horror movie review – Horror Ghouls

Last Shift (2014)

Posted on July 26, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

Jessica Loren is a rookie police officer, ready to take on her first assignment: taking the last shift at an abandoned police station that will soon be closed down for good. For some reason she doesn’t quite understand, her mother calls her and pleads with her to not take the job. She believes it must be because her father was killed on duty many years ago. Anyway, Jessica ignores her mother and leaves for duty. The commanding officer at the police station gives her a quick tour, and tells her that a Hazmat team will come around sometime later in order to collect evidence that is difficult to expose of. For this reason, she’s ordered to never leave her post. Sounds like a pretty easy task for a rookie, right? Nothing bad could happen here…right? Well, what sounds like a dull job, soon proves to be anything but as Jessica soon finds herself in stranger and stranger situations. The first incident is when a hobo enters the place and acts all weird, but it gets more disturbing when she receives a series of distress calls from a woman named Monica, who claims that she’s been taken hostage by a cult and believes they’re going to kill her. The thing is: no emergency calls are supposed to come into that police station anymore, as they have been rerouted to the new station. Jessica also finds out that in this exact police station the members of an infamous cult committed suicide one year ago, and she starts suspecting that the calls from Monica indicates that this cult still has some living members. Something is going on at this police station for sure, and while the place may be abandoned by people, something is definitely still there…

Last Shift is a horror film from 2014, directed by Anthony DiBlasi, written by DiBlasi and Scott Poiley. It was filmed in Sanford, Florida, in an actual abandoned police station. The script for the movie had actually not been written yet until the director and writer came upon the place. Sometimes you just need to find the right location and setting first, especially when you’re an indie filmmaker.

DiBlasi’s vision for the film was to have one that focused on atmosphere and would keep the audience wondering and intrigued by the mystery, and on this it definitely hits the sweet spot perfectly. Despite being a one-location movie, it keeps the pacing up and rarely falters. Much of the horror elements and sinister atmosphere comes from the main character’s isolation and increasingly bizarre and creepy events that keeps unfolding around her. Going from the subtle incidents at the beginning to a gradual rise in bizarre occurrences, the tension always keeps building. It’s also obvious that DiBlasi used the Manson Family as inspiration for the cult, while adding some occult and satanic elements into the mix. I guess you could define this movie as a little bit of a slow-burner, where indeed the focus on creepy atmosphere and a tingling sense of foreboding is what drives a lot of the movie forward, keeping its mystery elements in the shadows and revealing little bits and pieces along the way.

Overall, Last Shift is a creepy and effective psychological horror film with an emphasis on cults and satanism. DiBlasi also directed a remake titled Malum in 2023 where it appears the focus is a lot more on gory effects and an expansion on the cult elements.

Director: Anthony DiBlasi
Writers: Anthony DiBlasi, Scott Poiley
Country & year: USA, 2014
Actors: Juliana Harkavy, Joshua Mikel, Hank Stone, J. LaRose, Sarah Sculco, Kathryn Kilger, Natalie Victoria, Mary Lankford Poiley, Matt Doman, Lindsi Jeter, Randy Molnar
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2965466/

Anthropophagous 2000 (1999)

Posted on July 23, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

For those familiar with Andreas Schnaas’ epic Violent Shit saga, and just add Nikos the Impaler to the list, know pretty much what to expect: Amateur-hour overkill extravaganza all the way through. And his remake of Joe D’Amato’s Antropophagus isn’t much different. It’s Violent, it’s Shit, and lots of tasteless, inept fun.

The film starts with a group of Interpol agents who have discovered a cave with human skeletons. One of the agents spots a diary which he takes a further look into to maybe get some answers. Then we flashback to a family of four on a boat-trip: dad Nikos (not related to Nikos the Impaler) with his younger daughter and pregnant wife (UH-OH). Shit happens when they get hit by a storm which leaves them stuck on a lifeboat where Nikos goes insane and eats his whole family. Since then, he’s paddled himself to the mainland to some remote village where he’s eaten up most of the people.

Our first body counts are a young couple who are about to have sex in a tent. We’re a few minutes in where the cinematography is non-existent and the overall quality reeks of amateur homemade porn. And don’t expect it to be any better. However, Nikos is soon about to pop up where he deletes them both with an ax and rips their faces off.

We jump to a train station where we meet our main characters (or just body-counts, if you will), a group that I’d guess were some middle-aged Anonymous Alcoholics, gathering for an intervention. It’s less serious than that though, as they’re here on vacation. The place is supposed to be in the countryside of Italy, yet the only post listed on the IMDb trivia section tells us that the film was shot in Austria. Whatever.

They continue the trip with an RV where they struggle to find the destination, a town called Lorenzo (if I remember correctly). They ask a local for help, a hobo, who strongly warns them to NOT go near Lorenzo. The pregnant woman pukes straight at the hobo’s hands, which he slurps and smears over his face. Uh.. OK.

It’s pretty straight-forward from here on with the same plot points as the original. The pregnant woman mysteriously disappears (and we all know what lies next for her), the body counts enter an empty village where they stumble upon (what is supposed to be) cadavers. Don’t let the cheap Halloween props fool you. This is the real thing. They get spooked and surprised by a blind screaming lady in a basement. The classic fetus scene is of course here, and instead of using a skinned rabbit, we actually have a real baby. Just kidding, they used an animatronic baby doll.

We also have some new fresh ideas with a quick side-plot of a gay couple hiking in the local woods, only to amp up the pace and kill count. And instead of the obligatory taking-a-piss break, we … are having a smoke. Because Andreas Schnaas tried to go for a far more serious tone with this one, if you can even imagine – and it falls completely on its face on all fronts. If the acting wasn’t bad and amateurish enough, with the same juvenile and frantic backyard-filmmaking approach as his previous films, the film is also shot on video. A fugly combination that never looks appealing. So don’t look for any visuals or atmosphere like the original.

That being said, Anthropophagous 2000 doesn’t fail to entertain. It’s a fun retarded so-bad-it’s-good trash fest that could exist in the Violent Shit universe. I said the same about Nikos the Impaler. Just replace the killer with Karl the Butcher, and there you have it. It makes zero difference. The gore is over-the-top, messy and comical, as Schnaas is known for. Some look decent while others look fake, like a plastic turd. Also watch out for a Cannibal Holocaust reference. Andreas Schnaas plays, of course, the cannibal, where he acts more like a cosplay version of George Eastman. It’s like watching a mouse trying to be an elephant. But as always, he seemed to have a jolly fun time playing yet another boogeyman.

Director: Andreas Schnaas
Writer: Karl-Heinz Geisendorf
Country & year: Austria/Germany, 1999
Actors: Oliver Sauer, Cornelia De Pablos, Andreas Stoek, Sybille Kohlhase, Achim Kohlhase, Andre Sobottka, Britt B., Andreas Schnaas
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0202233/

Original:
– Antropophagus (1980)

Faux sequel:
– Anthropophagus II (2022)

Anthropophagous 2000 (1999) – Trailer from Movies From The Crypt on Vimeo.

Anthropophagus II (2022)

Posted on July 19, 2024July 23, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

Anthropophagus II, my ass.

Because this has nothing to do with Joe D’Amato’s film, even though I see clearly through the cheap and ridiculously outdated selling tactic. Italians were notoriously known for spewing out cynical and half-assed unofficial “faux“ sequels to more successful films way back in the day, which most of us horror ghouls know pretty well already. This one came just four decades too late. I discovered the film while I wrote my review of the original, and I honestly expected the worst of the worst and that I’d maybe turn it off after the first thirty minutes (which is something I rarely do). And to my fat surprise, I had some fun with Anthropophagus II, because it’s so dumb it’s actually amusing.

The plot goes as follows: A group of young female students are writing a thesis on a historical air-raid shelter bunker located near Rome, Italy. To get a sense of the place and its environment, they let themselves be isolated in the bunker over a weekend. No alcohol allowed. And I thought that girls just wanted to have fun. They also have to hand over their cellphones, which I don’t believe for a second that any Gen Z would survive without for even two seconds. They would crumble and die of abstinence before starvation. Anyway – it turns out that a disfigured, tiny freak lives deep in the bunker where he has his own secret little dim-lighted torture chamber. He looks like an older, retired brother of Yellow Bastard from Sin City, just without the beer gut, and is of course not related to the cannibal from the original film. He’s moons apart from the creepy and intimidating presence we saw with George Eastman, if we really have to compare. So, what’s his deal? You’ll see.

On the surface, there’s nothing new here, just a string of tired, over-done clichés and modern TikTok characters with a half brain cell and the personality of an emoji. Nothing much to grab onto there, except some nice flesh, I guess. It’s formulaic by the textbook. The acting is flat with tone deaf dialogues written by an alien who doesn’t have a clue how humans interact. Yes, it’s one of those movies. The girls are cute, though, I’ll give ’em that. All the actors have English dubbing and some of their dialogue delivery is on Scooby-Doo level and overall so goofy that I burst out laughing several times. Lol and Lols and more emoji lols. The film is produced by Giovanni Paolucci, an old-timer veteran who’s worked on several films by Bruno Mattei and Dario Argento’s big turkey, which was Dracula 3D. So that alone should maybe say something.

The film’s strong side is the effects and the setting of the bunker which reminded me more of Creep (2004), while we have a series of fleshy Guinea Pig-inspired torture porn scenes. And this one goes hardcore on the gore, already in the opening scene where we have a baby being ripped out of a woman’s vagina. A nice quick nod to the original. The effects are impressive, and the violence is mean-spirited, brutal and callous, whereas Art the Clown would probably have smiled from ear to ear. Solid work from the splatter & gore department, in other words. So, if you’re primarily in for the bloody and messy stuff, sprinkled with some flavors of classic Italian horror aesthetic to make it taste more than a week-old frozen pepperoni pizza, you won’t be too disappointed.

Anthropophagus II is available both on DVD and Blu-ray, and also lurking on our favorite streaming site, Tubi.

Director: Dario Germani
Writer: Lorenzo De Luca
Country & year: Italy, 2022
Actors: Jessica Pizzi, Monica Carpanese, Giuditta Niccoli, Diletta Maria D’Ascanio, Chiara De Cristofaro, Shaen Barletta, Valentina Capuano, Alessandra Pellegrino, Alberto Buccolini
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13757762/

Original:
– Antropophagus (1980)

Remake:
– Anthropophagous 2000 (1999)

Lovely, Dark and Deep (2023)

Posted on July 12, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

In Arvores National Park, several rangers and other people have gone missing over a span of many years. Lennon is a backcountry ranger who starts working at the place, after her predecessor became one of the missing people. Of course, Lennon also has a motive for working at this place: when she was a child, her sister Jenny disappeared there, and she hopes that maybe she will find some answers. In her ranger cabin, she also keeps track of all the people that have gone missing over the years, including her sister. Soon, there’s report of another missing person as well: Sarah Greenberg, who went missing during a hike. The rangers form a search party, but the head ranger orders Lennon to stay at base camp, an order she quickly disobeys. She starts searching for Sarah as well, and finds her bloody and disoriented. What sounds like a happy ending to what could have been another missing persons case, ends up getting Lennon fired and she is asked to await airlift out of the place in five days. Well, five days can be a long wait…and strange things start happening when Lennon then decides to take a hike through the park…

Lovely, Dark and Deep is a horror film from 2023, written and directed by Teresa Sutherland. It’s her feature debut, and stars Georgina Campbell (from Barbarian) in the leading role. The movie was filmed in Portugal, providing many great forest and landscape shots.

The feeling of total isolation comes through well during the film, where the infrequent appearance of other rangers and hikers almost come as a surprise. It is both beautiful and unnerving, where Lennon walks through the confines of the forest on a sunny day, while also feeling like the entire place is ready to swallow her up and leaving no trace. Every year, hundreds of people go missing in national parks, and many of them are never found. While it comes as no surprise that this could easily happen due to the lack of proper planning, not having proper gear, unpredictable weather, sudden illness and even wildlife, it’s still something that’s fruitful for fanciful explanations and creepy theories: from the more down-to-earth speculations like serial killers roaming these places to supernatural explanations, Bigfoot, ufo’s, you name it. And while Lovely, Dark and Deep does offer some supernatural elements, most of it is subtle enough and without any thorough explanation, which works just fine for a movie like this.

Lovely Dark and Deep is a slow-burner which focuses on mood and mystery, providing an unsettling and often dreamlike atmosphere. It’s primarily about a woman who returns to the place where a childhood trauma happened, in order to seek answers. Not only does she get isolated in the vast forest landscape, but she’s already mentally isolated by dwelling on her past terrors and conflicting feelings and self-doubt, partly blaming herself and wondering if she could she have done something to save her sister. It does take a certain turn after a while where it ventures into the supernatural and surreal, which may take some people out of it, but which I personally found enjoyable. Recommended if you want something beautiful, mysterious and atmospheric. Or something lovely, dark and deep if you will.

Writer and director: Teresa Sutherland
Country & year: Portugal/USA, 2023
Actors: Georgina Campbell, Nick Blood, Wai Ching Ho, Mick Greer, Celia Williams, Maria de Sá, Ana Sofia Martins, Ivory Lee Smith, Letícia Assunção
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15560132/

Ouija Shark 2 (2022)

Posted on July 9, 2024July 9, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

It’s Shark Week and all, and since I’ve already talked about the modern classic that is Ouija Shark four years ago, now it’s time to take a look at the sequel.

Ouija Shark 2 opens with a quick summary of the first one where Anthony (John Migliore) sacrificed himself to save his daughter from getting eaten by a ghost shark. Anthony (John Migliore again) has since gotten stuck in a cheap green-screened Hell as a twisted parody of Dr. Strange where he’s getting chased and fighting against… gorillas. Of course, what else did you expect.

Anthony’s supposedly grieving wife (played by Deborah Jayne Reilly Smith) gives an emotionless speech with some crocodile tears, standing by his gravestone and swears that she will bring him back. She visits the fortune-teller who helped Anthony crossing over to the other side, in order to whack the shark and get some answers. The crystal ball tells us what we already know: that he’s in Hell. We can’t leave him THERE. We have to SAVE him, Anthony’s wife says with the emotion of a flat google voice. It’s not gonna be easy, the fortune-teller replies. It’s gonna be a barefoot trip to the park, don’t you worry.

Because after a quick meeting with The Grim Reaper (played by a dude with some cheap white paint on his face), Anthony gets some assistance from a ghost alligator which will help him finishing the evil shark. And just out of the blue, as expected, we have a musical number here where a goofy Satan and his TikTok brides show Taylor Swift how you make a catchy song (and that was not irony). Meanwhile, in the land of the living, Anthony’s wife is in the local woods to ask the mom of the fortune-teller for help. She’s a hermit and not interested. Shove off, she says. Can’t blame her. She changes her mind, though. But who cares. Now we want some shark mayhem, as the poster teases us with.

And the poster didn’t lie. If the film wasn’t amateur-hour already, just wait for the last thirty minutes – or as Satan himself says: You’ve seen nothing yet, folks! Here we have a series of random nightly cityscape shots where the ghost shark and the gator boss fight each other. Both creatures are, just like in the first film, ultra-cheap looking cute puppets that toddlers would have in their bed, and it looks as epic and cinematic as you’d expect. The gator spits out yellow-glowing puffy CGI balls while Satan controls the shark with a ouija board as he’s laughing and having a blast. The military chimes in and fires some missiles. The shark zaps them by shooting force-lighting through its eyes. Lots of buildings get destroyed, even a nuclear power plant (!) Oh, the mayhem, carnage and destruction! Roland Emmerich would eat his heart out. Really intense stuff, in other words. We see a handful of extras who run left and right in front a black, foggy background, all of which I would bet is super proud to be a part of Ouija Shark 2. And don’t blink if you wanna catch the two-second cameo by Lloyd Kaufman.

Ouija Shark 2 is written and directed by the main protagonist himself, John Migliore. And he goes all in for a crazier tone than the first one with a script that must have been co-written by a group of eight-year olds who just made it up as they went along. While the first had a whopping budget of 300 (yes, three hundred) Canadian dollars, I’d guess this one is slightly higher (50 dollars extra maybe), which gives us a few more green screen backgrounds rather than just the local woods and the director’s backyard. The acting is, of course, a big factor here, which is as strong and solid as you’d see in an elementary school play. But the one who takes the golden raspberry here, is Deborah Jayne Reilly Smith. She’s so stiff, lifeless and ridiculously robotic that she makes Mark Zuckerberg actually look like a normal human being. That in itself quite impressive.

So, whats next for this epic franchise, we may wonder? How about Ouija Shark 3: The Harpoon Made Me Do it, just to spitball an idea.

Writer and director: John Migliore
Country & year: Canada, 2022
Actors: John Migliore, Deborah Jayne Reilly Smith, Kylie Gough, Simon Wheeldon, Lena Montecalvo, Jay MacAulay, Sabrina Migliore, Emmalene Pruden, Nicholas Migliore
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21409958/

Prequel: Ouija Shark (2020)

Piggy (2022)

Posted on July 5, 2024July 5, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

Sara is an overweight girl who gets constantly bullied by a group of other teenage girls: Maca, Roci and Claudia. One of these girls even used to be her friend. They call her Cerdita (Piggy), and she can’t get a moment of peace no matter where she goes. On a hot summer day, she decides to visit the local swimming pool, where there’s no one else except another man who leaves shortly after. The peace doesn’t last long, though, because of course the three bullies comes along and ruins everything for her and also ends up stealing her backpack and clothes. Wearing nothing but her bikini, she has to walk home and gets harassed by a group of men who makes fun of her weight. Devastated, she escapes onto a side road, where she sees a parked van. Suddenly, a bloodied Claudia appears in the window of the van, screaming and begging for Sara to help her. Struck with fear, she freezes when realizing that the driver of the van has kidnapped those girls. Then, the kidnapper locks gazes with her, and she recognizes him as the man who was by the swimming pool earlier. He drops off her towel so she can cover herself, and drives off. Returning home, Sara finds herself conflicted as the kidnapper is one of the very few people in her life who have shown her some kindness and respect, and she decides to not tell anyone about what happened. Things escalate as the search for the missing girls are put into force, and other people are found dead. Sara is not sure how long she can keep her mouth shut in allegiance with the serial killer…

Piggy (original title: Cerdita) was released in 2022 and is Carlota Pereda’s feature film debut, and based on the short film by the same name from 2018. Both the feature film and the short film features Laura Galán in the leading role, and the shooting locations included the village of Villanueva de la Vera and the surrounding areas.

Now, looking at some of the posters for this film, where Sara is covered in blood on a hot Spanish summer day, and others where she’s been edited to be wielding a knife in her hand, one might think this is a typical revenge thriller movie. It’s not. Setting the film off by showing how Sara is bullied by people left and right while getting to meet an actual serial killer who – ironically – is the only person who shows her some kind of affection, really does set the mood. Yes, we sympathize with Sara and what she’s going through, and yeah…we don’t really feel too bad for those girls who are simply portrayed as a group of mean bitches. The exception is supposed to be Claudia, who used to be Sara’s friend, but who now enjoys being with the “cool” girls instead. We can see that she initially hesitates when seeing how the others treat Sara, but she soon joins in and does absolutely nothing to stop them. Despite being somewhat portrayed as the “lesser evil” among the girls, I honestly think she’s just as bad, maybe even worse. So yeah, we want to see Sara getting justice, but it plays out more as a drama thriller where the heroine is constantly plagued with differing feelings of both guilt and loyalty to the man who kidnapped her tormentors. And the majority of the villagers are also portrayed as people who aren’t exactly easy to like, including Sara’s own family, with the exception of her dad who seems to be the only person she’s got an okay relationship with.

Piggy aka Cerdita is a not a typical revenge film or slasher, but as a drama thriller about a bullied girl who ends up fighting quite the dilemma. Who to choose: the serial killer who saved you from your bullies, or the bullies and villagers who couldn’t really give a shit about you? In a regular slasher the answer to that question would have been obvious, but this movie is taking a more realistic approach. Sara never turns into some kind of badass heroine, but instead she’s coming to her own decisions despite her conflicting feelings. Definitely worth a watch, and an interesting take on how a bullied person would deal with having an evil savior.

Writer and director: Carlota Pereda
Country & year: Spain, 2023
Original title: Cerdita
Actors: Laura Galán, Richard Holmes, Carmen Machi, Irene Ferreiro, Camille Aguilar, Claudia Salas, José Pastor, Fernando Delgado-Hierro, Julián Valcárcel, Amets Otxoa
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10399608/

Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever (2023)

Posted on July 2, 2024July 9, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

It’s been approximately 30 years since the events of Nightwatch aka Nattevakten (1994), and the survivors aren’t actually faring so well. Martin is a complete wreck, not just because of his obvious PTSD but also because his wife Kalinka committed suicide after never getting over the trauma this incident caused her. He’s without a job and haven’t even received any welfare pay, and he tries to chase away his demons with drink and pills. Yeah, that always works great. His daughter, Emma, is trying to help him out but it’s apparent that she hasn’t properly processed her mother’s suicide either, which isn’t too surprising considering that she’s the one who found her. Not to mention the impact it all had on Jens, who bailed ass out of the country and have been living in Thailand ever since. Trauma has indeed dug its claws deep into everyone involved. Emma was never told about what happened, but when looking through some old newspaper clippings she finds out about the serial killer Wörmer and her parents involvement with him. History often likes to repeat itself, and Emma ends up taking a night watch job at – you guessed it – the exact same place as her father worked. Good choice! And when she finds out that Wörmer is still alive and just woke up from his coma, she wants to meet him in the hopes of finally exorcising both her father’s demons and her own. Unwittingly, she just ends up letting even more demons loose…

Nightwatch – Demons are Forever (original title: Nattevagten – Dæmoner går i arv) is a danish thriller/horror movie from 2023. It’s a direct sequel to the first film from 1994, Nightwatch, and both are written and directed by Ole Bornedal. A sequel almost 30 years later may feel like an odd choice, but considering how this movie became a danish cult classic back in the days it’s a fun way to re-introduce the film while giving a follow-up to the story, including the original actors coming back to play their earlier roles. It’s definitely a nice watch for those who have seen the original, and while some may argue that a sequel this long afterwards feels unnecessary, I’d like to counter-argue with what the hell kind of sequel these days are really “necessary“ anyways..?

Just like the first film, there is a mystery and several red herrings attempting to throw you off guard. While this isn’t as effective as in the first, it’s compelling enough to keep you engaged. The red thread here is trauma and its effect on everyone involved, and while this sequel can’t even come close to being as effectual for today’s audience as the first film was (which would have been a bit weird to expect anyways) it’s still a well-crafted thriller. It’s also a lot of fun to see the old actors from the first film getting back together again for this sequel, and the actor playing Emma, Fanny Bornedal, is the director’s own daughter. It was also enjoyable to see Ulf Pilgaard back as the serial killer Wörmer, although quite reduced due to old age (83 years) he manages to come off as an intimidating predator who of course still likes to repeatedly listen to some creepy-ass old song (Lille Lise lett på tå).

Overall, Nightwatch – Demons are Forever is a decent sequel that comes incredibly late, but better late than never as they say. Or at least that’s true in some cases. Sure, there’s nothing groundbreaking here, and if we are going to be perfectly honest there wasn’t really any of that in the original either, it was just presented to an audience where the majority had never seen something like that before. The film offers up a nice thriller mystery and will probably work best for those who have seen the original, although it isn’t a must.

Writer and director: Ole Bornedal
Country & year: Denmark, 2023
Original title: Nattevagten – Dæmoner går i arv
Actors: Fanny Leander Bornedal, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Alex Høgh Andersen, Sara Viktoria Bjerregaard, Kim Bodnia, Vibeke Hastrup, Pelle Emil Hebsgaard, Ulf Pilgaard, Sonja Richter, Paprika Steen
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6318608/

Prequel: Nightwatch (1994)

Fragile (2005)

Posted on May 7, 2024June 12, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

Mercy Falls is an old hospital that’s about to get closed down, but due to a horrible train accident the main hospital, St. James’s, can’t take in any more patients. Thus, Mercy Falls will need to stay partly open for a while more, keeping some of their patients there and the children located in the children’s ward. One of these children is Maggie, a little girl suffering from cystic fibrosis. She is terrified of “Charlotte”, someone she claims to see. One of the new nurses, Amy Nicholls, bonds with Maggie as they have something in common: they’re both orphans. Maggie confides in Amy, telling her about this Charlotte character which Amy later finds out is some kind of urban legend at the hospital, where several children have claimed to see her over the past two decades. When Amy starts looking even further into the mystery about Charlotte, she discovers that all the other children who claimed to have seen Charlotte are deceased, and she fears that Maggie might be next.

Fragile (aka Frágiles) is a supernatural horror film from 2005, directed by Jaume Balagueró (who is most known for the two first REC movies). He came up with the idea for this film after seeing an old photo of a little girl suffering from Osteogenesis Imperfecta, a horrible disease where bones are easily fractured, also known as “brittle bone disease”.

Fragile is going in a well trodden path, but the savoring points of the film is the atmosphere from the old, gloomy hospital where the Bearwood College in Berkshire, England, was used for the exterior shots. There’s certainly a fair amount of good old-fashioned gothic atmosphere, tinged with mystery. The story unfolds slowly, where you’re being introduced to the main character Amy Nicholls (Calista Flockhart), various nurses and the sick children in the hospital. Since the plot starts with knowing that the hospital is about to be completely abandoned, but having to postpone it for the children due to the full main hospital after the train accident, you get a feeling of the characters being in an even more isolated and threatening situation. And of course, there’s the abandoned floor where we know something terrible happened. It’s all a nice recipe for a solid, albeit not especially strong, ghost story. Its suspenseful, atmospheric, and quite decent.

The ghost here, though…well, she’s something that looks more like she came from a Hellraiser movie and wandered into the wrong set. While there are certainly a lot of horror movies where the ghosts appear a bit over-the-top malformed (like for example the Insidious franchise), she does feel a little bit misplaced here amongst the otherwise traditional gothic elements. Then again, this does make her first full appearance an unexpected surprise. The scenes when she is more obscured works a lot better though than the ones where we see her full on, but overall we don’t really get to see all that much of her.

There’s a scene where the children are watching an animated “Sleeping Beauty” film (nope, not the Disney one, as you might have guessed), and this animated film was actually created specifically for this movie. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be anywhere in its entirety, aside from in the clip from Fragile. This animated clip does have a certain significance to the movie’s sad but sugar-coated ending.

Overall, Fragile is a familiar-looking entry into the supernatural genre of vengeful spirits, mostly held up by its atmosphere and moody locations.

Director: Jaume Balagueró
Writers: Jaume Balagueró, Jordi Galceran
Country & year: Spain, UK, 2005
Actors: Calista Flockhart, Richard Roxburgh, Elena Anaya, Gemma Jones, Yasmin Murphy, Colin McFarlane, Michael Pennington, Daniel Ortiz, Susie Trayling, Michael Gatward, Scarlet Carey, Cameron Antrobus
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0422272/

Nazis at the Center of the Earth (2012)

Posted on May 3, 2024June 12, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

Nazis at the Center of the Earth. How can you go wrong with a title like that which sounds more like a drive-in flick from the 1970s, or something that Robert Rodriguez, once upon a time, could have made under his Grindhouse banner? Well, first off – this is from the cheap film company The Asylum which is, in the most recent decade, most known for its own original Sharknado franchise. Besides that, we can mention a neverending list of shitty low-to-non budget mockbusters such as Titanic II, Transmorphers, Atlantic Rim, AVH: Alien vs. Hunter, Invasion of the Pod People, Independents’ Day (yes, really), Battle Star Wars … And the list goes on like a non-stop diarrhea of the most shameless clickbait titles to fool people with one brain cell to trick them into watching something familiar to a mainstream Hollywood film. Their Paranormal ~~Activity~~ Entity wasn’t the worst as far as I remember, although it’s ages since I saw it.

The one we’re talking about here is their own warped version of Iron Sky, only here the Nazis aren’t coming from the moon but from the depths. And mockbuster or not, the title is enough to get my attention as I eat fat turkeys like this for breakfast, and it turned out to be as fun and crazy as the title would suggest, with even more surprises. In other words; the best way to experience this loony ride is to go in blind as this review will contain some spoilers.

We are at the research center Niflheim in Antarctica where two scientists are out on the snowy fields, ready to sample the surface for their research. When they unfold something metallic under the snow with a swastika painted on it, they get captured by a group of Nazis wearing gas masks, and they take them to a bunker somewhere deep underground. The leader of the research team, Dr. Adrian Reinstad (Jake Busey, the son of madman Gary Busey) heads out with his crew to find them.

One of the crew members, named Silje, is supposed to be Norwegian, by the way. And she speaks the language just as clearly and fluently as Brad Pitt speaking Italian – or like these two guys from an episode of The X-Files.

Anyway – they descend into a huge, dark pit that takes them to something that at first looks like an alternative Narnia dimension. But with a further look, it’s a huge underground world with trees, plants, and a forest where a fortress can be seen in the distance. Here they meet the evil Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele (Christopher Karl Johnson), with the infamous badass nickname The Angel of Death, who performed torturous experiments on victims at the Auschwitz II concentration camp during WW2.

So, the big question is: why is he still alive, and what’s his agenda?

Wikipedia can tell us that Mengele died by drowning after he suffered a stroke while swimming in 1979. That’s of course BS and pure falsification of history as we here learn that he actually kept himself alive all these years by taking organs from victims and replacing his bones with mechanical skeletons. And with his army of Nazi zombies, he’s still experimenting, so he finally can reanimate none other than der Führer himself. The plan here is to rise up to the surface with a war spaceship, so they can finally take over the world and create the perfect Arian race. Of course.

The film has apparently one of the highest visual effects shot counts in an Asylum production with a budget of $200,000. And still, it looks like a Lada trying to be a Plymouth Fury flooded with empty bottles of Vodka, Smirnoff and Jägermeister. Not a single outdoor scene looks realistic with its cheap digital backgrounds. The snow vehicle we see at the beginning looks like something from PlayStation 2. We see people who are supposed to be in the distance in the fake-looking Antarctica when they’re clearly copied and pasted with lousy use of green screen. It’s also made in a serious way with actors who really try to act professionally, which just makes it more amusing. A great recipe for a funny-bad movie, for sure, and in my judgment, not made bad on purpose like the Sharknado films. There’s some decent gore here, which is the only legit quality to point out.

But what’s takes the cake here, or the big Golden Raspberry, if you will, is the true star of the film: Please kneel and give your salute to – Robo-Hitler (James Maxwell Young), where Hitler’s head is attached to a cyborg machine. Yes, you heard that right. This actually took me off guard, I did nazi that coming, and my eyes teared up from laughing. Everything here is just perfect; the way he stomps with his cyborg body like a mecha boss from a Sonic the Hedgehog game, the amateur acting, the goofy faces, the whole naive, enthusiastic energy. What more is there really to say? Nazis at the Center of the Earth is an epic schlockfest and a true gem in its category which is available on Blu-ray at Amazon.com, and last time I checked, on Tubi.

Director: Joseph J. Lawson
Writer: Paul Bales
Country & year: USA, 2012
Actors: Dominique Swain, Jake Busey, Joshua Michael Allen, Christopher Karl Johnson, James Maxwell Young, Lilan Bowden, Marlene Okner, Adam Burch, Maria Pallas, Abderrahim Halaimia, Trevor Kuhn
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2130142/

Nightwatch (1994)

Posted on April 30, 2024July 9, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

Martin is a young law student who’s looking for a typical student job: something that will earn him a bit of money but won’t get in the way of his studies. He ends up seeking a job as a night watchman at the Forensic Medicine Institute, which seems to be perfect. Just sitting there all alone at night, being able to spend some of that time studying. It doesn’t take many nights before paranoia starts setting in, and several unexplained things start happening at the place. Is the job just getting under his skin and fraying his nerves, or is something else at play here? Things get worse as one of the victims of an uncaught serial killer is brought in to the morgue, and just as Martin seriously starts wondering if he’s losing his mind, something happens that ends up making him the prime suspect of the murders.

Nightwatch (Danish title Nattevagten) is a Danish horror thriller from 1994, written and directed by Ole Bornedal. After Bornedal released his television film Masturbator (1993), he got the inspiration for Nightwatch after visiting the morgue, which he found to be “both scary and beautiful”. It made him think about how, on the outside of a morgue the daily life continues on, while on the inside you’re standing there with the realization that this is where everything ends. Upon release, the film was a huge success in Denmark where it sold 465.529 tickets. In fact, it got so popular that it ended up being a bigger box office hit in the country than Jurassic Park the previous year.

The movie starts out fine enough, with a quick introduction to Martin and the other main characters. When he gets the job and the old, soon to be retired, night guard shows him around, there’s a checklist of “rules” the guard advices him to follow: get yourself a radio. When going into the room with the stiffs, just look straight ahead and never to the sides. And so on. If this wasn’t a movie from 1994, you could’ve thought this setup was based on some kind of classic Creepypasta story. However, like with many things that happen in this movie, you’re thrown a load of red herrings already from the start in order to make you just as confused as the main character ends up being.

Originally, the movie was seen as a rather gruesome little flick, and while there are some topics that certainly are controversial (necrophilia, under-aged prostitutes, etc.) none of these topics are displayed in a manner that’s exposed enough to be adequately disturbing. Sure, it was probably an entirely different experience back in ’94 when Scandinavian movies didn’t have much to offer in the horror genre to begin with, but seen with modern eyes it’s not really going to crawl under your skin. There are several effective scenes here though, especially when Martin takes his rounds in the morgue when he’s not sure exactly what is going on, and the scene of a grisly murder that happens during the soundtrack of a cheesy, upbeat Danish song (Lille Lise let på tå) that provided a perfect paradoxical effect. Overall it’s a fun and exciting thriller with lots of twists and turns, and although there are some slight pacing issues throughout, it keeps you entertained and guessing what will happen next.

While the movie was a huge success in its home country, there were some who didn’t exactly find themselves pleased with the whole situation. Apparently, the film caused a rise in number of people who had withdrawn their organ donation wills, and Professor Morten Møller claimed it was due to the film’s distorted image of doctors, students and researchers’ treatment of the dead and their body parts. He stated: “The movie ‘Nightwatch’ has certainly not had a positive effect on us. I don’t know what people imagine. That we should be sexually interested in the dead and want to lie down on their bed? A crazy fantasy that has not the slightest hold in reality.” Oh well…in any case, there’s no doubt that Nightwatch certainly had quite an impact in its home country.

There was also an english-language remake of the film released in 1997, also directed by Bornedal, and this year, a whole 30 years later, we get a sequel which is called Nightwatch – Demons are Forever. It was originally released in Denmark in December 2023, but it’s starting to hit the theaters elsewhere in May this year.

Writer and director: Ole Bornedal
Country & year: Denmark, 1994
Original title: Nattevagten
Actors: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Sofie Gråbøl, Kim Bodnia, Lotte Andersen, Ulf Pilgaard, Rikke Louise Andersson, Stig Hoffmeyer, Gyrd Løfquist, Niels Anders Thorn
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110631/

Sequel: Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever (2023)