Haunted Hospital (Heilstätten) Needs the Infirmary [Blu-Ray Review]

Originality is overrated. The best stories are the ones that execute well. Wes Craven’s classic Scream is a pastiche. With the exception of the Billy/Stu reveal at the end, it borrows every blood-soaked moment from other slashers. It doesn’t matter whether or not you’ve seen a masked killer charging with a raised knife before, because Craven does a masterful job building suspense and thinking through the most minute details. Sydney doesn’t just hide in a closet halfway through the film, she hides in the closet that Craven painstakingly showed the audience twenty-minutes earlier. Those small things, not original concepts (which can help), separate a great film from a good one. Haunted Hospital would’ve been okay if it were only lacking in originality, but the execution isn’t spectacular either, leaving it too good to be so-bad-it’s-funny and not good enough to really make an impact on its own.

The premise is archetypal. Six young adults spend a night in the titular haunted hospital. Three are established digital content creators, one is an up-and-comer, and the other two work as tour guides at the sanatorium during the on season. The trappings are original: the Prankstaz.tv bros play with corpses a la Logan Paul; the hospital was used for Nazi experiments; and director Michael David Pate tries to manipulate the material to fit his hatred of vloggers, but when all of that boils off, it’s still a found footage spend the night in the haunted house film.

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Evil Dead II 4K DVD and Blu-Ray Combo is Groovy [Review]

The Evil Dead series uses a classic horror setup. In the first two films, Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) and his friends go to a cabin in the woods for a weekend of partying and reading aloud from an ancient evil book (“Legend has it it was written by the Dark Ones, Necromicon Ex Mortis.”) In Evil Dead and Evil Dead II, they summon Kandarian demons who promptly possess them. While the first film is a more serious take, the second goes bonkers. It’s part slasher, part possession film, part pro wrestling match, part Lovecraftian horror, and excellent.

Director Sam Raimi didn’t invent point of view shots. In Hitchcock, in Carpenter, in the groundbreaking Peeping Tom, and in nearly every film of the slasher boom, the camera stalked. It plodded, giving viewers a glimpse of what a killer saw as they closed in on their victim. In 1987, Raimi hitched a rocket to his camera (figuratively) to show what the world looked like to the Kandarian demons. It zooms miles in a second, breaking down doors, chasing down cars, and sending poor Ash halfway across the damn forest without missing a single branch. It was frenetic, revolutionary.

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Silencio is Based on True Events, but Uninspired [Review]

Lorena Villarreal’s second feature film, Silencio, opens with a short scene and then a title card telling its viewers that the film was “Inspired by True Events.” A lot of movies tell this lie, and in the case of a story that’s trying to be true-to-life it makes sense. It fails in movies like 2013’s mostly forgotten Gangster Squad, where the picture opens with a promise of realism and then ten minutes later one of the principal officers chasing down the gangsters decides it would be more effective to throw knives than shoot in a gunfight. There’s nothing wrong with movies that strive for realism or movies where characters have knife-throwing gimmicks. But there’s a tonal clash when a feature claims to be inspired by true events then proceeds to introduce outlandish elements.

Silencio falls into that trap. It’s telling the story of Ana (Melina Matthews as an adult/ Shayne Coleman as a child), who died as a young girl. Her grandfather Dr. James White (John Noble) remembers her death, but he also remembers resurrecting her. He and his assistant Peter (Rupert Graves) were cleaning up the remains of a U.S. test missile that crashed in the Zone of Silence—Mexico’s equivalent to the Bermuda Triangle. They were experimenting on a strange stone they found at 3:33 am. It fell, and when White caught it, he and Peter were transported to the site of car crash that killed Ana. They manage to save her, but not her sister and parents. This all happens within five minutes of the title card telling the audience that the story was “Inspired by True Events.”

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We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a Good Adaptation of a Great Book [Review]

I’ve heard two fundamental schools of thought about what a cover song should do. In one, a song is radically transformed. Think of the way Johnny Cash transformed Nine-Inch Nails’s “Hurt.” The other is like Weezer’s cover of Toto’s “Africa” where the style of the song changes to match the performers, but remains fundamentally the same. That’s the way Stacie Passon tackles her second feature film, an adaptation Shirley Jackson’s final novel, We have Always Lived in the Castle. Passon embellishes at points, but stays true to the excellent source material.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle opens with Merrikat Blackwood (Taissa Farmiga) burying talismans in the yard to bar outsiders, as she says in her voice over, “The Blackwoods have always lived in this house.” Neither the Blackwood family nor the Blackwood house are what they used to be. Everything changed when the family sat down for dinner one night to find their sugar had been replaced with arsenic.

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Review: Along Came the Devil Has a Good Title, Not Much Else

If you took The Exorcist and surgically removed every hint of personality, you would wind up with a movie very similar to Along Came the Devil. It’s not hard to understand why so many filmmakers try to do their own take on The Exorcist. It’s a great film with an easy to copy premise: a child (usually a girl who’s beginning puberty or a young woman who is becoming sexually active) unknowingly invites in a demon. There is havoc and a medical search for answers. Ultimately, only a faith based exorcism can save the possessed and it does at a cost. So many films following that siren song crash on the rocks of complexity.

The Exorcist is good because it has well-rounded, complex characters. Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) is a movie star who doesn’t believe in God (a bigger deal in 1973 than now). She’s remaking Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and going through a messy divorce while trying to raise her daughter. Father Karras (Jason Miller) is an ex-boxer with a Psychiatry MD who blames himself for his mother’s death. He’s struggling with his belief in God. They’re conflicted and they have lives outside of that conflict.

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Cinepocalypse 2018 Review: The Cop Baby Almost Lives Up to It’s Hilarious Premise

Buddy cop comedies are a staple of American media. From Starsky and Hutch, to Lethal Weapon the movies series, to Lethal Weapon the TV series where Clayne Crawford is being replaced by Seann William Scott for its third season. They’re fun because the old-cop-who’s-about-to-retire and the young-cop-who-doesn’t-play-by-the-rules dynamic works. It leads to friction, and in the end, an unbreakable friendship. Russian director Aleksandr Andryuschenko and writer Andrey Zolotarev get that, but they sensed that something was missing. Or maybe that it had become too familiar. Or maybe it wasn’t Russian enough. So they decided that buddy cop movies would work better if the older officer was a baby. Thus, The Cop Baby was born.

It opens with a prison exit interview. Katya (Liza Arzamasova) is assessing whether Khromov (Sergey Garmash) is rehabilitated enough to be allowed back on the streets. She doesn’t know that he’s a cop who has gone undercover for the last year to gain the trust of the elusive drug lord, the Dragon. He doesn’t know that in the next fifteen minutes of film he’ll trade bodies with the baby she’s pregnant with. He insults her husband, his soon-to-be father, calling him a loser who ruined her career.

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Blu-Ray Review: The Endless Will Entertain and Challenge You For Endless Viewings

Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are big horror fans, and it shows in their third co-directed feature film, The Endless. They also star, playing brothers Justin and Aaron, who escaped what Justin called “a UFO death cult.” They’re in deprogramming, which they’ve attended in the ten years since they got out, but their lives are a mess. They’ve got no friends. Their car’s battery is dying and they have to choose between replacing it and affording ramen for lunch. They clean other people’s houses for a living. And in the midst of this, they get a tape of Anna (Callie Hernandez) talking about the ascension arriving.

Aaron doesn’t remember as much as Justin does, but he’s had a crush on Anna since he was a teenager. He manages to convince Justin to go to the cult’s homebase, Camp Arcadia, for a day. But when they arrive, the day sprawls in more ways than one. And of course, odd things start happening. No one at the camp remembers sending them any tape. No one has aged since they left. And there’s a third-person point of view that the movie never offers a clear-cut explanation for what is watching everyone there and sending them photos of what it’s looking at.

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Review: Vidar the Vampire Reimagines Jesus as a Vampire

Vidar the Vampire is an irreverent, black comedy that reimagines Jesus as a vampire. The film plays on the obvious connections—drinking blood and rising from the dead—to highlight some of its issues with Christianity. All of this is told through the familiar frame of Vidar (Thomas Aske Berg who also wrote and co-directed the film) telling the story to his therapist (Kim Sønderholm), who asks Vidar to start from the beginning after Vidar shows him a newsclip about the satanic rituals that took place at Vidar’s farmhouse.

Vidar was a lonely child, growing up with his mother. The kids in his neighborhoods bullied him while he ran the family farm on his own. He has a Playboy hidden in the chicken coop, which Berg and co-director Fredrik Waldeland brilliantly transition from Vidar looking at to Vidar milking a cow. Twenty years pass this way before Vidar prays to Jesus, begging to “sample” all kinds of women who are “twenty-plus.” That night, a vampire who calls himself Jesus comes to Vidar. Rather than transfer vampirism through the traditional bite on the neck, Vidar becomes a vampire by giving Jesus a blowjob. It’s not an exaggeration when I write, this movie is fucking wild.

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Review: Cold November Will Warm Your Heart

Since this is Wicked Horror, let me start by saying that Cold November isn’t a horror movie. There’s a dream of a dead cousin that’s debatably a ghostly visit in the first third of the movie and two graphic scenes of deer gutting, but none of it is played for scares. Rather, Cold November is a tender coming of age story, following Florence (Bijou Abas) on her first family hunting trip. That said: It’s quite good.

What first-time director and writer Karl Jacob does best is capture the awkwardness of adolescence. Florence doesn’t know whether she’s an adult or a child. The adults in her family don’t either. She swears in front of her mother for the first time, and the moment feels so true-to-life. Her mother Amanda (Anna Klemp) replies, “I’ve never heard you say, ‘Shit,’ before.” It’s awkward, and Klemp’s performance underlines that she doesn’t know if she should punish Florence. Amanda settles for warning Florence not to do it in front of her grandmother, Georgia (Mary Kay Fortier-Spalding). It’s one of the more subtle indications that Florence is entering into adulthood.

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Review: Island Zero Proves Not All that Starts Well Ends Well

Island Zero starts well. First time director Josh Gerritsen does good work making viewers afraid of a monster without showing them what it is from the start. The film opens with a very drunk man singing to his dog on their boat. Yacht Man (Paul Hodgson) leaves his dog on deck as he goes under to fix himself another martini. The dog passes by two open windows before it disappears behind a third closed one. It’s a great moment because Gerritsen manages to tip viewers off that whatever happened to the dog on the other side of that window wasn’t good.

That dread of knowing something is wrong but not being able to nail down exactly what it is really works in Island Zero. The fish have disappeared off the coast of an island off Maine. Sam (Adam Wade McLaughlin), a biologist chasing a previously undiscovered apex predator, explains, “The pattern is always the same. The sudden disappearance of fish. Local economic devastation. Then the fisherman start to die.”

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