#1st summoning

[horror-in-my-veins]

Horror movies based in each state in the United States

Part 4: Arkansas

12 Hour Shift 2020

1st Summoning 2018

Encounter With the Unknown 1972

Ghosts of the Ozarks 2021

House of Darkness 2022

Hunter’s Blood 1986

Sharkansas Women’s Prison Massacre 2015

The Town that Dreaded Sundown 1976

The Legend of Boggy Creek 1972

The Shadow of Chikara 1977

[scary-movies-on-netflix]

1ST SUMMONING (2018)

This is currently streaming on Netflix.  It’s not terrible, but it’s not good.  It’s aggressively mediocre. 

 Director guy previously made a “found footage” movie, and now he’s trying to strike again with yet another “found footage” project.  Tagging along are his girlfriend, producer guy, and camera dude.  They travel to backwoods Arkansas, talk to some locals about a spooky factory (abandoned in the 1970s), and then interview a creepy pastor. He talks about some incident in the past where a guy invoked SATAN and then put his children in stocks and killed them with an axe.  The quartet then sneak around the cemetery behind the church, and camera dude slips into the house, where nothing interesting happens.  Afterwards, we then have lots of interpersonal bullshit, because the girlfriend and the producer had a thing in the past, but none of that is very interesting and doesn’t really add to the plot or the creepiness.  Unfortunately, this bullshittery continues into the next day. We have a bit of the director being obsessively driven to explore the factory, even using a nice drone to look at it from overhead (before the drone crashes), but we have MANY MORE MINUTES of the girlfriend arguing with the producer.

Eventually, we get moving to the factory, and the crew find some empty stocks!  Shit!  They’re in a field.  Director guy throws up or some bullshit, but they press on, and we finally make it into the factory.  It’s just an abandoned factory, or a fantasy of what an abandoned factory might look like, because it’s full of a weird mix of contemporary and old-timey furniture and machines.  Like, the locker room has calendars from the 1950s, which makes no damn sense because earlier they said the factory was only open during the 1970s.  What the fuck?  Is the locker room traveling through time?

Anywho, they all reach the factory floor and perform some ritual summoning, and there’s noise and shouting and the director dude disappears!  Shit!  The others try to run out, but a bunch of dudes in cloaks and masks appear and chase them around for a long time.  This part drags on and on and on, but the trio are finally caught, and then we see them in the stocks, out in the nighttime forest.  A new cloaked figure appears and we watch from behind as they’re all axed in the head. The clocked figure is obviously the director, as his pants and shoes are the same.  

Overall, this is not spooky. The weird pastor was nicely strange, but that’s about it.  The rest is drama that doesn’t particularly enhance the frights and some half-assed spookiness. (A trinket that keep reappearing? Yawn.)  When the frights do arrive they mainly fail to deliver.  The final betrayal of the director was a somewhat nice trick.  There were some hints dropped along the way that something wasn’t right with him, but it still sort of comes out of nowhere.  The acting and production values elevate this mess a little bit, but not by much.  It’s obvious that many scenes were redubbed because they were originally too quiet, and the acting was fine, but to what point? This is still a boring movie.

[splatteronmywalls]

[thefilmagazine]

Horror Movie Review: 1st Summoning (2019)

"Found Footage is a subgenre that requires creativity and a semblance of originality... this film fails on both counts." Raymond Wood directs '1st Summoning', Jacob Davis offers the horror movie review.

[goatyellsateverything]

Yes. I GET that found footage is cheeper and if you can tell they spent the saved money on SOMETHING then it would be forgivable. Like, a couple I’ve seen used it on effects and stuff.

But if you dont have anything to show for the saved funds, what was the POINT? Make something smaller and stay within your budget. Otherwise, you’re just been cheep as fuck.

[goatyellsateverything]

Heh. Someone drew a dick in blood on the bathroom wall.

[goatyellsateverything]

Y’know, found footage would be easier to stomach if the characters actually used the cameras in realistic ways. Like, if you’ve got a camera with a screen on it, use it to see whats around corners instead of walking in and then scanning the room.

[goatyellsateverything]

Well, at least the first one dead is the dickface that forced them all into this bullshit...