J*A*S*M

After a long time a film where I ended up relating so much to the characters that I would love to go with them and sit somewhere, or for a drink, or to have a chat. A nice movie about a nice town, emotional and melancholic. Great soundtrack.

What a lazy film! The creators evidently took the path of least resistance, recycled everything they could and really, really avoided doing anything interesting, let alone untraditional, God forbid! Not a single interesting scene, not a single interesting jump-scare. Utterly empty. The recent Annabelle at least had that brisk camera work and a couple of effective jump-scares, but this one is also boring in its execution, like made for TV.

Heavy in psychology, a bit weaker when it comes to terror. The Babadook is certainly not a fun or happy movie. The characters are psychologically fucked-up long before any spook shows up, and the director translates this with a lot of skill. It made me pretty nervous almost from the beginning. A widowed - and sleep deprived - mother and her screaming and hyperactive son, both descending into a psychological maze, and you can only guess who is more bonkers. The core storyline about the monster from the book was quite uninteresting, I’ve seen similar ones countless times. I didn’t give a toss whether the Babadook was real or not, besides, the director doesn’t use it to scare the viewer much. I also have mixed feelings about the ending, where very impressive moments alternate with other less stellar. In fact, the last twenty minutes felt as if the thus far carefully built and maintained atmosphere was fully reset several times. The ending is slightly WTF, if not a little ridiculous; it felt out of place given the tone of the film up to that point. Overall, it’s good, very good, actually, but this year’s competitors Oculus and It Follows scared me more.

The idea of conveying to filmgoers the experience of walking through a ghost house with handheld cameras proved to be utterly pointless.

He wanted to be like Wan, tries to be like Wan, but it’s not Wan, who is it? The director of Mortal Combat 2. In the standard of consumer commercial horror, it’s passable, but also, and without debate, forgettable and pointless overall. We’ve had enough with demons, we need another trend.

The opening scene promises a competent and mysterious UFO sci-fi flick that would make even Mulder and Scully proud, but that impression begins to fade with the minutes. The ambitions were evidently lacking, the creators were happy enough with reprocessing The X-Files and Fire in the Sky. That could have been fine for some B-movie fun, as there aren’t many similar films, but for that the protagonists shouldn’t be so annoying. Really, those characters seem to be competing at which of them can be the least likeable. The winner, by the way, is the Sheriff’s deputy, who manages it in two scenes. The aliens, in addition, look run-of-the-mill and the climax kills it dead.

The protagonist, who basically never leaves the screen, is probably the biggest cunt in the history of cinema. It was good fun for a about forty minutes, the exchanges between the characters are funny, Onur Tukel always drops some incredibly crap that makes you hold your head and laugh. But then it weirdly starts grinding and I stopped having fun. 5/10

It has surprisingly weak performances, and it’s also uninteresting and unscary overall. It’s a pity that Cornwell didn’t follow up his decent The Haunting in Connecticut with something more ambitious. This is nothing but a made-for-TV B-movie that won’t offend anyone, but it’s not worth looking for, either.

Until the last moment I didn’t believe it was as bad as Filmbooster was saying (32%), but it is, it really is. I can’t understand how they allowed this decent anthology series to be run so much to the ground – though the list of directors, a much lower class than in the previous one, should have been a warning. But the saddest thing perhaps is that they stopped giving a fuck and abandoned even the original concept of a found VHS, replacing it with some utter nonsense about a mysterious ice-cream truck (really, I don’t get the what and how about it), while the stories themselves are no longer the classic found-footage format – the first one is in part some sort of documentary with captions and in part something shot with a normal camera. The only story worthy of attention is Parallel Monsters, by the the Spaniard Nacho Gigalondo. It would be average if we put it against the stories from last year and the year before, but in Viral is way better than the rest, and the rest is so bad that I don’t want to write any more about it.

Unfortunately, just your average found-footage, but worth watching just for that scene with the human-snake head. Ew!