It's spooky season and while I watch horror movies year round, this is the time of year I watch something almost every night. So, here's some quick and dirty reviews on horror things if you're looking for something to watch (or not watch) in the lead in to Halloween.

Right now I'm watching the penultimate episode of The Midnight Club on Netflix. It's the new Mike Flanagan series based on the book (and other books) by Christopher Pike. No lie, The Midnight Club has been my favorite book since I read it in the 90s. It's not a great book, but it is my favorite and I reread it often. So far, I've enjoyed the series a lot. It's not an exact match for the book, but I wouldn't have wanted it to be.

If you don't know what it is, The Midnight Club (the book) is about a group of teenagers in a hospice for teens with terminal illnesses. Every night, at midnight, they meet in the library to tell stories (very Twilight Zone style stories). I read it again before the show came out and it was just as good as I remembered it and even knowing how it ended, I was still moved by it. The Midnight Club (the tv series) is done in the same framework, terminal kids who tell each other stories at midnight, but the framing stories of the kids is slightly different. And, the stories for the show are some of the stories in the book but mostly their stories from other Christopher Pike novels. They're well done, Flanagan's style is all over them, it's just that the cast are teenagers and not adults.

The Lost Footage of Leah Sullivan - A really really low budget found footage movie about a woman who returns to her small town home to investigate the stories about a haunted home/family. This is so low budget, I actually recognized the lead actress as a woman who does ASMR on YouTube full time. That's not to say it's not good though. It's a little weighed down by the investigation pieces, but if you like found footage and don't like a lot of gore and something just a little spooky, this is a great option. It's also free on either TUBI or Roku. Free somewhere.

Who Invited Them - This is a type of movie I tag in my notes as "rich people" horror. A couple is having a party to celebrate their new fancy home. Another couple they don't recognize attends the party and is still hanging out in the house after the last actual guest has left. This is very much a slow burn thriller, where the end is pretty predictable. The suspense is well done, and it's very much about how far people will go to please someone else in a social situation. This couple keeps going along with the strangers because it would be awkward and impolite not to, even when they know something's wrong. (If you get secondhand embarrassed or cringe, this won't be for you.)

Revealer - This is classic B movie fodder in the modern age about a woman who works at a peep show and another local woman who as a staunch Christian protests where she works. This is gory and gross and really well done apocalyptic horror and it's better if you don't know what the apocalypse is going into it. The acting and dialogue are over the top, but I honestly enjoyed this one.

We Need to Do Something - I think this is a Hulu exclusive, but boy this one really surprised me. This is the story of a family that hides out in their master bathroom during a heavy storm. Except once the storm is over they realize they're stuck. There's no way out and no one comes to check on them. There's some jump scares in this one, but mostly it's the tension about what's outside that's interesting.

We're All Going to the World's Fair - Just don't. It's slow, plodding and meandering and the ends do not justify the means. This is about a girl who gets caught up in what's essentially a creepypasta ARG. We watch her make YouTube videos about what happens to her after the 'game' starts. Like I said, it's boring and not worth the time. CW for depression and a relationship that definitely reads as grooming.

Okay, last one for this post:
Speak No Evil - This is brand new and had some buzz for a foreign film so I probably had too high of hopes after I'd heard the premise. In this, a Dutch family and a Danish family meet on vacation in Italy. One family invites the other to come visit them at their home for a long weekend. Once they get there, they realize something is DEFINITELY off about the family they're staying with. This is slow but tense, awkward and another one that preys on the main couple's need to try and stay polite and grateful for the other family's hospitality. I don't know that it's necessarily predictable, but I don't think it's hard to figure out the scary hook of this story. If you're okay for slower, tense tales, this is an interesting one. CW for kids in this one.

That's all for this time. If you have very specific triggers that you want to know about for any of these, I'm happy to answer questions in the comments. This doesn't catch me up to my most recent watches, but there will definitely be more of these posts this month. I'm not online much so I have to share them with someone, so I hope those spooky movie lovers out there enjoy.

Early at my new job, I managed to win a year-long membership to our local museum (which is VERY GOOD), the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Part of that is the invitation to some free talks from other museums or events at our museum that are member only (and sometimes costly - so I don't know how many if any of those I'll attend). I attended one of the Zoom presentations last Saturday morning: Asian Art & The Red Pagoda: A Conversation with Baroness Jacqueline von Hammerstein-Loxten. It's a chat being given from the Red Pagoda in Paris because of our museum's relationship with the man who built the Red Pagoda in the 1930s. The Baroness and the art historians at the Nelson have interacted during the last few years about some work in the Red Pagoda that was believe to be new to the structure that the historians have matched to pieces on display at the museum we know to be about 400 years-ish old. I find that fascinating. The Nelson is well known in art circles as having one of the best and most extensive Chinese art collections, whish is due in part to the Chinese and Indian art dealer both sold, loaned or donated as many as 150 pieces of art to the Nelson alone. If you're interested in that kind of thing, you can see one of the Jain shrines that the museum has in common with the Red Pagoda. You can also see what is arguably one of the most famous pieces that was acquired by the museum through this same man, The Guanyin of the Southern Sea. It is extremely imposing in person.

The talk included a video walk-through of the Red Pagoda which was breathtaking just over the video. I can't imagine how beautiful in must be in person. This Baroness acquired the building in 2011 after the descendants of the art dealer and designer of the Red Pagoda passed away couldn't keep up with the maintenance of the place. The building had been closed for years and she has spent the last 11 years loving restoring the place and researching all the art within it, and the man who built it. You can learn more about the Red Pagoda here.

I hope I get to attend more of these over the year while I have the membership since actually going to the museum in the time of COVID seems like a bad idea. This was a really nice light bit of my weekend when everything about my week was a little overwhelming.

Pretty much everyone on both sides of my family has had COVID in the last two weeks, people in no contact with one another, just badly coincidental timing and most of whom were both vaccinated, boosted and doing their part to stay away from others. Both my half-brother and my Dad (unrelated) are different kinds of high-risk and both are really, really ill. My dad barely answered my text messages when I checked on him every day because he was so sick. But thank goodness I got him that fitness watch for Christmas so he could watch his numbers. He'd the numbers to me when he didn't have the energy to type anything else, and that was actually really reassuring. As of last Sunday both my dad and brother seemed to be feeling a little better but still having hard times breathing, which is likely to just be something they'll be dealing with for awhile.

Last Thursday our friend Amy came over to watch a movie. The point was to hang out, not to watch anything specific, so I went out to Shudder on a whim and found something that sounded truly terrible. What we landed on was two hours of the most mundane haunted house movie I've ever seen. In fact, this review for the movie here at Confluence of Cult probably says it better than I could ever:

"Fatal Exam, a regional supernatural slasher filmed in St. Louis, might be the longest 1 hour and 52 minutes ever committed to 16 mm. Writer, director, editor, and producer Jack Snyder never met a mundane moment he didn’t want to film the hell out of. Although the movie purports to be about a group of university students spending the night at a haunted house in which they’re stalked by a scythe-wielding killer, Fatal Exam is actually mostly about a group of university students walking around a drab house for 92 minutes, at the behest of their Rod Serling-sounding college professor, and then feebly battling a scythe-wielding killer for 20."

This movie was a bad movie gem. It's the sort of things that I feel like is meant to be watched with friends for a laugh. Sure it's two hours of the most mundane shit, but it absolutely did not feel like that for the three of us. For us, it was two hours of hysterical laughter that got us giggling and crying and it was perfect. This has something my friends and I have definitely found the beauty in over the last two years. While we used to do this in person every few months before the current panorama, we now do this once or twice A WEEK. Sundays are regular face time sessions and now occasionally when everyone's in good health and safe, we can do them in person again too.

I haven't been around much lately because all my non-work energy, or these small occasional breaks for real life, I've been writing. I DEFINITELY got the writer's equivalent of eyes are too big for my stomach with this story I'm working on. I picked up a challenge pinch hit for a 10k minimum story. And I thought... oh I've got the perfect idea, I can get it to 10k no problem. Except I had three weeks (which I'm now at the very end of today) to write it and way more story than I expected to have. I THINK I can cap it at 15k today and be done. But if I'd had the whole length of the challenge (which I was not a part of before grabbing this pinch hit) I think I could've done at least 30k if not more. This is the easiest writing has been in a long while, it's great.

I hope you're all well. As soon as this story is behind me, I've got more to share. Shit has been kind of wild lately, so these distractions have been very very appreciated.

I picked this movie on a whim and I'm really glad I did, it was a fucking delight. This is a New Zealand horror movie playing absolute homage to metal fans and campy horror movie fans like Evil Dead. The movie centers on Brodie, a poor metalhead that's recently had to move in with his aunt and uncle who don't particularly like him very much. At the one record store in town, he meets the one other metalhead kid in town and they decide to start a metal band with the only two dudes at Brodie's school that he hangs out with.

The group go to retrieve something from an old metalhead and find the man dead, clutching some metal album. The boys take the album from the dead man and within in find pages of music. It's weird, and Brodie takes the Latin words that accompany the music to translate later. During all this, Brodie has also met Medina, a pretty girl at school that seems to have an interest in him. They meet outside a store, Brodie and band still in full corpse paint and she seems very interested in his band and the metal music he loves. He introduces her to metal and she (as if she's never heard it before in her life) has a brief moment of metal maven Valkyries, and is all in on the idea.

Of course things aren't great for Brodie. His new band buddy from the record store tries to steal the girl, Brodie gets beat up at school by his cousin and some other assholes and once he's translated the words on the mysterious song they found, he realizes playing it might finally give him the power and fortune he thinks he wants. He tells the band they should play it, which unbeknownst to them in the moment, opens up some kind of portal to tell.

The next day, people all over town seem to have grown sick, are started to falling apart, and eventually by nightfall, are seemingly possessed or demons or something. The group has 'band' together to take down the creatures to save each other and try to put the biggest demon back in it's box before it can ruin them all.

There's more at play here - some dude that looks like a Bond villain wants the pages for himself, hoping to take the power granted by the demon it summons. The first scene with him in the movie is quite literally the best comedic scene in a horror movie I've ever watched. EVER.

This movie is full of fun comedic bits, over the top gore, and dumb (but actually funny) sextual references. I mean this movie runs the very very thin line between parody and horror and manages to actually do it well. Sure it's not the most feminist representation in horror media I've ever seen, but I feel like Medina gets to be a real badass in this movie and she's only sexualized in a way that shows how she feels empowered (the Valkyries scene). I really really loved this movie. It's dumb and funny and makes EXCELLENT use of traditional special effects. If you're a fan of old Evil Dead movies, metal music or traditional special effects in horror movies, definitely watch this. (Though very serious warnings for blood and lots of it — which I feel is worth mentioning for people not already familiar with the Evil Dead movies.)

Anyway. It's great. I loved it.

It took me several tries to watch this movie through in its entirety. It was just a night of a million things going on. I fell asleep on the first attempt, rewound it to the beginning, then had to stop multiple times for phone calls with family. I'll say here that I could really use 2021 to like chill way out. Family stresses are only getting worse not better to the point I've gone back to weekly therapy sessions. I'm having a real time concentrating on anything right now, which is also part of why this was difficult for me to really get into from the get-go. After talking to my mom and my brother separately, I restarted the movie again and then had to pause and rewind a few times to catch up on parts where I zoned out. None of this was the movie's fault, but mine. But the quality and style was enough for me to be interested enough to keep retrying. I'm glad I did, this movie is great. A little cheesy in the stylization of camera effects, but otherwise, cool.

I'll add here too -- the zoning out thing is a real problem lately. It's not even doom-scrolling or getting lost in tiktok or anything it's just me being overwhelmed and unable to concentrate on things. I had to delete a numbers game app off my phone today because I played it for like three hours and just did nothing else. I'll probably add it back when I've got my shit better together, but now's not the time.

ANYWAY

This movie from 2018 is a found-footage but more recent style that's 'online', where we follow the footage from a digital medium. Think Unfollowed, Searching, or Host. In this case we're watching the vlogs of the main character, a youtuber type that feels very much like something the Buzzfeed Unsolved guys used to do. He's trying to hit a follower milestone in order to win a sponsorship and takes his crew to a haunted hotel in downtown L.A. to stay in the same room as a serial killer from thirty years prior.

Over the course of the weekend (Halloween, of course) he and his crew investigate some of the mysteries that have happened inside the hotel in the last thirty years. What I love about this is that once the scene setting takes place, stuff starts happening almost immediately. There are a few jump scares, but they're not huge.

Honestly, I love these kinds of movies, especially like this where there's an ambiguous nature to the release of the videos that we're watching and what's happened to the main characters after the events of the weekend. Also there are both real threats (real as in in-person threats to the characters) and perceived or supernatural threats to the characters. It's a really good mix of the two.

I think if you like movies like Unfriended or Host, you'll probably like this. There's enough of a hint of what's going on, the backstory of the serial killer makes this slightly different than those similar movies where there's an active threat, giving this a supernatural bent.

There is an opening at the end for a potential sequel if they wanted to make one. I'd definitely be interested to watch it and maybe dig more into the backstory they've built up. I'm giving this a 4/5 on my completely not defined in any way reviews scale.

I don't remember any sort of advertising for this, it just sort of showed up one day on Prime. So I'm not sure if it was a direct to Prime or if it was on the big screen in 2018. I didn't really read up on it either. This was definitely under the radar though. I've never been super interested in found footage films but over the past year of all the horror movies I've watched I've seen quite a few good ones so I'm more willing to check them out now. Especially these online style, like HOST (which was probably in my top five of 2020).

In my continuation of watching horror movies this year, I did pivot to Christmas horror movies for the holiday. There is definitely a lack of really good Christmas-themed horror movies. And calling some of these Christmas movies is definitely a generous term, many of them just happen to take place at Christmas but really could've been staged at anytime of the year without any real changes. There are a few I've missed though I might still go back and watch, or at least try to watch. For now, here's a little round-up of what I did watch, with a bonus mention at the end for Christmasy but not at all horror.

Black Christmas (1974) - They consider this like the first modern day slasher movie, I guess. And I can't help but think it's somewhat inspired by the actual college slayings of Ed Kemper who killed sorority girls. This cast is pretty interesting: Margot Kidder, Olivia Hussey, Andrea Martin, John Saxton. The movie takes place around the Christmas holiday, where the girls of the sorority girls are getting drunk, having parties some of which getting ready for Christmas leave, or in the case of Margot's character "Barb", getting very very drunk (some of which I strongly suspect was a bit of 'method' on her part). In a way that other moves sometimes don't though, they actually get the police involved in what's happening and very early in the story, and they actually take everything seriously.

Black Christmas (2019) - What they say is that this movie is a 'remake' of the original. And in so much as there's a killer on campus, hitting the sorority girls still at the university through Christmas break and they're harassed, stalked and killed in their own home… sure, there's some similarities here. But the nature of the slayings and the reason behind them is very different. Instead of just a bad guy, there's a group of them and a hint of the supernatural at their core. I did like this one, for what it's worth, but I'd almost recommend watching them in the reverse order, so you don't expect the same thing out of the 'remake'.

Santa Jaws - A bad movie night watch party choice to keep with the spirit of the season. This was amazing. Better production quality than most movies on our 'bad movie' watch party nights. It also lives up to its title. There is a shark, it eats people, it's Christmasy (the shark and the movie). The story centers around a teenage boy and his family on Christmas, and this mysterious shark that shows up in a Santa hat, attracted to Christmas things and seemingly determined to kill the kid's family. Honestly, it's just a surprisingly decent movie for all the wackiness about it. If you have any affinity for bad SyFy movies, you should watch this.

Dead End - Suffers from the late 90s, early 00s mentality, the high school aged brother in this is just all kinds of awful. The movie itself though is a really interesting one. A family is on their way to Christmas dinner at the wife's mother's house. The mom, dad, daughter and her boyfriend, and the high school aged son, are all in the car on a long stretch of road headed to grandmother's house. The father has taken the long way, avoiding the interstate because he wanted a less boring drive to help him stay awake. Of course they nearly drive into another car and all of them are suddenly very awake. From there, the trip becomes very surreal as they taken in a woman in white who is carrying a small child, and realize that they don't know where they're going or how to get back off the road their on. I'd never heard of this before and while their are some faults in how the son talks, or how the family deals with what's happening, overall the story is fascinating.

Slay Belles - This is a goofy, fun and ridiculous movie. It's better done than I expected it to be, though some of the effects are poor. It's about these three women, two of whom make videos for the internet about random places they visit (while in appropriate costume). The two YouTubers are dragging their third friend along to this long abandoned Santa Land park. What they don't know until they arrive is that there's been a rash of attacks in the area (written off as bear attacks). During their trek through Santa Land, they come across some strange creature, and are rescued by the park's "Santa" still living in the park.

Better Watch Out - It's Christmas Eve and a babysitter who's about to move out of town goes to babysit her favorite charge. The boy she's watching (12) has a crush on her and plans to make a move sometime during the night. The night turns dark when it seems like someone has broken into the house and the babysitter tries to keep the boy safe. What seems like a break-in turns dark when she finds out who is behind the break-in and what's really going on. This is really well done, surprisingly dark, and not at all what it seems. Fun trivia: two of the kids (the babysitter and the kids best friend) in this movie are the two siblings in a horror movie from 2015 called The Visit, about their trip to their grandparents house.

Nasty Piece of Work - This is technically a horror movie that takes place at Christmas, although you could really take or leave the Christmas part of the equation. Two guys vying for promotions from the same boss are invited after the yearly Christmas party (where it's announced there will be no bonuses this year) to their boss's house. They attend, with their wives to meet the boss and discuss the promotion, though neither of them are really expecting the other. The night very quickly descends into chaos. I don't know if there's a horror sub-genre for 'rich people make the characters due horrible things' but this would definitely fit there.

Creepshow: Holiday Special (2020) - This is the first offering of the new Creepshow revival on Shudder and I'll admit up front I wasn't really impressed. The story revolves around a man who shows up to a support group for shapeshifters, having just recently realized he's responsible for a recent rash of killings in the area. The group discusses the different types of shifters there are, each of them being different (and a joke inserted regarding furries - YMMV on that). An attack interrupts the group and it's revealed that Santa is out to kill the shifters. Chaos obviously ensues. This "movie" did not hold my attention, I found myself drifting off near the end. But, if you're interested in the incredibly absurd, this might be for you.

The Wolf of Snow Hollow - This isn't technically a Christmas movie, but it is a winter movie and it takes place in a small ski town in Utah. Not exactly meant to be a parody but does at times come off in such a way with it's baked in humor. The story of a string of attacks in a town named Snow Hollow, the Sheriff's son is poorly dealing with being in the limelight of this huge case and the pressure of his father's health issues that have him taking a backseat. It's a surprisingly good werewolf movie, good creature silhouette, interesting premise and tie-in w/alcoholism + anger issues. Done in a David Fincher-eque manner, purposefully but with a bit more light-hearted flair.

Last Christmas - This isn't a bad movie, nor is it horror, but it doesn't leave you with a happy lovely feeling at the end. I feel like it deserves at least an honorable mention here. What's sold as a romance, with Emelia Clarke and Henry Golding, is about a woman whose life is just really shitty after a near brush with death requiring her to have a heart transplant. She's an elf in a Christmas store run by Michelle Yeoh (who is wonderful). It heavily relies on the music of George Michael and for that reason I will wholeheartedly recommend it. I liked it overall, but boy, it's a rough watch near the end. So go in with some tissues, please.

I need to get some of these bad ones out of the way. And boy howdy is Amazon Prime just chock full of really bad horror movies.

The Torment of Laurie Ann Cullom
The production on this is garbage quality. They're definitely going for a kind of 70s feel but everything is really flat, there's no real focus on the cinematic aspect and the lead actress has a garbled mushy mouth voice. I ALMOST DNF'd this after the first twenty or so minutes but decided to power through because there were some good reviews on it. However, it's not worth the time I spent to watch it.

It's about a woman who was attacked years prior to the movie and she's now housebound due to PTSD. The original attacker is stalking her again. But there's no build up here, there's very, very little explanation and it falls apart pretty quickly. Definitely on my DO NOT recommend list.

10x10
This is a strangely interesting thriller staring Kelly Reilly? and that one dude from that one thing (it'll come to me)...oh, he's Luke Evans. This man takes the woman hostage in a grocery store parking lot in midday (distressingly easily) and when he gets her home he locks her in a ... you guessed it... 10x10 room in his house. I'd hoped there would be a lot more focus there, but there really isn't. The name of the movie is (like so often) something we spent the least amount of time with. We see this man (who is very rich) spending a lot of time to go through the woman's purse and other things. He demands to know her name and doesn't believe her once she gives it.

There's no real horror elements to this, it's far more a thriller. The woman fights back, obviously and then in the back half of the movie we found out what this guy wants and why and it all seems very... played out, I don't know. The action was very meh as was the very thin thread that tried to hold this premise together.

The Loved Ones
This was a great, original premise. This is an Australian horror movie about a guy that gets kidnapped by another girl in his highschool after he turns down her advance for prom. At her house, he wakes up tied to a chair at her dining room table, with her, her dad and another woman we realize is her mother. The girl is dressed in her finest for prom and she has all these demands for him to make this prom special for her. Her dad is strange and threatening and insists he goes along with his daughters demands. It gets wild and bloody from here.

This wasn't like a good fun watch or anything but a really interesting twist on the horror genre. I liked it for what it was and it's probably one of the best I've watched in a long stretch of shitty horror movies.

Along Came the Devil
Our protaganist in this movie is a girl who's had to movie with her aunt. Her mother is dead, but Tanya starts to believe that her mom is contacting her from beyond. She sees visions of her mom as she's trying to reintegrate into a neighborhood she knew as a kid. Her aunt is a Christian and tries to urge her to come to church with her. Meanwhile, when she tells a friend about what she's seeing, her friend suggests a seance. (As you do.)

I feel pretty meh on this one. I watched it not that long ago and still had to look it up again to make sure I remembered the story right. It just isn't very memorable. I think there's a potential interesting premise here and in the right hands with some heightened spooks I think it could've been a lot better instead of meh.

Other than The Loved Ones, I have recently watched some others that I've enjoyed recently that might warrant more full reviews. I took a short break for horror movies as I binged watched Criminal UK (both seasons) and Ratched (all 8 episodes). I'm sinking back into it now and continuing to expand this ever growing list of movies for more of the good, the bad and the interesting.

Another rendition of "I Watch Bad Horror Movies So You Don't Have To" theater.

Over the weekend Matt and I watched the new Amazon Prime movie, Vivarium. This movie with a very odd premise caught our attention back when the trailer came out and we've both been eager to watch it. The movie stars Imogen Poots & Jesse Eisenberg as a couple searching for a home to move into together, a house somewhere vaguely outside London.

They're taken in by a very strange man at the housing office who convinces them to come on a quick trip to the newest neighborhood, Yonder. The houses their are copy/pasted from space to space - all the same color, size, shape, lawn. They come to #9 and the guy from the office leads them on a tour throughout the house. Near the end of the tour, after showing off a very eerie ability to mimic the voice of the woman, the man from the housing office disappears while the character's backs are turned.

The couple attempt to leave when they can't find him and in their car trying various routes and turns to leave the neighborhood they always end up coming back around to #9 with it's open door and lights on. When the car runs out of gas on one of these many attempts to flee the house, they must face the open door and the small bit of food the housing agent had left with Champagne in the fridge.

From here, the movie just keeps on spiraling. The couple makes a whole day's attempt at leaving via the connected lawns. before eventually getting fed up with the place and burning the whole house to the ground. In the morning the house has returned in place and there's a box in the road waiting for them. The box contains a baby and a note: "Raise the Child and Be Released".

I don't want to spoil things, but it's obvious from the trailers that things don't go well. This couple doesn't take well to having a baby forced on them, let alone the odd one they've been saddled with.

Overall I think the abstract and absurd elements were done well here. I'm not sure it completely qualifies as a horror movie (but I'm counting it based on a few spoilery things). But it's more like a absurdist science fiction film.

After a few days of thinking about it though I think there's an argument to be made about this movie from a ex-Vangelical standpoint. Specifically I was thinking about some of my ex-JW friends or ex-Mormon friends that would maybe see this movie with a different light. Going there would get a little spoilery, but if you want to talk about it more in the comments, I can add to that.

Has anyone else seen this yet? What did you think?

With everything upset at home, I haven't had a chance yet to join in on the sunshine_challenge posts. I keep meaning to start and then by the time I would normally sit down to write, I'm just exhausted. So while I do like this year's colors theme and want to participate, fair warning that I might be drawing these out into August at this rate.

RED

Maybe it's cliche but the color red brings to mind, Little Red Riding Hood. I loved that story as a kid. I'm not sure what appealed to me, but I always had a taste for the macabre as a kid so maybe that's it. I've written a fair bit of what qualifies I guess as fanfiction using LRRH as a backdrop, or as an AU opportunity. In fact, there's a whole, big fic a friend I wrote for Dragon Age like a million years ago, using it as a backdrop for a gender-swapped AU. But that's not specifically what I wanted to talk about.

Instead, let me talk about The Path. A video game from Tale of Tales, a little indie video game design team that made a few very atmospheric games, though I think this one was the most popular. The Path is a game about Little Red Riding Hood, only 'Little Red' is six sisters who go out from their mother's house one at a time to visit their grandmother. Each girl has a different 'red' name: Scarlet, Ginger, Ruby, Robin, Carmen & Rose, and they're different ages (each about two years a part). There is a goal in the game: "To go to Grandmother's house". But if you do that, you're not actually playing the game. As was once noted in an article by Justin McElroy, "You get one instruction in the game and you have to disregard it."

The point of The Path, is to get off it. You explore as one of these six sisters, taking your basket and interacting with the world. Each sister has a different experience. Each sister encounters the Wolf, but it's not THE Wolf, it's A wolf. Each sister has their own. And at the end of the path, each girl finds their grandmother's house different than the time before. When you finish the path with one sister, you start over and get to choose another sister to take the path. And when you've been through the sisters, the cycle seamlessly starts back over.

The game itself is about exploration and adolescence, about trauma and acceptance. It's scary and disturbing and beautiful. It's not a long game, though I think it bears repeating The Path for each of the sisters multiple times, as there is always something to find on subsequent playthroughs. Even if what you're finding is just a different interpretation of a sister's particular story.

There is another character in the game, a seventh girl available for interactions who is neither a sister nor a wolf. There's been some theories about her too, and the tie-in to another ToT game, 8.

The Path is more than a decade old at this point and the simple design and graphics reflect that now. But the story is still engaging and I often go back to it. One of the most beautiful things about this game is the music and sound design. The characters aren't voiced in this game, so there's nothing to break the sound of a heartbeat and footfalls in the forest and the sounds of the wolf as it closes in, laid over the music. It's really, really good.

If you've never heard of The Path, or played it, the trailer is below. It's available at the Tale of Tales site and a variety of other places like Steam or itch.io.

Watch on YouTube

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.

Since I can't type a whole lot right now, I thought I'd come in with some small things. Especially since I didn't have the ability to put together my New Music Friday post. That effort is just a lot more than I've got at the moment for my set up. However, I did work today in my new space, even sans new desk I put up all the other stuff and put a folding table where the desk will be and it was pretty nice. My arm feels better today after work than it has in awhile. Though while typing and gaming still not great, so I'm laying it off as much as possible when not working.

My continued watch list of horror movies is ever growing. I'm VERY close to giving in to at least a 30 day trial of Shudder, if not dropping something in order to pick it up. I can't do a big post right now, but I've watched a couple of stinkers, so let me leave with you with a short list of DO NOT watch these:

• Blood & Lace - I don't know how old this movie is (late 60s early 70s maybe?) and maybe it gets scary later, but 10 minutes in and the detective and the PI are talking about what good "breeding stock" the teenage survivor is and I noped out and this was a complete did not finish for me.
• Even Lambs Have Teeth - a r*pe revenge fantasy where two girls get back at their kidnappers. I get what they were going for, and I like some female vengence, but this missed the mark in a lot of ways.
• Dark Encounters - Aliens. Come to a small US town in the 80s to tell one family what happened to their daughter who is been missing for a year. All the actors are British which makes every bit of dialogue sound fake, even in intense scenes. And the pay off was not worth it. Also, what a concept.Jesus.
• Scare Me - A low, bottom of the barrel budget horror anthology that's like a modern day Afraid of the Dark. It's got a bunch of mixed political messages and strange stories and BAD acting and it's just not worth your time or energy.

One movie has stood out as an absolute must watch if your like an old school slasher movie fan, or maybe even just like a Mystery Science Theater fan. My friends and I watched Chopping Mall over the weekend. It was great. We laughed so hard, it's so dumb and JUST the right kind of bad for watching with friends you love, who also love bad movies.

As a reminder if you haven't been through your passwords or reset your DW password, pay attention to denise's recent post. I got a message from reddit today that my account had been suspended for suspicious activity and had to go through the whole thing to reset my password over there. I was pretty quick to do it, but someone had definitely started the process of stripping all my profile info from my account.

To share a musical thing before I sign-off for today. I came across the new Halocene video and thought it was worth sharing. Four awesome rock/metal female vocalists got together for a cover of Bohemian Rhapsody and it's very enjoyable. I hope they do more like this together.

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