bad movies – Yorgos Cotronis – Artist/Art Director

Capsule Reviews: Lord of Tears and Monsters 2

January 24, 2016 No Comments

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

October 6, 2015 No Comments

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)

Bad Movies Double Feature: Buck Wild and In Fear

September 11, 2014 No Comments

Buck Wild

What happens when you make a horror comedy with actors that possess no comedic talent. Extremely awkward, rarely funny and too long by half.

”When their originally planned outing is cancelled, four friends go on a hunting trip in Texas. They include Craig, a straitlaced man; Jerry, a mysterious relative of Craig’s from New York; Tom, a nerd; and Lance, a hedonist. When they arrive, they discover that a chupacabra has bitten their guide Clyde, and, unknown to all, he has begun to slowly turn into a zombie.”

The synopsis doesn’t inform you how ~*wacky*~ the movie is. There’s a flaming gay redneck mafia dude that shows up at the beginning. At some point there’s conflict between the protagonists and him and one of them get paddled by the mafia boss’s cronies. This is the height of comedy this movie is trying to attain.

Between painful jokes about Craig’s unfaithful girlfriend, shitty sex scenes with the ”dumb slut” stereotype neighbor and the meandering plot, there’s very little of value here. You might enjoy it more if you’re into gore and zombie stuff, but I was just waiting for the whole thing to end.

1 out of 5 redneck zombies.

In Fear

This is a movie so boring, so bland, so incredibly shitty, that I feel as if I’ve already reviewed it in the past and I’m stuck in a kind of purgatory where I have to talk about this piece of shit forever. Harsh words, you might think, but I’m 100% serious, this is an offensively stupid movie, made even more agonizing by the fact that the director think he’s some kind of auteur making cinema. It seems to have worked as the movie has a 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is idiotic at best. Fuck you.

”Tom and Lucy have decided to go on their first trip as a couple, to a music festival and a secluded hotel. However they soon find themselves unable to actually locate the hotel and spend much of their time getting lost in a labyrinthine series of forest roads. As they continue to drive, their tensions rise as they realize that something or someone is deliberately toying with them and enjoying their torment. They pick up Max, a strange hitchhiker that may be connected to everything that is going on.”

Probably the couple with the least chemistry in the world, you’ll spend the first half hour trying to figure out if these two idiots have just hooked up for a weekend getaway or if they have actually met before. After a series of increasingly improbably events and choices, they get lost in some sort of maze made out of hedges. Why at no point does anyone say ”fuck it, I’m off-roading this bitch” is a question that will torment you as the minutes tick on by.

Realizing at some point there’s only so long you can go without having anything remotely interesting happen and also that your actors are just not good enough to prop the whole thing up, a weird guy they find on the road is added and that’s really where the terribleness of the movie ramps up into nonsense.

This is devoid of value.

0 out of 5 idiots in a car

After (2012)

July 31, 2014 No Comments

Oh boy. I don’t even know. A cut rate Silent Hill clone that somehow manages to be completely boring and predictable. Hell, it even gives away its own twist in the first 20 minutes. Plot synopsis says ”When two bus crash survivors (Steven Strait, Karolina Wydra) awake to discover that they are the only people left in their small town, they must form an unlikely alliance in a race to unravel the truth behind their isolation. As strange events begin to unfold, they start to question whether the town they know so well is really what it seems.”
These two end up in their hometown who is suspiciously devoid of people, except for when they seem to travel back in time and there’s a bunch of people they can’t interact with. It takes them about half an hour to figure out what’s going on, because at no point do they think about reaching out and touching one of these phantom people. Imagine the frustration as they go ”Hello? Hello?” for the duration of each scene while everyone around them ignores then. Everything looking like a totally radical 70s sitcom doesn’t give it away either. Mystifying.

A situation that could have been creepy as hell becomes completely toothless at the hands of this director and actors. Ugh, I can’t even go on.

Just watch the trailer, it’s enough to give you a migraine.

0 out of 5 Silent Hills.

Help, These Movies Are Kinda Bad: Ladda Land, Tape 407 and Bunshinsaba.

January 25, 2014 No Comments

Ladda Land
Oh Ladda Land. A movie with a schizoid personality that never know what it wants to be. A comedy? A drama? A horror film? A thriller? Fuck knows. The movie deals with a pathetic guy and his utterly shitty family. His wife may or may not have been fucking her boss. His mother in law openly hates him and turns his own kids against him. His daughter treats him like shit and actually moves out of the fucking house at one point, with the blessings of her mother. Holy shit dude, just fucking go already. Pack a bag and get the fuck out, these people are literally shit.

They have no value. Just fucking run.

Anyway, some maid lady gets murdered (I don’t think we ever find out who did it) and appears to be haunting a bunch of houses in the neighborhood. There’s subplot about their neighbor who is abusing his son and his wife, one about the guy’s job being a scam and leaving him hanging, the wife’s boss who is implied is fucking her (I’m honestly not sure, he shows up at their house and later the husband notices the bed is unmade, so who knows) and a bunch of other stuff.

The actual horror thing is just an afterthough for most of the movie. The last part tries to ramp up the tension, but ultimately ends up being pretty dumb. Fuck it.

1 out of 5 closet ghosts.

Tape 407

Oh god. I can’t really recommend this movie. It has a bit of a twist so it gets points to that, but it’s the usual found footage shit in every other way. Especially in all the wrong ways, like people perpetually screaming at each other for no reason, repeating the same phrases again and again (”Listen to me! Okay? Listen. Listen to me! No, listen to me! Are you listening!”) in the name of ”realism.”

Look dude, you’re not making a documentary. You’re making a movie. That’s why you should try and avoid things that make me want to throw your DVD out my window like a Frisbee, even if you think they’re ”realistic.” Just make the yelling stop.

Anyway, the movie deals with the survivors of a plane crash that are stranded in the middle of nowhere and proceed to get munched on by creatures unknown. There’s two sisters, who serve as the protagonists, a tough air marshal, some photographer dude, whatever. Everything is by the book: The asshole guy that everyone hates, people getting eaten one by one, the dumb twist at the end.

I don’t really care enough about this movie to keep talking about it.

0 out of 5 airplane peanuts.

P.S. This movie is so shitty I can’t even find a decent poster of it online.

P.S.S One of the posters has this quote: ”A twist ending to leave you breathless” – Frightfest. Jesus Christ that quote should get someone jail time.

Bunshinsaba-poster-korean-chinatsu-miyoshi

Ouja Board / Bunshishaba

I’m gonna keep this short because I didn’t actually hate this movie, I just didn’t particularly enjoy it. Bunshishaba is a local legend, kind of a cheapo Bloody Mary thing. Three high school girls call upon her to exact revenge on their bullies. Their plan works exceptionally well as they immediately start dying. Unfortunately, the titular demon has possessed one of them and the dark secrets of the weird ass village they live in are about to be revealed.

IMDB says: ”Yu-jin and her blind mother move to a small village from Seoul. On her first day at the new school, Yu-jin gets picked on by her classmates. Along with other victims of hatred, Yu-jin puts a curse on the four girls tormenting them through a Ouija Board. On her second day at school, one of the spellbound bursts into flames and dies just as she sits down where Yu-jin used the board. The next day, another victim burns to death, and now the school is enclosed by horror.”

It’s nothing mind blowing but at the same time it didn’t make me want to kill myself, so it gets a pass. I can’t say I found anything scary about it, the usual girl with long black hair jumping out here and there, but the back story was interesting enough, if a bit derivative. I’d say it’s worth a look, but definitely middle of the road stuff.

2.5 out of 5 vengeful ghosts.

More Bad Movies: Ghost on Air, Black Rock, Magic Magic

January 9, 2014 No Comments

Ghost On Air
I liked the premise of this movie enough to go against my gut feeling and watch it. A popular radio DJ gets moved to the night shift slot and decides to tell ghost stories. Scary shit follows. How could you fail with this premise?

Turns out, pretty easily. The plot was a tad confusing at places, mostly because it featured a bunch of unrelated ghost stories with similar elements. One of them is about a girl who has an abortion and is haunted by her dead kid. The girl’s mom finds her hanging. Then there’s a different young girl haunting a store and it becomes really hard to tell which old lady is the mom from the first story and which one is the shop owner and how, if at all, these two stories are connected (from what I can tell, they’re not, but I’m still confused).

In any case, the DJ’s dead girlfriend was a horror writer who decided to investigate some ghost stories she heard about. It’s unclear even at the end of the movie, if this research was the cause of her death (I’m unsure if we’re ever told how she died, all we get is a scene in a hospital where she’s on a stretcher) or if it was unrelated. The dj finds her notes and after telling the stories on air, decides to also look into these hauntings.

There’s also a subplot about how a young female dj takes the prime-time spot from his, but it’s fairly misogynistic. I was expecting something more interesting to happen, as the woman is always trying to help the protagonist and he always blows her off. Unfortunately, it looks like we’re really supposed to think she’s a horrible monster.

Spoilers follow, including ending.

The movie has a pretty dumb ending. After the DJ ”solves” the hauntings by revealing the truth, he wins an award for best male DJ, gets his old job back and gets to push his rival out of the show. Apparently being a woman and having a job means you’re a whore and you should be punished.

In any case, there’s a scene right after that where the DJ watches on his laptop a video of his girlfriend telling him she’s haunted and asking ”Where are you?” I’m not sure why she’s recording this video or why she’s asking that, it seems like she could have called him or something, but what do I know, I’m not a ghost. Then the ghosts descend upon him and presumably drive him crazy. The end.

All and all, I wouldn’t recommend this movie. It has no good scares, the plot is convoluted for no reason and there just isn’t anything all that interesting here.

2 out of 5 ghost DJs.

Black Rock (spoilers throughout)

Another utterly dumb movie about how apparently ordinary people will decide to commit felonies for no reason, with no regard for their own safety or best interest.

Three women decide to go on vacation back to their childhood vacation spot, on a tiny island. Once there, they meet three hunters who they kinda-sorta know and invite them to hang out. After one of the women flirts with one of the men and invites him into the woods to presumable have sex, she has a change of heart but the guy won’t take no for an answer and tries to rape her. She cracks his skull open with a rock.

His two buddies are upset and decide to kill the three women because of reasons. I don’t know, not a lot makes sense here.

They play the usual cat and mouse game on the island, including more dumb scenes, like having the women try and make it into the water by crawling towards the beach, but one of them freaks out and starts screaming and gets up to run, immediately getting shot in the face.

I don’t know why. She couldn’t get the pressure of crawling on a beach I suppose. The remaining two women run into the water only to realize they’re freezing to death, so they get back out. This, despite a five minute conversation they had before they put the plan in motion, where one of them absolutely knew she could handle the cold water. I guess she was wrong.

The two women get naked to battle hypothermia. I guess the boobs were unavoidable.

Anyway, the movie ends as expected. It’s really dumb. If you’re really into watching women get victimized for an hour and then maybe get their revenge for two minutes, I guess you could give it a shot.

1 out of 5 hypothermic, naked women.

Magic Magic (spoilers throughout)

Ah, the dumbest of them all. I admit to being intrigued for the first half hour of this movie, but once I realized the movie has an unreliable narrator, I kinda gave up on the whole thing. I like unreliable narrators, but when you got every other character acting weird as shit and then compound that with a protagonist that appears to be schizophrenic, is there really any point in watching? If there is no basis for reality and the events aren’t even that interesting (oh woo, this guy is mean to her, her friend was rude on the phone, a dog tried to hump her), it’s hard to take it seriously. Couple this with a really dumb ending and you get Magic Magic.

Everyone in this movie is both irritating and stupid. And terrible, like the guy who wants to have sex with his girlfriend who had an abortion the previous day and suggests anal when she says she’s still hurting. What.

In the ending, her friends take her to a Mexican witch who tries to exorcise her and ends up chocking her to death by feeding her a frog. This is happening as about ten people watch, none of them saying anything, apparently convinced she’s possessed.

I can’t say enough bad things about this movie. Fuck it.

0 out of 5 humping dogs.

These Movies are Terrible: Home Sweet Home and Insidious 2

January 6, 2014 8 Comments

Home Sweet Home (2013)
What a terrible movie. The home invasion resurgence I’m seeing is bad enough on it’s own, but where other movies might try something a little bit different, this one is happy to be the usual shitty tripe. There is no Wikipedia page and the synopsis on IMDB is one line long, so I’ll have to wing it. A couple is spending a night at home when they realize some dude wearing that mask from Saw has broken into their home and also trapped them inside. That’s really about it and from here on, expect major spoilers.

Of course, the husband immediately gets his, leaving the wife to play the cat and mouse game with the killer. Of course right before that, she thought she’d surprise her husband with some sexy times while wearing a cheerleader uniform, so naturally the killer hunts her around the house with her dressed as a slightly aged cheerleader. She gets captured, escapes, gets captured again and so on.

A lot of dumb shit takes place, she makes choices that make no sense, her husband is completely useless and gets fucked up constantly and then in the end we have the usual fake-out death. The killer then stops messing around and murders the poor woman and then the plot twist hits. Turns out he was a police officer and under the painter’s onesie he’s wearing is a full cop getup. He stages the scene to make it look like he was called to the house and the credits roll.

I’m not sure how he’s going to explain that he got shot with the victim’s gun or where exactly he was earlier and why he’s at their house when no call has been made. Does this guy even have a shift? Or is he more like a freelance cop that works on the weekends? I don’t know. I’m sure you can plug these plot holes with some mental gymnastics, I’m vaguely aware that there was a whole thing where the couple had called the police the previous day about a prowler, but really, it’s too dumb to think about.

There is really nothing interesting about this movie.

1 out of 5 home invaders.

Insidious 2 (2013)

I honestly didn’t love the first insidious and I could never understand why people talk it up. It felt like one of those movies that you’d only think are interesting if you watch maybe a couple of horror movies a year. To me, it had a bunch of ideas I’ve seen before, but at least it was competently made, so I wasn’t completely disappointment. I’m even planning a re-watch.

I went into the sequel/prequel with good intentions, but ultimately, it was pretty bad. Again, Wikipedia fails me for a synopsis.

The movie takes place almost immediately after the end of the first one. The family moves to another house and tries to get things back to normal. But weird shit still happens, this time apparently centering around her husband and the baby.

Spoilers ahead.

The movie serves as both a prequel and a sequel to the original movie. We get a flashback showing how the father of the family also had a run in with the demons/ghosts/whatevers when he was a kid and managed to suppress his astral projecting abilities. Everything that takes place in the flashbacks is really well done and all around interesting. The problem lies with all the shit they add to the current timeline, which ends up coming off like a an episode of Supernatural mixed with American Horror Story season one. They throw in some ghosts, an overbearing, crazy mom, a cross-dressing serial killer that appears both as his innocent child self and his later, murderous incarnation and somehow try and tie all this in to the events of the first movie. It fell flat for me, though your mileage may vary.

I kept waiting for something to happen that would tie it up nicely, but it never came. It really is as disjointed as it looked to be. The bit of mindfuck where the events in the flashback are a reaction to the events of the future (you’ll know it when you see it, the movie makes sure to hit you over the head with it) was really the only interesting part of the movie.

The movie isn’t shy about showing us a bunch of ghosts in broad daylight (always accompanied by the usual piano and string cues), which gets ridiculous pretty fast. There is only a handful of effective scares and none of them are really that original or interesting. It’s a very formulaic offering, overall.

It’s probably not completely terrible, but nowhere near as good as the original, which wasn’t that good to begin with, so eh.

2 out of 5 ghosts.

October Challenge #2: Bride of Chucky

October 19, 2013 No Comments

After watching the latest Chucky flick, I felt I had to see the two that came before that I hadn’t seen. Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky. After watching the former, I’m not sure I want to see the latter. Anyway. I’m gonna keep this short because the movie isn’t worth it. The premise is ridiculous, the acting is atrocious, even the kills are dumb (if you go for that kind of thing). There’s very little to like here, especially not the nu-metal soundtrack that screams ”we’re cool we promise!”

IMDB plot summary says ”Chucky, the doll possessed by a serial killer, discovers the perfect mate to kill and revive into the body of another doll.” which is about as lackluster as the movie itself. Chucky gets resurected by his old girlfriend, who is hoping he’ll be super thankful and marry her or something. Turns out Chucky is still a dick and he kills her and turns her into a doll too. Now they’re both stuck in doll bodies, but they figure out a way that will allow them to change into human bodies. They need something from Chucky’s grave, so they hitch a ride with this neighbor kid that is eloping with his girlfriend. Even my synopsis sounds better than the actual plot of this piece of shit.

A bunch of things in the movie make no sense. In previous movies Chucky was pretty capable and largely resistant. In this one he gets placed into a play pen by his girlfriend and he’s stuck in there. He also (almost) dies when he gets stabbed. The part where everyone thinks the two young lovers are responsible for the murders is laughable too. Especially the one where a police car explodes and somehow they get blamed, as if they were carrying car bombs. I don’t know.

I give up, there’s nothing here to like.

1 out of 5 shitty dolls.

Bad Movie Two-Punch: Fright Night 2 and Curse of Chucky

September 30, 2013 No Comments

I feel dirty just writing about these, but I felt I should warn people. Me and the girlfriend watched these in the last couple of days and we’re still reeling from the terribleness of it all. Curse of Chucky Decided to watch it because in the onslaught of bad slasher flicks, even a Chucky movie could be a nice change of pace. Though it did fulfil that role, the movie was really bad.

IMDB says ”After her mother’s mysterious death, Nica begins to suspect that the talking, red-haired doll her visiting niece has been playing with may be the key to recent bloodshed and chaos.”

It stars some TV actors I couldn’t really place. Nica’s sister is played by a woman with so many surgeries done to her face she could be the star of her own horror movie. There is a really dumb lesbian subplot for some reason. Chucky is now CGI and doesn’t really say a lot. When he does, even the cheesy one liners are not that good or funny (and always misogynistic).

There are a couple of decent shots but there really isn’t much here to like. The ending makes no sense. There is a scene after the credits that is better than the rest of the film put together, although it completely negates everything that happened before.

Mark the text below for spoilers.

About halfway through the movie, the niece disappears. It turns out she was hiding in a closet, playing ”hide and seek”. I’m not quite sure how she could be hiding and ignoring the million times each person in the house calls out to her, screams in terror, gets stabbed, dies, falls from the second floor, down the stairs or when the power goes out and so on. That’s one dedicated little girl. Then even though the niece survives, we watch as Nica is found guilty for the murders that Chucky committed. I guess the niece didn’t want to narc on Chucky. Oh hey, wasn’t there also VIDEO FOOTAGE of Chucky murdering almost everyone in the house? No, I guess the paraplegic murdering four people made more sense. Okay.

The after credits scene shows the kid from the original movies receiving Chucky in the mail. He answers the phone and Chucky gets out of the box just in time to get his head blown off with a shotgun. I’m not quite sure why Chucky is still in the doll, since at the end of the movie it looks like he successfully transferred to the little girl.

1 out of 5 Good Guy dolls.

Next up: Fright Night 2 (2013)
I knew this was going to be bad, but I figured that the recipe is so classic that it could still be fun. I was wrong. The director chose to keep none of the original set up (vampire neighbor) but all of the original plot points. So you know exactly what’s going to happen and when, but it’s all dressed up as something else. Perfect.
It takes place in Romania, where some college-aged kids from the US are there to attend some classes (?). Apparently in Romania classes often take place after midnight and instead of teaching a class, there’s a full-blown rock concert show complete with smoke, lights and a WWE entrance by the professor. The professor, who is a hot hot hot lesbian (I feel the movie wanted me to really know how hot she was) that the main protagonist watches having sex at least twice before she’s introduced. Anyway, the rest is by the numbers with some truly eye-rolling events unfolding. Apparently Elizabeth Bathory was known as ”Countess Dracula” and was Romanian. News to me, but what do I know. They also switch out the Chris Angel-like Peter Vincent of the remake to an even more dumb Mythubusters kind of guy.
It’s just really, really dumb, I can’t go on.

0 out of 5 Draculas