i'm kael's ghost

The Haunting of Molly Hartley The gist: teenage girl has a crazy, religious mother and has to deal with mean kids at her high school. Bad things happen. If this sounds familiar, it's probably because you've been watching Carrie . Or you had your own crazy mother and hated high school. Or both. It could be both. The story is fairly predictable with moments that feel like The Craft and moments that feel like Carrie and then some that seem kind of like The Devil's Advocate . Despite being an underwhelming and derivative little film, it wasn't entirely terrible. What did give me a pleasant little surprise was the ending: no one was "saved" and everyone who did survive lived happily ever after as a servant of Satan. Hooray! Kind of like The Omen complete with a set up for a sequel that would likely run parallel to Damien: Omen II , were anyone to care enough to make said sequel. Unlikely . Overall, the movie is just a high school drama with a horro...

The supernatural is often the focus of horror movies; from ghosts, to psychics, to demons, to vampires, and so on - people are simply fascinated by that which may be real. Typically, these stories are set up in one of two ways: everyone except the main character believes in the supernatural OR only the main character believes in the supernatural. That means one crucial element of the story is always someone struggling to come to grips with the existence of something they don't believe in. Today we'll be looking at 3 examples from the past few years of people grappling with the supernatural: Red Lights, The Awakening, and The Skeptic. If you're a jaded skeptic, like myself, you'll naturally gravitate to each of the leading roles in today's movies as they fall into the category of, "staunch non-believers." Red Lights - 2012 The $.25 plot overview: a professor and a physicist try to debunk a famous psychic. Turns out the psychic is a fake but the...

How does this keep happening?... I see trailers for new, terrible looking horror movies - I trash talk them for months then finally break down and watch them (out of nothing short of morbid curiosity) and find myself (not even grudgingly) enjoying them. Tonight's unexpected gem?  v/h/s . Allow me to make the usual disclaimer here: I’m going to spoil the surprises, the twists, etc. If you don’t want that - bugger off. When I first read about this movie the gist I got from the synopsis was that it was another " Ring ". (Or " Ringu ", if you're feeling especially pedantic tonight.) There’s a “mysterious” and “evil” video tape circulating that, when watched, dooms the viewer to death. ...boooooring! Tonight, when I started watching it, I realized that's not  actually the case. In fact, it appeared to be something far worse than another cheap rip-off of a Japanese horror flick: a found footage movie. Ugh. Kill me now. Th...