i'm kael's ghost

So, I debated on doing a New Year's Evil post today, but I'm not ready to dive into that can of shitty worms. Instead, I bring you this: The Horror Show. We hold these truths to be self evident, that all 80's horror movies starring Lance Henriksen  will be bad, that any movie sold to us as a sequel to House (1986)  will have NOTHING  to do with the original movie, that we will love these idiotic movies, regardless of their shortcomings. This one you may not know: The Horror Show  was released nearly in tandem with Shocker . The two movies are nearly identical with the biggest differences being that Shocker developed a completely unbelievable cult following while The Horror Show crawled off under an old lady's porch and curled up to die a completely deserved death. In case you're falling behind on your bad 80's horror movies, let me give you the $.25 overview of The Horror Show / Shocker: serial killer gets caught and is sent to the electric chair. Zap t...

I made a rookie mistake today. I started watching a movie based on the title. In case you have never made this mistake yourself, allow me to protect you from your future self's stupid choice: NO MOVIE YOU CHOOSE TO WATCH BASED ON THE TITLE WILL EVER BE A GOOD LIFE DECISION! Good. Now you've been warned. So, I may have picked  Antisocial  out of my abundant Netflix choices because I was bored. And I may have done it because I, myself, am fairly antisocial. Or perhaps the most likely of all, I picked it because it immediately got me singing Anthrax . Whatever the ill-conceived logic was behind this idiotic choice - I'm actually apologizing to myself for this one. When a person like me, who adds movies to her Netflix queue because they have the fewest stars , tells you that a movie is an immense pile of crap, you can rest assured that the movie in question is better forgotten than watched. Another quick side rant before I get into the details of the movie: I am so d...

I can typically create a film summary in just a sentence. On other occasions, I come up against a movie like The Double that just tickles my brain with its many, many (obvious) sources of inspiration and it leaves me scrambling to wrap up the details into just one tasty morsel. Double is best described as "compellingly weird". It has the visual quality of a music video or like something Spike Jonze directed in the early 90's ( Being John Malkovich or Adaptation ). Smoosh that together with the surrealist dystopian masterpiece,   Brazil . Sprinkle on top the nagging feeling that Alex Proyas could have made it in between The Crow and Dark City . Mix the whole thing up and it feels like the perfect marriage of Jim Jarmusch and Wes Anderson .   Whew. The story is reminiscent of  Metropolis , and carries with it a similar soul crushing feeling about industrialization and the mechanization of humanity. There is an excess of subtext around feeling like you don't ...

Being a bit of a Twilight Zone nerd, I've watched all of the episodes many - MANY - times. This has the strange effect of giving me "known" plots to stumble over on my movie watching travels. Gallows Hill is a movie length version of episode 41, The Howling Man . For those of you who haven't seen it, the story goes like this: A man on a walking trip becomes lost and during a sudden rain storm, wanders into a nearby castle. Instead of being welcomed by friendly natives, he is told to leave immediately. On his way back out the door, he collapses. When he wakes, he hears a terrible howl and (stupidly) goes to investigate. He discovers a bedraggled man in a cell who claims to be a prisoner of an insane religious order. Said leader (Brother Jerome) later explains that the prisoner is not a man, but rather the devil himself. Convinced that Jerome is insane, our traveler waits until his guard falls asleep, creeps down to the cell, and releases the prisoner. As he wa...

I may have stumbled onto one of the most poorly acted, strangely written movies on Netflix. Comforting Skin . I watched it on the heels of watching Soulmate, meaning I accidentally watched all of the non-standard, human / something else horror / romance movies in one sitting. ...dammit.  Now, when I sat down to write about Soulmate, I challenged myself to "write something nice about it", even though it wasn't very good. I ran out of steam and started this review instead, as I wasn't holding myself to some standard of positivity. Being a snarky jerk is significantly easier, let me tell you. Were I to apply that self-imposed standard of giving a shit movie a chance, I may have been able to write something favorable about Comforting Skin - I just don't want to work that hard for something so undeserving. So, Comforting Skin. Somehow many folks have come to love this movie and keep treating it as some avant garde, low-budget, masterpiece exploration of men...