Man, These Reddit Threads are Out of Pocket

 

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

So, this week marks another week that I had to take a detour from our normally scheduled programming. As one of my beloved daughters pointed out, they had the nerve to release Scream(2022) on all the major streaming sources. So...guess what we're reviewing today?

Now, I'm not the biggest Scream fan, but I did thoroughly enjoy the first movie and the subsequent movies thereafter. All things considered, the franchise has been fairly creative along the way and...

Dang, hold up a second. I didn't even finish my sentence!  

You know, if some of y'all had put as much passion in, like, I don't know, world peace or social justice causes as you did about how you felt about the Scream franchise, maybe we can get some actual work done around here.

Especially since the filmmakers actually heard y'all complaining. Anyway, this week's movie!

Scream(2022) starring Jenny Ortega, Melissa Barrera, Jake Quaid, Mikey Madison, Dylan Minnette, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, Sonia Ammar, Marley Shelton AND pretty much all the principals in the original movie.

Yes. Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, David Arquette, and even a de-aged Skeet Ulrich all came back for another run at this franchise.

Okay, so the basic synopsis:

So, Tara (Ortega), a girl who doesn't really watch horror movies gets attacked and put in the hospital. Her sister, Sam (Barrera), comes into town to be with her and finds herself in the middle of a 30 year slasher movie.

All right, so this is a slasher movie, so it's time for Blood, Boobs, Body Count, and Bad Acting. Beware, there be Spoilers ahead

Blood: A

Oh, the blood did floweth. The level of stabby stab and blood splatter here was fairly top tier and honestly, it felt very old school. The terror was reminiscent of the slasher films of old and we appreciate that.

Boobs: F

As I've said before, we don't do gratuitous nudity in our slasher films in 2022.  The best you're going to get here is a flash of Liv (Ammar's) leg from the short skirts she wears.  That's it.  But again, as I recall, all we got from the original was nipples through Rose McGowan's shirt, so, yeah.

Body Count: D

I mean, seven deaths isn't exactly nothing to sneeze at in a slasher film, but when you consider that most of the cast actually survives, two of which being the killers...yeah. It's kind of a disappointment.

I mean, a high body count amongst fan-boy style serial killers is kind of the whole point, right? At the end of this movie, our killers had nothing to be proud of.

And yes. You read that right. Killers. But I'll get to that in a minute.

Bad Acting: D

So, you have to keep in mind that all the old school actors have done other things outside of Scream. You know, because they've been around for a lot of years.

But these young ones...sigh.
It is a horror movie though, so, it's whatever.

So, yeah, my take on this version of the movie? As far as the general horror, yeah, it's a fun movie. Overall, if I'd watched this without seeing any of the others, I might have higher opinion?

Like, for one thing, this one was less of a remake/reboot/reimagining and more of a remix of the first movie...and a pretty predictable one at that. I mean, yes, of course one of the killers is the boyfriend and of COURSE the other one is the angry girl with the Sanpaku eyes.

There is this overall theme that our killers were crazed redditors that just...snapped one day. You know, kind of like the first one. It's the whole horror movies make us crazy troupe, but remixed for 2022.

I can't be mad at it, though. You guys asked for this, so, here it is. Happy now?

Do I give it a jewel?  Meh. Here you go.

Oh. By the way? Best part of the movie? The Tribute at the end.

So, next week's movie! Okay, let's do Fresh for real this time.  See you next time!

O~
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It's all Fun and Games until Demons Get Involved

 

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

So, have you ever been actually glad you grew up poor? Like, have you ever experienced how the other half lives in a way that made you go, "Wow, those fried bologna sandwiches weren't so bad."

I mean, it's one thing to come into money, right? Like suddenly acquiring wealth is a different animal than being born into money. Your life is basically moving through a world where you can do just about anything you want, like traveling or world domination.

And then when you get demons involved it becomes a whole thing.  Anyway...

This week's movie!

The Privilege starring Max Schimmelpfennig, Lea Van Acken, Tijan Marei, Milena Tscharntke, Lise Risom Olsen, Roman Knizka, Horst Janson, Nadeshda Brennicke, and Caroline Hartig.  

Okay, so somewhere in some affluent part of Germany, a kid named Finn(Schimmelpfennig) acquired some pretty serious mental issues. Like he and his sister getting attacked by a smoke demon until she takes a header off a bridge, serious.

Which, as you can imagine, would fuck a guy up. 

So, as a result, he and his twin sister are in therapy and no, that isn't a plot hole. You just aren't really supposed to notice, I think?

Okay, it's kind of a plot hole.  Moving on.

Anyway, they and apparently every kid they know are in therapy and taking these special pills which, I don't know what they're supposed to do, but our protag is 'hallucinating' pretty heavily while he's on them.

Anyway, after witnessing some really weird shit with his family apparently auctioning off his naked sister to an old naked woman, Finn decides that something really weird is going on.

He also finds a weird tequila worm in his pills which turn out to be some kind of devil fungus.

It's around this point that the movie goes off the rails and suddenly there's a failed exorcism and a threesome, and ghost demons...just random stuff happening that doesn't really affect the core plot of the story very much.

What it all eventually comes to is that their rich affluent parents have developed a psych pill that's really infused with devil fungus. They use the devil fungus to invoke demons that take over their bodies and live their rich lives and...

Okay, let me just get into what worked and what didn't because I just don't have the energy to do a full synopsis here.

The Good

This was a pretty slick-looking movie. I mean, the CGI was a little hokey, but not so much that I would slide it in the low-budget category of movies.  The special effects were decent.

The set designs were pretty good, too. You really did have the feel of our characters being a bunch of rich kids living in a rich world. 

I'll also give this one points for diversity. Like there weren't a whole lot of diverse characters, but considering the story primarily centers on one family, I'll take a couple of brown faces over none in this case.

The Bad

There's really only one bad thing about this movie and that's the ambling nature of the plot. I mean, if you've ever talked to someone who couldn't stay on track with their story, this movie was basically that.

We jump from the main plot to an exorcism

Into a threesome...

To possessed middle-aged women murdering people...

To suicidal frenemies...

Oh, and there was a rave at some point where Finn takes a buttload of acid, he trips at the rave, sees some messed up stuff, we move on.

I don't know what the trend is lately for adding an inordinate amount of seasoning to horror movies. Usually, I'm down for lots of kookiness in horror movies, but lately, it's all been just a lot of noise and I've been like...

I'm just saying, this movie makers' focus needs more focus.

All that said, I'm not gonna raspberry this one for one reason and one reason on.  It stuck to a very important point that when a filmmaker gets it, I've gotta give them props for it:

You can't kill a thousand-year-old demon/monster/whatever by accident

Or Luck.  Or a plucky attitude. Or a big gun or an army. Ancient creatures of evil are ancient for a reason. All you can really do is delay the inevitable.

So, yeah, that being said:

Okay, so, next week's movie! Fresh! A movie that keeps popping up on my Hulu, so I guess I better check it out!

See you next week!

O~
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We Interrupt This Broadcast for a Special Announcement...

 

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

So, this week was supposed to wrap out the Black History Month/Chinese New Year edition of WTFHM and, to my credit, I did attempt to watch Midnight Melody as promised. But, I ran into a few problems.

Okay, not that many, but they still were enough to keep me from watching the movie. 

For one thing, as it turns out Midnight Melody is my first low-budget A-Horror movie...well, the first one in a long time anyway. As you might know, if you've been following this blog for a while, B-movies of all kinds are welcome at my table.

But I mention the low quality for a reason. See, this movie was available in only two places: Tubi and Amazon Prime for 3.99. Again, not a dealbreaker for me either way, but, I'm getting to it.

So, I find the movie on Tubi and start watching it and I notice that not only is this a low-budget flick, it's pretty bad. At least I think it is. As it happens, Tubi must use Google Translate for their subtitling because I could barely follow what was going on.

And then the subtitles broke altogether halfway through, so, yeah.

I had the choice between paying 3 dollars to watch it on Amazon Prime or just review another movie. So...

This week's movie!

Texas Chainsaw Massacre starring Sarah Yarkin, Elsie Fisher, Mark Burnham, Jacob Latimore, Moe Dunford, Olwen Fouere, Jessica Allain, Nell Hudson, Alice Krige, and William Hope.

Oh, and the dude from Night Court narrated the beginning. John Larroquette. This guy:

(Fun fact!  He was the narrator in the original movie!)

Okay, so before we get into the synopsis, allow me to remind you guys that I am not a fan of reboots/remakes/reimagines in general, but I have been proven wrong about a lot of them so I'm usually willing to give them a chance...particularly with this one. I'm saying, the trailer was all the way live.

So, yeah, I felt more obligated than anything to check this one out and...well...let's get on with it.

Once upon a time a bunch of hipsters in a van decide they want to renovate a ghost town so that they can have their own little hipster city in which to live their own peaceful hipster lives. 

And really, say what you want about hipsters, I'm not mad at it. Fundamentally, nothing wrong with wanting to build your happy place.

The problem comes when they discover an old woman and her son are still living in one of the houses. They call the police and drag the woman out. The woman has a heart attack and dies and her son decides to seek revenge and THAT, folks, is what happens when you're like "Leatherface needs a better backstory!"

My face once I realized where they were going with this:

Anyway, this is a slasher movie, so let's do a round of Blood, Boobs, Body Count, and Bad Acting.

1. Blood -- A+

There were buckets and buckets of blood in this one. Like every slasher film worth their salt, there were practically oceans of blood flowing through this movie.  The gore was top tier and all things considered, I'm here for it.

2. Boobs -- F+

This is 2022 people. We don't do gratuitous nudity in horror very much anymore.  That's right. Not a tit in sight in this one. To be fair, I don't think there were any tits in the original either, so there's that.

3. Body Count -- A+

So, IMDB puts the body count at 16, but there had to be more in my opinion. At one point, Leatherface takes out a literal busload of people, so...yeah. 

That scene had the best moment in the whole movie, though:

If there is some kind of commentary happening in this movie, it was lost on me...except for that part.

4. Bad Acting -- D-

I mean, no oscar winners in this cast or anything, but they didn't do half bad in terms of acting. I wasn't really expecting much, though. I think I'd have been fine with terrible acting.

So, the big, big question is that is this a reboot/remake/reimagining that I can get with.  The answer is...

I'm not gonna raspberry it, though. Clearly, somebody involved in making this movie had enough horror movie chops to pull off some really great scenes, but the vision of the original point of this franchise was just lost.

I realize I'm starting to sound like one of those gatekeeping purists, but hear me out. The reason why the original is a classic is that nobody made a horror movie quite like it before that. It was innovated for about a dozen different reasons. Horror nuts in the movie-making industry still cite it as an influence for their work.

So that being said, no. Not gonna give it a jewel. To be honest, I don't even want to give it a pink jewel, but here we are:

Next week's movie!  The Privilege! A Netflix horror movie.  Let's see how good it is!  See you next week!

O~

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