Category Archives: 00 – Current

“Dude Bro Party Massacre III” (2015) REVIEW

July 9, 2015 Doc Leave a comment

There is so much — and yet, somehow, so little — to say about Dude Bro Party Massacre III, so I’ll offer up both a short and lengthy review.

Short review: the movie, sadly, is a mess – both tonally and stylistically – and that’s a real bummer because the trailer looked promising, and my hopes were high. Whether intentional or not, the movie ended up being confusing, distracting, and (unfortunately) just plain unfunny. I kept checking to see how much longer until it was over, and that’s not a great reaction to have when watching a movie.

There, that’s the succinct review and I already feel like a jerk. If you’re interested in the details, read on.

Perhaps the biggest sign that Dude Bro Party Massacre III was doomed from the start is the fact that it was made by the people at 5-Second Films. Now, I have nothing against 5-Seconds Films; I love their stuff. In fact, if you aren’t familiar with their work, do yourself a favor and go check them out right now — their videos are hilarious, bizarre, and creative (this one is my personal fave of their shorts.) However, the micro format is clearly their strong suit, and attempting to stretch that out into a full length film unfortunately just doesn’t work. It makes this 90 minute movie feel like you’re actually watching 1,080 of their shorts back to back; a very exhausting feeling. Another unfortunate side-effect of cramming a joke in every 5 seconds is that almost of all of them fall painfully flat.

The central plot is fairly straightforward: a college kid joins a frat that his dead brother was once a member of in order to solve/avenge said dead brother’s mysterious murder. There is a bizarre (and completely unnecessary) subplot involving a couple of bumbling cops (and a cult leader? And oranges?), but their involvement in the basic story is too confusing to explain. Interstitial bits and pieces of bad tracking, blunt cuts, and fake commercials are thrown in the mix, making even the most basic storyline that much more impossible to follow.

That’s another issue I have with the movie: it tries to cash in on the current very popular trend of making something look like it was shot on VHS tape. Films, Youtube videos, TV shows — they all want to achieve this ‘look’ without adhering to the restrictions that would actually result in an analog recording being shot on magnetic tape. (One of the greatest offenders of this rule is V/H/S, a horror anthology which inexplicably dedicates an entire segment to computer video chats [a digital medium], not to mention several other anachronisms such as a pair of glasses outfitted with a hidden camera [yet another digital medium.]) Let’s put it this way: if the movie Super 8 featured a kid lugging one of these RCA shoulder-mounted consumer camcorders around instead, people would cry foul. Dude Bro Party Massacre III commits similar bothersome acts.

Animated words pop up onscreen, goofy sound effects occur, weird out of place transitions and obvious green screen effects abound. None of it makes sense in the context of things. The recently released Kung Fury — another VHS-style throwback — also commits these same acts, but the difference is that Kung Fury so obviously takes place within its own imaginary landscape, one that feels more videogame than actual movie, that it’s pretty much able to do whatever it wants and get away with it. DBPM3 wants you to feel like you’re watching an 80s horror movie taped off TV (it even tells you so with an opening crawl), but yet it doesn’t want to play by its own rules. (It also helped that Kung Fury was only 30 minutes long.)

Lastly, one final impediment: contradictory as it may sound, Dude Bro includes far too many references which end up hurting it doubly. The movie is loaded with 80s cliches, silly commercials, cheesy gore (the best part of the movie, actually) vapid characters, etc. DBPM3 is its own worst enemy because it fails to find a balance. Had it been played perhaps a little more straight-forward (and cut out about 2/3 of the jokes), it might have played a little better.

There is a crossroads — a junction where satire, homage, parody, and pastiche all intersect — that, if handled carelessly, can create confusion, blur the point, and distract the viewer. Ultimately, that’s what happens in Dude Bro Party Massacre III.

There are a few things that almost work — a montage where the bros clean up a dirty frat house to a dorky 80s song (ala Revenge of the Nerds) and a brief scene where a guy (Greg Sestero!) gets freaked out by several gardening implements in a tool shed (shot in a very Raimi way) — but those moments are quickly buried as the film eagerly jumps to the next weird joke/setting/character/edit/effect.

It has a great premise, a great title, and I do love the worn out videotape look, but there’s just too much going on. If you want a film that does a good job of spoofing a specific era, look no further than Wet Hot American Summer (a film I feel greatly inspired this one.) Or hell, just rent an actual shot-on-video horror movie like Woodchipper Massacre, Cannibal Campout, or Video Violence. Those movies are just as cheesy and silly as DBPM3, but are far less likely to induce seizures. If a 90-minute Tim and Eric sketch on speed is what you’re looking for, you will love this film. Otherwise, you may find yourself feeling a bit let down.

00 - Current, Reviews, Zombies

“Spring” (2014) & “Maggie” (2015) REVIEWS

June 19, 2015 Doc 2 Comments

I wasn’t going to review these movies together for any deep reason — I simply watched them back-to-back and thought I’d kill two birds with one review. After all, these were two very different films — tonally and stylistically — and I really liked one and kinda hated the other one. Pretty different flicks altogether.

But the more I thought about it, the more I drew parallels between the two films: both were fairly under-the-radar VOD films about having to accept the fate bestowed upon a loved one while helplessly watching them turn into some awful thing. So maybe reviewing them together does make sense in some loose way.

I knew very little about each film prior to watching them, but I’d seen nothing but praise and warmth for both films circulating online. I’d watched a trailer for Maggie and knew Arnold Schwarzenegger was putting in a dramatic performance as a farmer who watches his young daughter slowly succumb to a zombie bite. As for Spring, I’d only seen its poster and the head-scratching Rastafarian color scheme. I also had a friend who’d seen Spring and said he enjoyed it, but that the writing was “very college”, and it was a bit sappy. And I knew from reading a brief synopsis on iTunes that a guy goes on a roadtrip to Italy, falls in love, blah blah blah. At this point, I was totally on board for Maggie and couldn’t care less about Spring.

Oh, how wrong I ended up being.

I watched Maggie first, as I was more interested in it than Spring. It starts out promising, if not completely trite: muted color palette, desolate fields with arbitrary fires burning, governmental warnings being delivered in fuzzy bursts through an old truck radio as it ambles down a lone, vacant highway — the apocalypse, baby!

But boy it loses steam, and quick. It took me three tries before I was able to make it all the way through this 95 minute movie. It is rough. It’s fairly void of any dialogue, and the lines we are gifted are so brutally hackneyed. An incredibly miscast Arnold Schwarzenegger (playing a painfully earnest farmer) gives his daughter the old “you remind me so much of your mother” speech while he works on his truck; they laugh, they bond; it’s technically a ‘scene’. And when the film isn’t being incredibly cliche, it’s being incredibly oversentimental. Laughably, shockingly oversentimental. I almost want to spoil the ending because of how downright ridiculously saccharin it is, but where’s the fun in that? And then there are several ‘slo-mo traipsing through a field’-style shots from the Terrence Malick handbook which just end up feeling more like an anti-depressant commercial. There are so many of these shots, too many, that it feels as though they were included simply to pad out the runtime versus any real artistic or stylistic reasons. Also, when is this movie set? Their clothes, their house — they look like they’re from the 1800s. Yet everyone and everything else — Maggie’s teenaged friends, the local police — are modern. I mean, sure, I get it, “they’re farmers! Haha! Farmers always look that way, right?” It just furthers the uninspired laziness of the film. Also, this film apparently cost $8M to make when all was said and done, yet nothing happens at all. No explosions, no elaborate choreography or big set pieces. There is some (and I stress some) zombie make-up and very little CGI. Other than that, it’s all handheld camerawork on a farm. That’s it. Where ever that money went, it did not end up on the screen.

And for the people commending Schwarzenegger’s dramatic acting, c’mon, give me a break. I got more chills from the scene in Terminator 2 when he gives the thumbs up as he’s being lowered into molten metal than I did from his whole performance in Maggie. And I know that sounds funny and snarky, but I’m being serious. I’ve seen Arnold play the ill-fated lead quite effectively before, but that is not the case with this film.

So after the incredibly disappointing Maggie I was fairly hesitant to watch a film I had no real interest in watching to begin with. But I turned on Spring and holy shit I was blown away! Beautiful and competent cinematography, gorgeous locations, believable and engaging leads, effective and well done practical and CGI effects. Not to mention a smart script and original premise. I really, really enjoyed it.

I immediately got a Before Sunrise meets The Thing type vibe from it, and upon doing a little research have since found people calling it “Richard Linklater meets H.P. Lovecraft” — so my initial reaction was pretty on point. I won’t spoil it, but basically a burnt out American runs away to Italy where he meets and falls for a girl with a pretty heavy duty secret.

One of the many things I enjoyed about the film was that it didn’t let me down. Maybe that sounds silly and obvious to say, “I liked it because it was good!”, but horror movies these days so often find a way to ruin all the momentum they’d been building by tacking on a copout of an ending, or they blow it by throwing some unnecessary curveball in the middle that immediately evaporates the movie’s credibility. Not so with Spring. That’s not to say I wasn’t waiting for it at every turn, with every advancement; I was. But no, it keep moving along, sensibly and fluidly. And I just kept liking what was happening more and more. It’s great.

There is one, single scene early on which features a rapey dudebro type that feels forced. It only stands out because everything else is done so flawlessly. But thankfully that single scene is quite fleeting — seconds long, really — so it doesn’t distract too much.

At just shy of 2 hours, Spring is a long horror-ish flick, but it never feels long — and that’s a sign of skillful filmmaking.

Spring and Maggie may be similar films, but it’s the reasons they’re dissimilar that make all the difference.

00 - Current, Reviews

“We Are Still Here” (2015) REVIEW

June 7, 2015 Doc 2 Comments

There’s a strange trend I’ve noticed lately in independent horror: directors are seemingly desperate to prove to us, the audience, that they are worthy horror directors simply because they have a vast knowledge of horror movies from the past. And how do they prove that they know their horror history? Well, they just take a bunch of familiar fan favorite horror flicks, mash them up, and turn them in as a supposed new product. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Does this actually make for a worthy horror director? Does merely stoking the embers of nostalgia equal competent, compelling storytelling? Who knows, man. Why does Quentin Tarantino get to blatantly steal his ideas and characters from 70s exploitation films and win Oscars for it? Why does Led Zeppelin get to steal every riff they never wrote and still be hoisted up to an untouchable, God-like status? I don’t know, man. I just don’t know.

Now sure, there will be repeated tropes that I bet are near-impossible to avoid. Horror films have been around for 120 years; there are gonna be a lot of commonalities among films. But the modern thing I’m talking about is more than that. Adam Wingard’s The Guest (which I like) is a mash-up he describes as “The Terminator meets Halloween“, after he supposedly watched them back to back. Starry Eyes (which I loathe) is just Rosemary’s Baby meets The Fly (1986), until the last few minutes when it unfortunately dissolves into standard slasher stuff. Irish ghost flick The Canal (which I love) covers a whole range of movies, from Jacob’s Ladder to Pet Sematary. Sometimes the references are more subtle and play out as homage. The artistic influences of movies like It Follows or The Babadook reek of John Carpenter and Roman Polanski, respectively, but they don’t feel like they were simply pieced together from old classics; they took familiar sensations and made them new again. Like I said, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

The point of all of this is We Are Still Here, the haunted house/ghost/occult/possession/revenge flick from director Ted Geoghegan is such a mish-mash of references and themes that it fails to gain any footing and therefore elicits few scares.

Set during an ambiguous decade, presumably the 1970s, a middle-aged couple (played by Barbara Crampton and Andrew Sensenig) decide the best way to cope with the recent death of their son is to move out of the city and head for a house in the sticks. Almost immediately after moving in, Crampton tells her husband that she “feels” their sons presence in the new home. Shortly after that, an electrician is attacked by a mysterious entity in their basement. Soon after that, they receive a strange visit from their nearest neighbors (which is apparently pretty far, considering how remote this new home is), who inform the couple of a tragic history surrounding their new woodland residence: it used to be a funeral parlor at the turn of the century, run by the Dagmar family. Turns out, the family was also selling the bodies and doing other types of desecratory things that caused an angry mob to dole out a bit of street justice and murder them all. After telling this story, the neighbors abruptly leave, and the house goes back to creaking and thudding.

Crampton and Sensenig invite their hippy-dippy spiritualist friends, played by Larry Fessenden and Lisa Marie, out for the weekend to help them get to the bottom of these disturbances. Soon after this, things go from bad to worse. And before you know it the credits are rolling. There’s stuff I’m not telling you as to not spoil some of the twists and turns, but that’s pretty much it.

So what works and what doesn’t? Well there are some promising creepouts in the beginning of the film. I won’t give away anything, but within the first 10 minutes of the movie I was totally onboard, ready to have the bejesus scared out of me. But as the movie progresses, the scares become less scary and the plot less coherent. By the time the final act rolls around, it feels like they were trying to play catch up with all the time they squandered during the first two thirds of the movie.

Director Ted Geoghegan – like Wingard before him – openly admits the influences of his film, going so far as to name the evil characters after one of the actresses from Lucio Fulci’s classic supernatural Video Nasty, The House by the Cemetery. But there are other influences to be found: Evil Dead, The Exorcist, Poltergeist, Children of the Corn, The Shining, hell even Straw Dogs! But references do not a good horror movie make.

I love Barbara Crampton. Love. Besides the fact that she’s a genre staple and an always welcome face, she’s actually a really good horror actress. In fact, I’d go as far as to say she carries this film. Everyone else is pretty wooden, with exception for contemporary iconic horror figure Larry Fessenden, who does a better 70s-era Jack Nicholson in this movie than Nicholson could do himself — the hair, the arched eyebrows, the sloven-yet-charming air about him — Fessenden is the warm, likable comedic relief to Crampton’s distant and numb mother-in-mourning. I also love that the protagonists of the film are middle-aged parents. It’s a small detail, but one that actually makes a world of difference. And let me say one last time how much I love Barbara Crampton.

While this review may come across as generally negative, I assure you it’s not. The feeling I was left with after watching We Are Still Here was actually one of indifference. Feeling like I’d seen it before and I didn’t care. The mashing up of every ghost/witch/haunting trope, combined with the overwhelming praise I’ve seen (mainly from horror sites with a large following to maintain and reputation to uphold, which makes me question the earnestness of their reviews), left me even more confused and unenthused.

Independent horror has always been vital to the scene, but especially nowadays when the only horror that seems to be getting wide-releases are sequels and remakes. Independent horror should be an untamed landscape, a fertile ground to generate new, weird ideas. Films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Shivers, Repulsion, and Sisters are all great examples of independent horror from the past, from directors who had clear, original visions. Unfortunately, We Are Still Here chooses not to be part of that camp, and instead falls into familiar beats and patterns, ones I have no doubt we could see on the big screen in Insidious: Chapter 3, Ouija, Paranormal Activity 5, Rings, Poltergiest (2015), et al.

In a time when horror fans seemingly have only two options to get their fix, forced to decide between referential, homagey shoulder-shruggers and borderline-offensive, slapdash remakes and reboots, I’ll gladly choose the former. But only because it’s the lesser of the two evils.

00 - Current, Reviews

“It Follows” (2015) REVIEW

March 23, 2015 Doc Leave a comment

When information about It Follows started traveling down the internet pipeline, and after I’d watched the trailer, two words immediately popped into my head: “Black Hole“.

From 1995 to 2005, comic artist Charles Burns released a limited run story called Black Hole. Set in the dreary, overcast Pacific Northwest during the mid-70s, Black Hole follows a group of suburban teenagers with nothing better to do than wander the woods, smoke dope, go to the ocean, and screw. It’s well known between the two leads in the story (as well as every other character) that a mysterious sexually transmitted disease (“The Bug”) is being spread among the teens – one that affects each person differently, but still turns them into some sort of freak or mutant. And just like life, some get it worse than others.

Besides being gorgeously illustrated (I hate to use hyper-bowl on ya, but every damn page is absolutely jaw-dropping), the thing that really sells Black Hole is how nauseatingly real and relatable it was – afterall, we all were, at some point, teenagers – and we all had to deal with those awful, shitty teenage feelings. First loves, the pressure of not fitting in, the uncertainty of the future. I’m breaking out in a sweat just typing about it now.

But Burns managed to take this story of teens-turned-freaks and somehow make it a metaphor for teenage life in general and the loss of innocence. Don’t roll your eyes, it’s true! But we’ll get back to Black Hole. Let’s talk about It Follows.

I didn’t bother digging up any more information on It Follows than I’d already come across on the internet before seeing it in the theater, because all the reviews were rave and that was enough for me to want to go into it fairly blindly. I wanted to experience it as purely as possible.

The first scene of the film immediately establishes several things: tone, atmosphere, music, and suspense – all of which are enforced throughout its entirety, without ever losing steam or focus. And it’s those components that are so vital in making this film so damn effective and probably why it’s been garnering such high praise.

There’s something strange about It Follows that I can’t even explain, something unsettling. Watching it made me feel something. Set in a suburb of Detroit, the residential streets are wide and bare, the lawns are perfectly manicured, the sidewalks are lined with lush, drooping trees. In a way it very much reminded me of my own teen years, endless days filled with a listless wandering of the streets.

Perhaps it’s the unconventional way the film is shot – during the ‘golden hour’, lots of shadowy night shots, lots of natural indoor lighting – that make it feel real and therefore inherently more scary.

And it’s all of these things which liken it to its other greatest influence (besides Black Hole): Halloween.

Not since John Carpenter’s 1978 genre-defining classic has the combination of dreary suburbia, droning synths, and a widescreen lens created such a powerful and memorable horror flick. It Follows is filled with tons of wide shots, and this is an important and effective technique: it isolates the subject and makes them look (and feel) small and alone. And again, I can’t stress how important the use of natural lighting (and night shooting, and during the ‘magic hour’) is for the film: when the teens sit around the house, with nothing but the dim glow of lamps and a TV set illuminating the space, a chord is struck deep within your brain.

When The Guest was released last year, director Adam Wingard described it as, “Terminator meets Halloween.” And while I can appreciate that in a homage-y sense, It Follows actually feels like something John Carpenter filmed sometime in between Halloween and The Fog.

Another thing I really appreciated about this film is the characters. For once, I didn’t want any of them to die! And brother, let me tell you – that is a rare feeling for me when watching a horror flick. Usually I find the characters so damn irritating, that I’d be fine with having ’em all wiped out within the first 10 minutes. They’re usually real dum-dums, and when they’re not screaming at the monster, they’re screaming at each other. But the teens in It Follows feel like a real group of teenaged friends. They feel like real teens. They feel like real friends. And that’s important. Empathizing with the characters, rooting for them – that’s crucial.

At the time of this typing, I watched the film about 10 hours ago, so it still has some settling to do – steeping, marinating, coagulating. But how I’m feeling now is that I really, really enjoyed the film. I’m tellin’ you: there’s something about the way it makes you feel. This film is all about feel. It’s…hard to pinpoint. And that kinda creeps me out.

Overall it’s a refreshing take on a subject that hasn’t been too played out within the genre. I definitely want to see it again – as soon as possible, in fact – and rarely do I feel that driving need to want to rewatch a film immediately. There is a recurring water motif that I haven’t quite deciphered yet, but it’s got me thinking – and when’s the last time a horror movie made me think?

There are a few artistic choices I found silly, if not wholly unnecessary, but they were fleeting and not distracting enough to take me out of the movie. That’s another thing I give It Follows credit for: it rolls along at such a perfect pace, you never have a spare second to worry about what has happened – only what’s going to happen.

Oh, and one more thing about Black Hole ‘fore I wrap this up. At one point Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary were attached to a film adaptation. And after they dropped out, David Fincher was signed on. Eventually director Rupert Sanders produced a short fan film in hopes of actually getting a full length release produced. Unfortunately, nothing ever came of it, but fortunately the short exists on Vimeo, and you can watch it (just click the pic!)

With its drab and wearisome setting, throbbing synth score, natural indoor lighting, and array of STD-affected teens, I can’t help but wonder if this short wasn’t in some way an influence on It Follows. Or maybe they simply exist within the same creepy, depressing world.

Go see It Follows. And then see it again.

00 - Current, Reviews

“Late Phases” (2014) REVIEW

March 1, 2015 Doc 2 Comments

Werewolves have been a horror film staple since Lon Chaney (that’s the junior Chaney) donned the faux fur in The Wolf Man way back in 1941. Since then, movies have tried to present lycanthropes in a variety of differing ways, doing their best to expand upon the lore and offer a little variety to the standard “man bitten by wolf seeks out gypsy who explains the changes he’s been seeing in his body”. Whether it’s as simple as a high school geek who suddenly becomes popular due to his fur-suit (Teen Wolf) or high brow werewolf-as-metaphor (Mike Nichols’ Wolf), the genre has seen it all. Sometimes it’s fun, creative and pulled off successfully, as in the case of American Werewolf in London. And other times, well, it’s Howling IV.

Late Phases falls somewhere in the middle of those two, though it definitely teeters more towards the positive end of the spectrum. Granted, I’m not a werewolf or vampire fan (I can’t explain it, just never been a fan), but of the movies I’ve seen about people turning into wolves? This’n ain’t so bad.

The movie finds blinded ‘Nam vet (Nick Damici) and his dog (who provides more companionship than guidance) being dropped off in an old folks community, essentially deserted by his son. However, Damici is a grizzled, tough ol’ grump who would rather spit “good riddance” than give off any vibes of abandonment.

The film jumps into action almost immediately, with Damici encountering the fanged antagonist within the first 10 minutes. It soon becomes apparent – from the clueless residents to the typical “let us handle it, sir” behavior from the local law enforcement – that Damici is on his own, and stopping the beast is entirely up to him.

The movie borrows heavily from Silver Bullet, the Stephen King novel-turned-film about a wheelchair-bound boy who thinks the preacher at his local church just might be a werewolf. Late Phases has its own preacher who just may be a werewolf, too. This movie, however, is sorely lacking the presence of a totally batshit Gary Busey.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a werewolf movie without a transformation scene, and Late Phases has a beautifully executed one, with creature effects courtesy of Robert Kurtzman himself. The way it’s shot, it seems to be the centerpiece of the film – and I can understand why.

Lastly, it wouldn’t be a film review without just a little criticism. Nick Damici. Oh Nick, Nick, Nick. I’ve seen Mr. Damici in four films now (Mulberry Street, Stake Land, We Are What We Are, and Late Phases), and I can tell you this: no one is a bigger fan of Nick Damici’s acting than Nick Damici himself. He’s not bad by any means. In fact, he’s better than that one-note hack Leonardo DiCaprio (and look how famous that a-hole is.) I just feel like everything I’ve seen Damici do has ‘acting class’ stamped all over it. Perhaps it comes from his recent career of writing his own lines (as was the case with Mulberry Street, Stake Land, and We Are What We Are) that makes it seem like he thinks everything he’s saying is the coolest, most profound, most hilariously badass line ever said. And while he didn’t write his own dialogue for this movie, there are still some very hammy – borderline sleazy, even – undertones to his acting and line delivery.

And despite the passable age make-up he wears throughout the film, I just wish the 50 year old Damici had been dropped off in a retirement community that housed people his own age, instead of the 70 and 80 year olds that inhabit it.

Overall, a fun entry in the full moon genre and worth a watch for sure.

00 - Current, Reviews

“Starry Eyes” (2014) REVIEW

February 20, 2015 Doc Leave a comment

I was compelled to write this critique after seeing so many glowing, positive reviews for the film – a feeling I did not share.

First, the positives:

Technically, the film is sound. It’s easy to watch, nice to look at. Nothing boring or distracting about the visual compositions. It was shot by a competent cinematographer. Same for the editing and sound/music – it was well done.

As for acting, the lead, Alex Essoe, does a solid job as well. It can’t be easy to bounce between meek and sweetly optimistic, to terrified and revenge-filled. She does it all without ever going over-the-top (though, she does come close).

So what don’t I like? Well, two things stick out to me – things I can’t ignore enough to be able to enjoy the film.

First: as the film progresses, the deterioration and degradation of the lead character, is almost beat for beat identical to a film that came out just one year prior, “Contracted”. Now, in the name of fairness, the fact that I HATED (loathed, despised, abhorred) “Contracted” really doesn’t have any sway on my opinion of the merit or worth of “Starry Eyes”, but what happens to both leads is so goddamn identical I couldn’t help but keep thinking of the former film, and that was distracting. I’m talking identical scenes. In the way that you can only see so many night-vision-nanny-cam-ghost-in-the-room scenes before your brain shuts off automatically whenever it sees another one, I just immediately checked out due to the similarities. “Contracted”, boy. I can’t write a bad enough review for that mean-spirited, aimless, derivative drivel.

The other thing that got me tangled about this movie was that it just doesn’t add up. Look, I am all for suspending disbelief when watching a horror flick. In fact, a pet peeve of mine is people who pick apart the believability of some horror films. (Y’know, films about zombies and monsters and ghosts – they need to be believable.)

However, this film uses a logic to get the lead from point A to point B by any means necessary that ignores (and hopes the audience will ignore, too) any sensible conclusions that could have/would have occurred in the meantime that might’ve led the film in a different, exciting direction.

Take an amazing movie like “Rosemary’s Baby”, which this film seems to borrow from heavily. In “Rosemary’s Baby”, the fertile Mia Farrow is conditioned and lulled into a false sense of security by the sweet, loving old neighbors in her new apartment. Little does she realize she’s being set up to be the incubator for the second coming of baby Satan. The warning signs Rosemary sees are dismissed by her husband (a co-conspirator) as just imagination. And we, the audience, aren’t 100% sure, either – until it’s too late, of course. And that’s what makes it such an effective, well-made film.

However, everything about “Starry Eyes” is so…naggingly off and predictable. Every new scene screams at the lead, “Stop what you’re doing. Why are you doing that?”

It’s hard to enjoy a movie when there’s no one to root for.