ROOM 33 (2009)
When I explain how ridiculous the plot to this movie is, you won’t wonder why it’s on the list. See, a roller derby team on a road trip picks up two strangers, starts to run out of gas, finds an obstacle in the road ahead of them and so they stop to spend the night in an abandoned asylum where, of course, their phones don’t have signals. They find a girl there, Roxy, who’s bruised up and who attacks them first thing. So, after they start getting picked off, one roller derby girl thinks Roxy is the killer and another roller derby girl thinks Roxy is just a victim. When the killer is revealed to be some rando in a trench coat, it is as nonsensical as it is stupid.
ASYLUM OF FEAR (2018)
As you may have guessed, DJ and I watch all the asylum movies. We usually even find something to like about them, but with this movie, we just couldn’t. A group of paranormal investigators go to the asylum after two boys disappear. Freaky shit starts to happen and they decide to stay anyway. They’re even kinda excited about it. They end up finding out some interesting truths, but something in the asylum wants the truth to stay buried. Unfortunately, this movie should have stayed buried. The filmmakers spent all the money on blood and guts and left none for the actors or more importantly, the story. It really should be missed.
JOLLY ROGER: MASSACRE AT CUTTER’S COVE (2005)
It’s just a cheap version of “The Fog” really. It’s about a demon pirate who’s unwittingly unleashed by some stupid teenagers. Alex, Jess and four of their friends are drinking on the beach, when two of them accidentally let the homicidal pirate out into the real world. He immediately kills four of them, leaving only Alex and Jess alive. When they go to the police, the chief believes it was Alex who killed his friends, so he runs, taking Jess with him, to track down the pirate. Meanwhile, the petty pirate is killing the descendants of the people who robbed and killed him. However, he soon seems to kill indiscriminately, doing it all for fun more than anything. He even goes to a strip club, seemingly out of nowhere, and kills a stripper and a bouncer. And if you’re not sure how cheap the movie is by this point, when the police get the “surveillance video” from the club’s security camera, the footage is somehow seen from many different angles and is literally just a black-and-white version of the murder scene we were already shown. There’s several other glaring mistakes as well, like when the bartender at the strip club says they don’t serve alcohol, but in the very next scene you can clearly see alcohol on the shelves behind the bar. The movie as a whole is ludicrous. We should have turned it off. The script was severely lacking, the innovation was a yawn and the ending was ridiculous. There were boobs though, we’ll give it that at least.
ANIMUS (2013)
We can’t give this atrocious movie any points at all. It’s yet another abandoned hospital movie we watched that brought nothing new to the table. Of course, it’s about a group of young people who go to the hospital because they think it’s haunted. They need to make a documentary type thing for a college class, so they pick this subject and head there with ghosts in mind. And although the main girl talks of nothing but ghosts, the movie isn’t really about ghosts at all. There are ghosts there, but they aren’t important in the end. The killer isn’t a ghost, he’s just a guy. A guy with massive knife attached to his arm. The movie is unbelievably stupid. The budget is beyond low and the actors are beyond awful. We are certainly never watching it again.
DAY OF THE DEAD 2: CONTAGIUM (2005)
We actually turned this movie off after 30 minutes. It was that dreadful. It – supposedly – intends to be a prequel to the 1985 George Romero classic, Day of the Dead, but it doesn’t feel that way at all. The plot follows the zombie virus as it is initially released inside of a mental hospital. In the very beginning of the movie they talk about this crackpot philosophical bullshit that mentions immortality and love not mattering. Say what now? Moving on, the movie doesn’t really address these philosophies. It’s not about immortality per se, it’s about zombies. They’re not immortal because they’re already dead. And they can technically get dead again, so, whatever. And the whole love thing makes no sense at all. There’s not even a proper love story in the movie, so why they had to bring it up at all is beyond me. There was no point. The characters were obnoxious, the acting was terrible, the story was forgettable. Skip it.
INFECTED (2013)
Another zombie movie we hated actually had some rather successful actors in it. But even with Michael Madsen, William Forsythe and my brother’s crush, Christy Carlson Romano, as leads, the movie failed to impress. Madsen and Forsythe are fathers who take their sons hunting to bond with them. While they’re there a mutant strain on Lyme Disease turns people into zombies, but only in the loosest sense of the word. These “zombies” can walk straight and talk straight and even argue with people. It also seems like they are somewhat remorseful. That’s just nuts. How are there now zombies with regrets? Besides that, some of the acting is really flawed, the pacing is a drag and the effects are not cool. And most of the time you’re just watching people drink alcohol and eat the poor animals they’ve hunted down. Blah.
URBAN LEGENDS: BLOODY MARY (2005)
Kate Mara, Rooney Mara, Don Shanks and Olesya Rulin headline this movie, but just like the last movie, they could not save the wretched plot. In this, Bloody Mary became Bloody Mary in 1969 when she and two other girls were drugged by a few male classmates. When she fought back, one of them hit her, knocking her out. Believing she was dead, they put her into a trunk. But she was alive and she ended up suffocating. Decades later, three girls barely chant Bloody Mary’s name, conjure her up and she immediately goes on a killing spree. Apparently she’s killing the children of the people who killed her. It’s a crap motive really. The ways in which she kills people are recycled from better movies. The acting is bad. The script is ludicrous. The movie is just so unrealistic and pointless. Predictable as well.
THE GALLOWS (2015)
Written, directed, produced and/or edited by Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing, this found footage movie did nothing to help the horror genre. We should have turned it off as soon as the guy behind the camera started talking – and talking and talking and talking. We hated him. We hated everyone. We hated the whole story really. The viewer is shown a high school student, Charlie, being accidentally hanged during a school play. Then, we are made to believe that 20 years later, the same school would attempt to put on the same play. Why? What would be the point? But that’s what they do in this story and it all turns out terrible. Four students wind up locked in the school, at night, and Charlie’s ghost wants to play. The students don’t appear to know anything about Charlie at first, which doesn’t make sense. How would they not know? I know I keep throwing questions into the void here, but all this movie does is inspire questions. There really aren’t any answers given at all. Just more questions. By the time you get to the twist in the movie – because of course, there’s a twist – you are already in such a headspace that you couldn’t actually care less about what’s really going on. It’s not like the twist isn’t horrible anyway. We really should have listened to Rotten Tomatoes when they said it wasn’t any good. And you should listen to us now when we say it’s just awful. There’s simply not enough here to condone watching this. It’s unoriginal. The script is lousy. The motive is lacking. There’s no Freddy Claws. It’s seriously unwatchable. Don’t put yourself through the suckfest that we did. It ain’t worth it. None of these movies are.
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