The Five Worst Horror Flicks Of 2012

For the past two years, this is where I've been Mr. Positive and said “I don’t care if everyone else is proclaiming that this was an abysmal year for the horror genre, I thought it was great.”  This year, however, I’m on the “damn, it really was a bad horror year” side.  Don’t get me wrong, 2012 definitely produced some great flicks, but man did it give us a lot of foul film feces too.  I’ll happily take one for the team and sift through it all for you though, Cellmates; because I believe the old adage that without the dark, there is no light.  Without a villain, there can be no hero.  Without nu-metal, there can be no real metal.  In the world of horror flicks, it means that without sifting through a multitude of sucktitude, you wouldn’t find those precious nuggets of badassery.  I’m gonna share said badass nuggets with you starting tomorrow, but first, I would be remiss if I didn’t at least try to save you the trouble of watching these five atrocities.  Ladies, gentlemen, and everything in between…I present to you The Five Worst Horror Flicks Of 2012.

5. Detention

This is a very divisive movie.  It’s actually showing up on a lot of top 10 lists, but it lands on my worst flicks list for one main reason…I find most hipsters unbearably annoying.  Therefore, by proxy, I hate hipster humor and hipster movies like Napoleon Dynamite, Juno, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and Detention.  If hipsterism ever truly becomes mainstream, then this is what will happen to horror cinema.   That absolutely cannot be allowed to happen.  It’s a film awash in that style of comedy that continually pokes the audience to say “Hey, did ‘ya see that?  Wasn’t it funny?”  If you have to do that, then no, it wasn’t.  Basically, this flick is trying way too hard for snarky coolness.  It’s the cinematic equivalent of that 12 year old sporting a brand new “distressed look” Pink Floyd ’73 tour shirt his parents paid 35 bucks for at Hot Topic.

To be fair, it did have one inspired sequence (the detention room parade of teen eras), but getting to the end of this one became a war of attrition against the movie itself.  If you want to see how it’s possible cram as many references as possible into a flick and actually be funny about it, then watch The FP.  Otherwise, just find a couple of those guys with the skinny jeans and meticulously disheveled hair, get them jacked up on cocaine (note: it might have to be soy-coke) and whatever energy drink the mainstream hasn’t caught onto yet, then listen to them argue for an hour and a half.  That would be roughly the same experience as watching Detention.

4. The Devil Inside

I just went back and looked at my initial review of this flick from January, and I was WAY too generous.  I gave it one severed thumb up.  What the hell was I thinking?  I still stand by my opinion that there is a 20 minute or so stretch of this film that is pretty good.  Unfortunately, it’s preceded by an unoriginal and entirely tepid first hour.  What follows the good portion is what makes it deserving of the vitrol spewed at it by horror fans and its place on this list though; the worst rip-off ending of the year.  Hell, it might be the worst ending in horror history. It just stopped.  No logical conclusion, no closure, no well crafted cliffhanger, nothing.  It just stops.  They actually expected viewers to go to the film’s website for the rest of the story.  As I said in my original review, “Screw that, screw you, screw your ending; and god help us, if that was your way of setting up a sequel, screw The Devil Inside Strikes Back too!”

3. Cold Creepy Feeling

I hate deriding this kind of micro-budget “labor of love” type of flick, but this one was just plain boring.  The problem was that NOTHING happened.  For the first half hour, we watch tedious vacation style “found footage” of a couple driving to their new house.  Then we watch as they explore the grounds and settle in.  Then they start in on a little hanky panky in a haunted house.  Time for the spooky stuff to kick in right?  Not by a long shot.  A spider pulls a little coitus interruptus, and the couple goes to a bar for the next 10 minutes.  When they get home, the girl has a slightly unsettling dream, so we’re treated to them spending 8 more minutes taking turns reading from an online paranormal forum.  Get the picture?  When the film finally gets to the point in the last 10 minutes, it’s too little too late.  The title is the only cold, creepy feeling to be had here.  For the record, this was my first, and to date only, actual two severed thumbs down review.

2. Chernobyl Diaries

You know that third person shaky cam that I always bitch about?  This is the epitome of everything I loathe about that style.  Honestly, after watching the trailer, how many of you thought this was a found footage flick?  Yeah, I did too.  It’s not, but it’s shot like one.  Why would anyone do that you ask?  For the same reason most movies employ this cheap blight on modern cinematography; they’re attempting to create artificial action and tension to cover up for the fact that the filmmakers failed to create any within the actual story.  That alone would be enough to call it one of the worst flicks of the year.  But wait, there’s more.

Leah, my most frequent movie watching companion, is my scare meter.  She’s a pretty easy startle.  After thousands of horror flicks and almost 20 years in the haunt business, I’m too jaded to be a good judge of the effectiveness of jump scares, so I use her for that purpose.  She didn’t jump once.  If you can’t get a rise out of her, you have officially failed in the scare department.  That’s still not the end of the suckage to be had here.

Chernobyl Diaries had one thing, and only one thing, going for it; that great setting.  Chernobyl is creepy as hell.  So what did the filmmakers do?  They set the second half of the flick in a dark underground labyrinth, effectively nullifying the one selling point of the film.  While we were in the ruined city, it was at least kinda cool to look at.  Then again, as spastic as the camera was during all of the “action,” we wouldn’t have been able to get a good look at anything anyway.  Chernobyl is a killer setting for a horror movie.  Hopefully someone makes a decent one there someday.  I saw this one at the discount theater, where tickets are $1.99, and still felt ripped off.

And the winner, er, loser...

1. Area 407

I should have known better.  I told myself that I wasn’t going to subject myself to any more found footage movies outside of the PA series.  I loathe the vast majority of them.  Notice how 3 of my top 5 are found footage flicks and one might as well have been?  Point made.  How did they get me to break my oath and watch a FFF?  They promised me dinosaurs.  It had to be dinosaurs.  You bastards.  Dinosaurs are, like Nazis, bad movie kryptonite to the Son of Celluloid.  I love dinosaurs.  Led by my dino-love, I gave this flick a chance against my better judgment.  Wouldn’t you know it, it turned out to be a bait and switch.  There are less than 10 seconds of dinosaur footage in this movie.  Yes, less than 10 seconds.  To make matters worse, every last shot of the dinosaur(s?) is in the damn trailer!  It’s a dinosaur-less dinosaur movie.  So, if less than .1% - not 1% mind you, but POINT ONE PERCENT - of this flick contains dinosaurs, then what in the green hell could the rest of the movie possibly consist of? 

After the plane crash 15 minutes in, it’s 75 minutes of people pointing into the darkness and screaming “What was that?” and “Did you see that?”  Yes, that’s really all it is.  The whole point of a FFF is realism, right?  Well, let’s just say that you’re in a large, dark area with unknown monsters and someone panics, points into the darkness, and yells “what the hell is that?” What would you do instinctively?  Right, you’d look too.  Not in this flick. The camera never leaves the survivors.  Never.  It’s painfully obvious that the camera operators were instructed to do everything in their power not to catch any of the action, or anything interesting at all for that matter, in the frame.  All of the deaths occur offscreen.  Yup, every last one of ‘em.  Literally all we see is annoying characters yelling at each other, pointing at things we don’t get to see, freaking out, crying, and running in the dark.  It’s as if someone bet the director that he couldn’t make a movie entirely out of reaction shots. 

What we end up with is a movie that not only epitomizes every overwrought, overdone, and played out weakness of the found footage subgenre; but cheats the viewer out of the promised hook, which was the only reason to watch the movie in the first place.  Congratulations Area 407, you are the worst horror movie of the year.  Think about that for a minute.  You were worse than every remake released in 2012.  You were worse than every neutered PG-13 teen thriller that the major studios vomited forth this year.  In fact, you are the first indie flick that this staunch indie horror supporter has named “Worst Horror Flick of the Year!”  I would much rather slap Hollywood around, so don’t ever make me do that again, please.  Basically, I can sum up my feelings about Area 407 with a quote from a REAL dinosaur movie…”That is one big pile of shit!”

Review: Cold Creepy Feeling

This review courtesy of filmarcade.net

I’ve said many times that while, like everyone else, I like good movies, I like bad movies too. I find a lot of bad movies just as much fun as the good ones. I can forgive a lot in a bad movie as long as it’s entertaining in some way. There is one unforgivable sin however, and one thing that I will never EVER forgive a movie for being, and that is boring. I hate to say it, but that’s exactly what Cold, Creepy Feeling is; boring.

The synopsis: A young couple, Chloe (Lisa Younger) and Jason (Jared Vandenberg), escape the Los Angeles rat race for the quiet life in Joshua Tree, California but paranormal visions and voices quickly turn the house of their dreams into a house of nightmares. They enlist the help of a spiritualist, Alex Damiano, to help exorcise the premises but this only awakens and angers the demonic presence that lurks within. When the town Sheriff (Dennis Woodruff) becomes involved, he discovers that another family mysteriously disappeared 10 years earlier without a trace and he also becomes entangled in the web of evil horror.

The problem with this movie is that nothing really ever happens. So much time is wasted on things that have nothing to do with what very little plot there is. It takes them about 20 minutes to get to the damn house in the first place. This includes the couple in the car talking, a pointless stopover in a ghost town where they just play around, and a lot of shots out the window. It’s like watching a stranger’s vacation tapes. It’s freaking tedious. Then, when they get there, they explore the grounds for 10 minutes. Then the happy couple settles in, has a couple of drinks, and starts getting it on in the new house. At this point, the scary stuff should finally kick in, right? Wrong. There’s a false scare here involving a spider, which was the best scene in the film by far as it’s the only one with any originality, humor of the intentional variety, or drama. Then they go out to a bar. THEY GO OUT TO A BAR! In a horror movie, if someone is having sex in a haunted house, that should be the start of something oh, I dunno, creepy maybe? You know, creepy? Like we were promised in the freakin’ title? Anyway, when they eventually get home and go to bed, they hear a weird noise and Lisa has a weird dream. Finally something is happening! Did I mention that the movie is literally halfway over at this point? It’s got to pick up now, right? Well, they spend the next 8 minutes taking turns reading posts on a message board about ghosts. I’m not kidding. We are now 55 minutes into this film’s 86 minute running time. Are you starting to get the picture of how this flick is going?

We have about 15 minutes of shots of stuff, meaning nothing is happening, it’s just filler footage of plants, buildings, the sky, traffic, or whatever they could pad this flick with. We get a performance from Dennis Woodruff as the town sheriff that is so bad that it does have humor value, but it’s not worth sitting through the flick to get to. The final reveal is supremely inadequate considering what we sat through to get there.

Cold Creepy Feeling is sort of a combination of regular narrative film and found footage film. The problem is that when they’re not boring us to death with the “vacation footage” I mentioned earlier, they try to use the first person camera as a special effect. They employ the night vision thing to deliver the only two scares in the movie, and they fail badly. The whole night vision first person thing is so cliché by this point that if you’re going to use it, you’d better show something innovative or it’s going to fall flat on its face. Here, it’s like they think the technique is still unique enough to enhance the weak…I was about to call them jump scares but they’re so unfrightening that I’m honestly not 100% sure they were meant to be scares. While we’re on the subject of not using clichés, if you’re going to have someone perform an exorcism, which literally lasts less than a minute, DO NOT say the words “the power of Christ compels you” unless you’re going for laughs. That line is too much of a punch line to ever be used in a serious context again, especially twice. The song that’s playing when they are dancing in the bar deserves a special mention too. Holy crap it’s terrible. The rest of the music is decent if a bit generic but that song is just terrible.

I can’t wrap the review up without saying something good, so I’ll say that I did enjoy the tarantula scene. As I said earlier it was the only really good moment of the film. Lisa Younger and Dennis Woodruff as the young couple are at least somewhat likable. Given better material, they might have been effective. Well, that and Miss Younger has a fantastic ass. Just saying.

I believe this was writer/director/editor/effects (what effects?)/ sound/cinematographer Keith Kurlander’s first attempt at a feature, and unfortunately it wasn’t a successful one. The directing wasn’t necessarily bad, the problems primarily came from the story, so maybe if he stuck to directing someone else’s script and got some other artists to collaborate with, he could turn out a winner. Honestly folks, I hate writing reviews like this. Every time I get a screener of an indie flick I’m rooting for it, because I know that people put their hearts and souls into these things. Unfortunately, Cold Creepy Feeling failed to deliver even a moment of the titular sensation. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a historic moment, because I am about to type these words for the first time in my year and a half of reviewing horror flicks…two severed thumbs down. Nathan says do not check it out.