Smiley Face Killers (2020) - It’s a movie based on the real-life “smiley-face murder theory” that a serial killer (or killers) murdered a bunch of college-age men in the late 90’s. Written by Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho, Less Than Zero). Directed by Tim Hunter (River’s Edge). Starring Crispin “Crazy Legs” Glover himself as the serial killer.
With all that, you’d think the movie would be at least interesting, but it’s not. Half the movie is the intended victim getting stalked by a white van. He rides his bike around town and the van just slowly cruises behind him. The movie spices things up in a few scenes by having the killer creep around in the dark while the main character frowns at his phone or mopes at his girlfriend.
Crispin Glover doesn’t even show up until halfway through the running time, and he doesn’t even speak. In fact, he doesn’t do anything that a non-Crispin Glover couldn’t do. Why hire Crispin Glover to play a serial killer if you’re not going to have him say nutty things or act like a super weirdo?
I watched The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016) and it was good. Awesome even. Hell yeah!
Father (the always lovable Brian Cox) and son duo do an autopsy on a ominus corpse found in the basemenet of a house with two murdered people upstairs. Corpse completely unrelated.
And every freakin time the camera went to that face view it creeped the hell out of me. Their tampering with it only made it even worse!
Evilspeak is significantly better than you’d expect from a movie about Clint Howard as a cadet at a military academy who uses an Apple II to summon Satan.
I was thinking about this movie the other night! So many great little reveal moments, and the way things click together at the end and you realize the bigger picture of this body made me shiver with happiness.
Love the scope and scale of this movie, as well. It knows exactly how big it is, and tells its story really well.
Also, when they peel back the [redacted] and find the [redacted], the dread I felt and the feeling of the bottom dropping out and just how creepy and screwed up this is was delicious.
This movie makes very little sense if you think about it at all. Nearly every piece of it is done better by some other movie (exceptions: the opening scene and the bonfire scene which were just wild.) It’s like a gallimaufry of greatest hits of 20-teens horror… which turns out to be surprisingly fun and creepy in parts. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Just started streaming on HBOMax.
Alive (2019) - A guy and a gal with severe injuries wake up in a decrepit hospital. They have amnesia and the weirdo doctor treating their injuries yells at them, cajoles them to eat some kind of plant-based gruel, makes them do physical exercises, and tells odd stories about nutrition. Who are the couple? How did they get here? Who is their tormentor? By the end of the movie, you will not care about any of those questions. You’ll just want it to be over.
The Empty Man (2020) A really odd movie and I’m not sure how I feel about it. As others have said, the initial premise seems to be like any one of the teen horror movies which are based around a circle of friends doing an urban legend thing (take a selfie with cursed Polaroid, say “Bloody Mary” into a mirror, pray to the Slenderman, etc) which causes a boogeyman to come get you. But in this movie the teens are dispatched pretty quickly, leaving the audience to follow a retired police detective as he tries to figure out what’s going on. It turns into a cult investigation and Jacobs Ladder-style thriller. As @Matt_W already wrote, the movie has two really good parts, but the rest of it is kind of dull and the twist is dumb. But hey, Stephen Root!
Beautifully shot though. The transition from the map to the car driving, the nighttime ring around the bonfire, and even the way the movie plays with light in general are all solid. Really unexpected work for a goofy horror movie.
Honestly, I’d love if the movie had just been about parents and officials dealing with the aftermath of a teen horror movie incident. That’s been a concept of mine for years. Back when I first saw Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (terrible movie, by the way) I’ve always wanted to see a movie made out of that core idea. Like, imagine the parents and cops trying to explain how a teenager drowned inside of his waterbed. Why do all these kids keep dying in weird ways? You can do that with any of these goofy teen supernatural boogeyman horror movies.
Not a horror movie, per se, but I watched all the episodes of Cursed Films on Shudder. It’s a documentary series covering stuff like the mythology that sprang up after the deaths of the Poltergeist cast, etc. Not much is new here for film buffs, but the audience is intended to be folks that probably didn’t grow up with many of the movies we did.
Anyway, I just wanted to warn everyone that the final episode covers the accidental killing of Vic Morrow and the two child actors in Twilight Zone: The Movie. They show the actual crash. I have seen the film evidence before, but in every instance it’s been edited so you don’t actually see the helicopter contact the actors. Not here. They show the final moment. So that’s my warning to you if you don’t want to see the second Vic Morrow and two kids were cut in half by a helicopter.
Yeah, totally in agreement here. It still creeps me out. The face cam runtime is super affective.
Outside of the opening scene…it could have been a rare single location movie. Alas the fate of many movies.
I watched The Autopsy of Jane Doe finally. It’s been on the list for awhile. I liked the first section and the investigation aspects, but the rest of the movie didn’t work for me. Also, that was bad fake fire on the ceiling, even if it was less bad than Hell House LLC 3. I feel like Hirsch has been pretty good in some stuff but didn’t quite work here.
Perfect Skin - Richard Brake plays a tatoo/body mod guy who runs a little shop in London (called Perfect skin) and is also. . .uh. . . I guess he’s a psychopath. Anyway he abducts this gal (who he says has perfect skin) and slowly but surely tats her up (and does a few mods) before, uh, the finale. And kills another gal along the way and eats a lot of pills either because he’s crazy and trying to deal or has Parkinsons (although this isn’t really even a plot point) or both. This is a slow burn except it never really gets above a smolder. I like Brake a lot but this feels like it wasted him.
Yeah, my girlfriend and I enjoyed the first part or build-up of Jane Doe as well, and while I can’t remember the specifics now, the payoff didn’t land for us either.
Doctor Sleep - I was surprised to notice a whopping three hour runtime but then I saw it was the director’s cut.
I liked this, mostly? I am surprised, I suppose. I never did get around to reading the book but now I kind of want too. This seems like it’s fairly faithful insofar as it feels stuffed to the gills with Kingish things (although I understand the plots diverge somewhat). Talking about little character moments like Cliff Curtis telling the story about stalking the buck. The AA meeting with Sir Bruce Greenwood. The cat and the hospice scenes. The lore. The way the True Knot are written.
Watching the bad guys get wrong footed repeatedly was pretty entertaining, but there are downsides to this. It robs them of some of the established creepiness and does rob the movie of it’s atmosphere a bit. But I thought the little girl was good and it is solidly atmospheric for most of its run time, and occasionally creepy. I don’t feel the three hour runtime although I had to break up the watch (I noticed it was past midnight as I was approaching the two hour mark and decided to call it a night instead of pushing on).
The Shelly Duval replacement was good. I spent the first half of the movie going “Dammit where have I seen Abra’s mother before” and finally giving up and googling it before bed and oh of course House of the Devil.
I think Henry Thomas worked out as well as it could have (and I liked it).
A return to the Overlook was inevitable but I glanced at the book wiki page and it seems there’s some big plot divergence here and I think the return in the movie isn’t very well done (I don’t see any reason for Abra to fear Rose at this point, I mean she’s kicked everyone’s ass repeatedly).
