#5) + 1 (2013)- This is the teen sex comedy meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers mashup that I'm not sure anyone was asking for. A comet crashes to earth and creates duplicates of a group of kids attending a raging house party. The dupes do everything their counterparts do, except they are about an hour behind. A series of blackouts brings the dupes and the originals closer and closer in time. When they catch up to the same place at the same time, well, like the highlander, there can be only one.
There is a small group of protagonists who figure out what is going on but they are all kind of jerks. The real core of the movie isn't all the stuff I just described. At its heart, it is about second chances and lost love and being young and stupid. Rhys Wakefield and Ashley Hinshaw are a star-crossed couple who break up at the beginning of the movie due to some mistaken identity shenanigans. As Wakefield tries to apologize and reconcile with Hinshaw over the course of the party, he realizes the doppelgangers provide an opportunity for him to correct his mistakes and say all the right things. Has he learned anything? Is he a better person? If you manipulate someone into loving you, how is that love? Lots of big questions sit at the heart of this little sci-fi chiller but it doesn't delve too deeply into any of them.
If you can get beyond the nudity of the first hour, I would argue there are some rewards to be found in this flick.
#6) Creep (2014)- Mark Duplass is the whole show here (almost literally) as we finally (?) get a mumblecore found footage horror movie. Patrick Bryce wrote and directed this (and is the only other person in the movie). Duplass plays a man dying of cancer who hires Bryce as a videographer to document a day in his life for his unborn child. Duplass keeps messing with Bryce until the camera man just wants to leave. Then things start getting really creepy.
There is a pacing issue with this movie as half the runtime takes place on the same day and the second half is oddly split up over an undetermined amount of time. The old "why are you filming this?" question that rests at the heart of all found footage movies is never completely answered. The ending is a little tidy but Duplass brings a lot of dark, dark comedy to the role as well as dramatic gravity. Also, a scary wolf mask can go a long way.
If you like Mark Duplass, give this a go. It doesn't change the genre or anything but it is worth a watch.
#7) Beneath (2013)- This is probably the best of the 11 movies I've seen so far in that it ended up being one of the more rewarding when I had zero expectations. Jeff Fahey leads a cast of "hey, I know him"s in this tale of miners trapped during a cave-in. Ghost stories are, historically, really hard to pull off. Ghosts, mostly, can't really hurt you. Place a ghost in a precarious place (like a WW2 submarine in the excellent flick Below) and you ratchet up the danger factor. When the slightest misstep can bring a mountain down on you, having visions of dead people can seriously harm your chances for survival.
With a quick throwaway reference to 19 miners who were trapped and died in the 1920s, the stage is set for a pretty cool little thriller. As oxygen levels deplete, are the characters seeing vengeful spirits possess their friends, or are the going crazy? Special effects are used sparingly and the ambiguity of what is really happening is downplayed. I am a sucker for a small cast trapped in a small space and this movie has done nothing to cure me of that affliction. I would argue this is the best underground horror movie since The Descent.
#8) Crave (2012)- More a Taxi Driver homage than a horror movie, this flick follows a crime scene photographer who has vivid daydreams of standing up to both criminals and just annoying people. These daydreams are the source of much gore but are mainly played for laughs. Ron Perlman appears as a character I would swear is imaginary. Otherwise, this is a cast of mostly third tier actors you may or may not recognize (including Terminator 2's Eddie Furlong).
This one tries to have a love story at the center of it, also. The photographer has a random hook up with an adorable neighbor that he becomes smitten with. Unfortunately, he says all the wrong things at all the wrong times and comes off as an incredible douche. All his other choices in the movie seem to inform this, too. He dabbles in blackmail and intimidation, vigilantism and stalking. Really, one of the least likable characters I have seen hold down a movie in awhile. Your mileage may vary (maybe you, too, want to take a sledgehammer to overly earnest AA attendees?) but I found him boorish.
Without a likable center, this movie doesn't hold together that well. I can't recommend it.
#9) Proxy (2013)- The presence of indie horror mainstay Joe Swanberg should announce to you that this movie will be insane, if nothing else. The real enjoyment of a movie like this is in trying to keep up with the constant plot developments, twists and reversals. I will say that, in the first ten minutes, you see a pregnant woman mugged and her belly beaten with a brick. Once she leaves the hospital and joins a support group for parents who lost children, she finds a fellow mourner with some dark secrets of her own. What follows goes kind of off the rails into violence, revenge and lesbian erotica. I had no idea where this was going and that is also the main thing I can recommend for it.
If you like Lifetime movies with a little harder edge, this is for you. The director claims to be a Kubrick disciple but this movie has Psycho written all over it. You'll see what I mean.
#10) V/H/S Viral (2014)- The third installment in this found footage anthology regains a little of the cool that the first edition had and avoids the pitfalls the second one fell into (mostly). The wraparound segment is more compelling this time as a kid who yearns to record a video that goes viral loses his girlfriend while trying to film a high speed pursuit around L.A. As he races to keep up with a mysterious ice cream truck, several smaller stories break off and examine the downside of everyone recording everything. It even has sort of an ending. Of course, these things are only as strong as their components...
Dante the Great by Gregg Bishop- This one really strains and batters the found footage concept, sometimes abandoning any rationale to get a good shot. It is about a trailer park magician who comes across a magic cloak that will grant him fame and powers so long as he feeds it with people. The effects are cheesy and the acting isn't great. The premise is kind of cool but I thought this was one of the weaker entries in the whole series.
Parallel Monsters by Nacho Vigalando- I admit, I like Vigalando's work. Timecrimes is one of my favorite time travel movies. He delivers some awesomely disturbing stuff in his segment about a scientist who opens a doorway to an alternate dimension at the same time as his doppelganger. They meet each other and agree to switch universes for 15 minutes. Although some details are pretty much the same (they are both married to the same woman and live in identical houses) there are some huge discrepancies between the two worlds that become swiftly obvious. This is some nasty little fun with lots of...interesting depictions of genitals.
Bonestorm by Justin Benson and Aaron Morehead- These guys brought us the top notch indie horror film Resolution last year. Now, they do a really scattered take on two skateboarders hiring a third guy to film them do tricks. The camera man seems more interested in getting the kids hurt than filming their smooth moves. He finally takes them to Tijuana to film in an empty culvert. The kids don't seem to notice all the shrines, rotting meat and pentagrams in their filming space and are soon visited by some spooky sorts. Once the ADD of the first half gives way to the confrontation between the skaters and the cult, all the go pros and camera angles actually create an intense effect.
Maybe it was the shorter runtime or the lack of a really long segment with a weak payoff but this edition just plays better than the last. If you like any of the directors involved, give it a shot.
#11) Dead Snow 2: Dead vs. Red- If you saw the first Dead Snow, you know how wacky these movies can be. The first was an Evil Dead homage with six friends going to a cabin in the woods only to find themselves hunted by Nazi Zombies. This one picks up right where the last one left off (with the sole survivor realizing he still has some of the Nazi gold that started all this). If anything, this installment is more ambitious. The success of the first one in America gets us Martin Starr as a co-star in this one, leading a group of Zombie hunters from the U.S.
This movie is not afraid to be silly and sets that tone from the beginning. If you always wondered why children and babies get spared in horror movies, this one takes such considerations off the board with extreme prejudice. Sometimes the juvenile sense of humor gets in the way of the movie (one character exists only as a gay panic joke) but, on the whole, it combines zombie action with humor pretty well. I won't give away how the communists come into this but just believe me when I say you do get some good zombie on zombie action.
Whew! Well, that is certainly enough for now. Be back soon with more.
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