LAKE MUNGO [2008]

10/4/12

Following the death of 16 year old Alice, who drowned, her family must face the struggles of trying to overcome the fact that she’s dead, and are faced with the thought that their house may be haunted by her.

The film is half interview, and half reenactments. I’ve heard a ton of good things regarding this flick, so needless to say I was really excited for it.

The family starts noticing strange occurrences in the house, the mother even goes as far as contacting a medium hoping to find out the truth about her daughter. As the family tries to get more answers about Alice they soon found out that Alice might have been living a secret life.

Other than a twist, and a little deception the film doesn’t have much to offer. I was reading on this before I even watched it, I saw reviews that were giving this a 10/10, 5/5, and so on, so forth. I don’t know how a film like this can be a 10/10, the film is definitely sad, and you do feel for the family. I was expecting some sort of ghost movie, not over an hour of people talking in front of a camera with a few flash backs.

The little twist was enough to keep me watching, but it wasn’t enough to tell everyone I know to check it out. The twist was awesome, but they never continued with it. Other than that the film seemed to drag, the characters were dull at times. The few things we learn about Alice are quite interesting, the main objective of the film wasn’t to scare anyone but to make the audience feel for the family. It certainly does that, although the delivery could have been a lot better.

A ghost is seen, but that becomes more of awhat the fuck…then an actual scare. If you want to watch a flick that will make you feel sorry for a family, and if you wanna see how a family goes through the mourning process then check this out. If you read the summary of this movie, you won’t be getting a ghost story.

5/10 rotting corpses
C Vengeance

Kicking it off my October movie fest with this bad boy. 1/31 Shark Night

Now watching

HAPPY TERROR TUESDAY.

INSIDIOUS (2010) 

I’ve been meaning to write this one out for a while now, there’s a lot of mixed reviews out there for this flick, and it seems to either be a good or a bad one. 

A young couple and their children move into a new house. Within a few days their oldest son, Dalton falls off a ladder and ends up in a coma. They cannot explain why he’s in a coma, all they can do is sit and wait. As he drifts into his coma weird, unexplained things happen in the house. Doors slam on their own, things falls, the baby screams, the mom thinks she is seeing things, and all those fun things we all love. 

A psychic comes into the home and she tells the couple that Dalton is not in a coma but is being haunted by a demon who does not want to let him go. I won’t post any spoilers in here after all of that has already been said. 

I loved this movie until about thirty minutes before it ended. I felt it was hurried, things unveiled themselves rather quickly, the “demon” looks like an angry Darth Maul (not meaning that in a good way), and the ended seemed so predictable. 

Granted, despite all of that, the acting was great. All for one character though, Patrick Wilson, who played the father really did a shitty job. Maybe his character was written out that way? He sucked big time, and was an overall d-bag throughout the film. 

Scary parts? Oh yes. The major redeeming factor of the movie, plenty of suspense in between the scares. I tried calling out all of the times something would pop up and I was wrong. The ghosts were creepy, and scary in their own right. So minus an ending in which I felt was rushed and predictable, minus the crappy acting from Mr. Wilson, and minus the Darth Maul lookalike this film was a lot of fun. Packed with scares, suspense, what started off to be a great plot with an awesome story, it just fell a little flat for me. But not flat enough for me to hate it. 

6.75/10 rotting corpses
C. Vengeance  

Don’t Go in the Woods (2010)

I honestly do not know where to begin with this.

Here’s what the premise of the film is: A band of indie rockers go into the woods to separate themselves from society so they can work on an album. Until someone with a sledgehammer comes to ruin the party.

Here’s what you get instead, you get a fucking musical. A MUSICAL. There’s some dialogue, and they do crank out some songs so they can work on the album. When the lead singer tells them to give up their cell phones, no drugs, booze, or girls so they can work on the music things get out of hand when their girlfriends come to the woods to party with them.

It takes 35 minutes until we see the first death. It wasn’t long, and you won’t see much for long. When the girls interrupt the music session to start partying and SINGING.

It’s not until 1 hour and 4 minutes that people actually start dying. Is there any type of plot, or any build up for the killings? None what so ever. In fact, they come out of nowhere. The death scenes aren’t done well either, some scenes you could tell that they just wanted to rush. The blood was minimal, the killings were half assed, and most importantly there was about 40 minutes worth of singing.

The ending wasn’t horrible, there was a slight twist, but by then there was no way of repairing the damage that I put my eyes and ears through. The acting wasn’t great, no one added anything important to the film, and did I mention, it was like a damn MUSICAL? Adding 10 minutes of spinning camera angles, random blood splatter, and a plot twist of an ending doesn’t make it a fucking horror movie.

1/10 rotting corpses

1 for me being able to sit through it.

C. Vengeance