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

Quasi

Year 16, Day 286 - 10/12/24 - Movie #4,871

BEFORE: Yeah, this one doesn't look like a horror movie, either - it's a very tenuous connection because ihunchbacks are sort of a staple in horror movies, always serving as those deformed lab assistants working for mad scientists like Dr. Frankenstein and such.  And I think back in the day Lon Chaney played Quasimodo in an early film version of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", one which IMDB classifies as a horror film. Of course it's based on a classic French novel by Victor Hugo, but I bet the early 20th century Hollywood versions got it all wrong and made Quasimodo out to be a shocking monster.  Then of course in 1996 DisneyCorp. came out with their version, which recast him as the hero of the story, part of their new mandate to stop making films about beautiful people and try to be more inclusive, but the film had animated singing gargoyle characters in it AND changed the novel's ending to a happy one, so really, most people don't even talk about that version any more. 

This new version is a satirical comedy from the Broken Lizard guys, the ones who made "Super Troopers" and "Beerfest" and "Club Dread" and "The Slammin' Salmon", which are all films that i enjoy and watch every time I see they're on TV.  OK, maybe it took a couple tries to enjoy "The Slammin' Salmon", but after watching it with my wife I got there, so I'm willing to give these guys the benefit of the doubt.  When I heard they made a new film about Quasimodo, I figured I'd have to watch it as soon as possible, and so today is "as soon as possible" - still, it took me a year and a half to be able to link to it. 

Brian Cox carries over from "The Water Horse".

THE PLOT: A hapless hunchback who yearns for love finds himself in the middle of a murderous feud between the Pope and the king of France when each orders the hunchback to kill the other. 

AFTER: Yeah, this was about what I expected - damn, I really was hoping for a better film experience tonight, but this film just does NOT reach the quality level of Broken Lizard's previous films. "Super Troopers" (and its sequel) were just brilliant, like I saw that film at the Sundance Festival back in 2001, and I had to tell everybody about it when I got back to NY, how it was one of the funniest films I'd ever seen, and it's endlessly re-watchable, as I said. I'll watch that or "Beerfest" or "Club Dread" any time they're on, and I've seen each one at least a dozen times.  

(They opened a new German restaurant out in Stony Brook, Long Island, called Schnitzel's, and I said we had to go there because it was no doubt a reference to the fake restaurant in "Beerfest", which was called "Schnitzengiggles". Yeah, they serve beer in a boot and the staff at the restaurant seems to be in on the joke, because they host beer stein holding competitions and the servers wear punny t-shirts. There's also a restaurant out in Ronkonkoma called Shenanigan's, which is the name of the fake restaurant mentioned in "Super Troopers", but we haven't made it there yet.)

Anyway, "Quasi" kind of let me down because it's just not as funny as those other Broken Lizard movies, so I'm kind of upset that they spent a couple years making this one, when they could have been filming "Potfest", the proposed sequel that they teased at the end of "Beerfest".  Hey, it's legal now in a lot of places, so why not?  Is watching people get stoned just not as funny as watching them get drunk?  Because it worked out OK for Cheech & Chong.  

I don't think they kept anything intact from the original VIctor Hugo novel, like where the hell is the Notre Dame cathedral and why is Quasimodo a low-level torturer and not a bell-ringer?  He makes references to "growing up in a bell tower", but the whole point of the original story is that he does the bell-ringing job that nobody else wants to, because it would probably make them deaf, plus he serves in sort of the "Phantom of the Opera" role, being the guy backstage who calls everyone to church with the bells, and if you take that away from the character, what are you left with, besides a whole lot of nothing?  

In the novel he falls in love with a Gypsy girl, and, well, let's just say it doesn't end well, not for him or her or anyone, really, because 15th century France really sucked. In this film Quasi is enamored by the Queen, but of course she's totally out of his league - or is she?  Maybe she's into freaky stuff with freaks, they kind of suggest that here in this film that's set back then but has all their characters acting like modern people, with a nod and a wink.  Satire may be set centuries ago in the past, but it's meant to be a commentary on the time it was made, which is now.  So sure, let's make fun of kings and popes because they're not as powerful as they used to be.  And let's make fun of torturing heretics and people dying from the plague and how kings abused their power, because it's what Mel Brooks and/or Monty Python would do. 

Each member of the Broken Lizard troupe plays at least two characters here, which is a very Monty Python-type thing to do.  Back then for "The Holy Grain" and "Life of Brian" it was quite possibly just a cost-cutting measure, they couldn't afford to hire more actors so each Python guy needed to play at least three roles.  I was pretty confused as a kid, because even then I wanted to know the name of every actor, and I didn't quite understand why the actor who played King Arthur also played a castle guard with the hiccups and the middle head of a three-headed monster knight.  Didn't this bother anyone else?  Just me, a 12-year-old kid?  (And that ending of "Holy Grail" bothered me, too - but Eric Idle was on the talk-show circuit last week explaining that, yes, well, they did run out of money at that point. Explains a lot.)

I wish I could say that "Quasi" makes some valid points about the futility of the feudal system or the ridiculousness of the Pope or religion, or what happened in old-time Europe when the King disagreed with the Pope, and people died as a result.  But no, it's all for laughs here as people get tortured and killed just because the people in power want to act like spoiled children.  OK, great, go for the humor, but then why isn't this film funnier?  Because comedy isn't easy, that's why, if it were then everyone would do it and everything would be funny, and it's just not. Even experienced comedians make bad comedies that aren't very funny, because that's subjective and it depends on connecting with the audience, and you just don't know if a film is going to succeed at that, until it doesn't.  

Plus they made the same mistake here as Disney did back in the mid-90's, they gave it a happy ending - by which I mean that the evil men who were in power die, and Quasimodo somehow comes out on top and finds love and also, against all odds and through unfathomly impossible plot twists, also becomes king.  So the whole point of the novel is missing here, which is that the system in 15th century France would totally prevent a deformed bell-ringer or a Gypsy girl from getting ahead.  The deck would have been totally stacked against them, and success was not an option. Let's be real for a second. 

This one's good for a couple quick laughs, but I don't see this becoming any sort of cult classic or repeat favorite.  Feels like some people spent so much time working on their basic cable TV sitcom that they forgot how to make a funny movie. 

Also starring Steve Lemme (last seen in "Super Troopers 2"), Jay Chandrasekhar (ditto), Paul Soter (ditto), Kevin Heffernan (last heard in "Scoob!"), Erik Stolhanske (last seen in "The Onion Movie"), Adrianne Palicki (last seen in "John Wick"), Eugene Cordero (last seen in "When in Rome"), Marcus Henderson (last seen in "Pete's Dragon"), Gabriel Hogan (last seen in "Head in the Clouds"), Hassie Harrison, Gabrielle Lane, Michael Yurchak (last seen in "The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two"), Phil Hudson, Richard Perello (also last seen in "Super Troopers 2"), Ken May.

RATING: 5 out of 10 Belon oysters

The Water Horse

Year 16, Day 285 - 10/11/24 - Movie #4,870

BEFORE: All right, I'm betting this one won't be very scary, because obviously it's going to be about the Loch Ness Monster, and the poster makes it look a bit like a re-telling of "Free Willy".  But I've done two movies about sea monsters already this year - "The Sea Beast" and "Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken", so that will probably be a whole category at the end of the year, sea monsters and mermaids and selkies and yeah, giant sharks.  Sometimes they're monsters and sometimes they're not, it just depends on the film.  I'm surprised that we still call these films "monster movies", isn't that just a bit perjorative?  You'd think by now the P.C. police would have stepped in and demand that we call them "non-human creature films" or "films about differently genetically endowed life forms perceived to be monstrous by non-aware people". I mean, sure, CGI monsters have rights too, umm, don't they? Maybe not. 

Ben Chaplin carries over from "Dorian Gray"

THE PLOT: A lonely boy discovers a mysterious egg that hatches a sea creature of Scottish legend.

AFTER: Yeah, this was as bad as I figured, they tried to cutify the Loch Ness Monster by showing what it would have looked like as a baby (If it existed, which it probably does not) and a young Scottish boy finds its egg on the seashore and takes it home, then he inadverently causes it to hatch, and now he's got a baby sea monster running around his family's home - what could POSSIBLY go wrong there? 

This film is set during World War II, and just days after finding the egg and hatching the creature (which he names "Crusoe", not "Nessie") a group of Scottish soldiers sets up camp at his family's estate, because of the strategic location of Loch Ness nearby, and the chance that German submarines may invade Scotland from the ocean.  Yeah, I just checked the map, that seems unlikely due to the position of Loch Ness on the map - why would the Nazis go all the way around England, past London, and invade the U.K. from the north, through Scotland?  That seems unlikely, but even if they would (which they wouldn't), Loch Ness is quite a ways inland, wouldn't it make more sense for the army to set up their guns and their observation point at Inverness to the north or Fort William to the south?  Just saying. And why target Loch Ness and bypass Edinburgh, or Glasgow, or, you know, LONDON?

I don't think that the MacMorrow family owns this big estate, it belong to Lord Killin, whoever that is, and I'm not sure what the relationship is, I guess Charles MacMorrow, Angus' father, was the handyman at the estate, and where Lord Killin is, I have no idea.  But Charles went off to war a year ago, and his son Angus is counting the days on a calendar until his tour of duty is over, but then later in the film Angus' mother lets slip that Charles was lost at sea after his ship sank, and that was more than a year ago.  So no, I don't think he's coming home, but I guess if they acknowledged his death then the family couldn't live on this estate any more?  A new handyman comes to replace Angus' father, which would only be a problem if Angus was storing some kind of baby sea monster in that workshop...

But Lewis, the new handyman happens to know what the creature is, it's a legendary Water Horse, which the story says is genderless, and each creature lays one egg before it dies, so its child is born an orphan.  And as a baby that Water Horse doesn't know how to eat or take care of itself, so it's no wonder that the species is rare and endangered, because it's quite dumb and over time that species would starve to death, right?  Like by the time it figures out how to swim and eat fish, it's too late. Anyway, Angus cares for the creature and feeds it apples and puts a bandage on the cut on its back that he probably gave it when trying to crack open its egg. 

Now he's got to raise this sea monster and prevent his mother from seeing it, because she's very strict about not having pets, and also he's got to keep it away from the Royal Artillery Troops, who have been hunting deer in the nearby forest and would probably love to hunt a dinosaur or Water Horse or whatever the hell Crusoe is.  So Charlie and Lewis have to keep it hidden, even though it's growing at a phenomenal rate, must be all that garbage it's been eating, who knows.  But the Army's mascot bulldog, Churchill, keeps destroying the kitchen and the dining room whenever it chases the sea monster, god damn it, this it a Loch Ness Monster film, not a Tom & Jerry cartoon.  

Lewis and Angus take Crusoe in a truck over to Loch Ness, thus fulfilling the prophecy that they didn't even know about - and Crusoe takes to the water almost like he was made for it, which he was. Later, when Angus sneaks off to the lake - because who wants to do stupid army chores and learn some discipline, am I right - he goes for a ride on the Loch Ness Monster, and Crusoe kind of forgets that Angus needs to breathe air once in a while.  But this is probably the highlight of the film, a thrill ride on the back of a sea monster while exploring the depths of Loch Ness.  There are ruins down there, a sunken ship with a treasure chest, and so on. 

Captain Hamilton of the Royal Artillery seems to have a thing for Angus' mom, so he tries to discredit the new handyman as some kind of non-veteran or deserter, to no avail.  Then he takes the MacMorrow family to a hill overlooking Loch Ness so he can demonstrate the artillery by firing shells into the lake, because what better way to keep your outpost's location secret than by blowing a bunch of nothingness up?  The shells come a bit too close to Crusoe and manage to change the docile creature's temperament, which only goes to prove that MAN is the ultimate monster, not the monster itself.  Sheesh, give me a break. 

Meanwhile, two fishermen who encountered Crusoe face-to-face have no luck taking a photograph of the monster, so they create a wood-frame silhouette of a sea monster's head and take the famous photo that has been all but debunked over the years.  Right, because the photo was faked but that also means that the sea monster is real.  Again, give me a break. That's like disproving the famous footage of Bigfoot by finding the costume somebody wore when filming it and then deducing that Bigfoot simply MUST be real, but that doesn't make any sense. 

Finally the soldiers come to hunt the sea monster and prove its existence, of course by trying to kill it.  (Again, man is the monster here, he kills anything he doesn't understand...). But the McMorrows and Captain Hamilton, having seen the creature up close, help it to evade the army's net and get out into the open sea.  So it really IS like "Free Willy" in the end.  Angus grows up and never sees the creature again, but he's got a hell of a story to tell any tourist who wants to hear it, and also a few who don't. 

Again, I fondly remember the day when monsters were monsters and we didn't have to justify them or cute-ify them or explain in movies why they weren't monsters at all, they were all just horribly misunderstood.  The woke-ness started a couple decades ago, it turns out, before Godzilla and Kong were defending Earth from the BAD giant monsters and the Sea Beasts were hunted to near-extinction for a totally B.S. reason.  Did the Loch Ness Monster NEED a back-story where it looked like an ugly Pokemon and grew up faster than anyone thought it could?  Umm, no, it probably did not, mostly because it's not real.  

Also starring Alex Etel (last seen in "From Time to Time"), Brian Cox (last seen in "Deadpool & Wolverine"), Emily Watson (last seen in "A Royal Night Out"), David Morrissey (last seen in "Welcome to the Punch"), Priyanka Xi, Marshall Napier (last seen in "The Light Between Oceans"), Joel Tobeck (last seen in "Avatar: The Way of Water"), Erroll Shand (last seen in "Slow West"), Craig Hall (last seen in "Pete's Dragon"), Geraldine Brophy (last seen in "King Kong" (2005)), William Johnson (ditto), Ian Hancourt (last seen in "The Power of the Dog"), Eddie Campbell (ditto), Bruce Allpress, Carl Dixon, Nathan Christopher Haase, Megan Katherine, Lorraine McDonald, Edward Newborn, Louis Owen Collins, William Russell, Ben Van Lier, 

RATING: 4 out of 10 pints of McEwan's at the pub

Dorian Gray

Year 16, Day 284 - 10/10/24 - Movie #4,869

BEFORE: I'm sorry that I'm kind of jumping all over the horror map here, started with ghosts and moved on to zombies, then some straight up killers (political and non-political), then came some sea monsters and a giant ape, then back to ghosts or ghost-demon or whatever that was last night.  I can't help it, I've chosen the actor links as my organization system, and I have to go where that takes me right now.  All brands and flavors of horror are accepted here, no film gets turned away for its subject matter, it just has to be spooky in some way.  Look, I don't limit my documentaries by subject matter, I'll watch a doc on any subject, as long as it interests me in some way. I tend to gravitate toward rock stars and actor bio-docs, but just this year I watched one about the Mars rover, a couple about Trump, one about people with strange last names, and one about the guy who started Nathan's hot dogs. 

I'll go wherever that linking muse takes me, that's my point. And the horror genre can work the same way, films can be animated, or comedy-horror or monster-horror or even a doc about filmmakers like Spielberg or De Palma who directed horror films have qualified, if needed. Whatever keeps that chain going can be OK, I might even slip in a superhero film like I did "Morbius", if it seems spooky enough AND it keeps the chain alive (or undead).  Tonight it's a film based on classic lit that may not be outright horror, but it's freaky and hopefully spooky. OK? 

Rebecca Hall carries over again from "The Night House". 

THE PLOT: A corrupt young man somehow keeps his youthful beauty eternally, but a special painting gradually reveals his inner ugliness to all.  

AFTER: Of course, I'm somewhat familiar with the "Picture of Dorian Gray" storyline, though I've never read it, you just pick up things by osmosis sometimes.  I've never watched a film version of it either, unless you count the character's appearance in the movie "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", which seems to have fallen out of favor for some reason, but it was based on a comic book that had THREE volumes, and the film only dealt with the first one.  It's not too late, somebody could still make a sequel with Captain Nemo, Mina Harker, Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde and the Invisible Man fighting off the aliens attacking from Mars as in "The War of the Worlds".  Sure, I get that Sean Connery's no longer available, just replace Allan Quartermain or bring him back from the dead and played by a younger actor, I'm fine with it either way, but let's get to it!  Replace him with John Carter of Mars, I don't care. 

The one character who can't come back for the sequel would be Dorian Gray, who crumbled to dust after being forced to look at the portrait of himself, which had taken on all his injuries and aging that he somehow managed to deflect on to the art.  But of course that "Extraordinary Gentlemen" movie was a bastardization, with Stuart Townsend playing Dorian, and I've never bothered much to find out what takes place in the REAL story, the only novel written by Oscar Wilde.  I've seen other films based on Wilde's plays, like "An Ideal Husband" and "The Importance of Being Earnest" and "A Good Woman", but never tackled any version of "Dorian Gray" until tonight. 

My first question is, where did the story idea come from?  My first thought is that it came from Wilde's own vanity, perhaps looking in a mirror and seeing signs of his own aging, and wishing he could stop it. Or did he see someone having their portrait painted, as was the custom of the time, and notice the fact that the portrait would never age, while the person would, and hey, there's maybe a story there, what if it worked the other way around?  It turns out my second guess is very close to the mark, in 1887 he watched a female friend having her portrait painted and remarked in jest that it was tragic, that the painting will never grow older but the subject would, and right away his brain reversed it and he had the idea for the story.  

Now, the story went through some changes, apparently after Wilde had written it as a short story, his publisher took out any references to homosexual desire, because that sort of thing would have marked the book as "indecent" and might have prevented publication.  But by 1891 the novella had become a longer novel, twenty chapters but still light on the gay stuff. It wasn't until 2011 that the "uncensored" version of the book was published, and the parts of Wilde's story about the artist, Basil Hayward, having romantic feelings for Dorian Gray were restored.  Whether this is for the better, it's not for me to say, like I'm all for the artist being in love with Dorian, but somehow the art displaying Dorian's age might be tied to him selling his soul, so I don't know how close anyone wants the gay themes to be to the work of the Devil, just saying. 

But to what extent is the story meant to be taken seriously, and how much of it is metaphor about the purpose of art in society, the value of beauty, and the role of an artist in creating a portrait of someone.  Somehow the creation of this picture freezes Dorian in age and beauty, and is that ultimately a good thing or a bad thing?  Did he make a deal with the Devil just by saying so, is that the way the world works?  If Dorian could stop aging just by having his portrait made and wishing it to be so, why didn't anyone else seem to be able to do this?  

More to the point, are we supposed to take Dorian's actions as "evil" or just that of a young, wanton man in Victorian England who falls in with a bad crowd, and uses his money to pursue beauty and pleasure in all of its forms?  Would he be considered "good" if he settled down, married a woman and remained faithful to her, until they grew old together and one of them died?  Is that course of action "good" just because society says it is?  While pursuing hedonistic relationships with many women (and men) without any boundaries, is that considered "evil"?  I think there's a slippery slope there, and we should probably resist putting the good/evil labels on any relationship choices, because it's not the Victorian Age any more, we went through a whole sexual revolution and people fought for gay rights and we've come too far as a society to revert to "marriage good, orgies bad". It's a whole new ball game out there, some people live in thrupples and some people are polyamorous and gender-neutral and so maybe Dorian Gray was just 130 years ahead of his time, as Oscar Wilde may have been. 

Dorian experiments with every vice out there, but the effects are not reflected on his own body, they appear on the painting instead.  So he's forced to remove the painting from view and hang it in the attic.  Basil, the painter, wants to include it in a gallery show but Dorian obviously refuses.  When Basil realizes why, he urges Dorian to pray for salvation, but Dorian blames his fate on the artist and kills him. Meanwhile, James Vane is out to kill Dorian for breaking the heart of his sister, Sibyl, who was engaged to Dorian then drowned herself when he called off the wedding.  Well, she was playing Ophelia in "Hamlet" when they met, so that seems kind of fitting.  Anyway, Dorian decides to travel and see the world, returning to London 25 years later to find that all of his friends are now old, though he has remained young. 

He takes up with Emily, the daughter of his best friend, Henry Wotton, the one who told him to pursue beauty and pleasure in the first place.  Umm, except he's not crazy about Dorian dating his own daughter, it turns out, probably because he knows what Dorian is capable of.  But Dorian is trying to straighten out and fly right, whatever that means - only Emily is curious about what's stored in the attic and why she's forbidden to go up there. Gray is reminded of how cruel he was to Sibyl, as her brother James makes another attempt to kill Dorian for it. Meanwhile other people are looking at old photographs of Dorian and wondering how he managed to not age over time.  All this leads to Henry sneaking into the attic and finding evidence of Basil's murder, then exposing the covered-up portrait which seems to growl and nearly come to life, and it's angry.  The only possible response is to try and kill it with fire, and hope that does the trick. 

It's a little tough to discern what lesson, exactly, we're supposed to take away from this story.  Don't make a deal with the Devil?  Umm OK, I won't. Don't have your portrait painted with those paints that will steal your soul and make the painting age in your place?  Sure, I can do that. Learn to grow old gracefully? Well that seems more reasonable, but does anyone ever really do that well? I mean, we're all getting older every day, you can't stop it. I've got another birthday coming in 10 days, so yeah, I'm aware but as Indy said, it's not the years, it's the mileage. Growing old sucks, but it does beat the alternative. 

Also starring Ben Barnes (last seen in "Easy Virtue"), Colin Firth (last seen in "Barbie"), Ben Chaplin (last seen in "The Dig"), Rachel Hurd-Wood (last seen in "Peter Pan" (2003)), Johnny Harris (last seen in "The Last Days on Mars"), Emilia Fox (last seen in "Blithe Spirit"), Fiona Shaw (last seen in "IF"), Maryam d'Abo (last seen in "The Living Daylights"), Caroline Goodall (last seen in "Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard"), Michael Culkin (last seen in "An Ideal Husband"), Pip Torrens (also last seen in "Easy Virtue"), John Hollingworth (last seen in "Napoleon"), Nathan Rosen, Jeff Lipman (last seen in "United 93"), Louise Kempton, Douglas Henshall (last seen in "Twice Upon a Yesterday"), George Potts (last seen in "The Son"), David Sterne (last seen in "The Protégé"), Louise Rose, Aewla Huillet, Jo Woodcock, Max Irons (last seen in "The Wife"), Lily Garrett, Emily Phillips, Hugh Ross (last seen in "The Four Feathers"), Andrew Harrison, Daniel Newman (last seen in "The Dark Knight Rises"), Tallulah Sheffield.

RATING: 5 out of 10 imported cigarettes in a silver case

The Night House

Year 16, Day 283 - 10/9/24 - Movie #4,868

BEFORE: I'm in "Phase 2" of the October horror chain, remember that I cobbled this year's programming together from four small chains once I realized that my planned large one wasn't going to work, there was a big gap.  Well, four little chains is going to get the job done, and then I'll assess what's left for next year, and I'm still adding to the list all the time, so maybe I can put another chain together next year, who knows?  The same people keep popping up in horror movies again and again, so it must pay well.  I know Bruce Campbell has done a bunch of them, I'd love to put the spotlight on him next year if possible.  All I have right now is a bunch of little chains, two or three films here, maybe four over THERE, but you never know, they could come together.  Or I could force them together, whatever works. 

Look at yesterday's movie, they trimmed their main cast down to maybe three or four name-brand actors, and then maybe a dozen other people I'd never heard of.  That was enough to link in and out, because I only need two connections.  Hell, sometimes I only need one, if it's a good one.  So Rebecca Hall now carries over from "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire", today's film also has only three or four actors I've heard of, but I only need to put it between two other films with Rebecca Hall and we're good to go. 

I also just went through the fims that are new to streaming this month, and as you might imagine, there are a lot of horror movies premiering on every platform, so all I can do is list them right now, and I'll go through the cast lists when I can.  Now that I have Christmas sorted, it's more important to go through cast lists of romances for February and then docs for the Doc Block. 

THE PLOT: A widow begins to uncover her recently deceased husband's disturbing secrets. 

AFTER: in this horror film, a widow named Beth is still going through the stages of grief after her husband committed suicide.  When we first meet her she's still in a form of denial, like she just wants to watch movies alone at night and she's just phoning it in at her teaching job.  One parent complains that she gave her son a failing grade, however it was a case where the teacher wasn't in that week to grade him, because well, the husband thing.  So Beth gives the teen a B, but also gets real bitchy about "Well, my husband shot himself, so I don't really care, and your son's grade doesn't matter in the long run."  That's actually good, I think that counts as the bargaining stage, so it's a sign of progress.  

Beth also starts talking to herself as she starts going through her husband's notebooks of planned architectural projects, it seems he was working on plans for some weird labyrinths and hidden rooms or something. Still possibly OK, maybe he had a weird client or he was just working through some ideas.  But when Beth has a vision at night of women running across her lawn and jumping into the lake, then imagines lights from a house across the lake, she goes to investigate and finds another house, very similar to her own, in the process of being built.  Was her husband building an identical house across the lake for some reason, and if so, what could possibly be the reason?  

Then Beth sees a photo on his phone of a woman in a bookstore, it looks like herself, but she can't be sure. A search of her husband's hard drive reveals dozens of photos of women who look sort of like her, and all that can't be good, either.  At best he was having affairs with women who reminded him of his wife, but then, what's the point of that?  Maybe he has a "type", but what exactly was he up to before he died?  Once doubt has crept into her mind, she starts seeing shadows in the windows and silhouettes of her husband in various furniture, and so there's either a ghostly presence in the house or she's going insane, or maybe both are possible.  

Nobody sees the bloody footprints on the dock but her, however her neighbor says he once saw Owen in the woods at night with a woman who looked a bit like Beth, and also Owen confessed to having dark impulses that he was trying to control.  Oh, great, it's the other thing. Or maybe it's something even worse than that.  But by the time Beth manages to figure out exactly what the entity haunting her house is, it might be too late to stop it.  Or perhaps there's nothing there at all, which is kind of even scarier. 

This one won't exactly hit you over the head with horrific stuff, it's more a psychological thriller, but then that's what I would expect a horror film that played at the Sundance Festival to be.  What is happening right now, and what's causing it?  Is her house really haunted, or is it all just her imagination?  What is a "waking dream" anyway, and could it come from lack of sleep and anxiety after one's spouse dies?  And is there an upside to having a second house just like your first?  Can you just go there for a change of pace once in a while, or if it's just like the first house, is there no point in that?  I guess it's got a different view of the lake, but who cares about that?  Jeez, just sell the duplicate house and take the win.  Or sell them both and start fresh somewhere else, maybe that's a better idea. 

Also starring Sarah Goldberg (last seen in "The Hummingbird Project"), Vondie Curtis-Hall (last seen in "Blue Bayou"), Evan Jonigkeit (last seen in "Together Together"), Stacy Martin (last seen in "The Electrical Life of Louis Wain"), David Abeles (last seen in "Begin Again"), Christina Jackson, Patrick A. Sova, Crystal Swann, Catherine Weidner, Laura Austin (last seen in "Alone Together"), Jacob Garrett White, Samantha Buck (last seen in "Private Life"), Lydia Hand, Lea Enslin, Amy Zubieta, Allie McCulloch.

RATING: 6 out of 10 home movies