Category: movie

So let's go full horror here. Indonesian director makes an Evil Dead homage. A man makes a bad deal with a creepy witch woman and gets a suitcase of money. Just how bad a deal will be revealed in time.

Years later, his business empire has risen and fallen, his first wife dies and leaves a daughter Alfie more or less orphaned, and at his deathbed, his gold-digging actress second wife and her brood meet her. They go to his secluded villa in the woods to see if there's any loot. That's surely going to turn out well!

Everyone (except the little girl) is terrible, and Alfie's got her own secrets. They don't really need to open the sealed, magically-warded cellar door and the Deadites to start giggling and killing, but that's the second hour of the movie.

The effects are good latex and squibs and mouthfuls of black slime. The camera work is straight out of Sam Raimi's playbook. Music is simple piano plinking, actually kind of annoying, but very direct and to the point.

The pacing is often glacial, lot of flashbacks, interrupted by good action scenes. It's never really scary, even at what should be jump scares, but it's fun, like Evil Dead or Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or any classic splatterpunk film. Maya's actress is not really competent to play such a heavy role; everyone else is much better. Chelsea Islan as Alfie's a good final-girl type, I'd like more with her.

★★★½☆ (Could be 4 with better editing for pacing)

(this concludes our movie-watching day, please take your cups and wrappers and demonic voodoo dolls and exit the theatre.)

Collection of short-short (under 10m) horror(?) flicks on Netflix. None of these are the least bit frightening.

• Friendship Bracelet: Obvious but not terrible. Could've been made into a real movie. ★★★☆☆
• CTRL+ALT+DEL: Shitty "darkweb"/"VR is real" shit with crappy puzzles like a Rubik's Cube of skulls. Film school project with no talent. ★☆☆☆☆
• Incommodium: Shitty "Faces of Death" blooper reel, no plot. ☆☆☆☆☆
• Keep Out: Stupid frat boys enter a spooky house and get what's coming to them. Plot & actors are awful, makeup for last scion of his line is OK. ★★☆☆☆
• Antoni Psycho: Foodie parody of American Psycho's morning routine. Dumb. ★☆☆☆☆

Take Satanism and evil magic from medieval Christian superstition, rather than from Wicca or LaVeyan Satanism which don't believe in a real Satan. This is already a borderline hate crime.

Add bullshit high school drama and an anti-bullying, anti-transphobia plot that goes nowhere because nothing mortal matters. And it's weird: Everything in the show tries to look like the 1960s, but with random modern anachronisms. I think the writers and set decorators are not being clever here, they're just too stupid to understand how different the 1960s were.

Add bullshit boarding school, half-blood bigotry from Harry Potter. The Harry Potter fanficcery is strong in this, right up to the suggested shopping for familiars, and witch girls with black lipstick who might as well draw "SLYTHERIN" on their foreheads.

Add one very dark-haired bleach-blonde-but-gross-roots-showing weird-looking chick who does a lot of shower scenes for someone supposed to be 16 (actually 19). Her creepy, lumpy boyfriend (actually 23, and looks 25+) doesn't help.

Add maybe the worst Q&A with a "High Priest of Satan" ever (imitating Lucius Malfoy, but with all the charm of a bored accountant).

The dialogue's awful, like a Christian trying to write "spooky gothic". It's exactly like fucking Twilight.

I made it barely into E2, and gave up. This is the worst.

★☆☆☆☆

This is weird. A series based very loosely on Shirley Jackson's great book (more likely for the writers, the 1963 movie The Haunting or the shitty '90s remake).

The builders/founders of the house, the Crains, and the scientist ghost-hunters of the book, are here replaced by house-flippers with five children in flashback to the '80s(?). In middle flashbacks of the '00s, one boy becomes a ghost-hunter, one a junkie, one girl a mortician, one girl is useless, one a mousy little housewife. In present day, the plot moves forward. Sometimes the time is obvious from the characters in a scene, sometimes it's hard to tell which flashback is which, and the characters' clothing and accessories are not distinctive (fashion died in the '90s and never recovered). It's good that they have iPhones and iPads in the present, because those make it possible to date the scene.

Everyone seems pretty resigned to seeing ghosts or at least having hallucinations on a regular basis. OH NO the walls are banging in an old house, must be ghosts. OH NO my dead SPOILER is here where they were expected and now ghosts.

Long tracts of "dramatic" footage which aren't good enough for "reality" TV are painfully uncut here, I'm 2 eps in and it feels like it's been 12. The movie was so much better at getting to the point (that secrets and madness will make you see anything, even/especially if there's something to be seen). But there's scenes which are effective, where the oppression of Hill House works, where it actually creeped me out. The actors range from reasonably good (Stephen, Shirley), to stiff and unlikable ("Dad", and whoever the middle daughter is, I keep forgetting that she's even in this and then I go "wait, who's the other brunette?"), to bland caricature (the Dudleys).

★★★☆☆