Julia X (2011)

This film begins in a way I expected, a woman (Julia, I guess) gets chatted up in a café by a date she met online. He turns out to be a serial killer and abducts her. She tries to get away but is re-captured. She is then driven out to an old oil well where he disposes of the body of a dead naked woman that she shared the van with.
She gets away and starts to fight back. Eventually she turns the tables and captures him. It gets weird after that. She has a sister. There are flashbacks to her child abuse. I can't really go on without spoiling the story but I was intrigued as to where the film was eventually going. It confused the hell out of me, not necessarily in a good way either, I found the sister's behaviour extremely odd. At one point she also entices a neighbour into the house and restrains him blindfolded in a chair directly opposite the serial killer. She does this for no apparent reason. In a later part, she also puts a pair of wire cutters in the serial killers hands, allowing him to free himself.
This is a strange film. It's another film that has a bit of an identity crisis due to a confused script. Not exactly rubbish and not good either, somewhere middling for this attempt. I think there was some attempt at humour but with the child abuse elements, you could hardly laugh at this.

Don't Look Up (2009)

This was a bit of an odd film. It told the story of a film maker making a film that was unfinished from many years ago. It isn't a documentary film or anything like that. I thought it was a bit of mix of different films blurred together to tell a story that wasn't very interesting. The not looking up of the title relates to some stills of the original movie that show a woman holding a candle and looking up. The part where the main character visits an ex-girlfriend just feels slightly like its in the wrong film and it's not clear sometimes whether he is just having a seizure and is dreaming or not. The effects are mainly just CGI and are pretty bad but probably just a reflection of the type of effects possible in 2009. I don't think the scares were very creative in this film, so were mainly based around the special effects. I was dissatisfied with this film, I can't say I was disappointed though because I didn't have any expectations to begin with,

Crawl or Die (2014)

I watched this film this week, I started it about 3 times without being sure I was actually watching it from the start, the premise is explained a few minutes into the film. Not that there is much premise to it. It is set in the future sometime, a "package" must be delivered safely by a crack team of special forces operatives. It sort if gives a nod to Aliens or a multitude of other films like this. Probably Aliens is the closest though.
Amongst the special forces is a blonde with a partly shaved head, her name is Tank. Don't know why and it's never explained. The package is the last fertile woman alive, the team are to deliver the package to a lab on Earth 2. earth 2 turns out to be inhabited by a predator and it starts to kill off the team of special forces. The remainder of the team enter a series of narrow tunnels with the predator pursing them and killing them one by one as they protect the package.
The film uses very confined sets and abridged storytelling, the action is largely just grunts and noises as they squeeze through tunnels. I don't know why the tunnels are there, I think they are going through the tunnels to get somewhere but I wasn't sure where that was.
I wasn't surprised, horrified or terrorised by the film. Infact if anything, I was a little bored I've got to be honest. I watched it until the end and despite feeling uncomfortably claustrophobic during most of the last half, I can't say I was sorry it ended.
Probably not a film I would watch again, not awful but not much happens and the ending isn't anything special either. I can't even tell if the acting was any good, there was so little dialogue. I imagine the actors faces were not faking the effort it took to get through the tunnels.

Dark Summer (2015)

I watched this film on Friday night, start of the weekend. It's set in the US and is mainly about the house arrest of a teenager who seems to have been guilty of stalking a fellow pupil, a girl. It is a slow film generally, set mainly in the house. The boy somehow is able to circumvent the Internet prohibition and gains access to the net. He has a couple of friends who visit him, one of whom is clearly in love with him. I don't know why, I found the lead actor rather annoying. There is no explanation of why he was infatuated with the girl he stalked and rather unbelievably she skype calls him and proceeds to commit suicide while he watches. She then seems to haunt him in his house. Or is it his mother's house? Why was he alone and she not there? So much was left unexplained in this film. I just got the sense of this selfish boy who was self-absorbed and didn't really need the friends he had got. I just don't get why they were his friends and what they got out of the situation. I found this quite a frustrating film in the end and was glad when it finished. There were probably only two jump scares in the film. The ending wasn't that surprising either. No recommendation from me for this one.

Wolf Creek 2

I enjoyed this return to Wolf Creek and the crazy Australian who likes to chop up bodies and torture backpacking tourists. Now I'm familiar with the character I didn't find this as disturbing as the first film. I did feel sorry for the German couple at the beginning and I thought that they would be the central victims in the story but instead it was the Englishman and history graduate. That was a surprise, I enjoyed that part. If "enjoyed" is the right word! Sorry to everyone, if that's a spoiler!
This film belongs to the same genre as Hostel and Saw, about some evil whacko who kills because he enjoys it. Like a butcher, humans are just meat to be carved up. No sense of conscience about them. It's hard to imagine someone like that but they must exist because you read stories like it in the newspaper. The story of poor Becky Watts from Bristol in 2015, for example, in which her step brother and his girlfriend murdered her and chopped her up. An awful and harrowing story but one that was true. So these things do happen in real life.