House at the End of the Street

A divorcee and her teenage daughter Elissa move into a small town and a house they can really only afford because of what happened next door.

Legend has it that a young girl killed her parents years ago and now only the girl's brother lives in the house. The girl, 13 at the time, was said to have disappeared into the nearby woods and/or drowned in a nearby lake. But no body was ever recovered, so you know there is something very fishy about ti. The boy, one Ryan, had been sent away to live with an aunt after causeing an accident that left his sister mentally challenged. He is now back (and in college) to renovate the house so that he can sell it.

Elissa totally likes Ryan and even though the rest of the town, at best, shuns him or, at worst, beats him up she stands by him. Her mom doesn't like that either for some reason. I'm not quite clear why that is, especially since she has something going with a local policeman who finds no issue with the young man whatsoever.

Anyway, both Elissa and the small town cop are wrong about Ryan.

What really happened is this:
The parents were totally drugged out in the house while Ryan and his little sister were playing outside. The girl wanted to go higher and higher on the swing and Ryan failed to hold her arm for a bit and she fell off backwards and hit her head. This left her not retarded (bad word! bad word!) but, um, well, dead. The parents blame the boy and from now on decide that he is the daughter and raise him as such. But then once the teenage hormones kick in, he snaps and kills the parents and reappears as the poor discarded brother.

He cannot, however, cope without his little sister and keeps a young woman in the basement that he pumps full of drugs of some kind (whereever he got them from....). The woman in the basement is exchangeable because, you know, sometimes shit happens and he breaks her neck when she tries to run off through the forest and he catches up with her just in time.

Anyway, final showdown, cop dies, mom gets injured, Elissa kills culprit. And then....they move out again. Sure, they were fine living beside a house in which some sort of tragedy happened and where the town weirdo is still holed up, but now that it is just a house, no way José. We're done here.

3/10

Evil Dead II

I took a couple of weeks off from posting or, rather, from watching movies because I was preoccupied with working my way through all nine seasons of The Office.

My return to the blog is part 2 of the Evil Dead series.

Following this is a re-telling of part 1 in which our hero Ash only takes his girlfriend to the deserted cabin of the first installment. The find the book, girl loses her head, Ash is left to face the evil spirits all alone. He does lose a body part, as well. To save himself from alien hand syndrome he cuts the affected limb off with a chainsaw. And he goes slightly mad.

Soon he is joined by a group of four people, one of them the daughter of the owner of the cabin. Her scientist father found and translated the evil book and it was his voice on tape that called on the evil spirits. The daughter now brings with her the means to undo all that - missing pages.

But before they are saved of anything more blood will flow.

Basically the same as part one with different cast (except for the wonderful Bruce Campbell). The main difference is that this one does not take itself too seriously.

7/10

"Carnival of Souls" Horror Movies 1918-1966

In case you are in Vienna for the next few weeks...

Ghost Ship

Last Sunday's horror film bonanza (see my previous posts) concluded with Ghost Ship. Sort of as a way to calm down after The Collector/The Collection we needed something blood free and relatively calm. It was....fine. Not really scary.

Some guy contacts a group of what can only be described as ocean teasure hunters because he saw a seemingly deserted ocean liner in the middle of nowhere while flying over and, who knows, it may be worth something. The group is beat and ready to go home but the promise of financial gain prompts them to join in.

When they find the ship it does hold what they were hoping for - gold. And lots of it. It is also haunted by seemingly all the passengers that were on it when they 'mysteriously disappeared' in the 1960s. The disappearance, of course, was not so mysterious after all. Most were killed for the gold the ship was holding.

The new arrivals also find a pile of bodies that could only have been there for a few months. And they start seeing things and miscalculating dangers and people die. (Of course they do.)

Not too surprisingly, the guy that first alerted them to the ship's existance has something to do with all the eery things that have been happening. Turns out he is not a human but once was a very bad man and has to collect souls for his boss (the devil, one assumes) and the ship seemed to be as good a hunting ground as any, but he needed to get someone to fix it agains because it was in danger of sinking.

In the end, the lone survivor is straped to a gurney, because she is badly injured and as she lifts her head she sees the boxes of gold being loaded onto another ship and the bad guy boarding with them.

Oh, well.

4/10

The Collection

Daddy's little rich girl gets cancelled on by her (no good) boyfriend and goes off with friend to a party so exclusive one needs a password ('Nevermore') to get in. Looks like everyone knows the password, though, as the place is stuffed. Even the boyfriend is there, making out with some random blonde.

The location has been prepared by the elusive serial killer known as the collector. The people on the dancefloor get eliminated by what looks like a part of a giant lawnmower, some get caged in and simply squeezed to death. Also on the premises is one red box, holding our hero (ish) from part 1, Arkin.

He manages to escape the house of death by jumping from a first floor window with a body (the boyfriend) in front of him to break his fall. Daddy's girl takes his place in the box. Arkin is questioned by police who apparently cannot decide whether he is just a victim or is somehow involved with the mass murder that has just occured. Just in case, they cuff him to his hospital bed.

Shortly after, he is visited by a squad like outfit tasked with finding and rescuing the newest collection piece. And they want Arkin to lead the way. They don't give him much of a choice in the matter but simply put a gun to his head. So he takes them to the location he was being held and tortured in. He can tell the way because he cut marks in his arm, one straight one whenever he had counted to 100 and a diagnol one for every turn the car made. They end up at a place called Hotel Argento (a nod to the director? maybe), which is the collector's headquarter.

Unsurprisingly, the place is a death trap. The group (including Bubble from The Wire) has to pick their way around the house and - also unsurprisingly - get killed off one by one. They find a few victims of the collector in various stages of paranoia (mostly drug infueled). Daddy's girl has by now managed to free herself from the red box and navigates her own way through the labyrinth of death.

Her and Arkin will be the only ones to make it out alive. The body of the collector, or whatever should be left of it after an explosion and extensive fire, is not found on the scene. Jump to some time later...Arkin has dedicated himself to finding the culprit, having concluded that the guy really is a collector. Of insects, that is. He finds the guy through some registry of entomologists and - after telling him that he will torture him extensively before killing him, forces him into a box.

The stage is set for part 3, I think.

7/10

The Collector

The Chase family has recently moved to a remote location and as the house needs some fixing up, they have hired Arkin (Josh Stewart, very easy on the eyes) as a handyman. They also have a bit of a bug problem, so an exterminating firm makes an appearance early on in the film

Arkin needs money to pay off his wife's debts with some shady character. He needs this money right now. Luckily, the Chase family is set to go away for a couple of weeks and he knows where the safe is hidden and the things inside it will easily get him what he needs.

After dark, he goes back to the house and lets himself in. Just when he is about to crack the code for the safe he realizes that he is not alone, after all. The next thing he notices is that the entire house is rigged with deadly traps. A masked man, the 'Collector' in the title, is looking for an addition fitting for his collection (he collects humans, apparently) an it could be one of the Chases.

The parents are both stashed away in the basement, both badly hurt. Unfortunately, he could not yet get a hold of the two daughters of the family. The older, Jill, is a bit of a trouble maker (your average teenager) and off somewhere with a boyfriend after having refused to go on the family vacation. The younger, Hannah, is simply hiding. Also in the house is the previous collection piece, a man kept inside a red box (the box is what ties the collector's crimes together).

Arkin is torn between helping the people he was going to steal from and making a run for it. The latter option made very difficult thanks to the deadly weapons that could hit him in every room in the house.

Jill and her boyfriend make an appearance. They believe the house to be empty. When they start to make out the collector takes a creepy interest but Jill spots him and after being attacked dials 911 without being able to talk to the operator. There follows the death of the boyfriend, and a disgusting death it is. Arkin comes to Jill's aid while the collector is off investigating a sound. Arkin looks bloody and beat at this point and has no business being there in the first place, so Jill assumes he is an accomplice. While backing away from him she picks up a pair of scissors to use as a weapon, triggering a trap that nails her to the wall.

After he realizes that both parents and Jill are dead at this point, Arkin makes it out of the house but when he turns to look back he sees little Hannah begging for his help from an upstairs window. So back in he goes to rescue the little girl. Despite all the traps, some acid fluids, and one very angry dog they manage to get away. Arkin, having quite the bad day, gets hit by an oncoming cop car. Nevertheless, Hannah gets rescued and he gets put in an ambulance and taken away.

But there is no happy ending for him. The collector hits the ambulance with his own car, causing it to flip over and Arkin ends up in the red box.

Bad guy wins.

8/10

Sinister

A true-crime writer, who apparently gets a kick (or "inspiration") out of moving into homes where crimes have been committed, tries to reignate his faded flame of stardom by writing this one book that will change everything.

For that purpose he moves his family into nice suburban house. Of course, this home is no different, never mind what he tells his wife. Right at the beginning of the film, we see a super 8 film of a family 'hanging around'. In this case, this translates to a group hanging of every family member but one - a little girl disappears and is never heard of again.

Soon, our writer finds a box in the attic holding a number of home movies from different decades and shot in far apart locations. What they all have in common is that on each we see a family murdered. The manner changes but from each family one child goes missing.

The connection? Bughuul. That is some sort of demon, only few drawings of it remain. Along with the videos, the writer finds drawings of the different crimes, seemingly done by children and naming all the victims and putting an extra figure next to the dead bodies, called 'Mr. Boogie'.

What connnects the victim's families is that each has lived in a house that was once occupied by one of the other families. So, when the writer finds that out, it is already too late for him and his loved ones, even though he did get the hell out of Dodge when weird occurences and sounds in the new house had spooked him out enough.

They die by the hand of their young daughter. After she is done, she is picked up by Mr. Boogie and carried into another super 8 film.

In normal films this would all be weird but in horror films this sort of works. It would have been great except for one thing that bugged me throughout - they never turn on the lights. They even have dinner in the near dark. While this may add some suspense to the viewing experience if you stop and think about it it is just plain stupid.

6/10