12/12/12

Year of Release: 2012
Genre: Horror
IMDB Rating: 2 / 10
Level of Awful: High
Breast-O-Meter: 1.5 /5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

Right, it’s official: I’m giving up my dream of gradually taking over the planet by being the world’s most efficient paper-pusher and applying for a job at The Asylum. I want to earn my living by spending my days high on crack and writing stories, because I’m pretty sure that’s what happened before the cameras started rolling on 12/12/12. Even by Asylum standards this was horrid, and whoever was behind it doesn’t seems to have even the foggiest idea about how anything in the world actually works. That being said, I watched this alone, and if I’d seen it with my elite squad of movie watchers I think it could’ve been a lot of fun. So, dear reader, grab a seat, grab a beer, grab your crack pipe, and let’s get this review on the road.

The gooey, bloody, possibly back-alley miracle of birth.

Everyone gather round and meet Veronica. Veronica’s in terrible pain – she’s about to have her first child delivered by the country’s most inept team of doctors. I guess this is what one should expect when you decide to have your baby in an emergency ward that has a park bench outside it and an entrance that looks like some dingy club’s back alley. Not that Veronica notices; she’s too busy screaming out in pain / orgasming in her vain attempts to give birth. The doctors can’t decide what to do, and baby daddy Carlos seems to think that the best plan of action is to lunge violently at every nurse that comes his way. After a lot of comings and goings the very independent baby climbs out of Veronica’s womb and promptly attacks, strangles, nibbles and kills the entire surgical team. One might think that this would be cause for alarm, but mommy’s tired and doesn’t seem to think much of it.

Hold on honey! Mommy’s chest is coming!

Things seem to be going OK until Veronica and Carlos bring little Sebastian home. Sebastian looks a bit like Baby Sinclair from Dinosaurs, but this again raises no concerns from his parents. Despite only being 6 days old he also tends to bite a lot with his razor-sharp little teeth, is quite capable of crawling on his own, and has this bad habit of compelling people to do terrible things via telepathy. Things like making his dad drink water from a kettle that’s just boiled, or making the delivery boy slit his own throat open. Sebastian’s taken into child protection after the death of Carlos and Veronica goes to stay with her sister, vowing revenge upon the government for trying to protect the country’s children from harm.

Amen brother.

At some point our characters make the transition from blind confusion to blinding insight so far as Sebastian’s demonic origins are concerned. By now Sebastian looks like Baby Sinclair after he was involved in a tragic cooking oil incident, and his blood lust (and his desire to throw his nappies everywhere) has become insatiable. Couple this with the group of satanic doomsday prophets who are looking for Sebastian to use him in some rite or other, dear Veronica really has her work cut out for her. She’s aided by a policeman who’s constantly sucking on a lollipop, and her sister who has some serious issues that are never really explained to us. Will Sebastian spare his mother when the devil arrives to take over the world? Will Veronica ever stop running around the city and causing teen suicides? Will 20-somethings ever stop taking night hikes along deserted highways? All this and much less will be revealed when you watch 12/12/12.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• No one ever talks about Satanic monks.
• You can still give a woman an epidural even if the baby’s crowning… and then again when the baby’s half way out.
• You can still perform a caesarean section even if the baby’s half-way through the birth canal.
• IV equipment can be manually set to ‘murder’.
• You don’t need to provide any kind of anaesthetic before performing a C-section.
• An umbilical cord isn’t a weapon you should underestimate.
• Any woman can lose all her pregnancy weight by the time the hospital discharges her.
• It’s perfectly normal for a 1-week-old baby to have teeth like a piranha.
• Police protocol dictates that 1-week-old babies should be considered suspects in murder trials.
• Vaginal baby suffocation is still a serious problem in modern society.
• The custody of a child can just be thrown from person to person, willy nilly.
• 6 Vicodin will usually take care of the pain from a small cut on your thumb.
• Police always use their sirens to let people know they’ve arrived.
• You should always be on the lookout for perverted babies – you never know when one’s watching you in the shower.
• Strangulations are always more fun when your hands make whooshing noises.
• Police these days are almost always psychic – you don’t need to tell them where you when you call.
• Priests and homeless people are equally adept at spotting the Anti-Christ.

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Short Film: X Marks The Spot

I’m going to be very honest, I’m not usually a major fan of short films. Maybe it’s because I’ve been subjected to too many student films or because I like to be terrified for protracted periods of time, who knows. That being said I like to help out any aspiring film makers wherever I can, so when a certain Gore Whore from Twisted Central asked me to review a short, I was only too delighted to do it.

In my opinion a short horror film should be able to pack into its limited time frame what a full-length movie takes its time in developing and building up to. This is by no means a simple task, but something that X Marks The Spot managed to pull off remarkably well. The plot is simple enough: Abigail has developed this silly habit of telling absolute strangers her every movement via the Friend Tracker app on her phone. Her roommate Chloe thinks that it’s not the best idea, but what’s the worst thing that could happen by letting possible lunatic stalkers know where you are at every single moment of the day?

Well, one day is one day and the stalker eventually shows up and starts following the girls around town before lurking around outside their apartment at the dead of night. In the film’s few short minutes of runtime this guy begins terrorising the girls and, admittedly, the guy’s creepy as hell. To round it all off, and I really wasn’t even expecting it, the movie has a twist at the end, and quite a clever one at that. You wouldn’t think that it could all be packed into that short space of time, but the guys at Twisted Central really did a good job with it.

I’m still not a major fan of short films, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever be converted. That said, it certainly was interesting to see a short film executed properly and it does make me curious to watch more, if only to see how much people can pack into a short space of time and whether or not they can do a proper job of it.

As with everything reviewed here at The B-Horror Blog I like to take lessons from the things I watch. Since it was a short film I will only take the one single, most fundamental lesson I can from it:

LIFE’S LESSON LEARNED:

• Weird guys lurking around your apartment’s dumpster are probably not there to make friends with you.

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