Haunting in a Haunting Kind of Way

 Hey, hey, Horror Nuts! Welcome to another edition of WTFHM!

So, I wasn't able to get out to the movies this week to check out Barbarian. It is what it is, though. Sometimes life just happens, right?

But, you know, this is Hispanic Heritage Month as well as Halloween month, so I figured this week, maybe we'll cover a movie from one of our Latin neighbors.

This week's Movie!

Nocturna Side A: The Great Old Man's Night starring Pepe Soriano, Marilu Marini, Jenaro Nouet, Mora Del Veccia, Desiree Salguiero, Lautaro Delgado, and Nicolas Scarpino

 

So, this is the story of 90-year-old Ulises(Soriano) living in an apartment with his wife, Dalia(Marini). What we know from the beginning is that it's clear that he's having a bit of memory loss (as I imagine you might have at 90).

His wife is a bit curmudgeonly and basically talks all kinds of shit about him and his faulty memory. Plus, she's convinced that the HOA in their building is planning to kick them out because they can't take care of themselves.

Anyway, everything's everything until they're awakened by a crash in the middle of the night. Thinking that it's a burglar, Ulises investigates but doesn't see anything other than he left the gas stove on.

Right after that, someone comes banging on their door. Ulises looks out the peephole and sees it's a woman. She's claiming to be a neighbor from upstairs, and she needs help. Dalia tells him not to open the door. That it's a trap. Soon after, her cries for help turn angry and sinister.

So, yeah, he doesn't open the door.

 

She stops banging and then another knock comes at the door. It's Daniel(Delgado), the super. He tells him through the door that he has the fire department with him and they need to get in ASAP.



He lets them in and Daniel promptly tells him that his upstairs neighbor took a swan dive out of the window and landed in their courtyard.

Confused, Ulises insisted that the dead woman was just at his door. Daniel tells him to chill and they'll talk in the morning.

And this is where it kind of gets trippy. Throughout the night, Ulises experiences strange ghostly occurrences, mixed with memories of his childhood.

Like, the whole movie is filled with all these beautiful, stunning images as we kind of go through Ulises dementia with him. I mean, midway through this thing, I was at a loss as to what was real and what wasn't.

His upstairs neighbor continues to haunt him as he tries to figure out if anything he's experiencing is real or not. And he's met with not only actual ghosts, but ghosts from his past.

The movie ends when he helps Elena(Salgueiro), the woman upstairs by letting her know that she's dead. He then comes to terms with his own life and that it's time for him to go as well. 

Listen, I'm not gonna say that this one had me up in my feelings or anything...

...but this one had me up in my feelings.

Like getting old is a thing that we're all gonna have to go through (if we're lucky) and of all the real life things that might scare the crap out of us, rarely do we ever consider how frightening that can actually be.

So, yeah. No brainer. Easy A, here, folks.

Side note. This appears to be part of a companion piece? Like there's a Nocturna Side B out there, but I don't have any info on that just yet. There's not a lot about either of these movies on the interwebs. Imma have to do some research.

Next week's movie!  Sissy. Despite the name, it looks decent, so let's give it a go! 

See you next week!

O~

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#I'm Feeling Very Attacked

 

Hey, hey, Horror Nuts! Welcome to another edition of WTFHM!

So, if you haven't noticed, I've been gone for a week or so for a couple of reasons; I'm working on some ghostwriting projects but also...

I don't know how to talk about this week's movie.

And I honestly don't know if it's my broken social meter or what, but I feel like this week's movie lives outside of my own reality.

I mean, yeah, that's part of it, but mostly it's got to do with the fact that this one is in a league of its own. Like I really feel like it should be its own genre.

Wait.  Is this a new horror genre? Are we about to see a rise in "Among Us" horror movies?

Hmm. Okay, so...This week's Movie!

Bodies, Bodies, Bodies starring Amandla Stenberg, Maria Bakalova, Rachel Sennott, Chase Sui Wonders, Pete Davidson, Myha'la Herrold, Lee Pace, and Connor O'Malley

So, when I say this is "Among Us" horror, I'm not kidding. Here's how it breaks down.

Seven rich twenty-year-olds have a Hurricane Party at the house of one of their parents. Um...

Okay, I'm already hopeless at remembering names so I'm giving these guys colors instead in keeping with the Among Us theme.

Okay, so the party's at Pink's parent's house(Davidson). Now, there's a love triangle happening here, but I'll be real, I don't remember who was hooking up with who. I believe Pink is dating White(Wonders), but she used to date a dude named Max and he's pissed about that.

He's also pissed at Red's(Sennott) boyfriend Green(Pace) for some reason? Maybe White used to date him, too. Anyway, Pink's got beef with both dudes in this equation.

Green, by the way, canNOT be 20-something. He's easily thirty, but that's neither here nor there.

Anyway, Yellow(Stenberg) and Blue(Bakalova) show up late and unannounced to the party. Everybody's surprised, especially since Yellow and Brown(Herrold) used to date. Brown says she's cool with the new girlfriend, but, spoiler alert, she's not.

So, the party's going and Yellow gets the bright idea to play Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, which is a slumber party game where people run around in the dark accusing people of murder. Which totally can't go bad, right?

I mean, seven people with a reality show level of history playing a game where the whole point is to accuse one another of murder?  Yeah.

Honestly, it's all just base-level pettiness until the lights go out and they find Pink's body outside with his throat slit and the real fun begins.

Systematically, they all start accusing one another of murder as one by one they all get picked off. And they die in some pretty interesting ways.

They accuse Green of taking Pink out. In the argument, Green tries to defend himself, but gets a hand weight across the back of his head for his trouble thanks to Blue.

 Red falls down a flight of stairs, presumably pushed. And by this point, everyone's accusing Blue as sus. 

Brown arms herself, and during an argument where they're calling her sus, she accidentally on purpose shoots Red.

Following so far. Cool.

  

Brown chases Blue and Yellow calling them sus while they call her sus. She gets accidentally pushed off a balcony.

So, with just the two left, they end up fighting each other. In the scuffle, they find Pink's cell phone. They look on it and in the greatest gotcha moment since 1980's April Fool's Day, they find out who the murderer really is.

So, dig this (or scroll past, if you don't want to know)...

So, earlier in the film, Green showed off his ability to open a champagne bottle with a sword. Which everyone thought was cool.

Everyone except for Pink, who was seething with jealousy about it.

So, Pink decides to record himself doing the trick. For TikTok. Guess how it went?

Nope. Not a joke. Pink slit his own damn throat, thus causing the whole crazy night. I literally said this in the movie theatre:

And thus, here is my dilemma.  Did I like this movie?  I don't know!  I appreciated it, for sure. It's a fabulous commentary on what it's like trying to differentiate reality from fantasy in this dystopian landscape we're currently living in.

But also, I'm not so keen on being duped. While I do own a copy of April Fool's Day, it's only in a historical kind of way. Like if my movie collection was a museum, I'd hold it up as the one time filmmakers thought it'd be cool to spend millions of dollars just to troll an audience.

So. I guess I'll give this a pending jewel. 

I think I might really like this one in the future, but right now. Undecided.

Next week's movie!  Maybe we'll go see Barbarian since it's this year's "Scariest Movie of the Year".

Suuuure it is.  See you next week!

O~
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The Movie They Should Have Made in 2009

 

Hey, hey, Horror Nuts! Welcome to another edition of WTFHM!

Have you ever not enjoyed a movie that everyone else seemed to love? I mean, sure, if you've been reading this blog for a while, then you know the movies I end up enjoying don't often line up with what everyone else is into.

I'm saying, I'm usually the one who raves about a movie that everyone else loathes, and, you know, that's okay. Don't follow the crowd, people! If you hate a movie, say so.

Case in point, there's this movie:

The original Orphan movie is really not one of my favorites for a few different reasons.

1) It's wholly unoriginal. It's The Bad Seed and The Good Son and The Omen and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, with a twist that I saw coming halfway through the first act of the film.

2) There's no satisfaction in the movie? It's been a minute since I've seen it, but I remember the ending just being not satisfying enough for me. Maybe Esther needed to kill more people, I don't know. But the movie's ending just had me like, "Well, yeah, because that's how all these movies end, so..."

The long and short of it is that Orphan is a movie I've seen so many times I probably could have written a complete review of it without ever seeing it, and no one would have ever known the wiser.

Which brings us to This week's movie!

Orphan: First Kill starring Isabelle Fuhrman, Julia Stiles, Rossif Sutherland, Hiro Kanagawa, Matthew Finland, and Samantha Walkes.

Before we get going, let me just drop this off right here:

Because you guys are not gonna understand my rating unless I spoil the hell out of this thing.

So, once upon a time, there was a girl named Leena(Fuhrman). Leena lives in Estonian Arkham Asylum, you know because she's criminally insane.

Leena, being criminally insane, decides to break out and get to causing havoc as one does.

Now, before we move forward, we need to address the thirteen-year-old elephant in the room.

Back in 2009, Isabelle Fuhrman was around 12 years old, and if we're all being real, she actually looked around nine or ten.

Which worked and, by the way, is the one good thing I can say about both films. Fuhrman was and is a pretty talented actress to have pulled this part off so well. She was so phenomenal, the filmmakers decided to bring her back for the prequel!

No, no, you're right. The math is indeed not mathing.

So, fun fact, instead of getting a child actress to take over the part, the filmmakers decided to do some creative camera angles and body doubles and...lifts for the whole cast like this:

Which, I'm like, okay, except it just wasn't working. Fuhrman just ends up looking like a very short grown-ass woman. For all the work the filmmakers did to restore the illusion that little Leena could pass as a little girl, they ended up with...well, with this:

She is all of twenty-five in pigtails, and there is just no hiding it. I don't know. Maybe the makeup guy quit at the last second or something because we are living in the same year where we were able to do this:

But little to no effort was made on Fuhrman's actual appearance to at least try to fool us into thinking she was a child.

I wouldn't normally spend this much time on something like this, but, bruh. It's part of the whole damn plot. We're just kind of left thinking that everyone in the movie needs glasses.

But anyway...

After leaving a wake of bodies behind her during her daring escape, Leena decides to pose as a child who went missing four years ago. Kid kind of looks like her, so she figures, what the hay?

So, as it turns out, the real Esther's parents are richer than God, which, hey, is a plus for someone with a habit of ripping people off. So, she poses as Esther and meets her new mom Tricia(Stiles), new dad Allen(Sutherland), and kind of assholey brother Gunnar(Finlan).

And everything seems to be going well. Esther immediately gets attached to dad Allen who, admittedly, makes some pretty cool paintings. She paints with him and, just like in the first movie, starts to develop a crush on him.

Otherwise, everything's Gucci until Esther starts to notice the detective that 'found' her snooping around her and the family. After a very strange visit with him asking to speak with the mom, Esther decides to take matters into her own hands.

Something like that, except angrier? She stabbed the detective until her hand cramps, and as she's questioning him about how he found out about her...

Enter Tricia, who puts a hole in the detective's head, finishing him off.

So, at this point, we're all like, Wait...um...wait...what? Dig this.

As it turns out, Tricia has known that Esther was not Esther all along...because Gunnar "accidentally" killed Esther years ago, and she covered up the murder. But now, her husband is like a new man, so she blackmails Esther into keeping up the charade.

Yeah, old Gunnar is a bigger dick than we thought. Moving on.

So, the charade begins, and for a minute, it's all good. Esther just plays the role and stays out of the psycho mom and son combo, right?

Yeah, no. Gunnar's still an asshole, and Esther still has a crush on Allen, which, of course, Tricia confronts her about.

Well, this all puts Esther in a kill-or-be-killed mindset. She sets it all off by trying to kill both mother and son by pushing them on some train tracks. It fails, and she steals the family car--

Yeah, I don't know where she was going, but it was giving me life. Anyway...

The cops bring her back home, and Tricia and Gunnar decide this game is over and they need to kill Esther...which, given everything we know thus far, is not going to turn out well.

And it doesn't! Esther catches Gunnar in her dad's painting room...

And she fights Tricia all through the house, starting a fire and ending up with them on the roof.

Okay, so Allen comes back just as the two of them are hanging off the edge of the roof, leaving him with the eternal question of if one's wife and child were in a fire, who would they save first.

Welp. It wasn't Tricia because she ends up falling to her death.

But after Allen pulls Esther up, this kind of happens...

He's horrified that his little girl is really a grown woman with false teeth, and in the ensuing argument, he, too, falls to his death.

And so, with the whole family dead, Esther walks out of the burning house, and the authorities put her in an orphanage where someone would eventually adopt her again.

Yeah, that's the movie. So, what did we learn?

Well, we learned that prequels suck...except when they don't.

We also learned that dressing up as a grown woman to be a little girl does not mean she's a little girl, but we knew that in both movies, really, just in different ways.

And, yes, of course, this is jewel worthy.

Okay! Next week's movie! Gonna check out Bodies, Bodies, Bodies finally!! I'm stoked for this one!

O~
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