House of Bones

Year of Release: 2010
Genre: Horror
IMDB Rating: 4.3 / 10
Level of Awful: Surprise!
Breast-O-Meter: 0 /5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

Lately I’ve come up against a bit of a brick wall so far as my reviews are concerned. I’ve watched so many movies in the past month, but they’ve all ended up being direly boring and I couldn’t think of a single way to write reviews for any of them (although the good Lord knows I’ve tried). It might just be that my standards have dropped, or I was just so desperate to write about something that my mind is making it all up, but I actually found this to be a decent and passable horror movie. It’s certainly not original, it doesn’t try to shake anything up and it doesn’t try to elicit any kind of emotional response from the audience, but as a standard haunted house story it works in the sense that what it does, it does well. I wouldn’t recommend rushing out to get your hands on a copy, but if it happens to come on TV sometime and you haven’t anything better lined up, give it watch. You may end up being mildly entertained.

WARNING! WARNING! Smarm overload!

In a move that may briefly leave you confused and mistakenly thinking that you’re watching Grave Encounters, the movie opens with us following the crew of a ghost hunting show. The show’s a little old school and is made up primarily of stock footage that they’ve green-screened their rather smarmy and pony-tailed host in front of. Since nobody appreciates a classic anymore, the ratings for the show have started to dip tremendously, and the producers are threatening to axe the show unless something is done. Enter the man who knows buzzwords! In his opinion the show needs to take on some elements from reality TV shows (no it doesn’t – nothing EVER needs to take points from reality shows. EVER.) and place the producer in the haunted houses and record his overly dramatic responses.  So essentially they’re going to make it into Ghost Adventures.

Let’s just call it a feminist fertility rite and leave it at that.

The powers behind the show have found the absolutely perfect house! It’s set in a lovely neighbourhood, plenty of room for a family, fresh coat of paint, slave lodgings, the works! It also has a terrible history of people going missing as soon as they set foot inside of it, and the neighbours keep complaining about disembodied voices pleading for mercy, but it’s nothing that a new lamp and a mild exorcism won’t take care of. When the crew arrives there’s nobody there to open up for them; thankfully the movie’s a bit racist and has equipped its only black character with the skills to pick locks and a desire to break into white folks’ homes. It’s all a bit strange inside though: why is there a fully stocked fridge in a house that’s been abandoned since before the 1950s? Why is it so spotlessly clean? Why is the psychic they brought with them bleeding out of her eyes? Nobody seems particularly concerned with these questions, so it’s on with the show they go.

Bitch needs an extra-strength lozenge! Stat!

It becomes quite apparent quite quickly that this isn’t one of those fake haunted houses – there is some genuine malevolent shit going on in there. Unfortunately the crew is headed up by the biggest asshole of a producer that a film has ever dared to create, so despite the fact that people are disappearing into the walls he absolutely forbids anyone to abandon their posts. As it turns out it isn’t that the house has evil spirits in it – the house itself is the evil spirit. To survive it literally eats its victims in order to maintain itself (gorgeous wallpaper and a meticulously clean crystal chandelier come at a cost, you know), and it isn’t interested in letting any of its new meals out. It’ll be up to the bleeding-eye psychic, a black dude and a melted corpse to solve the case if there’s any hope of them living to see the sun rise again.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Haunted houses are known to spin people right round (baby, right round, like a record baby right round, round round).
• Haunted houses have no right to go around giving themselves fresh coats of paint.
• When the ratings for your TV show are down, it calls for life threatening situations to revitalise them.
• It’s supernaturally dangerous when a haunted house’s pleasure to pain ratios are too high.
• The colour of the ectoplasm you find indicates the level of malevolence you are dealing with.
• It’s very important to routinely check your psychic for hairballs to ensure optimum health.

HOUSE OF BONES TRAILER

BUY HOUSE OF BONES AT AMAZON.COM

Killjoy

Year of Release: 2000
Genre:  Horror
IMDB Rating: 2.1 / 10
Level of Awful: Requires Post-Film Lobotomy
Breast-O-Meter: 1 / 5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

For a horror fanatic Halloween is that one really important day that you want to spend with those closest to you. For me there was no one I would rather spend the day with than My Friend The Killer Clown Movie. We go back a long way and I hadn’t seen him since we went camping together in June at the beautiful Camp Blood. Since it had been such a long time I thought I’d give him a call and arrange to get together in a bad neighbourhood to have a sit down and a catch up. Now, if weird shit’s going to happen to anyone it’s going to happen to My Friend The Killer Clown Movie, so while we sat at a little corner café drinking very manly lattes he began telling me about the movie Killjoy, a movie that had made him feel more like a fool than many others he’s been forced to star in.

...and then I stuck my finger in the outlet...

What a lot of people don’t know about My Friend The Killer Clown Movie is that, while he is a bit of a psychotic lunatic, he’s very much in favour of equal opportunity. When he heard that Killjoy would be set in the hood with gangsters and guns and the like, he thought that this would be an amazing opportunity to prove that he isn’t a racist. Hindsight is an amazing thing and he now feels like this movie has set the civil rights movement back by about 50 years, something that brings a tear to his eye. After I wiped away his tears he told me the basic outline of what happened in the movie. Michael is the local nerd that no one likes, and he has a very big crush on Jada. Jada already has a boyfriend named Lorenzo, and he’s pretty thug. When he catches Jada speaking to Michael he gets his friends T-Bone and Baby Boy to beat the crap out of Michael. Rising above the situation Michael decides to perform a little black magic and summon a demon clown, the movie’s eponymous Killjoy, to take revenge, but Lorenzo & Co. kill Michael before the spell can be properly enacted.

Minimalist seances were all the rage back in 2000.

Being so close to My Friend The Killer Clown Movie I could tell that recounting this acting experience was very hard for him, so I decided to let him take his time. To put him more at ease we finished our lattes, ordered another round, took a few minutes to finish polishing our guns at the table and started taunting the odd old lady that walked by with them. This seemed to cheer him up a little and he continued with the story. A year has passed and Jada has since broken up with Lorenzo. She’s now romantically attached to a man named Jamal, a much sweeter man who knows how to treat his bitches and hoes right. Lorenzo & Co. are still around being thugs, but things are about to go rather badly for them. It seems that Michael’s spell was a slow-release one and has just kicked into effect, summoning Killjoy to our reality and letting him loose on the world. His ice-cream truck is a portal to his own dimension and Lorenzo & Co. are none too bright, so Killjoy lures them into the truck with promises of illegal drugs and discount ice-cream. Once trapped he then kills them in a number of ways that can only be done on a minimal budget before sending their bodies back to our dimension.

It's terribly sad to see a killer clown in the post-stroke phase of his life.

By this point we were all latted out and in the mood to torment some other people than just the old ladies we threatened to shoot, so me and My Friend The Killer Clown Movie decided to go for a walk, hand in hand, through this bad neighbourhood. As we walked along he told me the rest his sad story on the set of Killjoy. Playing the clown in this movie required that he become a lot more gangsta than he really is, learning to speak the lingo and acting like he rode in on the special bus. For reasons neither he nor the director could explain Killjoy now started to go after Jada, Jamal and their friend Monique. Thankfully a homeless man appears at random and tells them exactly what they need to do in order to stop the clown from killing them and trap him in his own dimension once more. Along the way they’ll encounter the spirits of Lorenzo & Co. and Michael, who’ll do anything to stop them. With faces that don’t move and voices that don’t range, our little group must ignore these spirits and bring Killjoy’s reign of terror to an end once and for all.

And so my lovely day with My Friend The Killer Clown Movie came to an end. I felt that him telling me about this awful movie he had starred in, with such good intentions, had brought us even closer together. In the back of my mind I also thought he was a bit of an idiot for starring in the movie’s two sequels, but decided that that was a conversation for another day. After a quick hug and a grab of the ass I went home, but promised to call him soon to arrange our next get together.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• A red mustang convertible will get you anywhere with a black woman.
• Hostages should not speak unless spoken to.
• Study groups are best conducted with porno RnB in the background.
• Year old breakups that you initiated mean nothing.
• Killer clown drug distribution from an ice cream truck is a major issue in poor neighbourhoods.
• Gangsta killer clowns use some of the most foul language you’ve ever heard.
• Lack of showering is one of the leading causes of foul vaginal smells.
• A pistol can hold, on average, 24 bullets.
• Women often come out of the shower wearing nothing but a pair of high heels.
• Some boys only have a doll and satanic magic as friends.
• 3 people count as ‘many, many’ murders.
• Boxes with lead pipes often include swords and axes as an added bonus.
• Pressing down on someone’s eyebrows can kill them.

KILLJOY TRAILER

BUY KILLJOY AT AMAZON.COM