Category: Halloween

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.

So Delirium, I wasn’t expecting much from it, dude gets out of a mental hospital and his parole is house arrest. His father’s dead, self-inflicted from a few days before, and his brother is stilling jail, his mother ran off when he was young, so he’s gone from being surrounded by people in a mental health facility to being on his own and isolated.

Naturally, he gets a bit weird. Especially when his parole officer decides to take his pills away.

Of course, we’re not really sure how much of the story is reality and how much of it is his head; normally that leads to an unsatisfying conclusion. This time however, they did a good job with the script, navigating us through the potential mess, and out the other side where things get darker and more interesting.

I can’t say much more without spoiling it, but it’s been my favourites of horror movies I’ve watched recently.

Mayhem, one of the first Shudder Originals that I watched, and possibly one of the reasons I signed up for Shudder in the first place. Well, that and it’s $5 to support horror movies. All things considered, this movie is pretty sharp and self aware. We’ve got a world where the rage virus exist, and the legal precedent has been set regarding murders committed while under the influence of the virus.  Basically, you’ve got immunity to prosecution, if you’ve been infected.

Side note: It was phrased that a loophole got the case dismissed, which I think would actually mean that precedent wasn’t actually set, since a case has to be heard and decided to set precedent. At least that’s my understanding with regard to certain human rights cases I followed. They were dismissed on other merits, so the case law was never established.

The main character has just lost his job, a nice corner office gig. He’d been used as a scapegoat to cover up someone else’s error. Then the virus exposure hits, he tries to get back upstairs, gets taken to the basement for a beating instead. And then we have his long bloody climb from the basement to the penthouse, removing people along the way.

And of course, he’s accompanied by the person he couldn’t help earlier in the film, a woman whose mortgage had been bought up and foreclosed on by the company. He’d given her advice, but been unable to help her. And since she’d been a problem for security, she was also waiting in the basement for the cops when the virus quarantined the building. 

It’s a fun tale of revenge, corporate power structures and toxic people. Plenty of violence, plenty of gore. Horror, though, less direct horror, and more just horrible people doing horrible things, before and after the rage virus. 

So, the Collector, is a tense movie about a dude who does horrible things to a family, inside a house, and another fellow, who breaks into the house to rob it while these horrible things are happening. And it’s a damn creepy movie, with a good variety of disturbing traps. Most of the traps make some amount of mechanical sense.

And then we have the Collection, the sequel, where he goes from a horror movie bad guy to super villain levels of evil. We get news reports that he’s terrorizing the city, we get him committing mass murder at a nightclub, using a threshing machine to clear the dance floor, some sort of hydraulic press elevator to crush the people in the lobby, and some random blade traps. Cool traps, but a bit nonsensical compared to his previous set. 

He kidnaps a girl, and in the process, on of his previous victims gets away. In the first one, we knew he brought his previous victims along to the new houses, though it wasn’t really clear why. In this one, he’s trying to complete his collection. Since in this film, he’s got a base. An abandoned hotel, the Argento, a nod to the famous horror director, I suppose. And the hotel is rigged with booby traps and filled with people he’s turned feral with drugs.

We get some scenes very reminiscent of a zombie movie, where the rescue team are shooting zombies. We get some traps, which make even less sense than the previous ones. And of course, we get to see his collection, various taxidermied folks, preserved in some liquid, that for whatever isn’t flammable. Which is important, since smashing these tanks provides liquid that puts out the fire that he’s started to destroy the evidence. 

And of course, he gets away, and then our main victim tracks him down later, stuffs him in a box. Which isn’t really a horror movie ending, unless becoming the monster is the horror of it. 

Really, I’d have a hard time imagining how the two films could be more different. The main characters are the same, but the motives, methods and abilities aren’t. Well, I suppose the burglar fellow uses his lock picking skills again in the second film. 

I watched this one at a friend’s place. She is one of the few people I know with a Shudder account, and this Ruin Me, is another Shudder Exclusive.

It had some clever bits, some decent twists, and you spend a good portion of the movie wondering what’s real and what isn’t.

It starts as a roleplay weekend getaway, “Slasher Sleepover”. A handful of people meeting up at a creepy gas station to get black bagged, taken into the woods and then scared while they live out being in a horror movie.

In the end, I guess it’s worth watching. But it kinda falls flat when the motives come out.

It’s got some fun scenes though, and the characters aside from the main pair are entertaining.

So, I’ve seen this one on netflix as a suggestion a few times, but didn’t think it would be worth the watch. Well, The Ritual definitely has some amazing moments. Especially the first death, that sets the stage for the whole trip into the woods. It’s incredibly mundane and ordinary, but also rather gory. There’s just something heavy about that scene, and you really feel for the protagonist who seems to have a mix of PTSD and survivor’s guilt over how his friend died. And of course it doesn’t help that some of his other friends blame him for it. After all it was his idea of walk into that store, and while one of them died, he walked out without a scratch. It gets creepier once they get off the beaten trail, and at times I wondered how much his PTSD was screwing with him, vs something actually being wrong with their circumstances. 

Overall, I’d say give it a watch, it definitely has atmosphere and some creepy moments. 

So, Bedeviled, despite being a mashup of creepy phone app and spooky ghost, this one actually had some clever bits and scary scenes.

Ensemble cast of high schoolers get an app invite after a friend’s death, and it’s a personal assistant with some neat tricks that turn nasty fairly quickly.

The app acting as a bridge to the spirit realm, technology giving us awareness of them and them a way to reach us; sure it’s been done before, but they did it without it feeling rote.

Oh, and there was the clever callback where the one dude’s custom firmware was an issue.

Selfie From Hell

Well, you start with some internet buzz words, like selfie, darknet, black rooms, etc, and add some mysticism, like the number 13, and a catatonic person with psychic powers. And somehow, it’s still not all that interesting. Sure, there’s a lesson about not being a dumbass online, especially not on the dark web, but beyond that? I can’t recommend it.

Meet the Blacks

Purge Parody, with a black family named the Blacks, moving into a primarily white neighbourhood. Tons of racism, probably a bit hard to unpack. Some funny moments, some stupid ones. Watch it during a Purge Marathon, it’ll fit right in. 

Bad Match

Tinder meetup results in sex then ghosting, followed by a suicide attempt and criminal charges. Overall, actually better than I was expecting. I’d actually recommend watching this one, though I’m not sure I’d qualify it as a horror movie, except maybe that dating these days is a horror itself.