What horror movie did you just watch? (Was it any good?)

I just finished Hell House LLC 3: The Lake of Fire. It’s a Shudder exclusive, so kudos to Stephen Cognetti, the writer and director of the series, for getting the final movie in his trilogy made, I guess.

It was awful. This time, a multi-millionaire bought the hotel and turned it into some terrible interactive play called Insomnia. A modern retelling of Faust. The conceit was that the audience walks through hotel to watch the play being acted out in the various rooms. They have to wear white blank-face masks because the idea wasn’t pretentious enough on its own.

None of that matters though. Hell happens during the rehearsals and lead-up to opening night. More spooky clown stuff occurs, along with ghost characters from the previous movies, and annoying digital camera glitches, then evil supervillain guy pops in and blah, blah, blah. Finally, a bunch of people get killed by evil cultists via the lamest, least convincing blood effects I’ve seen in a really long time. Then everyone gets miraculously saved and resurrected by the multi-millionaire because it turns out he was an angel all along, and he was trying to lure the evil head cultist out to fight him. I shit you not. The hotel burns down and everyone previously killed wakes up in the field behind the hotel. The movie ends with the cast from the first movie waking up in the afterlife purgatory of the hotel, and the angel telling them they’re fucked and have to stay there forever because they started all this garbage. The last bit of dialogue is two of the guys saying, “Fuck it. Let’s see if the bar still has booze.” Then they walk out of the room.

I could’ve watched anything, but I chose this. I’m dumb.

Ugh. That’s really disappointing, since my buddy Cliff – who reviews a lot of horror movies on his blog here – really liked the first Hell House LLC, despite having misgivings about it going in.

I’ve got that first entry in the series queued up for sometime soon. Still worth a watch?

Oh, also queued up for weekend watching: Studio Canal has done a 4k UHD remaster of Angel Heart, which I’m a sucker for, so yeah.

The first one is surprisingly solid. I’d say it’s worth a viewing.

Ha ha, you saw Hell House LLC III!

The first one really was a fluke. Now, like so many horror franchises, they’re just getting worse and worse. How about those special effects, though? When the earth cracks open near the end and the flames come roaring out? That must have cost dozens of dollars of CG work.

-Tom

The worst special effect was the acting.

It really is painful watching these kids who can’t act left to improvise dialogue during found footage movies. Ouch. At least write some lines for those poor kids or something.

-Tom

I thought the first one had some cracking scares and moments so it’s absolutely worth a watch. The others I haven’t seen, for obvious reasons.

Sounds like he was ripping off Sleep No More. But, uh, that spoiler stuff. Hooboy.

Is Samara Weaving the new Ashley Bell until Ashley Bell returns to the fold? I don’t know. Bell has a project forthcoming called Voices that’s labeled as horror but I don’t know much about it. I keep hoping for a return to form (so to speak; truthfully she’s been good in everything I’ve seen her in but the projects haven’t all been good).

I just watched a couple of years old Aussie vehicle with Weaving called Bad Girl. It features an actual bad girl who is the adoptive daughter of a couple who have moved out of the city in aprt due to all the trouble she has caused. She befriends the local girl Chloe (Weaving), who has more going on than meets the eye and I bet you can guess where this goes. It does nothing new or especially clever. But Weaving is capable and I’ve spent much worse 90 minute intervals of my life than this.

Helhouse LLC - I liked it. It had some flaws, as these sorts of movies tend to I suppose, but overall I thought it was effective and creepy.

I will say

I’m not generally a fan of the "person in the group is “attacked” and disappears only to reappear later but not taking or acting creepy or whatever. So Paul’s reappearance wasn’t that shocking (I don’t know if there’s a trope for this, there may as well be) nor I think effective.

Did they say what happened to the one guy who films the clown heads turning while Alex’s childhood friend is looking into the large walk in meat locker/fridge thingy? The one who the BFF has the chat with out in the field (that was a nice scene), where I assume he was revealing that the company was struggling and that was Alex’s big secret. Anyway I feel like I lost track of the dude in the carnage

I vote for @triggercut watch it.

And before any of you say anything else, of course I am going to watch the apparently ungood sequels.

Oh man. I can’t wait to see your verdict on those.

To paraphrase Gutter from the movie PCU, “I am prepared for it to be bad, and yet still be surprised at how bad they turn out”.

Also, now that I’m a glasses wearer watching horror movies through hands is much harder and I’m not sure what to do about it.

“I knew it was going to be bad. I did not know it was going to be this bad”.

It occurs to me that a final act can certainly do a lot to change the state of a movie; to elevate it or as the case may be lower it. I am thankful that Hellhouse LLC 2: Abaddon Boogaloo

I also wonder what it is about people like Stephen Cognetti that drives them to see a vision all the way through, for better or for worse. At least it feels like there was a larger vision here going to the first movie. It’s just not a compelling one. It’s hard not to compare him to Corscarelli - both impressive first movies (Phantasm is weirder, and better, than Hellhouse but still), both created a series based on that movies for better or for worse (as it turns out), both have first names that start with “C”. Ok so it’s not hard not to do it but I did it anyway.

I guess I should be happy about the finale, since it at least made the proceedings interesting. In a “I’m watching Michael Scott melt down” sort of way, granted.

Let’s get to it.

In my humble, non expert, just another random asshole on the internet opinion, the very end of the first movie was a mistake. Whoever said it failed to stick the landing was right. It should have ended with (1) the documentary crew - well the two of them besides Mitchell - setting out to enter Hellhouse and we never see them again. (2) the girl not showing up since all she was going to be is basically the avatar of hellhouse on the move. And that’s just less interesting, IMO, than the story of a haunted hotel that seemingly reawakens and claims victims on hand in spectacular fashion.

But the reveal there doesn’t ruin the movie or anything. What it does do is set up a shtick for the seqel that doesn’t work at all until that spectacularly awful finale. Hellhouse is out recruting people to come explore and build forts in the back yard, and mailing people shit, and emailing other people shit, and submitting poems to /r/poetry and /r/nightmarefuel and the well crafted mystery of the first movie diminishes in the face of this, before. . . well. . .

Cognetti knows a lot more than me about movies and movie related things. But this was an awesome misfire. The sequel is mostly an ineffective retread for the first hour, making bad “expand the universe/explain backstory” decisions and not really doing much of note. There are a few creepy segments but they were all done in the first movie. You never come to feel a particular way about any of the characters. You wonder, what’s the point really?

Well, the motherfucking point is what I believe is cinema’s first Satanic GhostDemon Bond Villain showing up and dropping knowledge bombs like mad. And suddenly we’re in the plaid, as the bard once said. And while the entire finale is awful, it’s spectacularly and amazingly awful in ways I have never seen. I mean he expositions for 15 minutes. Like that actually just happened. A movie series that never features a single extended dialog sequence said "not only are we going to introduced what is apparently the main series antagonist, but we’re going to do it Bond Villain style. Except he’ll kill the people after because he’s smarter than Bond Villains.

Don’t tell me this wasn’t the most unexpected thing like ever. Because it was. I am at a complete loss. Now I wish the third movie was a Raid: Redepmption crossover where expert martial arts trained cops infiltrate his tenement base and just fuck shit up silat style for 90 minutes but never mind.

A microcosm of the movie not working is the end, when we cut back to the MI6 police interrogation room and the dude crosses in front of the camera and when he does the blond journalist lady’s face turns into beat up angry monster face before he crosses back and she looks normal again before saying “I was at Abaddon hotel. You should visit there”. If you’re going to ride the “Abaddon Hotel is on the internet haxing your shit” wave, just stick to the “you should visit there”. It’s more effective and creepy, even in the circumstances, than monster face. But where the first movie opts for some subtly and leaving much to the imagination, this movie does not do that. And it suffers for it.

But at least we got a Bond Villain out of it.

There is no way I can skip the impending trainwreck of the third movie now. No way. It’s destiny.

So I felt like maybe the quality (lack thereof, really) of the acting in Hellhouse LLC 3 was being oversold, but I realized on reflection I’m sort of numb after the events of the 2 finale. Like I probably couldn’t tell the difference between O’Toole or Hepburn on A Lion In Winter versus Montalban devouring scenery in Wrath of Kahn versus the Sam Watterson sized hole in any Sam Waterson movie ever right now.

Also it’s hard to notice the acting when, once again, we’re just rehashing shit from the first two movies. Like, a lot. Way overuse of that stuff. And then the, uh, “blood”. And the, uh, “fire”. And the, uh, “portal”. Remember the weird trashy CGI effects in Lord of Illusions (thinking of the weird thing that chases Bakula around the mansion that’s just an illusion created by Swann)? Or even better the hell effects in the awful 90s horror movie Hideaway? These were way worse than those. Like, way way worse.

Credit to Cognetti for having a strange vision and realizing it. That’s something. Although it’s really all there is. The series got goofier as it went a long and it’s a reminder that world building is a subtle art beyond most of us.

But then I guess so is improv.

I suppose my greatest disappointment. . .

I legit thought we were going to two Bond Villains at first. Millionaire? Weird scar on face?
Super driven and hiding motivations? I have no earthly idea where that might have gone but I dreamed of two such characters monologuing at each other for the last 20 minutes of the movie.
Alas, it was not to be.

Well that and there doesn’t exist a movie that’s The Raid: Redemption crossed with all sorts of horror stuff and Iko Uwais is fucking kicking the shit out of everything.

Gotta go find something better to watch now, as part of the cleansing ritual.

Super Dark Times
Having also been a sulky teenage boy once (though mostly in the 00’s and not the 90’s), I thought this was a decent effort and the characters were mostly believable even if the pacing was a bit off for me. The real star for me was the set dressing that really hit the 90’s boy’s room completely with Windows 95 screensaver and game consoles. I looked it up on Netflix due to Tom Chick’s recommendation on a movie podcast and I actually enjoyed seeing it as a fresh take on teenage slasher horror so thanks, Tom. I think I will check out the director’s future work because he could make great stuff with a better script/editor.

Jennifer’s Body
Being a man was probably a detriment to “getting” this but it left me totally confused in a bad way. Not as bad as Babadook because there is actually an ending that adresses the plot but it seems to contradict itself a lot.

Oh, I also remember I finally saw Let the Right One In. Even though it was mostly a slow burn it was a better “monster” companion movie than Jennifer’s Body. There is a whole thread in the forum that I might need to read through but it seems like I would like the book better. It was kind of cool though to see the kid challenge vampire conventions from the perspective of a middle-class resident in Sweden. CGI cat scene was ridiculous though :)

I wish someone would create a better way to browse movies via the web.

Watched the movie:

Belzebuth: featuring the guy who played the ex-Luchador on The Strain (Juaquin Cosio. this one has great amazon reviews (4.5* in 16 reviews), and an ok RT score (6/8 fresh) but I thought this was merely ok. It’s not quite fully formulaic, I guess. Could have been a better movie if they had gone for the angle that was teased a couple of times, I guess. I dunno, I’ve seen worse movies, in fact two this weekend! I hoped for more from the small sample size review success, but that’s a risk we have to take some times.

Watched the Trailer:

Itsy Bitsy: so when I was glancing over a list the thumbnail for this caught my eye and I never really looked squarely at it, I just clicked the page and went straight to watch the trailer and my brain never fully parsed the name of this and then I got a bit of the way into the trailer and noooooooooooope. I mean the title gives it away, but I just never got that far up here taps head

Ghost Stories This movie brings a simple question to mind: y though? There are no answers. Skip.

Pure - This was an episode of Hulu’s series “Into the Dark”. It’s about a father who takes his two daughters - one of whom is a recent addition (he wasn’t aware of her existence until a few months prior) to a purity retreat. To be clear, this is where kids - just the gals, to give you an idea of where this is going - sign an agreement not to lose their virginity before marriage. But it’s more than that, it’s about remaining as pure as possible to give their future husbands “the best gift they can”. Of course it’s all really about control and men dictating to women (indeed at the purity ball each father is to claim a key that they will eventually give to their daughter’s future husbands, lol). A group of girls (who have all been coming to this for awhile, including the one dad’s main daughter) like to sneak out and do pretend rituals to Lilitth (who was secretly an angel who was cast down for I can’t remember what) and guess what they summon something. Despite the interesting setup and themes, this doesn’t really get off the ground. Which is too bad.