I know, I'm running a litte behind with my reviews. It's fine, I can catch up, two movie reviews a night for a few nights and I'm back on track. Tonight, we have two movie reviews for you, Dig Two Graves (2014), and Malevolent (2018), both on Netflix right now if you want to check them out.
Dig Two Graves (2014) is a tender story of a teenaged girl who loses her brother to a stupid dare. Jake (Jacqueline) and her brother are about to jump into a water-filled quarry (which, if you've ever seen a horror movie, is always a bad idea), and she chickens out. Jake's brother ends up jumping, and vanishes into the murky abyss of the quarry. In shock and upset by his loss, Jake isn't sure what to do with herself. Then jake meets a trio of black-magic-using gypsies that tell her the rules of life and death aren't so absolute...
Yeah, I think my synopsis is almost better than the movie, but really, it's not bad. Good acting by Ted Levine, who plays the elderly Sherrif Waterhouse, and meh acting by Samantha Isler, who plays Jake. I guess she's basically in shock during this entire movie, which kinds of fits the shocked look she wears on her face throughout the movie, so I can't tell if she was acting or not. I gues that's a good thing? I don't know. Effects are minimal, and unnecessary. There's a lot of flashbacks in this movie, which bounces back and forth between 1947 and 1977, but it's not really hard to keep track. All the flashbacks revolve around Ted Levine, and in one set of flashbacks he's young, so it's easy to tell what year the action is going on in. A tiny bit of nudity, some minor supernatural stuff, a little bit of spookiness in the form of menacing, monnshine-swilling hillbillies. I don't think I'd watch it again, but it was entertaining enough the first time, mostly carried by Ted Levine's acting skills.
Malevolent (2018) is a story about a brother-and-sister team of fake psychics, who are cashing in on their deceased-psychic-mother's reputation by giving troubled folks a fake psychic show and then collecting money from them. It's set in 1986 Scotland (I think), and the brother is in deep financial debt to some rather unsavory characters. The two siblings and their friends are going to need a big payoff to settle the brother's debts, and then a call comes in for an old mansion that used to be a girl's orphanage, where a horrible massacre occurred and all the girls died. Unfortunately, the dead girls just won't stay quiet!
Malevolent wasn't bad, it was just very predictable. The main female lead (Angela, played by Florence Pugh) is easy on the eyes, so I didn't mind staring at her for a couple hours. Jackson (played by ben Lloyd-Hughes) is the in-debt brother, who drags everyone (the sister and their two technician friends, who provide the spooky fake effects to fool the folks out of their money) into a fine mess. The only actress I recognize in this movie was Celia Imrie (Mrs. Green), who owns the mansion / former girl's orphanage. Bunch of fumbling around, some minor bad camera work as they switch very briefly to a shot from one of the hand-hald cameras from one of the techs, but thankfully that blair-witch shit doesn't last long. Saw the ending coming a mile away. Forgettable, but maybe worth a watch if you're bored.
In other news, enjoying a minor heat wave here the last few days, temps in the 80s in October, ffs. I think we broke some records. Tomorrow, a cold front is going to sweep through and drop the temps back in to the 50's, which I guess is about normal for this time of year. I'm probably going to come down with another cold. :-D Okay, that's all for tonight, hope you people are faring better than I am this month. More horror and more reviews to come!
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