I went on a bit of a horror binge the last couple of days. I'm going to list these in order of least-like to most-liked...
Invoked: A found-footage film that presents us with a group of young people that are so dull and unlikeable that you quickly find yourself rooting for the ghost to win. And since the beginning of the movie informs us that they were never found, you realize that the ghost does win. Influenced in part by the Grave Encounters franchise, from the looks of it. If you hated Grave Encounters, you'll hate this movie even more.
Bleed: Horror movie that goes seriously off the rails after a relatively un-scary first 2/3rds. Not only do we get bland and unsympathetic characters, but the plot just disintegrates near the end so that we don't know who the bad guys are, who the good guys are, and most importantly we really don't have a clue just what the fuck is going on.
The Presence: (German film w/subtitles) Three young people decide to spend a few days in an old haunted castle and it goes about as well as can be expected. The alternate title to this film should have been "90 minutes of ghosts banging on the walls" because there wasn't really much aside from that. There is a clear "Paranormal Acitivity" influence here. If you hated Paranormal Activity, you'll hate this movie even more. If you loved Paranormal Activity, you'll hate this movie even more than that.
The Damned: A decent take on the body-hopping demon trope and another movie that takes too much time trying to make me care about its characters and failing to do so, but once the action starts it moves at a brisk pace. Still, when a movie cannot make me care about the characters it loses the ability to scare me aside from the occasional jump-scare, which this film happily uses very sparingly.
The Dead Room: Holy shit, a decent horror movie! This one wastes little time setting up the plot and the characters and builds a decent mystery with a nice twist ending. The motives of the 'spirit' that haunts the house become a bit confusing until the end and I think it hurts the film a bit by making it seem like they're using convenient plot devices until the big reveal. But it's worth the time investment.
and finally...
Tucker & Dale vs Evil: A funny send-up of a few horror genres where two hilbillies working on their 'vacation home' deep in the woods run across a group of obnoxious teens who fear that they're being stalked by the harmless bumpkins. There's a good thirty minutes or so of pure hilarity before the movie slows down a bit to resolve the plot, which lets the air out of the whole thing. But that thirty minutes is worth the price of admission.
Invoked: A found-footage film that presents us with a group of young people that are so dull and unlikeable that you quickly find yourself rooting for the ghost to win. And since the beginning of the movie informs us that they were never found, you realize that the ghost does win. Influenced in part by the Grave Encounters franchise, from the looks of it. If you hated Grave Encounters, you'll hate this movie even more.
Bleed: Horror movie that goes seriously off the rails after a relatively un-scary first 2/3rds. Not only do we get bland and unsympathetic characters, but the plot just disintegrates near the end so that we don't know who the bad guys are, who the good guys are, and most importantly we really don't have a clue just what the fuck is going on.
The Presence: (German film w/subtitles) Three young people decide to spend a few days in an old haunted castle and it goes about as well as can be expected. The alternate title to this film should have been "90 minutes of ghosts banging on the walls" because there wasn't really much aside from that. There is a clear "Paranormal Acitivity" influence here. If you hated Paranormal Activity, you'll hate this movie even more. If you loved Paranormal Activity, you'll hate this movie even more than that.
The Damned: A decent take on the body-hopping demon trope and another movie that takes too much time trying to make me care about its characters and failing to do so, but once the action starts it moves at a brisk pace. Still, when a movie cannot make me care about the characters it loses the ability to scare me aside from the occasional jump-scare, which this film happily uses very sparingly.
The Dead Room: Holy shit, a decent horror movie! This one wastes little time setting up the plot and the characters and builds a decent mystery with a nice twist ending. The motives of the 'spirit' that haunts the house become a bit confusing until the end and I think it hurts the film a bit by making it seem like they're using convenient plot devices until the big reveal. But it's worth the time investment.
and finally...
Tucker & Dale vs Evil: A funny send-up of a few horror genres where two hilbillies working on their 'vacation home' deep in the woods run across a group of obnoxious teens who fear that they're being stalked by the harmless bumpkins. There's a good thirty minutes or so of pure hilarity before the movie slows down a bit to resolve the plot, which lets the air out of the whole thing. But that thirty minutes is worth the price of admission.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould