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maxxdolo
Reviews
Nightmare Cinema (2018)
One out of five stories merit interest, the rest are mediocre genre spoofs
My take on this is probably not a popular one, as I have seen many user reviews praise the first and last segments, the one I felt merited watching it is not mentioned by anyone. Spoilers from here on out.
The first segment is a take on traditional slasher movies. Overall unappealing costume and set design with the gore being the only real highlight. The main characters have been running from a killer through the woods, they appear clean, no torn clothing, soon it appears that they are fleeing from a boring slasher villain and starting in media res helps few thing but a convoluted twist ending with poor cg. Not a great start, but ok.
The second segment is funny and entertaining enough, it features one of the few unsettling scenes (a dream) and is really predictable.
The third segment is an absolute snooze fest with few appealing twists or justifications for it's narrative, and awful cg ruins whatever charm the gore and low-key synthwave could have brought to the affair.
The fourth segment is the only one that in my opinion makes the movie worth watching. It features genuinely scary shifts in reality, and i found the concept of "descending realities" to be an interesting one. It has shades of the silent hill otherworld or the downside from S L Grey's "The Mall". Interesting effects and a cool, ambiguous concept. Not earth-shattering, but being shot in black and white makes this segment stand out even more. I get why most people tuning into something like this would find it unappealing, I guess, but with the fifth and third segments book-ending it this one stands out like a speck of gold in a pile of dung.
The last segment is embarrassing. The sixth sens meets awful writing and poor characters. Featuring a murder man robber who has little to do but antagonize the main character and lacks any motivation beyond being a bad man who does bad things for undefined reasons. Also we have an edgy dreadlock girl who attempts suicide because she is edgy or something. Absolute drivel.
I get that most of these installments seem like they're trying to play up the shlock but they come off as boring and unispired, which when you're given the opportunity to experiment and execute tighter, more focused horror narratives they all come off as lazy, by-the-numbers, derivative trash with plots anyone who has watched a few horror movies can see coming from a mile away. Instead of phoning it in they should have phoned someone with an actual original, or at least, funny idea.
The Devil's Candy (2015)
Strong first half but leaves most of it's themes largely unresolved
I watched The Devils Candy largely on a whim and i can't say i wasn't entertained throughout it's run-time. As someone who enjoys a wide variety of horror movies - from slow burning psychological horror movies, slashers and outright gorefests i found what "The Devils Candy" was offering up competent but also incredibly forgettable. I've read that other reviews found it's "subversion" of classic horror tropes (haunted houses, possession, serial murder) satisfying and refreshing but i just can't see it. Maybe I've grown jaded, but from the movie's poster to it's opening title screen I thought I was in for something that would delve more into genuinely unpleasant territories.
The movie tells the story of a metalhead painter taking his wife and equally metal obsessed teenage daughter to live in their new home in Texas, a house where the death of an old couple has taken place. Turns out the dead couples mentally-challenged son, who is implied to have some connection to satanic forces leading to the death of his parents, is roaming around the town, turning up at the door of the house not long after the family moves in. He plays a guitar loudly in the preceding sequences, presumably to keep the voices of what I can only assume is Satan from taking control of him and making him murder. He then leaves the guitar with the family, which then leads to him targeting their daughter despite his wishes not to hurt her. The movie deals well with the family's relationships. The father is a caring man, and seems to only want to please his wife and daughter despite continually messing up. He is driven to deface his original paintings, by either the acts of the killer son or the devil himself (I'm unsure) turning them into satanic images which then gets him a deal with a gallery (named the belial gallery - great symbolism guys!) but at the cost of his daughter (something the gallery owner drives home in a painfully obvious scene, stating "nothing great comes without a few sacrifices" to then make a toast "to sacrifice" as the daughter is kidnapped by the killer elsewhere). The scenes shared by father and daughter are genuinely engaging, and promises something more complicated than what the movie eventually delivers. The resolution with the killer storming the house and shooting (but not killing) the painter and his wife seems muted, something more akin to a bad terminator knock-off than a horror movie. I can suspend my disbelief in moments where characters with gunshot wounds shrug them off to fulfill their roles in the last act - I understand that having the main characters getting shot through their torsos brings ambiguity to their predicament, leaving the audience hoping they'll make it to the end safely, but from the general tone of the movie I was surprised they did. The killers motivations is left largely unexplained. Nothing is hinted at or playfully hidden in subtext, he seems to kill children solely because the devil tells him to ("they're the devils candy"). The killing is off-screen, which considering the fact that he targets children is weirdly inept. It seems like they where going for some sort of shock but it never delivers - unless you feel dread at the implied murder of uncharacterized children who have no screen time as anything but murder victims, and serve no purpose but to be killed off-screen to drive home that he murders kiddies. I understand child murder would evoke a pretty strong reaction from an average movie-goer, but i also feel like this is exactly what the story is taking advantage of, as we are never really shown anything that is genuinely off-putting. It's like the child murder was included to up the ante rather than to showcase anything of actual meaning. The killer is shown eating candy before the one solitary murder scene, not exactly layered imagery. I can make presumptions about the children serving as sacrificial lambs to further douse the movie with religious imagery, as the painter dad kinda looks like Jesus, i guess? And a goat is spotted in the back yard to allude to the devil being present, maybe? Or maybe metalheads have a tendency to have long hair and beards, and maybe a goat is about the most cliché thing to just ham-fistedly put in your movie to illustrate that "the devil is here", and maybe a fat guy with reduced mental faculties would just drive around eating tubs of candy.
At no point does the movie go into any real nastiness. Nobody is killed beyond one disposable child and two cops, and these killings are handled as if it was aiming to be a PG-13 horror movie. There is no brutality to the violence, no point to any of the killers actions beyond feeding the devil his favorite treats, and no real consequences to the pain he inflicts on the protagonists. It's a shame, because the acting is good, the pacing is slow and engaging, and everything is competently shot and put together. Even as a story about Jesus protecting his family from a satanic acolyte with a double-digit IQ it delivers on few things, making me wish for a more realized movie with more consistent themes. The metal music seems included merely as an aesthetic accent, and beyond the killers first two scenes playing a red V guitar (which to my delight he keeps insisting he has to "play. loud.") and the licencing of a few metal songs it has no impact on the movies tone or story. I hope I eventually realize I've watched a severely cut TV-version of this movie so I can finally understand why it's so highly rated on IMDb and rottentomatoes (disregarding the fact that it has less than 40 reviews/ratings) and maybe even watch it again. It's an enjoyable 80-minutes of squandered potential that i'd rather not repeat, even if it had featured more actual horror.