20 Horror Movies for $7.50 — Part XV of XX.

A title card tells us we are starting off in Stockholm Sweden so hopes are high with visions of nurses, stewardesses and — that being a free country, bikini teams — dancing in my head. Nope, nuns.  Well that was a buzz-kill.

While schoolgirl Anna is lured to the science lab on the last day of school, another girl goes through her luggage, passport, plane tickets, and au pair contract.  OK, OK, au pair . . . this thing is salvageable.  Anna gets to the dark lab and is clobbered by a pestle^[1] the size of a bowling pin — WTF were they mashing up in there?  Cut to a well manicure hand turning on the gas in the lab (which has more jets than United), a body strolling past a lit candle, leaving the school, and KABOOM.

Back in the USA, hot business woman Kate (a Linda Hamilton doppelganger) comes home to a house that is messier than my condo, like they just moved in.  That day.

Stay-at-home dad Bob makes dinner for her and their 8 year old daughter Christina played by 10 year old Elizabeth Moss and looking exactly like she does in Mad Men.  Somehow Bob has managed to burn dinner in  a microwave with a freakin’ timer, so they order enough Chinese food for Peking. On the bright side, maybe they don’t have a gas stove.

That night, just as Bob and Kate are about to have the sex, faux-Anna (hereafter known as Anna) knocks on the door.  Despite her first day being a disaster, she stays on at the house.

Meanwhile, back in Stockholm, Kirsten’s (the faux Anna’s) father is suspicious why her personal things are gone from her room.  Personally, I am suspicious why the enormous conflagration did not seem to do any damage to the school.

Other than the inevitable 1) au pair very mildly flirting with the father scene, and 2) mother feeling replaced and threatened scene, not much happens in the middle section, yet I was never bored. The cast was good in their roles, even though I didn’t recall seeing most of them (as adults, anyway).

So Anna took Christina to a theme park 2 days before Kate had promised to take her.  So Nick and Anna went shopping for Christina’s birthday presents without Kate because she was working.  Nothing radical ever really happened, but that’s all it took to get to the two lines that ignited the 3rd act:  Kate:  “I want that woman out of my house. Now.  Today.”  Nick: “What do we tell Christina?  That Anna had to go away because mommy couldn’t stand the competition?”  Oh no you d’int!

Act III:  Kate storms into the house and into her bedroom, slamming the door.  She immediately gets a call from Dr. Loomis — er, I mean “Anna’s” father. Since his character gets no name on IMDb, let’s just go with Loomis.  He tells Kate that “Anna” is really his daughter Kirsten and , “She is EVIL!”  Wow, he IS Dr. Loomis.  “And that she will do anything to get what she wants . . . your child.”  Christina has been chosen by Anna to make a bond with the devil.

They agree on a meeting place and hang up, but Anna has been eavesdropping on the kitchen phone.  Oddly, Kate has been talking on a black phone, and EVIL Anna has been listening in on a white phone.  Seems like . . . well, I ain’t no director.  Kate tears through the house looking for Christina, but she and “Anna” have fled and are hiding in the woods.

Rather than call the police, Kate goes through “Anna’s” room and finds 2 passports and a t-shirt from the Rhode Island School of Design.  She breaks into Nick’s studio and finds a Gieger-esque painting of the family and “Anna”.  She runs to Christina’s bedroom to find her coloring — so what was the point of hiding in the woods.  As Kate drags Christina screaming out of the house, she is stopped by Anna who has enlisted Nick and, for some reason, the landscaper to stop her.

Kate, again forgoing the police, goes to see Loomis at an abandoned building scarier than “Anna”.  There is the usual EVIL rigamarole, a pact with the devil, wedding a child bride, a pendant, a book.  On the other hand, Satan waits until the child’s 21st birthday to bear him a child.  So either devil-babies have remarkably long gestation periods, or Satan does have some boundaries.

The landscaper finally has a purpose as he kills Loomis in the classic “always run in a straight line when a car or spaceship is bearing down on you” strategy.  Finally Kate calls the police — no, wait, she drives home,  The wedding ceremony has already begun with Nick creepily giving away the bride and putting the pendant on her.  In a struggle, fire spreads throughout the orchard as “Anna” escapes with Christina into the burning house — another brilliant strategy.

Caught between “Anna” and her mother, Christina does the right thing and tosses the book into the fire.  “Anna” tries to retrieve it, but is killed as the roof collapses — a trick Satan usually saves for snowy church roofs.

Despite a firey load-bearing member^[2] collapsing on top of her, “Anna” escapes without so much as a singe as she is seen hitchhiking.  Looking like she does, she easily gets a ride — and what luck, a nice couple with a daughter.

There is absolutely nothing remarkable or fresh about this movie, but somehow I found myself kind of liking it.  Maybe it was little Elizabeth Moss looking crazily like grown Elizabeth Moss, maybe it was grown Marcy Walker (Kate) looking like grown Linda Hamilton, maybe it was Olivia D’Abo just looking awesome, maybe after a rough week, I just needed a big fat comfortable chair of a movie.

Would I ever recommend it to anyone?  Never.  Will I ever watch it again?  Never.  Yet, somehow I didn’t feel like it was a waste of time.

However, the poster is God-awful.

Post-Post:

•  ^[1] Finally, I know which part is the mortar and which part is the pestle.  It’s been keeping me up nights.
• ^[2] Coincidentally, the same thing Satan had for Christina in a few years..
• Executive Producer:  Victoria Principal, who in 1992 should have been in front of the camera.
• The director went on to do several episodes of Breaking Bad, winning an Emmy for one.
• Does anyone eat Chinese food at home with chopsticks?  Even the Chinese?  Use a fork, ya hipster doofus!
• Was the Rhode Island School of Design t-shirt a joke?  That was the alma mater of David Byrne, maybe best known for Psycho Killer.
• The plural of au pair is aux pairs.

20 Movies for $7.50 — Part XIV of XX

A pretty nice car pulls up in front of a not so nice run-down house.  A man steps out and says, “I can’t believe somebody bought this piece of shit.”  He goes in, but is quickly scared out by ghostly breathing and murmurs.

Six months later.

Calling from  his office, the hyper-tanned Mitch interrupts a very pleasant viewing experience (see below) as Sara cleans up some spilled milk.  He informs his wife Sara that the family is taking a trip to her family’s old cabin which he purchased.  The lack of emotion, and really any sign of life, he exhibits in this call, is stunning.  He is a non-entity.

The reaction of Sara is strange also.  We have just seen the cabin a few seconds earlier.  The realtor is correct, it is a “piece of shit.”  Seen in the prologue, it is filthy and does not even seem to still have walls separating the rooms — God knows what’s holding the roof up.  Why isn’t her response, “Are you f***ing crazy?”

Clearly Mitch is successful, he has a beautiful wife with big boobs, his cute young secretary is flirting with him while he talks to his wife, he either owns a tanning bed or has lots of free time to lay out by the pool, and he just bought a cabin in the woods.  Yet, I reiterate, he is a dull, dull zero.  I just hope this is laying the groundwork for him to eventually go ape-shit with an axe as the movie progresses.

They pull up to site of the house formerly known as “piece of shit.”  Mitch has had the original house torn down and built a large luxurious cabin in its place.

The movie is so inept that it is not clear when Sara learns that he has had this palace built.  He only told her on the phone that he bought the property, but when they get there she says it looks nothing like the pictures, so she is aware of the new structure.  Like her husband, she shows almost no interest or emotion.

Their teenage son Scott has no interest in the house and takes off for a walk in the woods.  Being a teenager, this is at least in character for him.  He too senses someone else and hears murmurs and laughter.  He then becomes very interested in the house — interested in running his ass inside of it to hide.

We discover that Mitch had an affair and his wife and older son’s still hold a huge grudge against him.  Sara says she wishes there was some way she could thank him for the house, clearly implying he ain’t gonna get any — he looks like he spends more time in a tanning bed than regular bed anyway.

That night, they get a little mileage out of a kid scurrying by just out of Sara’s sight, and other creepy kids being revealed as a character move to the side.  I’m usually a sucker for this kind of thing, but this is going nowhere. There are several, and I mean multiple scenes of the creepy kids near or seen by the daughter Christina, but nothing ever happens.  They are not threatening, the are just there.  After a while you can get used to anything; even a creepy zombie kid just standing around.

The filmmakers also make far too extensive use of screeching violins.  Everyone can agree the the shrieking strings in the Psycho shower scene were great. Imagine them going on for several minutes and you’ll get how grating this noise is.

The next day, Mitch has to go back home for the day — something about trouble at the office or a missed tanning appointment, I forget.  OK, now things are really going to take off.  Well we do get a flashback of Sara’s abusive mother, but it’s too little too late at this point.

There is some occasional interesting camera work, the creepy kids are explained, and the interaction between the live kids (not involving the parents) often rang true. Otherwise there is nothing to be said for this one.  What a waste of a good title.

Post-Post:

• No, Sean Patrick Flaherty is in this.
• Available on Amazon Prime, but why would ya?

20 Horror Movies for $7.50 — Part XIII of XX.

A woman awakens from a nightmare at 3:25, no 3:26.  I feel sorry for directors — they want to establish the time, but there’s not much you can do with a digital clock, so they always have the same hackneyed shot of the minute clicking over.  And that’s all we get before the title. Not exactly setting us up for a thrillride.

Cedric the aspiring entertainer is on his bike in New York City looking for a vocalist for his band.  Apparently auditions are passé, and such career opportunities are now offered to random strangers.  He is talking to one candidate on the sidewalk, but she turns out to be a poet — so close!  Ebony, the woman with the nightmare, sees her old friend Cedric, so he offers her the job.

They go out the next night Cedric finds out she had been dating a white guy.  His racist response, “I don’t know why you’re frontin’, dating all these vanilla guys.  You know you need a brother in your life.”  He further sweet talks her by accusing her white boyfriend of having a small dick and stating that “You know brothers is the ones with the anacondas.”  Off to the side, we see a leather clad figure crumbling a red rose in his hands.

The next night, Vanilla white guy Alex breaks into her bedroom and begins assaulting her.  She fights him off, and he immediately disappears as her father comes to her rescue, assuring her it must have been a dream.  But could we have had one shot of maybe an open or closed window to give us a clue?

Ebony explains to some vanilla white girl named Candice — roommate, best friend? — while painting each other’s toenails that she dropped Alex when he began to get into sorcery, magic and Gothic spells. Ebony, as a Christian, “is not down with that shit” as they say in church.  Alex calls, but Ebony tells him it’s still over.  That night she has another nightmare about Alex.

Ebony goes to see Cedric whose advances she had blown off earlier that night.  But, damn the timing, he is getting blown off again by his old girlfriend Dee — and the good way.

That night Candice has a scary but non-eventful wait for the subway.  At home, Candice erases two messages without listening to them, I guess assuming they are from someone who had harassed her cell phone earlier.  She pours a class of wine and sees a man down on the street doing something, but it is impossible to see what she finds so menacing about him.

She runs for her landline but gets a “the number you have reached is not in service at this time” recording, so she runs for her cellphone.  Candice mutters something unintelligible, but why does she think her cellphone will get through when her land line will not?  She picks up the cell and it shows a text message “I AM COMING TO KILL YOUR ASS!”

Rather than call, oh say, 9-1-1, Candice begins running down the stairs toward the guy. He has the same idea and begins running up the stairs.  He follows her back to her apartment and she is able to take a baseball bat to him, unfortunately about as effectively as the girls in The Cellar Door.  In the next inning, he begins beating her beside the bath-tub, but she recognizes him and says “You?”  He crumbles a red rose over her dead not-naked body.

Cedric figures it was Alex and says, “I’ll kill his cracker ass!” Fortunately, his friend and business partner Kyle is more level headed.  Kyle then also goes to Ebony to hit on her. Ebony shows him the door also.

Cedric’s girlfriend Dee calls Ebony and threatens to kill her if her man Cedric is there. As she is leaving to kick Ebony’s ass, the leather-clad man is at her door and kills her. Thank God.  Ebonys’ father comes in to see what is upsetting her, but he makes it clear that he had no use for her “cracker” boyfriend either.

And then some other stuff happens.  Finally, Alex possesses the body of Cedric.  He explains how he killed everyone, and emerges in the form of Alex; with a pentagram carved in his forehead.  Somehow Ebony sends Alex back to hell.

She and racist, cheating Cedric head out for LA, because he’s such a catch.  The detective walks out of the room and says , “I’m going to have a hard time explaining this.”  You and me both.

This seemed like a borderline racist white guy’s idea of making a black indie movie. Other than Ebony, there were really no black characters to root for.  Cedric is an asshole, cheating on his girlfriend, Kyle is a good guy, but then you are lead to believe that he is the murderer.  Both are assigned the character of “aspiring rap artists” which shows up in a lot of crime reports.  Dee is just a caricature of a loud-mouth obnoxious black woman.  Even Ebony’s father seems like a nice guy until he starts calling her boyfriend a cracker.

On the other hand, the voices of authority and reasonableness are Ebony’s white friend Candice and the white detectives. These just seem like strange choices from a black writer / director. The ultimate bad guy — the murderer — is white, however.  So props for that, yo.

Post-Post:

• I had never seen any of these actors, except Ebony’s father in other shows.
• The roses were not emphasized or explained enough to warrant the title.