12 - Ghost of War (2020)

Yep, I know, I'm a little behind again.  One day, it's not horrible.  I'm already almost caught up, just need to write some more reviews, but that's tomorrow's work.  In other news it's late and i want to get this review in before it 's after midnight, so i'm just going to jump right in.

Ghosts of War (2020) is about a squad (ok it's 5, i'm not sure how many that is, but i'm calling it a squad) of soldiers during ww2 heading to a mansion to hold it until reinfrocements arrive.  It's a nice mansion, and it' already been liberated from the germans, but there's one problem with it.  It's haunted.

First, I want to say, I love horror movies set during ww2.  There have been so many of them over the years and putting a bunch of worn-out ww2 soldiers into the middle of a horror setting is brilliant.  The Nazis make perfect villains, and the idea that they'd do anything (including breaking the laws of nature) to preserve themselves is very believable.  My second thought is trying to figure out why they decided to put a squad of soldiers there already, and then, send these five guys in to relieve them.  I mean, it's a little confusing.  At one point, and I don't want to give anything away so i will be vague, but the soldiers are told that if they leave, they will die.  But the other squad left just fine.  So (1) knowing kinda how it ends, I am a little confused as to why the first squad was there in the first place, and (2) why they did it that way.  Meh.  So here's my real problem with this movie.  If you're going set a ovie in a ww2 horror setting, leave it there.  It's like they wrote themselves into a corner and didn't know how to get out and they used the usual bad writing tricks to save themselves.  It's annoying.  Anyways, let me move on before I get into a rant.

Okay, I recognzied some of the actors in this.  Several of them look like they were just in a war movie i saw somewhere else.  they have that look about them, you know?  Like they just went through hell, and haven't quite come out the other side yet.  I was surprised to see billy zane pop up as a german officer, but it was pretty funny.  I'm watching one of them in so help me todd, a series on regular TV.  I didn't think I'd like it, but it's like a crime-solving thing where the main character (todd)'s partner is actually his mom, and I thought that was funny.  Anyways, so there's a few recognizable faces, the acting and effects were decent for a movie of this type, and it's on netflix if you want to watch it.  I did not like the ending, but maybe you have a different opinion.  I swear, it was good right up until then.  I mean, they had an hour and 15 minutes of decent b-movie horror going on here, and then they just, blew it.  Oh well.  I think any ending would have been better than what they came up with, but then, what they came up with wasn't even an ending.  Bleh.  I'm ranting again.

In other news, it's almost halfway through the month, and i seem to be doing okay finding movies to watch.  I thought I'd have trouble this year, but so far so good.  I've only seen one movie once already and it just came out and i didn't review it when it did, so that one (Day Shift) doesn't really count.  Plus, it was a decent movie.  So don't blame me if some of these movies i review are crap.  I have no way of knowing how bad or good they are going to turn out, because i have never seen any of them before.  Maybe next year, if I am in a better position, I will do a month of just halloween favorites.  Films I have seen over and over through the years, ones i find really represent the month of october and halloween, and are bona fide good and fun movies to watch.  But not this year.  I am not in that position yet.  But I am working on it.

Til next time, ppls!  I know, I'm still a review behind.  Almost caught up, i swear.

11 - Umma (2022)

So hard to find horror movies on just one service.  Oh well.  Took me forever to track this one down, but I haven't seen it before, and that's the important thing.  Also, I have indigestion right now.  Ugh.  Shouldn't have eaten three slices of pumpkin cake so soon after dinner.  I mean, it's tasty and all but much better going down than coming back up, amirite?

Umma (2022) - Umma apparently means mother in korean.  So tonight's netflix movie is about a mother who ran away from her abusive mother and started a new life with her daughter, except now, her mother has found her, and has come home.  Which, is probably bad, because her mom is dead.

Yea, I'm not really giving anything away that isn't revealed in the first ten minutes of this short (one hour and about 20 minutes) movie.  Sandra Oh plays Amanda, Dermot Mulroney is her friend from town (no, not that white man from town, this is not about gypsies, that's another movie entirely) and there's a small supporting cast that I didn't recognize, but they get the job done.  Effects are decent, some korean culture tossed in for good measure, a few light scares.  It's not a bad watch, but unlikely I will watch it again.  Check it out on netflix if you want to keep up with me.  Eleven movies down, 21 to go!

In other news, Angela Lansbury died at age 96.  I remember my dad watching her in murder she wrote back in the late 80s and early 90's.  I guess she's been doing mostly stage plays since then because i really don't recall seeing her in anything since.  I knew she was still alive and all because I've seen little bits and pieces about her the last ten years or so but nothing major.  RIP!

In other other news, my mom would have turned 90 last week, but has been deceased for a little over 6 months now.  I wished her a happy birthday and had ice cream she would have enjoyed.  RIP too, mom.  I have no idea where you are right now, but I hope you're having fun.

Catch you guys tomorrow or the day after for another movie review.  I may not post tomorrow.  I'm probably DMing a D&D session for my buds.  Should be the end of their adventure unless my players really screw things up.  Which, can happen!  Bad dice rolls and all.  I'll catch up on thursday.  Night for now!

10 - The Privilege (2022)

Whee finally found something i can watch!  Hopefully netflix comes out with a new movie every day this month, otherwise i am going to be running short on movies to review.  Also, i have a headahe coming on, so I am going to keep this brief.

The Privilege (2022) is a german film about body horror, I guess is as close as you could call it.  The tagline is something about rich german kids going to an elite school and finding out something weird, but the story really had nothing to do with thae school as far as i could tell, and that's not even a spoiler because nothing really has anything to do with the school?  Idk why they even mention it.

Not a bad horror flick, maybe worth a watch, on netflix.  I've known about the zombie ants they mention in biology class during the movie for a long time now.  Acting was decent.  Weird exorcism sub-plot that kinda goes nowhere.  Special effects were kind of lame, bad CGI crap they used to use in the Syfy movies of the week about ten years ago, but I guess it serves the purpose here.  Obviously the actors are all german so I didn't recgnize any of them from other horror movies i've seen, but that's probably the second german horror movie i've seen this month so maybe they will become familiar to me in time.  Would be nice to see more countries come out with their own horrror movies besides just japan, whop have had a lock on horror since 1954's godzilla movie.  Which i still find amazing, 9 years after they got bombed into surrendering during WW2, they come out with godzilla.  totes amazeballs.  why, yes, stewardess, i speak jive.  anyways, maybe germany will have more horror movies coming out.  I'm hopeful, I love a good horror movie.  probably not going to watch this one again, though, it wasn't really that great.

Yay finally cuahght up, 10 movie reviews in 10 days!  In other news yea that headache is settling in so i'm going to have some tylenols and distract myself with computer games til they kick in.  Have a nice evening, catch you on the rebound!  yea, that's right, da scribe is hip to the jive!

9 - Mr. Harrigan's Phone (2022)

Happy Columbus / Indigenous Peoples' Day!  I was waiting for a friend to come visit but it looks like he's not going to make it today.  So, I watched a movie to try and get caught up.  I knew the moment i started watching it where it came from (it's a netflix movie written by stephen king) because king has a distinctive style and references in his writing that I have grown accustomed to recognizing over the years.  Plus, it said so at the end of the movie, so it was kind of hard to miss.

Mr. Harrigan's Phone (2022) is about a young boy who meets an old man.  The old man is having trouble reading and has hired the boy to read old books to him.  The relationship lasts until the boy enters high school, and somethign bad happens, but the relationship doesnt end there.  Like most of King's stories, I'd be giving things away if I said more, so I'm just going to end it ehre and let you watch this one on your own.

Donald Sutherland gives an excellent performance as Mr. Harrigan.  I admit I have not seen Mr. Sutherland act for a while and expected his acting talent to have suffered some of the effects of aging, but if it has, I was unable to find any.  His performance as the titular Mr. Harrigan was excellent and appropriately creepy in all the right spots.  I imagine they could have done something with special effects to approximate Mr. Harrigan's vengeance, but not showing him at all was just as good.  A simple view of the end result in which Mr. Harrigan "dispatched his enemies with haste" was supremely effective in and of itself.  The rest of the cast did an appropriately good job and I won't mention any of them here because I've never seen them in anything else that I can recall.

I only have one problem with this movie and I get that it violates the suspension of disbelief rule, which was otherwise in full effect for me, but this one is a contrsdiction that the movie makes for itself, and that always triggers me.  Mr. Harrigan hires this boy to do his reading for him, saying his eyes are failing and he needs the boy to read the old novels in his bookshelf for him.  This relationship continues for at least a good 5 years, as stated in the story, until the boy is in high school.  At which point, the boy (craig) buys Mr. Harrigan a cell phone (where the title comes from).  But, if his eyes were too bad to be able to read, how was he able to discern the text and information on his phone, which he seems to readily take to?  I imagine there is the possibility that Mr. Harrigan just wanted some company, and if that's what the movie was trying to point out most obviously by making sure the viewer knew that Mr. Harrigan could see perfectly well, then that makes more sense and is not actually a contradiction to its own established plot.  I'm thinking that's probably the case, because otherwise this was a pretty decent psychological / spirtual horror movie, and I don't want to think the movie made an accidental mistake.

Okay, in other news, I am still one movie behind so maybe I can catch up today.  Not much else going on in the news, you know, aside from the usual wars, corruption and madness that plagues mankind on a daily basis.  I'm still quite sore today and slept poorly so if you notice mistakes in my spelling, cut me some slack, jack.  That's something they used to say in the 70's.  Hopefully I shall return later this evening with another review, and be all caught up.  All new movies so far this month, or at least, ones i have not seen before.  Well, technically I did see Day Shift once before, but that was only a couple months ago when it came out, and it was good enough to watch again.  Hopefully I can keep this streak of new movies going, instead of having to review something I've seen before, but whata re the odds?  I don't think I've ever had an OHMRAT where I could even find 31 horror movies I had not seen before.  I mean, let's face it, I watch horror movies a LOT.  :-)  Til later then, hope you are enjoying the holiday, if at all possible.  Sunny out.  maybe I'll grab some fresh air, too.

8 - Old People (2022)

Right, well, this is going to post very early on ther 10th, but the point is, i watched it on the 9th and it's number 8 for the month.  So i have two movies to watch tomorrow and then I am all caught.  if I can find two movies to watch tomorrow.  But it's late, I better get toth e review before I nod off in mid sentence.  Has happened before.  Probably will again.

Old People (2022) is a horror film similar to 28 days, only instead of a rage virus we're looking at some sort of ancient (heh, ancient, old people, see what i did there?) curse, similar to the witch's curse movies that I reviewed earlier today, only there aren't as many flashbacks.  Anyways, to sum up, a woman returns home with her kids to her ex-husband's place to attend the marraige of her younger sister to her betrothed.  Along the way they pick up her dad, who is in one of the old folks homes.  As is usually the case, the home is understaffed and the old people are treated like refuse, but they bring her dad tot he wedding and then the wedding night comes and, as usual, you guessed it.. all hell breaks loose.

This is a german-made film, so i didn't recognize any of the actors.  The acting was decent, special effects were pretty minimal, but it made sense, i suppose.  The old folks did a great job of appearing threatening.  i mean it's kind of like one of those evil-kid films but it's like an evil old-person film and sometimes a veteran actor can really do evil better than a kid can, I suppose.  I don't know.  I think kids scare me more anyways.  Meh.  It's on netflix, not a bad watch, but I probably won't want to see this one again.  might be worth a watch if you're looking for some horror.  nothing outstanding, and no really cool monsters, so it goes to the bottom of my list.

that's all for tonight, will be watching more movies soon to catch up.  Just not tonight.  it's late and i need my sleepies.  geting old, you know.  hell, i've lived at least a tenth of my life give or take 10000%.  i can't say what sort of technological and biological advances we will have in the future so i don't want to short-change myself.  good talk!

5, 6, 7 - Fear Street Trilogy (2021)

Yes, I know I am running a little behind on my movie reviews, but i'm working on catching up.  Was just a busy weekend.  I watched the fear street trilogy and had watched all of them by friday, but sadly was unable to post in time to get them up friday night.  But whatever!  it's not like you care about my personal troubles!  You are just here for the movie reivews!  So let's get to them!  Why do I keep putting exclamation points at the end of everything?!

Fear Street 1994, 1978, 1666 (2021) - Fear Street is the saga of Sunnyvale vs Shadyside.  In Sunnyvale, everyone is wealthy and everyone is safe and everyone is happy and everyone is healthy.  No bad things ever happen in Sunnyvale.  Why, they don't even have car accidents!  In Shadyside, basically just on the other side of town, bad things happen all the time.  People go insane, they beat each other up, people are stabbed and killed and there's basically a serial killer going on a killing spree there every other week. Of course, they don't actually have a sherriff in Shadyside, they just send the sheriff of sunnyvale over to clean up the mess once the killing is done.  In the midst of this mess live Deena and Josh, the latest residents of Shadyside to fall victim to the curse of the Witch, Sara Fier.

Okay, basically this is a 5-hour movie broken up into three parts for easy viewing.  Part one is titled Fear Street 1994 and you definitely have to watch these things in order to understand what's going on, and not chronological order.  So, don't start with 1666 and work your way up because that will just screw everything up and your head will explode.  Trust me, i am still cleaning up the walls.  So, 1994 is obviously the year this starts, and Deena and Josh are sister and brother heroes who get sucked into the Witch's Curse right after the latest round of killings happens.  Everyone knows about the witch's curse.  Sara Fier was hung as a witch, and cursed the residents of Shadyside.  No one really believes in the curse, except there's no good reason why someone goes crazy every few months and starts murdering innocent shadysiders for no particular reason.  Deena and Josh end up getting sucked into it when Deena's ex-girlfriend gets involved, and then... yea.  All hell breaks loose.  Of course.  Part one happens mostly in 1994, and be warned, there's 2 major flashbacks that happen, so be ready for those.  Normally I don't like flashbacks but when they go tot he trouble of breaking them up into succinct and distinctly-viewable piecees like this, I'm intrigued.

Part 2 happens in 1978, and is a flashback from 1994 to some summer camp killings in shadyside in 1978.  As I mentioned, you only have to wait a week before the next bad thing happens in Shadysde, and in 1978, the bad thing that happened was that Tommy Slater went nuts and hacked up some kids with an axe.  Part 2 is all about that.  Part 3 is titled Fear Street 1666, and details yet another flashback (easily watchable chunks, so i didn't get annoyed by them, thanks for that) to 1666, when the witch Sara Fier was hung, and then we snap back to 1994 for the final conclusion to this epic saga.  1666 is when all the bad things started happening in Shadyside, and tells you how all this started.  All these movies came out in 2021, I think

This wasn't a bad set of movies.  Pretty classic Witch's Curse stuff.  Multiple brands of killers involved, axe murderers, and so on.  Some of them are pretty creepy, like the girl who sings a song as she stalks you down and starts cutting you up with her switchblade.  Tommy Slater seems an obvious rip-off of Jason Voorhees fromt he friday the 13th films, even going so far as to have a sack over his head like in the 2nd and 3rd Friday the 13th films, before he picked up and put on his signature hockey mask.  Just ona  side note, I once carved a halloween jack-o-lantern with eyes and holes in the classic Jason hockey mask pattern.  All the trick or treaters loved it, and I got many compliments.  Anyways.  Enough about how awesome I am.  So Tommy Slater is a Jason ripoff, who cares.  It works for the movie.  I am sure several other killers were ripped off from other horror franchises too, but I didn't really care about the rest.

Special effecsts were decent for this sort of film.  There was a little bit of nudity in part 2, but the only only actress I really recognized in this whole movie series was Sadie Sink, I think her name is, from Stranger Things.  The rest of the cast was good but I don't think I've seen them in other places yet.  Available on netflix if you want to watch it, and have not done so already.  Good viewing, and I will probably try and watch the whole set of movies again next spooky season, just for fun.

In other news, it's still spooky season, and I'm still two movies behind, so I am going to go find some other movies to watch before the weekend is out!  Slow news week, as far as I know, not that I pay much attention to the news these days.  See you in my next review, will will probably be in a couple hours.  Man I really have an urge for Halloween candy right now.

4 - Day Shift (2022)

Yes, finally a decent vampire movie.  It has been a while since I have seen one.  Technically I saw this one during the summer months when it came out, but I went through my blog and noticed I hadn't reviewed tonight's flick, so I watched it again.  Definitely passes the rewatchability test, which is a vital mark of a decent movie.  More action than horror, but hey, vampire movie with action is just another day in the life of an unpaid and hopefully-not-soon-to-be-homeless-horror-movie-reviewer.  Wow that's a lot of hyphens.

Day Shift (2022) stars Jamie Foxx as Bud Jablonski, a pool cleaner who has an unusual side-gig as a vampire hunter.  Most of Bud's issues in life arise not from Vampires, but from the vampire hunter's union, which pays out poor bounties on the vampire teeth that the hunters collect, taking absorbitant fees out of every bounty.  Bud's marriage is also on the rocks, mostly because he can't tell his wife, who he's seperated from, about his job as a fearless vampire killer.  Bud's just trying to make ends meet, when, well, you know.  All hell breaks loose and all.

Okay, so we got Jamie Foxx as Bud Jablonski, Dave Franco as Seth, Bud's weaselly union rep who is supposed to be spying on Bud for the Union.  Snoop Dogg plays Big John Elliott, a cowboy vampire killer who backs Bud up from time to time.  Peter Stormare is Troy, an illegal vampire-tooth broker who works out of a pawn shop or something.  I didn't recognize any of the rest of the actors in this movie but they all did decent jobs.  There's lots of action in this movie, which is always good for a vampire movie, because you don't want this to turn into another Twilight and ruin the good name of vampire movies all over again.  heh.  I make myself giggle sometimes.  Day Shift is on netflix, if you want to watch it.  I've seen it twice now, and it's still pretty good.  I may watch it again next october, too, if I can.  Snoop Doog references the Lost Boys at one point, saying "That's what I like about LA.  All the damn Vampires." which, if you've seen Lost Boys, you know is almost the same line Grampa speaks when he talks about Santa Carla.  I don't mean to toot my own horn here, because I am usually not that felxible, but I recognzied the line immediately, and chuckled.  There are some laughs in this movie, but it's mostly action, which is a totally fine combination and a great popcorn movie.  Loved it, will watch again.

In other news, oktoberfest has ended and spooky music is now playing on the sounds of the season music channel on cable tv.  Yeah.  You know when i am listening to music channels, my options for entertainment are limited.  Too poor to afford more at the moment.  Working on getting an income and thus saving my own life.  Hoping for the best!  Been really worried lately.  Got maybe a few more months of money before I am flat broke.  Anxiety, depression and chronic pain issues prevent me from doing more than like, one thing a day.  My supportive friends online tell me it's okay if all I can do some days is feed and take care of myself, and yes, that's important, but sometimes it's just not enough to just feed myself.  I also need to make money to make sure I can feed myself tomorrow, and the day after, and so on.  Meh.  I guess everyone worries about the future at times.  I'm no different than anyone else.  We all have problems to overcome.  Hopefully I can manage it.  I guess we all fail eventually, but I was hoping for a few more good years of fun before it all went to hell.  Ah well.  We'll see what happens.

But I devolve into depression.  Must be tired.  I am sure i will feel better and more hopeful after a good night's sleep.  See you guys with another movie review in another day or two.  Hope you are enjoying your lives as much as you can, given your individual circumstances.  You never know when life will throw you a curve ball, bean you in the forehead and get you carted off the field on a stretcher, amirite?  Sorry, odd baseball reference.  came out of nowhere.  I'll stop trying to be clever and go play computer games to get my mind off things.  See you next time.