i'm kael's ghost

You know the drill - there's ALWAYS spoilers. Don't want the movie ruined for you, come back after you've seen it. Also - I'm still without an editor - typos and bad grammar await you! I keep hoping that the cultural obsession with zombies will end; literally every other damn movie that comes 'round seems to feature some sort of shambling, undead being bent on devouring the weak flesh of regular humans. Once upon a time, zombies have have been used as a metaphor for the blind consumerism created by our capitalist society, or the perceived depletion of resources by immigrants, or even the ravages of time and disease on our frail bodies. Now it seems that the deeper social commentary has been lost as audiences mindlessly consume "zombie fiction" in an attempt to keep up with trends. ( How very meta - a film buddy of mine commented on this assessment! ) All of this is just a sideways rant, leading up to my actual point: it seems that zombie may actually...

"Move over Freddy. Move over Jason. Here comes The Mister." The cult of the 80's is strong. People often wax nostalgic over glorious 80's cinema with its practical effects and over-the-top stories. And it's true - it WAS a glorious time for horror AND comedy AND action movies - genres you often found romping playfully together at that time. BUT! This pro 80's nostalgia conveniently forgets the failures. If getting the formula for a great comedy is hard - balancing the elements to make a GREAT horror comedy is virtually impossible; this means there is potential to make BOTH a bad horror movie AND a bad comedy AND a bad movie overall. Enter tonight's train wreck (oh the puns!): The Sleeping Car  - not technically an 80's movie (having been made in 1990) but it's aesthetics are close enough to let it pass. And it was made by VidMark - any 80's horror fan knows that  VidMark  is like a beautiful seal of mediocrity in the VHS world. Here...

After the completely predictable failure of Battleship , someone still thought, "Hey! Let's make another movie based on a board game!" Enter Ouija . Unsurprisingly, this movie was also a flop. This financial failure was not great enough to keep some idiots from banging out a cheap, imitation they hoped would ride Ouija's coattails to success. Yet another brilliant idea.  Or not.  This brings us to my most recent wasted night on the couch with The Ouija Experiment . Here's the gist: For an unknown reason, a film student from NYC goes to Dallas with an Asian girl (who may be an escort or a hooker or a porn star) to film a "mysterious" event she won't tell him anything about. There's no explanation for how these two met and no obvious reason he'd want to film said event. Turns out, she's not an escort and the "event" she's taking him to is a "surprise" the boyfriend's best friend has set up. We will come to f...

Before I begin this one, allow me to state the (possibly) obvious here: there are spoilers in this post. If you DO NOT want to know the twist ending of Come Back To Me , STOP READING NOW . You can check out one of these less-spoiler-y reviews instead:  The Hollywood Reporter Review of Come Back To Me  OR  The New York Times Review of Come Back To Me. If you’re a regular reader, you know that I hate everything. In terms of genres, I've been cultivating a particular hatred for zombies, exorcism, and found footage. Don’t get me wrong here - each has merits, but I’m tired of the overwhelming number of each currently available. Because these genres have exploded in popularity, many movies in each are poorly made attempts to capitalize on that popularity. Little thought is given to the quality of the story, the production, the writing, or the acting. In the past few months I've developed a new hatred; paranormal, domestic abuse movies. Please imagine me rolling my eyes...

I didn't have high expectations for Soulmate ; the cover is completely ripped off from The Awakening (so I kept thinking it was that movie in my queue) and the description on Netflix reads nearly identically to The Lake House . The combination of the low rating Netflix thought I’d give it and knowing that Neil Marshall felt good enough about it to produce it, created an intoxicating desire for me to give it a try. Unfortunately, I think Marshall produced the movie because his wife directed it, not because he truly felt it was a good movie. The lesson? Don't trust other people when they tell you a movie is good - that goes doubly for me - you should never trust me . Soulmate is basically a chick-flick wearing the mask of a horror movie. The gist? A woman's husband is killed in a car accident. The guilt she feels for surviving drives her to try and kill herself. When her attempt fails, she runs away to a remote village and takes refuge in what turns out to be a haunted c...

I know what you're thinking: there just aren't enough movies about angry Aztec gods turning women into hookers. And you're right. Do a Google search on it and you'll get, well, basically no results. The closest you'll get is Q: The Winged Serpent - which is really less about hookers and more about an angry, winged beast devouring New Yorkers. I don't want you to worry! Tonight's offering, Unrest , is here to (eventually) fill all of your angry god needs. And by “eventually” I mean more than 2/3 of the way through the movie… by which point you’ve probably lost interest anyway. Our story opens on a woman alone in a run down looking hospital room. It’s unclear if she’s a patient or visitor or something else entirely. There is ominous sounding Spanish chanting. She smashes a mirror and uses a piece to slice open her face. Very dramatic. The scene cuts to black and we jump randomly into a modern looking (but strangely vacant) hospital where a young medical s...

Today's movie is  Hellgate  - and holy shit is it boring. Running just about 1.5 hours, the pacing makes it feel like you're slogging through mud for more like 5 or 10 hours. There are more things to be frightened of in a Disney movie than there are in this movie. The Gist: Jeff ( Cary Elwes ) loses his family in a car accident which may or may not be his fault . Post accident (a la The Dead Zone ) he can "see dead people" and hear them (alternately) asking for help and threatening to destroy him - if one can call zombie grunts any type of actual threat. During his recovery, he falls for his sexy Asian nurse. Throw in some spiritualism and we learn that his soul is trapped in the spirit world - yada yada yada. Complicated rituals and spooky pronouncements follow. When Jeff crosses over to the spirit world to collect his missing soul, his dead, mangled wife tells him that he should go back and have a life with the sexy nurse who would do anything for him. I don...

Release Date:  October 24th, 2014 The People Responsible: Trace it all the way back and you'll end at Michael Bay . Blame Michael Bay. The Gist: A bunch of teenagers awaken "something" by playing with an old ouija board. Gut Feeling: This movie will be another failed attempt to turn a Hasbro game into a movie (like Battleship ). The story will be predictable. The effects will be acceptable. They will rely too much on "jump scares." Box Office Prediction: They'll make just enough to get a sequel made. You can learn more from their website.

Once upon a time, there was a Mexican director with a passion for mythology and a knack for writing a very particular type of emotionally charged, supernatural horror that burrows into your brain and chews its way into your subconscious. If someone had mentioned his name to you in the early 90's, you'd have turned to them, blank-faced, and asked, "Who?" Now, a decade later, you'd say, "Oh!  Guillermo del Toro , he directed Hellboy ! I love him." Jump across the ocean to Spain and you'll hear a nearly identical tale - one that ends with, "Oh!  Jaume Balaguero , he directed the [REC] series! I love him." Granted, if we're being honest here, the [REC] movies may be popular  but, they aren't even close to being on the same globally successful (or globally known) level as any  of del Toro's movies. Which is a shame because Balaguero can be as good a writer and  a director as del Toro. Here's my $.25 on the handful o...

The Possession is yet another installment in the seemingly unending genre of possession movies and brings nothing new to the table. I'm fairly certain they just Googled "possession movie script template," downloaded the first option they found, and pitched it to the studio. The gist: A   couple gets divorced (that's a sin or something, right?) and shares custody,  but  not parenting styles. Dad is struggling to be cool and to remain relevant in his daughters' lives so he buys them things at a creepy tag sale. One daughter becomes obsessed with her tag sale find, which turns out to be inhabited by an angry, Jew demon who like to devour children's souls. Possession progresses to a point where the family seeks spiritual support. Then there's an exorcism. The rabbi eventually gets the demon back in its box and takes it away. Don't worry though! Apparently nothing ends a divorce like a good possession and the family ends up together in the end - demon...

Haunt is a heavy-handed little flick that lives somewhere between classics like Amityville Horror  (even having a viral website campaign that tried to convince folks Haunt was based on a real paranormal event) and more modern thriller types like What Lies Beneath  (which has a genre classification of "supernatural horror drama" - pfffffft. Oooohkay). Here's the scoop: family is tragically killed in their home, one by one, ALL except for the mother. SPOILER ALERT - if ALL BUT ONE family member is killed, you should immediately assume that they are a SUSPECT and not a lucky, escaped VICTIM. Fast forward to the new family (same head count as the old family) moving into this wonderfully under-priced for it's extravagant size house DESPITE the entire town making it known to them (albeit off screen) that the house is haunted. If you aren't already sure at this moment that things will ABSOLUTELY GO TERRIBLY WRONG FOR THEM then you need to hand in your movie-wat...

The general consensus about Odd Thomas seems to be thus: critics think it's crap while audiences seem strangely taken with it. Before watching it, I read nothing but bad reviews in magazines, but kept hearing friends of friends saying that it was, "pretty good." Here's my $.25 take on the movie: I didn't hate it but, the entire time I kept thinking, "I liked this movie better when it was The Frighteners ." I also couldn't help feeling like it wasn't as charming as Dead Like Me . The gist, if you couldn't gather, is as follows: dude sees dead people and commits to helping them. He saves the day but in the end, he has to lose the girl he loves to do it. Sad music plays. Credits roll. The movie, folks, is over. There were moments that were supposed to be funny that didn't make me laugh. There were tender, sentimental moments that didn't make me care about what happened to the characters. I feel like, overall, Anton Yelchin isn...

On a fairly regular basis, I end up watching a type or subgenre of movie that I typically dislike and would avoid. Tonight's accidental viewing? The Entity - which turns out to be a found footage movie. This is actually the type of movie I accidentally watch the most often because it's not always called out in the synopsis. This should really be a lesson to myself about doing more thorough research before  committing to watching a movie. Alright, taking a step back here, let's do a $.25 plot summary: A British TV crew from a "ghost hunter" show go exploring in the woods of Russia with a psychic in tow. They uncover a sinister looking building in which the Russian army (apparently) conducted medical experiments on psychics. This outing ends badly for everyone, thankfully (because all of the characters are terribly annoying). The thing that I found weird about this movie is that it's a found footage movie but  there's footage not  shot by any of th...

This will be the first review in some time where I don't begin by writing, "I've been avoiding or ignoring this movie" - shortly after appearing on Netflix, I just took the plunge and watched this one. (Who knows why I do things...) On the flip side of that, I was wary of this movie, on my way into it, because it's a ghost story and  a low-budget indie flick - two things that I often dislike. There was a very high likelihood that I would completely despise this movie. I will admit though, to being pleasantly surprised to get an unusual and enjoyable ghost story from Last Kind Words  (LKW). LKW is essentially a Southern-set gothic tale with peaceful, meditative pacing that never rushes the viewer into anything. Sometimes, that slow burn is a beautiful building of anticipation and sometimes the filmmaker isn't skilled enough to give the audience a proper "pay off" at the end. In this case, the wait was worth the investment. Many horror movies...

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...

A child of the 80's and an avid horror fan, I feel almost obligated to have a soft-spot in my black heart for Wes Craven . And I do. I really love some of his work; A Nightmare on Elm Street ? One of my favorite horror movies. The Hills Have Eyes ? Great (ridiculous!) movie. Last House on the Left ? Terrific. Swamp Thing ? I just adore it's campy, comic-booky quality. And today's focus, The Serpent and the Rainbow , which I think is his best movie. As a kid, one of the greatest joys in life was going to the local video store  (a thing some of you may never even have heard of - which is another rant for another time!) and looking at the covers in the horror section. As those of you who also enjoyed this know, one of the top criteria for picking a movie is the cover art; is it badass? Is there a great-looking creature? Is there blood? How cool is the font? Is there a half-naked, bloody chick? Etc. Etc. Etc. To that end, my friends and I often over-looked Serpent and...