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!
Blue Sunshine (1978). Starring Zalman King, Mark Goddard and Deborah Winters.
Two and a half stars.
Actor/softcore porn director (and possible lost twin of Marjoe Gortner) Zalman King stars as a Jerry, a man on the run for murders not committed by himself, but by people tainted by a specialty brand of LSD, eponymous with the title.
Jerry's trouble begins when he and his girlfriend Alicia (Deborah Winters) attend a get-together with some old college friends from Stanford University. One of his friends named Frannie Scott (a guy named Frannie, I'm not misgendering him) is revealed to be completely bald after a mishap with one of the guests. Frannie goes an a kill-crazy rampage and chases Jerry until he's hit by a by a moving truck. The drivers' mistakenly believe Jerry is responsible, which leads to Jerry also being blamed for the other murders committed by Frannie.
Jerry finds himself on the lam, trying to clear his name ala The Fugitive. Jerry does a poor job of this through most of the movie, as he acts like a total lunatic in every single situation. He enlists the aid of Alicia and surgeon David Blume, another friend from Stanford. Upon further investigation, Jerry learns that a rash of bizarre homicides have been perpetrated by persons that have gone completely bald. He visits one of the crime scenes, which reveals the killer possessed a psychedelic poster with a local politician's face and the words "BLUE SUNSHINE" written at the bottom.
This leads Jerry to Edward Flemming (Marc Goddard), who's running for Congress. And boy, does this movie let you know that he's running for office. Almost every goddamn scene for the remaining two-thirds of the movie features either his campaign posters or his workers canvasing every fucking neighborhood. I'm not certain why this is so prevalent in the plot, as he appears to be running unopposed. There's no sign of another candidate anywhere to be found. I will say, Flemming gives some major Greg Stillson vibes, which makes me wonder if Stephen King saw this before he wrote The Dead Zone.
After Jerry has a confrontation with the politician at one of his rallies, he discovers that Flemming had been an LSD pusher who also attended Stanford. He specialized in dealing Blue Sunshine and that every person affected had been customers. Through some more misadventures, Jerry gets blamed for another death and rushes to find proof before the police close in on him.
Blue Sunshine has an interesting story that was based on the public's growing fear of LSD meltdowns following the drug-addled late 60s. The scenes where the LSD-zombies flip out are genuinely creepy and you're never certain which person will go crazy next. It's pretty entertaining. But I have some problems with it as well. For starters, the plot isn't well fleshed out. The viewer never receives any real explanation for why this specific type of LSD is causing the plague of attacks and there simply isn't enough movement in this film to make up for this lack of information. The ending sorta fizzles out with a lame epilogue text. It's implied that Flemming is somehow behind a conspiracy to distribute this drug, something in the vein of MK-ULTRA. But this doesn't come to fruition. Nor does the overexposure of Flemming's political campaign in the film. Flemming's character could've easily been a variety of other professions and the movie would still have the same basic ending. This leads me to believe that writer/director Jeff Lieberman was forced to excise portions of the script due to some constraints. There are too many setups that never really pay off and it's jarring.
Be sure to watch for the two best sequences in the movie. One is a showdown between Jerry and Flemming's ex-wife, when she snaps and tries to murder her neighbor's annoying-ass children. The other involves Flemming's bodyguard (Ray Young, who I swore was Merlin Olsen) having a psychotic break and running amok in a shopping mall/disco. Out-fucking-standing!
Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark (2019). Starring Zoe Colletti, Michael Garza and Gil Bellows.
One star. (SPOILERS)
So if you were a kid in the 1980s, chances are you read the Alvin Schwartz anthology novels of the same name. Anytime you received a Troll book order form at school, there was the familiar sight of a scary zombie with a pipe in his mouth or gray-scaled trees with dark figures walking beneath. I always got a kick out of the fact that our teachers never said squat about these books (in fact, they had them available for checkout in their rooms). So imagine my surprise when I read on the Wikipedia entry that these books had made it to several "most controversial" lists over the last few decades. This is credited to busybody librarians and parents who generated the controversy (the content wasn't close to being that dark). Guess I missed that one somehow.
Anyway, I assumed this would be an anthology flick. That's how the books are structured. But instead, we get a bunch of Gen Z kids and a story setting in the late 1960s. If it wasn't for the cars and the constant references, you wouldn't know this. That and the fact that phones are visibly absent. You can tell, because the actors themselves look lost without an electronic device stuck to their hands. I have no idea why this wasn't just set in modern times, but whatever.
The characters are completely unlikable as a whole. Whether it's the local jock-bully Tommy Milner, the local new kid Ramón, the main character Stella, or their geeky friends, it's hard to have any emotional investment in these kids. This may be due to the current modern horror phenomena of two-dimensional characters, which is prevalent in post-pandemic flicks. I don't know if this is a reflection on the actors or simply bad writing.
The device used to tell the stories revolves around the main characters coalescing in a spooking house of long-dead witch Sarah Bellows. Upon finding her journal, the group begans to experience stories held within the book. Some of these include the toe story or the Me-Tie-Doughty stories from the novels. The book also begins to feed on the fears of the teenagers, ultimately leading to a showdown with the malevolent spirit of Bellows. These subplots sound interesting, but the characters are too monotone to care about in the first place.
Another example of a typical PG-13 scary movie in the modern age. Watch only if you're that bored or curious.
