Seen any crappy movies?

[slimshady2357]

Madame Web

I knew almost nothing going into this, not even that it is has been almost universally panned. It was pretty bad, shoddily written, terribly shot, poorly acted... I can't really think of a redeeming characteristic. I guess it's not the worst movie I've ever seen, but man it was just bad.

I would recommend skipping it if you were thinking about checking it out. Unless you love seeing Pepsi advertised a dozen times in a movie. Then it might be for you

[specious_reasons]

Ghostwatch (1992)

I could have sworn someone mentioned this before, but a search didn't yield results. Basically, this is the "War of the Worlds" for British TV. A sly found footage style movie that replicates a live broadcast from a haunted house.

A mother and her two girls think they're being haunted by a ghost, and a BBC TV program goes to the house live on Halloween to investigate. There's a few twists and like any good horror, things start to go wrong.

The thing I really liked about this was the little details that kept up the realism. Uri Gellar and CSICOP were name-checked, they made references to "real" parapsychology experiments. This was fun, but gets a bit muddled at the end.

[ShottleBop]

"Irish Wish," with Lindsay Lohan. I watch rom-coms with my grandchild; we took a flyer on this one. We both agreed that this was a crap movie.

Then their mother proffered that "Ricky Stanicky" was a better movie. We didn't make it past the creation of the name.

And the opening of "Wonka" made us turn that one off.

[specious_reasons]

I didn't actually watch much movies over my vacation - spent more time reading.

Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1972)

Classic title, decent low-budget movie. A troop of young actors follow their controlling director onto an island where he has planned a series of mindgames around a spellbook he found that purports to raise the dead. He uses the threat of unemployment to make the actors play with corpses. Eventually, the spells work, and the dead come to life.

The bulk of the horror is how the director bullies his actors. The zombie action is fairly late in the movie and I think most people would find this pretty dull.

Night of the Demons (2009)

A remake of the 1980s classic.

Angela (Shannon Elizabeth) is the local wild girl, and she decides to host a Halloween party at an abandoned mansion where 6 people disappeared almost 100 years ago. The party seems to be going well until the cops bust it up for no reason. After the bust seven people remain, which happens to be the perfect number for the demons in the mansion to enact their plan to be released on the world. Angela is the first to be possessed, then dead meat 2-5 get taken in quick succession. We're left with nice stoner guy, bad drug dealer guy (Eddie Furlong, who looks awful), and final girl Monica Keena. The script decided that Furlong and Keena's characters had a relationship in the past, but Keena is so far out of Furlong's league that they needed to add an exposition scene to explain why. At any rate, the remaining three get terrorized by demons until it all comes to an unsatisfying conclusion.

While this had some fun scares and some cool ideas, it's pretty bland and annoying otherwise. There's a lot of 2000s horror movie tropes in this that aged terribly, and it looks bad overall. The remake fell into the modern trap of pretending this needs to all make sense, so there's a lot of unrealistic exposition, and it's provided (in writing) by the only person of color. Somehow, the stock characters in the original seem more alive and realistic than the generic clump of people we're given in the remake.

This was a miss for me, I didn't hate it, but I can't recommend it, especially when the original is better. (For my money, though, Night of the Demons 2 is the best of the series.)

Mute Witness (1995)

Billy Hughes (Marina Zudina) is the special effects/props person on a cheap horror movie being directed by her brother-in-law in Russia. She's good at her job, but is mute and has some communications issue with the rest of the cast and crew. At the end of the shooting day, she gets locked into the studio for the night. She's trying to get out when she sees some activity in the studio. She goes to get help, only to realize that some of the crew members are shooting a snuff film.

She tries to sneak away, but makes enough noise that it raises the suspicion of the crew members. There's a long sequence where she's trying to get away from the people looking for her, and it's about as thrilling a cinematic moment as I've seen. She eventually gets free, but the crew has done just enough cleanup that they convince the police it was a screen test, not an actual murder. Later, the two men are convinced by their boss to make sure to tie up any loose ends...

This is a pretty great thriller. The escape sequence is so good that the rest of the movie is a bit of a letdown, but it's still fun and interesting, with a few more plot twists. I liked this a lot.