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Reviews
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)
Frustratingly Bad
Not that I expected very much, but there are enough genuine good moments to make the movie as a whole very frustrating. The surprises are all non-surprises, you see them coming from down the block and around the corner. There's some suspense, but the focus seems to be mainly on brutality. One or two character development points are winning, but otherwise, it's hard to like or feel much sympathy for any of the characters, and I've had enough of killers that "die" and return as though they hadn't got a scratch on them.
Can we please stop having these sequels/remakes/reboots/ whatever from people who have noo understanding of what made the originals such classics? Bah - this is a time-waster. See something else.
The Resort (2021)
An Infuriating Disappointment
I had higher hopes for this than the over-all rating expressed, based on the trailer. I'm not saying that this is one of those where the only good parts were in the trailer, mind you. The movie has an interesting premise - also decent production values and good acting. My quarrel is with the script - this was a half-hour TV horror anthology installment, laboriously stre-e-e-etched to an hour and fifteen minutes. And FIVE of those minutes are the closing credits! The structure is predictable, the pacing is awful, and I had a hard time rooting for any of the main characters. It's pretty clear just where the budget started to go dry and they had to start wrapping things up quickly. And that ending - PHANTASM did it a hell of a lot better. You can watch this if you want, but man, I'd give it a miss. The cast deserves a lot better than this dreck.
Old (2021)
I'm pretty forgiving, as a cinema audience member, but...
...if you get a chance to see OLD - see anything else. Stay home, have an Ed Wood film festival, it'll be more entertaining. Rarely does one encounter such a fascinating premise so cheaply, self-indulgently bungled. Heavy-handed foreshadowing, dreadful dialog, everyone except Rufus Sewell needs to take an acting refresher... It's one of those movies that leaves one feeling angry by the time it's all over. You could order a better movie from Wish. I saw this on my birthday - I hadn't been in a cinema for TWO YEARS, and this was my choice for the occasion. This insult to the audience and the material. For what we paid for tickets to what was, for me, an "event", we could have ordered take-away and watched a far, FAR better movie. This doesn't even succeed as camp, ffs. It's like they shot the first draft, with only one take of each draft. At this point, though I'm a fan of (mostly) his earlier work, I'm no longer convinced that M. Night Shyamalan is capable of writing and directing a quality motion picture, anymore. GLASS should have been his farewell to the profession.
She Demons (1958)
Deliciously Awful!
This one pulls out all the tropes, and ends up being far better then it should have. Tiny budget; a surprisingly dull, ineffective; bristling, meet-cute couple who end up falling for each other; irrelevant side-kick "comic relief" (good to see Victor Sen Yung working, though you kind of keep hoping for Birmingham Brown to show up and get him out of there); sadistic Nazi scientist (complete with cigarette holder!), trying to restore his experiment-scarred wife; girls in fright masks and novelty-store teeth; volcano lair... You know - the usual.
What surprised me was the sudden and unexpected depth of some of the characters, and that the leading lady turned out to work more effectively against the baddies than utterly dull leading man - but I suspect that might have much to do with the presence of Irish McCalla, TV's "Sheena, Queen of the Jungle". You just don't see a lot of strong woman characters, in this era OR this genre.
There isn't any really new ground broken, with this one, and it certainly didn't win any awards - and yet, it has a certain comforting familiarity. It's fun, and even more fun to poke fun at with your friends. Keep your expectations low, give it a chance, and see if you don't end up liking it!
Saturday Morning Massacre (2012)
Not for Everyone - BUT...
Imagine Jack Ketchum - who gave us the girl next door, offspring, the woman, and a number of other terrifying novels and stories that haven't yet made it to the big screen - wrote an episode of SCOOBY-DOO, where are you?. That's what we have here - as with "old-school" SCOOBY, any ghosts are metaphorical, and ordinary humans are behind it all. Except these individuals are nothing like ordinary, and a bit short of human!
There's comedy, here, but it's dark, a little bitter, and largely hangs on the translation of Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and Scooby into Chad, Gwen, Nancy, Floyd and Hamlet. But if you're looking for guffaws and knee-slappers, you've come to the wrong movie. The makers are playing it all straight and for adults, so this isn't exactly a movie you can sit down and watch with your small children.
It's fun and stands on its own as a horror film, even without the SD references. If you and your friends have never seen the original Scooby-Doo cartoons, you should be able to enjoy this on its own merits. The people complaining are just mad because they didn't get the movie they wanted - and that might be at the fault of the marketing department, because they did kind of set up to sell people a Scooby-Doo movie, but there are very few of the cartoons tropes at work.
Anyhow, if you can put Scooby and the gang out of your head, and you're a horror fan, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to enjoy this for what it is - part homage, part gritty, visceral horror!