singedsun

Matt and I went to see the movie Men tonight after work. It was a great time to go because it was later, it's Tuesday, there were only a handful of other people in the theater. I've been a fan of Alex Garland since I first saw The Beach in like 2000 or something? Like I watched it because it had Leonardo DiCaprio (I was an easily persuadable young thing) but fell in love with the beauty of the setting, the bizarreness of the story and was probably one of the first real media that kind of taught me the dangerous of white people playing tourist in spaces (places/communities) that don't belong to us. I know it wasn't for everyone, but I loved it.

So Alex Garland has always been like a much watch for me. But I'd heard some early meh reviews for Men so I was excited but hesitant going in. And now having seen it, I know I'm going to sit in the minority with my feelings on this movie, but I freaking loved it.

If you know nothing, here's the basics: (It is in fact a horror movie.)
Our main character, Harper, who has travelled into the English countryside to stay in a large rental home in a small village after the traumatic death of her husband. During her stay, she encounters a variety of men that are all played by the same actor. One in particular seems to be stalking her. That on its own might present plenty of horrifying or at least troublesome situations for a single woman out on her own. That said, each of these encounters seem a little more off-putting than the next, until the final scene sort of brings it all together.

I've already seen and read some think pieces from men about how it doesn't say/do much, and from women about how they felt meh about it. Me though? I snapped (felt weird to clap), but I would've cheered had I been watching at home alone. Whether he meant to or not, what Alex did with the final scenes felt (to me) very much in line with the rest of the movie no matter how bonkers it might've seemed to other watchers.

Matt left feeling like there wasn't enough narrative thread but I felt like there was a thick, single connective tissue beginning to end.

I'm not going to put spoilers, but if you want to see it and you'd like some content warnings I can provide those. And if you have seen it and want to talk about it, we can do that in the comments.

I haven't done a quick round up of recent horror movies in a long-ass time, so here, let me give you a quick spoiler-free synopsis of several from my recent list. I'm skipping the ones that come from my weekly Bad Movie Night group, but if people ever want a few thoughts on the truly breathtakingly awful movies my friends and I watch every week for Bad Movie Night, I will make a post about them.

Not counting those:

Night's End I think this is a Shudder exclusive, so it may not be available to rent or watch elsewhere, but if you have Shudder or have been thinking about getting it for a little while, this is definitely one worth watching. It's the story of a Black man who for reasons we don't understand at first, is living alone, isolated and hermited in his apartment. His only connection to the outside world is his friend and his ex-wife and her new husband whom he talks with over zoom/facetime something. This man is making YouTube videos from his apartment about the stuff he likes: birds, plants, what have you. His friend points out a random thing that happens in the background of his video. The video gets around as people latch onto this "ghost sighting" in his video. He makes more videos. Weird shit happens. His videos catch the attention of a popular YouTube paranormal video collection site to which he wants to be invited.

This movie is wonderfully acted, beautifully atmospheric and very chilling for someone alone by choice in a new apartment with literally few other residents and a very sketch history. I really liked it. And would recommend.

The Bunker Another Shudder original. This is a huge pass. It had promise - a group of LARPers at a get together that gets shut down, they're locked in... weird shit ensues. Only no where in the description I read did it tell you that the LARP they're doing is in an old locked bunker with a WW II backdrop. It's bad for that reason. But then the rest of it is also, just bad. The acting isn't great, the story isn't great. It feels like it relies far too heavily on bad lighting and mediocre acting.

The Scary of Sixty-First ( this is getting a cut because CW: CP/SA and mentions of a IRL but now dead billionaire )

Fresh This is the Sebastian Stan is an adorable doctor dreamboat who might or might not want to murder the new woman he's seeing. Honestly? This is a winner in my book. It's beautifully shot, it's light on the actual gore we know is happening behind the scenes, and there's STILL somehow an earnestness in both the main characters. For a horror movie, it's kind of delightful? If by delightful you understand that I mean, nothing that happens here could be out of place in an episode of Hannibal.

The Deep House A documentarian couple goes on a dive to take video of a house at the bottom of a lake. It's haunted. The end. (This movie was a boring waste of my time and I do not understand the ruckus people made about it when it came out.)

Untitled Horror Movie :chefs kiss: This movie. I loved it. (Also it stars Emmy Raver-Lampman from Umbrella Academy which was a selling point for me.) These are six out of work actors from a big soap opera due to COVID. One of them is writing a screenplay, they encourage him to write more, they get together and read bits and pieces of what he's writing and eventually decide to try and shoot the thing remotely, each of them in their own spaces. I'm very much about these modern horrors using modern technology to do new things with the genre. This one delighted me. If you liked HOST from 2020, you'll like this one.

Last but not least, I did watch Scream 5 but there's not much to say there. It's a Scream movie, it did what a Scream movie does and I thought it was fun and worth the watch. If slashers or meta-takes on the horror genre aren't for you, then this isn't for you.

Anyway. That's from the last couple of weeks. I'll try and do more of these if people like them.

CW: anxiety, suicidal ideation, intrusive thoughts

This movie feels very much like it was made for the ~aesthetic~. If you can follow what's happening, there's a story there about anxiety, intrusive thoughts, suicidal ideation. The "main" character, Amy, seems obsessed with this idea that she's going to die tomorrow (hence the title). A friend of hers comes over, when it's obvious on the phone that something is off about Amy. Amy tells her what she's thinking and it doesn't feel like it's self-destructive thinking but more that it's definitive. Several times throughout the movie, people try to define how the thing "feels" how they feel this knowledge that they're about to die with such conviction and they all come a little short, but many of the descriptions sound like intrusive thoughts.

Amy as we see her in the beginning is a bit obsessed with the Mozart's "Lacrimosa", listening to it repetitively as she savors the sensations around her. She seems sad, but the scenes shift quickly and we only catch glimpses of her: feeling the wood on her table, searching for urns online, drinking wine as she picks out a fancy dress to wear.

When her friend arrives, Amy tells her what she's feeling, and tries to convey her certainty... but she seems so sure of herself and her friend leaves rather quickly. But what we see almost immediately as the scene shifts is that her friend, having gone home after seeing Amy, becomes overwhelmed with certainty of her own impending death.

From there the story continues as this sudden, worrying spiral of anxiety about the dread of an impending death hits everyone they come in contact with and explain how their feeling to. The waves come quicker from person to person and the scenes shift between characters as we see how each of them is dealing throughout the night. We also get flashbacks of Amy, happy with someone, before all this happened and we can infer her depression from there, the trigger for her dark spiraling thoughts.

The film is pretty, colors and lights used brilliantly to convey the sort of confusion that comes on every person with this anticipatory dread and certainty. I won't spoil it, but I would recommend it if the darker topics won't throw you off it. It's advertised as a horror movie, and maybe it is, but it's more psychological and emotional than anything else.

The story is not, as I said before, is not the most cohesive, but the watch can piece together what's happening and why. And it's a lovely watch, and there's several bigger actors in it as well, a few that were a surprise to me toward the end. It's a movie you really have to watch, not just have on in the background, if you're immersed in the feelings of the characters - which I do think they do very well - it will likely be an idea that really sticks with you for awhile.

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.

Got so much good cleaning done this weekend. There's nothing like searching for one particular thing that motivates me to do a bunch of deep cleaning so it can be discovered again. Which I did find. But I tore apart my entire closet in the process. I haven't been able to see the floor in there for like a decade due to large rubbermaids and old luggage and shoes and all the variety of things one tends to collect and has no other home for. One giant trash bag and several loads of laundry later, things are organized, I've pulled the giant rubbermaid with the majority of my CD collection into my office and the floor is wonderfully cleaned and visible. The cats keep wandering in there and sniffing everything. The dogs are just mad we picked up the blankets they'd taken to sleeping on.

I've started the long process of ripping old CDs, starting with the goth collections I found both in that one giant rubbermaid container and the second one that had somehow migrated into the basement already. That box will have to come into the office too at some point, but for now I grabbed the two big collections out of it I was looking for and will save the rest for later.

In addition to some deep digital organization by reposting some of my old game reviews from my time at GamingAngels.com on my website. I think I got everything from all the sites I've written for, for now. It's enough at least that I've already used it to apply for a paid zine article. For non-fiction, I'm happy to continue to use my old name and website. For fiction... well, I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Also I promised some horror movie reviews, so I've been working on those too. I've now watched 2 movies in which an evil app kills people. And 2 movies in which people are convinced to do horrible things for money and the amusement of some very rich people.

BeDeviled: [Amazon Prime] I'm stating up front that this was awful. It's about a group of "teens" who get this app on their phones akin to something like Alexa. It talks back to them, it handles texts and emails and a variety of tasks. And then it preys on their fears and haunts them and they start getting picked off one by one. The concept itself is interesting, I suppose. And I've heard other people state that they like this movie but it definitely wasn't for me. The jump scares weren't scary, the deaths weren't either. At best the only actually scary thing was the app itself and depths of people's lives it plumbed in order to scare them. Not worth the watch unless you're very bored.

You Die: [Amazon Prime] A GIANT CW for this movie for suicide.
You Die is an Italian movie that's part BeDeviled and part The Ring. This movie has subtitles but is all in Italian (with one short conversation in English). So it required my full attention to watch. This movie begins with a girl downloading an app called "You Die" onto a guy's phone. The app gives you 24 hours to download the app onto someone else's phone or... you die. In that 24 hours the person is beset by ghosts, at first through the app which functions a little like an AR game that shows you ghosts you can't see in real life. But then the ghosts become more and more real and the people start to lose their grip on reality altogether until their 24 hours is up. If they can't download the app the ghosts get them.

This was good. While the details of the app and the internet and whatever are deeply inplausible. With a little suspension of belief, it's a good time. The spooks are interesting and the main character is likeable because of how she struggles with this in comparison to some of the others we see. It starts rough, but it's worth sticking with.

13 Sins: [Netflix] A man, about to be married, is given the opportunity to participate in a game of 13 challenges. He wins money for each challenge in small amounts at first and then larger and larger until he's completed all 13 challenges. The 'goal' I guess is to transform the person, from someone meek and in a financially difficult position to someone with confidence and money and little concern for what others think about them. The game starts simply, to kill a fly. Then to eat the fly ... and then the challenges escalate. Of course the challenges include misdemeanors and then felonies and then this guy is running from his life, and the cops, trying to complete the challenges. If he wins, he's promised, everything just goes away and he keeps all the money.

I actually really liked this one. The trope of the 'game' is a little old but I liked the escalation of the challenges. The acting was good (Rutina Wesley from True Blood is in this as the fiance) and while it's a little older so the tech is out of date, I thought it was well done. It does get really bloody though, so heads up for that if it's a thing you have trouble with.

Would You Rather: [Netflix] Another CW for suicide here too, in addition to self-harm and addiction.
A Brittany Snow movie, also staring Sasha Grey and Enver Gjokaj (from Agent Carter and Agents of SHIELD). So is the other dark game for money movie, in which a woman is offered the chance to attend a party and play a game for money. She needs the money badly to pay for her brother's leukemia care since their parents have both passed away. She attends the party with seven other guests. In this one the action is tight, centered on this dining room table the guests sit at as the challenges are passed from one player to the next. Once the game starts in earnest, the challenges are the same for all players to begin. So they have to watch or perform these challenges knowing exactly what they entail. Some of them involve harming other people. These escalate very quickly.

I have heard a lot of people really enjoy this movie for how it's presented and it certainly is interesting. I do think I really hate the rich people play games with poor people for money trope. But for the way this movie is constructed, I liked how it was done. This one is far gorier than the other three movies above, LOTS of blood here.

Apparently I had this movie on my list twice. Well that's fun to check off twice. :D

I've watched WAY more movies than I've had a chance to write about, so I'll probably do another one of these soon. And I like bundling them like this with similar themes so I'll try to do that too moving forward.

If you've watched any of these, let me know what you thought about them.

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?

I thought, for those of you horror movie fans on my list, you might like to watch this little 5 minute horror short on YouTube. It's two people in a relationship chatting over zoom, and I think really well done for the condensed format and limited toolset.

If you've watched content from Geek & Sundry, DC Daily, Critical Role-- you might recognize the female actress as Whitney Moore. She's an internet personality and hostess who has been in a number of lower budget horror movies. She was in this great show Critical Role did when they were still at G&S called Thrashtopia -- which was basically an interview show in a Mad Max type apocalypse. I loved it.

Anyway. If you've got five minutes and like horror movies with interesting hooks, watch this one.

Watch on YouTube