THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: CABIN FEVER (2016) * ½

Cabin Fever is about as unnecessary a remake as there ever has been.  I mean, the original was only thirteen years old when this was made and from the looks of things, the franchise was far from being put on life support.  In fact, the DTV sequels were marginally better than most franchises.  I’m sure they could’ve squeezed out a few more of them before panicking and hitting the reboot button.  

The original film’s director, Eli Roth “presented” the film and also co-wrote the script.  However, I think this is one of those deals where the new filmmakers changed so little of the old script that the original screenwriter gets credit because of the writing guild rules.  I’m not sure why Roth did this, other than a paycheck, but the whole thing is just uninspired and a tad depressing, especially when you consider just how mind-blowing Cabin Fever was when it first came out.

If you’ve already seen the original, there’s very little reason to see this.  Sometimes, director Travis Zariwny remakes the original scene for scene using identical dialogue and camerawork.  There are a few concessions to updating the material, like when the characters complain about not having the internet to play video games, but even these moments land with a thud.  

The one big change is the fact that Deputy Winston is played by a woman, Louise Linton.  This isn’t one of those progressive types of changes where they give a woman an opportunity to update the role.   Instead, she just acts weird and crude, and the effect is just plain odd and doesn’t work at all.  Part of the problem is that Giuseppe Andrews was so memorably offbeat in the original that it’s hard to picture anyone else in the role.  Here, when Linton tries to act off-kilter, it just comes off feeling forced.  The socially awkward moments when she flirts with Matthew Daddario are painfully unfunny and are a bit of a chore to sit through.

Zariwny hits all the highlights of the original, but without the wit and style that Roth brought to the material.  There’s the finger bang scene, the kid who says “Pancakes!” (although he doesn’t do any random Kung Fu moves, which is disappointing), and the leg shaving scene, and yet all of it just feels like a hollow imitation than anything.  It’s almost like you’re watching an Unsolved Mysteries re-enactment of the original than a real movie.

Zariwny also oddly eschews the final nightmarish hospital sequence for whatever reason.  That was one of my favorite bits, so maybe it’s best he left it off limits.  I guess he figured he couldn’t top Roth so why try.  Instead, we get a lame post-credits tag, which adds very little.

In short, this Cabin Fever needs to be quarantined.

AKA:  Cabin Fever:  The New Outbreak.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: CABIN FEVER: PATIENT ZERO (2014) **

Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever is one of the great horror-comedies of the new millennium.  Ti West’s messy, but fun Cabin Fever 2:  Spring Fever is as good as you could hope for from a modern DTV horror sequel.  Kaare Andrews’ Cabin Fever:  Patient Zero is an adequate, yet thoroughly uninspired prequel that has a handful of good ideas, but never figures out a way to properly do them justice.

A group of friends take a cruise to the islands as part of their bachelor party festivities.  Meanwhile, on a nearby island, scientists are performing experiments on Patient Zero (the film’s lone star, Sean Astin), the cause of the flesh-eating disease in the first film.  Naturally, that’s the island where the partygoers decide to drop anchor.  It doesn’t take long before they become infected and try to fight their way off the island.

The scenes of the boating bachelor party bros are OK, but they lack the dark humor and outrageousness of the other films in the series.  Likewise, the scenes inside the laboratory are played far too seriously for their own good, which takes much of the fun out of it.  Maybe I would’ve felt different about the film if it hadn’t carried the Cabin Fever label.  I guess it’s a matter of expectations.  Shifts in tone within a particular series happen occasionally (Return of the Living Dead 3 is a good example), but this is a case where the more serious tone doesn’t quite work.  (Although I guess the fact that the women scientists all look like models and have plunging necklines is a clue that we shouldn’t take any of this seriously.)  

The laboratory setting is just novel enough to sustain your interest.  At least there was an attempt to try to take the horror out of the cabin and do something fresh with the concept.  It’s just a shame that Andrews doesn’t have the same touch Roth and West do when it comes to balancing the yuks with the yucks.

The good news is Patient Zero delivers on the gore.  Granted, that’s about the only department in which it delivers in (aside from some occasional gratuitous T & A), but we’ve got to take what we can get.  The inevitable escalation of the “finger bang” scene from the original is the obvious highlight and one of the rare moments where the film comes close to matching its predecessors in terms of melding gore and comedy.  Other notable gory goodies:  Blood puking, a skin-peeling catfight, and the deadly aftermath of a pistol’s recoil.  While some of the effects start to look like something out of a Troma movie by the end, you can at least say this for Andrews:  He isn’t afraid to toss the red stuff around.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: ANNABELLE: CREATION (2017) ** ½

A dollmaker (Anthony LaPaglia) and his wife (Miranda Otto) suffer the devastating loss of their daughter.  Years later, they open their home to a group of young orphan girls.  It doesn’t take long for one of the girls, who is stricken with polio, to become possessed, which might hamper her chances of being placed in foster care. 

The first Conjuring spin-off, Annabelle was thoroughly awful and had the distinction of being the worst major release horror film in recent memory.  David F. (Lights Out) Sandberg’s prequel manages to top it in the very first scene with a disturbing sequence detailing the accidental death of a child.  There’s a lot more going on here technically too.  Sandberg’s use of camera movement and effective atmospheric lighting, especially early on helps to set mood nicely.  He also delivers one or two crackerjack moments, like when a sheet begins walking around all by itself. 

The problem is, the stuff with the evil doll feels unnecessary.  The scenes of the orphan girls exploring the creepy house at night work much better.  These scenes are compelling, and every time the doll pops up fighting for screen time, it takes the wind out of the girls’ storyline.  Their lowkey moments are much more effective than the stuff involving the CGI oil slicks, gratuitous jump scares, and random appearances of the doll.  You almost get a sense that the doll was put in there so it could be sold as a Conjuring movie but deep in its heart, it wants to be its own thing.  It’s also too long at 109 minutes.  

Like Ouija:  Origin of Evil, Annabelle:  Creation manages to outdo the original in every way.  If you ever saw Ouija or Annabelle, you realize that wasn’t very hard to do, but still.  Neither film is exactly a home run or anything, but you at least have to appreciate the enormous uptick in quality.

Anthony LaPaglia does a fine job as the bereaved father, especially in the early scenes.  You’ll wish he had more to do though.  Stephanie Sigman is quite fetching as the sexy nun in charge of the girls.  I’d pay good money to see her in a reboot of the Laura Gemser Emanuelle series. 

Overall, Annabelle:  Creation works better as a possession movie than as an example of the killer doll genre.  In the end, I guess that was smart considering how bad the first Annabelle was.  It still has to be disappointing for anyone who walks in expecting a killer doll flick.

Hey, are you wondering where my review for the original Annabelle is?  Well, you can find it in my latest book, The Bloody Book of Horror, which is currently on sale at Amazon.  To get your copy, follow this handy link:  https://www.amazon.com/Bloody-Book-Horror-Mitch-Lovell/dp/1542566622/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1538450805&sr=8-3 

PRIME EVIL: DEMON SEED (1982) ** ½

So, in between all the various horror franchises, sequels and remakes I’ll be reviewing this month for The 31 Movies of Horror-Ween, I’m going to try to sprinkle in a few reviews for some of the bizarre, offbeat, and generally WTF movies I stumble upon while perusing Amazon Prime.  If you’re like me, you find tons of this oddball oddities while searching Prime.  Most of them have misleading titles, strange thumbnail images, and/or cryptic plot synopses.  Whenever I find something that looks incredibly weird (and sometimes just plain bad), I immediately put it into my watchlist.  Folks, this is about as close to being in a video store and renting the most random, strangest movie on the shelf you can find as we’re likely to get in the 21^st century, so we must embrace it.

The first film in this (hopefully ongoing) column is Demon Seed.

Now, Demon Seed is a film that’s popped up several times while searching for other movies with the word “Demon” in the title.  I incorrectly assumed it was the Demon Seed where Julie Christie gets impregnated by a horny supercomputer.  I looked a little closer and saw that the cast list was completely different, so I took a chance on it.  As it turns out, Demon Seed is actually Fury of the Succubus, a movie I’ve always wanted to see after reading about it in Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In.  While it isn’t perfect, it made my jaw drop enough times for me to want to create this new column.

The opening crawl states, “Loneliness is the gateway to the supernatural”.  Lucky for us, our main character, Lisa (Lana Wood) is a lonely married woman who is about to have a run-in with the supernatural.  She lives with her family in a house by the beach and… can I interject something here?  Why is it all these emotionally troubled women in these movies live by the beach?  Is it because it affords the director an opportunity to give the audience endless shots of actresses wandering around in a daze in their nightgown as they slowly sleepwalk towards the crashing surf?  It certainly helps to pad out the running time, but it does diddly for the atmosphere.  

Okay, where was I?  Oh, after having a bad dream, Lisa’s asshole husband, Carl (Don Galloway) picks a fight with her and storms out of the house.  That night, she is attacked and raped by an unseen force.

Remember when Wood played Plenty O’Toole in Diamonds are Forever?  Well, she gets plenty of tool in this movie.  Invisible demon tool that is.  These scenes are a lot like the invisible rape scenes in The Entity, except done on a nonexistent budget.  That is to say, they just rely on Wood to roll around the bed naked a lot.  That’s right, Wood gets plenty O’Nude scenes too. 

The specter isn’t always invisible though.  Sometimes it appears as a purple smudge on the camera lens.  Other times, it’s a projection of Octopussy’s Kabir Bedi on the ceiling. Or sometimes, it’s a pulsating pink light.  About halfway through the movie, Bedi just appears and starts making love to her in the flesh.  By this time Wood has become his willing sex slave, which starts to put a crimp in her already testy relationship with her husband.

So, what does Carl do?  He asks her best friend Ann-Marie (Britt Ekland, from The Man with the Golden Gun, and if you’re keeping score at home, that’s THREE James Bond alums in the picture) to check in on her.  When their hot tub almost kills poor Ann-Marie, Carl finally starts to realize the Wood Lana has been getting belongs to the devil. 

All of this SOUNDS great.  The first half when Wood is getting naked and yielding her will to the sexual desires of an unseen demon is good times.  The second half isn’t nearly as much fun.  It’s here where Ekland’s character becomes more prominent (she was top-billed don’t you know), which gets in the way of the supernatural shagging.  You also have to put up with a lot of blurry-vision nightmare sequences, many of which are too dark to make out.  Speaking of which, there’s a potentially awesome accidental death-by-guillotine scene that’s completely undermined by the fact you can barely see what’s going on.  

It also hurts that Wood gets less and less to do as the movie wears on.  She basically just stands around looking catatonic for the second half of the film.  The finale, which mostly requires the cast to hang around a burning basement before a few of them accidentally stumble into the flames, is weak too.  Hey, The Entity’s ending sucked too so what did you expect? 

Despite that, there are enough moments of WTF lunacy here to make Demon Seed marginally recommended.  You also get John Carradine popping up in one scene as a priest who offers up a lot of helpful plot exposition shortly after a funeral.  All in all, Demon Seed is worth planting.

AKA:  Satan’s Mistress.  AKA:  Dark Eyes.  AKA:  Demon Rage.  AKA:  Fury of the Succubus.  AKA:  Incubus.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: THE CONJURING 2 (2016) **

Paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) go to London to investigate a possessed girl who lives in a supposedly haunted house.  Together with a team of local doctors, they try to uncover the nature of the girl’s trauma.  The investigation is called off when a videotape surfaces that suggests the girl may be faking the whole thing.  However, thanks to their psychic abilities, the Warrens come back to the house and discover the supernatural shenanigans are very real.

Director James Wan did a fine job on The Conjuring, so it’s a bit of a mystery that he never hits a consistent tone with this sequel.  He often struggles to find a balance between the subtle scares (like toy fire trucks rolling around by themselves) and the over-the-top CGI nonsense (like the stupid looking “Crooked Man”).  It’s almost like there’s no middle ground in between the two.  The overreliance on jump scares also gets a bit grating as the film goes along.  The opening sequence, a séance set in the Amityville Horror house, is a lot of fun though, and it almost makes you wish the whole movie revolved around that.

Instead, we have a lot of shoehorned subplots that fight for supremacy.  In addition to the old geezer who’s trying to possess the girl, we also have a ghost nun (who seems to portend Ed’s demise), and the aforementioned Crooked Man specter (who… uh… doesn’t do much).  All of this just feels overstuffed.  I mean the haunted hag in a habit (who eventually got her own spin-off movie, which I may or may not be able to squeeze in this month) sort of belongs there, but that Crooked Man dude is rather unnecessary.  Not to mention the fact that he looks like he came out of an episode of Goosebumps or something.

The inflated running time (133 minutes) doesn’t help matters any.  The first half is especially slow going as it takes a good hour for the Warrens to finally take the trek to England.  From then on, things improve somewhat, but it lacks the panache of the original Conjuring in just about every regard.  The ending is also needlessly drawn out and curiously low on chills.

The scenes of the family in England dealing with Exorcist/Poltergeist-style happenings don’t have enough money shots to make for a fun (or scary) ride and the relationship stuff between Wilson and Farmiga isn’t all that compelling either.  Throughout the film you have a feeling that their talents are largely going to waste, which further cements the overall atmosphere of disappointment.  Wilson does get to do a not-bad Elvis impression when he sings “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You” to the kids.  If they ever make 3000 Miles to Graceland 2, Wilson would be right at home playing one of the leads.

The Conjuring 2 is just weak all the way around.  It’s especially lame whenever Wan tries to make the most mundane things seem supernatural.  I mean in one scene, a remote control disappears and we’re supposed to think the ghost did it.  Hell, I don’t know about you, but disappearing remote controls are an everyday occurrence in my house and you don’t see me calling Patrick Wilson over it.

For more horror reviews, check out my latest book, The Bloody Book of Horror, which is currently on sale at Amazon.  Get your copy here:  https://www.amazon.com/Bloody-Book-Horror-Mitch-Lovell/dp/1542566622/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1538450805&sr=8-3

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: SINISTER 2 (2015) * ½

Well, the first Sinister didn’t exactly set the world on fire, but we got a sequel to it anyway.  If you remember Sinister, you’re already one up on me.  All I remember is Ethan Hawke cashing a paycheck by watching snuff movies in his attic until a white-faced boogeyman came to kill his family.  

This time around, it’s Shannyn Sossamon’s family’s turn to be menaced by the weird boogeyman dude.  She and her two sons are hiding out at a remote farmhouse from her asshole abusive ex.  While she’s busy playing footsie with a private investigator (James Ransone), her kids are busy being shown snuff movies by the ghost children that inhabit the house.  Naturally, it’s only a matter of time before they’re trying to make a snuff flick of their own.

Sinister 2 basically remakes the original in a new setting with a different cast.  The results are all-too familiar.  The family drama is relatively uninvolving, and Shannon Sossamyn is no Ethan Hawke either.  At least Ransone (who is soon to be seen in It 2) is amusing as the nerdy, well-meaning, but ultimately ineffective investigator who becomes the family’s de facto protector.  Whenever he’s onscreen, the flick is at the very least tolerable.

Unfortunately, the horror elements are woefully lackluster, which doesn’t help matters any.  The scenes of the ghost kids showing Sossamon’s sons their various snuff films quickly become repetitive.  Most of them go on and on without much of a payoff.  The only marginally effective sequence is the one involving rats gnawing their way out of people’s stomachs.  That’s about the only gnarly moment in an otherwise forgettable, unnecessary sequel.  If we had one or two more sequences of this caliber, it might’ve worked.  As it is, there’s nothing remotely sinister about Sinister 2.

Hey, are you wondering where my review for the original Sinister is?  Well, you can find it in my latest book, The Bloody Book of Horror, which is currently on sale at Amazon.  To get your copy, follow this handy link:  https://www.amazon.com/Bloody-Book-Horror-Mitch-Lovell/dp/1542566622/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1538450805&sr=8-3 

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN

Well folks, it’s October.  It’s that time of the year again.  Time to switch your Twitter handle over to something horror related.  (In this case, I’ve changed mine to “Witch Lovell”.)  Time to change your blog format to an all-horror movie reviewing platform.  As per usual, I will be reviewing nothing but horror flicks this month.  31 movies in 31 days.  I have the line-up already sketched out and I’d say about 75% of the films will be taken from popular (and possibly not-so popular) horror franchises.  

Along the way, I will be also reviewing an occasional oddball “Deep Cut” and/or some crazy shit I stumble upon on Amazon Prime (which I’ll label as “Prime Evil”).  There’ll probably be a “real” movie review or two; but they will be more the exception than the rule.  Horror movies have always been my first love and it’s always a blast finding new shit to geek out about.  One thing is for sure, it’s going to be fun sharing some of my wild discoveries with you all, whether they are good or bad.

As you probably already know, my work schedule as well as my family life often prevent me from blogging on a daily basis.  As much as I’d love to review a single movie every day, it often just doesn’t work out that way.  That’s why I call it “The 31 Movies of Horror-Ween” and not “The 31 Days of Horror-Ween”.  I’m sure I’ll wind up watching so many that it’ll spill over well into November.

So what do you say?  Let’s start cracking!