Urban Legends: Bloody Mary (2005) Horror Ghost

Urban Legends: Bloody Mary (2005) - It's important to note that these thoughts are as I watch the film. They are not designed to be a review necessarily but more as thoughts while watching. There is so much spoiler information and guesses of what will come that you should be wary of reading this prior to seeing the film. You have been warned.
It's 1969 in small town America and Mary and her friends have not been the most popular of girls in the local high school. Some sudden attention from the jocks has her on a high because the guy she likes Willy has broken up with the prom queen to take her to the dance. It seems like it is going to be a magical night when Willie and the boys spike the punch of the three girls and a cruel alternative plan is revealed. Mary walking outside with Willy notices her friends all but passed out in the alley behind the dance and the Queen of the prom there beckoning to get the girls into the car. Mary runs and tries to hide in the school. Willie catches up to her and in the physical altercation that follows he accidentally kills her. Instead of doing the right thing he hides the body. Cut to teen girls in the bedroom during a sleepover telling the story. It is a legend.
  Samantha  (Kate Mara a young 22) is one of the young women telling and talking about Urban Legends. They makes some mentions to set the mood and also reference movies like Candyman (1992), before talking about how you do the Bloody Mary legend where you stand in front of the mirror with the lights out and say her name three times. She will appear and have a corpse face, and if you look at her she will drag you into her darkness unless you turn the light back on. Now the film immediately after setting up the rules breaks them because sure Samantha says "Bloody Mary" three times but she is lounging around with her friends not standing in the dark in front of a mirror. There is a desire by writers Mike Daugherty and Dan Harris to connect what is made up urban legend with well known stories in urban legend. This so he can blend the old with this new story they are trying to tell.
  Dougherty is so much the thing these days having written the already Halloween classic Trick r' Treat (2007), the wildly entertaining and I may say turning classic very quickly Krampus (2015) before graduating to blockbuster size films with Godzilla: King of Monsters this year. So when we cut to a creepy Bloody Mary appearing outside the house it is a head scratcher. Then when Mom comes in to wake the girls up they are all gone. A montage of scenes shows that the girls went missing maybe not to be found again. The girls suddenly came back and say they woke up in the cellar of the old mill, mind you with date rape drug in there system. Its weird because what we have here is the current story mirroring the events of 1969. This I am sure is on purpose as the Director Mary Lambert is going to integrate it all. Although I am wondering why include the urban legends stuff at all. It does not necessarily fit with the ghost story they are telling here and thus gives sort of a false read of the film.
  So my mind is going at this point, this seems like a classic misdirection as I pause the film to write this. The step father in the is family is Bill Owens (Ed Marinaro), running for mayor and I have a theory. Bill is Willie from the opening, we know his wife Pam was a prom queen so that matches. Then the fact the girls were drugged, maybe Bill never got over his need to drug girls like in 1969? What if the POV that seemed a bit creeper in its gaze when he checked on the girls the night they disappeared was a red flag purposely put in the film by director Mary Lambert?  It could be the current jocks who were established as being pissed at Samantha for a school article she wrote are the culprits. I think that was a misdirection though, creepy guilty of murder step dad is the suspect I am leading towards at this point. It is possible though. A parallel works here and I think there is a couple stories really taking hold at the same time.
  Talk in school is that the girls may have done the whole thing themselves but we quickly learn it was the jocks getting back at Samantha for her article. Twin brother David (Robert Vito) is trying to defend his sister but is ill equipped to do anything. The jocks are not pleased with the outcome worried that the girls will tell on them and get them into trouble. By the way this is exactly what should happen. All should be disciplined and kicked off the team but this is not the route the film takes. Instead the secret is kept so we can talk about this all happening before. Then we start to have incidents that are all very urban legend. One jock is fried in a tanning booth. Heather  (Audra Lea Keener) the lead jocks girlfriend although her relationship with Samantha has faded from when they were kids suddenly has the real life problem of a spider laying its eggs in her face. The absolute go for it attitude of the film makers having Heather pull off her face is pretty cool.
  There is a bit here on the effects of trauma but it is a bit over shadowed the linear story of the jocks wanting to blame people for the deaths of their friends. Instead we get even more urban legend deaths, like the guy getting electrocuted by pissing on a high voltage fence. The mystery seems to get bigger and bigger with Samantha and David thinking there is some conspiracy going on. There research leads them to the original disappearance in 1969 but it seems like all of the adults are suspects, like the step father and then the coach of the football team starts showing up being creepy himself. The children will always suffer the sins of their parents. The inexplicably builds this connection between the past and present even introducing premonitions that Samantha receives. So maybe this is really a ghost story where 35 years later the first crime is found out by the ghosts coming looking for justice? It is but is is wrapped up unnecessarily in urban legend talking points that sort of take away from a very reasonable revenge ghost story. Of course without all these extra shiny objects one might be reminded of the movie Stir of Echoes (1999) where a ghost gets her story told by using a neighborhood guy who was put under hypnosis to get revenge. The vengeful ghost is a motif after all so there will be many examples of this.
  The film takes the interconnectedness of all things and stands it on its head with what seems like a story that is not sure what it wants to be. Is this urban legends? No not really all those parts seemed disconnected from the real plot. A revenge ghost story? Yes it is a ghost that for some reason has to be reconciled at this time for no real reason other than that the children of the perpetrators are the same age as the victim when the original crime was committed. I am not really going to recommend this film but it isn't horrible just a bit too much.

The Kiss (2008) - Horror Vampire

The Kiss (2008) - When I received this film for Christmas I was disappointed that it was not the great and awesome "The Kiss (1988)" Where a women keeps her eternal youth by stealing it from young women she gets close to with the help of an African god idol. But alas instead we have this strange film that doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. Is it comedy, horror, or just horrid. The opening with its explanation of the different clans of vampire and the burial of the snake clan queen left me worried that this would be a movie full of its own importance. The horrid acting in that first scene shaded my hopes for the film.
Jeremy Williams (Lendon LeMelle) is the picked on kid in the apparently one room schoolhouse, a loner with a disconnected Mom he goes through his days listening to his head phones and trying to not get noticed. One day when hiding in an abandon house to avoid some bullies, he hears the cries of our buried vampire queen. After opening the tomb and carrying the dried corpse home he goes about, and I guess this is the comedy part, collecting small animals for blood for her. Her psychic connection to him grows as she gets more blood and reforms into the beautiful Santa Maria (Lourdes Colon). Upon becoming fully formed again she fucks him to seal the deal. Note: If you are going to bring a latina vampire queen back from rotting hell make sure you get to bang her as part of the deal. No longer a virgin Jeremy now has a new confidence and some amazing powers, well they are her powers to keep him safe from the bullies. Jeremy has a start to a normal relationship with the startlingly blue eyed Carrie (Angela Rachelle) that never quite goes anywhere but was getting us thinking Jeremy is semi normal. Then of course he starts acting like a dick, he has a group of girls hanging on his jock, he is confident even cocky with the former bully Javier (Michael Galvez) and in general is not an appealing guy.
Santa maria wants more than dogs blood so she has Jeremy invite the groups from the high school to her place for a "Party", she really is the only one who gets to party at this event though. When they arrive Jeremy is all uppity under the spell of Santa Maria and the kids seem to not notice that non of the guest at the party spend much time interacting with them. They are ghost summoned to fill out the room and have little interest in the living. Santa Maria now goes about looking to feed on the kids, two end up in a bedroom for a romp, Fonso (Vincent Rivera) and Sandra(The ever so sexy assed Noel Signagio) and while she is in the bathroom putting in her birth control, Santa Maria comes in a hot little nighty and bites the shit out of him. Then snacks on Sandra when she comes out. Here though we get to see the real flaw in this film. The makeup! Santa Maria has this big latex mouthpiece of fangs that looks like a Halloween, five and dime store bought costume. It spoils what so far has been a fairly decent low budget vampire flick. Up until this point writer/director Scott Madden had done a nice job hiding the bad makeup with quick cuts and deceptive angles but here it is on full display.
She goes about killing off the other kids and when finally we come to pretty Carrie we get surprised that she is killed too. Jeremy was shocked and so was I. My thought was there would be a choice for Jeremy between the two women but really his choice is to either die with them or join Santa Maria as a vampire. Finally the last bit of bad fake mouth is shown in full light and looks stupid and the film comes to a close but what about that explanation about the vampire clans? How will this come into play? Well it won't, you will get a couple throw away lines and realized that whole idea could have been edited out and it would not have impacted the film at all. Now I want to recommend this but boy it is really close, this really is not a good film but I still enjoyed it. Maybe because I watched it after Katiebird so anything would seem better than it is.
Rating (5.0 barely) 5.0 and up are recommended, in the Zombiegrrlz system only rent it!

Notes on the year: Back in January the Finalgirl Blog launched a plan to watch 100 movies in the year and I was trying to match that effort on this blog. I did not break the films up into categories, like she did but figured that with all the films I missed as a youth I could get 100 in in the calendar year. Well this is my 100th review this year. Cheers for me!!!!!!

Tormented (2009) Horror

Tormented (2009) - This British horror film could have been J-horror, a vengeful ghost kills the cool kids at a boarding school who tormented him in life. Justine (Tuppence Middleton) is the girl of poor Darren Mullet's (Calvin Dean) affection, overweight and unliked Mullet is relentlessly picked on and Justine never even notices him. When he commits suicide she can't even remember who he is. Her friends and his tormentors go on being the cool kids at the school and it seems his memory will soon be forgotten. But some things can not be forgiven that easily. Mullet , in ghost form starts killing his former bullies one at a time. What will Justine be able to do to not be one of the victims? Who will notice that the sudden deaths of these prize students seems strange? The basic plotting of this tales was very passable even with the very steriotyped set of characters. The ending was better than I expected and the kills were unique enough for this type of horror movie. So give first time writer Stephen Prentice some credit for not sticking with the most abvious choice in direction. Still in the end I think a lot of poeple will want more depth and subtext, the whole bullies get their due is far from original and the side story of Justine leaving her original group of friends to get in with the cool kids was barely touched. This movie is not poor but could have been so much more.

Rating (5.0)

Deadgirl (2008) - Horror

Deadgirl (2008) - This movie is not what you would expect. Two high school boys find a girl who can't die chained to a slab in an old abandoned mental hospital. The boys were obviously poorly cast, with each looking way past high school age. Ricky (Shiloh Fernandez) is 24 and J.T. (Noah Segan) is 26, of course this is a common Hollywood issue. Once the boys find the nude woman (Jenny Spain) instead of calling the police like any sane person would do, J.T. pushes for a free sex slave arrangement. The rest of the movie for the most part is J.T. fucking the dead girl and Ricky struggling with the immorality of it. To create tension we learn that J.T. has experimented killing her, but she comes back to life. Ricky has a second and third plot line in the girl at school he likes and her dickhead Boyfriend, and his shitty home life. Another friend is brought in by J.T. so he does not have to rape alone creating the risk of discovery. Mostly this movies is boring, at least to me. I found the dead girl parts repulsive and the rest unoriginal. The climax builds as others learn of the dead girl and we learn her bite is going to make the bitten like her. She starts to rot, I am not really sure why, she was locked rot free in the room for years but maybe it is a side effect of being repeatedly harmed and raped. J.T. wants to take a giant step and continue his rape fest and Ricky wants it all to end, how will it turn out?

Rating (3.7)

School Killer (2001) Horror

School Killer (2001) - The story of six teenagers who attempt to spent the night at an old and apparently haunted school. Like his father did 30 or so years before Ramon (Carlos Fuentes) brings his friends to the closed down private school for adventure but only finds horror and death. Trying to solve the mystery of what happened to his father Alex and his friends may save these teen from a similar fate. Early in the film the characters referenced A nightmare on Elm street and one of the Scream movies in talking about how they are not as stupid as the teens in those films, hmmmmm...

Strange light when there is no electricity quickly leads to the classic, have sex and die scene. Soon there is running and screaming and a car that has flats and does not start. The tired going back into the creepy dark building, then more running and dying. The mystery was a bit interesting and seeing Paul Naschy as the evil security guard was cool. Overall though this is pretty standard stuff and for all their talk of knowing horror movies the characters in this one made the same mistakes.

The movie looks dark, and the sound and music was a bit grating.

Rating (3.8)