So, All I Need, it’s a movie about a hotel room filled with bound young women, and a dude who delivers packages. It keeps switching back between the hotel room with the girls trying to escape, and the dude slowly working his was up the ranks of some criminal empire. And it really doesn’t work. It’s slow and it’s jarring, and the hotel room seems oddly secured, despite being filled with a ridiculous number of kidnapped women. The scenes with the girls, while tense, just seem kinda ridiculous, given the sheer number of bodies in the room. 

So, Condemned, originally titled God’s Acre, is a horror movie about a dude who rode a bubble, buying property, becoming a landlord, and then losing the majority of them in the collapse, as the tenants failure to pay resulted in the bank foreclosing on most of the properties. Just one crumbling unit is left, and he’s going to try to fix it up, flip it and rebuild his life. Except the walls don’t match the blueprints. And so he uses a hammer to open up the wall, finds weird stuff and develops a theory about a former tenant who killed his wife and daughter. After which, he follows up on one of them, only to find out that the guy’s wife was still alive and carrying a shotgun, which he accidentally discharges into the fellow. And then has a breakdown, because he remembers where the stuff in the walls really came from. I don’t know, this was a slow film, and didn’t really work for me. 

So, I decided to rewatch one I hadn’t seen in ages, Drag me to Hell. I’ve been a fan of the Sam Raimi’s work for a while, and this definitely has feel of his other work. It really reminds me of the Evil Dead films. The gore is gross and over the top; the vomiting of bile, the toothless gnawing, the popping eyeballs, all of it. It’s somehow far tamer than I remembered. There’s a few fun scenes, but also some that remind me of loony tunes. Like the anvil falling on her head in the garage. The levitation during the seance is pretty great, and the final scene with the rail road tracks is just perfect. But the scene with the flooding grave… It was just a little too silly. 

So, Errementari: The Blacksmith and the Devil, is one I saw recommended by netflix and on facebook. The original language was likely Italian, but I watched the rather terrible English dub. Crazy old man, keeps to himself in his fortress in the forest. Little girl is being bullied, her doll’s head gets tossed over his fence, she learns about the devil locked in a cage in his house, and gets entangled in his life. And then we learn that the dude from the Gov’t who’d come to town and tried to arrest the blacksmith, is also a devil. Politics gets in the way, and long story short, the blacksmith goes to hell with a giant gold bell, to rescue the little girl, and annoy the devils. Weird movie. I was hoping for something like “Witching and Bitching”, but this wasn’t quite as interesting. 

Officially, Law Abiding Citizen isn’t a horror film. But it starts out with something that would be at home in the rape-revenge horror category, a home invasion, murder of wife and daughter by creepy dudes. Then we get some courtroom bits, dealing with the system, and how people make deals. After that, we get the fun of the main dude beginning his revenge. Swapping the lethal injection chemicals for something messier, multi-limb amputation of the accomplice who made a deal to get off on lesser charges. And then we get into his revenge on the system. Bombs, killer robots, and more bombs. In the end, he gets tricked and hoisted by his own petard; or roasted by his own napalm, rather. 

So, dude and random girl who dates his bully go into a closet as part of a Seven Minutes in Heaven that the bully orchestrated. Maybe he’s got a cuckold fetish, or thinks this will humiliate the dude? Not really sure. But they come out of the closet into a slightly different house, in a place where stuff is a little strange. He’s being accused of murdering someone with a pencil, and people seem a little aggressive, including his guidance counselor. After some strange twists, they learn that somehow they’ve ended up in some odd version of hell. And they have serious problems getting home. I’m not sure it’s really a horror film. I’m not sure what it is, really.  

So, spoilers. Hiring a psychic to clean up the ghostly echos of all your murder victims, not a great idea, since the psychic might just learn that you are the killer, not the patsy you’d pinned it on. Not a bad movie, decent atmosphere. Not really sure why I didn’t enjoy this one, it had the elements for a decent film, but it just wasn’t all that entertaining. 

Charlotte, was a weird anthology with a framework of an evil doll converting a babysitter into a doll. The first one, it seemed like a bargain basement Tales from the Crypt script. Jealous siblings wanting things that the other one wants, resulting in death. The second one, actually makes even less sense than the first one. Something about a woman, leaving her purse as bait to lure people into a trap. The third one, the babysitter tells a strange story about a troll, and then the troll shows up. And when the troll cuts off her feed, I grumble because using a sickle to make a vertical slash isn’t really possible. Then we have weird mind control girls scouts, and I don’t really remember the one after that. Then we have one with a little girl getting a doll, the doll being creepy, and the mom trying to kill the doll. Overall, pretty bad, pretty forgettable.

Triangle is an odd film.

And it’s hard to talk about without spoilers. So I’ll be somewhat vague, in case you haven’t seen it yet.

It’s a story with three sides. It ends where it begins, multiple ways. The short loop, of the wreck, the boarding, the murders and then the escape, are tucked into a longer loop of the whole day.

In some ways, you could argue this is related to Ground Hog Day. But the layering of the loops makes it far more sinister.

Though I suppose she makes less loops than he does. Though the seagull bodies on the dock hint perhaps not.

It’s worth seeing, to see the loops play out.