Grave Halloween (2013)

I watched this film in two parts and hoped the second part would be better than the first, it wasn't. It is set in a Japanese forest known locally as Suicide Forest for the sheer number of people who commit suicide there.

Some American students are making a documentary for one of them whose birth mother committed suicide in the forest. They meet up with some other American students who are also in the forest but seem to be there for a good old laugh. These jokers find an abandoned tent and find an expensive Rolex watch, that one of them takes hoping to sell and split the profits.

It doesn't end well for any of our students but the story and the journey to get to the end are not told in an interesting way. The make-up effects are pretty good but the dialogue and story are weak. It could have been a lot better because there is probably a more interesting way to tell the same story.

When A Stranger Calls (2006)

The Horror Channel has a season called Sunday Thrillers and this film was the one from last week. I wasn't going to watch it but in the end it was on TV and I just continued to watch it. I guess it says something about the film that I continued to watch but quite what that is I'm not sure. I did enjoy the performance by Camilla Belle who plays a young girl who is baby sitting for a wealthy couple who live in the middle of nowhere.

The film is a psychological thriller about her receiving a series of phone calls through the night that eventually transform into a very real physical threat to her life and the lives of the other inhabitants of the house. This is a remake of a film that I can't remember if I've seen. Is it better than the original? I don't know because I can't remember the original, the original is apparently famous for having a very scary first 20 minutes. Probably not the same class on show here but I thought Camilla's performance as the main character was strong.

Girl House (2014)

A female student who is struggling financially joins an online porn website called Girl House run from somewhere in the middle of nowhere. The USP of this place is that there are surveillance cameras all ove the house to watch the girls going about stuff around the house like playing pool and taking a shower.

She moves in and gets a chauffeur driven car to university lectures. At other times she performs striptease and chats to paying web guests. One of the paying guests is an obese man who seems to have some form of psychological damage due to being humiliated sexually by a couple of young girls during a flashback. He threw one of the girls who he had pushed off her bike over the edge of a bridge. Well, he forms an attachment to the new striptease girl and he shares his photo with her, the other girls in the house somehow find it and pin it to the noticeboard in the house with a nasty comment. Somehow he sees this and he sees red. He goes on the rampage and because he is into computers he is somehow able to tap into the cameras and find out the location. There is a sub-plot about another student at the same university who was in love with the girl from the past and now watches her and realises who she is.

This is a silly film but nonetheless it is quite enjoyable to watch. The porn is totally turned down for a polite audience, so I guess the film will appeal to a wide audience and not just men. There are plenty of gruesome murders, so if you like gore you'll probably like this.

The Apparition (2012)

This film was one that apparently bombed at the box office and I can see why, having barely watched it a few days ago there was nothing memorable about it I could remember. I needed to read the plot synopsis again on Wikipedia. The film ends in a camping section of Costco. Need I say more?
It's very loosely based on something called the Philip Experiment that was conducted in 1972 in Canada. That doesn't make it any better, by the way.
There are some nice looking actors in the film, Ashley Greene is the female lead. As a result of a séance conducted at a university several years before an entity has been let out from "the other side" and is haunting one of the students who took part. He lost his first girlfriend in the experiment. He now has a new girlfriend and they are moving into a house together. So thinks start happening around the house and a strange fungus appears. The new girlfriend finds a box of stuff belonging to the student and realises she might end up in the same fate. One of the students who conducted the experiemental séance originally gets back in touch (the actor who plays Draco Malfoy in Harry Potter) and they try to perform some kind of exorcism - with electronics involved, though frankly at this stage things were so ridiculous I was past caring.
Not a film I can recommend to you.

Deadline (2009)

This is one of those haunted house films that get made a lot. There is a hint of a lesbian relationship between the two female characters in this film but it is never made obvious. A writer who has gone through a mental trauma needs peace and quiet to finish a book. She starts to hear strange noises and gets caught up in watching DV tapes of the previous owner who was a man who got obsessed that his pregnant wife was cheating on him. It turns out that there are a lot of similarities between her and the previous owner's wife. Not a scary film really, I sort of lost interest during the film but stuck with it.

Devil May Call (2013)

This film was more interesting than I thought it was going to be. But that's not necessarily saying a lot! It's about a killer who calls a crisis hotline on a regular basis insisting he speaks to a specific handler. She happens to be a young female who is blind. The killer calls on a night when a male student is also visiting the centre to learn about the job. He listens in on the call. Unfortunately for the killer he has to hang up to kill a woman held hostage in his house who has escaped. He does this before the call handler can tell him she is leaving. He calls again in the night and one of the other call handlers accidentally lets it out that the one he prefers is leaving. He doesn't take it well and turns up at the centre and kills the security guard and receptionist and then attacks everyone remaining in the building, its the night staff so is quiet anyway. He takes the call handler he prefers back to his house, it's unclear what he intends to do. But things don't go exactly to his plan. It's obviously a low budget movie and was shot very quickly with a limited set of locations. I disliked the killer, maybe that was intentional. Some films have a baddie you can like but this one didn't. He didn't say much and has a very flat delivery. Not a movie I'd particularly recommend or want to watch again.

The Vatican Tapes (2015)

This film has a title that you think would mean the film is very memorable but that's not really the case. I was watching hoping it would get more interesting than it did. The plot involves a young American woman and how she becomes the anti-Christ. Yep, it's that silly. After a car accident that she seemingly caused herself by grabbing the steering wheel of the taxi she is in, she falls into a coma. Her father and boyfriend think they've lost her after 40 days and the life support is turned off but after a few seconds have lapsed she coughs and lo and behold she recovers! Except she is not as before. Crows start gathering outside on the ledge of her hospital room. She starts talking in an old language and can get people to do things that hurt themselves. A Roman Catholic priest believes she is possessed by the devil and tries to perform an exorcism but she's too far gone for saving. As she is stabbed with a blessed knife she disappears. Only to re-appear reborn with holes in her wrists and ankles as if she'd been crucified. All very silly but nicely set up for a sequel.
I watched this but didn't really enjoy it very much, I didn't feel any sympathy with any of the characters and didn't particularly believe Michael Peña's portrayal of a Catholic priest, since watching his appearance in the Ant Man films, I always expect him to say something funny. He has a face for comedy, not horror (sorry, Michael).

The Victim (2011)

This film stars Michael Biehn, who played John Carter in The Exterminator. He's much older in this film, 56 years old he states. Two girls are with two guys in the woods, they are good time girls.They want to party but one of the guys is a horrible man and kills one of the girls during sex. He calls his buddy and they panic, they decide to kill the other girl. She realises and has to run. She finds her way to a cabin somewhere else in the woods. It turns out to be Michael Biehn's place. He wants to be left  alone and doesn't want to help but she insists. He does believe the girl's story. Then they hear someone outside, it is the two guys. They say they are police looking for a female fugitive suspected of murder. He doesn't believe them and turns them away, not letting them in to his cabin.

It turns out that the murderer is next in line to be the county Sheriff. So not a great situation. It's a film that is well paced and quite short. It's a strange one in some ways because Michael Biehn wrote the screenplay, directed the film and his company produced it, the female co-star was one of the producers. It's a grindhouse film, I'll have to look up what that means. It was entertaining if not unpredictable.

The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)

This film is one that I've heard the name of before but wouldn't have been able to picture what it was about. It's the story of a successful female fashion photographer who suddenly starts to see through the eyes of a murderer. It's a great premise for a film. The execution lets it down though. Faye Dunaway plays the part of the photographer, not very realistically I might add. Her eyes are pretty scary when the shot is a close-up. That's the only scary part however. The casting choices are strange, Tommy Lee Jones plays a detective that falls in love with the photographer. He sports a monobrow and it seems unbelievable that he would be attractive to the photographer. The fashion photographer takes provocative photographs of semi-naked female models. They are much more reminiscent of the kind of photos a man would take.

The plot is a bit of a convoluted one and I'm not really sure I understand it at all. I can't tell you why she was having these visions through the murderer's eyes though. Not a film I can easily recommend.

The Last Exorcism (2010)

A preacher from Baton Rouge in the US is followed by a small film crew as he describes how he uses his skills as an entertainer within the church. He doesn't himself believe in demons but he knows that the people being exorcised believe they are possessed so by putting on the theatre of "curing" them of their possession he hopes to be doing good. He knows that through use of some measures to exorcise demons some people have been killed such as through asphyxiation. The preacher believes his way is better but he is a bit jaded by it all. He opens a letter at random that is sent to him and it is a call for help, with all the usual traits of this kind of request. He is very cynical himself and exchanges knowing looks direct into the camera because he is aware of being filmed.
This time however it is different. He sets up his usual ritual and stages demon noises and bed shaking as he works and the girl seems to believe the demon is gone. But it does not work. She turns up out of the blue at his hotel on his way back home. She doesn't know how she got there but she then vomits and they take her to hospital They take her back home and discover she is pregnant, as a virgin they begin to suspect her father is involved. Then she admits that the father is a 17 year old boy who works at a local diner operating out next to a gas station. The preacher wants to pass this problem to a psychiatrist but the father is having none of it. So the preacher turns to the local Pastor for help. He goes into the village to speak to the local Pastor. The pastor agrees to visit the family despite having a falling out with the father where the father pulled his girl out of church school to be home taught. Everything seems well, so the preacher leaves with the film crew having the pastor and pastor's wife attending the family.
As they leave town they spot the local diner and go inside to check on the boy they believe to be the baby's father. It turns out he isn't the father and is actually gay, having met the girl only once and exchanged polite words. Instead of leaving it to be someone else's problem the preacher decides to turn around and go back to the farm. It's getting dark and the house is quiet with nobody home. They enter the house and are disturbed to find Satanic painting on all the walls but nobody is home. They are on the verge of leaving when they hear screams coming from the woods. They run towards the screams even though the two members of the film crew accompanying think it is a bad idea.

I won't spoil the ending but it ends rather predictably. Quite an entertaining film but not as scary as I thought it might have been. I liked the premise of it and thought it was well acted.

Chained (2012)

Chained is a film by Jennifer Lynch, shot in Canada. In the description made by the TV announcer I was led to believe it would be a film with an unpleasant subject handled in an exploitative way, like the Eli Roth SAW films. However, I would compare this more to Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.
Chained is the story of a young 9 year boy who is abducted with his mother by a serial killer who drives a yellow cab. At the start of the film we see the boys mother on the phone to her husband and he wants them to take a cab instead of the bus home for safety and security reasons.
The cab driver misses their intersection and the boy's mother starts to freak out understandably. A little bit unbelievably she can't get coverage on her phone to alert someone. She starts screaming and panicking and the driver pulls over and when he opens the door he is able to over-power her and punches her in the face knocking her out.
He pulls at his home (somewhere that has a lot of open land around it) and enters the garage. He drags the mother out of the car and leaves the boy. We hear her screams and see the boys terrified and frightened reaction. When he returns to the boy, the boy asks for his mummy and is told she is gone and is never coming back. He asks if the boy has a name and calls him Rabbit. He also says he expects no sound from the boy and the boy to wash and clean the house and eat only what is left over from the man's plate. The boy is left alone and tries to escape but the man is outside, the boy is knocked unconscious and when he wakes finds he has a shackled ankle inside the house.
The man brings girls home and rapes then kills them. The boy has to clean up the room afterwards and bury the bodies in the cellar of the house. We don't see much as the viewer but we're not left with any doubt about what happens. Identity cards of lots of girls are kept in a box and the man wants Rabbit to cut out the news stories of missing girls from the newspaper and stick them in a scrapbook.
As I said, the subject matter is dark. The boy becomes a teenager, still held in captivity. We see the man have some nightmares. His father was abusive. We also hear him describe all women as whores and sluts. He holds women in contempt. We see him as a cab driver one day when an older man and his son get in the cab, whatever has happened we don't know but the man is verbally unpleasant to his son. This brings back the memories for the man.
Later in the film, he wants Rabbit to choose a victim from a school yearbook. He tells the boy his view of the world will be different once he loses his virginity. He also gives the boy books to study, they are about the human body. Rabbit doesn't want to pick a girl from the book but is eventually forced to.
I won't spoil the rest of the film, there is a good twist to the story at the end. It didn't end in quite the way I thought it would.

I was expecting an unpleasant film that I would never want to watch again but instead I thought it was an interesting and unusual take on the subject of serial killers. It didn't feel exploitative while watching. I could recommend this film, it's not a horror film per se and I'd say was more of a psychological thriller. The acting is pretty good too.