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Podcast Review: The Black Tapes

Everyone’s been talking my ear off about this podcast but I’ve been avoiding it, not really being an audio drama kind of way. The journalistic dress-up helps with that, I guess, since I’m now a convert.

The black tapes referenced in the title are a collection of cases (and sometimes actual VHS tapes) that a skeptic paranormal investigator (Dr Strand) has gathered over the years. Cases that he couldn’t debunk or prove either way. The journalist (Alex) meets him while recording a podcast about people with interesting, or different, jobs. This changes the nature of the podcast and leads to them investigating these unsolved cases, of sorts.

Production values, voice acting are absolutely top notch. If you’re tired of lazily recorded podcasts of dudes around their living room talking about the Avengers movies or whatever, this podcast is a salve. Probably a good entry point for podcasts of this type too. 

The writing is fairly good. The only thing I’ve had issue with was the overall plot progression and format of the show. The writing itself, episode to episode, scene to scene is solid throughout. So what’s my issue?

At least as far as I’ve listened of it (season 2 episode 4), the show is frustrating in that it often presents cases, features a couple of interviews and then closes without any kind of resolution. While it’s true that most cases end up showing up again, slowly progressing and revealing their secrets, I’d argue it’s fairly frustrating to follow a case throughout 14 episodes and there’s still no end in sight.

It doesn’t help that some of them are really vague or plain goofy, like the episode about a ”hard rock” band that “wants to become the new Soundgarden or Nirvana,” whose lead singer “hammered a butter knife into his chest with a mallet.” 

Others are surprisingly effective and will probably creep you out. The one about the talking boards was a good one.

Perhaps most interesting is the overarching plot about Dr Strand  and the disappearance of his wife. Alas, just like every other case, it moves slow as molasses, with morsel bites thrown at the audience every other episode or two. 

I feel like I’m being too hard on this show. Before I started getting frustrated with the pacing, I was enjoying it immensely and it’s such a well produced show that it’s hard to not recommend it.

Worth a look.

4 out of 5 VHS Tapes

Capsule Reviews: Lord of Tears and Monsters 2

Lord of Tears

This is the one with that Owl Man dude that everyone thought was super creepy. While I like the monster design, we only get to see it a few times. The rest of the movie, we’re enjoying people talking about shit nobody really cares about, trapped in a film that looks like it was shot on a 20$ camcorder and then transferred to VHS, probably recorded over some old Seinfeld episodes.

It looks like garbage, it’s slow as heck. There’s nothing here.

I don’t know. I just can’t.

0 out of 5 Owls

 

Monsters 2: The Dark Continent

Hey, we should take that pretty decent indie flick that came out a few years ago and make a shitty sequel, mixing American Sniper in with Cloverfield. But make it extra shitty.

Bunch of soldiers head out to the middle east where giant monsters are hanging out. But they’re still fighting those TERRISTS out there, while the monsters are an after thought. It’s as if a rejected Jarhead sequel’s script pages got mixed in with a monster movie. This is really bad and all the ‘MURICA shit gets old real fast.

I mean, I dunno. Written and directed by the guy who directed the second season of Misfits, which wasn’t that bad. Maybe he should leave the writing to someone else.

1 out of 5 Vagina Monsters (DNF)

 

Capsule Reviews: Among Friends, Dark Summer, Death Do Us Part

Sometimes I watch bad movies and then forget all about them because they don’t even warrant a review. But they gnaw at me, these terrible things, and thus I review them months later, half-remembered and half-assed.

 

Among Friends

Utterly forgettable, not completely boring and unoriginal as hell. The premise is ludicrous. The plot as I remember it: A bunch of friends have 80s themed party but it turns out a maniac set it up to get their revenge of them. They proceed to reveal their darkest secrets (and oh boy are some of these people fucked up) while he murders/tortures them. It’s a bit like like Happy Birthday to Me but without the charm or the quality.

2 out of 5 Dark Secrets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dark Summer

Some dude gets cursed or possessed or something and him, his friend and the girl he’s crushing on try to save him. Oh yeah, I think he’s on house arrest because he was stalking some girl. Peter Stormare chews scenery as his probation officer and I wonder what kind of student loans he has that made him work on this. College is free in Sweden, so this is a real life mystery.

It’s like Disturbia, but not any fun at all. It’s boring and the ending sucks.

1 out of 5 Cursed Creepers

 

 

 

 

 

 

Death Do Us Part

Do you like people yelling at each other in the woods? Do you enjoy watching a bunch of ”friends” who are mysteriously horrible to one another and seem to hate each other’s guts, yet they hang out constantly? Do you like telegraphed plot twists that make no sense? Boy do I have something for ya.

Some lady is getting married and she takes her friends and her SO’s friends to a cabin in the woods to celebrate. Someone starts murdering people. Nothing of value is lost.

1 out of 5 Wedding Dresses (1 point deducted for that ludicrous ending)

Hellions Review

Ooph. Where to start. According to the marketing department, the director (Bruce McDonald), made a splash with his previous flick, Pontypool. I’m not sure that ”a big splash” is the word I’d use for Pontypool, but I won’t argue too much; I enjoyed it a lot.

Some of the same mad genius is in play here as well, but unfortunately, Hellions is an uneven affair. Probably more so than Pontypool was. And while Pontypool had a really original idea to prop it up (based on a book by Tony Burgess), there’s nothing like this here to save it from mediocrity.

It looks good, and that probably accounts for most of the hype surrounding it (that, and the poster. Look at that fucking poster!)

And I have to say, I was a bit let down. I was looking forward to liking this. Hellions manages to be at once both muddy and obvious. When it’s not beating you over the head with the motherhood/abortion angle, you’re getting nonsensical flashes of a parallel world, weird, budget special effects and lots and lots of screaming. It looks pretty cool, but ultimately doesn’t seem to serve any purpose.

The premise of the film is fairly simplistic, but somehow confusing. Just like the movie, I am now confusing the shit out of you. What I mean is that while the movie straight up tells you what is happening eventually, in the meantime you’re watching a girl run around her house, or/and a parallel universe, always screaming and crying at the spooky little kids that want her baby. And you’re always expecting something more to happen, some kind of twist that will tie this together, but it never comes. Or maybe it does:

The cop that shows up about halfway through is both out of left field and completely on the nose. This was the point when my opinion on the film turned from ”Okay, this isn’t that bad” to ”Why am I watching this.”

It has a slightly stronger third act, but I had checked out by then. Your mileage may vary however, and while that’s a given for any movie, I feel like this one might have its fans.

2 out 5 Creepy Halloween Kids

The Heart Does Not Grow Back by Fred Venturini

Now and again you pick a book, planning to maybe read a couple of pages, then check out what else you’ve loaded into your e-reader thing in the past few weeks as you impulsively buy anything that looks good on Amazon. My book pile grows larger every day and it’s sometimes hard to commit to just one.

Then you get a book like this one and instead spend all night reading this one, perfect book until dawn.

I probably have a soft spot for books about kids growing up in small nowhere towns. That said, even the best of those end up doling out some melodrama sooner or later. I stayed with The Heart Does Not Grow Back because it didn’t. While the events of the book are tragic, the book isn’t a downer; it’s too smart and it moves too fast for desperation to settle in. Don’t get me wrong, this is a dark, dark book, but the way it’s handled makes it more of a dark satire or even a black comedy.

Dale is a teenager when he realizes he has an extraordinary power: He can regenerate missing limbs as well a heal any wound at an extraordinary pace. Other than that, his life is pretty normal up the the point when a tragedy hits the small town, changing his life forever and leaving him a husk of his former self.

The ”catastrophe” mentioned in the blurb serves as the catalyst for the later action. It’s followed by a lull in the narrative that’s I wasn’t a big fan of, but I won’t dock the author too many points; it serves as a springboard for what comes next. Any notion of Dale turning superhero are quickly squashed (and thank God for that). Instead, we’re treated to the sad sack of a protagonist trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life and with his power, the two entwined. While Dale’s constant angst does get a little tiring, it’s never too much so; you end up rooting for the guy, even when he’s holding on to a teenage crush for years or failing to look after himself and his best interests.

The end is pretty satisfying, equal parts cold hearted and smart. I almost wish for a sequel.

You should pick this up.

4 out of 5 Hearts

Southpaw

 

I expected to like this, but had my misgivings on the Kurt Sutter script. While I enjoyed the first season of Sons of Anarchy, the rest of them and Sutter’s ridiculous social media presence and macho bullshit have long ago turned me off his projects.

On the other hand, I like sports movies and I like Gyllenhaal .

For most of the movie, I felt like Gyllenhaal, getting my ass beaten by cliches building upon cliches. The aforementioned macho bullshit mar an already weak script by trying extra hard to make things dramatic. Our hero is a winner, he’s rich, he has a loving family, he dominates in the ring, but he does all this by letting himself get beat on because apparently he won’t block or dodge. Apparently he does this because he’s super tough and then he gets angry on the last round, hulks out and beats his opponent.

I’m no boxing expert, but I can tell you that’s the dumbest shit you’ve ever heard. While there is such a thing as tiring out your opponent, nobody goes in the ring with the intention to get right hooks to the face for twenty minutes.

I wont spoil the plot, but suddenly, overly dramatic thing happens and this leads our protagonist to lose literally everything. His wife, custody of his daughter, his house, his money (early on he’s giving out platinum Rolexes to his buddies, but six months later he’s homeless. What.), his friends and his career.

He takes about a week to wallow in this and then gets back on the horse by getting a shitty job in a shitty gym that a has-been coach runs (Forest Whitaker), intending to reclaim his throne.

If you haven’t had enough of cliches yet, the rest of the movie plays out like Rocky, only significantly dumber; the whole fight hangs on the use of the titular Southpaw stance, as if Gyllenhaal is a fucking Power Ranger striking his power pose.

However, it’s not all bad (it’s pretty bad). Gyllenhaal does the best with the lines he’s given, 50 Cent was born to play the shifty, shitty manager and some of the bit roles are pretty good.

2 out 5 Left Uppercuts.

P.S. Sons of Anarchy sucks, go fuck yourself.

I Review: Bound to Vengeance

Bound to Vengeance has a 20% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is bizarre. I’m not saying it’s the greatest movie ever made, but in a long line of shitty slasher/exploitation flicks, this was mostly a pleasant surprise.

The review over at The Dissolve is particularly scathing, as it seems to be more interested in figuring out if the director ”sided” with the protagonist or not, which is an…interesting way to review a movie, I guess.

Anyway. This movie is about a kidnapped woman who manages to break free and capture the man that held her in his basement. She makes him lead him to all the other girls his ring of degenerates is holding captive.

This type of movie isn’t really my kind of thing. Victimized women, whether they’re getting revenge or not is something I’m not really interested in. I did stick around however, mostly because it seemed competently shot and acted.

The movie is overall a bit hit and miss. The violence (almost exclusively dealt by the heroine) is brutal and satisfying (What, they’re horrible people, they deserve what they get), the dead women less so. I’m not sure why the screenwriter went with that.

The minor plot twist near the end isn’t really that good. I’d call it pedestrian.

All in all, this is only a recommend for people who like shit like I Spit On Your Grave.

2 out of 5 creep vans

Review: Southern Bastards Vol 1

Southern Bastards Vol 1 by Jason Aaron(Author), Jason Latour(Illustrator)

Earl Tubb is an angry old man with a very big stick.

Euless Boss is a high school football coach with no more room in his office for trophies and no more room underneath the bleachers for burying bodies.

And they’re just two of the folks you’ll meet in Craw County, Alabama, home of Boss BBQ, the state champion Runnin’ Rebs and more bastards than you’ve ever seen.

A Southern fried crime comic by Jason Aaron and Jason Latour

Southern Bastards is on the Best Of lists of quite a few places and I can see why. It’s a very tight and solid narrative and the art is gorgeous; visceral even.

I’m not as taken with it, but it’s hard for me to explain why. Maybe because it failed to surprise me in any way, always calling its shots and setting up the next beat in the narrative. It reminds me a bit of the Demo series by Brian Wood, but that was back in 2003 and now it’s 2014.

Anyway, I don’t want to talk shit about the book just because it feels vaguely familiar. There’s good stuff here and I suspect the series will take off with the next few issues. Perhaps Earl Tubb’s story was a bit too archetypical for my taste, but I’m looking forward to see what happens in Vol 2.

If you’re into that whole Southern Rural Noir stuff (True Detective, maybe?), this might scratch that itch. It’s certainly southern as hell.

3.5 out of 5 Big Sticks.

Review: Starry Eyes

Sarah (Alex Essoe) is a beautiful actress that wants to make it in the acting world. She’s willing to do whatever it takes, even at the detriment of her own personal being. When she’s scouted for the film The Silver Scream, Sarah has to decide exactly how much she’s willing to go through for fame.

Oh, aren’t you just trembling from excitement after reading that very original and not at all cliched synopsis? I know I was. Or rather, I decided to watch it because it was getting some good press and seriously, there had to be some kind of interesting twist to the plot, right? No way it would just be about a woman who desperately wants to be an actress that falls prey to some weird producers and ends up dead/monstrous/captive.

I got bad news.

Leaving the plot aside for a moment, I have to say that this is a competently made movie. The acting is mostly solid but not exceptional and it has some great photography, especially towards the end. The soundtrack didn’t really stick with me. The last five minutes of the film were pretty great and it kinda makes me wish that was the beginning of the movie. It largely felt like we got to watch the introduction to a much more interesting film. The details of the protagonist’s shitty job and shittier friends were of little interest, since it was all fairly shallow. Especially most scenes at her job were head scratching and completely differed in tone to the rest of the movie.

Sarah’s arch nemesis is another woman actor who always has something shitty to say to her, yet no one ever calls her out on her plain to see hatred of our protagonist. Why this happens is a mystery, especially after the tenth time she flat out tells Sarah she’s a huge failure and an ugly loser.

Once the plot starts rolling, we’re treated to some vaguely unsettling scenes of Sarah’s auditions for The Silver Scream that instead of making her run screaming seem to only feed her need to be successful in her acting career. Again and again she goes back for more auditions, each one worse (and more humiliating) than the last.

The movie staff seem to be grooming her for some nefarious purpose.

I guess you’ll have to watch it if you want to find out. As far as I’m concerned, the ending was very obvious. Part of that is because of the marketing material, but the plot is so completely by the numbers that you’re lulled into a false sense of security (”I bet there’s a twist! I bet the plot will lead somewhere else other than the inevitable conclusion!”) but alas, it is not to be.

2 out of 5 Starlets.

Review: The Babadook

urlThe Babadook is one of those movies that you expect to be disappointed in. A creepy, atmospheric trailer seems to be a recipe for disaster, as proved by movies like The Conjuring, Sinister, Insidious 2, Mama and so on. Your mileage may vary on those flicks, but I was ultimately disappointed in all of them, even if I didn’t outright dislike them.

I’m happy to say Babadook breaks the mold. It’s not a perfect movie, but at least it delivers on what the trailer and the marketing promises. It can be a pretty scary flick at times, but it doesn’t overplay its hand. Even at a crescendo you don’t get a really good look at the boogeyman and it avoids the usual exorcism/easy solution trick that plagues the genre.

Amelia, a widowed orderly, has raised her son Samuel alone following her husband’s tragic death. Sam begins displaying erratic behavior: he rarely sleeps through the night, and is constantly preoccupied with an imaginary monster, which he has built weapons to fight. One night, Sam asks his mother to read from a mysterious pop-up storybook he found on his shelf. The story, titled “Mister Babadook”, is about a supernatural creature that, once someone is made aware of its existence, torments that person indefinitely.

It’s a pretty great setup. Even the book is pretty scary on it’s own.

While the son is pretty irritating and irritating kids are one of my top pet peeves in horror flicks, I have to say he comes around before the halfway point and is generally very believable in his role. The mother’s slow descent into madness and violence seems a bit improbable, but I’m willing to chalk it up to actual mental illness and/or the Babadook’s influence.

The movie is essentially the tale of how mother and son become increasingly cut off from the world as they fall victims to the attention of the Babadook. She loses her job, he gets kicked out of school, her (terrible) sister doesn’t want to see her and so on and so forth. Inside the house, the mother is becoming increasingly erratic and paranoid, at times attacking her own son and at times protecting her from the monster.

The few times we get to see it, it’s fairly terrifying and the sound design is particularly creepy. Bonus points for the movie being light on jump scares. Read on after the jump for my take on the ending.

4 out of 5 ba BA ba DOOK DOOKs

The Babadook

Spoilers abound!

I am a lazy man. My take on the movie as a whole and on the ending in particular is fairly simple: It’s a metaphor for mental illness. That’s not to say everything that happens in the movie is explained this way, I’m sure you can nitpick a few scenes that ”prove” that Babadook is real, but that’s not the point. Both mother and son are unreliable narrators and anyway, everything that happens is a metaphor as well. Amelia ignores the signs of her depression and whatever mental illness seems to be circling her and sinks deeper into it. She cuts herself off from everyone that can see what’s happening either by her actions or on purpose (pulling her kid from school). I don’t want to get too into it, but you could also argue that Sam just goes along for the ride, as kids usually do. Their parents are their compass. If mom says there’s a monster trying to kill them, who is he to argue? Especially since he has been insisting the same thing since before Amelia believed in it.

As for the ending, I take it as a (a bit on the nose) metaphor for acknowledging your problems and choosing to manage them, instead of ignoring them and letting them control you, as symbolized by her ”feeding” the Babadook, the monster (sickness) you can never get rid of.