Jennifer's Body

Year 16, Day 290 - 10/16/24 - Movie #4,875

BEFORE: I know, I know, I've done the math and now that we're halfway through October there are 76 days left in this year (it's a Leap Year, remember?) and only 25 movies left to watch. What the hell am I going to do for the other 51 days?  OK, a week's vacation , if you count both weekends that's 9 days, I've still got 42 days of NOT watching movies to fill up somehow.  OK, OK, I'll deal with all the weeds in the backyard and in the front planter, but that should only take me 2 days, tops. So I guess it's almost time to start catching up on all the TV I haven't been watching. 

A reminder that I'm shutting down for four days after this, because of New York Comic-Con - I'll basically live at the convention center from 10 am to 8 pm, come home and sleep and then just turn around and do that again.  It's only once a year, but I'm seriously getting way too old to maintain my own schedule. So I guess it's almost time to pull back somehow, either cut down on my hours worked or train someone else to do my Comic-Con magic.  Today was just the load-in day, all I had to do was get four boxes of merch, plus one banner, across 10 blocks of NYC from an animation studio to the convention center.  10 BLOCKS, and I was free to use any method available to me - walking, taking the subway, taking a cab, and I had one other person to help me.  I landed on: subway to the Convention Center (to get the move-in wristbands, since I couldn't get the badges today), walk 10 blocks back to the studio, use a cab to take the boxes over, and then walk those 10 blocks back again.  I was thorougly exhausted, and that's not a good sign heading into four full days of the same - except once I'm in, I do get to sit down a lot at the table, so really, maybe the worst part is already over, but then on Sunday there's the load-out, and I can't do that by myself either any more.  Whatever, I'll find a way to get it done, it's worth it if we have a lot of sales. 

Juan Riedinger, who played an assistant coroner working the late shift on Christmas Eve in "Black Christmas", carries over to play the very memorable (I'm sure) character "Dirk" today. 

THE PLOT: A newly-possessed high-school cheerleader turns into a succubus who specializes in killing her male classmates.Can her best friend put an end to the horror? 

AFTER: It's almost (not quite) the reverse of yesterday's movie, which featured a male serial killer taking the lives of many college sorority girls. This film flips that over, and has a female (possessed by a demon?) taking the lives of many high-school boys.  Still not cool, but at least it's got the female empowerment angle added. Is that a good thing? 

I'll admit I was confused a few times during this film's set-up, probably because I went in knowing just a bit too much about it.  Since I knew where the film was going, I guess maybe my brain got ahead of the plot, and so I assumed Jennifer was possessed at the start, which of course she wasn't.  Then when the fire started during the concert at the dive bar, and Jennifer seemed very out of it, I assumed that she had some kind of pyrokinetic power and SHE started the fire, but now I realize that wasn't the case. It was bad wiring on the band's equipment, combined with bad acting from Megan Fox. Why was her character nearly catatonic during this scene, was she enamored by the lead singer, transfixed by the band's music, or just incapable of expressing herself in that moment?  Sure, I could see if her character was in a state of shock after escaping the fire, but she kind of blanked out a few minutes before that, during the concert. So, what gives?  

It's important, because Jennifer then gets into a van with the members of the band Low Shoulder, and she seems unable to stop herself from joining them on a drive to nowhere.  But she HAD a ride home with her best friend, Anita ("Needy", which is quite a telling nickname...).  A teen girl should probably not get into a van with four strangers, right?  So why was Jennifer unable to stand up for herself in this moment?  

We don't find out exactly what happened to Jennifer that night until much later in the film, but she shows up at Needy's house, covered in blood and desperately hungry for any meat from the fridge, then she vomits up a horrible black liquid and flees, leaving Needy to clean up the mess.  Now again I made an incorrect assumption, I thought she killed the four band members and maybe at them, but I was getting ahead of the plot - so when the band appeared later in the film and they were very much alive, I was quite surprised, I thought they were dead and maybe nobody had found their bodies yet. These plot points could have been a lot clearer, that's what I mean to say.  

It turns out the band believed Jennifer when she said she was a virgin - she probably said that because she thought the band members all wanted to have sex with her, and if she said she was a virgin they might be less interested in her, due to a lack of sexual skills.  But it turns out this was a terrible plan, because the band was actually looking for a virgin, to sacrifice as part of an occult ritual.  Needy later figures out that if the virgin sacrifice was not really a virgin, then the dark rite would not have gone as planned, and instead of granting the band fame and fortune, a demon ended up in Jennifer's body.  And it's hungry for teen boys.

So Jennifer literally becomes a "man-killer" or let's say that the boys in school are dying to go out with her, whichever. When she kills a male classmate, and eats his flesh, she gains power and energy, she can heal very quickly and she's got a real glow to her - really, isn't this the most important thing for girls to think about, their appearance? Isn't a little murder here and there worth it if it makes her more attractive?  This is a very strange message to send out to the teens in the audience.

As for the kissing scene between the two lead female actresses, I'm not sure this is the empowering moment that the filmmakers thought it would be, especially if it was done just to appeal to the male audience.  Right idea, kind of the wrong result, or is that just me?  There should be more to female characters than performing just for the attention and fantasy fulfillment of the male audience, right?  Throughout the movie the boys and mean are kind of portrayed as weak and easily seduceable, it's too bad that tone couldn't be maintained for the whole film.

I knew the director of this film, Karyn Kusama, back at NYU. We were in the same comedy writing class together, but not in the same writing group - I think Karyn was on a writing team with the woman who later became my first wife, we met in that class and she sat down with me in the cafeteria one day and asked me how I got to be so brilliant.  Pretty good opening line.  I don't think there's much comedy in this movie, except when someone invites Jennifer on a date to see the "Rocky Horror Picture Show" and she says she doesn't like boxing movies. 

That's all I've got tonight, it's just another weird film, but aren't they all recently?  I've got to get up early tomorrow and start four days at Comic-Con, where there are other weird people dressed in weird costumes and doing weird things or going to panels about other weird movies and weird TV shows. 

Also starring Megan Fox (last seen in "Expend4bles"), Amanda Seyfried (last seen in "Mank"), Johnny Simmons (last seen in "The Phenom"), Adam Brody (last seen in "The Ring"), Sal Cortez, Ryan Levine (last seen in "Ghostbusters" (2016)), Colin Askey, Chris Pratt (last heard in "The Super Mario Bros. Movie"), Juno Ruddell (last seen in "It: Chapter Two"), Kyle Gallner (last seen in "Beautiful Creatures"), Josh Emerson, J.K. Simmons (last seen in "Ghostbusters: Afterlife"), Amy Sedaris (last seen in "Somebody I Used to Know"), Cynthia Stevenson, Nicole Leduc, Aman Johal (last seen in "Juno"), Dan Joffre (last seen in "A Guy Thing"), Candus Churchill (last seen in "Crash Pad"), Carrie Genzel (last seen in "The Layover"), Emma Gellello, Megan Charpentier (last seen in "Frankie & Alice"), Emily Tennant (ditto), Jeremy Schuetze, Valerie Tian, Karissa Tynes, Eve Harlow (last seen in "The Tomorrow Man"), Michael Brock, Genevieve Buechner (last seen in "The Final Cut"), Adrian Hough (last seen in "Things We Lost in the Fire"), Gabrielle Rose (last seen in "The Company You Keep"), Michael Bean (last seen in "Cold Pursuit"), Bill Fagerbakke (last seen in "The Meddler"), Marilyn Norry (last seen in "The Professor"), with cameos from Diablo Cody (last seen in "Ricki and the Flash"), Lance Henriksen (last seen in "Scream 3").

RATING: 4 out of 10 crime scene photos

Black Christmas (2006)

Year 16, Day 289 - 10/15/24 - Movie #4,874

BEFORE: We're halfway through October (already?) but I'm more than halfway through the horror chain (already?) because remember, I'm limiting myself to just 27 horror films this time. Four days off for NY Comic-Con, and 27 plus 4 equals 31. Coincidence? No such thing. 

Mary Elizabeth Winstead carries over from "The Ring Two". I freaked out a little when I heard her character in that movie had her scenes cut from the film, but since she still is listed in the IMDB as being in that movie, she's still in there somewhere, for at least a second or two.  Reports are a little sketchy, but I'm relying on the "Trivia" section of the IMDB, which is reporting that she's seen at the very least in photos in a newspaper article, but also a few seconds of footage that wasn't cut. 

THE PLOT: On Christmas Eve, and escaped maniac returns to his childhood home, which is now a sorority house, and begins to murder the sorority sisters one by one. 

AFTER: Naturally, since I work in both an animation studio and a movie theater, I talk with my co-workers about movies, like a lot. Most of them know about my linking system, and I think they know if they ask me, "What have you been watching lately?" I might have something interesting to say.  Some of them are also aware that I try to only watch horror movies in October, so they may ask which ones I've been watching this time around.  When I said "Black Christmas" to a co-worker tonight, she said, "Oh, which one?" and that was kind of the correct follow-up question, in the same way as when I go to a German deli and I ask for some head cheese and they ask, "Which one?"  Yes, exactly, that means they HAVE more than one kind, so they are very correct in asking.  (The mild one without the pistachios, please.)

There are at least THREE prominent versions of the slasher film "Black Christmas", one from 1974, this one from 2006, and one from 2019. Only this one fits in with my linking, I think, and I'm wary of the 1974 one because it looks too schlocky, and I'm wary of the 2019 one because it looks too woke.  Somehow the most recent version added female empowerment to the typical slasher film, and that could be a bit like putting chocolate sauce on an onion. Also my co-worker referred to it as "the one with the weird ending" and I said, "Whoops, say no more, point noted, but please, no spoilers."  I'll consider both for future editions of the horror chain, but after watching this one, really, I'm in no rush.  

I said I'd get to some Christmas-themed movies, but really, this is not what I meant.  This is the worst kind of horror movie to me, one with a high body count and no real justification for the killings.  Sure, I get that serial killers in real life are driven by emotions and violence and can be sick and twisted and kill for no reason, but there's no real reason to reflect their meaningless violence in movies. To just have violence against women for no purpose other than to create a transitory thrill on screen, I mean, what's the point?  No good can possibly come from it, unless I'm missing something. At best it's mindless fodder for the eye, an outlet for dark impulses so that maybe such things would satisfy someone and prevent them from committing similar atrocities in the real world, but it's just as likely to cause those dark impulses in the weak-minded, and suggest terrible courses of action which are just not OK.  

Torture porn, that's what it feels like - pretend killing for the sake of entertainment, it's not really healthy unless there's a point to it all, and there's just not, just variations on how the victims get killed and under which ironic circumstances. Look, I suppose you can make a case for "Friday the 13th" movies that promote teen abstinence as long as they ONLY kill off the teen characters who have sex out in the woods, but that doesn't apply here - these college-age women are on holiday break and snowed in, so clearly they all have to die?  I'm not following the logic there.  

At least the killer in the "Scream" movies calls ahead with a warning, and I think he tests young women's knowledge of horror movies before he kills them, so it's like some twisted trivia contest where a wrong answer costs them their lives, but hey, at least it's a contest.  "Black Christmas" features Billy Lenz, a mental hospiital inmate who killed his family years ago, and he figures out a way to escape, thanks to a wayward carton of eggnog and a guy in a Santa suit who got lost visiting the children's ward. (There's a children's ward at the mental hospital?). Billy heads for his old family home, which is now a college sorority house - gee, what could POSSIBLY go wrong there?  

But the killings actually start before Billy escape, so something else must be taking place, unless the scenes are shown out of chronological order, that means someone else killed the first few women - who could it be?  That's the only real redeeming feature here, trying to see if you can outsmart the screenwriter by determining the other murderer before that's revealed, if in fact there is one, and it's not just faulty writing or messing with the timestream. 

Through flashbacks we learn that Billy had some bad Christmases as a boy - his mother and her boyfriend killed his father one Christmas (does not justify him being a serial killer) and his mother locked him up in the attic for years (also does not justify him being a serial killer) and his mother also sexually assaulted him, used him to get pregnant, so he became the father to his own sister (still nope).  But yet all this backstory is presented to us as kind of an explanation as to why he kills AND why he hates Christmas, only once we explain it, we kind of condone it, and that is something we must not do.  Neither is Billy being born with yellow skin any kind of excuse, or any kind of justification for later making Christmas cookies from his mother's flesh.  But no, by all means, let's feed the serial killer chicken because it tastes the most like a certain other meat that people say tastes like chicken. Not helping, prison guys. 

Gotta call a NITPICK POINT here, since the house mother calls the police and is told that they can't possibly make it across town in under two hours, because of the storm.  OK, so how does an escaped convict with no vehicle or warm clothing then make it from the prison to the sorority house in, let's say, half that time?  It does not compute.  For that matter, how does the killer make it everywhere he needs to be, inside and outside and around the house, without ever being seen by anyone?  

I kind of never realized how many showers everyone in horror movies seem to take, but I did kind of noticed it last week in "The Rental".  Of course, my mind goes back to "Psycho" and that famous shower scene there - but people take showers in horror movies to get spied on by the killer, then again when the killer makes his move (because nobody sees him coming when they have shampoo in their eyes, right?) and then if anyone is lucky enough to survive the assault from the killer, what's the first thing they do?  Take a shower, because they may be covered in blood, dirt or sweat, or maybe they pissed their pants because they were so scared. Think about it.  

Look, I get it, you're looking for some cheap thrills, maybe you just want to watch a bunch of college girls take showers, I've been there. But if you're looking for a thrill watching over a dozen college girls get killed in gruesome ways, yeah, this might be the movie for you, but please, take a moment to think about WHY you want to see that so badly.  Sure, I'm probably overthinking this, it's just good unclean mindless fun, right?  Well, it's fun until it isn't, perhaps, which means that it's questionable fun to begin with, and I don't see it leading to anything positive. You do you, but maybe make better choices regarding what you consider to be entertaining?  

I realize there's a whole weird genre of Halloween-meets-Christmas films, but I'm guessing very few of them are gems like "The Nightmare Before Christmas".  There's "Silent Night, Deadly Night", "Christmas Evil", "Jack Frost" (not the one with Michael Keaton, the other one) and "Better Watch Out", and if there's not a movie called "Slay Ride" then there really should be, but I'm not really into this slasher genre, as you can probably tell. 

Also starring Katie Cassidy (last seen in "Taken"), Michelle Trachtenberg (last seen in "Take Me Home Tonight"), Lacey Chabert (last seen in "Not Another Teen Movie"), Kristen Cloke (last seen in "Lady Bird"), Andrea Martin (last seen in "Bathtubs Over Broadway"), Yan-Kay Crystal Lowe (last sene in "Good Luck Chuck", Oliver Hudson (last seen in "The Christmas Chronicles"), Karin Konoval (last seen in "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed"), Dean Friss, Robert Mann (last seen in "Welcome to Marwen"), Jessica Harmon, Leela Savasta (last seen in "Big Eyes"), Kathleen Kole, Cainan Wiebe (last seen in 'The Twilight Saga: Eclipse"), Christina Crivici, Howard Siegel (last seen in "Man of Steel"), Peter Wilds, Ron Selmour (last seen in "A Guy Thing"), Peter New (ditto), Michael Adamthwaite (last seen in "Walking Tall"), Christian Sloan (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1), Aly Purrott-Armstrong, Juan Riedinger (last seen in "The Day the Earth Stood Still"), Aaron Pearl (last seen in "The Unforgivable"), Peggy Logan (last seen in "Cats & Dogs"), Jill Teed (last seen in "Godzilla" (2014), Peggy Jo Jacobs, Jerry Wasserman (last seen in "Head Over Heels"), Derek McIver (last seen in "Trick 'r Treat"), Evan Adams, Jody Racicot (also last seen in "Good Luck Chuck"), Anne Marie DeLuise (last seen in "Frankie & Alice"), Greg Kean, Kent Kubena. 

RATING: 2 out of 10 Secret Santa presents

The Ring Two

Year 16, Day 288 - 10/14/24 - Movie #4,873

BEFORE: Naomi Watts is having a pretty good Movie Year, I must say, as she carries over from "The Ring", and she was also in two of the "Divergent" movies, and "Penguin Bloom" before that and "The International", "Ophelia" and "Infinite Storm" after.  So this makes EIGHT movies with her in this calendar year, which puts her on the big board, umm, let's say between Jason Statham and Mark Wahlberg, yeah, that seems about right for this year. It won't be long now until I close up shop for the late fall and re-open for the holidays, just like a hunting lodge. But after Christmas I'll break down who had the most appearances, from 12 down to 3 anyway.  Hundreds of actors and non-actors have appeared in two watched movies this year, I won't have space to list them all, so only those with three or more films in 2024 will get name-checked.  My rules, I make them up. 

But yeah, I'm watching both "Ring" movies within 24 hours, so that's a double dose. If I die six or seven days from now, you'll know what happened to me. 

THE PLOT: Six months after the incidents involving the lethal videotape, new clues prove that there is a new evil lurking in the darkness. 

AFTER: For some reason, teens are still watching that VHS tape that kills people, I guess because it's 2002 and most reality TV hasn't been invented yet, except for "Survivor" and maybe "Big Brother".  One guy named Jake watched the tape seven days ago, and he's desperately trying to get his girlfriend (?) to watch the tape, with just minutes to go before he somehow dies. Not cool, dude. Maybe she gets suspicious when he puts the tape on and leaves the room, or maybe he oversold how COOL it is to watch this scary tape that kills you.  Either way, he comes back in the room, thinking he's beaten the system, only to find out that Emily "watched" it with her eyes closed. Yeah, maybe Emily's not the sharpest knife in the drawer - OR, maybe she's smarter than we think, because she doesn't die at the hand of the evil ghost-demon Samara, he does.  Still, someone should probably explain to Emily how to watch a videotape. 

They never made a sequel to this film where the ghost-demon upgraded to DVD or BluRays?  Or since Samara died in the 1980's she doesn't understand that technology?  Man, I think we skated on this one because nobody's watching VHS tapes any more, except for me.  Thank God the evil ghost-demon who was thrown down a well doesn't understand how to get her movie on streaming platforms, but then again, from what I've seen, nobody really understands how that process works.  Anyway I don't think she'd make any money doing that, because nobody seems to be making money from streaming any more, Samara would be better off getting a YouTube channel, but then she really would need to promote it to get the required number of views, they keep sort of moving that goalpost and making it more difficult.  Welcome to the world of independent film distribution, evil ghost-demon!  

Anyway, Rachel and her son Aidan have moved from the Seattle area to a small town in Oregon, and Rachel's working for a local newspaper with a nice-guy editor, Max, who's a potential love interest for her, if all goes well and he doesn't get scared to death by an evil ghost-demon.  But come on, what are the odds of THAT happening?  Rachel hears about the new trend in Western Oregon, trying to get your girlfriend to watch a VHS tape that kills you, and she breaks into the crime scene to burn the videotape, so there you go, problem solved, movie over. But that also alerted Samara to Rachel's location, and the evil ghost-demon decides that inside Rachel's son Aidan would be a pretty cool place to hang out, so she enters him inside a gender-neutral restroom at the county fair.  

A bunch of deer try to attack their car on the way home, and honestly it's a bit unclear if the deer are being controlled by the demon, or if they can sense the demon and are trying to destroy it.  I suppose if a bunch of deer wreck your car it doesn't matter much what their motive is. But Aidan's body temperature starts to drop and bruises develop on his arms, and everyone in the hospital is convinced that Rachel is an abusive mother, because people don't just get instant hypothermia, not even in northern Oregon.  But since he's in the hospital this gives Rachel more time to investigate Samara's back-story even further - unlike in the previous film, where she just left her kid home alone with no supervision for long stretches of time.  

Rachel tracks down Samara's mother, who is somehow still alive despite giving birth in the 1950's (?) and tracks her down in a psychiatric hospital, which is where she's been since she tried to drown her own baby because the baby told her to.  Meanwhile, Samara/Aidan kills his doctor in the hospital and then just walks out and goes back to Max's house. Rachel figures out that Aidan is possessed because he calls her "Mommy", and before he was calling her by her first name.  Yeah, I tried that with my mother once when I was a kid and got in trouble for it. 

Apparently the only way to get Samara out of her son is to put sleeping pills in his jelly sandwiches, and then drown him in the bathtub, because Samara still has a fear of being drowned, even though she's dead.  Seems a bit weird because she can't drown AGAIN, but whatever. But this is just going to give mothers out there bad ideas, the movie's basically saying any time your ten-year-old is acting weird, just drown him in the bathtub, that'll fix it. Then it's just a simple matter of allowing herself to be pulled into the VHS world, climb out of a well before the super-fast ghost-demon, and close the lid on the well. What could be easier?  Now just get your soul back into your body and try to enjoy life, if you can.  

This franchise was WAY over-hyped, considering how much didn't happen in these two movies.  They sure tried to do a lot with a little, and the footage that kills you really just looked like a bad student film.  Anyway, that's another franchise crossed off the list, and I never have to circle back to this one, let's hope. This is what you get when the film's director and lead actress are contractually obligated to keep working on a sequel but just don't really want to be there. 

Also starring David Dorfman (also carrying over from "The Ring"), Simon Baker (last seen in "The Killer Inside Me"), Kelly Stables (last heard in "Dolittle"), Sissy Spacek (last seen in "Being Mary Tyler Moore"), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (last seen in "Kate"), Elizabeth Perkins (last seen in "Moonlight and Valentino"), Gary Cole (last seen in "Blockers"), Ryan Merriman (last seen in "42"), Emily VanCamp (last seen in "Captain America: Civil War"), Kelly Overton, James Lesure (last seen in "Fire with Fire"), Chane't Johnson, Cooper Thornton (last seen in "Walk of Shame"), Marilyn McIntyre (last seen in "Very Bad Things"), Jesse Burch (last seen in "The Last Word"), Michael Chieffo (last seen in "Battle of the Sexes"), Steve Petranca, Michael Dempsey, Kirk B.R. Woller (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Jeffrey Hutchinson (last seen in "Changeling"), Mary Joy (last seen in "The Rundown"), Michelle Anne Johnson, Teri Bibb, Jill Farley, Aleksa Palladino (last seen in "The Irishman"), Victor McCay (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Brendan Tomlinson, Phyllis Lyons (last seen in "The Bridges of Madison County"), Amy Haffner, Jonathan Coburn, Sherilyn Lawson (last seen in "Feast of Love") with archive footage of Daveigh Chase (also carrying over from "The Ring"), Shannon Cochran (ditto)

RATING: 3 out of 10 discounted VHS tapes at the county fair

The Ring

Year 16, Day 287 - 10/13/24 - Movie #4,872

BEFORE: I've got today off, last day off for a while, because I'm headed into Hell Week, aka New York Comic Con week.  I worked yesterday at the theater on a shift starting at 6 am, so that threw off my whole sleeping schedule, which is not good news going into NYCC week.  So I took a nap on Saturday afternoon when I came home, stayed up to watch "Quasi" but then overslept going into Sunday, which was my wife's birthday.  I'm glad I got us a dinner reservation for 6 pm and not earlier, as we seniors are likely to get.  Anyway, all of this put my movie watching on the back burner a bit, so I'm going to double-up on the "Ring" movies tonight and then I should be back on track.  But I'm only watching four more films before I shut down for the duration of the Comic-Con, you know how this goes, I have to be at the booth for 10 or 11 hours at a time, and it doesn't stop for four days, unless I can find someone to cover MY shift on Sunday. 

BUT if I can make it through Hell Week (NYCC will be followed by NewFest and then the New Yorker Festival at the theater), then there are just 14 horror films to go this month, then after 2 weeks comes a real break, no movies until just before Thanksgiving, and a week out of NY down in North Carolina in November.  So some form of vacation is on the horizon.

Brian Cox carries over again from "Quasi". 

THE PLOT: A journalist must investigate a mysterious videotape which seems to cause the death of anyone one week to the day after they view it. 

AFTER: There's a bunch of these "death is stalking you" movies that were made back in the day, like last year I watched "One Missed Call", which was quite ridiculous - where a person gets a cell phone call from their future self, and they learn about the exact moment they're going to die the next day.  There's nothing they can do to stop it, so this might make you wonder WHY they get the phone call announcing their impending doom, if the time and method of death can't be changed, the goal I guess is just to ensure they spend the last 24 hours of their life in abject terror and dread.  Then the presence picks a number saved in their phone and calls the next victim with a similar message pre-recorded in the future, and so on. 

Then there's the "Final Destination" series, which I have not been able to link to yet, and there's one called "It Follows", I haven't gotten to that one either.  But they all maybe trace back to "The Ring" from 2002, or perhaps to the 1998 Japanese horror film that "The Ring" was based on.  Here death is coming in seven days for anyone who watches a certain video-tape.  Two teen girls are sitting around, talking about the tape, and one pretends that she saw the film seven days ago - ha, ha, she was only kidding to scare her friend!  But then it turns out she wasn't kidding after all, she was spending time with her boyfriend a week ago and they watched "the tape".  They also discuss some B.S. about electro-magnetic waves, and how energy is always flowing around us and through our brains, as if that helps explain how watching a VHS tape can KILL YOU.  

So yeah, Katie's a goner, because she watched the tape a week ago and, umm, forgot to tell anyone about it until the last minute?  Sure enough, she gets a phone call from the mysterious force that tells her she's about to die, and then she gets scared TO DEATH by umm, something, it's a bit unclear.  But at the funeral, Katie's mother asks her sister Rachel to see if she can find out more about Katie's death, because Rachel is a journalist, and that's the ONLY profession that's allowed to ask questions about things.  Rachel agrees because her son Aidan was close to his cousin, Katie, and they spent time together a couple days every week.  

Oh, yeah, Aidan has some kind of supernatural ability, like he's been making drawings for the last week about a girl being buried, and also he's been drawing a house with a well and an attic room.  Probably not important, at least not yet.  Aidan's psychic drawings are kind of a nod to films like "The Sixth Sense" and "The Shining" - or maybe he's just a weird kid dealing with tragedy the only way he can, it's a little tough to say.  

Anyway, Rachel investigates the place where Katie (and all of her now-dead friends) was a week ago, which is the Shelter Mountain Inn, where I guess all the teens go to get laid?  The only entertainment available to the guests at the inn is one jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces, one game of Parcheesi and a limited selection of VHS tapes, including the one that KILLS YOU seven days later.  So, umm, forgive me for asking, but why does anyone watch that tape?  I mean, teens today take drugs and eat Tide Pods, so they don't exactly have the best judgment, but how bad are the other movies at the inn when people guests want to watch the tape that kills them?  Are the only other movies "Plan 9 from Outer Space" and "Howard the Duck"?

So Rachel does the only thing she can think to do to learn more, she watches the videotape.  Yeah, umm, sure.  She's an adult, she heard that watching this tape can KILL YOU and then that's the first thing she does. Great. She gets the phone call with the ominous whispering voice that says "Seven days...." and somehow she does not regret her decision to watch the video. OK, sure, let's proceed. Maybe deep down she just doesn't believe the hype, really, because no movie could be so bad that it kills you, unless it's "Miss March" or "Norm of the North". But now there's a ticking clock, she's got 7 days to figure out who made the tape and how it's killing people, or she faces death herself. Right. 

Thankfully, her ex-husband is a video-tape analyst, because somehow that's a job back in 2002.  The film isn't even all that scary, it looks a bit like a Bunuel film from the early days of silent movies - there's a ladder, there's a lighthouse, a giant millipede, some things that are semi-spooky, but nothing outright scary.  So the film itself isn't scaring people to death, but some malevolent entity is tracking down the people who watched it and haunting them or subjecting them to psychological trauma, you know, because of energy and stuff, and I guess the power of filmmaking.  And it's not even that the film is SO BAD that people who watch it want to die, like with "Popeye" or "The Cat in the Hat", apparently it's something else. 

Rachel identifies a woman on the tape, a horse breeder named Anna Morgan, who committed suicide after a number of her horses drowned themselves.  She lived out on Moesko Island, and as Rachel is traveling there, a horse being transported on the same ferry breaks free and jumps off the boat.  Then when she meets Anna's widower husband, Richard, who tells her about their adopted daughter, Samara, he then commits suicide himself.  Man, people and horses were all just desperate to get out of this movie!  

Samara apparently also had psychic abilities, which she used to - umm, torture the horses?  She could psychically etch images into people's minds, whatever that means. There's a video-tape of her explaining her powers during a therapy session, and honestly the timeline doesn't really match up here, because Anna made a film that looked like a 1920's short film, and Samara was recorded on video-tape in the what, 1980's?  I can't tell when anything in the past took place, the timeline here is all screwed up somehow.  Very frustrating. 

NITPICK POINT: There's a drawing of a tree on the wall in the Morgan, home, and once Rachel and Noah peel off all the wallpaper, they see the tree, which Rachel immediately recognizes as the tree near the Shelter Mountain Inn.  REALLY?  There are hundreds of trees on the island, thousands of trees in the Seattle area, and Rachel immediately recognizes ONE tree in particular?  COME ON, the drawing was made thirty or forty years ago, that tree couldn't possibly look exactly the same, assuming it's still standing.  Trees do eventually fall over or die or get hit by lightning or destroyed in fires, they don't all last quite that long. 

Rachel and Noah then find that under the motel where Katie watched the tape, there's a well that leads down to - I don't know, hell or something?  Apparently Anna Morgan threw her evil adopted daughter Samara down the well and it took her seven days to die or something?  Thus the spirit of Samara kills people using the possessed VHS tape?  A bit of a stretch, to put things mildly.  

NITPICK POINT #2: There's a dead body in the video room, and Rachel's dealing with the trauma, but when she sees his girlfriend arriving and getting on the freight elevator, she doesn't even stop her, so a second person gets to experience the trauma of discovering the body?  Not cool - how about a simple, "Hey, stop, don't go up there!" - or is that too much to ask? 

Rachel somehow frees the soul of Samara from the well, and they give her body a proper burial, but that's not the end of the story, because young Aidan and his mother Rachel (who both watched the tape) figure out the loophole - Rachel copied the tape and showed it to someone else, and that freed her from the 7-day curse.  So all Aidan has to do is the same thing, copy the tape and show it to someone else, and then THEY will be cursed, not him.  Ah, so it's more like the "Star Wars Holiday Special", then.  That I definitely understand. 

Also starring Naomi Watts (last seen in "Infinite Storm"), Martin Henderson (last seen in "Smokin' Aces"), David Dorfman (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor"), Jane Alexander (last seen in "Three Christs"), Lindsay Frost, Amber Tamblyn (last seen in "Nostalgia"), Rachael Bella (last seen in "The Crucible"), Daveigh Chase, Shannon Cochran (last seen in "Captive State"), Sandra Thigpen, Richard Lineback (last seen in "Ready to Rumble"), Sasha Barrese (last seen in "Legally Blonde"), Tess Hall, Adam Brody (last seen in "American Fiction"), Alan Blumenfeld (last seen in "In Her Shoes"), Pauley Perrette, Joe Chrest (last seen in "Clockwatchers"), Ronald William Lawrence, Stephanie Erb (last seen in "Fearless"), Sara Rue (last seen in "My Future Boyfriend"), Joe Sabatino (last seen in "Vice" (2018)), Joanna Lin Black, Keith Campbell (last heard in "Rango", Chuck Hicks (last seen in "Everybody's All-American"), Michael Spound (last seen in "Must Love Dogs"), Gary Carlos Cervantes (last seen in "Stick"), Aixa Clemente (last seen in "Stand and Deliver"), Art Frankel (last seen in "The Back-Up Plan"), Billy Lloyd, Guy Richardson.

RATING: 4 out of 10 blurry photographs