The Cult of Tweezology

Remember AIM? For the young ones out there, that's AOL Instant Messenger, an internet chat function akin to today's Snapchat (I assume?) that no longer exists. 

Side note: my AOL username was MSTyodameister, because I was the coolest person using the Internet that you could possibly know

The fact that this was by far the most exciting thing to be found in Cult says a little bit about the movie, but more importantly, a whole lot about the very specific days of the early 21st century.

Quick Plot: Picture it: the opening still image prologue to 1991's Beauty and the Beast, only instead of being about a spoiled prince and magical rose, it's an ancient Chinese maiden named Kwan Yin whose out-of-wedlock pregnancy leads her father to gouge out her eyeballs and slice open her belly, thus empowering her as some sort of goddess. 

Cut to a Taoist cult in 1990s era California (more specifically, an abandoned Chinese buffet) where a white lounge-erie-clad beauties sacrifice themselves in the name of the aforementioned Kwan Yin only for one to discover their male leader, Quinlin, is trying to steal all of their power for himself.

20 years later, the daughter of the slain cult member has grown up into Mindy (The Butterfly Effect 3's Rachel Miner), a hard-working college student who spends as much time studying ancient Chinese cults as she does shaping her extremely shaped eyebrows.

Mindy is currently working on the worst thing ever asked of a college student: the dreaded group project, this one specifically about the temple massacre. Her team includes pal Cassandra (played by the always welcome Taryn Manning), Cassandra's emo boyfriend Bailey, the school mascot/token awful human being Alex, and the MIA Morgan, soon to be found by Mindy to have brutally killed herself in the dorm bathroom in a manner very similar to those ill-fated maidens in the empty Chinese buffet.

Apparently, all it takes is for an unmarried pregnant woman to take her own life for Quinlin to reemerge, slaughtering those around Mindy with the help of an occasionally important jade amulet. Mindy's sexy Australian professor tries to help, but stopping Quinlin is no mere academic affair. 

Let's be very clear about something: like most of late '90s/early 00s horror titles that you have never heard of popping up on Amazon Prime in recent months, Cult is not a good movie. When your primary set is an empty Asian restaurant and the rules of your villain are clearly made up as you go, you do not, you know, have a good movie.

But that doesn't stop an idiot like me from enjoying it.

Maybe it's the fact that I wrote "EYEBROWS" in my notes twelve times over the course of its 90 minute run, but Cult just seemed to tickle some very sensitive part of my funny bone. The bargain bin CGI does wonders, and random lack of attention to logical detail makes you scratch your head with a smile. Take, for example, the lack of custodian services on campus. I don't care how cheap your film is, it's pretty hard to conceive of a college that doesn't clean a blood-stained dorm bathroom after a student commits suicide inside. I can accept crime tape a few days after the event, but can I REALLY be asked to believe no one FLUSHED THE TOILET THAT WAS FILLED WITH THE DEAD KID'S BLOOD?

Such moments are what make an otherwise underwhelming, probably once straight-to-Blockbuster-shelves genre flick somewhat memorable.

Make of that what you will.

Low Points

That's right: I'm reversing this! Here's why: Alex, played by Cruel World's Joel Michaely, is easily the most obnoxious and intolerable (and also, apparently, racist and intolerant) character I can remember seeing onscreen in some time. I hated his face, hated his voice, and have never wished a more painful death upon anyone on camera

High Points

I mean, I have to give some credit to a film that makes me that excited to see someone die a horrible death

Lessons Learned

Never question the moral character of the people who make your meatloaf

The best college professors are the ones who fashion themselves akin to female porn actress starring in teacher-student scenarios

It's probably not a good idea to joke about the tragic death of any young person to your fragile daughter, let alone one whose bloodied body was discovered by, you know, your own daughter

Rent/Bury/Buy

Cult is streaming on Amazon Prime, which is probably the most effort you should put into watching it. Those with a very particular nostalgia for the early 2000s might have some fun, but to call this a good movie would be a step even someone with as bad a taste in movies as myself wouldn't do. I had a good time with it, but as regular readers know, that's not always a good thing. 

 

Siri: Kill Me

Maybe it was the failure of the American remake of Pulse, but it seems surprising that here we are in 2017 with so few smartphone-centered horror movies. 

It's almost like someone just read my data and heard me...

Quick Plot: Nikki is a seemingly healthy high school senior who suddenly drops dead, devastating her best friend Alice, boyfriend Cody, and a few other incredibly attractive pals, all of whom eventually find a new app invitation on her phone.

Meet Mr. Bedevil, a sort of dandy version of Siri crossed with Freddy Krueger. While each teenager initially finds the app helpful in a cheat-on-your-homework kind of way, it doesn't take long for them to realize the software's goal is to exploit their deepest fears until they are medically scared to death.

Clowns, racists, teddy bears, and old people: the typical phobias of today's millennial. The kids recognize their doom, attempting to uninstall the program to no avail. The police are similarly no help, and oddly enough, none of these seventeen year olds seems to have parents or teachers that think to raise any kind of alarm when they continue to die off. 

Bedeviled is the kind of low-ish budget horror movie that has charm about equal to the amount of ridiculous logic suspension its audience must take. The young actors aren't all fully comfortable with screen dialogue, but they're enthusiastic enough to garner audience sympathy, especially since each character has enough individuality to make an impression. The fact that they don't seem to be complete idiots is what hurts the film a tad. Haven't they watched enough movies to know that splitting up is easily the worst idea anyone can have when being stalked by a slender man-esque stalker?

Look, movie characters aren't always the brightest bulbs onscreen. I get that. But if I was the only one seeing dreamlike images of my deepest fears while my friends went through the same thing, wouldn't I, I don't know, say to my pals, "hey, let's stick together because maybe this slender app-man can't be in two places at once?" I don't know much about this generation's youth, but apparently, they really don't work well together.

Details aside, Bedeviled is a fun little watch that plays like a neat little modernization of Nightmare On Elm Street. The main villain and his many incarnations have some visual flair, and the pacing moves well to make its 90 minute runtime feel just right. This isn't a franchise starter or new classic, but it's a perfectly solid for a one-time watch. 

High Points

While it's still a pick 'em off horror movie centered around high schoolers, it's admirable that this is a film that actively casts a diverse assortment of (very attractive) actors and finds ways to touch on their racial/ethnic backgrounds in somewhat thoughtful ways

Low Points

I mean, I get that Alice's mother is a single working woman, but considering just how many TEENAGERS ARE BEING KILLED, you'd think ONE adult in their lives might actually acknowledge that something is amiss

Lessons Learned

In 2017, nobody really cares if four kids from the same school die mysterious deaths within days of each other

Duck faces and assholes are pretty much the same thing, particularly if you're a bitter police officer

Seriously, kids, stop recording yourselves having sex, especially when said device includes an app that easily accesses all of your data. Seriously 

Look! It's-

Lead Saxon Sharbino, who I mostly knew from a recent Law & Order: SVU episode but who I apparently originally met via the climax of the criminally underseen, truly horrifying Red White and Blue

Rent/Bury/Buy 

I don't know that I'll ever watch Bedeviled again, but I'll certainly welcome more horror from the writing/directing team The Vang Brothers.  You can find it on Netflix.

Happy Holidays!

Whether yours is filled with chestnuts or latkes or Wookie porn disguised as holograms of Diahann Carroll, I wish you all a wonderful season of warm fuzzy happiness in whatever form you most prefer.

Enjoy!

Many Reasons For the Season

So I queued up Red Christmas via Netflix because hey! I like a good seasonal horror flick. With Christmas looming, why not devote that Monday to a new yuletide slasher?

Then I slogged through the mean-spirited coal that was Red Christmas and thought to myself, you know Emily, this year has been ugly enough without ending it on such a negative, punishing, anti-choice, mixed garbage statement of a movie. Let's find a happier note to play, something seasonal but positive.

So here are a few random things to love about horror movies during the holidays. And if nothing here works, just screw it all and queue up The Muppet Family Christmas for the 9,00th time. No judgement here. 

The Crypt Keeper Singing Holiday Jingles

Easily the best item ever to be purchased in the '90s by a teenage Emily at the Spencer's Gifts, this album (originally on cassette tape, natch) includes a dozen holiday tunes with the lyrics rewritten to be more fitting of the singer, John Kassir's pun-wielding, tale-spinning Crypt Keeper. Can't get your Walkman working? Revel in the kindness of strangers with YouTube accounts.

The Very Fact That There Exists Not One But Two Killer Snowman Movies

And yet, the unrelated but weirdly similar Michael Keaton family film of the same name is somehow far creepier

The Choice to View Christmas Evil As a Magical Tale of a Lonely Santa-Loving Man Ascending to Angel Status

My (and John Waters) favorite holiday genre film can be viewed as a lot of things: a an early entry into the slasher Santa trend, tragic tale of mental illness taken to extremes, the chance to spot a way-pre-Home Improvement Patricia Richardson in a tiny role. For my money, it's something even more special (that's also all of those things). The key to keeping Christmas Evil on the right side of your heart is to make the conscious decision that SPOILER ALERT! Harry Stadling's van doesn't crash and burn after his killing spree is over, but rather, transcends into the heavens, transforming into a magical sleigh and changing our sad sack factory worker into the real deal Santa. 

Margot Kidder In Black Christmas, Goddess

Easily on the top five list of Film Characters I Want To Lost a Drinking Game To. She. Is. Divine.

Vincent Cassel's Insanity In Sheitan

The movie itself? Somewhat insufferable. The MAN himself? 

A god. Or, well, technically agent of the devil. 

The Most Feel-Good Pop Montage In the Least Feel-Good Slasher

I've said it again and I'll say it an estimated 781 more times before I die: Silent Night Deadly Night is memorable for a bevy of reasons, but none more so than the weirdly placed, tonally mismatched "The Warm Side of the Door" sequence, wherein a sweet country tune cheerfully plays as our soon-to-be-mass-murderer learns about friendship, work ethic, and the joy of having alcoholic bosses.

Eric Freeman's Case For The Academy Awards Adding a Category for Best Performance By a Pair of Eyebrows

I mean...

Clint Howard's Phallic Coven Mask

Everybody forgets Silent Night Deadly Night Part 4 because it doesn't have The Warm Side of the Door or eyebrows, but you what it does have? Murderous roller blades. Also, this:

Ray Wise & Lin Shaye In Dead End

A good but flawed little Christmas Eve ghost story, Dead End deserves to be seen more, mostly because, you know, Ray Wise and Lin Shaye. 

Disco Cameo Greatness

Don't Open Til Christmas is filled with a lot of wonderful things, among them, a smily plastic mask, Halloween costume holiday parties, charmingly innocent peep show conversations, a sleazy male flutist, and insanely slow motion overwrought flashbacks. But you know what REALLY makes it exciting? That it has Caroline Munro randomly performing a disco number. Because if that's not the real reason for the season, what is?

The Ugly Americans

As an American who lived abroad for a few years during my twenties, I can safely say that yankee expats can sometimes be the worst. While I like to think I was generally respectful and open to the cultures I was experiencing, I also spent a drunken dinner or two with a variety of fellow non-natives who didn't always charm those around them. Watching 1979's bizarre Bloodbath, I witnessed a nightmare version of those days. 

Thankfully, Dennis Hopper never taught ESL at any of my schools.

Quick Plot: A gaggle of awful Americans party together on a mysterious and beautiful Spanish island. Chicken (Hopper in full loon mode) shoots heroin and makes racist jokes. Treasure Evans (the treasure that is Carroll Baker) is a washed up movie star who kills time with booze and local men while waiting for her agent to call. Finally there's Allen (screenwriter Win Wells), a gay hedonist looking for just the right young fellow to seduce.

As our ugly Americans frolic and sin their way across the island, the locals take part in their own mysterious traditions, from child marriage to child sacrifice. A caravan of hippies arrive just as things start getting truly weird, with hallucinations and dead bodies turning up every scenic way you turn.

Directed by Silvio Narizzano, Bloodbath (aka The Sky Is Falling, which makes a whole lot more sense in terms of a character being named Chicken) is a surreal, strange little movie that plays with religious iconography and Manson-esque cult violence. The oddest thing about it (of which, seriously, there are many) is that for being such a product of the late '60s/early '70s, it comes with a 1979 date.

I don't know how much I can say I enjoyed Bloodbath, but it certainly was an experience not like much else. For Dennis Hopper, however, I'm guessing it was pretty much casual Friday.

High Points

It's always a pleasure to see Carroll Baker, but it's even more of one when she gets such a juicy mess of a person to play

Low Points

It may be more Amazon's fault than the film's, but it's a shame that the visual quality feels so compromised

Lessons Learned

Never call a snotty Britishman an expatriate if he's simply living abroad

Real pearls are what you would call "proper'

There are few things worse than a white expat with easy access to liquor

Rent/Bury/Buy

Bloodbath is certainly not for everybody, but if you're looking for something way off the beaten path, it's definitely one to try. You can find a poorly lit grainy version streaming on Amazon Prime if your eyes are up for it.

The Time Traveler's Abs

Back when I watched The Butterfly Effect 2, I was angry. Here was a case of a potential franchise with a good central premise being applied in the worst possible way on the least possible interesting characters and situation. 

While it's far from a masterpiece, The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations (because every franchise eventually needs an entry subtitled "Revelations") makes a batch of good decisions that put its predecessor to shame. Easy tip for new filmmakers: want people to enjoy your movie? Don't center it on a white millennial startup tech salesman.

Quick Plot: Sam is a handsome young butterfly effector. Somewhere between presumed four hour ab workouts, he finds the time to assist police on murder cases by butterfly effecting and care for his agoraphobic sister Jenna. Advising him is a friendly weed dealer/former high school teacher named Goldberg who somehow knows a thing or two about butterfly effecting and when not to do it...namely, if it involves saving someone close to you from a violent death.

Some years earlier, Sam made that very mistake, going back in time to spare his sister from a house fire only to lose his parents in the tradeoff. Now a somewhat happy and well-adjusted young man, Sam's life is rocked once again when the sister of his brutally murdered high school girlfriend comes to remind him that there's an innocent man on death row.

Against all common sense and rules of butterfly effecting, Sam heads back to the scene of the crime. In the process, the murder adds another victim and seems to officially launch the birth of a serial killer who continues to take the lives of other young women. Sam continues to butterfly effect at various points in the past, disrupting his life and status each time.

But never his four-hour ab workouts

Like Part 2, The Butterfly Effect 3 (REVELATIONS!) has nothing to do with the rest of the franchise, which is perfectly fine. The other key part to that is how it trusts its audience enough to not dwell on the details of butterfly effecting, assuming (probably rightfully) that they've seen the first film and get the general gist. In a world where every superhero movie has to be an origin story, this is refreshing.

At right around 90 minutes long, the story moves quite well, wasting no time on subplots. Directed by Seth Grossman from a script by Holly Brix, it plays like a straight murder mystery with a much more standard horror movie feel than the other installments. It even makes intense use of its Detroit setting, milking the city's reputation for crime and abandonment several years before It Follows and Don't Breathe. When you add that with the ridiculous (in a good way) twist ending, you end up with something far more satisfying than you'd expect...especially if you suffered through the slog that was The Butterfly Effect 2. 

High Points

I won't reveal it here, but the aforementioned ending is rather glorious, and the subsequent coda has a weirdly black comedic tone that makes the movie feel a little more memorable than your typical third installment

Low Points

At the risk of spoiling a big reveal, there's a sparseness (which might be a nice way of saying low budgetness) about The Butterfly Effect 3 that keeps the cast of characters so slim that our suspect list can't help but limit the surprise factor

Lessons Learned

Detroit is such a dangerous place that even a bear trap will get you when you least expect it

Seeing your mother bludgeoned to death will not leave you unharmed

Proper butterfly effecting requires a steady supply of ice cubes and journals

Rent/Bury/Buy

While it's probably a little below par of the first Butterfly Effect, Revelations is still a decent and engaging watch (and it goes without saying but I'll say it anyway: miles better than part 2). It's streaming on Amazon Prime and requires no familiarity with any of the other films. If you're looking for a darker crime thriller version of the first film, go for it.