You didn't think I was slacking, did you? That'd I'd only watched one film so far? HA! Don't make me laugh.
2. As Above, So Below (2014)This is a found footage film about a mixed group of Parisian thrill seekers, a student filmmaker, an adventurous anthropologist, and a guy who likes to repair artifacts for fun. Yeah, it's sort of a modern day Indiana Jones, only in a horror setting where the cast descends into the catacombs of Paris in the hopes of finding the Philosopher's Stone and in the process may well uncover the doorway to their own personal Hell.
I'm not big on found footage, but I'd seen this movie getting reevaluated by horror film critics on Twitter, so I thought it would be best to go seek it out and come to my own conclusions. End result? It's a mixed bag, but it's an inventive one that contains some arresting issues. Did it need to be found footage? In the context of what we get, I think it makes the situation more personalized, though I would hesitate to say it's always effective. The movie occasionally relies on jump scares and ridiculous ideas that work once and then become laughable. However, I did find myself liking it despite my bias.
3. Southbound (2015)I'm no stranger to anthology horror, and I was familiar with this crew's previous work in that area, particularly V/H/S. While I thought that one was a mixed bag, the trailers for this film looked interesting enough that I was willing to give it a shot.
And I loved it. Southbound flows between each story with effective ease and wraps around on itself, so that the end is the beginning is the end. Time doesn't make sense in context, but it doesn't have to, because this is a nightmarish world where regular people don't belong. While the stories aren't all equal, I wouldn't call any of them bad, just uneven. Of the five, the first and last are a part of the same, the third is genuinely disturbing and only gets worse as you think about it, and the fourth creates a world that I would have been willing to see as a complete film in its own right. Only the second story falls flat, and it's less the horror and more that the story just doesn't do anything for me.
But that third story? I have spent two days thinking about the ramifications of it.
4. Don't Look in the Basement (1973)I watched this purely out of loyalty to the idea of finally tracking down all of the Video Nasties. Yes, this movie was banned in Britain for its moral depravity, shocking violence, and general threat to society. While all of that is crap to attack and vilify a genre in what is most certainly a protectionist stunt (only one Video Nasty was a British film) in the same nation that produced Hammer Studios, it certainly adds a certain scuzzy gloss to these films.
In this movie, a psychiatrist is trying a new form of treatment on the mentally ill, to try and understand insanity while also treating the inmates as a family as opposed to criminals or sick people. While the approach doesn't work out, it is an almost understandable response to a doctor performing a lobotomy and then being horrified with the result of what was considered modern medical science. He probably shouldn't have given that one guy an ax though... It doesn't end well.
What you get is 90 minutes of a bunch of people acting crazy, and one poor psychiatric nurse trying to do her job only to realize that the new doctor in charge of the asylum is in actuality also a patient who took over after the previous doctor's murder. The nurse is only saved in the end by one of the mentally ill recognizing that she doesn't deserve to be trapped there, and then the movie ends with a murder spree. It's cheap, it's sleazy, it's often boring, and at times it's frustrating. Meh, they can't all be winners, folks. Still, I continue to look forward to future Video Nasties.
On to the next film!
