. Most of the movie takes place during the dive, requiring a considerable amount of expensive underwater set and camera work. Those parts of the production were genuinely impressive (other than some small details such as modern-looking door handles in a house that had supposedly been at the bottom of a French lake for decades). Unfortunately, the story is nowhere near the equal of the technical quality. The movie hits its halfway point before anything even vaguely supernatural happens. And the script of the back half – consisting mostly of “Ben! Answer me!” screamed over and over – would have been way better suited for extreme low budget garbage than for something that should have been good. And the filmmakers seem to have given almost no thought at all to how viewers would react to the “running out of air” motif. If the protagonists are going to drown no matter what they do, being chased by ghosts is kinda beside the point. I was even disappointed by the bit at the end of the credits, which could easily have been more clever. See if desperate

Review – Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

Going into it, the folks who made this movie must have realized that they weren’t going to be able to create anything as eerie as the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark book series, especially not Stephen Gammell’s excellent art work. So they didn’t bother to try. Instead, this is a handful of elements from the books stirred into a gumbo with everything from high school bullies to the Vietnam War. The main thread is about a ghostly manuscript that writes itself, bringing doom to all who find their stories told within its pages. Mildly amusing

Review – Ouija: Origin of Evil

This production started with two strikes against it: it’s a sequel to an uninspiring horror movie, and its premise is as cliché-ridden as they come. Though the characters and the story do indeed turn out to be on the stale side, the production has some fun moments, too. Some of the scares are good, though they return to the same wells too frequently. And on the technical side, the director added some quirky touches to make the movie look more like it was shot in the early 1970s. Mildly amusing

Review – Shutter (2004)

I’m fond of those rare moments when folks making a horror movie can start with a good concept and then do something good with it. The theme here is spirit photography, a subject with great potential to either provide genuine scares or descend into cliché-ridden nonsense. Fortunately the folks who made this Thai production chose the first path. To be sure, parts of this movie are hard to watch (particularly the sexual assault). But overall this supernatural revenge picture is an impressive assembly of coherent story, good acting and some genuine creepiness. Worth seeing

Review – Ghosts of War

Why is it so goddamn hard to combine the war and horror genres? They seem like they’d go well together. Yet this is the umpteenth attempt I’ve seen that starts out solidly enough but then can’t seal the deal. The plot drops a small group of WW2 GIs into a haunted mansion, and at first it plays as a standard ghost story. Then it starts to meander, becoming implausible even with the extra latitude due a supernatural tale. And as if the filmmakers realize it’s going off the rails, they lean into the skid with a shaggy dog twist. They might have gotten away with it if that had been the punchline that ended the joke. But it kept going from there. Perhaps they were trying to draw some kind of awkward parallel between Nazis and ISIS, but any point they were trying to make got lost in the inept storytelling. See if desperate

Review – Malicious

Young married couple Adam and Lisa have it made. With a baby on the way, they’ve just moved into a huge house supplied to them for free by his new employer (math teachers being in such high demand at small liberal arts colleges that they merit such royal treatment, apparently). That makes it extra sad that opening an innocent-looking box unleashes a baby-murdering, marriage-destroying evil spirit. Not even the parapsychologist head of the husband’s department at work can do much to stop the horror or end the movie any faster. See if desperate

Review – Lights Out

This movie’s plot description sounded so much like Darkness Falls that I had to watch at least a few minutes of it just to be sure I hadn’t seen it already. Turns out it isn’t literally the same story, though it has a lot of similarities. Director David Sandberg expands his chilling little short subject into a feature-length tale, and though the longer version isn’t as scary, it still works reasonably well. Mildly amusing

Review – The Quiet Ones

After sitting through this effort from Hammer, i felt the need to go back and watch a couple of old pictures from the (allegedly) same studio just to remind myself that they used to make movies that didn’t suck. Apparently the mighty art fallen into dismal little bits of nonsense about psychology academics tormenting a girl who can supposedly conjure a ghost exclusively using the power of her mind. For what it’s worth, saying this is based on the real-life “Philip experiments” is a little like saying Transformers is based on the work of Alan Turing. See if desperate

Review – Our House

You can tell you came from the 80s if you immediately want to follow the title with “in the middle of our street.” And you can tell you’re an indie-film-loving hipster if you like this movie. The story begins with a Tesla-esque attempt to invent wireless household current. Sadly for our already-sad orphans, the experiment 1. doesn’t light lightbulbs and 2. awakens evil spirits in their house. The cast isn’t bad, but they’re wasted on a lackluster script. See if desperate

Review – The Curse of La Llorona

This is by far my favorite entry in the Conjuring universe, at least in part because I had no idea until midway through that it was even intended to be part of the set. No Warrens. Only a brief, irrelevant glimpse of Annabelle. Instead of the series standbys, we get a genuinely scary antagonist from Mexican folklore. A social worker and single mom (Linda Cardellini) finds herself pitted against the infamous child-snatching ghost. Worth seeing

Review – Ghost Stories (2020)

Despite the unimaginative title, this quartet of supernatural tales from India is quite good. Though naturally some are better than others, the set is stylish as well as spooky. Mildly amusing

Review – Winchester

The true part of this story is familiar enough: Sarah Winchester, widow of the firearms manufacturer William Wirt Winchester, believed she was being haunted by the ghosts of people slain with her husband’s rifles. So she had a mansion built (and built and built) with no end of eccentric details in order to placate and/or befuddle the restless dead. Simply positing that her ghosts were real should have been enough to sustain a good horror movie, especially with Helen Mirren in the title role and permission obtained to do at least some of the filming in the real location. Alas, the plot never finds a way to get off the ground. Mildly amusing

Review – Insidious: The Last Key

Yeah, I’ve seen the word “last” in horror franchise titles before. In this one, Dr. Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye) is asked to help the current occupants of the haunted house where she grew up. The story features an unpleasant subplot about child abuse, but otherwise it’s what fans have come to expect from the Insidious series. See if desperate

Review – Ouija 3: The Charlie Charlie Challenge

An hour and a half of “Charlie bit my finger” would have been less of a challenge to watch. This has no obvious connection to any other Ouija movie, and it’s justly listed on IMDb only as Charlie Charlie. The cast appears to have been recruited from an undergraduate theatre program. The setting is a struggling-to-get-by haunted house attraction. If you’ve ever seen a movie that met those two descriptions, then you already know exactly what you’re in for here. If you haven’t had this experience already, please don’t feel like you need to. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Ghost House

Thailand bears the burden of scapegoat in this typical cautionary tale for American tourists who dare to stray into the woods. Triteness and racism aside, I’ve seen worse spins on the general plot. See if desperate

Review – Rings

If the Ring video turns into a creepypasta and goes viral, poor Samara is going to have her hands full. As her next victim struggles to escape her watery clutches, I can hear her moaning, “Dude, do you mind not running? I’ve got another 20 million people to kill tonight.” Part of the story here is a college professor’s study of the whole videotape thing in which he arranges a chain of viewers so nobody dies. It left me wondering if it could circle back, with the last person in the line showing it to the first person again. Of course if I’m wondering about that kind of silly nonsense, I’ve obviously lost interest in the movie itself. Which was easy enough to do, given the parade of go-nowhere plot twists and absence of any likeable characters. See if desperate