Review Bomb!

With the overall lack of blog participation over the past few weeks I have been less than inspired to do my review bomb.  However, everyone is cancelling on me at work because we're getting some snow in a little while (wusses) and I am sick of shopping on Amazon.  So here it goes, jerks!

Ritual (Modus Anomali)

(2012) ***1/2 (if I understood the ending)

           * (if I don’t understand the ending)

I don’t know how to rate this given my confusion over the “twist” at the end of the film.  A man awakens buried alive in a forest.  Clawing his way out he finds a cabin with a television and video camera inside.  The camera has a note on it that says, “Press play”.  He watches in horror a video of a masked man murdering a pregnant woman.  Stumbling backwards in terror he trips over the dead woman seen in the video.  What follows is a Momento-like mystery that is highly engrossing as the man pieces together what happened.  The problem is that I didn’t understand the ending.  I have looked online and even the explanations make no sense to me.  Perhaps you guys will watch it next year and give me your take?

Blackout

(2008) ***

Three people become stuck in an elevator during a blackout.  Slowly we learn their back stories and it eventually becomes apparent that one of them is a serial killer.  Fun, tense stuff. I love a good predicament!

The Task

(2011) **

A group of reality-show game contestants must spend a night in a “haunted” jail.  A completely unrealistic story as the game show contestants are placed in very dangerous scenarios.  Fun but stupid.

Apartment 143

(2012) *

This is a lazy, low-budget version of the Paranormal Activity films that takes place in a small apartment with an unlikable cast and very few scares.

.

Dark Skies

(2013) **

With echoes of Poltergeist and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you have seen this plot a thousand times before.  A family moves into a large home in a remote area and strange things begin to happen.  This is certainly watchable but it offers nothing new or very interesting.

Tourist Trap

(1979) ***

Creepy Mr. Slausen owns a defunct roadside souvenir shop/wax museum filled with some of the creepiest mannequins you will ever see.  When a group of teenagers seek help after their car runs out of gas (who runs out of gas?) Mr. Slausen is all too happy to offer them shelter in his off-putting establishment.  This was a fun 70s find that is a (slight) step above the usual slasher stuff from that era!

House of Frankenstein

(1944) **

JSP and I simultaneously watched this while on our cell phones.  We were going to do a joint review but he's too burnt out to write more reviews and he is unable to get online at work given that he was recently promoted to a new position.

When the popularity of the classic Universal Monsters started to wane, Universal started to combine the monster franchises (see also:  Freddy vs. Jason, Alien vs. Predator, etc).  What should have been a “can’t miss” opportunity (Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Wolf Man all in the same movie!), this flaccid, disjointed story goes nowhere.  The first 20 minutes of the film features a resurrected, homely, Dracula who dies once again before ever meeting his monster peers.  The rest of the story is a jumbled mess and Karloff doesn't even play any of the monsters!  Fail.

Fingerprints

(2006) **

Fingerprints is based on a Texas urban legend involving a school bus full of children who all perished when their bus became stuck on some train tracks.  As the legend goes if you drive onto the train tracks and put your car in neutral the ghosts of the children will push you to safety.  Some townsfolk even claim to have seen fingerprints on the back of their vehicles.  Melanie, who just completed a stint in rehab, moves into her parents’ new home in the small Texas town.  Soon the children’s ghosts begin to haunt her in an effort to help her solve a decades old mystery.  Meh.  Generic and not scary for even one second.  I should know to avoid any movie starring Lou Diamond Phillips.

Overall I watched a lot of terrific movies this year.  If people comment on this post I will write up my superlatives!  If I don't receive comments I guess there is always more I can purchase on Amazon now that I just joined Prime, woo-hoo!