Reviews

"House of Purgatory" is based on the urban legend of a remote haunted house attraction that is so frightening, visitors get their money back if they can complete the entire creepshow. According to the legend, no one has ever finished the course. Interesting premise, unless the fabled haunt turns out to be one of those ultra-Christian spook shows that feature the sins of pedophilia, homosexuality, driving while drunk, and oh yeah, sex out of wedlock.

Four annoying teenagers (who are terrible actors in their late 20s pretending to be high school stereotypes) leave a dull Halloween party to seek out the haunted attraction, and hey bingo, they find it. Getting into the house for free is like, awesome!, so in they go. The silly scares begin to take on surreal qualities and suddenly the foursome gets split up and must confront the Evangelical evils based on their deepest secrets.

The drunk driver who's killed someone and runs away is given the shortest time and not much punishment. Evidently vehicular homicide is some pesky annoyance, like acne.

The sex before marriage "girl" gets tied to a gurney, and suddenly her Christian mommy and daddy show up. Boy howdy, now little miss open legs is hugely pregnant! Mommy, who's carrying a bible, castigates the girl for her predicament and leaves, not offering a shred of compassion. Daddy just takes off his glasses and follows mommy away. Naturally, there's a bloody painful birth with a skull-painted guy in surgical scrubs and a hoodie acting as midwife. Hooray! It's a baby made of hamburger, which is all you can guess from the 1.5 nanoseconds you can see it. At least this poor unwed teen mom didn't abort, so she should get points for that.

And now, the guy who's secretly gay although everyone thinks he's a badass jock. Like you couldn't see this coming at all. He's left to wander the high school hall, and finds his locker glowing and filled with pictures of man butt. His daddy appears, calls him all the things you know he's going to, and beats his son. Later, the jock "homo" is surrounded by his classmates and daddy, who proceed to beat him to death with what look like pool cues. There's an implied rape by daddy and his cue. Why the poor guy is killed for his secret is homophobic in the extreme. The treatment this character gets was telegraphed during the opening sequence in which three high school "girls" are carving pumpkins and getting drunk on another mommy's stash of vodka. One of these girls spends a long time reviling a male classmate because she believes he's gay.

Finally, and the most degrading storyline, is the victim of child abuse who gets another meeting with her pervy uncle and a pillow across the face while he molests her again. Why is this person is being punished for the actions of the uncle? This is revolting. Are we supposed to think she was at fault, perhaps luring the uncle and maybe enjoying the abuse?

One wonders if the director of this idiocy got money from some Fundamentalist group to vomit up this garbage, or perhaps he's got a secret of his own he's attempting to exorcise? The only real horror here is that it did get made, and although only available on direct to DVD or the shallow end of some cheap streaming service, it still sits there waiting to kill your soul by telling you what a sinner you are. Absolute crap, with a terrible ending you've seen 1000 times. Avoid.

Damn, this is one polarizing movie. Viewers seem to either love it, or hate it. After a watch, I'm going for a six of ten. This isn't an easy movie to pigeonhole. Is it a thriller, or horror? Actually it's both.

The plot has been spelled out by many others commenting on this odd flick. My take on reviewing is to attempt interpreting what the director was trying to tell us. While the movie itself has a number of flat sequences, there are enough shock sequences to keep you awake in the latter moments of the enterprise.

The opening sequence is simply a foreshadowing of what would occur later. Charles Dickens did this in "A Tale of Two Cities" when a cask of wine is broken in a Parisian street. The wine is blood, soon to be spilled. The killing of the coyote, seen before the titles, is simply something that will come around again by the end of the movie.There is a fair amount of thinly- veiled religious imagery as well. The lead character looks pretty much like the Sunday school Jesus, who's forced to take part in a "last supper".

There are any number of such "forshadowing" elements seen here. The color red. The lighting of the lantern. The knife in the red velvet cake. The vapid LA characters seem to be a microcosm of the brainless and easily led new-age hipster drones. The party guests just accept the weird behavior of the hosts, based on a friendship that's a couple of years dead. It's not too hard to see where the movie is going, once "The Invitation" is revealed on a laptop for the guests' amusement...or conversion.

Taken in entirety, "The Invitation" is an interesting observation on a number of levels. Obsessive behavior fueled by money. Damaged people giving up to some charlatan guru in the Est fashion. The cross-section of attendees at the dinner party wasn't random, rather, it was an attempt to show a PC ideal of millennials that occupy the Hollywood hills. Some Manson, some Jim Jones, some "self help" pop psychology, and the inevitable arc of useless, lost souls in the Heaven's Gate mode. Death is never pretty, no matter who tells you it is. This isn't a bad movie, but it's not a great one either. Perhaps the mirror it holds up doesn't reflect what the viewer wants to see? Despite it's slow pace, "The Invitation" actually succeeds in a vision of dread.

Somehow, I watched "Autumn" since it appeared in the streaming service I use. While studiously avoiding all zombie flicks for a long while, it seemed that this incredibly bad movie might finally offer something different. I was wrong. Really wrong.

"Autumn" is (and owes everything) to a lost and forgotten flick by Arch Oboler made in 1951, "Five". Ostensibly one of the first, if not THE first film to speculate the aftermath of nuclear war. "Five" eschews the dead in favor of the living, as "Autumn" tries to do. Survivors of a global tragedy pick up the pieces and try to go on. "Five"is a shrewd little movie, only showing the remains of the unlucky in one riveting scene. "Autumn" attempts to copy this idea, by focusing on the survivors of some kind of viral epidemic; the resulting zombies from the holocaust are kept at bay until the movie runs out of steam and then attempts to scare the viewer with some eat-em-up action. The climax of this foolish exercise from Canada is ripped off completely from "Night of the Living Dead" and reaches some ambiguous ending that you can't bring yourself to care about. The end titles are pretty and seem to have some kind of medical message about the viral epidemic by showing microscopic somethings wiggling around in psychedelic colors.

The living protagonists in "Autumn" are not as smart as they appear to be at first. If they were smart, there would be no movie. We wait around for nearly two hours until something happens that could have been avoided. The time period here is murky, as autumn moves into winter. How many winters? Why do the two male leads never shave, yet their facial hair stays the same trendy stubble/neck beard? No mention is made of exactly how the three survivors live other than raiding for supplies in a conveniently nearby town, but in a burst (the only burst) of deviating from the norm, not one of the two men hit on the lone woman. These three idiots know that sound attracts the undead, yet they lounge around in the "safe" house eating snacks and watching movies at night. Evidently, the twist here is that in the beginning the undead are just "meatsuits" that wander around rotting off the bone, but by the end of this exercise in stupidity, they're full-fledged Romero zoms looking to make fajitas out of the dummies who should have left instead of holing themselves up in an isolated farmhouse. Gee, that doesn't sound familiar at all, does it?

Skip this junk as I should have. It's slow, attempts to be meaningful, and ends up being the same as every other zombie movie out there. Oh yeah, a puppy gets eaten by the undead, which is not something anyone wants to see. A cheap gimmick that pretty much sums up the fear factor in this stupid movie from the Great White North. Also, a slobbering clown appears to stoke your clownaphobia. No more zombies!!

"Kaptara" was a labor of love for someone, but it's not a labor of love to watch. The glowing reviews for this sub-par animated tale of Theseus and the Minotaur must have been written by the director's family and friends, because they're describing something I didn't see at all.

The video game "God of War" had much better animation and that came out years ago. Much of the activity in "Kaptara" seems to have been a strange marriage between that old video game and Ray Harryhausen's 1958 epic "7th Voyage of Sinbad". Despite this shaky pedigree, the storyline has been altered to include Atlantis, which is not in the original myth. Nothing weighs anything on Kaptara. People glide over the surfaces they're supposed to be walking on. Ships float over the water. The Minotaur stamps it's hooves, but they never connect to whatever this sexless beast is standing on. Yes, the Minotaur has no junk, just a small hair curtain that appears and reappears at will. All the ladies have to worry about is getting their arms ripped off. Still, an incredibly weird love story is introduced between the bull-man and the incipient queen Ariadne. She can't drop a rock on this monster's head when she gets the chance because it gave her pomegranates and someone's liver. At one point, the Minotaur knocks off part of one of it's horns, yet the next shot shows both still in place.

Ariadne has very successful Frankenboobs, which each weigh about ten pounds apiece (the only things that seem to have any weight at all in Kaptara); they never move. Ever. Even when running, her teensy bandage top never fails to stay in place. These ancient wonders must be stuffed with cement. The men in this gyros sandwich have all been modeled after Tom of Finland's gay hero Kake, with gigantic pecs and some nicely rendered nipples.

Some steampunk stuff is thrown into the mix with gears and levers and falling hardware as the island starts to sink. Boulders fall slowly, looking like props from a high school play.The destruction of Kaptara looks suspiciously like the sinking of Atlantis from George Pal's 1961 epic "Atlantis, the Lost Continent". Again, nothing weighs anything so all the running and screaming seems a bit useless.

This is a hard watch. It seems to go on way too long, but the steadfast will stick it out just to see if Ariadne has a nip slip. Spoiler: she doesn't. She does have what appears to be a French manicure which is an anachronism, but hey, nothing else makes much sense here either. For insomniacs only.

How such an interesting premise for a movie could have gotten so poorly executed is the most compelling thing about "The Devil's Rock". Supposedly, Hitler was looking into the occult for ways and means of winning WW2. This is fascinating. TDR is not. It's a snooze fest that reminded me of a bad episode of the long-gone TV series "Night Gallery".

Good things first: For a low budget film TDR is well-filmed. It looks good. The atmosphere is suitably gloomy. The premise that two saboteurs have been sent to a remote Nazi outpost in order to distract the Germany army from the Normandy invasion is clearly spelled out. The bunker in which the majority of the movie occurs is also suitably gloomy and owes a lot of its Bauhausian dread to the first appearance of the castle of the Wicked Witch in 1939's "Wizard of Oz". Once inside the bunker, the labyrinth of tunnels is also suitably gloomy. That's the end of the good things.

Bad things last: Why did the soldiers not follow orders on such an important mission? On nothing more than a whim, the Captain decides to go into the looming structure in case whoever's screaming inside might be "one of ours". This, after a puking Nazi soldier comes out of the bunker only to have our brave Captain stick a knife in his neck. This terrible decision to enter costs his friend's life. The Captain is overtaken by a mumbling Nazi who gets the best of him. Their initial encounter drags on for nearly half the movie as they take turns getting the jump on one another. Something is screaming it's head off upstairs. The Captain finds out that the Nazi has a demon chained to a wall. Uncle Hitler has used a grimoire to call up what might be a weapon.

The demon is a sort of succubus, using sex to lure the Captain into thinking it's his dead wife. This makes no sense since the soldier has already had a long exposition explaining the death of his Mrs. to the marble-mouthed Nazi who's been feeding guts to the creature. Speaking of guts, how did the demon who's chained to a wall tear apart all the other Nazis who are in different parts of the bunker? Was she/it loose at one point? How did she get chained up again instead of blowing the Third Reich popstand? This is successfully ignored by the writer/director. Anyway, an attempt is made to send Tim Curry's daughter back to hell. She/it looks like a female version of Darkness from Ridley Scott's "Legend".

Mushmouth Fritz gets dead, the Captain capitulates and lets Little Miss Darkness go and the Allies win D-Day.

An hour and a half of three talking heads, some exposed breasts, and many prop corpses, one of which has a machine gun shoved down his throat. TDR produces snores instead of the scares you hoped you'd get. If you want really scary female Nazi thrills, get "Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS" (1975). Although some thought was put into this flick, it still requires too many lapses in logic. Pass this Rock by, there's nothing to see here.

Without streaming, I never would have known this bizarre movie existed. It was a real pleasure to stumble over this, given the number of accessible movies these days. An obvious homage to old- school monster movies from back in the day before technology made almost every movie look exactly alike. The "no CGI" touted by the makers of this frantic goofy movie is exactly what you get: some really great miniatures and a guy in what must have been a really uncomfortable monster suit. While ridiculous, this popcorn flick bounces along merrily, mixing a whole truckload of references to other beloved horror flicks while stubbornly refusing to submit to the dreaded computer effects. Not everything works, but damn it, the guys who made this were having a great time, and it shows.

Seems that a legendary "millennium bug" is about to hatch out in the piney woods after a thousand year gestation period. Combine this with the faux-terror from 15 years ago about the "millennium bug" that was going to infest all technology and send us back to the Stone Age. Mix in the closest incestuous relatives of the Texas Chainsaw gang, the obsessed scientist who is about to find out he should have stayed home, a family that has the worst New Year's Eve imaginable, and a monster that's more Godzilla-esque than insectile. Lots of hysterics, axes-to-the-face, a nasty wooden dildo wielded by "Uncle Hibby", and a courageous father who's named after the real guy that directed "War of the Worlds" back in 1953, Byron Haskin. Fun for the whole family!

The Bug itself is more kaiju than anything remotely resembling an insect. Undoubtedly the production costs prohibited the necessary six legs, but who's counting legs when this bad boy bug smashes everything in sight, and eats everyone. A loving homage to "Aliens" makes for an incredibly gooey birth scene...and that's the second ugly birth we're treated to. The human version occurs early in the picture, giving up the immortal line "You're drippin on my beans".

Anyway, you could do worse than spend a few mindless minutes on this labor of love. No vampires, zombies, "found footage", paranormal activity in an abandoned hospital/asylum/prison/factory/Wal-Mart. Just a throwback to the 80s, when invention trumped technology. Give it a chance, and don't drip on the beans.

"Wow, let's make a shaky-cam "found footage" horror movie! Yeah, it's been done but hey, here's a great idea , we'll cross the scary stuff with an art backstory to explain all the woodsy scarecrow sculptures made of twigs, roadkill, and old mason jars!We'll throw in some supernatural explanation and kill at the box office!"

One suspects this imaginary dialog was pretty much what the director of "Mr. Jones" used to get some funding. Since "Blair Witch 2" was already taken, the title pretty much sums up the mysterious artist who's using some remote location to set up a one-man show that will keep the real world safe from the dream world. Or something.

Into the sylvan setting come two carefree artists who have given up everything for a year's navel-gazing and creative freedom. Things don't pan out as planned and within weeks they are quarreling over all the art-making that's not getting done. Suddenly, our intrepid couple discovers they have found the mysterious "Mr. Jones", an iconic artist and legend whose work induces evil dreams and whatnot. Shazam, creative blockage is suddenly gone and the two main characters invade Mr. Jones' home and studio, filming and snapping pictures with wild abandon and no permission. Mr. Jones makes fetish scarecrows out of twigs, old silverware, roadkill, and mason jars. He's the progeny of the original Blair Witch and her brief fling with Leatherface, so twigs and roadkill are in his blood. We get a short respite from the spooky things that break twigs in the night, as the male film auteur leaves his photographer wife alone in the woods to go to NYC and interview experts who know all about Mr. Jones! Their filmed interviews act as a sort of haughty collection of NYC art mavens that flesh out the information we need about Mr. Jones.

Meanwhile, back in the woods, the photo taker wife (or girlfriend, we're never told which) has gotten too close to Mr. Jones and his work. She knows better than to mess with him but still goes along with breaking and entering his workplace so the film guy can huff and puff in an underground maze, eventually stealing a Baby Jesus-sort of infant thing with candles for eyes. Uh-oh, now he's upset the balance between the real and dream worlds. The artsy couple is now trapped in a nightmare that features screaming, pounding on the doors, lots of blue lights, a group of somethings wearing hoodies and a small army of Courtney Love lookalikes. Something something something happens and it's all over.

All this is filmed in shaky closeups, a la "Blair Witch" but without the runny nose business. We see the two main characters in extreme closeups for 50% of the movie. Endless jump cuts and camera angles that no one could possibly take of themselves. Although we are not actually told this is found footage, the implication is there. There's an interesting idea buried in all the pretension on display, but the director hasn't a clue how to use it well. The ending is...well, see for yourself. The scariest thing in this tale of terror and art is the bitter old NYC gallery owner who tells the interviewer he can get "seven figures" for any of Mr. Jones' work. I thought the theft of the baby fetish was gonna bring some cash for the two main characters, but alas, it did not. Art is cruel.

I only see one review here on IMDb of "Come Back to Me" that mentions the source material for this mid-level horror flick. The real deal is this film's source, "The Resurrectionist" written by one twisted man, Wrath James White. Having read the book quite a while back, it came as a surprise that someone was audacious enough to attempt filming it. That being said, it came as no surprise that White's uber-nasty novel was stripped of nearly everything except the basic plot line. Luckily, the film redeems itself during the last twenty minutes by not conpletely changing the end of the story. You'd have to read the novel to find out what really happens.

White's novel is of the "extreme horror" genre. The authors that make up this cadre write books designed to turn stomachs. There is no atrocity, sexual perversion, or degradation these guys won't put on the page. Tanker trucks are needed to supply the gore. Extreme horror is not for the squeamish or faint. "The Resurrectionist", however, for all it's bloody excesses had a unique plot, which is the only reason the film version CBTM works at all.

This looks and feels like a Lifetime afternoon movie. Dale, the creepy instigator of all the unpleasantness isn't fleshed out well. His backstory is integral to the plot, yet it's glossed over here in one flashback and one exposition by his mother. We only know he can bring the dead back to life and uses this power to sexually abuse people, kill them, and resurrect the victims who have no memories of the assaults. Like "American Psycho" some years back, the novel could not be filmed as written. Both books were incredibly nasty pieces of work that brought pornographic levels of mutilation and murder to the reader. Trust me, Dale was up to a lot more in the novel, and used everyone for his twisted sex. Including the husband.

Many characters are missing from this film version, it's watered down to only a few people who figure out the whole mess fairly quickly. A number of plot holes exist in the narrative. The tension in the novel came from a longer time line in which the main female character began to remember some of what happened to her. This is seen briefly in the film but is rushed, like everything else. The ending was kept, but again, the horrendous bloodbath that ended the novel is nowhere to be seen. The film ends with a superfluous shot of a baby sired by Dale out of one of his victims. Smells like a sequel set up, but White only wrote the one book. I can't spoil the end of the novel for someone who might be curious and read it, but suffice it to say, no baby is involved. It's something much, much worse.

So, "Come Back to Me" is a tepid telling of White's book. It undoubtedly gives some shivers for viewers, which is a testament to the power of White's imagination.