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

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Ghost Storm

Year of Release: 2012
Genre: Sci-Fi / Horror
IMDB Rating: 3.8 / 10
Level of Awful: Medium
Breast-O-Meter: 0 /5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from the ungodly experiment that is the B-Horror Blog, it’s that anything the Asylum can do, Syfy can do a thousand times better (except for those few times when the Asylum makes the Syfy movie). They’re both good staples: The Asylum if you want a movie that’ll be easy to throw insults at, and Syfy if you want some guaranteed cheese. Ghost Storm will give you everything you need so far as cheese factor is concerned, and it even throws in a little soft science just to make the final product that little bit more saccharine-sweet. By the looks of things the people behind this movie had a fairly decent budget to play around with, and gradually these people seem to be coming to grips with making CGI monsters that aren’t so bad they’re insulting. I recommend hanging onto this one for one of those really rainy Sunday afternoons when you want to chase away the approaching Monday blues.

No good will possibly come from this.

What is it in a teenager’s genetic structure that draws them to creepy cemeteries like moths to a porch light? Science should really look into that. Anyway, as you may have guessed, our story begins with a group of bored teenagers in a dark and spooky cemetery – during a lightning storm, no less. Wherever the hell their hometown is, it would appear to be on a tiny little island, so I guess you gotta get your kicks where you can. Everything’s going absolutely fine (guys scaring girls, ominous thunder) until a bolt of lightning strikes the memorial for the people who died during the town’s now-infamous mass-suicide. The lightning, through means I should check with my Occult Specialist, releases the angry spirits of the departed, who quickly go about turning one of the teenagers into a grey piece of human jerky.

Run Generic Background Character, Run!

Thankfully, Officer Dad (AKA Hal, father of Daisy, one of the girls that was out in the cemetery) is on the case. There must be a logical, rational reason why Daisy’s 18-year-old boyfriend’s corpse went from looking like the Crypt Keeper to being a pile of mulch in a matter of hours. Of course, the problem here is that they’re stuck on an island, and how exactly would you report this kind of incident to the authorities back on the main land? This of course is only the beginning of the town’s problems – you see, these aren’t your regular pissed off, vengeance-seeking ghosts. These ghosts are smart – why hunt individually when you can join together, form a supernatural storm system and blight the inhabitants of the island all the more faster?

Dammit, it’ll take forever to get the Redrum off the windows….

So, with the angry spirits swirling around the island in a giant, lightning-filled vortex, it’s up to Hal, ex-wife Ashley, and Daisy to come up with some kind of way to defeat the ghosts before they turn the entire town’s population into little piles of dust. They will be aided by a seafaring ghost hunter who happened to rock up on the island just as the storm formed. They will need a combination of a lot of random electrical equipment, some occultist knowledge, Ashley’s meteorological know-how, a lot of salt water, a fire extinguisher, an old diary with some town secrets, a weather balloon, a gun, a lot of jumper cables, some cans of silicon gel, half a dozen rolls of duct tape, an ancient talisman and a cellphone tower if they’re ever going to be able to stop these ghosts. Then, of course, there’s the mysterious old priest, and Ashley and Daisy’s old, but not forgotten, family history that ties into the whole affair…

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Lightning storms are a tremendous turn on for randy teens.
  
• The new iSpirit app is very useful for knowing when there are vengeful spirits in the area.
• Exhuming bodies is nothing but good, small town fun.
• It’s very expensive to build a machine that’ll let you speak to a storm cloud.
• Salt water is the best thing to use to soak up spilled evil.
• A good old-fashioned witch hunt usually eases the tension when you’re being held hostage by ghosts.
• Always make sure that your ghost complies with regulatory electrical standards.

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Shredder

Year of Release: 2003
Genre: Horror / Thriller
IMDB Rating: 4.4 / 10
Level of Awful: Medium
Breast-O-Meter: 0.5 /5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

There’s a special place for many kinds of movies in my heart: cheesy disaster movies, disastrous monster movies, monstrous 80s horror movies, but there’s also something very special about the early-2000s slasher movie. The harsh makeup, the proliferation of pseudo-lesbionic characters, the jocks with the bleach blonde hair and ebony eyebrows, the strange overuse of animal print – it all makes for a delightful assault on the eyes. Shredder doesn’t disappoint on any of these criteria. It reminds me of another classic I reviewed, Do You Wanna Know A Secret, but on ice. With a soundtrack that would rival the best porno, a decent assortment of sluts and bitches, and such riveting dialogue as “What country are you from?” “Europe”, I would thoroughly recommend giving this a watch if you’re in the mood for a good laugh.

Thank God, I thought I was the only one who bought that hat.

The joys of being a 30-something college student with rich friends: you get to go to deserted ski resorts whenever the mood takes you. This is exactly what Kimberly Van Arx has in mind for the weekend – daddy wants to buy an old ski resort to further bolster the family’s already considerable assets, and she’s gonna go up and check the place out. She sells this to Cole, her boyfriend, as a romantic get away for the two of them, it’s just that two actually equates to seven people. But it’ll be fun! Plus, the more men that go along, the more chances Kimberly has of prancing around in the snow in a high-waisted, leopard print bikini, so it’s all for a greater good. Of course, none of these kids heed any of the traditional warning signs about going on such a holiday – things like all the locals in the bar creepily staring at them, the fact that the resort’s entrance has been bolted shut, and the fact that there’s a lot of brand new ski equipment in the lodge, with no owner around to be found.

I’ll be good! I’ll be good, I swear!

But all of these things are trivial when the main goal is to get blind drunk, high as a kite, and bang more people than a hooker on payday. For Kimberly, the main goal will be to land Christophe, a blonde gentleman of some vague European abstraction that they picked up along the way. Sure, he won’t tell anyone where he comes from, he becomes oddly uncomfortable when the police are around, and he seems to know this area very well, but surely that doesn’t mean he’s up to anything shady, right? Then, of course, there are also the legends surrounding this resort, the story of the young girl who was killed in a snowboarding accident, and now her wrathful, angry spirit roams the mountain seeking her skiing revenge on any snowboarder she finds. But of course, that’s just a myth…

Now take two of these, get plenty of rest, and you’ll be back on your feet in no time.

But if it’s just a myth why are so many people in this little group landing up dead? And not snowboarding accident dead, like murdered by the mysterious skier dressed all in black dead. And apart from him, there’s also some extra kinds of weird going on around here. Like the random skiing chick who likes to ski naked or have men’s hands down her parka while sitting on the ski lift. And there’s her crazy father who keeps screaming on about the dangers of snowboarding. And what’s with all the pamphlets about the proper use of the skiing slopes? To these kids, very little of it matters – there’s sex and some extreme snowboarding to be had, so by the time they actually wake up to the fact that there’s a problem they’re already up to their necks in it. Well, at least the ones that still have necks are. It’ll take all their combined, underwhelming abilities to make it off this mountain alright and, if they’re lucky, one member of the group might just be that right combination of hardcore and bi-curious to get them all to safety.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• When going on a ski vacation, it’s essential that you pack enough bikinis.
• Women peeing needs to be documented for future generations.
• Smart kids carry their own jaws of life with them wherever they go.
• European men speak only in innuendos.
• With enough ass waving and a spare pair of knickers any sheriff will be putty in your hands.
• It’s very dangerous for your blood/alcohol level to surpass 10.kajilion.
• The best way for a man to thank a woman for saving his life is to invite her to a bisexual threeway.

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Hookers in a Haunted House

Year of Release: 1999
Genre: Horror / Comedy
IMDB Rating: 2.7 / 10
Level of Awful: Requires Post-Film Lobotomy
Breast-O-Meter: 10 / 5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

Sometimes life just kind of happens, and for the past few weeks I have been completely unable to dedicate any time to watching awful movies. As a result I felt I should come back with a bang and chose the spectacular sounding Hookers in a Haunted House. Now, while it is the only movie I’ve reviewed so far that has managed to match Witch’s Sabbath‘s Breast-O-Meter reading, unlike the previous breast fest Hookers in a Haunted House barely makes any attempt at actually being a movie. It’s a very thinly veiled softcore porno with horrendous jokes thrown in to pad the time out a bit. If you ever feel the sudden urge to watch this movie, consider yourself warned.

She has the strength of a thousand hookers!

In what really is the setup to a poorly conceived joke, a blonde, brunette and red-headed hooker are about to spend an evening in a haunted house. IMDB swears blindly that these women have names but I don’t recall any of them being used in the actual movie. All the ‘action’ has already taken place and we are being told what happened through a series of flash backs from the blonde hooker as she details her harrowing evening to a rather strange TV journalist. The girls landed up in their frightening predicament when they decided to sell their wares out on a country road, the idea being that there would be less competition here from the other inner-city hookers. As luck would have it a group of Trekkies just happened to be driving by at that point and are more than happy for the girls to raise their shields to full power (or some pun along those lines).

So here's the plot in a nutshell.

The evening starts off with the nerdiest of the Trekkies trying to impress the hookers with his collection of human eyes in a jar and other bizarre paraphernalia. Perhaps as a result of this the girls don’t really take much of a shining to him, choosing instead to play around with his two friends. What follows is a slow strip tease, a lot of breast action and some ass shots that reveal some truly horrible thighs. The ego dented from the lack of attention the head Trekkie decides to whip out a Ouija board and play around with demons from another dimension. By randomly waving his hands over the board and muttering some old school song lyrics he manages to invoke, and I quote, “hideous, vile, ill-tempered and excessively butch spirits from beyond the grave”. This is actually misleading as he only summons one spirit, the ghost of a deranged bag packing boy, and nothing about this spirit suggests in any way that he is particularly butch.

Even in Hell you can't find the receipt you're looking for.

Obviously terrified by the presence of this hideous, vile, ill-tempered and excessively butch spirit from beyond the grave the girls do the only logical thing you can do in these kinds of situations: have more sex and look for food. While they’re doing this and a smoke machine mysteriously puffs away the bag boy goes about killing people with boxes of Corn Flakes and a pricing gun. It will take the blonde hooker a trip into hell to visit her long-deceased ancestor to discover the powers she has hidden deep within her that will help them escape from the clutches of this terrifying spirit. It will also take her posing topless for the camera for the news crew’s ratings to stay high enough for her to finish telling her terrible tale.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Credits should contain as many breasts as humanly possible.
• B-movies hinder a hooker’s ability to make money.
• Smeared makeup is a traumatic thing for a hooker to go through.
• Female journalists and hookers share a deep, spiritual bond.
• Ouija boards can double up as a crystal ball in the event of emergency incantations.
• Evil spirits are known to return hookers to their fully clothed states.
• A good nipple licking and pinching will resuscitate a fainted hooker.
• A family sized box of Corn Flakes can be used as a brutal and effective weapon.
• Terrified hookers will often do a strip tease for the malevolent spirits stalking them.
• Professional hookers should, in the interest of political correctness, be referred to as Pleasure Oriented Care Givers.

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