The House That Jack Built (2018)

This is a movie that had people walking out furious and sickened during festival screenings, so of course I had to see it. And of course it was directed by acclaimed provocateur Lars von Trier, whose films are often considered either brilliant (by eccentric film nerd standards) or hot, terrible garbage by everyone else. So all in all, this movie about an insane serial killer is a perfect storm for a review here.

Director: Lars von Trier

Starring: Matt Dillon, Riley Keough

IMDb

So why did all those people walk out of this, anyway, you might be asking? Well, because the movie is basically wholly comprised of trolling and edge-lord stuff. It's like a peek into the mind of a 4chan board or something, only done with some actual humor and good directing. I couldn't stop watching just because I had no clue what was going to happen next. It's basically like Dexter if Dexter had a lot to say about how much he hated women. It's American Psycho with no sense of irony.

It's a completely immoral movie, too, which is often the worse sin for some people. You can have some blood and guts in it, but if a movie seems to be on the Right Side™ then it's often much less offensive to a lot of people than a movie that roots for its bad guy and doesn't even try to have a message. The House That Jack Built is about a serial killer named Jack (woah, what a leap) and we get zero insight into his character, no sympathy or backstory. Just him chronicling five times he killed people over a period of years.

There's one time where he kills two kids with a sniper while hunting and then forces their mom to try and feed pie to one, which is bad because too much pie will make a child fat. And, oh, hell, who am I kidding? Making jokes like that is beneath me for this movie. It's so obvious it's like a big neon sign. The movie itself is already kind of a joke anyway and me joking about it is the extra whipped cream on top that nobody wanted.

It's horrifically, almost parodically violent – the stuff that happens crosses a line from gruesome into just plain goofy a lot of the time. I mean it's still horrible to watch, but it's so over the top that it actually kind of lessens the impact at times – like, one scene he kills a woman and then has to keep coming back over and over to make sure he didn't accidentally leave a speck of blood anywhere. That's just ridiculous. Another time he cuts off a woman's tit and then pins it to the hood of a cop car. Take THAT, cops! Do you now see the error of your ways, police officers?! What deep social commentary this is...

There's also a bunch of inner monologuing and dialogue that's mostly just him raving about nothing. It's all a lot of nonsense. A lot of it comes off like stuff you'd read on some Incel message board in a dark hole of the internet. One time he shouts at a victim that “it's always the man's fault and the woman is the victim.” A few times he goes into lengthy screeds about Nazi architecture and you even see a few pictures of Hitler. ARE YOU OFFENDED YET??? That seems to be the only real goal here. No bigger story, just provocation. As much as some reviews will point out that you barely get any character insight or development, no reason why this guy is the way he is – I don't think it's necessary. If you want to know why he is the way he is, just log into Reddit or 4chan and find one of the many alt-right rat-holes where these people congregate.

Oh, and the finale is a trippy, 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque journey into Hell full of creepy Halloween lights and dramatic sounds. Then he falls into the abyss and that's the end of it. Honestly, it would've been funnier if he went to heaven or if there was just nothing after death. That would have been more fitting than 'the Christian idea of Hell is right.' Kind of an orthodox way to end such a gritty, edgy movie, huh?

This mostly seemed like what I said above, purely an exercise in offending people. If it wasn't so funny at parts and so well acted, it would basically just be a sloppy diatribe by an alt-right dude-bro on the internet. It's hardly anything substantial. Seems like von Trier hearing what everyone said about him, including a ban from the Cannes film festival for some shit he said about Nazis years ago, and really just everything about his other films, and then was like 'I'll just make the movie everyone thought I would make, anyway.' And then he basically made a very well made internet troll comment and put that on screen. But it doesn't have the sharp, vicious point of a Dogville or the sheer misanthropy and misery of Antichrist – not even close.

In a way it seems every provocative filmmaker could very easily slip into this mode. I didn't find very much depth here. It was entertaining at points just for how utterly depraved it was, and then at other points it was just cringeworthy – that tit-cutting scene was pretty awful to watch. I'm sure von Trier's point here, lashing back at critics and just fucking with everyone, was fun for him, and he'll get some views from all the controversy. But in terms of depth and actual quality it just seems like a big-budget equivalent of a guy screaming at the sky just to vent anger.

Image not mine; credit belongs to its owner.

The ABCs of Death 2 (2014)

If you want to learn the alphabet, there are lots of ways you can do it. Feeling left out, the horror movie genre decided to get in on the game, too. Then, a few years later, it tried again.

Directors: Various

Starring: Various

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle and Tony.

Coming off like a children's book written by Ted Bundy, this is yet another anthology of horror stories with 26 different directors trying their hands at making some weird, crazy, creative stuff. Some of it's good, some of it's bad...and some of it just makes me wish I had stayed home today. Let's dive right in and see what this batshit insane lesson has to teach us about the alphabet.

A is for Amateur

The worst hitman in the world, who I'm guessing was hired from the security department of a Toys R Us, botches up his kill and ends up re-enacting Die Hard in the air vents.

B is for Badger

The story of an incredibly obnoxious TV personality who bullies his staff until they presumably want to see blood – either their own or his. Fortunately, a giant demonic badger is there to help them with the second one:

His last word, after he is torn in half, is “Cut!” Which is a line so stupid that it circles the globe, goes into orbit and finds all the knowledge in the universe, then plummets back down to Earth, cures all the world's ills, and then bends time backwards with its newfound superpowers and it goes straight back to being ass-backwards stupid again.

...that's how dumb that line was.

Anyway, I'm just astounded that a giant demonic man-eating badger isn't the focus of this, but a jackass TV personality dying is the focus of this. Priorities schmiorities.

C is for Capital Punishment

In a truly award-winning society, the town conspires to beat the shit out of some random guy who they think kidnapped some girl. It doesn't really give a reason why they think so, so I'll just assume they picked his name out of a hat. Anyway, they take him out in the woods and try to kill him, very unsucessfully, with a rubber ax they apparently bought from Toys R Us where the guy from the “A” segment worked.

"DAMMIT JENKINS, DID YOU BUY A GODDAMNED FAKE AX AGAIN?! *sigh* I thought we learned our lesson the last five times we did this."

But they eventually get it right. At least they can kill a guy five-against-one when his hands are bound! They at least have that. Oh, and it turns out the girl is okay and they killed him for nothing. Have fun with years of soul searching and self loathing, guys!

D is for Deloused

"So this is the end of life...eaten by a giant lice..."

This one is about lice, apparently, as some truly strange things happen with a guy and a bug. I dunno. The mood and atmosphere are creepy, but I can't help but think this is what's going on in Sid from Toy Story's head all the time – either lice, or the batshit insane contents of this short film, you decide.

E is for Equilibrium

Two stoner rejects from a 90s movie have become trapped on a desert island and nobody noticed or cared. A beautiful woman shows up, inexplicably surviving despite the harsh waves and lack of any other land around the island. They fight over her but then decide to kill her because she's breaking up their non-gay 90s-movie-style bromance.

F is for Falling

A really interesting segment about an Israeli woman paratrooper fleeing from Arab law and getting caught in a tree. Some kid finds her and they strike up some quite well written dialogue that is sweet and kind of sad. It's a sort of romance, although I don't think many romances involve the main girl breaking her leg and hobbling around with the bone sticking out. Or, for that matter, the boy shooting himself by dropping his gun.

Buuuuuuut it was still good. Love just knows no boundaries.

G is for Grandad

I just...you know what, no. I'm not talking about this one.

H is for Head Games

No matter who you are or what you like in a partner, no matter what your tastes are in terms of romance, I think there's one thing we can agree on – we all need a guy or gal we can do this with:

Ah, true love.

I is for Inheritance

This one is about as charming as a five-month old child who hasn't been fed in a week, and with even more screaming and less capacity for sympathy. With all the graphics of your least favorite Nickelodeon shows as a kid, the “I” segment is about some kind of immortal grandma who won't die and her screeching hell-spawn relatives who try and kill her to get money or whatever - what a bunch of fucks.

It turns out there's some kind of strange amulet in the grandma's mouth that makes her live forever. She seems to want to die, and all the miserable hellspawn trying to kill her presumably also want that to happen. But instead of just taking the amulet out and getting rid of it, I guess setting her on fire is more appealing.

J is for Jesus

Two gay guys get tortured and killed in some shithole by some piece of shit bigot fuck. Fortunately for them, one of them was hiding the ability to turn into a vengeful spirit from beyond the grave that comes back and eviscerates their tormentors.

K is for Knell

A young woman looks out the window and sees a bunch of people killing each other in hotel windows. Then, the same thing happens to her as a black slime mixes with blood on the floor. It's effective, creepy and way too vague to figure out what the fuck it actually meant.

No, my vacation is turning into an unfinished Windows screensaver! Control Alt Delete! CONTROL ALT DELETE!!

L is for Legacy

A spirit comes alive in Africa and brutally murders several members of a nearby village. Too bad they didn't have the special healthcare plan that offers protection from ancient primordial spirits!

M is for Mastication

When my friends and I were watching this one, about a crazy guy in piss-stained underwear who goes on a cannibalistic rampage on a busy street, I made a joke about bath salts. Which turned out to be exactly the same punchline as the movie itself came up with. I'm not saying I'm the secret writer of this segment, but I am saying the writer of this segment and myself have never been seen in a room together.

Zach Galifinakis, no!

N is for Nexus

A trippy short in which a girl is bitchy to a cab driver while trying to meet her stupid boyfriend on Halloween. This causes a chain reaction of events which ends in a child dying. Moral of the story, be nice to your cab driver, or else little children will die at his hands. Fear the cab drivers. Keep one eye open when you sleep.

O is for Ochlocracy

Another of the really good ones in this, a Japanese film telling the story of a postapocalyptic future where a woman is being put on trial for killing her kid in a zombie apocalypse. It's actually really effective, with some good acting and the oppressive atmosphere working really well.

At the end there's a twist and we find out everyone persecuting the woman is a zombie, as zombies have now become sentient. It's kind of played for shock value a bit, and there's some of the old Japanese vaudeville-esque humor, but mostly it's a very dark story.

Except for the cartoony judge that yells “DEATH!!!!” like it's the biggest thing in the world for him. I love this guy. He should be the judge for every case in real life. Give him a pay raise.

The legal system at its finest.

P is for P-P-P-Scary!

A tribute to old black and white Three-Stooges esque movies. It's funny and has a guy who can shrink his own head as well as make his head appear on a baby!

So like every movie in that genre, I like it.

Q is for Questionnaire

A story about a guy who answered a bunch of questions to get money, only to have his brain put inside of a gorilla instead. Worst April Fool's ever. I dunno though, maybe it was an improvement. We don't really know anything about the guy. Maybe he was actually a big slacker, and the gorilla version of him will fight crime or something.

R is for Roulette

A bunch of people play Russian roulette as zombies wait outside. Or, Walking Dead season 11. Either one.

S is for Split

Another of my favorites here – this one is about a guy who hears a home break-in while talking to his wife on the phone from another country. She gets killed, and it turns out to be another woman – and the wife of the other guy the husband was staying with at a hotel! What a twist!

"Since you'll be going away for murder for the rest of your life now, honey, I guess I'll just stay with this guy and be gay."

T is for Torture Porn

Girl gets man-handled at an audition for a porn tape, and then turns into a demon and rapes and kills everyone in the room for being misogynistic shitheads. Not that what the porn tape guys were doing was good, as they were just being real dicks the entire time, but...what was the story here? Did she just go into that porn tape audition thinking gee, I bet they'll treat me like a respectable person and not ask me to even take off my clothes? I know she's a demon, but it's confusing as shit. Unless she was just a vengeful spirit who planned to kill them in the first place.

Well, actually, that sounds good to me. Let's let that be it.

U is for Utopia

An ugly guy who somehow wandered into the exalted halls of beautiful people finds out that that isn't allowed after he gets incinerated immediately by the robot police that roam the halls of this place. Gee, if your only standard for a Utopian society is “no ugly people,” my guess is you're also the type of person who thinks Budweiser's Superbowl ad this year was accurate.

V is for Vacation

A girl chats on video on the phone with her boyfriend, who for some reason is at a resort without her, but with a male friend of his – huh, yeah, not weird at all...

Anyway, she finds out they've been sleeping with a bunch of whores and doing drugs. The one guy whose girlfriend it is frantically protests that it wasn't him! It was the other guy who was doing all of it alone! The whores, the drugs, everything! What, was the main guy just curled fetal-pose in a corner sucking his thumb the whole time?

Oh well – they get killed by a naked prostitute, which is always the greatest way to end a vacation.

W is for Wish

Two kids get their wish of being teleported inside their favorite TV show, Fantasy Man. Which is a pretty shitty wish when you think about it. You dumb ass kids couldn't think of anything better? I guess they deserve what happens next – being trapped in the castle of the show's villain. The one kid gets killed, and the other gets kidnapped by Fantasy Man, who seems to mistake him for a princess and carries him away trapped in a bag.

He's riding off into the court of lawsuits for child predators. That light in the distance will go out pretty quick.

X is for Xylophone

Little girl plays with a xylophone, babysitter goes nuts and disembowels her and then plays with her bones.

Okay, come on – I know these are just goofy, overexaggerated cartoon-horror type stories, but we have to start asking questions here. Where did they get this babysitter? Is it really the best idea to shop for babysitters for your kids at the nearby mental asylum? I doubt they even waited until she got out – the mother probably just gave the director of the asylum a handjob in a broom closet and he went, okay, take your pick of the litter!

The lesson I take away from this is, never cut corners when hiring a babysitter.

Y is for Youth

A Japanese girl takes out her woes about her family by engaging in some admittedly pretty creative fantasies. I mean, even as shitty as her family must be, they'd at least appreciate the creativity in these fantasies.

Z is for Zygote

A woman fends off birth with medicine that makes her keep a child inside her belly for 13 years. If that didn't sound like something that would end up on the cover of a tabloid rag or the Daily Mail or some shit, it's actually an extremely hamfisted metaphor for a miscarriage.

Yeah, I don't know about this one. For what it was trying to do, it's pretty well done – it's well-directed, creepy in how depressing and dark it is, very disturbing and certainly doesn't pull any punches. I'm sure whoever made this has some reason they wanted to do it – it's not like this is a topic you just skate around lightly.

But it's just so heavy-handed and in your face, and there's just no context to this. Is there a reason I need to see this? It seems like something this intentionally dark, gruesome and serious was made for a reason, but like a really pushy political protester while you're just trying to go to the post office send a package to your sister in the mail, it's just needlessly heavy when we have zero context for it. Maybe some people will find this one powerful – I just found it a huge downer.

Plus, as my friend put it, "it was just really disgusting."

Can't argue with that one either.

Conclusions

So this is the end of our lesson today. What have we learned? Hmm, well, a lot. The ABCs of Death 2 was certainly a mixed bag like the first one, but I liked this one a bit more if I had to choose – more of these were good as opposed to those that weren't. The first couple are pretty shitty, but once we hit F it's actually quite strong – that one, along with H, L, M, O, P, Q, S, V and W were all varying degrees of good.

The only ones that were real downers this time were G, I and X. T wasn't great either, and Z had its own problems as I mentioned above.

And even the bad ones are still better in a minuscule way as opposed to stuff like The Thing remake or some other corporate bullshit with zero effort. So there is that. If you want something weird and crazy, this is a pretty good bed. Personally I hope we see more of the directors in this anthology – maybe full movies for some of them. That's the great thing about horror; the underground is usually the place to go to find good shit.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

V/H/S Viral (2014)

Lots of things go viral now. The Internet has become a sort of do-it-yourself paradise for people who aren't talented enough to get famous any other way. Hell, look at my own blog for a perfect example.

...I think I need to go re-evaluate my life choices. In the meantime, here's a review of V/H/S Viral I had previously written and will now somehow play back to you even though this is a text-based blog post and that makes no sense.

Director: Various

Starring: Justin Welborn, Emmy Argo

IMDb

Co-written with Tony and Michelle.

Yes.

We start this off with one of the most realistic things ever according to modern horror filmmakers – people playing around with cameras and filming their girlfriends' cleavage:

What amazing cinematography and lighting.

I'm sorry, I gotta break character so early in the review but really...who acts like this? Who in real life ever plays with a fucking camera like this? Nobody does! Absolutely nobody in the world ever uses a video camera this much and just follows their girlfriend or friends around filming all day! You'd probably be slapped with harassment fines if you filmed your significant other this much! They'd leave you in a second! But the way these movies tell it, no, filming your loved ones is the highest mark of respect! Truly it signifies decency and respect, and doesn't at all mean they're about to cut you up into little pieces and store your body parts in a freezer while masturbating to the video later.

Sigh. I dunno. At least this time we get a sort of story here with Camera Boy seeing a car chase going on outside. I guess the idea is that it's actually a rogue ice cream truck going mad, which to me sounds like the kind of thing Stephen King could only dream of writing.

Anyway, a cop stands in the road telling Camera Boy to stop filming, because I guess the cop just feels insecure about his looks today. The ice cream truck hits him and immediately kills him, severing an arm in the process – I'm so glad we're letting our kids buy ice cream from these trucks which can kill a man in a second!

Dante the Great

Then we get the first of the anthology stories – this one is a documentary about a magician called Dante the Great. Apparently Dante used to be trailer trash up until he randomly found a magic cloak that used to belong to Houdini. Then he started being able to do cool things like pull rabbits from his cloak.

"Holy crap, I forgot I had left this in my back pocket for so long! Now I get why my clothes smelled like rabbit shit for months!"

After that it was apparently a fast ticket to success, as he gets huge sold-out exclusive shows in big cities and seems to be wowing the entire world. I love some of the people interviewed...like this one couple who say Dante the Great teleported them across the country during his act, from New York to San Francisco. Gee, honey, that magic show sure was worth the hundreds of dollars for a plane ticket back to our home and missing work the next day!

"Dude, he teleported us to the Antarctic Circle! I'm so in awe of the power of stage magicians!"

Another guy says Dante the Great picked his pocket on stage. Well that's great. You really spellbound me on the art of magic now! He stole money from you after you already paid for a ticket. The guy doesn't elaborate if Dante ever gave him his money back, but given the rest of the story, I'm inclined to think he didn't. Boy, Dante's kind of an ass, huh?

As the documentary goes on, it chronicles how Dante went slowly insane because of the cape. This magician's assistant tells most of the story, about how he made friends with her (though really he's just trying to get in her pants). He does creepy things like tie up her hands with rope without warning her first:

"Next I'll use X-Ray vision to see through your already skimpy clothing...isn't that amazing?"

And also beating the shit out of her abusive boyfriend, Chronicle-style!

Assault and eventual murder? Whimsical!

Though not all of his super macho-aggro fighting exploits are so noble – for example, I really don't think killing random women who you conned into sleeping with you is kosher.

I just love the amount of logic this guy has...hey, I'll try and get this hot magician's assistant to be my girlfriend! Oh, but I'd probably have a fucking girlfriend if I didn't keep murdering every woman who came home with me! Eh, what can you say but, magical cloaks turn you into a giant dildo of a human being.

Then we see more of his logic as the cops find out he's been killing people and arrest him. He escapes and gets into a huge fight with them, apparently figuring that will persuade them. Hey, maybe if I kill the cops, they'll leave me alone and I can go back to selling out theaters to perform magic! Yeah! And maybe if you try hard enough, you can also pull a rabbit out of your ass next time.

"This is great publicity for my shows!"

Assistant chick, meanwhile, is sitting in some cop's office and the cop is telling her magic doesn't exist. Then to prove her wrong, she gets magically sucked through a portal in her chair to where Dante is:

"Hmm, my sense of irony and comedic timing tell me this moment means something..."

In the fight she has with Dante, she of course never even has any dust on her face, and doesn't have a single hair out of place or makeup smudge. What can I say about this? Clearly it's important for women to look good while fighting for their lives.

Also, why isn't he just killing her? He's clearly an omnipotent super-god of a man; why not just kill her and get it over with? Or is it really still a possibility in his mind that he could get together with her if he just beats her into submission? Really proving how different you are from the abusive jackass that you saved her from before, guy! But whatever. Clearly he's just crazy now, so that excuses everything.

The guy can teleport anything he wants and rip open bunny rabbits without touching them, but his best recourse here is just strangling her with one hand. Brilliant combat strategy.

He gets sucked into his own cloak like it's a giant vacuum cleaner, and she goes home and uses a webcam so she can show off her own ass:

"Oh, I had an extra cloak after all!"

Then she gets sucked into the cloak too, and that's the end of that!

Bonus – there's a documentary scene where it shows his mom after his disappearance, still living in the same trailer park as before. So even when Dante the Great got all that money and fame, he didn't help his own mother move out of a trailer park. That is just the epitome of class!

Parallel Monsters

The next story is about this guy who builds a dimensional portal in his bedroom. You know, like you do. He meets up with himself from another dimension, which is super cool!

“Hey, Me from Another Dimension, I totally trust you even though you're acting suspicious as fuck and I don't know what kinds of dark secrets or fucked up shit are in this other world! Let's trade lives and explore each other's dimensions!”

“Okay!”

In the parallel universe, main dude meets up with a double of his wife, who apparently finds it fun to invite two wannabe porn stars over to sit on the couch and watch reruns of The Wicker Man.

"What? They don't do this in your dimension?"

He sits on the couch with his parallel-dimension wife, who complains that he ignores her too much. To alleviate her worries, he looks out the window and ignores her some more. What a class act, man.

Then some noises sound outside and he goes outside to find that the two porn stars from before actually have worm monsters in place of dicks, which is totally what I wanted to see. This movie is really hitting all the right notes! I don't think their porn careers would be very fruitful though – they have labor unions for shit like this now.

Hey, his facial expression is the same one all the viewers of the entire movie had after it was over!

Back in the real world, the alternate reality version of the main guy pulls out his own monster-worm-dick in front of the real-world wife. I thought he raped her the first time I saw this, but really we see her again later, and she doesn't look like she got violated by a worm monster...I mean, so far as my eyes can tell on the other side of this computer screen. So maybe he just wanted to show it off. Truly, the lesson learned here is just to use protection when you enter a parallel dimension. Always play on the safe side.

It's also never explained WTF that is, or why they have them - it's just, hey, this is weird alien shit!

I also wonder what her reaction was...

“I've been married to you for 6 years! How did I not notice this?!?”

Yeah that sounds about right. Anyway, both of the wives, in both universes, kill their husbands, which ends this time travel story on a bit of a sour note. I mean, it really isn't much of a selling point for interdimensional travel, is it? I mean, double homicide on both ends probably isn't going to have NASA barging into the basement of the next weirdo who makes a portal.

Wrap-Around Land

In the wrap-around segment, more teenagers try to film the car chase with the demonic ice cream truck, which is a sentence that really makes me question what I do here. Don't I have anything else I could review? No, probably not. Am I having a conversation with myself in the middle of a review? Yes. Yes I am...

We get some dumb enlightening, powerful plays on filmmaking like a shot from the prospective of a kid being dragged along on the back of a truck. KEEP FILMING, BRAVE SOUL!

Bloody feet? No problem! KEEP FILMING!!!

Or this masterful one, which shows from the perspective of a kid falling off a bridge to his death:

Truly this is the commentary on suicide we've been waiting for. Nobody will want to kill themselves now that they've seen what it looks like from this perspective!

Ugh. Okay, I'm done talking about this part.

Bonestorm

The last actual full-length story is about kids skateboarding and making literally everyone they come across mad. I'm not shitting you here. They skateboard on a roof and make the owner of the roof shout at them. They're on the sidewalk and one kid runs into a guy's jeep and damages it, and that guy gets mad at them. What kind of ingenious recourse do they have against all these angry squares who just don't get it? Well, they mostly just flip them off and keep going.

Nothing to do with what I described just now, but funny all the same just for causing these three morons pain.

Also, filming everything is TOTALLY radical, dude. I dunno, just show me the scene where they fight Scott Pilgrim and get exploded into a handful of coins.

They then decide the United States just can't handle their douchiness, so they go to a remote, desolate part of Tijuana, where I'm sure they will be in good company with the drug dealers and slum lords in the area!

"In America they just have photos of Kim Kardashian and Sarah Palin at their skate park ritual religious temples!"

Frankly, though, the dangers of drug cartels are nowhere near as perilous compared to the dangers of Satanic voodoo ritual cults. I can see why so many of them are eager to cross the border to the States now.

Fortunately for them, though, skateboarding means you get superpowers – again, Scott Pilgrim. Read up on it. So the skater-douches go to town on the cult members, even though they're violently outnumbered and smaller, and somehow turn into Sylvester Stallone mini-me's.

Wrap Around...Again

There's a short story in between the main ones about some girl taking off her clothes in a cab for a camera and then pulling a gun on the sleazebag making her do it, saying something about revenge porn. Unfortunately she doesn't kill him before a truck slams into the cab and presumably just kills all three of them. It's kinda just an excuse for boobs, which every V/H/S movie has some sort of insane quota of that I guess this one hadn't met yet.

Will this drive up my site traffic more? I think so. That's why I put it here.

After that we get the conclusion of the main story, where Camera Boy finds the ice cream truck in some abandoned field and finds inside it...well, look:

Hey, you found the neighborhood child predator's hideout!

What were they originally doing in that truck before the apocalypse? I mean, I can't imagine the demonic truck putting all those TVs in there by itself. So that means that, before all this crazy shit started happening, somebody else put all that shit in there...people really need to ask more questions of the ice cream man.

Then what happens next is...honestly kind of hard to describe. Camera Boy sees his girlfriend on the screen bashing her own head into a wall unless he takes his own picture and “goes viral,” I guess – maybe the whole thing is some weird-ass allegory for what technology and “viral” video culture do to us. I dunno, it really isn't elaborated on much.

A new way to take a selfie.

So that's V/H/S Viral. I honestly don't know what they were thinking with most of this, but it was a bit entertaining at least – certainly moreso than the lame second installment, which felt recycled and like an afterthought to the first one. This one, while dumb and mostly nonsensical, did at least keep you guessing and wondering what was going to happen next. I wouldn't go so far as to call it good, but it entertained me more than I thought it would.

Now, my minions, go and spread this review and make it...VIRAL!

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

The Collector (2009)

Some people like to collect stamps, other people like to collect seashells. Some people have collections that others might find completely insane or bizarre. Some people like to collect brain cells – clearly those who made The Collector were not among them, as this is a seriously insipid, valueless piece of celluloid trying to be a movie.

Director: Marcus Dunstan

Starrimg: Josh Stewart, Juan Fernandez

IMDb

(Co-written with Michelle and Kevin.)

If all you want is gore, gore and more gore, this will satisfy you. They succeeded at that goal. However I tend to think making a movie just to show off a bunch of torture crap is about as laudable an accomplishment as “Hey! I bashed my own face in with a hammer MORE TIMES THAN ANYBODY!” I heard about this movie back when it came out in 2009, but nobody ever talked about it all that much. I wondered why that was, especially for a movie that generated a sequel a few years after, up until I actually saw it. Then I perfectly understood why nobody ever talked about this movie.

We start off this movie with a couple finding a magic box in their bedroom. It sort of looks like one of the boxes a magician might use to "cut a girl in half." Since it's a suspicious object which shouldn't be there and obviously signifies that someone broke into their home, they call the police and ... HA HA HA, of course not. The idiot husband just goes up and, like a true idiot, opens the damn box, which is just a distraction for the movie's killer to grab them.

And it's allllllll downhill from this, guys!

After a credit sequence more befitting of a crappy CSI: Miami ripoff TV show, we get main character Arkin doing what he does best on the job: hanging out with little girls in their rooms and having tea. You know, the BEST parts of being a pest exterminator! The father comes in and is suitably indignant about it, as he only wants the plumber and the electrician to hang out with his daughter, NOT the pest exterminator.

Yeah this kind of credit scene was totally rad and cool ... when I saw it in Se7en 20 years ago.

The purposefully shitty picture quality combined with the awful audio doesn't make this retro, just ultralame.

It seems Arkin just can’t win though, as he goes outside and immediately gets the older teenage version of having a tea party: the other daughter of the family comes up and demands to take a drag from his cigarette. She’s the kind of person who flirts by asking what Arkin’s name means – truly a tantalizing and flirtatious question, I know. Then again, I guess ANYTHING sounds tantalizing when you mutter it in a voice so low the audience can’t hear a fucking word you’re saying. Yeah, this is one of THOSE movies … you know, the ones where the movie tries to disguise its own banality by making every line of dialogue a half-whisper like the characters are about to fall asleep.

Smoking is cool! Too bad the cancer spreading in our lungs right now will make it impossible for either of our characters to say a single line that isn't impossible to understand with the movie's bad audio quality!

So the daughter then goes upstairs and fakes an argument with her mom about going on some family vacation. Uh, OK? Why are we seeing this again? Maybe to confirm that the daughter is a bad actress, played by an already bad actress – it’s sort of like acting inception! Bad acting inside bad acting inside a bad movie.

So if you’re wondering if this movie has ANY real direction or coherence at all, the movie FINALLY gets off its ass and does something. Arkin goes to meet his girlfriend or ex-wife or mother of his daughter or whatever they are – it never really explains their relationship. He brings his daughter a stuffed bear, which causes his ex to get MAD because he should’ve been using that money to help pay off the loan sharks who will otherwise kill her.

I'm just blown away by how many shots there are in this fucking movie of Arkin up close in peoples' faces like that, holding the sides of their head. He does it like all the time! Weird thing to complain about, yeah, but even so - it's weird how many of these shots they tried to cram in. Also, you can't see it in my stills, but good luck not being nauseated by the jangling, unfocused mess that tries to pass for "camerawork" in this movie. Bunch of trendy shaky-cam crap, is what this is.

Yup, you know how it goes! The old “ex-wife owes money to the mob” love story. We’ve seen this a thousand times over in … uh … well, actually no, it’s just bizarre that THIS is what passes for drama in this movie. You seriously couldn’t think of anything else that could possibly drive the film’s conflict forward? It HAD to be “the mafia is coming to get me”? Maybe in a totally different movie, but in one of these torture-gore-porn flicks it just comes off as ridiculously extraneous and unnecessary - especially since they don't ever focus on it again, outside of a hollow reason to get Arkin into the torture-house pretty soon.

I just love the implications of this, too; the ex-wife is clearly afraid of someone coming to kill her, so of course she brings her young daughter out in public where anyone could easily try to kill them! Genius!

The scene is droll and boring: the ex-wife just bitches at Arkin a lot and there’s really nothing of substance to latch onto. Arkin then goes to a sleazy nightclub where I guess it’s “I Know Who Killed Me” day at work:

Aside from the sad fact that I Know Who Killed Me (second pic) is actually better than another movie - even just in terms of production quality - can you even tell the difference between these two? Would you even guess they weren't from the same movie?

I guess Arkin is just there to see Laurence Fishburne’s drunk deadbeat brother, who is some kind of crime boss or something – I don’t really know, and he never appears in the movie again, so either way. What follows is an overly long scene where Fishburne-lite and his cronies burn the hairs off of Arkin’s hand and eventually just tell him they won’t help him and he’s on his own about the money. Why did we have this scene at all? To pad out the running time, of course!

So that's what happened to Marcellus Wallace after Pulp Fiction.

The following scene, where he breaks into the house from earlier, is also incredibly boring and pointless. Yes, we have to have a scene painstakingly showing him breaking in to bridge where the movie is going – but does it HAVE to be so incredibly bland? The only thing going on here is what a fucking piece of shit ingrate Arkin really is. Yeah, buddy, you break into the house of those people who trusted you to work for them! You’re a real upstanding guy!

It’s just amazing that we’re actually expected to root for this thieving piece of garbage, good intentions notwithstanding. Maybe it’d be one thing if he was a better written character in whom we could see the complexity and depth of his conflict, but in THIS movie? That’s a laugh – the only thing any of what’s going on before this point was good for was just padding before the movie turns into a torture fuck-fest of epic proportions. As an aside, he’s there to steal some kind of rare jewel, which this family conveniently has in a safe hidden behind a painting. Because I guess most suburban families just happen to have rare jewels they can hide in safes in their own homes.

I have to admit a couple of the atmospheric shots of the house are sorta nice, building up some tension. However, it’s all pretty much ruined as soon as Arkin opens his fucking eyes and suddenly realizes that the entire house has been booby-trapped the whole time and SOMEHOW he just missed it when he was coming in! This guy is the worst thief ever. How could he miss all these wires and traps set up? They’re literally all over the place!

"Guess I must have missed these obvious wires all over the place when I came in! When they taught about situational awareness in thieving school, I was passed out drunk by a dumpster outside of a Burger King. Whoops!"

Some of these traps are just ridiculous, and way too contrived and implausible to really be effective at captivating the audience’s imagination. He tries to call 9-1-1 but…

Ha HA! He didn't count on me wearing protective earmuffs to make a phone call in his sick torture dungeon house fantasy land! I have outsmarted the great Collector killer!

Yup, a spike in the phone – I guess the killer was COUNTING on whoever came inside the house jamming the phone to their ear hard enough to drive that spike in. Because you know, that’s how you use a phone!

So Arkin, bewildered that he’s appearing in the Jigsaw Killer’s interpretation of the Home Alone franchise, finds his way down to the basement, where the family is being tortured in horribly green-lit dungeons with so much grain on the camera filter that it’s like the movie spent too long sunbathing at the beach without a towel to lay on.

"Allow me to keep placating and comforting you without actually trying to save you or do anything useful ever, like I do with every other character in the film." Seriously, yet another worthless cliche straight from the asses of the writers. When will these movies learn that the whole "leave kidnapped victims where they are so as not to distract the killer" thing NEVER works?

These scenes are just amazing in how stupid they are, mostly because of one fact: Arkin now knows the killer is in the house and has found the victims left alone. Instead of just waiting for the killer to come back and surprising him or knocking him out or something, Arkin decides the best course of action is to tell the blindfolded, tied-up wife to scream and distract the killer while he goes upstairs to fuck around some more. The movie could be over in five minutes if Arkin just waited down there and beat the killer over the head from behind! But that can’t happen yet. We haven’t had the SUPER SCARY threatening tongue-cut-off scene with the wife:

Yeah because for one, a tied up, blindfolded woman in a bathtub being tortured is real fucking good cinema, right? Fuck you. Two, they don’t even take advantage of this while they have it on screen! As despicable as it would be to mutilate this woman’s tongue, AT THE VERY LEAST it would fit with the movie’s modus operandi of showing gore! But the killer doesn’t actually do anything to her, and she’s fine the next time we see her. This movie's failure is so all-encompassing, so universal, that it can’t even accomplish the ONE MINISCULE, SMALL-MINDED GOAL IT SET OUT TO DO.

Upstairs, Arkin finds a bloody guy in the closet inside that box – the same guy who discovered the magic box from the opening. This guy is really only here to spew exposition like a leaky sewer pipe: the guy in the house is called the Collector, and he “collects” people and kills everyone else. That’s it – that’s really all the story you’re going to get with this. Just the image of the killer putting that guy in the box and hauling it to this house on the off-chance someone would actually find and open it in the fucking closet is astounding to me. How did this guy even survive that long trapped in that tiny-ass box? Did the killer just put a mini-fridge and A.C. in there for him? I guess it wouldn’t surprise me, given how implausible and insane the rest of this is.

Like, really, was putting hot yellow mustard-colored acid on the floor of a whole room a great idea? All it amounts to in the end is a cat getting caught in it. Arkin does the sensible thing and rips the cat out and hurls it toward the window – you’re not playing football, you inbred moron. What, you couldn’t have tried to save it? You had to throw it like that? The cat lands on the windowsill, which the killer anticipated: he outfitted the windowsill with a motion-sensing guillotine that clamps down and cuts the cat in half.

Huh. That’s two movies in the last three weeks I’ve seen where cats are killed. I don’t know how to feel about that!

We then see another trademark of the film – the killer just can’t seem to find Arkin. Part of me thought this was because he knew Arkin was there and was just playing with him. No, though – he can’t even see him right there:

"If I stay here long enough, maybe he'll get bored and go home!"

Don’t play Hide n’ Seek with this guy; you’ll stump him so bad he won’t EVER find you. Speaking of which, what’s with the killer’s outfit anyway? Was it made solely from the ass-cheeks of leather pants made for fat people? Personally I was more intimidated by the GIMP mask guy from Pulp Fiction.

Two Pulp Fiction references in the same review. Damn I'm good.

We then see the film’s ultimate height of stupidity as the older daughter comes back with her boyfriend and finds the house locked. The killer, somehow sensing them, opens the door for them and then hides. They come in and have maybe the worst sex scene I’ve ever seen, just for one fact – HOW DO THEY NOT SEE ALL THE TRAPS SET UP AROUND THE LIVING ROOM?! Even if you’re gonna tell me they’re just so into each other, even then – it still wouldn’t make sense. The traps are ALL RIGHT THERE. CLEARLY VISIBLE. OUT IN THE OPEN. These characters should see them, freak out, run outside the way they came and RUN. But nope, we need nudity in the movie, so we get some right before their unceremonious deaths:

And he's just sitting there watching them; what a fucking loser this killer is. "Hmm, well I was gonna torture and kill everyone, but I think I'll take a break to watch two people have sex." Pfft.

I gotta admit, the death scene by way of a bunch of bear traps is almost worth it. Almost. Not really though.

Arkin, finally having had enough, actually escapes and gets out of the house through an upstairs window. He could easily run to the cops and get help, but instead he sees the little girl of the family through a window and has to go save her:

No, the right answer is STILL go find law enforcement and get help. Not go back in the torture house it took you like an hour to escape from already!

Why are you so worried? Oh, I guess it’s because The Collector knows she’s in the house and is just biding his time to go get her! Actually no, he has no idea where she is. He can make ALL THESE DETAILED TRAPS ALL OVER THE HOUSE but he can’t find a 10-year-old girl hiding in a room. At first I once again gave the film too much credit – I figured maybe The Collector had kidnapped her and was hiding her in the room for later. But nope, I gave the film too much credit for even that miniscule level of brain activity. He doesn’t know where she is.

They hide in the bathroom, where of course there are a bunch of fish hooks hung up everywhere. Because yeah, if someone had already bypassed every other trap in the house, the fish hooks in the bathroom would get ‘em. Also I love how dumb-ass Arkin manages to see the hooks and duck the young daughter’s head under them, but then gets hit by them himself. What an idiot.

"Owwww, I could have easily ducked and NOT been hit in the face with fish hooks, but that would have made too much sense and I need to provide more gore for the camera!"

The Collector finally gets Arkin and tortures him in the basement. I guess he’s about to go find the daughter, when Arkin commits the unforgivable sin of calling the Collector a faggot and screaming profanities at him – truly a sign of his mental wit and word-wizardry. The greatest part about it is that it works. Yes, I'm serious; the Collector, this bad-ass torturing serial killer, gets his widdle feelings hurt when his captive victim calls him a faggot. Is there something you want to tell us there, buddy? Some insecurity you feel you have to defend your honor from?

"I spend my day disemboweling helpless victims, cutting off limbs and sewing their lips together, but don't you DARE call me a faggot! That offends my feelings!"

If this movie wasn’t worthless enough yet, we get the same dumb cliché we see in every bad horror movie: the cop who comes up and almost catches the killer, but is then killed by a cheap foil right before he can do anything useful. You waste of existence; you absolute void of anything creative or interesting.

I'm starting to think these scenes are like a neurotic tic bad filmmakers can't stop doing: the cop shows up, comes within an ass-hair of catching the killer, then gets killed off by some last-minute implausible scenario. It's been done a billion fucking times before and I am sick of it. I mean, what, do you HAVE to do every rehashed, trite scene in the book? You really couldn't resist the impulse to put this in the film?

But it's OK - the dog is killed shortly after when Arkin shoves a flaming bucket on its head and then throwing it in front of the Collector's shotgun blast, prompting it to literally explode in flames.

Tonight for dinner, chunks of exploded murderous German Shepard...

After finally escaping the Collector and trapping him in one of his own traps, Arkin gets away and he and the girl get to safety. Arkin is being taken away for his injuries in an ambulance when a truck slams into the ambulance. It’s actually the Collector, who amazingly has super-speed powers now and can catch up to a moving ambulance despite being incapacitated just moments before. So he kills the paramedics, overturns the ambulance, kidnaps Arkin and locks him up in another box! And I guess the wife just gets axed by the mafia or whatever, since Arkin definitely won’t be delivering that ruby to them now!

This was crap. It’s got no suspense, no character development, no real point to anything that happens beyond “HEY! LOOK AT ALL OUR TORTURE AND GORE, GUYS!” Not to mention the ass-load of bottom of the barrel disposable horror cliché this movie has all over it like a cockroach infestation. The whole thing is just one implausible, ridiculous scene after another. The traps were so ridiculous in how elaborate and set-up they were that it's impossible to believe even one second of this movie's plot.

Come to think of it, how did the Collector even get all those traps in the house in the first place? It's sort of implied that the Collector was actually one of the bug exterminator guys who was at the house at the beginning of the movie, and scoped out the house that way. Did he just put all of that stuff in while he was supposed to be exterminating the bugs in the house? "Oh, yeah, don't mind all the bear traps on the living room floor and the fish hooks hanging up in the bathroom! THAT'S JUST HOW WE CATCH BUGS, IT'S NOT WEIRD!" The only other option is that he somehow came back and set them up later without the family noticing, which is equally stupid.

Director Marcus Dunstan said in an interview that the Collector was supposed to be like a spider, hunting its prey – thus all the spiders seen in the movie at various points, I guess. It’s really not much of a metaphor, though, as the film fails to do anything clever with it. So the killer is sorta like a spider – so what? How does that help the meaning of the film or add any dimensions to it? It doesn’t at all. It's not good symbolism, and in fact the idea of this film having any symbolism is kind of like etching Shakespeare verses into a literal horse turd: it doesn't exactly help your case.

Maybe this movie could have been okay if the traps weren’t so prevalent and over the top; if it was just a home invasion movie about the family being kidnapped or whatever. It still wouldn’t have been good; it would have been turgid water-treading sewage without any real writing talent even then, but it at least would have been better than what we got here.

Overall I think this is a wretched experience with nothing good about it whatsoever, and I hope every copy of this movie burns in a garbage can where it belongs. You could get the same effect from looking at a stubbed toe through the night-vision filter on your video camera. With that said, tune in next week for the sequel!

Images copyright of their original owners. I own none of them.