You guys all probably know by now that I’m a pretty big scary movie fan, and since I’ve been back to blogging and have decided to integrate more spookiness and more things I love into my blog and photos to share with you all, I’ve decided to include movie reviews now and then. Last time I did a couple of mini reviews I focused on some true crime films, but scary movies are really where it’s at. 99% of the time if I’m going to put a movie on, I’m probably going to want to watch a horror movie.
The other 1% of the time it’s Harry Potter.
That being said, some movies knock it out of the park and some are bitter disappointments. In the last month or so, I’ve been lucky enough to have time to watch three scary movies, so I’m going to share my thoughts on them here. And within those three movies we have things all along the scale from that range of “bitter disappointment” to “knock it out of the park”. It’s a very eclectic mix.
Read on, fellow spoopy lovers.
School Spirit (2019)
School Spirit is a straight to Hulu type movie (which I guess is the new straight-to-video) from that Blumhouse “Into the Dark” collection, which seems to just be an onslaught of half-ass scary movies that are mostly rips off of something else and mostly just good for mindlessly killing time but not actually that enjoyable.
Oh, no, am I foreshadowing my thoughts on this one too much?
This movie starts out basically as a shot for shot remake of The Breakfast Club (I’m barely even kidding), complete with “the jock”, “the brain”, “the princess”, “the bad boy”, and the freak—who is kind of more of a female Judd Nelson, to be fair. (And has a pretty cute pair of boots, I’ll give her that.)
This one kid even looks like Anthony Michael Hall.
I don’t know, am I the only one seeing this?
Even the assistant principal is a dead ringer for VP Richard Vernon, complete with the whole bit where he threatens the resident bad boy with more and more days in detention and they get into a student/teacher power struggle standoff over it. Whether or not this imitation is intentional or not, I truly have no idea. But if it is, it’s pretty spot on, so congrats, I guess? The movie simultaneously takes itself too seriously and is also too ridiculous.
The VP sets the kids to work scraping “gum” off the bottoms of the library tables (which is clearly just balls of colored silly putty or Playdough because chewed gum looks nothing like that, and I would’ve thought Blumhouse had a better budget for props and effects than this, but okay. I guess this anthology is like the red-headed stepchild under the Blumhouse umbrella) before he leaves to quietly wallow in his own misery in the privacy of his office, stalking his ex-wife on Facebook as he drinks and cries over her new boyfriend or whatever.
This leaves the Saturday detention kids to do what Saturday detention kids in movies always do—find some trouble to get into. In this case, we bypass the quirky dancing in favor of getting high and telling ghost stories (like, where was my invite for this party, amiright?), specifically about the “school spirit” (get it?! School spirit? So clever, right?) which according to the kids could be the ghost of a vengeful dead teacher or a zombie—they really don’t know, but apparently this spirit haunts the school and that’s the main takeaway here. Meanwhile, one member of their party (the Anthony Michael Hall looking kid) has already wandered off and not returned, and they all seem remarkably unconcerned, probably due to all the weed.
Some other pointless stuff happens, and then the school spirit starts taking lives in the classic “wander off by themselves and end up dead” fashion of most slasher movies. We get an extra kill here in the form of Erica’s (“the princess”) ex-boyfriend who apparently hangs around the school on weekends for “basketball practice”, which is weird because there don’t seem to be any other members of the basketball team there…
Basketball Boyfriend plays the totally necessary role of the character who’s kind of a super douche and you actually don’t really care what happens to them, so the killer knocks them out first just to show the audience what they’re capable of.
The rest of the movie unfolds basically how anyone who has ever seen a movie would expect it to. The masked mascot villain (their mascot is “The Admiral”, so it’s basically a guy in a pirate outfit as far as I’m concerned) terrorizes the students and stalks them out, catching them alone and taking them out one by one. The movie also includes interspersed Breakfast Club bonding moments where the kids get to know each other as more than just “the princess” or “the freak” right before getting hatchets to the head.
I mean, come on, it can’t all be murders and blood baths.
Anyway, I’m about to spoil the hell out of this movie for anyone who hasn’t seen it because the “big twist” here is that the killer turns out to be one of the kids in the Breakfast Club (the prep kid, for anyone keeping track. The one who would be played by Emilio Estevez in the actual Breakfast Club). His motivation is that his mom was a teacher who was murdered at the school or something (it was hard to pay attention by this point), making the “vengeful teacher” story the authentic one and he thinks their school gets no respect because the kids there misbehave all the time and give them a bad rap, so naturally his solution to this is…to kill them? And then position all their bodies in an abandoned classroom underneath the school where he apparently lives. With the corpse of his mom.
The only one left alive at this point is Erica, who sits tied up with a school flag while the killer does his best impression of Tyra Banks in a speech about how disappointed in her he is. I’m not even kidding, he literally yells, “We were all rooting for you!”
Our final girl, Princess Erica, tricks the killer by convincing him to untie her so they can have an impromptu school dance complete with K. Ci and Jojo and a disco ball, because all killers keep disco balls in their secret lairs, duh. Once he’s let his guard down, Erica kills him and runs outside just as cops are starting to show up to help. Erica manages to spin the whole thing in her favor by making herself look like the bravest/most dedicated student ever and using her experience as a topic for a college admissions essay so she can get into Harvard.
And that’s really how it ends, folks.
This is like a 1/5 stars. Do not watch this unless you really have no other use for your brain cells.
Pet Sematary (2019)
I’m sure you all basically know the plot of Pet Sematary. Magic/haunted/holy cemetery where if you bury things in a certain area they come back to life is discovered by family. They test it out, starting with the family cat, who comes back very changed and very angry, and ending with the family’s child who is killed in a horrible accident. Madness ensues. Whatever you think will go wrong here, it does.
Just like with the original Pet Sematary movie, the best character in this is obviously Church the cat.
Despite the fact that the loss of Fred Gwynne as the debatably creepy neighbor is a crushing blow and no one could ever fill those Herman Munster-sized shoes, I actually really did like this remake—mostly. We do the usual Pet Sematary rundown where they discover the cemetery, find out about its questionable abilities, etc. All of that part of the movie, I love. Even the introduction to it with the procession of kids marching in animal masks and drumming was perfectly creepy and a really good set up. If the whole movie had maintained that exact vibe (which I realize is probably difficult to do), it would have knocked it out of the park and been a 5/5.
But, unfortunately, we did stray from that at times, particularly with the whole completely unnecessary second storyline/B-plot about the mother’s sister. I’ve never liked this whole plot about the sister and I honestly think it adds absolutely nothing to the story, and I disliked how it was portrayed in this adaptation of the movie even more. The mother’s sister suffered from some a disease that not only twisted up her body in painful contortions but also apparently made her parents abandon her in her room to develop bed sores and random green spots all over her nightie, because that’s how sick people look, right? I mean how else are you going to know she’s sick unless she’s covered with unidentifiable green stuff and bodily fluids and there are flies in her room? There’s no other way to possibly get that across the audience, right?
Anyway, the sick sister eventually died in a dumbwaiter (which she for some reason crawled inside of when all she had to do was open it up to get her food??? This gives me more questions than answers?) which the mother in the Pet Sematary-centric family blames herself for, and now she is haunted by the memories of her dead, twisted up sister and that makes her hesitant to talk to her young kids about death. Again, I just feel that not only does it add nothing to the movie, it actually takes away from it. In my opinion, the story of the cemetery can stand alone. We don’t need all that.
So far as the actual Pet Sematary plotline was concerned, I loved it. I loved that (um, spoilers ahead) the child who died in this version was a little bit older, really allowing the actress playing the child to tap into the creepy. Sometimes younger children aren’t able to do that, so giving an older kid with acting chops the chance at the role was a really good decision in terms of spookiness and believability. Even though the little boy from the original Pet Sematary will always be a little shit in my mind thanks to the combination of his role in the film and his role in Full House (you all know what I mean), I liked the little girl in this better.
I think the young actress in this one did an excellent job of dialing up the creepy, right down to the monotone voice she used post-resurrection, and I also loved the effects they used on her after she had died and been dug back up. Definitely disconcerting. I also loved the dad’s acting as he gets more and more uncomfortable with what he’s done and with his daughter as he realizes that she is, indeed, not the same little girl anymore. The way the whole thing slowly fell apart and they came to see what she really was now was scary and well done.
There was also a really good, very tense, adrenaline-filled moment when the little girl actually dies where you’re not actually sure which child is about too be killed and it’s really a nail-biter, and I really liked the way it was filmed. One of the best moments in the movie, in my opinion.
Thennnnn we got to the ending. And I think it really fell apart here. I didn’t really like the ending at all. It’s a similar concept to the original (kind of), but it’s carried out in a way that I just think is really silly. Basically, they wrap up with every single member of the family except the baby pretty much taking turns killing each other and burying each other in the Pet Sematary and then they all shamble back to the house as a one big, complete zombie family. They don’t really show what happens to the little boy, who is just sitting inside the car waiting for his family to return and they leave it more open-ended, but yeah, the rest of them are super undead.
So, yeah, clearly we needed to quit while we were ahead.
I guess the TL;DR here is: pretty good movie throughout (with the exception of the whole B-storyline with her mom and her dead sister), super cool cinematography, very creepy moments—crappy ending.
I’d say 3.5/5? I enjoyed watching it, though. It was a fun time, unlike School Spirit which made me want to wander off and find something to bang my head off.
Hole in the Ground (2019)
A24, on the other hand, is just churning out bangers on the regular. People are starting to wake up to this production company, which is the driving force behind The Witch and Hereditary, with the latter easily being one of the best horror movies I’ve seen in the past year, and the former of which is also really good despite being the definition of a slow burn.
I just stumbled across Hole in the Ground while browsing through the available horror movies on Amazon Prime and Johnathan said that looks good, let’s try it. And he was right. This movie was so good. This came out in 2019, but apparently not to much fanfare, because I haven’t heard anyone mention it up until now. It definitely didn’t get the attention or promotion other recent A24 releases, like Midsommar (still on my list), have gotten. And for shame! More people should check this one out.
We’ve got the creepy kid angle here again, which as you know from my previous posts on haunted baby dolls and black-eyed children are always good for some spoop. In this one, a single mom and her son move into a big (really cool) new (but actually old) house and while mom is fixing the place up, they try to rebuild their lives after what seems to be a pretty ugly split from the little boy’s dad. One day on a walk in the woods they come across—well, a hole in the ground. A huge one. And everything changes.
That night, the mom thinks her little boy has wandered out into the woods again, and she chases after him. Not finding him, she returns home to call 911, only to see him in the house, where he insists he’s been the whole time. But after this, things change and she starts to think that the boy residing in her home with her is actually not her son and is in fact not just someone else, but something else. Something evil.
The entire concept of this is just so terrifying and I loved the way it was executed as we watch the young mother slowly break down, fighting with herself over the fact that she knows this seems crazy but she truly believes this being is not her own son who she knows and loves. His behavior throughout is pretty freaky, and the young mother has some really creepy visions and experiences as things get worse and worse.
Again, the little boy in this nails the role of creepy, really achieving a great dead-behind-the-eyes look as he combs his hair and sings or stares at his mother in a really tense moment where she tries to get him to play a little silly faces game they’ve always played together and he doesn’t remember how it goes.
The mother and son in this film both just nail it, and on top of being creepy as hell, it’s also gorgeous. There’s some impressive overhead shots of the woods and the roads leading to their isolated neighborhood, but what I liked the most was that the whole thing was done in really muted, grayish tones, which really added to the vibe and dreary, spooky feeling that overtook the whole movie.
This was my favorite of the scary movies I’ve watched recently and I highly recommend it! 5/5. Give it a shot, especially if you have Amazon Prime, as it’s included in the service!
What about everyone else? Have you seen any of the movies mentioned here? What did you think? What scary movies have you seen recently, and which of them would you recommend? Let me know in the comments! As always, I’d love to hear from you. <3