Some Killer Presents: Secret Santa (2015)

Secret Santa (2015)
Rating:**1/2
Starring: Annette Wozniak, Geoff Almond, Keegan Chambers

A seasonal slasher with a comedic side, Secret Santa (2015) has the basic plot of college students (and their professor) getting together for a Secret Santa Christmas party, only to have their gifts switched with used garden tools and sharp kitchen wares by a figure in a balaclava, now prowling around the house and murdering them one by one.

It's nothing altogether new save for one or two decent twists and takes, including foreshadowing how our characters will die based on the gifts they received during the Secret Santa gift exchange, the real identity of the killer and the admittedly hilarious "two hour" long monologue as to why they're doing this. (which still made little sense at the end)  And with its short 78 minute run, Secret Santa would have been a quick yet fun little ride down to familiar bodycounting territories if only the rest of its comedy portions were as good as the gory killings.

Even though college comedies aren't my thing, I usually am able to tolerate them in a slasher set-up if the payoff is seeing these teens die a good death at the hands of a decent killer. What I cannot stomach, however, is when a joke seems to be going forever that the punchline felt watered down from the prolonged build up. Secret Santa has more than one occasion of this, which in turn have us waiting until the last 20 or so minutes to get the climactic killing spree, and it doesn't help better the good half of the cliched campus funnies this movie is trying to make work. 

Pleasingly, the kills are rewarding enough to make up for some of the dud jokes Secret Santa (2015) coughed up so I couldn't consider this film a total lost. It's definitely an effort with a small budget, one that deserves to be seen and enjoyed for the simplistic cheesy story, few genuine funnies, the overall messy slaughter and nothing else. Check it out during the holidays (or, y'know, any time you want to) if you're in the mood for a not-so-great-but-far-from-bad bodycounter.

Bodycount:
1 female gets smothered with a pillow and a powerdrill to her eye
1 male had his throat repeatedly slashed with a knife
1 male knifed in the head
1 female ran through and disemboweled with an electric knife
1 male castrated with a pruning shear
1 female brained to death with a hairdryer
1 male decapitated with a meat cleaver
1 male stabbed in the head with a screwdriver
1 female ran through with a fire poker, bled to death
1 female knifed in the gut
1 male dismembered and decapitated with a chainsaw
Total: 11

Silent Night, Cruel Night: O'Hellige Jul! (2013)

Have Yourself a Mirthless Little Christmas~

O'Hellige Jul! (Christmas Cruelty!) (Norway, 2013)
Rating: **1/2
Starring:  Eline Aasheim, Tormod Lien, Magne Steinsvoll

When a movie starts with a family of four beaten, bound and gagged while the perpetrator rapes the mother before putting a running buzzsaw through a baby, you know this is gonna be one fucked up holiday horror.

A mean-spirited callback to the old days of artsy exploitation movies, O'Hellige Jul! follows the lives of friends Eline, Magne and Per-Ingvar as they celebrate the holiday season through festive decorations, pranks and some good ole' brewskies to the point of being shit-faced. Unknown to all of them, they're being observed by a man working at a public welfare agency who's planning to pay them a visit soon and contribute in any way he can so they don't have to worry about the New Year.

The problem with this? Well, this welfare worker and loving family man happens to be a serial killer with a brutally nasty habit of home invasion, rape and dismembering victims. As Eline and her buddies go through the Winter holidays with little to no care in the world, our killer plots his next killing spree and it isn't long before a creepy Santa costume is donned, paths are crossed and a chainsaw's teeth goes through warm flesh.

True to O'Hellige Jul!'s English title, this movie is cruel in every sense and not just in a manner of relentless onscreen blood work; while the beginning and the end of the movie befits the slasher/splatter category well, the middle run of O'Hellige Jul! is written more as a black comedy working around the bleaker side of the holiday with an almost realistic (and at times, darkly funny) depiction of those living in the lower end of the social spectrum, mostly unpleasant folks wallowing in misery and stress over the hectic (and often costly) yearly celebration. This works quite well to the fact that our killer's normal occupation is that of someone supposed to help these people, creating an ironic yet oddly clever walking and stabbing social satire on the welfare system, though it can divide the audience as this chunk of the story can get really slow with its pacing, and attempts to build character and tone can lead almost unwatchable obnoxiousness.

The exploitative portions, thankfully, deliver the best bits of the movie, holding little to no restraint when it comes to grue and unsettling scenarios despite the low budget effects. It's not one for the squeamish, pulling no punches when it comes to taboo subjects such as assault, infanticide and random acts of violence, but lovers of dark and gritty cinema certainly will find something to like about this movie, particularly the last third of O'Hellige Jul! where the savagery is at its worst and the final product is foreseen bleak, thus a very welcome payoff to a slow middle act.

Less of your paint-by-number slasher horror and more of a gore-filled grindhouse grit,  O'Hellige Jul! is a film that pushes the boundaries of shock value and explores the more realistic array of cinematic scares on the side. It is no mean a masterpiece as a holiday horror flick considering the, again, long and slow middle run, but I do appreciate the efforts the filmmakers made to put something daring and strangely natural on a horror film. With its cast of amateur actors giving the film an air of near fidelity, O'Hellige Jul! definitely has the potential to be better with a bigger budget or slicker direction, but for what we have now, I recommend this title only to those with a strong stomach and a love for good underground shlock.

Bodycount:
1 baby sliced through with a buzzsaw
2 males and 2 females presumably murdered offcamera
1 male brained to death with a hammer
1 male decapitated with a machete
1 female knifed to death
1 female dismembered with a chainsaw
1 male dismembered and eviscerated with a chainsaw
Total: 10

Cranky like a Krampus: 12 Deaths of Christmas (2017)

12 Deaths of Christmas (United Kingdom, 2017) (AKA "Mother Krampus")
Rating: *1/2
Starring:  Claire-Maria Fox, Faye Goodwin, Tony Manders

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) meets Darkness Falls (2003) set during the Christmas holiday. Do I really need to say more about this underwhelming lump of coal?

Well, if I do leave it at that, one might think this is a good movie, which it isn't. Not by a long shot. So if I need to (*sobs*), it starts with a exposition narration telling us about some gruesome child murders in 1921 at an English town called Belgrave, which happens again 71 years later. Superstitious folks blame these deaths on a witch named Frau Perchta, while the more capital punishment-ready townfolk pins the crime to a local pagan named Molly Fletcher who, after getting captured and whilst being hanged, cursed those responsible for her death a grislier end through the hands of Perchta.

Twenty-Five years later, we follow a young girl named Amy, whose parents are going through a nasty break-up after dad cheated on mum with a younger woman. Amy's mother struggles to keep things chipper, especially seeing it's near Christmas, but her efforts aren't fairing any better with her own father's drinking problems and the sudden (and unwelcome) appearance of one of grampa's old acquaintances.

As you would have it, grampa's friend is there to tell him that a new string of child disappearances starts to plague Belgrave and it seems that the victims are the kids of those who were hexed by Molly back at 1992. Making matters worse is that our culprit isn't satisfied with just snagging kids away in potato sacks (I'm not joking) but is also mutilating any adults that get in her way. This transitions from a couple of nasty onscreen slaughterings and offscreen kidnappings to Amy's very uneasy family Christmas vacation at Grampa's backwoods cabin when papa arrives with his new girlfriend. Perchta eventually shows up at the cabin that afternoon, thankfully cutting short one awkward so-and-so family drama, and all means of bloody dismemberment and twist reveals broke loose upon our hapless family. And a mistress.

Repackaged within the US as "Mother Krampus" to cash-in to the success of Krampus (2015), 12 Deaths of Christmas has a wee bit of a potential to be a good slasher movie seeing it is drawing inspiration from the Frau Perchta folklore, which says that the European witch (or pagan goddess, depending to whoever you address this to) would slit the bellies of misbehaved children open to remove their guts before stuffing the hole with straw and pebbles. (All the while leaving small silver coins in a shoe or pail owned by good lil' kinders. Fair contrast?) On a level, it does succeed on grabbing my attention with some decent kill scenes done in passable practical effects, but the story itself just felt cluttered to no end with its unbalanced cheese and shoddy writing, which is saying a lot considering I usually have no quarrels with that. I guess the movie's attempts to do in serious family drama to what's practically a low-budget I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) clone clashes horribly with its lack of better actors, proper pacing and a more solid direction, 12 Deaths of Christmas felt nothing special in the end and probably pushed itself back into low brow and awkward obscurity.

Add the matter that the last half of the movie hardly built any tension considering how much it stalled our characters (and us) to their own deaths by having them repeatedly survive whatever our villainess throws at them before finally biting the big one, 12 Deaths of Christmas (2017) just didn't cut it for me in the end. Microbudget movies are, again, no problem for me so long as they try to do something a tad more memorable than copy and paste plot points from better movies. (Apart from the aforementioned Elm Street and Last Summer, they also threw in some Candyman (1992) in there for some reason...) You could say I could love it for the gore, but I can't bring myself to be that shallow so, no. This is 12 Deaths I have no problem ignoring each festive season to pass after.

(Or was that 13 deaths? Lemme look at my bodycount real quick...)

Bodycount:
1 girl mentioned died from injuries sustained from an attack
5 children mentioned dead from throat cuts
1 female disemboweled and had Christmas lights sewn into her gut
1 female stabbed in the back with a machete, hanged (flashback)
1 female stabbed on the back with a machete and a cookie cutter, disemboweled
1 female stabbed on the throat with a machete, slaughtered with an electric knife
1 female axed on the throat
1 male had his hear clawed out
1 female had her throat slashed through with an axe
Total: 13

So I saw Into The Spider-Verse...

I came for this.

 ENDED UP LOVING EVERYTHING ELSE ABOUT IT!

One of the best Spider-Man movies EVUH!

Bad Building: Paradise Villa (2001)

Paradise Villa (South Korea, 2001)
Rating: **1/2
Starring: Han-jun Jo, You-Mi Ha, Hak-cheol Kim

On a regular basis, a slasher movie revolves around a certain group of people (mostly teenagers) getting caught in a situation that have them hunted down by a killer. Paradise Villa (2001) is an odd example of this premise, with the situation in question being the unstable wrath of an obsessed gamer. (Yep, a slasher movie with a lean and awkward geeky gamer as the killer. Better jot that one down in my list of odd slasher villain choices...)

The movie starts tediously as we watch our gamer focusing on his online role-playing game and starts to lose his shit when someone under the username "Viagra" (interesting pick?) hacks into his account and steals his in-game items. We then shift our attention to the titular villa as most of its residents enjoy a day watching a soccer match either by themselves or with company, while some go about their own little businesses, may it be selling water purifiers or having an affair behind their spouse's back. It isn't long before our distraught gamer simply strolls into the picture, looking around the residence asking random people if they're the thieving "Viagra" before going knife-crazy on them.

What I like about Paradise Villa is that it breaks the usual slasher film mold with its intertwined anthology direction, introducing us to a collection of troublesome yet intriguing set-ups concerning multiple characters. This would have help build the anticipation of getting to see these men and women deservedly snuffed out as a lot of them are written out to have a level of malice and rudeness to them and, for some, they do quite so satisfyingly once our killer rears his demented head in. But this also means that we get to see a lot of their ugly sides which really bummed the film down for lacking any likable characters. At all.

Curiously, one of the situations that we get to spend a lot of time on involves an affair gone brutally and messily wrong and this runs along our geeky slasher's bloody killing spree as the secondary murder plot brewing within the building, pacing about half of the movie's entirety. It's personally an interesting move for this slasher and one that I really wished they focused on instead story-wise since the misadventures of our murderous gamer, while still having some exceptional murder set-pieces here and there, gets old pretty fast thanks to his shallow murder motive and the very matter that he's as disgusting as he is annoyingly whiny. (Apparently he's into corpses. Eww.)

This isn't the biggest drawback for me, however, but rather it's the way the movie ended. Which it simply just did. There's no real resolution. No onscreen consequences. No actual direction. We're just left to watch our killer, seemingly snapping back to his senses after seeing a murder he didn't commit, walk away. Now, I understand Paradise Villa is unconventional but I kinda expected more than just a killer wussing out after all of the murders (and one necrophiliac rape) he committed, possibly cheating us out of a satisfying conclusion, but someone within the production thought otherwise and we're left with whatever the hell this movie considered an ending.

Paradise Villa (2001) looked like it was going to be a unique experience as a slasher flick, mostly resembling a character study clashing with bodycount horror. The production itself looks confident enough to pull it off with its decent actors, occasional good writing and a steady-paced bodycount with passable gore effects, just wished they could have thrown in some more considerably likable characters to even out the unbearable ones, as well as make up their mind whether they wanted the movie as a serious horror thriller or a cheeky black comedy as the unevenness of the tone can be felt throughout. It may be a mess, but it's a beautifully strange mess that's perhaps perfect for those who likes their slasher horror out of the norm once in a while.

Bodycount:
1 male brained with a barbell
1 female knifed to death
1 male bludgeoned to death whilst suffering through a heart attack
1 female beaten to death with a brick
1 female strangled to death
1 male knifed in the neck
1 male found murdered
Total: 7

My Holiday Wish List 2018

And here we are again for another December. It's been a while since I did one of these but, continuing a nearly sort-of tradition for this blog, here be my Holiday wish list for this year. Please don't be weirded out by some of the entries. I am a nerd of multiple (and sometimes, unfocused) interest!

Campfire by Shawn Sarles- After a rather entertaining time reading and finishing There's Someone Inside Your House by Stephanie Perkins, I think I'm ready for another slasher novel and this looks like a decent looking fork on the road.

POP Plush: Monsters- Mulch- I mean, why not? It's an adorable huggable wittle monster plushie. Not too cartoony and rather simple in design, it's definitely something that matches my taste for monster toys.

Funko Pop! Dilophosaurus- Particularly the frilled version. Something to remember by one of the most memorable movie monsters from my childhood...even though I occasionally re-watch Jurassic Park (1993) for giggle's sake and always loving this animal's scene with Dennis Nedrey!

 Amiibo Splatoon 2 Pearl and/or Marina- Coz popstar cephalopod idols.

This awesome walking chair! 

(lol joke)

Bloody Mary Cocktails for Satan's Cults: Blood Symbol (1992)

Blood Symbol (Canada, 1992)
Rating: **1/2
Starring:  Micheline Richard, Trilby Jeeves, Anne-Marie Leduc

For perhaps a lot of us, Maurice Devereaux is a name to remember as the indie director of new age slasher cult classics $LA$HER$ (2001) and End of The Line (2008), energetic and imaginatively wild jabs on the bodycounting sub-genre with the prior darkly parodying reality game shows while the latter pits its characters (and what looks like the rest of the world) against a religious foundation on a killing spree in the name of salvation. With such big ideas for a what's basically popcorn horror, it kinda catches me off guard to see a rather simplistic murder mystery such as this from him.

Originally started filming back at 1984 and only to be shelved through the years until the early 90s (when most slasher movies were dying out temporarily), Blood Symbol follows Tracy Walker (Micheline Richard), a college girl who's currently having nightmares involving a disfigured figure in black, something which appears to start weaving into reality when the same black garbed man begins to stalk her in campus. Tracy, fearing her safety, does what any early 90s horror heroine would do in an odd situation like this and decides to look up some of the strange images from her nightmares at the campus library, where she uncovers a history of Satanism and human sacrifices throughout the late nineteenth century. Not long then after, the stalking gets worse, and not only is the figure in black now also going after Tracy's friends, but they're starting to close in on our hapless protagonist.

Much like the case of a particular late 80s movie titled Blood Cult (1985), Blood Symbol is only part slasher movie with the rest being more reminiscent of a horror thriller, specifically of the religious cult type. There's a fair focus on amateur sleuthing and plot-building talking, leaving many of its horror sequences to black-and-white nightmares, decent looking stalking scenes and, whenever there's a need for it, a few good deaths that stay true to the Satanic human sacrifice plot. Not relatively bad, but some of the casts do show a level of amateurish acting (and what looks like some dubbed lines) which often hurts the effectiveness of the plot's own mystery, so Blood Symbol does have its slow tedious moments and variable performances. The killer doesn't look too bad neither, coming across like a heavily-scarred Italian giallo villain with their shades and black gloves, so I also find it kinda disappointing that the most this villain did was simply stalk and loom over our protagonist like a creep, racking up very little in the killcount.

There's nothing much to say else about Blood Symbol apart that it does show itself as Deveraux's earliest work. There's style to it and the plot is decent for its simplicity, but these efforts can be easily overlooked for just how stale the rest of the production is and how unexciting it can be at times. Not the best there is for what it is trying to be, but if you see yourself as a completist of all things related to slashers, then this could be worth a single viewing and no more.

Bodycount:
1 female had her throat cut with a dagger
1 female had her throat cut with a dagger, jabbed with a stake
1 female had her throat cut with a dagger
1 female killed offscreen
Total: 4

Where Have All The Cowboys Gone: Lasso (2018)

Lasso (2018)
Rating: ***
Starring: Sean Patrick Flanery, Lindsey Morgan, Andrew Jacobs

A survival slasher flick with a Western tang? Can we get a happy yee-hah with that?

It all started with a simple senior citizen outing as two teenage caretakers of the Adventures for Active Seniors group guide some excited old timers to a rodeo show. After half a day of bucking broncos, Rodeo Queen beauty pageants and carnival tomfoolery, our little gang were about to bus home when they unwillingly caught sight of a wounded woman being chased and murdered by a horse-riding cowboy, wielding an eviscerating hook-tipped lasso. What soon follows is a night of cold-blooded torture and gory slaughtering as the bus group unintentionally splits, with one gang getting stranded in the woods to be hunted by a gang of killer cowboys, while another forms an alliance with fellow captives as they try to survive and escape the hellish rodeo show they find themselves in.

Despite lacking any real depth in the story apart that it's a slasher survival flick with killer cowboys, Lasso does its very best to make the most out of this simple premise of a rodeo-themed horror flick, jam-packed with themed deaths, insane plot points and stalk-hunt action to keep a simple slasher fan happy and satisfied carnage-wise. And with the movie's editing and direction have the pace rolling along fairly fast to show how much it embraces the craziness of its own plot, we're eventually thrown into the batty fray and have us treated with enough run for both of the story's doomed groups to cover the carnage they have to traverse through the night.

Mixing the extreme body harm of torture porn flicks and the cat-and-mouse prowling of a typical slasher flick, the amount of violence and death in Lasso relatively goes into hefty numbers as not only do we get a sizable cast of interesting faces fending off our crazed cowboys (a few of which includes Sean Patrick Flanery of Darren Lynn Bousman's The Devil's Carnival (2012), Andrew Jacobs of Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014) and Lindsey Morgan of Beyond Skyline (2017)), but most of the kills have good practical gore effects flowing and very little to no CG is to be found whenever a member of both parties bites the big one. At times, a kill doesn't even necessarily have to show off the chunky detailed latex work to be memorable, with one murder here features a lassoed old lady being swung around the air before getting smacked directly against a tree ala Jason Voorhees' sleeping bag kill at Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1987).

The bulky cast number, though, meant that the script is tainted with your usual eye-rolling stupidity slasher movies are known for, some of which falls into questionable characterization with some of our protagonists be easily sum down to the word "whiny" or "dumb", may it be the young or old. A few does stand out for their badassery or for being a foil for black humor (Flanery's one-armed character, for one, is pretty much The Black Knight from Monty Python and The Holy Grail (1975) as he proceeds to get bloodily roughed up and even lose a few limbs, only to get back and save a whiny protagonist or two), so the film does manage to balance out the passable and the irritable enough to be forgivable.

If there is anything about Lasso that does trigger my mind into thinking is the villain's motive behind capturing and killing these people as the film never really addressed this. At all. I mean I'm not gonna lose some sleep over it and I guess you can say the movie was trying to do the same mystique Halloween (1978) did for its killer Michael Myers by giving the Stetson-wearing blood ranchers no modus behind their murders, but one or two members of this hell ranch aren't into the killings and would even openly help our casts so how exactly does this entire operation work? The pit of rotting corpses definitely shows they've been doing this for a while so what's the story behind all of this? Well, whatever the reason is, the movie think we didn't need it and, in a strange way, they're kinda right for most parts.

Lasso is the kind of indie slasher movie that exists for the sake of existing as well as to lighten up a horror junkie's day with messy sizable deaths and a unique take on villains in the matter of themes. It's that one horror movie that doesn't ask much from its audience apart from simply enjoying the bittersweet gruel it is offering that is a balls-out premise and if you're that one person that, too, isn't asking much, then this is a good keep.

Bodycount:
1 horse shot
1 female had her gut ripped out with a steel-tipped whip
1 male had his throat ripped with a steel-tipped whip
1 female murdered, method offscreen
A number of bodies seen in a cart
1 female had her head crushed with a weight
1 male had his neck snapped with a stock
1 male stabbed in the neck with a prong
1 male stabbed on the throat with a prong
A pit full of corpses seen
1 male stabbed on the chest with a prong handle
1 male electrocuted to death with a cattle prod
1 female seen stabbed on the head with a bull horn trophy
1 female snared with a lasso and swung against a tree
1 male beaten to death
1 dog seen disemboweled
1 female thrown off a horse, neck snapped on impact
1 male bludgeoned to death offcamera
1 male stabbed on the neck with a hidden knife
1 male stabbed in the eyes with a horseshoe, head cooked with an iron brand
1 male cut in half with a log saw
1 male had his neck stabbed and hooked with hay hooks, bled to death
1 male stabbed with a pitchfork and beaten with a barbell weight, head crushed
1 male impaled through with a prong
Total: 22+

Argentinian Floodland Massacre: Los Olvidados (2017)

Los Olvidados (The Forgotten) (AKA "What The Waters Left Behind") (Argentina, 2017)

Rating: *1/2

Starring:  German Baudino, Paula Brasca, Mirta Busnelli

So what we have here is Argentina's take on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, only less of the legendary 1974 original or its passable remake franchise and more of one or two of the bad sequels that came out throughout the years. Yay?

A gang of six Argentine teenagers are enroute to Villa Especuén, a town in the province of Buenos Aires that was completely flooded by a salt lake in 1985 after a period of heavy rainfall, to film a documentary about the disaster. Little do they know, a small family of animal skull-wearing murderers are roaming around the town's ruins looking for victims to slaughter and it isn't too long before, after a few shenanigans involving roach-crawled meat pies and a hostile gas station experience, our youthful group cross their path. As the family kidnaps the teens one by one, hauling them back at their dilapidated hideout, what soon follows is a deranged debauchery of gory murders, cannibalism and rape as night falls and madness reigns.

Now, I'm sure there is a decent movie to be found in Los Olvidados seeing some of the gore effects are awesome and the filmmakers did made some good use to the ruin-like town in terms of creating atmosphere, but that's all the positives I can muster out for this film. As mentioned, the movie took a lot of liberties from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, particularly the matter of fact that its villains are a family of blabbering individuals driven by hunger and insanity, but it lacks genuine creepiness and catharsis as none of the characters, including our protagonist group, are interesting or likable, coming out as crude, paper-thin and/or disgusting to a near-parody level.

This lack of care for its characters other than making them meat for the slaughter that borderlines whether they deserve it or not sadly shows the absence of a creative streak for its story, which doesn't help the matter that some of the movie's editing either ruins the pace or breaks the tone of the plot. Thus, Los Olvidados, while not a complete mess for its gore and camera work, is quite a boring watch for its reliance on gore and shock factor in favor over building decently fair characters, more complex villains and a smarter twist on a basic "cannibal family" exploitation flick.

It's horror that simply exists for the sake of existing and nothing else, so I wouldn't really bother much with this if I were you.

Bodycount:
1 female bashed on the head with a barbwire wrapped bat
1 male had his head pulped with a barbwire-wrapped bat
1 dog found impaled on a stake
1 male disemboweled with a knife
1 male hacked on the back with an axe
1 male stabbed with a knife
1 female had her throat slit with a broken bottle
1 male stabbed through the jaw with a dagger
Total: 8

Today I Love...

If you were a kid born and living in a country such as Philippines, it's not the best idea to be the English-speaking freak who loves cartoons, English movies and Magic The Gathering. No one will understand and very little would want to be your friend so, as you would have it, I was bullied through the years until college happened.

One of those days, a very nasty kid threw my notebook to a ceiling fan, shredding it to bits. All of those years-worth of lessons I could have used to review for quizzes and quarterly exams, gone in a flash. Now, you may think it's nothing that big of a deal, just borrow somebody else's notes, right? Well, remember when I said I was bullied through the years until college happened? Yeah, I was on my own and little of these kids wanted to help. The brat that threw the book said he did it because he got caught in the moment when he was scolded the following day and he was punished for it, but I was livid and downright sobbing that day seeing my hardwork as a good student is gone. Teachers comforted me, the guidance counselor took my side and promised to fix this, but deep inside I knew no one else in that godforsaken school would care. I was just one out of a hundred little shit for them. 

So what does this have something to do with Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)? Well, you see, I had to go home at some point that day when that kid ruined my good notes and my mum and my sister was watching a DVD of one of Queen's concerts that afternoon. I broke down in front of them, telling them how sick I was of being bullied. How much I hate school. For being different. For that time, I felt trapped knowing Monday will start again and the vicious cycle will start again. It was that time that I recognize and felt real loneliness.

And then I didn't felt alone. I felt comfort.

My mum and my sister talked to me. Listened to me. Cried for me. Hugged me. My afternoons then were my only haven out of a hellish day in school. It ain't always perfect, but at least I knew someone will be there whenever I'm down and on that day, I really needed someone to be there.

The rest of that afternoon was spent with me, my mum and my sister watching that one Queen's concert. With tears-stained eyes, I was introduced to the likes of Freddie Mercury, his quirky performance, and the songs I heard but never knew the title or the lyrics to. And then there was Bohemian Rhapsody, the one song that stood out for being so...unique. A rock and roll opera rolled into a single song. An anomaly of music that's quite beautiful as it is strange. It was a little speck of sunshine out of a cloudy sky and seeing it and hearing it with my loved ones just made it all the better. At that one afternoon, after feeling so much anger and sadness, with fear that I am going to go through this once more after the weekends, I became a Queen fan and I remember just how happy I am being myself.

I ain't normal nor am I perfect, but in life's silliest and often cruel way, I am. I am thankful I have people like my family to remind me of that and I am thankful I have my own little fandoms like Queens to remind me just how good life can be at times. Seeing Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) was my own way of indirectly thanking the band for the comfort they brought that one day. For bringing me closer to my family and keeping me happy and entertained with their music.

If you're yet to see Bohemian Rhapsody, I say give it a try.

((On a less dramatic note, Eli Roth? It's Thanksgiving again. Where's our Thanksgiving slasher? Some of us have been VERY patient...))

At A Long Lonely Road: Downrange (2017)

Downrange (2017)
Rating: ****
Starring:  Kelly Connaire, Stephanie Pearson, Rod Hernandez

If there's anything slasher movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) taught us through the years is that nothing good will come from a car full of teenagers getting stuck in the middle of a road.

Directed by Ryuhei Kitamura of the Midnight Meat Train (2008) fame, Downrange tells the unfortunate story of a group of youths getting stranded on a country road when one of their car tires blew out. It isn't very long before one of them finds out that the tire was shot, gruesomely leading to a shootout murdering two of them and leaving four survivors to engage in a battle of wits against a ghillie-suited sniper settled within the trees just a few miles away.

Albeit the plot sounds less like your classic teen slasher hack-a-thon, Downrange utilizes the same gory violence, methodic one-by-one slaughtering and even disguised killers your typical bodycounters are known for. The only jig here is that the story is in route for a more stationary survivalist tone which meant we don't get a lot of running or chasing, and instead of your usual hands-on stalking murderer, we have a sniper armed with high caliber bullets, a long-ranged rifle and enough water and beef jerky supply to last for an entire day of random people hunting. It isn't getting any more simple than that, but Kitamura brought enough style and flair to keep things interesting and, more importantly for a horror movie, brutal.

Much of the casts have little to no prior works to speak of so their sense of panic and stress is easy to picture, in a sense we're simply watching random people facing certain death at its most cathartic. The intensity of their situation is doubled by the fact that the film's direction and pacing give them enough time to think and find ways to escape their predicament and executing them, only for us to watch on horror as the sniper finds their own way around the teens' plans to put them back in square one. These attacks are nothing tame, with each shot fountains blood as hard caliber explodes through bodies and quite brightly against the movie's sunlit tint, vehicles crash and accidentally flatten bodies, and a fair amount of camera work focuses on the detailed latex effects and small set-pieces such as flies buzzing around sun-cooked corpses for that realistic grue.

The movie even stepped further into repulsive territory when the sniper attacks a family of three driving to the mess they made, brutally dispatching each member in a hail of bullets (this including a pre-teen girl) after they survive a wreck, but Downrange smartly included a few quieter, calmer scenes to balance out the splatter with emotional human turmoil in which our characters either lament for their fallen friends or silently succumb to their wounds. It isn't long after that the movie eventually goes action thriller on us with the survivors getting some shred of an upper hand on the sniper and the cops finally arriving (at night, mind you, when you can absolutely see a sniper hidden in the trees...) to put an end to the attacks, only to be gorily bested and more or less going back into the slasher flick tropes as a final girl gets even with our ghillie suit killer. The resulting end is nothing short of shocking, but surprisingly fitting with the tonal hopelessness played within the movie.

A minimalist horror at its best, Downrange evokes the horrors of shock, stress and duress in a senseless shooting scenario through a smartly handled combination of fledgling actors, lurid effects, and a curveball take on slasher themes and tropes, done under a production that looks rich, crisp and clear despite its considerable small budget. It's a movie that rewards its viewers for their patience and if you're the kind of good horror folk who loves their splatter film with a side of shocking maliciousness and stylized simplicity, then I can guarantee that the reward is worth the wait.

Bodycount:
1 male shot through the head with a rifle
1 female shot on the eye with a rifle, shot to death
1 male bled to death from rifle wounds
1 male shot with a rifle
1 female shot to death with a rifle
1 male caught on fire from a car explosion
1 girl shot on the head with a rifle
1 male shot through the head with a rifle
1 male shot on the head with a rifle
1 female shot on the head with a rifle
1 male shot to death with a rifle
1 male shot on the chest with a rifle
1 male repeatedly shot and bludgeoned to death with a rifle
1 female shot on the neck with a rifle
Total: 14

Stan Lee

December 28, 1922 - November 12, 2018

Thank you for the wonderful stories. Upward and onward to greater glory.

The Cycle of The Moon: Silver Bullet (1985)

Silver Bullet (1985)
Rating: ***
Starring:  Gary Busey, Everett McGill, Corey Haim

Do you want to know one of the few things that will blow my mind? What if there was a series of slasher films based on each Universal monsters created ala shared universe? Like, in one film, we can have teenagers awakening either a weaponized version of the Frankenstein monster or a warrior mummy, while in another film can have a new age vampire who lost most of his vampiric powers due to breeding and is now forced to find blood to feed on by moonlighting as a serial killer targeting parties at night?

It's a marvel idea and one that I am willing to check out so long as the people behind it are competent, but until then, I guess I have to settle with Humanoids From The Deep (1980) as an exploited slasher-fied Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954); Hollow Man (2000), Hollow Man II (2006) and The Invisible Maniac (1990) as slasher versions of the Invisible Man (1933); and the plentiful titles of Werewolf bodycounters to choose from such as Wolfen (1981), Hard Rock Nightmare (1988) and this, Stephen King's Silver Bullet (1985).

Based on King's novella Cycle of the Werewolf (which in turn was originally planned as an illustrated calendar!), the movie is set in 1976, at a small Maine town called Tarker's Mills wherein a sudden series of brutal killings perpetrated by a either savage creature or a madman (or perhaps both?) begins to thin down the town folks. To be unwillingly caught in this predicament is one Marty Coslaw, a young paraplegic boy who soon got too close on being another victim of the savage. After injuring the beast, Marty somehow discovers its true identity, which unfortunately for him means that the monster isn't going to back down now with its secrets threatened. Thus, a game of cat-and-mouse between a werewolf and a nearly-paralyzed boy begins.

As a horror movie, Silver Bullet is not one to be considered when it comes to complexity as it really is nothing more than a slasher flick with a werewolf for a villain, clawing people to death left and right for the first half before the story slows down into stalker horror territory and then eventually transitioning into an appropriate monster flick-style ending. These tonal differences led to plot holes being plenty and most of the characters prone to bad choices (not to mention a hefty amount of cheese and outrageous set-pieces. A motorbike wheelchair? That's friggin' odd yet awesome! And how about that random werewolf nightmare that just came out of nowhere?), but the pacing is relatively fair and easy to follow, most of the kills are quite gruesome and gory, and there's a lot of scenes that are just fun to watch for the character dynamics or for the gripping intensity of some of the werewolf/villain moments.

Talents involved include a young Corey Haim as our paraplegic young hero who is really just trying to be a normal happy kid despite his condition. I love how natural his performance is in this film and how it goes very well to the other main casts, particularly Megan Follows as his character's frustrated older sibling and Gary Busey, a fun and fitting choice for their  gruff yet lovable Uncle Red, who spits some of the best lines (most of which was ad libbed) in this film.

The only problem I have with Silver Bullet is that, despite starting off very enigmatic with its barely onscreen presence and dishing out some decent killings, the werewolf isn't really that memorable through the rest of the film; not only do the make-up effects used to create the monster look hardly terrifying (making the werewolf look more like a bipedal wombat with rabies, with a head a tad too big for its body), but their motive lacks any real depth nor originality, and its human identity raises more questions than answers. Honestly, I think the twist could have worked better if the reveal was handled a lot better and it wasn't made too soon into the movie.

A simple monster movie down to the core, Stephen King's Silver Bullet, truthfully, could have been better if it had more pizzaz to it but, nevertheless, with its sly sense of humor, a rather easy yet unique depiction of its monster and a lovable main cast, it's a werewolf-slasher hybrid that's quite a fun watch.

Bodycount:
1 male had his head clawed off
1 female mauled to death
1 male pulled into a broken floorboard, stabbed on the gut and mauled
1 boy mauled offcamera, bloodied kite seen
1 male clawed on the back, hurled against a tree
1 male had half of his face clawed off, mauled to death
1 male beaten to death with a baseball bat
1 male brained to death with a baseball bat
1 male shot on the eye
Total: 9