#state horror

[almostfinalgirl]

Borderline

Themes: 2.5/5. Stalking is bad, BPD Baddies are insane freaks, and rich people are self centered. Those themes are present and, in my opinion, fairly offensive on the BPD front as someone who IS borderline.

Storytelling: 3/5. It was coherent and the comedy was well paced. That’s pretty much all I can really say for it. The basis of the story itself was incredibly ableist as well. I think there are ways to write an obsessive stalker that, if ableist, are at least still fun to watch.

Acting: 3.5/5. The actors were on the good side of solid! I especially liked the main guy’s performance and the french girl. The rest of the cast was just fine, but those two were really putting their whole pussies into it and you could tell they were having fun.

Horror: 0/5. Don’t watch this if you want a horror movie. The only thing I think that qualifies this for horror is the stalking, but he’s so “adorkable” about it that it isn’t really scary as much as it is silly. He’s LITERALLY just getting silly with it, your honor. I also think for a horror movie it should have used a LOT more blood. It felt like a TV show amount of blood, and the movie was too scared to have any of the “good guys” actually die, so the stakes don’t actually feel high.

Personal Taste: 2.5/5. I’d consider rewatching this, but it’s not really what I wanted out of the premise. 

Total: 11.5/25

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[almostfinalgirl]

Bad CGI Gator

Themes: 3/5. As a commentary on bad horror movies, it manages to do that very solidly. It doesn’t bring anything new to the table, but you can tell the movie was more supposed to be fun than anything else.

Storytelling: 1/5. The premise is creative, but the entire point of this movie is to be bad, so a low score is honestly a success for them.

Acting: 2/5. The acting was fairly bad for most of the characters, although the two survivors did okay. Not good, but okay. The worse side of okay, but okay. Everyone else did so horribly that it was great.

Horror: 2/5. The dismemberment was cool and the suspense was attempted for sure, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it executed horror well. Then again, it wasn’t trying to, it was trying to rib on bad horror movies more than it was trying to succeed in horror.

Personal Taste: 3/5. This was an INCREDIBLE bad movie and probably a fun rewatch if I’m not sober, but the badness was too curated. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it just means it’s not as fun as something totally batshit where no one has ever acted a day in their life and talks like an anti drug PSA. I definitely recommend it though!

Total: 11/25.

[almostfinalgirl]

Death Tunnel

Themes: 4.5/5. I’m being incredibly biased, but I think this was an excellent example of the way cycles of abuse can present, taken literally. I either have to give this a 4.5 or a 2, because it was either horrible or great and I’m not sure which! I vote great because I enjoyed it. I think the ending serves this theme well. Some of us are incapable of breaking the cycle, and all it really takes is someone saying “then I’ll climb in with you and we can get you out together”.

Storytelling: 2/5. I may love the themes, but the story is really not great, and it barely holds itself together. You have to do some thinking to figure out how to make the ending cohere from a plot standpoint even if it’s excellent thematically, and I don’t think this movie was trying to be thematic. It stumbled into good themes. So if it wasn’t intentional, then the ending doesn’t entirely make sense. Why would a ghost who can’t leave their place of death go to college?

Acting: 2/5. It’s not great, but I’ve seen worse. There weren’t really any standout performances, but most of the bullies were played pretty flat.

Horror: 3/5. That’s a horror movie alright! We got ghosts, we got blood, we got haunted medical facilities, what more can you ask for? Quality? Sorry, that’s a different movie. 

Personal Taste: 5/5. I adored this movie. It was ridiculously fun, but not a comedy. There’s nothing I love more than dissecting the themes in a movie that was NOT built for being dissected like that. I liked several of the parts that made no sense. I love the goo. What is the goo even doing there? Being goo. How does the plot even fit together? Badly! I cannot recommend this movie enough, it sucks so bad.

Total: 16.5/25.

[almostfinalgirl]

Bone Daddy

Themes: 3/5. The base theme present in all copaganda is handled in a very run of the mill way, and that’s the undercurrent telling you that the cops are trustworthy. It handles the copaganda element the same way every other movie of its style does. Everything about this movie felt derivative of Silence of the Lambs but without the cunt. You could also argue that the film is trying to present complex father son relationships which, while very emotional for me personally, I can objectively say was handled in much the same way everyone writes fathers that are impossible to please and sons who reject them but still try anyways.

Storytelling: 3/5. It’s fine and it’s coherent, but it’s incredibly unoriginal. Given the release date, I’d say this is one of a thousand movies trying to fit the same niche as Silence of the Lambs but with none of the creativity behind it. I’ve seen a thousand and one copaganda movies with serial killers and pacing that moves almost identical to this one. The ending is exactly what you expect out of a serial killer movie. It’s just fine. There are certainly worse movies of the type out there.

Acting: 3/5. The acting wasn’t actively bad, but it wasn’t anything to write home about. It was about what the movie deserved. Any better and it might have made me overlook the mediocrity of the story, but it was on par with the storytelling in a way that was fairly seamless. 

Horror: 3/5. Being derivative of every other copaganda horror movie of the era made it unoriginal and left it feeling less like a horror movie than it had the potential to be, but it still did a solid job at executing what it set out to do.

Personal Taste: 4/5. The movie was perfectly mid and a little dry at several parts. Hell, since it was so derivative, it felt dry in a lot of parts. That being said, this is the category where I’m rating with my utmost personal bias. My personal bias says this movie will haunt me. If a serial killer told me I was my father’s golden boy (the man who was impossible to please growing up and who didn’t support me when I followed in his footsteps in his career so I built everything I had on my own without his support since he never gave it to me anyways) while he was about to kill me and when my dad saved me he held me, probably for the first time in years, I would turn into the Joker. That would be it. It’d be over for me. I’d go nuclear.

Total: 16/25.

[almostfinalgirl]

C. O. R. N: A Field of Screams

Themes: 2.5/5. There’s something to be said about fearing the mundane. It’s just a cornfield, we think, but the rustling can still disarm us if we’re not prepared for it. It’s just an artist collective, a small town, a neighbor, a coworker, but is it really so simple, or is it something scarier? Failure to approach that theme with intention lowers the score here, but it does a simple, clear-cut approach to the topic that suits the rest of the movie.

Storytelling: 3/5. CORN is the best thing I’ve seen put to film. I love their little fancy party. The story is coherent and simple. They didn’t try to do anything outstanding with it, and because of that, they excelled in the story they told rather than poorly executing something bigger. Unfortunately, it’s a bit flat of a story. The non-essential characters, excluding the members of CORN, exist solely as living props for the rest of the story. They have no personality. They’re cardboard cutouts of people. They’re not grounded. They’re horror fodder. That’s something I don’t mind, but objectively it’s a quality issue that I can’t super ignore. If you removed every nonessential character other than the members of CORN from the movie, it would actively be a better movie.

Acting: 2/5. Most of it is fine, but a couple performances are lackluster or actively bad. For the record, I think the bad acting is a plus here. The scenes set during the CORN party while the artists were milling about? Incredible. No notes. I love how you could tell the taxidermy actors were humans and not props because they were breathing or swaying.

Horror: 3/5. I wish there had been more gore in a movie centered around taxidermy, but the gore we did get in those last ten minutes? Pretty solid! I think human taxidermy is a fun angle to play with in horror. 

Personal Taste: 4.5/5. I love you, Collective Order of Recreational Necrophilanthropists. I wish those party scenes were longer. I wish you had the time to shine. This movie could be PERFECT if the CORN was a hair campier (I know, hard to do when it’s already super camp) and if there was more dissection gore. Definitely rewatchable for the collective alone.

Total: 15/25.

[almostfinalgirl]

Angels Die Slowly

Themes: 2.5/5. It could have handled the idea much better, but the focus was centrally on love and death, with attention paid to how the two intersect. It leaves with the question, “can we really escape fate, or are we always going to make the choices that lead us to our inevitable downfall?” and I like that.

Storytelling: 2/5. Conceptually the story goes hard, but the execution fell flat.

Acting: 2/5. Really subpar at best. There were moments, but overall it was on the worse side of fine.

Horror: 1/5. Not nearly as much bloodshed or slashing than I’d like out of a slasher. I know the budget seems pretty low, but so was the budget for A Bothered Conscience, and that movie had great special effects!

Personal Taste: 2/5. On paper, it’s exactly the kind of movie I want to watch. Genuinely so many parts of this movie sound incredible! The execution was just so disappointing.

Total: 9.5/25.

[almostfinalgirl]

The Blair Witch Project

Themes: 4/5. How well do you know the people around you? How well would you handle a crisis? How do your answers change when you’re viewing this from the comfort of your home? With other genres, they have different ways to approach these themes, but with found footage, it can emphasize the discomfort of having to think about those questions in application to reality. The Blair Witch Project handles them well even within the genre itself, making it a good example of those themes not just in found footage, but in horror as a whole.

Storytelling: 5/5. I know I reserve 5’s for those truly original, standout movies, and The Blair Witch is incredibly trope heavy for the genre. The thing is, those tropes had to come from somewhere, and The Blair Witch was at the forefront of the genre when it was released. Leaving aside the fact that it’s one of the earlier found footage movies to really take off in popularity, the pacing was well done and it was an objectively well crafted story with how the suspense built.

Acting: 5/5. I was really thrown into the world of this movie. Found footage can come across as deceptively easy to act - after all, you don’t need to deliver lines professionally. You’re delivering them conversationally. The problem boils down, then, to horror. Acting naturally scared when you’re safe. Making the audience believe that you 100% are frightened and that they’re watching someone’s camera they picked up off the street. I think the actors did a phenomenal job at both the conversational acting at the beginning, faking amateur acting when the characters needed to be delivering lines for their documentary, and conveying both the slow deterioration of their sanities and the growing horror of the Blair Witch. 

Horror: 5/5. The suspense building through the film is well done. Most of the movies I’ve watched for this project haven’t made me feel genuine unease like this movie did, perhaps because the last time I watched it I had less life experience and didn’t fully grasp the terror just of being lost in the woods with people you’re fighting with, and that’s not even mentioning the horror elements brought in by the witch herself. I often critique movies for not having enough gore, but even though this movie was a little conservative with the blood, I think any more and it would have pulled me out of the story.

Personal Taste: 3/5. I’m not always going to be in the mood for this movie, but I’m really glad I gave it a second chance after disliking it the first time a few years ago. 

Total: 22/25