Sunday, September 25, 2016

Three Films Make A Post: In the cruel, ruthless world of country music, she made it the hard way!

Most Likely to Die (2015): Even though the presence of Perez Hilton as an “actor” and Jake Busey as the star power in the cast and a deeply generic sounding set-up don’t exactly promise a world of excitement, I did expect this to be quite a bit better than it actually was because its director Anthony DiBlasi has a track record of making not terribly original but very decent to very good low budget horror films. Well, at least the not terribly original bit still holds, for this is as generic a slasher as you could (not) ask for, with basically nothing happening on screen I’m still going to remember a day after watching it.

DiBlasi’s direction is disinterested, the script yawn-inducing, and the acting goes from pretty damn bad (Hilton) to kinda okay (Heather Morris and Tess Christiansen) to painfully neutral (everyone else). There are some okay effects somewhere in there but honestly, who cares?

There’s Nothing Out There (1991): Of course, it can always be worse. Case in point is Rolfe Kanefsky’s spam in a cabin horror “comedy”. It’s self aware horror of the kind that thinks stating how awful and dumb it is somehow makes it less awful and dumb, and that being crap on purpose will somehow magically transform it into something not crap. After all, it worked for some other films, right? Alas, the bad movie fairy didn’t kiss this one, so we get lots and lots of nudity (Kanefsky looking into the future of his career as softcore director?) – this being a film where a short skinny dipping sequence is directly followed by a shower scene –, a really crap (on purpose yet still CRAP) monster, “funny” dialogue that’ll make your ears bleed, and lots of self-conscious shittiness that lacks the charm that would make it entertaining or the cleverness that’d make it bearable.

The Devil Complex (2016): Rounding out this trio of films I never need to see again is this POV horror outing shot in Romania with Romanian actors directed by a Brit. I do hope everyone planning on watching this likes shots of the backs of people wandering through snowy woods, because that’s what half of this is. As the “woods” parts suggests, this is the traditional would-be Blair Witch Project style of first person horror, just without any focus, mediocre acting, writing that does seem to try to get away from the original a little by going the “the supernatural reveals dark secrets” route but is just too crudely realized to manage anything with it, and disappointing sound design. It drags, it has about 0.5 interesting scenes, and there’s just nothing else to say about this thing.

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