internet wraith.

Masters of Horror: Cigarette Burns. In John Carpenter's episode of the horror anthology series, a guy (Norman Reedus) who finds rare movie prints is hired to find one that may no longer exist after horrific violence broke out on the night it was shown. I love stories about haunted media, and the haunted media parts of this were solid. Unlike Antrum: The Deadliest Movie Ever Made, this mostly resisted the temptation of actually showing us the cursed movie, but the effects as our guy gets closer to finding it are satisfyingly disturbing. It even gets pretty gory towards the end, which I was not expecting.

That said, it's weirdly paced and very talky, and the main character should have been played by someone older, because Norman Reedus with his baby face absolutely cannot sell this role. Also, IMO it really mishandled the reveal ( spoilers )

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Sator (2021). A man lives in a cabin in the woods while trying to discover what happened to his mother, who may have been taken by a demon that she and her mother both claimed to hear messages from. This movie doesn't have much dialogue, is very poorly lit, and relies heavily on the viewer being able to recognize and distinguish faces to distinguish what's happening, which I'm pretty bad at, so overall I understood only the broadest strokes of this movie. I think I would really like the movie that I think it was trying to be, a story of an inherited gift/curse and how it affects and has affected different members of the family, but I need a bit more than this movie could give me.

In particular,
( spoilery questions )

I will say the spooky woodsy vibes were very good, and despite being objectively pretty slow, I was engaged the whole time. Also, the actress playing the grandma with dementia was fantastic. Loved her.

Overall I don't recommend this one, but if you watch it, I would love to know what you think happens in it.

It's been a minute since I did one of these!

V/H/S/2 (2013). Too much gross, way too many zombies. The zombie helmetcam segment is supposed to be a classic, but a) gross, and b) HOW ARE WE SPLICING IN A WHOLE OTHER SOURCE OF FOOTAGE INTO THE HELMETCAM FOOTAGE. I will allow cutting in found footage but I refuse to accept editing in entirely other sources. I watched the Kill Count for the segments I missed and was not even a little sorry I skipped them. I like found footage, I like anthology movies, but I think I'm done with this franchise.

Resurrection (2022). Rebecca Hall plays a mother who (thinks she?) spots her past abuser/rapist at a conference and completely loses her mind over it. Hall is so good at psychological tension, TOO good in this case. I could not handle it, especially combined with the abuse dynamic. Apparently the movie got even weirder after I stopped, complete with on-screen pseudo-mpreg? IDK, psychological realism combined with plot surrealism is not my jam.

Psycho Goreman (2021). Two kids discover an ancient evil emperor of the universe and get him to do tricks for them. I think in order to like this movie I needed to be a huge fan of a certain kind of cheesy 80s fantasy movie, and alas I am not. Also the kids are really obnoxious, especially the sister.

The House October Built (2011). A camera crew goes on the road to film haunted houses people have set up for Halloween. This opens with the most excruciating "one (1) woman and a bunch of annoying men bicker" found footage scene I have seen in a long time. I lasted less than five minutes. Why is there always one woman max in found footage movies? Why is there basically NO found footage with majority women? Found footage is so cheap to make, why aren't there bunches of these movies by and about women? (Recs welcome.)

Stopmotion (2024). A repressed woman becomes increasingly obsessive about completing her mother's stop-motion film. This was slow and tedious, and I am so tired of movies about quiet, introverted characters inevitably becoming obsessed, deranged, and losing their entire grip on reality. And again with the surrealism, ugh.

Left for Dead (2007). A horror-western about a woman looking to kill a wanted outlaw, with the blurb "Saw meets the spaghetti western." When I bought this for $4 at Goodwill, I want to stress that I did not expect it to be good, but it may be the actual worst movie I have ever watched in my life. Somehow this movie has a wikipedia page, where we learn it was filmed in twelve days. There is copious slow-mo. Every single change of camera angle is preceded by a freeze frame. It is impossible to articulate how painful every second of this movie is, and I strongly recommend you hunt it down just to experience a couple of minutes of it for yourself.

Blink Twice (2024). Two women get themselves invited to a CEO's party island, and then they start losing parts of their memory. Or so I hear; I didn't even get as far as the island invite because the social embarassment squick hit me so hard. Then I looked up spoilers and discovered that the answer to all the mysteries in the trailer is RAPE because this is a RAPE island where the CEO and all his friends are RAPISTS. Did I mention this is a movie about RAPE? (And also about a drug with truly remarkable capabilities in selective memory suppression.)

Gothic (1986). Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary, Lord Byron, and a couple of others party at Byron's house with a lot of laudanum, and stuff happens. This is by Ken Russell, who did Lair of the White Worm, but that movie is a romp and this is... a series of events which may or may not exist within the same narrative? They're not even interesting events. It's like unsexy erotica, interpersonal drama, someone maybe hallucinates a monster, more unsexy erotica. Timothy Spall wears a corset at one point. With half an hour left I turned it off and read about Mary Shelley on wikipedia instead, which was a much more enjoyable use of my time.