#3 + #4, Stephanie, Hold the Dark

Okay, missed a day already!  Just going to be one of those months, I guess.  Before I forget, both of tonight's horror movie choices are available on Netflix.  I'm feeling crappy and falling behind so I'm just going to get right to the (admittedly short) reviews.

Stepahnie (2017) is about a little girl living alone in what appears to be her house.  There's something else living in Stephanie's house, or maybe it lives in the woods, and just comes to visit.  Whatever it is, it's alternately playful and creepy, like that one uncle your family never talks about.  Stephanie is doing her best just to make it on her own, and it seems apparent that something happened to her mother, father and brother, who seem to be out of the picture.  Then, all hell breaks loose!

Funny how often that seems to happen, isn't it?  Anyways, Shree Crooks plays Stephanie, and she seems to be having a hard time carrying the movie through the first third or half of it, because though the movie is actually pretty short, the first part of it seems to drag.  Then things pick up, and I won't tell you what happens because it's actually not a bad monster movie.  Kind of expected, really, but hey, it's a different story than I've seen before so I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt.  Anna Torv plays Stephanie's mother.  Effects were decent enough.  Worth watching a first time, and I might even watch it again at some point, and look for clues to see if I could have figured what was coming, now that I've seen the end.

Hold The Dark (2018) is a story about a little boy who goes missing one morning, apparently eaten by wolves.  The boy's grieving mother writes to a writer / wolf expert to get him to come hunt the wolf who killed her boy, and she realizes when he shows up that he actually wrote that book a while back, because he's older now.  Apparently, he only showed up because his estranged daughter lives in the area, and he was hoping to drop by and see her at some point, after taking care of the mother's little wolf problem.  Looks like it's old man vs a pack of killer wolves!

This is an original Netflix production, and boy, does it show!  Great settings and locations, awesome productions, veteran famous actors (some guy from True Blood, and some guy from WestWorld), and the worst writing and continuity I've ever seen.  Seriously, Netflix, wtf is up with you guys?  Is this why you took off the user reviews, so you could foist crap off on the viewing public that was written by your 4-year-old grandkids using crayons?  Let me just see if I can figure out what's going with this crapfrest of a movie.  At first, the trailer makes you thik the writer is going to go off into the wilderness and hunt down some killer wolves, like Liam Neeson in The Grey, or maybe Val Kilmer in Ghost and the Darkness.  I was thinking maybe there was something about the wolves that might even be supernatural, which would have been awesome!  Unfortunately, none of those things happened.

About 5 minutes after the writer guy arrives at the mother's cabin in rural Alaska, you realize things are rapidly going downhill, and they don't stop til they've hit rock bottom.  I don't know wtf was supposed to be going on in the writer's mind, but none of this makes a lick of sense.  It's like Netflix pasted together a trailer, and then did everything they could to fix it so nothing that you could infer from the trailer actually happened in the movie.  If you're thinking that made for a  great twist ending, because I didn't see it coming, then you'd be half-right.  It made for a ridiculously crappy ending, that made absolutely no sense.  And no, I'm not mad because the movie "fooled me," because I didn't see what was coming in Stephanie, either, and I was pleasantly surprised by that movie, so I don't mind being fooled for a good cause, like, oh, I don't know, maybe a half-way decent horror flick?  Which, Hold the Dark may not even count as a horror flick, and that's not a good sign.

This one just seemed stupidly ridiculous, like it was trying to explain how crazy those Native Alaskan-Americans were, and maybe they are, but I've talked to several people from Alaska (admittedly, over the internet) and they've never been anywhere near that batshit crazy.  A very unsatisfying and confusing ending, and it wasn't just the end, either.  Most of the cast didn't seem to do anything that made any kind of sense, and I'm not even talking about the usual horror movie tropes like running towards scary noises by themselves in the dark, so they could get picked off by the killer.  Nope, this whole movie just seemed dumb.  Well, what do I know, right?  Right.  Still a stupid movie, and I felt kind of disappointed and let down by the whole thing.  Way to go, netflix.  I would not watch it again.

That's all for tonight!  All caught up, hopefully I won't slip behind again, but it does happen.  Life gets busy, as we are all well aware.  Hope everyone is enjoying the October Horror Movie Review-A-Thon so far, and getting out to see the fall colors, or whatever it is you normally do in October.  :-)