Blind Horror Reviews

After reading my rant on Halloween 3, jiraffejustin suggested that I start a thread where I just talk about horror movies. So I thought about that for a moment, and decided to do just that.
Specifically, I am going to talk about horror movies that I have just watched for the very first time, hence the title of the thread. And trust me, I have an excess of them. I've mentioned a couple of times that there's this "big stack" I have of movies I haven't watched yet. Well, that was an understatement.

See all those DVDs and Blu-Rays laying on their sides? I haven't watched any of those, and most of them are indeed part of the horror genre.
Another idea that jiraffejustin had was something where I'd pick out a movie once or twice a month for us to watch, and we'd do a double review of it. I hope this will be okay with jj, but I've decided to make it a weekly thing. And it doesn't just have to be us two that do these reviews; you can join in on it too. At the end of each review that I do here, I'm going to say what next week's movie is. If it's something you've already seen, by all means share your thoughts any time you want.
Lastly, if you have any good horror flicks you'd like to recommend, just let me know and I'll consider watching it in the future if I haven't seen it. If I have seen it, I'll still tell you what I thought about it.

This is a film that I've been looking forward to since late 2011.
On Youtube, there's this site called channelfrederator which used to have a weekly show where people would recommend some cool animated shorts that you could watch online. One week, they named T is for Toilet as the short of the week. I went ahead and watched that, and it was probably the most disgusting animation I'd seen, but it was awesome.
I subscribed to the creator of this short, Lee Hardcastle, and in a video he posted later he talked about The ABCs of Death, an anthology horror film with one segment for each letter of the alphabet. There was a contest to see whose film would get to be entered for the letter T, and the purpose of this video was to ask his audience to vote for his film. He ended up winning, so good for him!
With the film comprising of 26 shorts, it does run for pretty long at 130 minutes, but it never gets boring. Each short is made by a different filmmaker, and as can be expected there is a wide variety of styles to be seen. While I was never scared by this horror film, it did elicit several feelings.
One of the best parts about watching this was that the titles of the shorts didn't appear until the end of each segment, and it was fun to try and figure out what each current letter stood for. I think the easiest one was Q, but most of these titles were freaking impossible to guess. I can guarantee that you will not be able to figure out every title in this film without cheating or already knowing what each letter stands for. You already know what T stands for, so you're welcome.
Naturally, some shorts in The ABCs of Death are way better than others, and I'm going to give you a super brief review for every single one.
A - an awesome and visceral murder scene followed by a silly, anticlimactic ending.
B - good.
C - meh.
D - one of the most impressive shorts, given the amount of animal training involved.
E - forgettable; I had to Google the movie's list of shorts just to remember what this was about.
F - really freaking weird; was this horror or soft core fetish porn?
G - dumb, and most likely the easiest of the shorts to make.
H - really fun and over the top.
I - disturbing, yet pointless.
J - weird and funny.
K - also weird and funny.
L - Disturbing and hard to watch, but darkly comedic and entertaining at the same time.
M - stupid.
N - same as M.
O - visually stimulating.
P - the most depressing of the shorts. I cried a little at the end.
Q - the funniest short of the bunch, which was sort of nice after sitting through P.
R - gruesome and squirm-inducing.
S - starts off really cool, then ends sloppily.
T - disgusting and awesome, like I said before.
U - very cool and entertaining. Both G and U are POV shorts, and U does it so much more impressively.
V - visually captivating and bloody as hell. This one has some of the best special effects in the whole movie.
W - my favorite out of the bunch. Certainly gets an A+ for creativity.
X - after being thoroughly entertained by W, I was thrust into an unrelentingly sickening vision. I thought T was disgusting, but this made me physically sick.
Y - I honestly thought that X was the grossest part of the picture until I saw this. I had to look away at one point, and I was even bent over the trashcan with my hand over my mouth for a moment.
Z - without a doubt, this was the most bizarre portion of ABCs of Death, making it the perfect conclusion. It reminded me a lot of Tokyo Gore Police, which is no surprise considering it was made by the same director.
So, those are my thoughts on the film. While some of these shorts are dumb like I said, the good ones made it well worth the watch. There's a little something here for everyone.
Next week's movie is going to be Smiley.

An unexpected stay at a relative's place in another state derailed my plans of seeing this one, but I'll get it watched and see how we compare on each short.

A - Like Joe said, this is uneven. The murder parts are done really well, but the ending is very bleh.
B - Unlike Joe, I didn't care for this one. I found it to be even sillier than the ending to A.
C - I do like the "Groundhog Day" element of it. Other than that, there isn't much to see.
D - The animal was a pretty good actor, but the story was meh.
E - Out of the first five, this is definitely the worst one. Bad acting, bad script, bad premise, just bad.
F - Definitely weird, but totally funny. I am almost ashamed to say that I enjoyed this at all.
G - What Joe said.

I'll finish this up tomorrow. I'm really tired, I should probably sleep now.

I think you've both done well to sit through this. This is the sort of film which, just the idea of seeing, bores me.

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5-time MoFo Award winner.

No shame, dude. I usually enjoy weird sh*t like that myself. Mutant Girls Squad is a perfect example.

Welp. Here I go again, let's see if this gets any better.

H - My favorite so far I think. It's just a kooky live-action version of the cartoons from the Looney Tunes era. Except maybe a little more violent and adult-oriented. The demon seed of Tex Avery could have done the H short.
I - The voice-over was really annoying, and with no backstory this short doesn't work.
J - Some of the surreal stuff worked, but it's nothing to write home about.
K - Didn't care for it.
L - Yeah, this was messed up. Parts of it were solid, but I wouldn't recommend it.
M - bleh.
N - I actually liked this one. It's silly, but compared to what it has been surrounded by, it's gold.
O - Visually stimulating is right. It's quite beautiful, even though it's hard to tell what is actually going on, and the sound isn't great. (directed by the same people that directed Amer, which makes sense now. I highly recommend Amer.)
P - F*cked up. Not in a good way though.
Q - It really does stand out from the rest of the shorts. It's a breath of fresh air after sitting through most of this film so far.
R - Incredibly violent, but not terribly interesting.
S - Starts off like some cheesy exploitation film, complete with terrible dialogue. I like some exploitation, but this is doing it wrong. Also that cgi fire. ugh. Even worse, the ending.
T - Now, this is the best of the bunch so far.
U - Felt like playing a first-person video game, but I don't think that is necessarily a good thing. For first-person point of view, you should see the recent Maniac remake.
V - Didn't care for it.
W - Certainly the most original short in the whole movie. I approve of it, it's almost like if Tim and Eric made a short for this film, except not as funny.
X - Gross. Ugh. Nasty. It's pretty good though, you just need a strong stomach.
Y - Joe wasn't wrong. This short takes the cake for nastiness.
Z - They cranked the weird level all the way up to 11 for this one. It's....weird. I don't know if I like it or not, but it was...weird.

Overall, I couldn't really recommend this film, but I do urge everyone to go to youtube and watch T is for Toilet. It's easily the best bit of the movie. This film didn't really have a great a chance of being good, as it takes a small part of horror films and tries to make a short around them without actually giving you any substance with it.

If I were to rank it, it only gets 9 popcorns out of 26. B, F, H, N, O, Q, T, W, and Z are the only shorts worth seeing.

Thank you for sharing, Justin. While I disagreed on several things, you did have some good points to make.

Thanks.

I expected there to be some disagreement there for us, I think that is the nature of there being 26 films in one. At least now we have a small gauge on what we both like or dislike.

Yep

When someone meets a stranger on webcam and sends them the message "I did it for the lulz" three times, a maniac with a smiley stitched to his face will appear and murder the stranger for the sender's viewing pleasure.



Smiley is yet another movie that I discovered through Youtube. In this case, the movie was directed by Michael Gallagher of totallysketch, whose channel I unsubscribed to a while back. Instead of being a comedy channel, totallysketch pretty much became the official Smiley promotion channel. However, I still wanted to see this film, because I thought it looked really creepy, and though the premise sounded a little similar to Chain Letter it was still twisted enough to catch my interest.
To start off, the entire first scene of this movie is unpromising. Within five minutes, we get a gratuitous ass shot, some shoehorned exposition about the plot, and two fake jump scares. By “fake” jump scares, I mean the type of jump scare where the thing that's supposed to make you jump turns out to be perfectly harmless. And yes, there are several more of these to follow.
Along with those jump scares, what cliched horror picture would be complete without the main protagonist waking up from several nightmares sitting upright in bed? This movie has it all!
There's another early scene overflowing with stupidity where the main girl goes to a party. One guy, who is surrounded by everyone in attendance, gets on a computer and meets some random girl on a webcam. He types in that infamous "luls" message and watches as she gets her throat slit. Everyone except for the main girl (who is quite understandably freaked out) laughs it up, because they insist that this is all fake. Because, you know, every random stranger you meet on a webcam site has this special appliance on their neck filled with fake blood, as well as some goon hiding off-screen with a Smiley mask and a knife. For the lulz!
There's an incredibly stupid twist at the end which attempts to explain this scene, but all it does is raise more questions.
The one thing that I enjoyed about this film was that it featured cameo appearances by some of the director's Youtube pals. Toby Turner has some fun scenes, Destorm appears a couple of times and does practically nothing, and Steve Greene overacts like nobody's business. Come to think of it, there are some people I've met in real life who talk like Greene's character (they're called douchebags), so I'll give his acting a pass. I already knew going into this that Shane Dawson plays a supporting role, and I expected him to be terrible, but he was surprisingly decent.
The most accomplished actors in this movie are Roger Bart and Keith David. Bart plays a smarmy college professor, and David appears very late in the film as a typical no-nonsense detective who doesn’t believe in Smiley. And yes, their performances do stand out.
As for the main girl who I've mentioned on and off, I suspect that her only requirement during auditions was to be able to act scared, because she succeeds in that regard with flying colors. When she’s having a normal conversation, though, I feel like I’m watching a high school play. Still, the actress playing her roommate makes her look like an Oscar contender.
Overall, Smiley is just another generic horror flick that borrows heavily from superior films like Scream, Urban Legend, and Cry Wolf. As for his status as a horror icon, I'd rank this movie's killer somewhere between the clown from Amusement and the Jason Voorhees wannabe from Bloody Murder.
To Justin and everyone else who reads this, I suggest that you skip this movie. There are better things that you could be doing with your time.
Score: 2/10
Next week’s movie is going to be Close Your Eyes.

haha. I saw the trailer awhile back and knew I'd never watch that movie.

I might try to catch Close Your Eyes and give some thoughts on it too.

A hypnotherapist who can see inside the minds of his patients must unlock the memories of a traumatized little girl in order to help the police catch the occultist madman she escaped from.



Now, I realize the plot isn't exactly overflowing with originality, but it's the type of stuff that you've seen before done extremely well. There's even a point near the end that reminded me of a certain story by H.P. Lovecraft, and anything that reminds me of Lovecraft is cool in my book. I won't specify which story, because if I did I'd be spoiling the plot of this movie.
Close Your Eyes is a hybrid between a detective thriller and a psychological horror story. As can be expected from a detective movie, there is a lot of dialogue and it's a bit of a slow burn, but the dialogue scenes are still riveting as long as you invest yourself.
There's one scene of real-life horror at the very beginning, and for a while after that the only scares come from some dream sequences, the most effective of which involving a needle as wide as a drinking straw. The real horror does kick in during the second half, though, and for me it packs a punch. There were even a couple of moments that brought tears to my eyes.
The acting is all top notch. The main were unknown to me, but they gave memorable performances. One face that I recognized was Fiona Shaw, who makes a cameo appearance in which she's barely recognizable as an aged author. The hypnotist's wife also looked familiar, and upon looking her up on IMDB I found out that she was the badass princess from The Lord of the Rings.
In the end, I'd pretty much recommend this movie to anyone who thinks it sounds like something they'd like. I'm not even a fan of detective movies, and I ended up liking it.
Score: 8/10
Next week's movie is going to be 388 Arletta Avenue.

A man named James is under the 24-hour surveillance of a faceless psychopath.



Not only does Tribeca have its own film festival, but now there's a studio which features some festival favorites. And 388 Arletta Avenue is their first movie. Have they started off with a bang?
As the word "surveillance" may imply, this movie is shot in the found footage style which most horror fans have grown sick of. I know I'm in the minority, but I really liked the first Paranormal Activity, so I went into this with cautious optimism. The premise sounds really cool, too; a man being unwittingly stalked by an unknown person whose soul purpose is to unhinge him? That could be legitimately creepy.
As it turns out, the first half of this movie is incredibly slow. The stalker starts off by screwing around with James by sneaking into his house while he's away and resetting his alarm clock, as well as adding some new music to his computer and burning a CD which he places in the car. James suspects that his wife went into his office and did this, and he goes off on her. That night when he comes home from work, his wife is gone. She didn't pack her bags or anything before leaving, she just vanished without a trace.
During the first forty minutes or so of this movie, my feelings ranged from bored to passively interested. It was hard for me to care about what was going on. It does pick up at a point when the stalker does something to James' cat; I usually have a soft spot for animals.
James himself really isn't likeable in this movie. For a while, I thought that might have been the point of his character, to be unsympathetic. He suspects that the reason for his wife's disappearance may be due to the fact that he pissed someone off in the past; there's a secretary at work who he may or may not have had an affair with; his relationship with her is never really made clear. Also, there's a guy who James used to bully back in school, and that guy was the only character I gave a damn about. There's a confrontation between James and this guy that establishes how much of a monster James really is, and it was at that point that I lost all sympathy.
There's another point during the final act where James breaks down and starts crying, and while I was watching this I honestly didn't feel anything. I'm still not sure whether I was supposed to sympathize with him or not.
To this movie's credit, I will admit that the ending was about perfect. In fact, it would have been a whole lot better if there was a stronger movie to precede it.
One thing that I know a lot of people won't like is that the stalker's motivations are never clear. I wasn't bothered by that, though. In A Game of Shadows, Sherlock Holmes said that sometimes people do bad things because they can. And that was pretty much the case with this person. I thought that was cool, but with a villain who you know nothing about and an utterly unlikeable protagonist, the movie just falls flat.
Overall, I didn't think 388 Arletta Avenue was terrible, but I'm probably going to forget about it before lunch time. I don't really recommend it.
5/10
Next week's movie is going to be Sucker: The Vampire.

Anthony the vampire plays in an underground rock band to lure young groupies to their doom.



I had a great introduction to Troma with Cannibal: The Musical, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, and The Toxic Avenger 1 + 2. However, I've also seen some really bad ones like Suicide, Rabid Grannies, The Ruining, Go to Hell, and The Toxic Avenger 3 + 4. So I went into this movie with low expectations.
The main character of the film is Reed, who disposes of the vampire Anthony's victims when he's done feeding on them. And he is the best part of the film. He provides all of the comedy in this picture. My favorite part is when he approaches his master as a stereotypical monster assistant, hunched over with a pillow stuffed into the back of his shirt and speaking with the worst Transylvanian accent I've ever heard. Even when he wasn't making me laugh, Reed was always entertaining to watch when he was onscreen.
Usually the vampires in a horror movie are the most interesting characters, but Anthony is just boring. He isn't likeable, charming, or even funny. There's a point in the film where he finds out that he's contracted a deadly virus from one of his groupies, and the movie tries to take on this new dramatic feeling that does not work at all.
Also, my biggest gripe with Sucker is that Anthony's two bandmates are killed off in the first half of the movie by Van Helsing's ancestor, and they are immediately forgotten about. I don't recall there being any point where Anthony was like "Oh my, it seems as though my guitarist and drummer have both gone missing. How very queer." None of that. They're dead, they're gone, that's it.
One good thing that I was able to take away from this movie besides the comedy was that there were some fine-looking women in it. I'm fully aware that hot women do not make a movie good and I don't normally point this out anyway, but the reason I'm bringing it up is because someone once said that Troma is where ugly people go to act. Apparently, that's not always the case. Even if you prefer men, you've got Anthony to look at.
In the end, Sucker is the first Troma movie I've seen that was merely okay. It wasn't a complete waste of time, but it wasn't anything special. I'll give it a slightly higher score than last week's movie just because it managed to make me laugh on occasion. This hasn't been my longest review on the thread, I know, but that's because there's not much for me to say about this movie.
If you're a die hard fan of Troma or vampire movies, or if you'll watch the worst movies ever just to see some nudity, give Sucker a shot. If none of those apply to you, skip it.
5.5/10
Next week's movie is going to be Super Hybrid.

This sounds like someone at Troma has read The Vampire Lestat.

I don't know if you are taking requests, but have you seen any of the following?:

Cannibal Holocaust
Blind Beast
Suspiria
Amer
Carnival of Souls (1962)
Eyes Without a Face
Tetsuo, the Iron Man
Hausu

I'd be interested in hearing what you thought about them.

I've seen Carnival of Souls and Suspiria, and I'm sorry but I didn't like them. I don't remember anything about COS.
As for Suspiria, it had some cool moments but I thought the story was rather weak, and the ending was just stupid. I know that it's considered a classic by many, but I wasn't impressed.
I'll look for the other titles, especially Cannibal Holocaust, which I've been meaning to see for a while anyway. Thanks for the recommendations.

Holy sh*t, I see the connection now xD

That is the problem with a lot of Troma movies, you really have to dig to find good ones that are not directed by Lloyd Kaufman. And on that not, watch Tromeo and Juliet. That is another good Troma flick.

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