House of Darkness (2022) - Review

House of Darkness (2022).  Starring Justin Long, Kate Bosworth and Gia Crovatin.

One and a half stars out of four.

What pisses me off is that this movie has the potential to have been something better than what the final product became. It has a great premise.  To be honest, the story (if paced properly) would have been excellent for an anthology horror series like Masters of Horror  or Creepshow.  That said, this movie could've been padded out in a way that would've been passable entertainment.

Instead, we get an opening with Justin Long and Kate Bosworth driving at night.  They drive into a gated residence, which reveals itself to be a giant gothic castle.  Red flag right from the start.  Before entering the domicile,  we have to listen to stupid, awkward dialog from Long spazzing like a dork that's never been on a date before and annoying dialog from Bosworth, where she perpetually answers questions with questions.  I swear this goes on for the first fifteen minutes of the goddamn movie.  Finally, she gets around to inviting him in the house.  We get to hear more of this dialog.  They enter the house, we listen to more of this garbage.  It just keeps going until at least 35 minutes into the movie.  

So I assume the title is derived from the fact that this "house"  is revealed by Mina (Bosworth) to have power outage problems.  This does not raise any concern with Hap (Long), who continues to babble like an idiot.  After some prolonged prick teasing from Mina, along with a stretch where she disappears and Hap brags to his buddy on the phone about is latest conquest, we're introduced to Mina's sister, Lucy.  Mina and Lucy?  Gee, I wonder if they're vampires, given the Dracula character names?

So the sister Lucy takes turn entertaining this moron, giving him house tours, also seductively flirting with Hap's dumbass . . . and it just goes on.  The basic gist is this is a feminist revenge vampire plot, where the protagonists seek payback from male Chauvinist pigs like Hap.  The problem is that nothing of any real interest happens in the movie until the last twenty minutes.  Which that last twenty minutes is fantastic.  But this comes around to my initial point.  There could've been so much more added to this story to keep viewer interest.  Instead, we get non-stop dialog.  And that could work too.  But since most of the conversations consist of Hap babbling while the sisters remain vague and mundanely mysterious, it's a chore to watch this film.  It's clear the creators thought this would make for an excellent slow burn, but it ends up being cringe.

Directed by Neil LaBute, who brought us the infamous 2006 remake of The Wicker Man with Nicholas Cage.  I can't fathom how a director that created such an over-the-top yet entertaining film as The Wicked Man  can turn something out this dull.

The Godsend (1980) - Review

 The Godsend (1980).  Starring Malcolm Stoddard, Cyd Hayman and Angela Pleasence.

One star out of four.

This is an adaptation of a novel.  I've never read it.  I don't even know how popular it was or if some producer at Canon thought this would be a big hit, so he optioned the book.  What I do know is this movie is boring as fuck.  Perhaps the book is much better, as everyone says. I highly doubt it.

The gist of the film is that a unknown woman (Pleasence) shows up at the home of a British couple with five kids.   Now this family is well established from the first ten minutes or so.  But my god, are these people dry.  Anyway,  the stranger is pregnant and at full-term.  She has the baby in the house, but before the local doctor can make a house call, she splits.  Because this couple believes you can never have enough children, they take the female baby in as one of their own.

Cut to a few years later, the baby is now a weird female albino toddler.   And one by one, the other children begin to die off.  The husband, Alan, begins to suspect it has something to do with and he takes his sweet ass time coming to this conclusion.  The wife, Kate, scoffs and becomes overly protective of the demon cuckoo child (a description made by Alan).  This all leads to the anti-climatic conclusion of the movie that has you realizing you've wasted ninety minutes of your life.

This movie gets one star for featuring Angela Pleasence, the daughter of Donald Pleasence.  Dreadful flick, avoid unless you're a masochist or having problems with insomnia.

In A Violent Nature (2024) - Review

In A Violent Nature (2024). Starring Ry Barrett, Andrea Pavlovic and Cameron Love.

One and a half stars our of four.

One of the most awaited and over-hyped scary movies of 2024, Nature was exactly what I expected it to be.  A meandering, dreadfully painful to watch movie with no substance or story to speak of.   It's simply a undead geek named "Johnny," who lumbers his way through the Canadian wilderness, in search of his necklace that was stolen by douchebag campers.  The upside is that Johnny makes it a point to kill said campers, definitely the high point of the flick.  This film has great kills and that's why I rate this with a whole extra star.  Otherwise, it's like watching your 93-year-old grandmother walk with a cane and suffer from sciatica.

We get the usual slasher villain backstory from the campers. It's something to do with Johnny being developmentally disabled and getting burned to death by yokel dickheads.  The necklace was given to him by his dad, blah blah blah.  There's no reason to care.  There's nothing particularly interesting about the story.  Or at least it's poorly paced in this film, where everything is carried out in real time.  I thought I read this movie was based on the defunct idea for making a found footage Friday the 13th entry, but I may have imagined that.

We have the ever prevalent trope of friends who hate each other at play too.  Another reason not to care what happens in this flick.  I know a lot of people think characters in slasher films are simply fodder for the blade.  But at least with slasher flicks in the past, the side characters had something of note with made them interesting.  Even if it's just to laugh at and riff.  The only character that stands out for me is the dumbass stoner.  The only reason there is because I really wanted to see him deleted way earlier than what happened in the movie.

Part 2 is on its way in the near feature.  Oh the humanity!