Mortuary Movie Review

Runtime: 94 minutes
Rating: R
Release Date: March 25, 2006
Director: Tobe Hooper

Leslie Doyle (Denise Crosby, Dolly Dearest) decides to move her two children to a remote house after the death of her husband. The old house was the mortuary in town, and she wants to start fresh and reopen the old building. Jamie (Stephanie Patton) is a little too young to really care, but Jonathon (Dan Byrd, The Hills Have Eyes) isn’t too happy with the change.

Jonathon heads off to the local diner to pick up dinner, and he runs into a local loser who somehow manages to have two girlfriends. The guy tells him the legend of Bobby Fowler who once lived in his house, and how Bobby was abused and horribly deformed. Rita, the owner of the diner, interrupts, telling them that Bobby never died, and she knows because she sometimes sees him scrounging for food out back. Jonathon doesn’t really pay attention because he’s too busy crushing on Rita’s niece Liz.

Cal and his girlfriends head into the cemetery near the mortuary and start fooling around when Bobby wanders out. It turns out that Bobby is actually infected by some weird disease and he passes it on to the teens. The teens disappear for a few days, which leads to the sheriff looking for them. They naturally start spreading the infection to others in town, including Leslie, leaving Jonathon and his friends as the only ones who can stop it.

Mortuary is easily one of the best Tobe Hooper films out there, regardless of what some might say. I saw it for the first time years ago, watching it on YouTube, and I recently bought a set that had it included with 7-9 other films. While those pretty much suck, this one is aces.

Lee Garlington who plays Rita is worth the watch all by herself. After one of the infected teenagers vomits on her, she flashes back to the 1960s and 1970s when she was a crazy drug user. She even manages to add humor when she’s not onscreen, shouting in the background about seeing colors. I also have a minor crush on Dan Byrd, which was once creepy, but now less so given that he’s of legal age.

Mortuary is an interesting film because it mixes horror and comedy without going too far in the comedic direction. The humor is definitely there, but it’s a little blacker than some might expect. I’m personally a big fan of the movie and even though I disliked most of the other movies in the set, I’ll definitely hold onto it.

Movie Review: The Possession

Runtime: 92 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Release Date: August 31, 2012
Director: Ole Bornedal

An older woman is sitting at home and trying to find a way to open an old wooden box. The woman tries to break it open, but something grabs her and tosses her around the room. Her son suddenly arrives and starts banging on the door, but she remains passed out on the floor.

Clyde (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Supernatural) recently went through a divorce with his wife Stephanie (Kyra Sedgwick, The Closer). It apparently didn’t slow her down any because she’s already dating a dentist named Brett (the yummy Grant Show, Melrose Place) who makes breakfast for them and hangs around a lot. Clyde takes his daughters Hannah and Em for the weekend and shows them his new house. Em seems a little upset because it means her parents aren’t getting back together.

On the way home, Hannah makes her dad stop at a yard sale because he needs dishes and silverware. Em finds herself drawn to an old wooden box with weird inscriptions on the sides, and Clyde buys it for her. When she wants to open it later, he can’t find a way to get the lid off. Later, the box mysteriously comes open, and she finds a dead moth, a tooth, and a ring, which she puts on her own finger.

Clyde tells the girls that he saw raccoons on the front porch. A few days later, they come home and find something in the kitchen. The thing rushes out the doggy door, and Clyde assumes it was an animal because he finds the refrigerator open and food all over the floor. Em begins developing an attachment to the box, even taking it to school with her and getting into a fight with another child. Just as Clyde starts thinking that there might be something more to the box, Stephanie begins doubting his role in their lives.

What can you say about a movie where a man’s teeth actually begin falling out of his head? That scene alone made the movie. The other scene that got to me was when the little girl was standing in front of the bathroom mirror staring at something in her throat. As she held a flashlight in her hand, she saw fingers coming up her throat. Granted the trailer showed that scene frequently, but it still got to me.

It’s funny because when I left the theater after seeing The Possession, I didn’t think it was very good. The more I thought about it though, the more I realized that I actually enjoyed it. I do have to admit that I have a crush on Morgan, but he’s looking a little rough here, which gave me the chance to stare at Grant Show. I can definitely see myself watching this again when it lands on DVD.

Movie Review: Paranormal Entity

Runtime: 88 minutes
Rating: NR
Release Date: December 22, 2009
Director: Shane Van Dyke

Paranormal Entity opens with a warning, letting the viewers know that a young man named Thomas raped and murdered his sister and another woman before jumping into the film.

Ellen (Fia Perera) lives in her home with her daughter Samantha (Erin Marie Hogan) and her son Thomas (Shane Van Dyke). The family lost their husband/father the year before, and Ellen started talking to him after his death. After a chance encounter at a “weird store,” a woman tells her that she can contact the dead by writing letters. Ellen begins writing letters to her dead husband, which leads to a haunting in the house.

Thomas starts recording the family early on, hoping to capture evidence of the haunting. As the film progresses, Thomas starts capturing some odd footage of his mother seemingly contacting something from beyond. Once the ghost starts attacking Samantha, the family realizes that the creature haunting them is not their dead father.

Paranormal Entity is one of those films that I passed dozens of times at the video store (yes, we still have one or two of those left in these parts). When I saw it pop up on Netflix, I added it to my queue, thinking that it was one of those movies I would never get around to watching. Then, I bought a random set of horror films from Walmart and decided to watch all of those movies in a row, which included this one. Is it wrong that I want my 50 cents back?

This film calls itself an homage to Paranormal Activity, but it’s just a pure rip-off. When Thomas decides to investigate things in the attic, I kept waiting for him to come across burned/destroyed photographs. Despite that, it does have one or two good moments.

One of the best scenes comes when Ellen wanders downstairs in the middle of the night, sits down at the coffee table, and starts writing. The vacant look on her face and the dark lighting definitely ups the creepy factor. Unfortunately, most of the movie feels like something I’ve already seen before.

Paranormal Activity 4 Movie Review

Runtime: 88 minutes
Rating: R
Release Date: October 19, 2012
Director: Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman

I have a confession to make: I despised the Paranormal Activity movies for a long time. I watched the first one and spent the entire film waiting for something to happen. I watched the second one and walked out halfway through it. By the time the third one came along, I was ready to give up on the franchise entirely. Imagine my surprise when I sat through all three films and discovered that they weren’t too bad.

Paranormal Activity 4 opens by rehashing the last few minutes of Paranormal Activity 2. Katie (Katie Featherstone) steals Hunter away in the middle of the night. The film then jumps ahead a few years, and Alex (Kathryn Newton) is filming her little brother’s soccer game. As she pans the camera across the field, she spots a strange little boy sitting by himself.

The same little boy starts showing up unexpectedly, hanging out in the treehouse when no one is there and acting oddly. One night, Alex hears an ambulance at the house across the street where the little boy Robbie lives. The next thing she knows, her mother Holly (Alexondra Lee, Special Unit 2) takes the little boy into their house until his mother (Katie from the other films) comes back from the hospital. Naturally, odd things start happening in their home, and Alex manages to capture the footage on cameras placed around the house.

As soon as the movie ended, my boyfriend whispered under his breath, “thank god it’s over.” It probably didn’t help that the only other people in the theater were a group of teenagers who screamed every 10 minutes even when nothing remotely scary happened. That’s my major qualm with these films: nothing ever happens. You spend most of the movie sitting on the edge of your seat and maybe one or two scares happened.

But I do have to say that I found a few things interesting in Paranormal Activity 4. I loved the use of the Kinect, and my boyfriend immediately wanted to go home and do the same thing with ours. I also enjoyed the use of laptop webcams, but I can’t imagine any computer that would continuously shoot footage all day long without anyone touching the camera. Case in point: Alex turns on the camera on her mom’s computer, which she uses in the kitchen. The woman only uses it once throughout the whole movie, and she somehow has no clue that it records her every action.

Several reviews and comments about the movie claimed that it would answer a lot of questions from the previous films, but I ended up with more questions than ever. Why would she steal her nephew only to let him go and track him down later? How many freaking people are in this weird cult, and do they all live in the same area? How the heck can Katie afford to keep running all over the place, paying for hospital treatments, renting new houses, etc. without a job?

I didn’t think Paranormal Activity 4 was a horrid film, but I expected more from it. I’m disappointed that I wasted the money to see it in the theater because it’s definitely a rental only.

Forget Me Not Movie Review

Runtime: 103 minutes
Rating: R
Release Date: October 22, 2009
Director: Tyler Oliver

Forget Me Not opens with a little girl running home from a cemetery in tears, only to reach her parents with no memory of what happened. The film then jumps to the present day as a group of teenagers prepare to celebrate their recent graduation. Sandy (Carly Schroeder, Mean Creek) and her little brother Eli (Cody Linley, Cheaper by the Dozen) recently scored full scholarships to Stanford while their friends all have plans of their own.

Their friend TJ (Sean Wing) invites the group over for a party at his house. Later, they head to the cemetery seen at the beginning of the film and start playing a game they did as kids. A young woman comes out of nowhere and asks if she can play. After heading deeper into the cemetery, Sandy sees the young woman standing on the edge of the cliff. When the girl realizes that she doesn’t remember her, she says that she will soon and jumps over the edge. The police investigate but find no sign of the girl.

While it takes awhile for the film to reach this part, it quickly becomes a little more interesting. Sandy’s friends slowly begin disappearing, dying in new and unusual ways. One girl gets dumped by her boyfriend who slept with another woman the night before. After tossing his class ring in the lake, he leaves her there and she begins swimming across the lake, only to find the body of the same girl from the night before floating. It’s the last thing she sees before drowning. Another man disappears after the same girl crawls into the backseat of his car and forces him off the road.

The creepiest parts of the movie come when the audience learns that only Sandy remembers those friends. The others have no memories of the people who died. She realizes this when she sees her friend Layla having sex with another man and no one thinks she is cheating because she doesn’t have a boyfriend.

It also leads to a scene where the group finds themselves at TJ’s house, which is now abandoned and deserted. This is a great scene because as Sandy wanders through the empty and destroyed house, she flashes back to the moments they shared the night before. She can clearly see the past and the present, but she has no idea why. Even though the people around her make it clear that the present is how they remember things, she knows that something weird is going on.

I actually really liked Forget Me Not up until the end of the film, mainly because it was a little confusing. There are two possible endings to the film. One is that everything occurred because of something they did as children, and the ending becomes a little more cut and dry. The other ending is more of a psychological ending where everything that happened only occurred in her mind. No matter which ending the director intended, this is one that I could watch again.

Movie Review: Alligator X aka Xtinction: Predator X

Runtime: 90 minutes
Rating: NR
Release Date: August 18, 2010
Director: Amir Valinia

Laura le Crois (Elena Lyons, Club Dread) comes back to her home town to discover that her father is missing. He owes the bank a ton of money, and they are threatening to foreclose on his land. She has a brief run-in with Charles LeBlanc (Mark Sheppard, Supernatural, Warehouse 13), a doctor who offers to buy the land before the bank forecloses. After the two fight and he leaves, she meets with Sheriff Tim Richards (Lochlyn Munro, The Terror Experiment, The Tooth Fairy). Richards reveals that LeBlanc has started acting a little weird and doing experiments in the swamp. Do you see where this is going?

A young man and his girlfriend stop by and hire the boat. Since her dad is missing, Laura decides to lead them on a swamp tour herself, despite not being in the swamp in years. Naturally, the boat dies in the middle of nowhere and they find themselves hunted by a giant alligator. Laura begins wondering if her ex-husband, the infamous doctor, had a role in the genetic engineering of the monster.

I absolutely love creature features, especially bad ones made for television and those that go straight to DVD. Alligator X should be right up my alley, but it was so bad that I spent most of the movie rolling my eyes. Some of the reviews I read claimed that Lyons was a great actress, but I thought she did a terrible job. I’ve seen her on several television shows, most notable USA High as a teen, and she always seems to play the same snobby, stuck up character. Even here, when she’s supposed to be a poor girl who made good, she still comes across as incredibly snobby.

The one bright spot in Munro. Munro made a career playing a variety of roles in straight to DVD and low budget films, and he seems to have a preference for horror films. He actually does a believably job as portraying a man who is still in love with the girl he loved in high school, and you can believe that he is willing to do anything to save her.

Sheppard is almost as good in the film. He seems to know that this is a low budget movie, but he still puts his best foot forward. He does a great job playing a man who might have feelings for his ex-wife even though he wants to keep working on something that will change the world. If everything in the movie was as good as the acting of those two, Alligator X could be a much better movie.

Bait Movie Review

Runtime: 91 minutes
Rating: R
Release Date: September 1, 2012
Director: Kimble Rendell

What can you say about a movie that involves blood thirsty sharks running loose after a tsunami hits a beach town? These are the kind of movies that I love because I know that I will get a kick out of them, but Bait actually comes across as a little boring.

Josh (Xavier Samuel) opens the film, lounging on the beach with his girlfriend Tina and talking about their upcoming move. His best friend gets attacked by a shark, and while he tries to save him, the man dies. Josh then broods about his life, breaking up with Tina and quitting his job.

One year later and things aren’t looking up for Josh. Tina comes back into town with a new man, and Josh works in a grocery store, which gets held up by two men, including Doyle (Julian McMahon, Charmed). Nothing really happens until the tsunami strikes, sending thousands of gallons of water into the grocery store.

One group of survivors climbs on top of the shelves, and the group includes a cop named Todd (Martin Sacks), his shoplifting daughter Jamie (Phoebe Tonkin), Tina, her boyfriend Steven, Doyle, his partner Kirby, and two people who work there. An underground tunnel provides access to the parking garage where Jamie’s boyfriend Ryan (Alex Russell) and a couple named Heather and Kyle get stuck. Naturally, the sharks begin attacking and both groups must figure out a way to survive.

I thought the premise of Bait sounded interesting, which is why I gave it a shot, and believe it or not, it does have a few good moments. Heather is easily one of the most annoying characters, constantly carting her dog around with her. When Kyle risks his life to get away with her dog, you will find yourself screaming at him to just drop it. When he finally does, you can’t help but laugh. There’s another nice moment between the two when Heather refuses to get out of the car because of her expensive shoes, and he has to admit that he lied and said they were designer shoes.

The group in the grocery store isn’t quite as entertaining. McMahon is a great actor and a personal fave of mine, but he almost seems to sleepwalk through the movie. When he suggests making a large fishing hook to catch the shark, it’s so ridiculous that I found myself waiting for someone to make a fake drum sound.

Bait never really delivers any scares, but it doesn’t seem like it should either. Despite having a bigger budget than most of the films that I watch, it plays like a basic run of the mill creature feature made for Syfy.