ESCAPE ROOM (2019) *

In my Haunt review, I told you all how much I hate walk-through haunted houses.  Allow me to begin my review of Escape Room by expounding on the idiocy of escape rooms.  They’re even higher than walk-through haunted houses on the list of shit that annoys Mitch.  They’re like a millennial version of murder mystery dinner theater, except they’re more annoying and there’s nothing to eat.  I’m sorry, I’m not gonna spend my time locked in a room trying to solve riddles and shit with people I can’t stand.  Now, I don’t want to waste too much time on the subject, but then again, Escape Room is so bad that I’d rather talk about literally anything else besides the movie.  Well, as they say… the only way around it is through it.

Six strangers receive Hellraiser-style puzzle boxes anonymously in the mail.  Once they solve them, they are given instructions to report to an escape room with the promise of a cash prize.  They soon find out the rooms are deadly, and they will all certainly die if they don’t work together to solve the riddles of each room. 

Escape Room is wall-to-wall typical predictable horror movie shit.  It’s basically a dressed-up version of Saw for millennials.  Yes, it’s another one of those deals where the characters are all atoning for their past sins, as each room is themed to their various misdeeds.  (A giant oven, a snowy wilderness lodge, an upside-down poolhall, etc.)

None of this really matters because you never care about any of the characters.  What is downright criminal is that the movie manages to waste to talents of the great Tyler Labine, who has the thankless role of the good ol’ boy of the group.  Only Deborah Ann Woll makes an impression as the soldier with PTSD.  Unlike Labine, she makes the most of her screen time and feels like the only character who has a pulse.  She’s also front-and-center during the film’s lone memorable set piece where she makes like an American Ninja Warrior and climbs on the ceiling… err… floor of the upside room.  Once her character plummeted to her doom, my interest in the flick pretty much plummeted too. 

This might’ve passed with a * ½ rating, but the ending totally sinks it.  It’s here where the villain, “The Games Master” (Yorick van Wageningen) shows up, and man, he is weak AF.  I mean even a strong and engaging villain (like Gregg Henry, who had a similar role in The Belko Experiment) couldn’t have saved the movie.  However, a decent villain would’ve at least ended things on a positive note, instead of leaving a sour taste in your mouth. 

In short, Escape Room needs a sign that says, “Do Not Enter”.

AKA:  Escape Game. 

FANTASY ISLAND (2020) **

 

No one asked for a big-screen, horror-tinged reboot of Fantasy Island from Blumhouse, but we got one anyway.  It wasn’t really a hit or anything, but because of COVID, it’s currently sitting on the list of the top ten highest grossing movies of the year with a paltry $27 million at the box office.  I tell you, 2020 is wild, y’all. 

Tourists come to the remote titular destination to live out their fantasies.  A pair of brothers want to party it up.  A woman wants a second chance at love.  A soldier wants to reconnect with his dad.  Fairly standard stuff.

Most of the horror aspects come from the girl who wants revenge on the bully who made her life miserable in high school.  These torture porn scenes eventually lead to zombie attacks, phantoms with black goop drooping out of their eye sockets, and some typical Monkey Paw/Faustian Bargain bullshit.  All this is surprisingly watchable for the first half or so, but everything begins to fall apart once the guests’ fantasies start to become interconnected.

The biggest problem is the length.  Seriously, there’s no way a horror movie version of Fantasy Island needed to be nearly two hours long, especially when the last act is practically a never-ending series of plot twists.  They could’ve easily lost a half-hour out of this thing and no one would’ve noticed. 

Another problem is that Michael Pena is sorely miscast as Mr. Rourke.  I mean nobody could top Ricardo Montalban, and Pena doesn’t even try.  He plays things way too seriously, and without his usual comedic energy he flounders, particularly when he’s trying to be subtly sinister.  The noticeable lack of the Tattoo character further helps to tarnish the memory of the original show.

It’s also hard to care about most of the guests or their fantasies, save for Maggie Q, who clearly thinks she’s starring in a different, better movie.  Heck, the flick even manages to waste Michael Rooker, who plays a detective who knows the island’s secret.  What a disreputable feat that is.

For my money, the greatest Fantasy Island spin-off was Daffy Duck’s Fantastic Island, and you can’t convince me otherwise. 

AKA:  Nightmare Island.

THE RETURN (1980) * ½

When Cybill Shepherd was a small girl, she saw a UFO fly over a hick New Mexico town.  Cybil grows up to be a scientist, and while she’s on the road researching extraterrestrial phenomenon, she winds up in the same little town twenty-five years later.  With the help of a drunk deputy (Jan-Michael Vincent), who just so happened to see the same UFO way back when, they try to get to the bottom of some cattle mutilations that’s spooking the local residents.  Eventually, they realize they’ve been brought together for a reason.

Directed by Greydon (Final Justice) Clark and co-written by Ken and Jim Wheat (who would later go on to write Pitch Black), The Return was riding on the coattails of the UFO craze of the late ‘70s as it touches on everything from alien abduction to cattle mutilation.  It also blatantly rips off other, better movies from the era.  The spaceship looks a lot like the one in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and one character brandishes a sawed-off version of a lightsaber. 

Because the Good Ol’ Boy genre was still in effect, there’s also a gratuitous car chase in the early going to pad out the running time and cater to the rednecks in the audience.  It’s not a terrible scene, but Clark uses way too much slow motion throughout the rest of the picture.  I guess he was trying to disguise how little action there really was.  Either that, or he was trying to draw things out until he got the movie to ninety minutes.

The Return starts off well enough, but it gets downright laborious in the middle section.  That wouldn’t have really mattered if Clark rallied the troops together for a big finale.  Instead, he delivers a damned Irritating non-ending that’s just downright insulting.  I mean the aliens wait twenty-five year to collect Vincent and Shepherd only to… drop them back off again?   What the hell?

Shepherd was only four years removed from Taxi Driver and she was already slumming in a Greydon Clark movie.  Vincent looks like he’s going the Method acting route during the scenes where he’s drinking six packs.  It’s nice when you can stay in character by staying drunk.  I guess he was trying to make up for the fact he had zero chemistry with Shepherd. 

The two leads aren’t much to write home about, but the supporting cast is kind of fun.  Martin Landau (who was also in Clark’s Without Warning) is kind of funny as the sheriff who tries to dunk his donut in his beer.  You can also have a ball watching Raymond Burr sleepwalking through his role as Cybill’s dad (and boss) as he apparently used a teleprompter to deliver his lines (and it shows).  Although I can’t recommend it by a longshot as it is dreadfully dull and mostly stupid, I insist that if you ever wanted to see Vincent Schiavelli stab Neville Brand through the face with a lightsaber, then you came to the right place.

Clark also has a cameo as one of Schiavelli’s victims. 

AKA:  The Alien’s Return.

SCREAM AND STREAM AGAIN: THE LAST REVENANTS (2017) * ½

(Streamed via Halloween Flix)

A virus is on the verge of wiping out vampires for good.  Faced with extinction, the last four sexy vampire women on the planet turn to a scientist for help.  Her plan is to develop a serum that will allow them to give birth to half-human babies.  However, she just might have her own ulterior motives for conducting her experiments. 

Directed by Jim (Blood Reunion) DeVault, The Last Revenants has a good idea, but the shoestring budget prevents it from realizing its potential.  I know making a low budget horror movie is a difficult endeavor, but you’d think they’d at least spring for better lighting.  Or use the takes in which the actors didn’t flub their lines.  Or edit out the bit where you can hear the director yell, “ACTION!”

The opening scene works pretty well though.  Elissa Dowling gives a guy a rub n’ tub massage before biting his neck.  I especially liked the fact she waited until AFTER he was dead to mount him and ball his brains out.  After that, the fun dries up fast and you’re left with a rather dull low budget vampire flick.

The sepia-toned flashbacks were really unnecessary too.  They eat up a lot of screen time and help pad out the running time.  I’m not sure we really needed them as they do very little to flesh out the characters’ backstories.  If they had been excised entirely, it would’ve made for a much tighter film.

Jim Wynorski was originally going to direct the film but was fired when he wanted to play up the sexy aspects of the story.  I can only imagine how much better the movie would’ve been with him at the helm.  The skin quotient is also low, and the lesbian vampire scenes are halfhearted at best.  I can easily imagine Wynorski tossing in a couple of gratuitous sex scenes to give this a reason to exist.  At least he would’ve brought a sense of fun to the proceedings.  As it is, it’s a somber, sluggish crawl to the end credits. 

Well folks, that’s about it for The 31 Days of Horror-Ween.  I’ll be sure to continue watching and reviewing more horror reviews well into November as all month long it will be Halloween Hangover.  Stay tuned and stay sick because there’s a lot more horror reviews to come!

THE HAUNTING (1999) *

The Haunting is Jan de Bont’s artistically inept, ludicrously overblown, and perpetually boring remake of the 1963 Robert Wise classic.  After the one-two punch of Speed and Twister, de Bont made Speed 2, this, and Tomb Raider back-to-back-to-back.  After that triple header of turkeys, he rightfully hasn’t sat in a director’s chair again.  Remember how bad Speed 2 was?  Well, this one is even worse!  It was so bad that even executive producer Steven Spielberg took his name off it.

Like Twister, it’s all special effects and no real human drama.  Take away the CGI (which isn’t very good to begin with) and you have a lot of boring people sitting around and doing boring things.  What’s amazing is that all the actors are genuinely fine performers, just not in this movie.  Lili Taylor seems to be doing a parody of her usual Lili Taylor schtick (there’s a reason she mostly appears in small indie dramas and not big-budget tentpole releases), Owen Wilson acts like he had amnesia and is trying to figure out how to be Owen Wilson again, and Liam Neeson smiles absentmindedly and appears aloof, almost as if he’s mentally calculating how much cash he’s raking in on that Qui-Gon Jinn action figure deal.

The biggest guffaws come from watching Catherine Zeta-Jones vamp it up.  She overacts to hysterical proportions as the horny bisexual of the group.  How dumb do you have to be to cast Zeta-Jones in a once-in-a-lifetime role of a horny bisexual and then you put her in a crappy CGI PG-13 horror remake?  Why couldn’t you have put her in a ‘90s erotic thriller playing the same character?  Her character belongs in Jade 2.  Not a remake of the goddamned Haunting. 

The house is the real star though.  It’s a marvel of Hollywood set construction and certainly looks great.  That’s the problem.  It almost looks like a parody of your typical haunted house.  It’s like the Haunted Mansion ride on steroids.  De Bont obviously didn’t get the message that bigger isn’t necessarily better.

You all know the story, right?  Neeson gets everyone to the house to study their dreams or some shit, but really, he wants to see how they’ll react to being inside a haunted house.  Generally, they act just like anyone would when confronted with ghosts and shit.  So, what’s the point?

From the stupid CGI ghost children that crawl under bedsheets to the giant swinging lion head plume that decapitates people, the set pieces range from yawn-inducing to eye-rolling.  The “feel good” ending is the fucking worst though, and the final big bad ghost is so shitty, it makes the “Darkness” monster from the House on Haunted Hill remake look like the Thing in comparison.

CLEANING OUT THE DVR: THE BYE BYE MAN (2017) ** ½

(DVR’ed from Showtime 2 on March 23, 2018 during a Showtime free preview weekend)

Back in the mid ‘90s, Stacy Title directed the star-studded cult flick The Last Supper.  For whatever reason, she was never able to really capitalize on her early promise.  Other than directing the dreadful Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horrors, she hasn’t done a whole lot since.  At least she was able to grind a paycheck out of this moderately entertaining, competent, but generic PG-13 horror flick.

College student Elliot (Douglas Smith) buys a house for dirt cheap and fixes it up with the help of his girlfriend (Cressida Bonas) and best bud (Lucien Laviscount).  They soon learn it’s haunted by the sinister figure known as “The Bye Bye Man” (Doug Jones) who gets inside their heads and messes with their minds.  Eventually, they can’t trust their own eyes as the Bye Bye Man puts images in their brains and tries to make them commit murder.

Even though this is all rather bloodless PG-13 horror stuff, Title tries her darnedest to keep you engaged.  She uses a lot of camera movements and long takes to help put the audience in the character’s shoes.  I’ll take that over a bunch of ill-advised jump scares any day.  The green-tinged cinematography also helps to saturate the film in a deathly pall, even if they kind of go overboard with it at some junctures.

There is a kernel of an interesting idea here.  If you say the Bye Bye Man’s name aloud to someone, they too will be driven insane by his visions.  It’s a subtle metaphor for teenagers who are afraid to talk about their problems, and the more they keep it bottled up inside, the worse it becomes.

While it’s a potentially potent idea, the film is pretty much undone by the weak villain.  I mean he’s just a tall pasty dude wearing a hoodie.  Those guys are a dime a dozen.  Jones has played some memorable monsters before, but unfortunately, this is not one of them.

Smith, Laviscount, and Bonas make for a solid trio.  They’re certainly more likeable than most of their PG-13 horror movie counterparts, that’s for sure.  We also get some extended cameos by name stars like Carrie-Anne Moss, Faye Dunaway, and Leigh Whannel, although they don’t really stick around for too long.

It’s Jenna (Terrifier) Kanell who makes the biggest impression as the sexy psychic who holds a séance at her friends’ housewarming party.  You know, when you’re doing seances in your new home the first night you have company, you’re just asking for trouble.  Next time maybe play Scattergories or something. 

SCREAM AND STREAM AGAIN: BLOODMANIA (2017) * ½

(Streamed via Watch Free Flix)

Bloodmania was the final directing effort of Herschell Gordon Lewis, the man who invented the modern-day gore film with Blood Feast.  I don’t know if co-directing and hosting a no-budget horror anthology movie was exactly how he wanted to go out, as it’s nowhere near the same league as his classics (or even the latter-day Blood Feast 2).  Even if his segments aren’t very good, I guess they aren’t bad for a ninety-year-old.  He’s clearly having a ball during his Crypt Keeper-style introductions to each story, which accounts for something at least. 

The first tale is Lewis’s “Gory Story” (* ½).  A loser finds out his girlfriend is cheating on him.  When he tries to kill her with a chainsaw, he accidentally cuts his own hand off.  He then goes around sporting a hook and finds out the hard way it’s cursed. 

Gory Story has a one-joke premise:  The dude keeps accidentally stabbing himself with the hook.  It’s not very funny, but at least the gore is over the top.  You know, when Lewis did this sort of thing in the ‘60s it all had a sense of humor, some style, and a lot of low budget ingenuity.  This unfortunately plays like your typical bad shot-on-video horror-comedy.  If it had been just a lot of gory shit for the sake of gory shit, it might’ve been okay.  However, it suffers from an awkward structure and the stupid newscasts eat up way too much time (and get in the way of the gore). 

“Attack of Conscience” (*) is the next story.  A woman goes for a drive with her unbalanced fiancée who purposefully crashes the car and sends her into a coma.  There, she perpetually lives out (and dies from) more horrible deaths at the hands of her lover. 

Like Gory Story, this chapter suffers from a crummy structure.  It could’ve played like a half-assed variation of Happy Death Day, but it’s all done in such an annoyingly vague way that it almost immediately becomes frustrating.  The shitty CGI is also an uneasy fit alongside the cut-rate practical gore effects. 

The next tale is “The Night Hag” (**).  A bickering couple are killed by something living inside their walls.  A new family buys the house and moves in, only to come face to face with the feral cannibal woman who secretly resides within the walls. 

This story was also done by Lewis, and it suffers from weird tonal shifts.  The early scenes play out like a comedy, complete with a sitcom laugh track.  The stuff with the new family is played mostly straight, and it’s sort of effective.  I liked the scene where the husband takes a sleeping pill which induces sleep paralysis, rendering him unable to fend off the night hag’s advances.  Too bad the ending is fucking terrible. 

They saved the best (relatively speaking) for last with GOREgeous (**).  It tells the story of a former rocker named Gordo who gets his kicks by chopping up women with a samurai sword.  He gets a gig managing an all-girl rock band and quickly sets out to make them his next victims. 

GOREgeous ain’t great, but it’s coherent, fast moving, and doesn’t wear out its welcome.  It’s also packed with lots of nudity, which makes it the best story by default.  Although it’s pretty cheesy stuff, it does contain the world’s first treadmill chase scene.  There’s also a funny swordfight, but instead of swords, they use guitars.

Although Bloodmania ended Gordon’s career with a whimper, it’s still far from his worst film.  Anyone interested in the legendary director will be sure to stumble upon it at some point.  Just try to watch his classics first.