Terrible Horror Movies

Filmed and acted liked a cheap porn movie, S.I.C.K is filmmaking at its absolute worst. Does not deserve to be a part of the horror genre... and, come to think of it, does not deserve to be called a movie either.

Simply jaw-dropping. Could possibly be the worst zombie movie ever made, as well as one of the Top 50 worst movies in cinematographic history... wait. Make that Top 20. Boll's film reaches level of crappiness so unforgivably low this film is bound to be remembered for decades (or at least until he manages to direct one half as bad as this one). This horrifying piece of crap has to be his all-time masterpiece-- EVERYTHING here, from the hysterical centerpiece zombie shoot-out (fueled by a laugh-out-loud hard-rock-rap-techno song) to the eye-gougingly bad performances has to be seen to be believed. Simply put, House of the Dead is Uwe Boll's masterpiece.

Horrible. Simply... horrible. I couldn't believe my own eyes. I was left unspeakable. The writing is so utterly fucking terrible it's not even funny ; stay as far as you can from this clunky piece of shit.

Dark Harvest is probably among the worst horror B-movies I've seen in my entire life. The effects are plain laughable, the performances just suck and, worst of all, you won't even have fun! How this crapfest was capped with not one but TWO sequels is just beyond me...

In the case of Jason X, evil does not get an upgrade. It just gets another tiresome, amateurish rehash. When the camp factor wears off (that's about twenty minutes in, folks), what we're left with is a piece of shameless crap; horror cinema at its very worst.

Monstrously written, shot and cut together, this absolute detritus tries to obtain both the spooky horror and ha-ha B-movie feel. Needless to say, it is an outright failure at both genres. The whole thing ends up as an ugly-as-hell stockpile of outrageously terrible ideas, such as placing snowmen props and decorations in every fuckin' shot or having the requisite horny barbie doll get raped by a carrot. The god-awful music, mostly thundering guitar solos whenever someone bites it, almost steals the show on its own. Most actors are also embarassing, but in a fun way.

For a 90 minutes of pure mockery and slackjawed horror (''oh no, they fucking DIDN'T''), Jack Frost is mostly worthless because the dialogues and situations are just so damn boring. But there are occasional bits of hilarity here and there (most of which you can find on YouTube), so if you want to be able to brag to your friends about having seen that 1996 Killer Snowman pictures... I won't stop you.

Here's a nice closet skeleton, too : Shannon Elizabeth is the one who gets the deadly carrot between her legs. That's cute to have on a resume, no?

...and, wait... who the hell funded this, anyway?!

Totally worthless. A campy, lousily plotted and terribly written 'sequel' to the phenomenal horror hit, Blair Witch 2 is a study of how the industry believes people want more and more of the same. Truth to be told, the film does come to life when it reprises elements from the original, but besides that, there is nothing to say except that it's just... a bad, bad film.

Proudly claiming to have Wes Craven on their team (yet only as an executive producer), this incredibly stupid horror movie is still miles away from featuring a scratch of the style OR humour found in even Craven's lamest offerings. On his very first opportunity to give us the chills, director Nick Mastandrea royally screws everything up; this grating habit is repeated over and over again up to a catastrophic finale. The killer dogs, would-be blood-chilling killing machines, come off as nothing more than a ridiculous excuse to string together idiotic chases, stunts and kills. As for the story that's told through the cardboard cut-out characters, one has to be supremely goofy to draw zero interest in every line of dialogue, which is unsurprisingly very poorly written, by the way. The cast, as photogenic as they may be, give their absolute minimum, probably not to worsen the whole deal. So what we have here is an almost complete turkey-- okay, a certain technical skill was obviously needed to shoot so many action scenes with real dogs-- but one thing is certain : we couldn't give less of a fuck if the director's intention was either to scare us, to make an 'hommage' to the 80's bestial slasher or just collect his paycheck. Dogshit.

I cannot say I am somewhat, eh, 'shocked' or 'surprised' when a remake of a Japanese horror film is said to be flat-out terrible... but I must say I definitely AM taken off guard when during my inevitable autopsy of the case, the actual quality of the film concerned reveals itself to be ten times as jaw-droppingly stupid as I was expecting.

First of all, One Missed Call is most definitely not part of the recent flock of glossy ghost film remakes, seing its surprisingly low production values. Every single death here is (on a visual point of view) cringe-worthy, hampered by TV-movie computer effects and/or simply blink-and-miss. So, when your 'scary' (PG-13!) movie contains litterally NOT A SINGLE GOOD SCARE, well, I'm sorry to report, but it's nothing less than dead in the water.

And the photography sucks.

The rest plays *exactly* like you think it will-- I must however tell you how unexpectedly quick the scenes move on from one to another and how nonexistent the dramatic tension plays. There is a 'jump' moment thrown pretty much in every scene, whether the character concerned is involved in the dead-people-calling issue or not, and whether it's in broad daylight or in silent'n'dark corridors. One second it's about freak accidents, then it's about distorted shit ghost-face thingies, and then it shifts to rotten old zombies. Nothing makes a lick of a sense, but every character not only buys it in a snap, their decisions also become increasingly dumb, such as heading for the Creepy Old Burned Down Hospital twenty minutes before their time is announced on the death clock.

But when we expect the goddamn thing to get better (I correct that-- when we expect it not to get any worserer)... well, it does the opposite. It's an extremely bizarre experience for anyone whose last twenty movies seen were not as crappy as this, but mostly, an awful, awful way to spend 90 minutes for anyone with a desire to be remotely scared. It comes very close to being worthy though, considering the frequent laughs (I can only picture the crowds all across America bursting in laughter one by one as the opening scene plays before their eyes), but it cannot survive on that alone.

Performances are blah.

So in the end, what's left? A big ol' chunk of crappy blandess, and... yada, yada, yada. I refuse to pump out any more shit out of this pony.

It's dead. There's nothing to do about it. It belongs in the can. Bye-bye.

(off)

The Covenant's seemingly unusual plot quickly drifts into a bottomless pit of clichés, the actors are just plain terrible and the CGI is *gasp* pretty lackluster. A minimally creepy sequence involving CGI spiders and some effective jump scares spare it from minimal score, but this one still has absolutely no reason to be (even though some might say the blatant homoerotic overtones are funny enough). An awful, awful film.

One big, big disaster of a movie.

Both halves of it are horrific-- and seriously not in the right way. When it pretends to be a 90's kidnapping/psychological thriller, Captivity is just... bad. STV bad. 'Why-are-you-doing-this-you-sick-fuck' bad. And when it jumps into its torture porn costume... things only get worse. The cheaply directed & inserted gory parts are either A) laughably over-the-top WITHOUT the fun, campy feel or B) needlessly revolting and misogynisitic. And what can you expect from a movie where a victim is drugged and then wakes up NINE FUCKING TIMES?! Not scary nor suspenseful for a single second, Captivity is a demented piece of crap whose next stop is the bargain bin at Wal-Mart in a year or so.

Poor Elisha, though-- she sure can look like she's crying. In a role that is about as deep and complex as a munchkin, she cries and screams her way out of this turd, choosing 'intensity' (read : sexy girl hysterics) instead of nuance and subtlety. The performances are extremely grating to watch... but, you know, it's not her fault at all (you can blame the fuck-awful stage direction, and maybe the stench of Daniel Gillies hamming it up as the pretty-boy cellmate with the violently obvious twist) , but it's sad to see an actress with a little more than just great boobs go slumming like every other.

So, yeah, stupid, stupid. No-good. Poo-poo caca. Shitcan. 'Craptivity'.

Urgh.

A fatally boring, ultra-predictable and cheap-looking rehash of the first movie where pretty much nothing happens until an incredibly stupid 'twist'. I'll Always Know... is Unforgivably lame. Kill off the series now!

Cube Zero thinks it's so smart it's laughable, and as a prequel only spits on the original by trying to explain everything. Keep the mystery alive... skip this atrocious prequel!

Not scary nor funny at all. Ridiculously cliché'd, and suffers from bad acting from its lead, Tamara is a DTV title that will never be more than a DTV title.

Brutally unimaginative. Part four is essentially everything that is wrong with the torture porn subgenre, and it's also essentially what dragged the whole series in the wrong direction.

The interest in this drivel is not linked to being a Saw fan or not anymore, but simply about your tolerance for being force-fed with increasingly stupid 'shocking' stuff that not only crosses the bounds of decency, but completely crushes them. It's clear by now that everything in the screenplay is an excuse to string together repetitive & ridiculously graphic torture scenes, which the first movie avoided very cleverly by not featuring any traps happening in the present.

Oh, how everything is awful in this film. Everything else is extremely been-there-done-that, from the inclusion of new cardboard 'detectives' to the sickening overuse of Charlie Clouser's 'Hello Zepp' theme. All in all, the makers of the series have shot themselves in the foot-- and not just with that god-awful final resolution, but also with the very poor structure this movie follows.

The flashbacks are incorporated with zero energy, and the final twists are just the dumbest of any film I can recall in the last decade.

Frankly, I don't even feel like pointing out everything that's wrong with this one. It just sucks, from the even more terrible dialogue to the offensive moral statement the writers think they made by placing us in the torturer's skin once more.

This time, it's really hit rock-bottom.

Horrendous.

Generally, I hold no particular grudge towards remakes. However, my intelligence has been severely insulted during my viewing of this unforgivably lame retelling of the horror classic Halloween. What Zombie doesn't seem to realize is that a movie must not rely solely on graphic killings, especially when everything in-between is good for the trash can. Characters are briefly introduced and then brutally slaughtered, silly plot elements try to slip in unnoticed and the endless scenes where Michael Myers stands behind his victims for looooong seconds before stabbing them or bashing their heads in (as if we believed the dorks & sluts had any chance) quickly become headache-inducing. There is a fraction of a good psychological drama buried here somewhere, but it is quickly swept under a thick layer of stupidity (or read : bullshit dime-a-dozen psychology) whenever it shows up.

Also, McDowell is criminally misused, and scream queen Compton makes zero impression-- although it's not really her fault.

Bottom Line : a pitch-perfect icon for those against the flood of retro horror remakes. Zombie didn't understand shit about the original, and it shows.

If the characters (which I personally remember only as colorless screamers) were more interesting, the long, long buildup to their night of ghostly reckoning might be suspenseful rather than tedious. Tom Welling, his hot wife, a couple of kids and old people and a black guy whose sole purpose is to say words like 'dawg', all confront a CGI mist that looks like it could be erased with a couple of mouse clicks. This film is not scary for more than fourty seconds.

So what we're left with is a criminally forgettable retelling of a decent film that was better off sleeping on the shelves.

With a lousy & derivative screenplay, mostly ridiculous performances, ultra-lame kills and not a single scene that could frighten, this series keeps getting shittier and shittier. The worst about it is that another straight-to-DVD sequel has been announced...

Excellent-- as in, of course, excellent 'craptertainment'.

From the eye-popping overuse of fake scares to the endless string of emo rock songs to the finger-lickin' stupidity of its cardboard cut-out characters, Prom Night is a hoot from its first minute to its, say, seventieth (because the final ten are so duck-fuckingly predictable there's nothing even remotely funny about it). Contrarily, however, to most recent horror films, there is nothing downright offensive about the watered-down Prom Night, down the line-- it's by-the-numbers commercial filmmaking made with zero effort for an audience full of screaming teenage girls, of course-- but, to be honest, it reached one of my primary fantasies, which is to be watching One Tree Hill with an extra added body count. To make a film in which the leads (read : bodies waiting to be bagged towards whom we're supposed to feel sympathy) are nothing but big-boobed byotches and square-jawed hunks (all looking too old for their parts, with no exception) reveals the filmmakers truly take tweens for complete morons, on which it is assumed television standards have already killed at least half of the brain.

Man, the characters.. the fucking CHARACTERS. All of them are so obvious, so flat and so fashion-magazine'd that Prom Night could kind of pass for a zombie film. There is a faint attempt at building poor lead girl Donna's psychology, and it's all the more hilarious because they sort of try tapping into that. Brittany Snow knows how to cue facial expressions really well, but as a blonde sweetheart whose whole family was murdered before her eyes, and who then tries dealing with the trauma a couple of years later, her number on the credibility gauge almost freefalls into the negative terrain. So, yeah, 'mentally tortured' + identifiable hot chick as the lead... teen girls love that. So, DING, here's all the requisite ingredients for their monthly Saturday Night Fright, all dressed up in this season's trendy clothes, and poised & prepped for public consumption.

This, I insist, is not a film-- this is one of the sucky rollercoaster rides in a beachside fair that you and your friends want to ride, and then when you come out, you say 'wow, that sucked'. You're not particularly happy having spent your hard-earned cash on such a shitty thing, but secretly, you had a blast as you were laughing through the ride, and now, you want to do it again.

So, as much as I kick and fight my desire to see such heavily-marketted horror crap like this, I know I'll keep seing them until I'm very, very old, and as stupid and ridiculous and WOOOOSH, annoyingly glossy as Prom Night was (the closeups trying to bring some kind of character insight are rather funny), I wish to thank it for reminding me how much I love films, and in particular garbage like this.

Oh, and Dana Davis, the sassy black friend, well, she really sucks at what we call 'acting'. But, hey, she has a great rack, and we get to see it bounce for a good 12-15 minutes of screentime during her chase scene, which almost reaches Scary Movie-levels of hilarity.

Not scary, not funny, not worth your time. Urban Legends : Final Cut is surprisingly undone by the creaky slasher mechanics. When attention is paid to its protagonist (the reasonably 'do-the-job' Jennifer Morrison), the film does actually sound decent-- but then it swings back to the boring one-by-one kills, which can be seen coming from a mile away. At least the final scene is a darkly ironic wink... thank fuck.

Upset the original didn't get its obligatory crap remake treatment? This is just what you need! This second and brutally unecessary trip to the Hills is practically ninety minutes of stick figures in uniforms running around with guns before getting the pickaxe one by one. And, even worse, when the 'shocking' viscera occurs, it's orchestrated in such an irritatingly 'IN-YOUR-FACE!' manner that it comes borderline close to-- no, come to think of it, it comes almost *exactly* like those awful DTV sequels' directing style.

Pumping up the gore and throwing in another rape (complete with mutant tongue!) just for the hell of it is a pretty shitty idea, but the capital mistake of this lame rehash of the 2006 remake has to be that the tension, from start to finish, is kept to a thudding zero.

Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. There's not a scare to be found, no suspense, no laughs, no gore, no nothing. Even as a campy horror comedy, the movie is an absolute failure. It's chock-full of ridiculous zombies that are barely any fun to watch moan and chomp, and don't even get me started on the abysmal, headache-inducing 3-D effects. Whoever you are, horror/zombie fan or not, clearly, you DON'T need to see this.

Redefines the term 'survival horror movie'. Cat-and-mouse chases have rarely been this dull, repetitive or just plain stupid. There is a certain kudos to give to director/writer John Shiban for making his 90-minute chase look strikingly good for a DTV movie, but some blame should also be put on him for writing such bad dialogue, staging loads of very unoriginal been-there-done-that scenes and handling a frustratingly 'whatever' ending with no punch whatsoever.

Cube 2 - Hypercube runs dangerously close to revealing too much about the beautifully abstract cube... and also blows on almost every level.

While this heavy-metal sci-fi horror B-movie isn't exactly dull, it only gets worse and worse as it runs. Condemned to rot in your local Blockbuster in-between two genre sections.

Risible and hopelessly flat, this useless Wicker Man remake is only advantaged by its beautiful scenery and (some of) the original version 's irony. As much as Cage and Burstyn kick and fight their way out this horrid screenplay, the ending result is just profoundly clunky and embarassing.

There might be some shocking imagery and startling flashbacks here and there, but feardotcom is a dry, lifeless horror bore that gets sucked up its own ass about thirty minutes in. Almost everything here is deja vu, and the result is an endless flow of yawn-inducing dialogue, peppered with some intermittently affecting scares. McElhone clearly does her best not to worsen the whole deal, but it's to no avail. Her performance, like the rest of the film, is just plain... blah.

Stylish and sometimes witty in its dialogue, Valentine still fails to deliver anything new and plays out the lamest clichés we've seen hundreds of times, resulting in an utterly generic thrill-less slasher.

Vile.

The Ruins is ten minutes of pretty people hanging out in the sun and drinking, twenty minutes of them walking through the jungle and arguing about whatsoever, fourty-five of (very) bloody panic and broken bones (accompanied by grade-A crunchy sound effects), and a very thin five minutes of thinking that actually makes sense. Since the suspense is kept at a shocking minimum and the whole thing is jam-packed with amputations and skin-cutting, one could argue about the effectiveness and purpose of the whole thing-- oh, silly me to have believed this could have been something more, something FRESH. Basically, The Ruins is set up as a slasher with vines and a lot of character hysterics, and aspires to be nothing more; this is a damn shame considerng the creep potential of the whole thing. But no, alas, all we're left with is paper-thin eye-candy characters who keep making stupid decisions for the whole running time-- I'm sure there's a message here somewhere about panic leading to crap decisions when in crap situations, but sincerely, how cheated can one feel if their film just 'stops' rather than 'ends'? The saving points of this film are, of course, the beautiful cinematography, whose effect wears off after a good half hour, and the cast. Yes, the cast. Save for an unsurprisingly wooden Ashmore, everyone does a pretty good job, especially Ramsey, who is the only one who gets to shift in the next act of terror and desperation. But even with an adequate cast, adequately pretty images and, hum, adequately animated killer vines, this monstrously unpleasant and formulaic adaptation of The Ruins, simple as that, turns a good book into a bad film.

God, I hated this film. This is, for me, the perfect example of un-entertainment-- the massive use of self-inflicted violence cannot even be laughed off since the prosthetics and CGI are top-notch... and, frankly, if you're among the people that get off on very realistically rendered atrocities, way above teens-in-peril slasher standards, well, you might enjoy it-- but to me, this pointless freak-out devoid of any payoff is just another example of the horror genre sliding off the rails...

Dissapointingly dull and by-the-numbers, An American Haunting is unable to cause serious chills despite the efforts of its good cast and a reasonably eerie atmosphere. But alas, sleek'n'moody photography and people staring at creaking floorboards can only get you so far, and if the viewer never really feels the character's immense terror... well... yawn. Also, the part of the plot set in the present day just feels like a cheap, terminally unscary ''OMG ghosty shit happened to those people!!!'' documentary you watch on a sleepy sunday night. Not good.

Stylishly directed and indeed very creepy in its first third, Saints-Martys-des-Damnés somehow ends up slipping into the interminable and the annoyingly so-called clever, when in fact, it's just a total mess plotwise once it approaches its clunky finale. One may be pleased by Aubert's beautifully gothic technique, but the story is a headache, and so are the boring characters. Talk about a missed opportunity.

Entirely assembled from borrowed parts and thoroughly executed with yawn-inducing seriousness (despite tons of seriously crazy shit splashing all over the screen), The Unborn is, unsurprisingly, a failure. Even worse : it also cannot succeed at being laugh-out-loud bad for a significant enough portion of its 87-minute running time to recommend as a hilarious oh-no-they-didn't romp.

You almost know, shot by shot, how crappy this film is. Really, you do. I shouldn't even tell you how cookie-cutter everything is. It's certainly not scary-- it's jam-packed with predictable jump scares and the imagery tries wayyy too hard to be disturbing. The heroine has no personality, but she emotes a lot, and apparently her panties are several sizes too short. She has a hunky do-nothing boyfriend and a sassy/irritating black BFF, and both get on your nerves after two minutes of screentime. Its deadening flatness and respect of nearly every modern PG-13 horror film convention make it a watch that's far more annoying than scary, and the way the story unfold is routine from top to bottom. Except, of course, for the monumentally distasteful decision of taking the plot to Auschwitz-Birkenau. But I won't dwell on that-- once it's over, you won't end up remembering the details of the main curse but you'll be able to point out everything silly and downright retarded about the 'frightening' moments.

Alas, had the film solely combined awesome badness and a few startling images, I would have rated it much higher. Sadly, it didn't enjoy its terrible content as much as I had hoped. When The Unborn is not wowing us with sublime ridiculousness, it's only superficial, moody and most of all, dull.. David S. Goyer shoots the thing as if it were a parody of The Ring, with its gloomy house insert shots and its REALLY, REALLY SEEEERIOUS BLUEISH TONE FROM SCENE ONE AND UP TO THE FINAL SHOT. Its screenplay is muddled at best, and not even worth following at worst. And since there is no humor to speak of to be found in here... well, the actors play it wooden, of course! And that... that can bore a viewer to death, let me tell you.

Speaking of which my, my, my, what wood is on display. Although lead girl Odette Yustman does get to show a little bit of her obvious talent (take that sentence however you want, I'm sure it works both ways) towards the end, she keeps the same mildly worried stare for nearly the entire running time. She's not bad, but she's not much fun to watch. The totally disposable Cam Gigandet looks stoned in all of his scenes, with no exception. And Meagan Good, well... oh, alright, forget it. If you know who this actress is, you know exactly what kind of performance she gives in The Unborn.

So, what do we have, in the end? Just another wet firecracker that will easily fill bargain bins all around the world five months after its DVD release. This is another low-voltage ghost story full of nothing that completely relies on staccatos and pale-skinned children instead of a dangerous atmosphere and sustained terror. It has a few decent scenes here and there (the opening is okay, and the climactic exorcism is probably the most unnerving moment of it all), but mostly, it was only made by disinterested craftsmen who knew damn well they were filming an easily-forgotten piece of horror junk food.

Skip it.

With its uninspired terror, incredibly dull screenplay and very little tension, The Eye joins the increasingly long list of tedious J-horror remakes. It's not that the source material is disrespected or 'americanized' too much; it simply feels like this rush job of ghost story has zero purpose to be beyond harvesting a shitload of cash from the wallets of 13-year old teens. The better than can be said about it might be that it looks somewhat classy, and that Alba delivers a more than satisfying performance; intense when necessary and, for once, almost natural-- or maybe it was the ragged looks or the puffy red eyes. Unfortunately, her, how can I say, simply 'decent' performance is not nearly enough to salvage this carbon copy of the last three years of PG-13 horror.

Those last three years, too, have frighteningly similar plotlines, so once those dreaded ghostly visions start occuring, it's a flat-out boring waiting game until poor Sydney traces back the original owner to know what the fuck happened. Another MAJOR complaint : in the original, the supernatural angle had no reason to be, whereas in this one, we get a line about cellular memory to content ass-stupid American audiences with a somewhat plausible 'explanation'. Goddamn.

No, seriously. You've already seen this movie before, believe me, and chances are you didn't come out very satisfied or startled. But hey, if you want to see it again, this time starring Ms. Alba in a role best described as prettily functional, help yourself.

Boo.

It's really a damn shame The Messengers becomes fascinatingly bad for a couple of scenes (i.e the cataclismically bad ending, a few crow attack scenes, etc.) because some sequences are genuinely frightening and well-above the usual PG-13 horror crapfest. Either way, even if it is bound to be forgotten very soon, and surprisingly for its cruel lack of atmosphere, The Messengers is an effective (and entirely disposable) scarefest.