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I Watch Bad Horror Movies So You Don't Have To
I'm not even going to make this a long post, but it's been awhile since I've posted about the horror movies I'm watching. And y'all I have watched SO MANY MOVIES in this time. Can't finish a television show for anything right now. It's taken us three months to watch 9 episodes of The Outsider, and I'm still not ready to watch the finale. 6 epsiodes into the second season of Dead to Me and I just sort of shrugged it off. But I have sat through some absolute dreck so let me tell you about this list of what's not worth watching on Amazon Prime.
I seem to have discovered a dark hole of cheaply made movies from the last few years -- maybe they were direct to Prime or done for Amazon Prime? I don't know. But I started down this path because the original list I was working my way through, I'm almost done with. And these movies came up and looked so much like the Hulu Into the Dark type movies (which I've mostly enjoyed). So I figured if they were just a little campy/cheesy, they'd still be worth the watch.
They're not.
Here's a quick list of what I've been through recently:
Even Lambs Have Teeth -- probably the best produced of the lot. But this really is just revenge porn. At the start of the movie two girls get kidnapped by the locals of a town where they're supposed to be working a community farm for the summer. Things happen to the girls that I don't need to repeat, I think you can get it. The two girls manage to escape their kidnappers and the second half of the movie is them tracking down each of the people involved and killing them. It's not what would traditionally be called a horror movie, the true horror is just what happens to the girls. And the revenge they take out on these kidnappers. I get it, this movie is trying to turn the tables on the typical victimhood of white girls in horror movies. However the revenge aspect is graphic and intense and played as funny. I would not recommend this for a variety of reasons.
Dark Encounters -- again another, not really a horror movie. This is a badly acted (a cast of almost all English actors trying on a Southern accent), and loosely plotted and is really just a movie about one missing girl and the aliens who come to reveal to her family what really happened to her. I can see what they're trying for, it's got a strangely supernatural, not alien, vibe to it. But picture me as the aliens guy meme when I say, "It's Aliens". I really didn't like this.
Scare Me -- a really awful anthology movie, cheaply shot, badly acted about a group of young adults who go out camping with their friends to tell a bunch of scary stories to each other around the campfire. The stories they tell are oddly political (with no real point sometimes), sometimes disgusting, and none of them are really worth sitting through -- not even for the story line that runs through them. It's SO LOOSELY PLOTTED, I cannot stress enough how not worth it this movie is.
As a caveat, I will say there's another movie by this title that's supposed to be coming out (or may have already) this year -- this is not that. I believe this "Scare Me" is from 2016.
The Dark Sitter -- I almost forgot watching this? That's how not worth it it is. A girl takes a babysitting job for a man who makes his own ghost hunting show. His girlfriend also brings her son over, so this babysitter is responsible for both boys (I think they're roughly 10-11 something like that.) Except this babysitter is actually scoping the house for expensive things, calling in her friends to ransack the house. Unfortunately for them all there's a book about witches that this second kid just discovers and reads from and let's loose a trio of witches. This movie is really of middling quality, the supernatural bits are pretty thinly put together and the girl's friends are a strange group of people who don't even seem to like each other? Again, not worth the time.
Wish Upon - An interesting plot, with actual actors I'd seen before (Ryan Phillipe, Joey King). The man character, the daughter of a dumpster diving dad, who's deep in a lingering depression after losing his wife some 6 years or so before. He gives his daughter, for her birthday, a box with strange Chinese characters on it that she can't translate (she's taking Chinese language classes in school). Turns out this box grants wishes. But it comes with a cost. This movie comes across as the kind of thing that like Nickelodeon or someone could've done, toned down the graphic things, shoved in a moral at the end and called it a day. Instead it comes off as a really awful highschool movie where some girl temporarily gets all the things she wanted. It's not an original concept and they don't offer much to the genre.
I wish I could tell you this is the end of the bad movies I've watched. But this is only scratching the surface. Please do yourselves a favor and go ahead and bypass these if they show up in your recommendeds.
I seem to have discovered a dark hole of cheaply made movies from the last few years -- maybe they were direct to Prime or done for Amazon Prime? I don't know. But I started down this path because the original list I was working my way through, I'm almost done with. And these movies came up and looked so much like the Hulu Into the Dark type movies (which I've mostly enjoyed). So I figured if they were just a little campy/cheesy, they'd still be worth the watch.
They're not.
Here's a quick list of what I've been through recently:
Even Lambs Have Teeth -- probably the best produced of the lot. But this really is just revenge porn. At the start of the movie two girls get kidnapped by the locals of a town where they're supposed to be working a community farm for the summer. Things happen to the girls that I don't need to repeat, I think you can get it. The two girls manage to escape their kidnappers and the second half of the movie is them tracking down each of the people involved and killing them. It's not what would traditionally be called a horror movie, the true horror is just what happens to the girls. And the revenge they take out on these kidnappers. I get it, this movie is trying to turn the tables on the typical victimhood of white girls in horror movies. However the revenge aspect is graphic and intense and played as funny. I would not recommend this for a variety of reasons.
Dark Encounters -- again another, not really a horror movie. This is a badly acted (a cast of almost all English actors trying on a Southern accent), and loosely plotted and is really just a movie about one missing girl and the aliens who come to reveal to her family what really happened to her. I can see what they're trying for, it's got a strangely supernatural, not alien, vibe to it. But picture me as the aliens guy meme when I say, "It's Aliens". I really didn't like this.
Scare Me -- a really awful anthology movie, cheaply shot, badly acted about a group of young adults who go out camping with their friends to tell a bunch of scary stories to each other around the campfire. The stories they tell are oddly political (with no real point sometimes), sometimes disgusting, and none of them are really worth sitting through -- not even for the story line that runs through them. It's SO LOOSELY PLOTTED, I cannot stress enough how not worth it this movie is.
As a caveat, I will say there's another movie by this title that's supposed to be coming out (or may have already) this year -- this is not that. I believe this "Scare Me" is from 2016.
The Dark Sitter -- I almost forgot watching this? That's how not worth it it is. A girl takes a babysitting job for a man who makes his own ghost hunting show. His girlfriend also brings her son over, so this babysitter is responsible for both boys (I think they're roughly 10-11 something like that.) Except this babysitter is actually scoping the house for expensive things, calling in her friends to ransack the house. Unfortunately for them all there's a book about witches that this second kid just discovers and reads from and let's loose a trio of witches. This movie is really of middling quality, the supernatural bits are pretty thinly put together and the girl's friends are a strange group of people who don't even seem to like each other? Again, not worth the time.
Wish Upon - An interesting plot, with actual actors I'd seen before (Ryan Phillipe, Joey King). The man character, the daughter of a dumpster diving dad, who's deep in a lingering depression after losing his wife some 6 years or so before. He gives his daughter, for her birthday, a box with strange Chinese characters on it that she can't translate (she's taking Chinese language classes in school). Turns out this box grants wishes. But it comes with a cost. This movie comes across as the kind of thing that like Nickelodeon or someone could've done, toned down the graphic things, shoved in a moral at the end and called it a day. Instead it comes off as a really awful highschool movie where some girl temporarily gets all the things she wanted. It's not an original concept and they don't offer much to the genre.
I wish I could tell you this is the end of the bad movies I've watched. But this is only scratching the surface. Please do yourselves a favor and go ahead and bypass these if they show up in your recommendeds.