Saturday, December 23, 2017

Red Christmas (2016)

Diane, her children and their spouses are getting ready to open their Christmas presents, when there is a knock on the door. Diane opens it to find a creepy man with a speech impediment wearing a cloak who has slightly oozy bandages obscuring his entire face.  His gloved hands hold out an envelope which has the word Mother scrawled across the front in pencil and it is obvious there is something very wrong with him.

Diane does what anyone would do in this situation and invites him in to sit down with the family. Keep in mind that it is a beautiful day in sunny Australia and the home has a huge front porch on which this stranger could have cooled his heels.  Based on the mans odd behavior, there is no way even the most compassionate person would have invited him into their home, especially when among the inhabitants are a very pregnant woman and a teenager with Downs syndrome.  What about the safety of your family?

Things get even weirder when the stranger, who's name is Cletus, insists on reading his letter to Mother and it is revealed that this is the child whose birth Diane terminated twenty years earlier.  The clinic was bombed while she was there and someone pulled the baby from the trash... the living baby... the large living baby who would never have been terminated at that age of development. It even waves it's larger than a newborn hand at the man who picks it out of the garbage.

There are two huge problems with this film.  Diane's family is completely unlikeable and ungrateful, other than Jerry the teen with Downs Syndrome who is totally in the Christmas spirit.  And the film is a complete bummer.  You don't care about the family, you don't care about Cletus, and when the movie ends you just feel yucky.  It's completely depressing and worst of all, it's just no fun. The only reason we managed to make it through this thing was Dee Wallace.

Sunday, December 10, 2017

Mothman (2010)

Graduation is fast approaching and a group of teens is hanging at the lake, drinking and having fun.  Well it would be fun if they didn't have to babysit Jamie, Jared's little brother who is a couple years younger.

When they decide to scare Jamie and play a prank on him, he accidentally drowns.  The group decides they don't want to ruin their own lives.  So they come up with a story that he hit his head and drowned. Argh!  What is wrong with these people? And Jamie's brother goes along with it? What a tool.

To seal the deal, they each hit Jamie in the head with a rock, which is incredibly stupid as it's not going to look like an accident with six hits to the cranium. But apparently either there was no autopsy or the medical examiner is incompetent because they get away with it.

Ten years later Katharine, who is now a reporter, is sent back to town to cover the Mothman festival.  So I guess she isn't a good reporter since that isn't the type of assignment you'd give a serious journalist.

After running into her ex-boyfriend, Katharine reluctantly meets up with her old friends and discovers she was the only one who ever left town. Coincidentally it is ten years since Jamies death and the old gang gets together every year to toast Jamie.  A very odd tradition since you would think they'd never want to think of that horrible night they accidentally killed someone and then bashed his head with a rock to make sure everyone kept the secret.

Within a day of her arrival, members of the group start getting killed by the Mothman.  The police have no idea that it's a supernatural being. Because no one really believes in the Mothman. It's just a  harmless legend. Not so, says the creepy old blind guy who claims to have scratched his own eyes out to avoid being killed by the Mothman.

Intrepid reporter Katharine and her high school sweetheart Connor pursue leads as to why their friends are dying and how they may avoid the death sentence themselves.  The blind dude tells Katharine that Mothman can only come into their world through reflective surfaces, and Katharine notes there are no mirrors in his home.  Someone should tell him that he's wearing glasses and his house has windows because glass is reflective, dumbass.

Turns out Mothman only kills those who have killed others and hidden it to avoid paying the price.  So basically, he's a good guy getting justice for those have been wronged.  This leads us to the big problem with this movie, which is why would I care that he is killing these horrible people?