Reviews

So before I watched this movie, I had no idea that the director was inspired by the likes of Lynch, DePalma, and Argento. I just thought it was another run of the mill slasher. Once I started it, I was greeted with a super strange opening song that fused jazz and lazy Bob Dylan inspired singing. Then the movie progressed and it was relatively normal until the color blue kept popping into scenes out of nowhere as if it actually meant anything to the story. The film went on more and there was all these gruesome scenes of violence and then Lindsay Lohan gets a robot arm and talks to a weird shirtless guy with a cgi tattoo (I swear that I dreamt that part). Then finally, her piano teacher who we see once and is never mentioned again in any capacity is the one who turns out to be the killer. It's a ridiculously weird movie that can only be described as a Giallo film made by a guy who has only heard about Giallo. It's sad teenage MySpace poetry mingled with pretentious symbolism that is really nothing but hot air. It's an awful movie to be sure, but it's extremely memorable and it's been lodged in my head ever since I saw it a few months ago.

Love him or hate him, Stephen Groo is an auteur director. Just not in the way he'd like to be viewed. 3 Wishes II is an unmistakable product of the odd director's imagination, complete with all the fixings of any of his films: a plot ripped off from another film (Wishmaster) bad British accents, shoddy cgi/green screen fx, cheap wigs, colored contacts, half-hearted attempts at making the film scandalous, tons of overly dramatic stock music, and no variation of camera angles. If you're not familiar with Groo's films, you're going to be bored after awhile. If you are familiar with his films, you'll have fun watching it for a quick chuckle. It just makes me sad because Groo is clearly wanting to be scary here. You can tell at certain points that he's throwing stuff on the screen that's supposed to be scary, but it's just so poorly executed that it falls into the realm of comedy.

This is a very symbolic and metaphoric film and this is how I interpreted it:

The whole movie to me felt like a Walter Mitty situation. All of the very crazy and ridiculous things that occur are products of Beau's very neurotic and fearful imagination that he inherited and learned from his mother. The entire segment in the city at home is him overthinking things and forgetting to take care of himself to the point of missing his flight. He then feels guilty for missing the flight and becomes more guilty when his mom dies. The toxicity of codependency, an abusive relationship, and familial responsibility (hence the call from Richard Kinds character), only causes Beau more stress. When he meets Grace and Roger, I took this in as people who actually care for beau and worry about his wellbeing but again, all friendships and relationships have their rocky moments. The entire sequence in the forest to me felt deeply symbolic of a man who's trying to find his tribe of friends while simultaneously feeling hopeful yet deeply discouraged about amounting to something. In reality, I thought the ending of the movie was really just Beau feeling so much guilt from not only his mom but also knowing he's been living in her shadow his whole life and has never had a say in anything. Even in death, the influence of her actions, her success, and her peers haunt him until he caves in. I think what was actually happening at the end was him arriving late for the funeral because he knew he was being abused but his mother's friends taking her side for him being a bad son. Either way, it's a really sad ending but I believe (I think?) that's what the director was trying to portray? It's open to a lot of different interpretations but that's my consensus.

I'm upset that I'm giving this such a low review. I just felt like it didn't really amount to anything except for shock for the sake of shock and weirdness for the sake of weirdness. The movie didn't really accomplish anything that wasn't previously accomplished by superior films in similar veins such as Speak No Evil. The visuals were admittedly cool and the overall aesthetic of the movie was well done, but what was the point? It ultimately just amounted to being a very pretentious, try hard, extreme film for commercial audiences. I felt like it tried very hard to be thought provoking when it was really just leaving out details and not really finishing anything it started with. On top of that, the ending scenes with Mia Goth freaking out were very hard to take seriously. I wasn't sure if the director meant for it to be comedic or not.

D+

Unless you're really into underground horror or you like very bad amateur pornography, you probably don't know about the 2 edgy 5 u "movies" of Canadian edgelord Lucifer Valentine. What we have here is a sequel to a movie that had no sense of plot continuity, story, or characters to go off of. As such, this movie is basically just a rambling mess of auditory and visual diarrhea being played and reversed throughout its all too long 70 something minute long runtime. Like all of Lucifer Valentine's movies, there's never an explanation as to why his movies feel like loud, humorless YouTube Poops, or why he feels a need to line them up with sex, urine, vomit, and a fat guy with an octopus on his head? I've been told by film fanatics that the best way to become a film auteur is to brand your insanity. Lucifer Valentine thinks he's doing this but he's literally just having semi attractive women and uglier women barfing on each other while the camera and editing software has a stroke. Sir, if you want to make porn, just say you're making porn. Don't be weird about it.

Smile has plenty of wild scares and amazing acting carrying it through most of it's runtime but once it got to it's final act, it lost steam. While the movie was already riding the wave of the "curse" trope like The Ring, The Grudge, It Follows etc., it also had the "trauma" trope added into it that's usually found in your standard A24 movie (it also adds all the same camera movements seen in an Ari Aster film). The trauma aspect added some momentum to the character and gave some explanation to why people may think she's crazy, but it didn't do much for me. It just made the movie feel way more derivative by the end. In my opinion, the ending also felt very anticlimactic. The characters talk about how you need to kill someone to end the curse and they briefly show something that alludes to that but nothing is ever really done with it. Instead, they end it with the main character taking her life whilst smiling. As I said, it left me feeling kinda empty and upset that they didn't do more with the concept. Overall, it was a serviceable horror movie that I don't regret seeing.

C+

If you're a fan of poorly made movies or films that are completely out there, the Christian film saga of Ron Ormond (and occasionally Estus Pirkle) are tailor made for you.

This saga (I have no better name for it), includes the Soviet/prison scare films If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971) and 39 Stripes (1979), and his biblical scare films The Burning Hell (1974), The Grim Reaper (1976), The Believer's Heaven (1977). His final film, The Second Coming (1980) melds these two genres together to make what I believe is his most ridiculous and underrated film of all time. All six films are pretty similar to each other. They all deal with a down and out Christian with little to no faith who's scared s***less into being saved. This one sets all 5 of those apart because it accomplishes what I've affectionately coined "the 8 image rule". This is when a movie is so bizarre that you can take 8 pictures from different points of the movie and someone who hasn't seen it would likely believe all images were from a different film. The Second Coming does this with flying colors as it berates the audience with bizarre images of biblical costumes, exploding statues, satanic foes, laser guns, medieval torture chambers, and the like. It's so wild that it's hard to know where the direction and logic was during the actual filmmaking process. All I could think during the film's slim runtime was that Tim Ormond (standing in for his late father), was more than likely an obvious George Lucas fan. His movie is shamelessly filmed with Han Solo replica pistols, THX 1138/ stormtrooper-like villains, and a finale that's comparable to Indiana Jones. It's astonishing in the worst way and it deserves to be seen.

A wimpy teenager is embarrassed he's a Christian because it makes him look like a moron. All of his cool atheist friends get to have sex, party, and be awesome while people just see him as a nice guy soy boy. One night, he prays to god to have never been saved and then when he wakes up, he's the coolest kid ever. However, his parents have divorced, his sister was never born, his best friend committed suicide because of his negligence, and his mom is a wh*re. On top of all that, he has a slew of super bad habits like doubling crossing women, gambling, and starting fights. The Angel that allowed all this to happen is very creepy looking and sounding and looks way more like a disciple of Satan. Again, this film is a biased exercise made solely to crap all over atheism and boost the egos of impressionable Christian kids.

The best thing Barbarian had to offer was it's bare bones trailer that left a lot to the imagination. Sadly, that's where a lot of the magic ended for this OK but formulaic horror. It started out promising and then got better and better as Justin Long showed up but as the twist was finally revealed and the pieces of the puzzle started to come together, it felt a little lame and more gross than scary. Yeah, I guess the whole incest subplot made for interesting world building around the characters but it didn't make much sense for the villain other than for her to be a lumbering brute. The whole affair ended up being unexpected but not in a good way. The other thing that bugged me about this movie was the title. Other than "Barbary" being the name of the street where the movie takes place, "Barbarian" was a pretty unfitting title for this drooly, claustrophobic horror movie.

In what would later be known as the crown jewel of lazy tropes in bad Christian "cinema", Atheists are portrayed as conniving, judgmental bullies that have nothing better to do than to bring Christians down. As such, the good Christian protagonist (played none other by eventual "God's Not Dead" producer David A. R. White), is depicted as a humble, clean cut, goody goody hero who destroys the stupid atheists with his own logic that makes them in turn look like the two-bit morons they're portrayed to be.

On top of all this, the supporting protagonist is a recently converted atheist who's depicted as being foolish, headstrong, and whiny. The most surreal thing about movies made by these types of Christians is the fact that they wonder why they get judged or picked on so harshly. And then you discuss these movies and realize that they're belittling an entire group of people and making assumptions about them as a whole. Unbeknownst to them, this approach is not only childish but also mean spirited.

I never once thought I could be scared by a movie involving aliens, but that's not why the movie was scary. There's a very creepy, realistic scene at the movie's epicenter that left me staring with my mouth agape, glued to the screen. It didn't necessarily have anything to do with the central storyline but it was arguably one of the scariest scenes I've seen in recent years for oddly specific reasons. If you've seen the movie, you know what I'm talking about.

This next paragraph contains spoilers so prep yourself if you haven't seen it:

There's a scene where a monkey attacks and kills a room full of innocent actors during a cute and funny tv production. There's no music, no jump scares, just screams and yells of humans and animal alike as blood sprays about. The film builds this up at uses it to juxtapose the dark sides of creatures and how they can't be tamed. For me, it's absolute nightmare fuel. I love monkeys. I've wanted to help rehabilitate them. This scene was so disquieting for me that it put me off of them, at least for a bit, especially given the set up (something harmless and friendly) and the characters surrounded. What's worse is that after the fact, this story is used as publicity and then scene as something humorous? It's so dark and legitimately terrifying. From the very beginning, I was wondering how this bloodied monkey had anything to do with the plot. I wanted answers so bad. Once the rampage on the set happened and I got the clarification, the aliens weren't too scary to me. That scene was so horrifying that it made the central antagonist of the film seem so pathetic in comparison. The scene was just too good that it trumped the rest of the scenes that were meant to make the movie. But the movie was still amazing and that scene in particular made the film what it was.

A.