Seventh Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series #10: Unfriended

In Unfriended, a group of teenagers get together for an online call session on the one-year anniversary of the post-cyberbullying-induced suicide of a friend of theirs.  Almost immediately, they notice that there's an unidentified stranger piggybacked onto their session, lurking silently at first.  They try to hang up on him and when they are unable to, simply ignore him.  Soon enough, they are getting increasingly threatening Facebook posts and messages from their dead friend and before long, the urban myth that responding to a dead friend's messages online will cause your death, well, that myth becomes a reality.

Unfriended is actually a clever variation of the found footage/documentary style horror movie that has been afflicting us for the last few years.  The movie is entirely in real time and from the point of view of the laptop of Blair, one of the girls involved, switching from screen to screen as she clicks between Facebook, Messenger, Chatroulette, Spotify, email, YouTube, etc.  You see these kids in their FaceTime (?) feeds and whenever the streaming causes the video to freeze up, it starts to get tense since the viewer (us, the audience, and them, the kids in the online session) can't see what's going on.

I had just a couple quibbles with this flick.  A lot of what is onscreen is text (FB posts, instant messages) and even with my television, it was sometimes difficult to read - I suspect it would be clearer either on a large format movie screen or up close on an iPad/laptop.  And once the deaths started happening, the cause wasn't clear - was it the unrestful spirit of their dead friend or something else?  Unfriended isn't particularly scary - there are a few quick shots of brutal violence/death - but what is the most frightening is that it shows how terrible cyberbullying is and how easily someone's online life can be hijacked.  Makes me glad that the internet didn't exist when I was in high school.

Seventh Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series #9: We Are What We Are

Note: This We Are What We Are is the American remake/re-imagining, not the Mexican original.  I didn't even realize there had been a Mexican original until after I watched this one and read some reviews of it.  Apparently they're quite different, except for the basic theme.  SPOILERS AHEAD.

The Parkers are your basic reclusive, southern rural, extra-religious family who, despite their strange ways, are accepted in their community (if not exactly embraced).  The two teenage girls, Iris and Rose, both of whom are quite pretty in a fragile, pale blonde way, go to the public high school; I at first incorrectly assumed they were home-schooled due to their very old fashioned clothes.  When the matriarch of the family collapses while running errands in town, hitting her head and drowning in a rain-swollen ditch, it throws the whole family into turmoil as eldest daughter Iris is expected to take her mother's role in the family's rituals.  This includes the killing, butchering and making into dinner of local girls.  Iris is troubled by this but not enough to refuse her father's insistence; younger sister Rose rebels, wanting to run away; their little brother, scarcely more than a baby, thinks the girls chained in the basement are "monsters" since they weep and wail and scratch at the door of their cell.  Back in town, the sheriff and the local doctor begin to investigate all the missing girls and I'm not going to say any more because I did NOT expect the climactic scene to turn out as it did and want to save it for you.

This is another creepy, atmospheric but not really scary, horror movie.  It's smarter than your average B movie but could perhaps use just a little more oomph to perk up the languid pace.  It is raining throughout the movie, downpouring at times, and that adds a nice visual to things: damp and dim with smeary outlines, curtains of water hiding things.  The family patriarch is quite a disturbing figure but the non-family characters don't get much in the way of development.  If you like to be creeped out and disturbed without much gore, We Are What We Are is a good way to spend an hour and a half.

Seventh Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Serives #8: When Animals Dream

When Animals Dream, a Danish import (with English subtitles), is an atmospheric take on a female-centric monster movie.  It is quiet, beautiful and dreamy, all pale colors and cold temperatures.

Marie is a solitary late teenager, out of school but still living at home in a tiny Danish fishing village.  She helps her father take care of her invalid mother - heavily sedated and stuck in a wheelchair - and starts a new job at a fish-packing plant.  She goes to the local doctor when she finds strange new patches of hair on her body.  Later, she catches her father shaving her mother's furry back and starts making the connections.  Her mother is kept heavily drugged to repress her aggression and transmutation.  It's genetic.  And the townspeople know this: they insist on Marie's mother's sedation and at her new job, Marie's coworkers harass her terribly.  After a night on the town, when Marie ends up having sex with one of the few friendly guys at work, her father and the doctor corner her in her room, trying to forcibly sedate her, to push the transmutation back into remission.  But Marie has had enough.  Her nature is to wolf out and she's not going to deny it any longer.

I've read some reviews comparing When Animals Dream to the original Let the Right One In (Scandinavian vampire movie with a sympathetic female lead) and the Ginger Snaps movies (Canadian werewolf movies with sympathetic female leads), and it definitely has some similarities.  When Animals Dream is much quieter than those movies however, barely springing into any action or violence, showing utmost restraint with the gnashing and rending and bleeding.  I liked it because it felt like a smarter movie than much of what I've seen recently, and it definitely falls into the Under the Skin category of atmospheric, barely-horrific horror movies.

Seventh Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series #7: Bloodsucking Bastards

Shaun of the Dead plus Office Space plus BtVS = Bloodsucking Bastards.  You could do much, much worse - and I have.

Evan Sanders (Fran Kranz, Dollhouse, Cabin in the Woods) is having a rough time of it.  He is the acting sales manager at a telesales company, with an apathetic sales team comprised of bros and weirdos.  His girlfriend just dumped him and she works in the same office so he sees her all the time.  Just when he thinks he's going to be promoted to sales manager, his boss hires someone from outside: Max (Pedro Pascal, the Viper from Game of Thrones), Evan's douchey nemesis from college.  And just to rub salt in the wounds: Max is a vampire and he's on a recruitment tear.

Bloodsucking Bastards is a lightweight horror comedy.  It's pretty funny and has buckets of blood but is never actually scary.  It's clearly lower budget than Shaun of the Dead or Slither, and yet has its own charms.  The characters are actually well-developed and the way they act makes sense for who they are and the universe they inhabit.  I'm not sure it's ever found much of an audience but I'm glad I found it: its cheerfully bloody tone has encouraged me to press on with scary (or, "scary") movies for the second half of October.

Seventh Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series #6: Bad Milo!

I am really scraping the bottom of the barrel here.  I have got to find something that is both scary and good, or at least not awful.  Bad Milo had some promise:  a Duplass Brothers production, this horror comedy has a great cast, including Ken Marino (who looks really good here), Gillian Jacobs, Patrick Warburton, Mary Kay Place, Stephen Root and Peter Stormare.

Duncan (Marino) is a very nice guy who is under a lot of stress.  His boss (Warburton) is making him do the round of layoffs and also has just stolen everybody's money.  His wife Sara (Jacobs) wants to have a baby.  His mom (Place) has a sexed-up boytoy second husband who wants Duncan to call him "dad."  A fertility doctor, hired by his mom, is convinced Duncan has ED.  And his dad (Root) abandoned him and his mom when Duncan was just little and is living off the grid somewhere, smoking a lot of dope.  All of this stress and anxiety has manifested itself as ... a giant, sentient, detachable butt polyp with shark teeth and a penchant for popping out of Duncan's butt to eviscerate his enemies.

Now, normally I love monster movies, especially ones with practical effect monsters.  But I just cannot get behind [pun intended] a rectal polyp monster.  This is a middling sort of movie, not committing to being really funny or really gory or really making fun of anything.  The cast is strong and game, given the potty humor they're given, but Bad Milo! is just unnecessary.  It's not terrible enough to be offensive but it's pretty pointless.

Seventh Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series #5: Pod

My notes, before the movie starts:  Well, at the worst it's only 1 hour and 18 minutes.

In Pod, there are three siblings: Martin, Ed and Lila.  Martin is a vet, struggling with PTSD and living "in the middle of nowhere" which is actually the coast of Maine.  Ed is a doctor and Lila is a millennial with a bit of a drinking problem.  This is all the characterization you will get for these three.  After receiving a disturbing voicemail from Martin, Ed and Lila drive up to make sure their brother is okay.  He isn't: he has covered the interior of the tidy little coastal cottage with foil, is paranoid, ranting and raving, has pulled out some of his own teeth and shaved his head, and claims to have been experimented on when he was in the army.  Oh, and he says he's got a "pod" locked in the basement, which creature killed his dog and scratched him up something fierce, infecting him.  Obviously his brother and sister think he's nuts.  But later, after [REDACTED FOR SPOILERS], Ed investigates the cellar - which is a pretty typical Maine cellar, all ledge-y and full of water seepage - and, gosh, he shouldn't have done that.

My notes, during the movie:  How many shots in a rifle like that?

As mentioned above, the characters are thin and underdeveloped. I did squirm a little when the tension rose a little: I was expecting jump scares that didn't come, so that made me nervous.  There's not much blood/gore and it really isn't scary.  The plot is nothing if not unoriginal, but at least what happened made sense in the movie's universe and was interesting.

My notes, at the end:  Well, it's not GOOD but it's better than Final Girl.

Seventh Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series #4: Final GIrl

Ugh.  To follow the marvelous Babadook with this piece of crap?  I'm talking about Final Girl, not to be confused with the recently watched and moderately entertaining The Final Girls or Stacie Ponder's excellent and much lamented blog Final Girl.  This 2015 steamer starring Abigail Breslin (still trying desperately to break away from her breakout Little Miss Sunshine role) and Wes Bentley is not worth anyone's time.  I almost didn't bother including it here - since there's nothing horror-y about it, despite its Netflix tags - but figured if I suffered through it, I might as well make you suffer through it too.

William (Wes Bentley) recruits recently-orphaned five year old Veronica into the Program, wherein the long goal is to avenge his murdered wife and child.  Twelve years later, Veronica (Abigail Breslin) has been "trained" to be an assassin and is pointed at four privileged teen-aged douchebags who enjoy hunting and killing girls.  Her "training" has included standing with bare feet on cold rocks and punching awkwardly; Veronica is no Sarah Connor.  (And these teenaged douchebags are clearly not William's ultimate targets, since they would have been five years old when his family was killed, so this "movie" is presumably the first installment in a series as Veronica hones her skills, I guess.)  Veronica goes out into the woods with the douchebags and with very little difficulty, no tension and no blood to speak of, kills them all.  Then she and William have diner pancakes where she sucks her whipped cream-covered finger suggestively.

This is not a horror movie.  It is not the least bit scary and there is no suspense or jump scares or gore.  It is scarcely violent.  The whole thing is stagy and stylized, with bright spotlights out in the middle of a rainy forest for no reason.  My notes include: "OMG SO BAD" and "We're at the climactic fistfight and I would be beside myself with annoyance except I just don't fucking care."  I don't know why Breslin and Bentley did this movie and I don't know who, if anyone, watched it.  Trust me, you can do better.

Seventh Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series #3: The Babadook

There now, that's more like it.

Widowed mom Amelia (the incomparable Essie Davis) is not coping well.  Still depressed by her husband's death as he drove her to the hospital for the birth of their son, she is stressed and exhausted, sleep-deprived, struggling to connect with her child.  Samuel (Noah Wiseman, also very good) is a weird little kid and from the moment you meet him, you feel for his mother.  He is disobedient, shrieky and off-putting.  Already under strain, their relationship deteriorates after the appearance of a horrible children's pop-up book, Mister Babadook; Sam becomes violent and menacing, building homemade weapons and repeatedly telling his mother that "[he] doesn't want her to die."  Unable to sleep and with no support from her family, Amelia becomes more and more unhinged until suddenly the audience realizes they have shifted their sympathies to Sam: his mom has become terrifying.  All the while the Babadook lurks and looms.

The titular monster isn't all that original or scary in and of itself - we've all seen skittering, looming and lurking before.  And I lost my focus for a time towards the end of the movie when the threats became more overt.  But for most of this wonderful little Australian movie, the tension ratchets up, bit by bit, until I was continuously squirming nervously in my chair.  Whether you believe that Mister Babadook is a real malevolent entity or instead a product of Amelia's instability and Sam's overactive imagination (and I believe a case can be made for that), The Babadook is a taut, scary look at loss, resentment and parenthood.

Seventh Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series #2: All Cheerleaders Die

Here's a brief plot synopsis of All Cheerleaders Die (2013): When the head cheerleader dies in a freak cheering accident, her spot on the squad is filled by her unlikely film student/outsider friend Maddie, who is intent on infiltrating the football team/cheerleader world to avenge her fallen friend.  After some high school lesbian hijinks and hurt feelings, it turns into the girls vs. the boys, which escalates into Maddie and her friends getting driven off an embankment and drowning the river.  Luckily, Maddie's ex-GF is a Goth witch and she resurrects the dead girls who, after a short adjustment period, get their revenge on.

Look, this movie is a mess.  Within the first five minutes, I was completely annoyed at the loud music montages - the sound is very uneven throughout.  There is way too much very shrill screaming, the magic/blood special effects are abysmal and distracting, there is barely any character development to differentiate one of the high school stereotypes from the other.  There are a couple of funny bits, and some laugh-out-loud/bizarre music cues, but just not enough to make this a clever horror-comedy.  The director is the same guy who made the strong little May and I could get what he was going for, some sort of a Jennifer's Body meets Heathers meets Bring It On meets The Craft.  But ACD is nowhere near the quality of any of those movies.

Plus the only really scary part came in the closing title card when it read: All Cheerleaders Die Part One. I mean, dafuck, there's more?  That's TERRIFYING.

Seventh Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series #1: The Final Girls

Seven years I've been doing this October scary movie series?  It's a good thing too, because if I didn't, the number of annual posts here at Friend Mouse Speaks would drop off even further: in 2008, I posted 217 times; last year, I only put up 61 - and twelve of them were in October.  Wow.  So here we go, limping along with 2015's The Final Girls.

Max Cartwright (Taissa Farmiga) is a sad girl, having lost her beloved mom (Malin Akerman) in a car crash three years ago.  Her mom, Amanda, wasn't the most successful person - her one claim to fame was starring in the in-universe sleepaway camp cult slasher, Camp Bloodbath, in the 1980s - but Max misses her.  When Max and some of her friends attend a local art house showing of Camp Bloodbath, they are mysteriously drawn into the movie and Max finds herself face-to-face with her mom, except that she's "Nancy," the character in the slasher film.  All the CB characters are only aware of themselves as the characters and it soon becomes clear to the modern teenage interlopers that they will only get out of the slasher flick alive if they make it to the end credits.  When the slasher flick starts to deviate from the script and the designated Final Girl meets an untimely end, Nancy and Max's bond becomes strong as they step up to fight against CB's masked and machete-ed villain.

Positive notes:  this horror/comedy mess has a strong cast, with the aforementioned Farmiga and Akerman, plus Alia Shawkat (Arrested Development) and Nina Dobrev (The Vampire Diaries) among others.  The scenes between Max and Nancy/Amanda are really strong.  And it's fun to see the teenagers navigate a universe they know so well due to repeated viewings of Camp Bloodbath and general knowledge of slasher film tropes.

On the minus side:  The Final Girls is incredibly uneven in tone.  The rules of the universe are changeable so it's difficult for the audience to get a grip.  Rated PG-13, it's practically bloodless and pretty much tension-free so as to scarcely qualify as horror, and while parts are funny, it's certainly not funny enough to be a comedy.  It isn't a full-on spoof nor is it much of an homage, as the camera work is not very classic slasher-like.  Scream, now a classic in its own right, did a much better job of acknowledging, pointing fun at and ultimately abiding by the rules of horror films.  The Final Girls is entertaining but would have been stronger with some actual scary moments to balance out the humor and the move-within-the-movie self-awareness.