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Movie Review: Apartment 1303 (2012)

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You can watch Apartment 1303 for free on YouTube, but I wouldn’t bother. The acting is terrible, the sound is bad, and the story isn’t interesting. The movie focuses on two sisters who move into apartment 1303 to get away from a drunk and abusive mother. They live in this apartment at different times, but both will experience the ominous presence of the ghosts that live there. It makes me wonder how this complex exists when half the residents are ghosts. 

Apartment 1303 fails as a horror movie in every regard. The poor acting and lack of any emotion kill any suspense this poorly written movie could have had. Its garbage sound mixing means you hear every breath and rustling in the background, and it gets distracting. The soundtrack is played on a speaker one room over, and once from a pair of wireless headphones. The plot is full of holes and continuity errors. There are lines of dialogue that contradict themselves in the same breath. This movie is lazy, boring, and a huge waste of time.

I do, however, want to take a moment to overanalyze the plot a bit. Usually, in horror movies, a character will make frustratingly incompetent choices that lead to their demise, like staying in an apartment everyone says is haunted. In this movie, I don’t blame the characters for not leaving the apartment. Apartment 1303 is a one-bedroom high-rise apartment in downtown Detroit that is definitely nicer and bigger than the one I am currently living in. The rent was only $700 a month with a full kitchen, a large living room, a full-sized bathtub, and a balcony with a nice view of the lake. I could put aside my fear of ghosts for $700 of rent. The sisters were also escaping an abusive mother who was desperately clinging to her failed career as a singer. I would choose the ghost too, especially after hearing her music. This movie is dumb, but living in the haunted apartment is blameless.

Anyways, this movie is free on YouTube, but I wouldn’t bother.

Movie Reviews, movies

Movie Reviews: The Inherited (2016)

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I didn’t know Lifetime made horror movies, but here we have the oddest ghost story you probably shouldn’t watch. I had to take multiple breaks to get through this movie, and it wasn’t worth it. The acting is very stiff and awkward. This kills all suspense; horror movies rely heavily on good suspenseful buildup. At least there aren’t any cheap jump scares. If there are jump scares, they are so poorly done that I didn’t notice. This is a very incompetent movie. The story is full of holes, and it never knows what it wants to be. Is this a movie about murder? A haunting? Spousal abuse? It is dumber than you could imagine.

The inherited is about a newly-wed couple who move into a mansion that the husband inherits. There is something sinister in the house, and it is Tom, the husband. The ghost of Tom’s ex-wife still roams the house, but the worst thing she does is try to open locked doors. Tom, on the other hand, is short-tempered and aggressive. There are a lot of red flags in this relationship, and it is not because the house is haunted. There is a scene in this movie where he is on the verge of hitting Eve because she was voicing that she felt unsafe in the house. I was more worried that Eve was stuck in an abusive relationship than anything the ghost could have done. 

This movie never figures out what it wants to be. It sets up an ominous town with creepy citizens like in Get Out, but they don’t do anything. After investigating Tom’s past, it is implied that he might have murdered his ex-wife, but he didn’t. There is a ghost in the house, but she doesn’t do anything sinester either. It takes an hour for this movie to remember it is horror and by then, there are only 20 minutes left. 

Eve is a dumb character. With possible murder on the table, Eve still doesn’t leave a clearly abusive husband. She gets poisoned, and she still decides to stay and work things out.Then there is ghost who roams the halls. You find out that its the ghost of the ex-wife. This is possibly the most helpful ghost in cinema since Casper. This ghost talks to Eve when she is lonely and even helps with the housework. It is no wonder that in the end, after Tom is murdered, Eve decides to co-parent a child with the ghost. Eve wins this movie. She gets a huge train money inheritance, a nice mansion, and a family. What more can a girl ask for? 

This movie is bonkers, but not in a fun way. It moves too slowly and the acting is terrible. It is free on YouTube, but I would honestly skip it.

Watch it Here!
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Movie Review: Awake (2021

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Awake is incredibly disappointing. Awake is a horror movie where the monster is human nature. People are no longer able to sleep, and sleep deprivation is slowly killing humanity. Now the race is on to find a cure before humanity goes extinct. The movie focuses on a dysfunctional family and their survival. You get to watch as society crumbles under the weight of sleep deprivation.

This movie is alright. The acting is decent, the action is appropriate, but the ending is terrible. This is a great example of a movie that uses its run time to build up to nothing. What makes this movie hard to recommend is that it makes some solid artistic choices, but it doesn’t make enough of them to make this movie work. Awake is good at showing the story rather than relying on exposition. For example, in the first few minutes, you are introduced to Jill who is a recovering addict who is trying to give her family a better life. You know this because the son will check the car for drugs or they will make slights at the mom for being late or looking tired. You get a lot of Jill’s back story without the characters having to explicitly say anything about it. I liked this form of storytelling and hope more movies can follow suit.

I liked Jill as a character. She isn’t perfect, some of her dialogue isn’t good, but she has some redeemable moments. Jill is smart, capable, and most importantly, human. Jill doesn’t go into situations guns blazing like she is immortal. Instead, she takes the time to think and only engages when she has to because there are stakes. These stakes give the movie much-needed tension, too bad it leads nowhere.

I can’t recommend this movie. There are parts of this movie that I liked, but I can’t forgive the ending. The movie does a good job of introducing different plausible conclusions. There could be a cure, God’s wrath, scientific mumbo-jumbo, or even aliens. But instead, the movie ends in disappointment. SPOILERS: The movie ends with a baptism. As a way to start over. The kids figure that people need to die to start over so they take Jill to the river and drown her and then the movie ends. You don’t know if the cure worked. You don’t know what happens to humanity. It just ends and I was left bitter about it.

Don’t watch this movie. This is another failed attempt at another A Quite Place clone. Go watch that instead. But if yo don’t believe me, you can watch it on Netflix.

Movie Reviews, movies

Movie Review: Kept Woman (2015)

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Kept Woman is a horror movie where the monster is toxic masculinity. The film is about a strong, intelligent, independent Jessica who is kidnapped and forced to live the rest of her life as a 1950’s American housewife in her neighbor’s basement. It is a story about the struggle between modern womanhood and the pressure of an always creeping outdated ideal. Kept Woman attempts to create horror in the mundane, almost like in Stepford Wives or Get Out. The monster isn’t scary, but rather the need for idyllic perfection. As a result, there are some beautiful set designs, but faulty execution.

The movie spends the first half of the movie establishing Jessica as the here. She is a quirky and intelligent amateur sleuth. The movie wastes so much time on her development, that the horror is limited to the last 30 minutes of the film. It is dull and disappointing. I believe the intent was to build up to a powerful moment when she escapes, but it doesn’t pan out as such. It feels rushed and forced. Some cool moments in this movie suggest that a bigger budget and better writing might have saved this movie, but as is, this movie is a waste of time. 

If you want a movie with the same plot done better, watch 10 Cloverfield Lane. It has the same plot done better, even with the whole alien subplot. But if you don’t believe me, you can watch it on Amazon Video with a Prime subscription. 

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Movie Review: Lantern’s Lane (2021)

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Do not waste your time on this terrible movie. The camera work, the plot, the acting, and the big reveal are irredeemably bad. There is nothing worth watching in this movie.

Lantern’s lane is about a girl who returns to her rural home town where she reunites with friends from high school. Bitter that she hasn’t returned, her friends attempt to play a prank on her by scaring her. Things turn sour when a killer starts hunting them instead. The mom and daughter from the opening scene are the killers. This movie spoils its ending in the first five minutes of play time with its terrible acting and camera work. Lantern’s Lane is a great example of a filmmaker who is trying way too hard to be symbolic. This movie is full of obvious foreshadowing that ruins any tension that this movie could have had. Not that anything of note ever happens. It takes a whole hour before the horror element comes into play, but it doesn’t matter because you already know who the killer is.

Instead, you are forced to sit through terribly read high school drama no one asked for. I don’t know which is worse, the acting or the writing. I don’t think anyone involved with the making of this movie has ever talked to a real person before. The dialogue in this movie is unreal. You can mash your keyboard right now, and the outcome would be better dialogue.

And the editing of this movie? I don’t think there is a single scene in this movie that isn’t a collection of shots lazily pieced together. There are more cuts in a scene of simple dialogue than there are in an MCU fight scene. Disney cuts fight scenes to hide the fact that the actors can’t fight. This movie does it to hide the fact that they can’t act. There are moments of dialogue where there is a 5-second delay before an actor responds to what was just said. I wouldn’t be surprised if the actors weren’t competent enough to remember simple dialogue. 

Don’t waste your time with this movie. Even if you like watching bad movies for fun, there’s nothing here for you. It isn’t worth sitting through because nothing happens. You don’t even get to see anyone die. But if you don’t believe me, you can watch it on Hulu.

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Movie Review: Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)

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The new Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the best-rebooted horror franchise I’ve seen so far. It isn’t going to win any awards, but it is a lot of fun. This movie knows what it is, and it does it well. Texas Chainsaw Massacre goes back to its slasher roots and capitalizes on what makes the genre great. The Leatherface is blood-thirsty, and it makes for some very cool deaths. If you are a fan of slasher movies, this will be a solid revisit to the genre.

Out of the remakes I have seen so far, Texas Chainsaw Massacre has the best pacing. Everything is concise and self-contained to the town. There is no needless back story or lazy tie-ins. There isn’t a whole lot of self-service for the legacy characters or the original franchise. The movie introduces the main characters and starts killing them almost immediately. I was pleasantly surprised that I didn’t have to wait through a bunch of meaningless reinvented lore to get to what makes this movie fun.

The characters are fine for what they are, although they are a bit insufferable. You spend enough time with them to care, or not care about them. You don’t get long-winded backstories that add nothing to the plot. The acting is good for the type of movie. The plot doesn’t feel long and drawn out. The kills and action are great, and although some are cheesy, it sets this film apart from the other reboots. Overall, I don’t think this is a movie you can keep coming back to, but if you have nothing else to do, at least it’s not Holloween. You can find this movie on Netflix.

Movie Reviews

Little Red Necro (2019) Review

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This wild ride of a movie leaves more questions than answers as it tries to take on a bit too much with its little budget. It is difficult to put this review into words because I am still unsure as to what I have just experienced. But I will try to explain it as I understood it and pick apart its flaws from there.

The movie takes place in a war-torn London. A war against an evil cult of Italian monsters in an undisclosed amount of time in the future. The story centers around the mysterious disappearance of the main character, a mother dealing with the loss of her family and a mysterious presence that is haunting her. There is also a superhuman killer on the loose.

This movie lacks focus. With its small amount of space and resources, it attempts and fails to create a large world. This movie has too many plots. As a result, a lot of them are left unresolved and are distractedly pointless. The war plot adds doesn’t affect the story and could have been left out honestly. There is also a plot about a cult that is confusing as all hell because it is never clear what their alignment is. Are they evil or the heroes of the story? There is also a infidelity plot that seems to be added to provide some drama. Unfortunately, this weaved around the killer’s rampage is incredibly distracting. As a result, there is no real tension as you jump from scene to scene. You will constantly be working hard to peace together the fragments of plot given to you through lazy exposition that seems to be added to connect all the gore.

It seems the movie started with a costume design, or a group of them. A plot was then written around these designs. This hurts the movie because these designs make little sense and don’t look good. The movie jumps from monstrosity to monstrosity trying to create this world full of monsters, but none of them are memorable. None of them look unique, and instead look like cheap copies of each other. Some are incredibly gross for the sake of being gross and their presence doesn’t feel important to the film. They add very little as they are destroyed by the main monster of the film.

Unfortunately, the narrative doesn’t read coherently, but rather like introductions of multiple stories en medias res. You will jump from a barely audible and unenthusiastic conversation with the main character and her friend to a gruesome murder. It feels as if the plot is left secondary in this movie as you can tell most of the effort goes into the murders because of how muted they are in comparison. Scenes with the main character are hard to understand because she sounds so far away, I didn’t understand who she was or why she was there except for the random bits and pieces that were written. In contrast, murders are loud and accompanied by gallons of blood.

Everything about this movie is over the top and cheesy. Body parts explode, the smallest cuts release the flood gates, and the acting doesn’t help much either. It is hard to take this movie serious, and as a result, all the big reveals are muted. This movie is rich with big reveals as they try to connect the plots together, but they do so poorly. I wish they had instead focused on one idea and one plot point and worked on developing the big plot a little more. It could have helped with the tension if instead of boring conversations of infidelity, they focused on creating the lore for the main monster of the movie.

The biggest issue with he movie is the main monster. They do a poor job creating this monster’s lore. You do get snippets of exposition relating to his lore, but they are incredibly cryptic. You do not see much of the monster in throughout the movie. Instead he is an unstoppable mysterious force and it makes the movie kind of boring. Without too much explanation, his intentions seem to be tied to the narrator’s diary. This kills the tension in the movie as every kill is explained by some girl’s edgy journal entries. You learn early on that he is unstoppable as he kills people easily. Even villains set up as somewhat competent are destroyed comically with a single punch. This makes the movie a bit boring as there are no stakes or any semblance of tension. If nothing hurts the beast, why should I care about the bad ass looking villain he is about to face off against?

I can’t tell you the importance of the film’s name, that is never addressed. I also can’t recommend this mess of a movie because even though there is a lot happening, it has no substance. It does a poor job at explaining anything so by the end of it, you will be trying and failing to understand what the fuck you just sat through. It honestly feels like someone made a bunch of monster costumes and pieced them together with poorly written dialogue. If you like incredibly cheesy horror flicks akin to things like Thankskilling, you might get a good laugh at the goofy monsters and over the top special effects. Other than that, there is no reason to watch this wild ride of a movie. You aren’t missing anything important.

Movie Reviews

Awoken (2019) – Review

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This movie does the viewer a great service by informing the viewer the type of movie experience it will take him on in the first 5 minutes; it’s going to be a generic, slow, painful journey of a movie. Hopefully you didn’t pay for it or seek it out as a brief and cheap thrill to your otherwise boring day because there are better way’s to spend your time. This film hits every generic cliché before the movie even begins to gain any kind of traction as a form of entertainment.

Awoken starts, as these movies often do, in the past. A cheap and predictable jump scare later, it cuts to a bored main character in class. I don’t know why the main characters in these movies seem to know in a class that is extremely relevant to the plot, but here we are, in an incredibly foreshadowing lecture that kind of spoils the movie. Not that you should stick around for the rest of it anyways. It is also here that you learn, through lazy exposition, that the main character is orphaned by some mysterious event that will constantly be alluded till its lazy reveal. And of course her obsession to cure her brother’s insomnia is the driving force to the plot of the movie.

A bit hole in this movie is that everything about this girls life is written to make the plot work. Were she not a sleep scientist, having her life directly effected by the villain of the movie, or even been a sleep major, this movie could never happen. Were she a poetry major, for example, her brother would never be put in the hands of the demon. She wouldn’t even know which demon to research as even this seems to be handed to her as a way to move the plot forward. I understand that there is no such thing as a sleep major and I am leaving a lot of details extremely vague, but I want to break down the movie to its basic elements to show how incredibly generic and forced this plot is.

This movie clearly didn’t have enough plot to the movie. It seems to lazily movie from one moment of gore to the next to achieve shock. You see someone hang themselves because reasons and then it quickly tries to move to the next scene. There clearly wasn’t enough plot in this movie because when you aren’t watching gore, you get to watch the main character work on a failed relationship that existed off screen. If that doesn’t sound exciting to you, that is because it isn’t. There are so many failed attempts at creating character depth in this movie, but all the characters are forgettable. This is mostly because they try to create this depth through exposition dumps. The best part of the film is a weirdly placed Settlers of Catan reference, but that isn’t reason enough to watch this movie.

This movie is without any real substance. There are so many holes in this movie that it doesn’t make sense. The parts that do make sense are done lazily and are rather boring. If you are a horror movie buff, you can find this concept done better elsewhere. This movie is so incredibly predictable that it becomes a chore to watch. Don’t pay for this movie, we can’t keep supporting these generic cash grabs for the sake of a movie date. We need content, narrative, and depth and this movie offers none of that.

Movie Reviews

The Invisible Man (2020) – Review

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I am not the hugest fan of Blumhouse because they usually disappoint. Because of this, I went into this movie expecting to hate it. I am honestly surprised at the result of this, it performed far better than I thought it would.

Cecelia runs away from her abusive and controlling husband, and this film shows the aftermath of this break up. As she begins to achieve normalcy and stability in her life, she gets news that her husband is dead. It is only when she begins to believe that she is finally free Andrew, he rears his ugly head, hell bent on destroying any peace Cecelia thinks she has. Now, Cecelia must survive as she tries to convince those around her that her invisible ex is ruining her life.

The Invisible Man takes the uncomfortable topic of domestic abuse and presents it respectfully. It isn’t brushed off as exposition, nor are there aren’t any scenes of abuse to add shock value to the movie. Instead, you get most of this story from Cecilia herself. The way she acts in the beginning of the film, scared and distrusting of everything, alone is enough to sell this narrative. Elisabeth Moss delivers a brilliant performance as you can honestly disturbingly believable. She isn’t a superhero victim with bruise makeup on. You see the fatigue take her over as the movie progresses. The way she dresses, acts, and even talks are in direct reaction to the amount of stress she comes under because of Andrew. What’s more, she starts to grow from these adversities which is something cool because when the climax arises, it isn’t because of some sudden burst of dumb luck and valor like traditional slashers, but she has finally had enough and wants the harassment to stop. This is one of the few movies where everything prior to this actually matters and contribute to the Cecilia’s character growth. It is an rare concept to find actual character development in slasher films, usually it devolves to a monster chasing stereotypes of people till the final brawl.

But this movie is without it’s flaws. Some of the interactions are awkward and there are scenes in this movie that exist just to move the movie to the next plot point. The story isn’t incredibly original and some of the science and logic are thrown out the window in order to make the plot work. But these can be easily overlooked as this movie is still enjoyable.

If you haven’t seen it, I strongly recommend checking it out. Especially if you are a fan of thrillers. Watch this because you like scary movies. Watch this because you want the suspense to grip you till the very end. Watch this movie for Moss’ performance!

A word of caution however, the movie deals heavily with the topic of emotional and physical abuse and if that is a trigger for you, skip this movie.

Movie Reviews

The Lodge (2019) – Review

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This review was a little difficult to complete. Not because of quality of the movie, but it is hard to talk about without spoiling the experience. So, this will be the most careful treading I will do in hopes of convincing you dear reader to watch this movie.

This suspenseful, tense, drama filled story will have you gripping at the edge of your seat as you experience one of the oddest weekends at the lodge upstate. Now, I must warn you, this movie is a slow start, and some scenes are a little long but this works in conjunction with the tone of the movie.

The movie starts off in the middle of a divorce. An awkward, almost silent car ride to the father’s house suggest that no one is happy with the situation. The silence only interrupted by slides towards the father’s new wife. A few awkward conversations, more silence, and a failed attempt to make peace between the kids and Grace (the new stepmother), it is decided that the weekend will be spent at the lodge. I do not name the father because he is barely in the movie save to give the kids and grace the reason to be at the same location. Father goes to work, leaving the kids and grace alone with something darker.

This movie does an excellent job at creating tension. The sterile silence that slinks around the cabin, only to be interrupted by sounds of daily activity echo that the kids do not like the Grace. And this movie is incredibly quite. You hear them fidget with papers. You hear the sound of the drawers when while they are talking to each other because conversations are forced and quiet. Add this to the fact that the lodge is on an isolated part of the lake and you have a creepy thriller that is creepy because of the elements that go into and not cheap jump scares. It proves that movie doesn’t need to really on a scary monster, tons of blood, or a creepy cult to elicit fear.

If you have seen Hereditary and enjoyed it, watch this movie. Although I wouldn’t consider this movie as horror, the suspense it builds is more than enough to have your heart pumping a little faster than it’s used to. Despite it’s slow start and some of the scenes taking forever, it does so much right. I definitely recommend this movie.