Blair Witch (2016)

Google this film and you'll be met with a smorgasbord of rating aggregate sites, all basically giving it a huge thumbs down. And no, it's not perfect, but I think Blair Witch has been given a rougher deal than it really deserves.

Of course, it was always going to be impossible to match The Blair Witch Project in terms of audience reception and cultural reaction. By no means the first found footage horror film (for that we could go all the way back to Cannibal Holocaust, and arguably further. Plus I'll always mention that The Last Broadcast came out a year before The Blair Witch Project did) it was a movie in the right place at the right time, breaking out into the mainstream and grossing nearly $250 million from a budget of just $60,000. Whatever your opinion of The Blair Witch Project, you have to admit it was a milestone in horror history.

So with that, despite this being another Wingard and Barrett dream team effort (like A Horrible Way To Die, You're Next, The Guest), this sequel is just "good" rather than "great".

The plot is simple: James (James Allen McCune) is the brother of Heather (Heather Donahue) from the original film, and has understandably never got over her mysterious and violent disappearance. After discovering previously unseen footage depicting (he thinks) Heather inside the same creepy AF house from the climax of The Blair Witch Project, he gathers a group of friends and locals to venture into the woods to investigate, so they can figure out once and for all what the hell is going on.

The gearing up sequences are a necessary but annoying start to the tale. Yes, it makes total sense to introduce newer technology, as the events shown here are meant to have taken place in 2014. So as well as the updated camcorder, we have a quadcopter/drone (I still can't decide if it was underused or used just enough) and the biggest cam contrivance: "earpiece cams". Even though they look like a bluetooth headset, these cameras seem to be able to film a full POV from the wearer...? There's also numerous mentions of SD cards and battery life, but ultimately none of that becomes relevant - so why bother mentioning it?

Of course, it makes sense why we have all this techy exposition up front. It's part and parcel of found footage, just like the "oh no, I lost cell service!" moment in modern horrors; we have to have an excuse for all the different camera angles. It's just my least favourite moment in any of these films, because it rarely plays as anything but clunky.

James and Lisa, with his "earpiece cam" visible.

Where the original was an exercise in long form improv, this was fully scripted, and the cast do a good job with what is essentially a lot of shouting and whimpering (there's even a small homage to Heather's to-camera crying moment). Callie Hernandez as Lisa has the most to do, and commits fully and convincingly, especially during an intensely claustrophobic sequence in the third act.

I'm interested to see more of her - and excited to see that she stars in The Endless, a movie I've been looking forward to for a while now.

Something unexpected was how reminiscent I found this to be of The Ritual. The nighttime sounds of the first film having evolved from children's voices and twigs snapping, to the screams of wolves and entire trees being torn down. The sound of something so massive out there in the dark made me think of The Ritual (*spoiler*! -->) and an immense old god lumbering around picking off unfortunate human visitors. I'd like to think maybe the witch has grown so powerful in the 20 years that this is kind of the case?

My one main problem with this movie comes at the very end. By now we all know that it's 'decent horror 101' not to show the monster - or at least not too much of it. However the glimpses we get of the "entity" here are way too lingering. This choice from these horror minds is surprising, and as horrible as the fiend may ever be to look at, some of the fear always drops off once you see it.

Despite this, Blair Witch is a competent handling of the evolution of the story, even if it rarely shows the finesse and imagination that we have come to expect from Wingard and Barrett. It still made me bring my knees up and pull up a blanket, ready to hide behind, and that sense of tension and unknown terror is such an important part of the Blair Witch story. Being lost in the woods at night is scary on a primal level, and these moments, though they mostly entail running, screaming and yelling, are satisfying to experience - even if they aren't anything particularly new.

A Wingard/Barrett 1.5 is still a strong 3 in the grand scheme of things! Speaking as someone who was properly obsessed with the original, this is decent follow-up, certainly making me re-live some of those feelings from '99! On Hulu at time of writing... I'd recommend it with the lights down and something to hide behind.

Oculus (2013)

I'll cut to the chase: this is a pretty pedestrian modern horror movie from Mike Flanagan. Which is surprising, given that he worked on Hush and Gerald's Game, both of which are far superior. At the risk of sounding like a snob, Oculus plays like a cash-in summer blockbuster: a hit with non-genre fans (those squares!) who fancy something scary, but a little too "horror by numbers" for anyone with a decent bit of experience.

Starring Karen Gillan (Doctor Who, Guardians of the Galaxy), Katee Sackhoff (Kara 'Starbuck' Thrace from Battlestar Galactica) and Rory Cochrane (the super stoned dude in Dazed and Confused), Oculus deals with family loss, and two siblings trying to overcome it. 

Unfortunately for her brother Tim (Brenton Thwaites), Kaylie (Gillan, sporting what I can only describe as a terrifying fringe) has become obsessed with proving that their father becoming a homicidal maniac 11 years ago was not your average psychotic break but in fact was due to a cursed mirror that hung in his office. She's managed to track it down and take possession, and she's invited Tim - himself fresh out of an institution for killing dad back then, in self defense - to come along and bear witness to the spooky goings on in their old house. What could possibly go wrong.

It's no more of a stretch than the average flick I suppose, but what doesn't help is Kaylie's general cold manner. She's an unlikeable lead character, and her odd rhythm of speech didn't do anything to warm me to her, either (I'd love to know if that was an actor or writer/director choice). We're to assume that her horrific family history affects her deeply, that she's never let go of the terrors she witnessed; yet I couldn't help but think this could've been played with more subtlety, rather than making her an obsessed robot. 

She reprimands Tim for his logical reading of those past events, telling him the doctors brainwashed him... because a killer mirror is so much more believable?! She's dismissive and withholding even to her fiance, too. It's no great tragedy when (spoilers) she kills him, because (a) we barely know the guy, and (b) she doesn't seem to have much of a connection to him anyway. Kaylie is a character born within this story to definitely die by the end of it, there's just nowhere else for her to go.

Additionally, most of the scares here are overworked and cheap. Creepy veiny people with weird eyes glide around the house, there's fingernail violence, and the old "accidentally killing someone who startles another character" plot twist. All of which do their job on a perfunctory level, but things never get any more interesting.

Anyone well versed in the genre will be able to call the majority of the eerie payoffs, they are signposted so blatantly - although the scene where Kaylie appears to bite into a lightbulb thinking it's an apple is one of the better moments here.

Flanagan is adept at fluidly transitioning the action between past and present. The young and older versions of the siblings all inhabit this space together, adding an otherworldly, untrustworthy quality to events happening within the house. Nothing is what it seems within the mirror's "sphere of influence", and this was definitely creepy... but only in a way that what I call the "Hotel California Effect"* always is.

NAILED IT. Full review here.

Oculus gets a 73% on Rotten Tomatoes, which kind of blows my mind.

It's on US Netflix now, but I'm pretty certain there are better choices you could make.


*This is when a character is trying to escape somewhere but the evil force at work manages to trap or loop them into always coming back. So named because my first memory of this eerie idea was from listening to the Eagles song 🎶 (sorry not sorry!).

The Houses October Built (2014)

Have you ever been to a haunted house? Being a non-US native the concept is slightly alien to me, though I think I visited something similar once. I'm not sure my nerves are cut out for such a place, anyway - and it's that fact that made me think this film might be an enjoyable way to spend 90mins.

And for the most part it is... although it's also chock full of faintly cheap scares.

Presented as found footage, we travel with a group of friends in their RV across the states, looking for the scariest and most extreme haunted house they can find.

It's pretty good fodder for a film to be honest. The POV shooting style really lends itself to someting like this, as there's no real disconnect between the viewer and the haunted house experience. It's like we're going through it ourselves. I imagine in the cinema this was definitely one of those films that had people jumping in their seats.

Have you ever wondered, what would happen if a terrible murder (or zombie outbreak, etc) happened on Halloween? How would anyone know those bodies and blood is real?

And it's this idea that The Houses October Built plays with, too. This group is intent on visiting extreme haunted houses; to recapture the fear they had the first time they experienced one. As they visit more and more, they and indeed we, are left to wonder the following:

1. Is some of this creepy backwoods shit they are seeing actually happening?
2. What's the worst thing they are going to see/how far are they willing to go for the ultimate thrill?
3. Are they being followed? Because that creepy clown/bunny/weird doll faced girl looks just the one from 300 miles ago...

The worst (and by that I mean best) thing in the entire film.

The "found" footage is intercut with haunted house workers being interviewed on camera, and these seem so completely genuine I wonder if the crew actually did seek out some real people to talk to. The acting of the friends, too, is very natural. They get drunk, they get irritated by one another... just like you do on a normal group holiday.

Where the movie went off the rails for me, was firstly jumping from footage the friends took, to footage apparently from the gang terrorizing them. Yeeah. Found footage to begin with requires quite the suspension of disbelief; to then ask us to buy into a second source of it in the same narrative, is a bit much.

Secondly, the ending feels like the writers didn't really know what to do, so they just picked something and quickly made it happen, and that was that. There was much build up to the Halloween day itself in this movie, with an onscreen countdown and everything. So the tension to The Day was definitely there. I will concede that this sequence was creepily effective..

The problem was that everything that came after it... not so much.

With creepiness as good as it sometimes gets, plus the cheap-but-potent scares, I would recommend this for a night in with the lights down and a few friends over. Especially this time of year. And if you don't see that doll face mask thing in your nightmares, you are a stronger person than I am!

We Are Still Here (2015)

You know what I love? I bloody love a title screen that jars against what came before. When everything is quiet and still, and the audience gets kind of comfortable with that, and then BAM the title slams up. It's one of my irrational loves. It brings me an absurd amount of joy.

We Are Still Here is a slow burn haunted house film. And rather like its title screen described above, it gets us used to its subdued ways before going pretty apeshit at the end and being a big old surprise. It's amazing. 

That's not to say all the bloodshed comes in the final act. It doesn't. Leading us along the path of "oh god!" and "what the hell?!" (I said both of these things out loud: a recommendation in itself) are some well executed jump scares and quick, gory moments to punctuate the white middle class normality.

The plot centres around a middle aged couple who've just moved into a house in a snowy, apparently sleepy New England town. Having tragically lost their son in a car accident not too long before their relocation, they're attempting to heal as best they can from such heartbreak. 

Only... the house almost immediately reacts to their inhabiting it; photos fall, doors open and close, and wife Anne swears she can feel the presence of their son Bobby in the house with them. Her husband Paul is a cynic, sympathetically indulging her until witnessing things he just cannot deny, leading him to literally exclaim: "I believe it all!".

It transpires that beneath the house lurks a deep evil, one that wakes every thirty years and must be fed. If a sacrifice isn't made, the entire town pays the price. The words of a shifty neighbour sounded sinister at the time he uttered them, but then become all too clear: This house needs a family. (Also serving as the film's tagline).

Dark, charred figures stalk the house, appearing both as visions and as direct threats. If they touch you, you burn. They can devour you, and they can punch right through your chest - but why do they seem to be sparing Paul and Anne?

Boldly, the film shows these early and often, but benefits from doing so.

So I'm finding it interesting that I enjoyed this film so much and found the similarly slow-into-bonkers Starry Eyes from a couple of days ago somehow disappointing.

Maybe it's because We Are Still Here is set in the 70s - and I mean flawlessly set in the 70s, they nail the vibe in my opinion - and many of the protagonists are older? Paul and Anne are a rather normal couple, older but still affectionate and unsteadily (realistically so) dealing with the loss of their son. Maybe it's just there was more emotional meat there. 

The set-up of such arguably mundane characters facing not only rampaging townsfolk but also cruel ghosts is, to be honest, delightful. There's a reason this type of narrative set-up is used so often: it works. Barricaded in the bedroom with nothing but a handful of small knives, Anne fumbles and drops one of them before the couple arm themselves, hands trembling. It's just a great little collection of scenes; their nervous defiance.

I remember pausing the film not long after this moment with about 15mins remaining, and having no idea where this was going to end up. The final part of the final act is a gloriously batshit bloodbath. If the violence from earlier were shots, this bit is a full-on keg stand.

The walls are quite literally soaked in blood as heads are blown off, stomachs are torn open and in two of my favourite moments: blood is belched from the crawlspace in the basement and an unfortunate fallen townsperson is climbed upon by one of the ghosts; each hand and foot placement creating a hot hissing sound as they make their way up to his head.

The house is hungry, and it feeds. People are sucked right into the foundations before our very eyes!

Throughout the film there are many prolonged shots of the snowy countryside surrounding the house. Bare branches and empty roads stretch out all around, giving us a sense of the isolation and claustrophobia inside.

Not to mention working as a counter to how hot the house is for the time of year (early on they complain of the basement being abnormally hot, putting it down to a faulty boiler). It's a great line-drawing technique of "in here" and "out there" as well as a cheeky spin on the trope of ghosts lowering the temperature around them. These spooks actually burn hot.

The ending may require some discussion (online or otherwise) or perhaps another viewing to fully wrap your head around things, and without having done much of either yet, I'll state that to some degree it seems open to interpretation. However I don't think this detracts from what a solid and remarkably enjoyable film this is.

Here's the poster art, just because I think it's worth seeing what a great job they did of this, too...

The Haunting in Connecticut (2009).

Whilst on the hunt for a new house, you happen across one that is perfect. However, when asked what the catch is, the guy renting it says:

"Well, it's got a bit of a history..."

And it's at this point you run, right? You don't shake his hand, you don't sign anything and you sure as shit don't move in.

So why Sara Campbell (the wonderful Virginia Madsen), upon learning this place used to be a funeral home - complete with handy morgue area in the basement - decides to do just that, it's hard to say.

What's that? The Haunting In Connecticut would never have happened if she hadn't? Well, that's kind of my point.

Times are tough for the Campbells family, to be fair. Their eldest son Matt is undergoing intensive cancer treatment; while the father of the clan is an ex heavy drinker, currently residing on a trembling wagon.

Their house move comes about in order to be closer to Matt's hospital. But it isn't long before the words of their doctor - "Basically we're waging war inside Matt's body" - start ringing more true than any of the family thought possible.

In short, some bad stuff went down in their new place. Far worse than just funeral arrangements. We're talking necromancy. We're talking... CGI ectoplasm.

I really love the word ectoplasm.

To cut right to the meat: this film is not scary in the least. It overdoes the jump scares in the first act, too, so even cheap shots such as those become old very quickly.

There's no suspense, and when we are shown anything horrible, the scene usually ends with one of those fucking annoying sped up intense zoom-ins that have become rampant in the genre over the past few years.

One brave move and about the only moment my facial expression changed from one of blank indifference, was when they showed an eyelid being cut off.

I kept thinking 'They're going to cut away from this any time now, surely?'. But they didn't. Owwww.

Aside from that, the haunting in question can be summed up in the following caps:

Matt-specific visions of ghastliness.

And crabs...?!

Bottom of the bed shadowy figures.

On the bed, well-lit lidless desecrated corpses.

Ho-ly shit. Mouldy food.

This movie doesn't teach us much about what makes a good horror film, however what we can take away from it is that getting a surveyor in before committing to a property is of the utmost importance. For it transpires in this tale, that the walls of the basement are lined with grave-robbed corpses. Literally piled atop one another.

Yeah, well that would certainly bring a few bad vibes to a place.

It doesn't take much more than a nudge from an axe wielded by a dying boy to uncover them, either. How the hell were these dusty stiffs missed for so many years of the house being occupied and people (presumably) terrorised?

While I am asking questions:

• Why does the DVD cover feature a boy in a crucifiction pose? Nothing like that happens in the film.
• Why does the film open and close with Sara talking to a video camera, but never explains the reasons behind this? Could they not think of another way to introduce and conclude the story?

I could go on.

As may have become clear by now, The Haunting In Connecticut is sadly neither good nor bad enough to warrant my recommendation. It's just... mediocre. Something no horror film should ever be!

To quote Madsen's last line of dialogue in the film: "Consider yourself warned."

Amityville II: The Possession (1982)

How many Amityville films are there? Why do I keep putting emphasis on the wrong syllable of the word "Amityville"? Where do I recognise Rutanya Alda from? Is this a sequel or prequel to the original film? And if it's a prequel, why is it called Amityville II?

These and many other questions will not be answered in the following Final Girl Film Club review.

I confess I never "got" the first film. I caught it on TV once, and having heard of it thought it must be decent, surely? Ho, oh to be young and naive again.

This film tells the story of the family who lived in the house with the evil eyes beforehand (although different websites tell me different things) and what became of them. The "diabolical influence" inside the house, built on an ancient Indian burial ground(!) and how it possessed certain family members and led to their destruction.

The family are fairly riddled with issues from the get-go. Dad is abusive; mother is at her wit's end trying to keep the family together and turning to religion for guidance; the two eldest children get along way too easily for teenagers of opposite gender and the two youngest do this kind of thing for laughs:

I repeat: this was before any demonic intervention! So it's pretty much a finger buffet for malignant spirits in this household.

Lamentably, again, we have a case of the plot sounding promising but questionable acting, dodgy ill-advised effects and pacing problems taking most of the punch away.

Floating paintbrushes. More Mary Poppins than haunted house.

To my delight the 99mins didn't pass completely without its effective moments. My two favourites being the scene which sees the already tactile brother and sister get even closer in a way close relatives probably shouldn't.

Being an only child, depictions of incest do not disturb me too much, but this segment was surprisingly uncomfortable to watch. One of the most unsettling things about the scene itself is just how far the girl lets her brother go before appearing even remotely concerned about what is happening.

Afterwards we are shown her confessing her sin to a priest, uttering a line I thought was one of the best in the movie: "We do not love each other. He does it to hurt God."

My second favourite point was the way in which it was revealed who was killed in the massacre at the house. It is set early in the morning, looking bright and cold; the priest arrives too late to save anyone, instead all he can do is bless the bodies as they are removed by the police.

It must be the stark, hand-held documentary style in which this is shot, as there is something I found really quite heartbreaking about it, even though I wasn't that attached to the characters in question.

Despite these two nicely unnerving episodes, Amityville II unfortunately doesn't get elevated from mediocrity into anything scarier or more entertaining. Nor do the cheesy instances pack quite enough cheese to make this a fun schlocky horror. It's just maddeningly stuck in the middle somewhere.

It also feels like two very separate halves. The relatively subtle haunted house yarn and the far more OTT possession and exorcism conclusion. In the first half we have flying paintbrushes, spinning beds and popping electrical sockets (and all I kept thinking was The Money Pit), in the second we have licked crucifixes, rivers of blood and The Fly-like body horror.

The two don't sit completely awkwardly next to one another... but they don't exactly meld perfectly, either. It felt to me like a decision should have been made as to what kind of film this was going to be, and stuck with. The haunted house culminating in family tragedy could have been the entire plot, with the stark depressing body bag sequence ending it on a nice downer. OR it could have gone balls out from the beginning with all the fun of goo and bleeding walls. Both shoved together just feels disjointed and untidy.

The last glide through the destroyed innards of the house, and up to the attic where the priest sits bloody and exhausted is undeniably impressive. However even this is over-egged. It should have concluded with us simply reaching him - fade to black - end. Instead we are treated to needless pulsing latex effects to really hammer home what his fate will be. Argh, no! We get it!

One sentence to sum this film up? Okay then... It has given me a hankerin' for The Exorcist.