By Steve Newton
Between 1987 and 2018 I reviewed over 350 horror movies when they were released theatrically in Vancouver, and lemme tell ya–there were some absolute stinkers in there.
The cool thing about it was that the editors at the weekly paper I was freelancing for would never pressure me to write glowing reviews just to try and entice film studios to buy ads.
I was always free to share my honest opinions about the fright flicks I’d just seen, and if I thought they were crap–which they very often were–I’d happily rip the shit out of ’em.
After spending 90 minutes suffering through money-grubbing genre garbage I was more than ready to use the power of the pen to condemn whatever actors, directors, and writers contributed to the offending dreck.
I figured I owed it to the real horror fans out there. And, inspired by the film criticism of Joe Bob Briggs, I owed it to myself to have a good time doing it!
Here’s my original reviews of 10 godawful horror movies that I gave a zero-out-of-five ranking when I posted them on Rotten Tomatoes.
The Apparition, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2012
I had my doubts about The Apparition as soon as I found out it was from Dark Castle Entertainment, the same production company behind such godawful horror flicks as Gothika, Ghost Ship, The Reaping, and Orphan. Not an impressive track record by anyone’s standards.
And it turns out my trepidation was well based, as this new supernatural thriller by first-time director Todd Lincoln has stinker written all over it.
In indelible ink.
The movie centres on the beautiful Kelly (Ashley Greene of the Twilight saga), a student veterinarian who–along with her Geek Squad boyfriend Ben (Sebastian Stan)–has just moved into a new suburban investment property owned by her folks. Strange things start happening: her cactus dies, ash-type grunge appears on a kitchen counter, and a dresser moves a bit. Then the neighbours’ beloved dog wanders into the laundry room, sees a shadow on the wall, lays down, and dies.
Cancel the Welcome Wagon.
We soon discover that Ben was part of a college experiment on paranormal entities led by Patrick (Tom Felton of the Harry Potter films), and that the research went terribly wrong. “We brought it into our world, and it’s loose!” warns Patrick in an urgent email. “It’s free!”
Yeah–free to create a fungal-looking batch of cement-like goo on Kelly’s kitchen wall, which–when chipped at with a handy broomstick by Ben–yields the same white carving of a man they used in the previous experiment. Interesting… not!
When the young couple starts hearing weird noises and the clothes in their walk-in closet get all knotted up, that’s the last straw. They head to a hotel, but the scary (to them anyway) stuff keeps happening. When they finally meet up with Patrick he explains: “Your house isn’t haunted. You are.”
An utterly pointless and inept mashup of Paranormal Activity and Final Destination–with a bit of Ringu thrown in for bad measure–The Apparition does have at least one thing going for it.
It’s only 75 minutes long.
My Soul to Take, Relativity Media, 2010
For his latest horror outing, writer-director Wes Craven tried to inject elements from his two best slasher flicks, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream, but something went terribly wrong along the way. What he wound up with was a witless stab-the-teen time-waster that could be his worst film ever.
And considering 2005’s wretched Cursed, that’s pretty bad.
In the wee burgh of Riverton, Massachusetts, a family man with a split personality comes to realize that he might be the serial killer known as the Riverton Ripper. He makes a desperate late-night call to his shrink, but his evil persona takes over before help can arrive, and he kills his pregnant wife and various hapless others before disappearing, possibly drowning in a lake. His unborn son survives the rampage, though, so the movie flashes forward 16 years later to see how the kid’s doing.
Not that well, as it turns out. He’s developed into a timid outsider named Bug (Max Thieriot) who spends most of his time thinking about carrion-eating California condors and trying to avoid the school bully, who takes punching orders from a ruthless bitch named Fang (Emily Meade). That’s not Bug’s only problem, though.
Local legend has it that, when the Ripper disappeared and/or died, parts of his soul were transferred to Bug and six other babies prematurely born in Riverton Hospital that very day. Thanks to that hokey premise we get to watch a knife-wielding maniac who looks like Rob Zombie in concert and talks like Jigsaw in Saw chase generic teens through the woods and stab them.
There was absolutely no point in releasing this thing in 3-D because not once does it make valid depth-of-field use of the format. Clearly the filmmakers only had one goal in mind: to charge suckers like us extra to view this crap through plastic glasses.
Now that’s what I call horrifying.
The Unborn, Universal Pictures, 2009
As soon as The Unborn’s end credits started to roll, a guy seated two rows down from me at the promotional screening declared: “That sucked!” I couldn’t have said it better myself—unless I’d added “donkey dicks!” to the assessment.
Cloverfield’s smokin’ hot Odette Yustman stars as Chicago college student Casey Beldon, who suffers nightmares about, and visions of, an undead twerp with icey blue eyes. After she gets smucked in the face with a mirror by another miserable brat—who ominously intones, “He wants to be born now”—one of her eyes starts changing colour. A doctor explains that the weird iris action is a rare condition that sometimes affects twins, and soon after Casey’s dad (a slumming James Remar) confesses that she did indeed have a twin, nicknamed Jumby—who was strangled in the womb by her umbilical cord.
Before you can say “unholy vengeance from the grave”, potato bugs are invading Casey’s breakfast and a dog with an upside-down head is menacing Rabbi Sendak (Gary Oldman), who decides it’s time for a good old Jewish exorcism.
In an abandoned asylum of her choice, Casey gets bound to a gurney and, to boost the kink quotient, ball-gagged before Sendak ceremonially blows on a huge, jewel-encrusted animal horn.
As expected, all hell breaks loose once Jumby shows up and starts possessing everyone in sight, making eyes turn icey blue and backs fold violently in two. I kept hoping Oldman would revert to his Sid & Nancy punk persona and kick the little freak in the yarbles like some pain-deserving Springsteen fan, but no such luck.
He just carries on with the Hebrew mumbo jumbo until you’re sure he’ll either burst out laughing at the sheer nonsense of it all or break down crying at this career misstep.
The Reaping, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2007
What’s with the recent spate of Oscar-winning actors starring in shockingly bad supernatural horror flicks? Two weeks ago you had Forest Whitaker embarrassing himself in The Marsh, and now you’ve got two-time Academy Award champ Hilary Swank committing career hara-kiri in The Reaping.
Have their Hollywood agents signed deals with the devil or what?
Written by former Baywatch Nights auteurs Carey and Chad Hayes, the movie opens with sad-faced Father Costigan (sad-faced Stephen Rea) waking up in the night to find a framed photo on fire, with the face of Swank’s character, former Christian missionary Katherine Winter, being consumed by a small flame. He checks a nearby stash of snapshots, and all of them show Winter’s noggin burned away. He lays the photos out on the floor and the burn marks form a cross with a hook at the bottom, the unmistakable emblem of ’70s hard rockers Blue Oyster Cult. Hey, didn’t they have a big hit called “(Don’t Fear) the Reaping”?
Bad advice. There’s lots to fear here, but not in a good way.
The priest sees the appearance of the Cult logo as a warning from God, so he gives his old friend a call, but she’s lost her faith in the Almighty after a family tragedy in Africa; she’s now a Louisiana State University professor specializing in debunking spiritual phenomena.
When a goody two-shoes schoolteacher from the god-fearing Louisiana hamlet of Haven (Basic Instinct 2‘s David Morrissey) shows up seeking help for his apparently cursed town, Katherine and her burly associate, Ben (Idris Elba), are soon up to their asses in a blood-red river. It’s just number one on the Top 10 of biblical plagues, all of which centre on a little girl (Bridge to Terabithia‘s Anna Sophia Robb) seen sneaking through the bayou with a confused frown.
Poorly paced scenes of clichéd silliness culminate in a hokey showdown between the wee sprite, the investigating duo, the riled-up townsfolk, and about a billion locusts. Schlocky special effects straight outta Firestarter ensue, and the filmmakers make a last-ditch effort to end things on a scary note, but nothing is nearly as frightening as the damage to Swank’s career caused by starring in this unholy debacle.
Alone in the Dark, Lions Gate Films, 2005
Alone in the Dark is a terrific horror flick–at least the one from 1982 is. It stars stalwart acting vets Jack Palance and Martin Landau as psychopathic escapees from a mental hospital who go on a murderous rampage. The flick comes recommended for Palance and Landau’s gleefully demented performances, and–partly because it’s based on a believable premise–it’s also scary as hell.
Then there’s the new Alone in the Dark, a Vancouver-shot chunk o’ junk based on an Atari video-game series. It stars Christian Slater as Edward Carnby, a “detective of the paranormal” who, as a kid, was one of 20 children taken from an orphanage where bizarre experiments, including having centipedelike thingies implanted on their spines, were conducted.
When we first meet Carnby, he’s flown into YVR with an ancient artifact from Chile, but before he can get his exgirlfriend, museum curator Aline Cedrac (Tara Reid), to check it out, his Yellow Cab gets waylaid near Quebec Street and 2nd Avenue by a chrome-domed assassin. (In the first of many ridiculous scenes, this guy doesn’t flinch when repeatedly shot in the chest, yet reacts big-time to one of Carnby’s karate kicks.)
The bad baldie has been dispatched by sinister Professor Hudgens (Mathew Walker), who needs the relic so that he can he use it to open a passageway to hell (the Britannia Beach mine) and unleash the hordes of hokey, dinosaurlike CGI demons gathered there.
Because anything allegedly based on a video game has to have lots of gunfire, Stephen Dorff (Pamela Anderson’s new boyfriend!) shows up as Carnby’s nemesis, Commander Richards, leading a group of heavily armed soldiers who inevitably become demon chow. The convoluted, terribly written film–which sports lines like Reid’s “The hairs on my neck just stood up!”–blatantly rips off Raiders of the Lost Ark, Alien, Tremors, 28 Days Later, and The Hidden, but never in a good way.
The most entertainment comes from watching Slater and Dorff and trying to figure out who’s got the biggest forehead.
I wouldn’t agree with the IMDb (Internet Movie Database) forum contributor who started the “Kill Uwe Boll” thread, but somebody should definitely confiscate the German director’s work visa.
He previously shot the ludicrous zombie flick House of the Dead in B.C., and, judging by the horrifically inept Alone in the Dark, there’s no telling how much damage Boll could do to the credibility of the local film biz if he’s allowed to go for three.
Jason X, New Line Cinema, 2002
I met Jason once. Back in ’89, they were filming Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan at an abandoned high school in Burnaby and I was covering the shoot for American horror mag Fangoria. During a break, stuntman-actor Kane Hodder came lumbering down the hall in the common Jason garb of work clothes, boots, and hockey mask.
Because he wasn’t clutching a blood-soaked machete, I wasn’t that scared, although the thought did cross my mind that Jason might squeeze my head like a pimple between his mighty palms and pop my eyeballs out—like he did to that poor sap in Friday the 13th Part 3.
So I kept my questions friendly; for his part, Hodder was the perfect gentleman. He even signed autographs for some of the horror-loving kids gathered around the old school’s entranceway. But all the off-screen charm and PR skills in the world couldn’t save Hodder from serious scorn and derision once the shamefully inept Part VIII made its way to theatres.
He must have impressed somebody with his hacking and slashing, however, because they brought him back for 1993’s Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (yeah, right), and now he’s donned the mask again for Jason X.
The bad news is that crossing over into double digits—“Nyaah, nyaah, beat ya, Freddy!”—only means that the series’ films have gotten twice as terrible.
The brainiacs who own the Friday the 13th franchise must have woken up one morning and gone: “Gee, Star Wars was pretty good, why not send Jason into space?” Through a series of silly mishaps, he winds up aboard a spaceship in the year 2455, a time when only sex-starved bimbos and kinky nerds are qualified to be in charge of things.
Suffice it to say that there’s much nipple-twisting, face-shattering, torso-skewering, and back-breaking—all sandwiched between volleys of excruciating one-liners.
Whatever they paid Canadian horror auteur David Cronenberg to appear in this godforsaken mess, it wasn’t enough. Lucky for him, his character dies early.
Bless the Child, Paramount Pictures, 2000
As soon as I got home after seeing Bless the Child, I happened to check my mail and found a schedule for the Vancouver Film School’s part-time fall classes. The cover of the glossy pamphlet caught my eye because it read, in big green letters, If You Suck, You Can Always Become a Film Critic.
Now, I’m living proof that anyone can be a movie critic, but the timing of this particular piece of junk mail left me cold, ’cause I’d just spent two hours suffering through one of the most insipid Satanic horror flicks of all time. The last time I was so poorly entertained I was having a root canal, but not only that, now I have to spend another tiny chunk of my life thinking about that dreck while I bang out this slagging review. Oh sure, you can always become a film critic.
Look how much fun it is!
Kim Basinger, the best-looking bad actress in Hollywood, stars as strait-laced New York City nurse Maggie O’Connor, whose junkie kid sister shows up one night and saddles her with an autistic newborn named Cody. As we find out later, this child has special powers that the forces of evil have been waiting to control, but at first all she can do is bang her head against a wall and make toys spin around real fast.
Later on, the kid brings a dead bird back to life and makes a whole bunch of church candles light up. Whoopie-ding. How is that supposed to save the world when the forces of darkness—in one of the movie’s only worthwhile scenes—can make demonic rats mould themselves into Beelzebub himself?
Eventually Cody gets abducted by a group of child-killing Satanists, and that’s when TV’s Jimmy Smits gets on the case as good-guy FBI agent John Travis. (We know he’s good because, in one of many shameful scenes, the dead lilies on his desk suddenly turn fresh!) A slumming Christina Ricci—obviously strapped for cash after devoting herself to all those low-budget indie flicks—shows up as a tough chick whose head falls off in a subway. And the well-respected Ian Holm from The Sweet Hereafter has one scene as an advice-giving reverend so the producers can use his name in the media kit.
An excruciatingly silly script, clunky editing, and an overbearing orchestral score help make Bless the Child something to avoid at all costs. It’s based on a novel called The Devil in the Sixth Circle by Cathy Cash Spellman. Never heard of it? Judging by this awful adaptation, there’s damn good reason for that.
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, New Line Cinema, 1993
I’ll never forget the time I saw Friday the 13th: Part 2 at the grand old Paramount Theatre in Chilliwack back in ’81. It was the first low-budget slasher flick I’d seen on the big screen, and, mindless and exploitative as it was, it scared the crap out of me.
I remember going home—to an empty house at the end of a dead-end road—and trying to sleep with the wind scraping branches on the window and slamming the garage door. I spent quite a while searching the house in fear, baseball bat in hand, fairly sure that Jason—or someone of similar personality—was bent on doing me some damage.
It was just my imagination, of course, stimulated by Part 2’s creepy Harry Manfredini score and creatively rendered murders. At that point, unfortunately, I became a Friday the 13th junkie, always seeking out that elusive fix of fear, and I’m ashamed to admit that—though I’m a peaceful guy who abhors real violence—I’ve now seen all nine of the series’ entries.
So trust me when I say that Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday is very likely the worst of the bunch.
The main difference between the supposedly final Friday and its predecessors is that Jason gets “killed” at the beginning of the flick instead of the end. While trying to butcher a towel-clad woman at Crystal Lake, he is led into an FBI ambush, shot more than 100 times, and blown up.
The only thing is, his big, ugly heart, oozing with black blood, remains intact, and when his remains are sent for inspection, the coroner—naturally—chows down on the nasty morsel. He now becomes Jason, and quickly sets off for Crystal Lake to murder some teens for not using condoms during tent sex.
In a blatant rip-off of the excellent sci-fi thriller The Hidden, Jason’s soul or spirit or whatever is transferred from person to person when they open their mouths real wide, say aahhh, and release a dark, sluglike creature into the new host’s mouth. This gruesome game of tag is played so Jason can get to his only remaining blood relatives (his niece and her baby), kill them, and become “reborn”.
Wicked story line, eh?
Hot on Jason’s heels is a sadistic bounty hunter (Steven Williams) and the ex-boyfriend and father of Jason’s two main targets (John D. LeMay from the Friday the 13th TV series). Like most of the actors here, LeMay gives a lame performance, and his hero is mainly there to get kicked around by the various incarnations of Jason and say “fuck” a lot.
Crummy acting and an excruciating script are common elements of a Friday film, of course, but Jason Goes to Hell doesn’t even have decent splatter effects, which is what semi-twisted Friday followers come to see in the first place.
A supposed shock ending hints that Jason will not be hanging up the hockey mask for good, though, and will even be taking on Freddy Krueger in a future cinematic masterpiece. Because New Line Productions now has dibs on both baddies, you can bet it’ll try to capitalize on the combined fan base of the two horror icons.
Hey, maybe they’ll even recruit Michael Myers from the Halloween films so wisecracking Freddy can knock the two quiet masked guys’ heads together before they take off for a night on town.
Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice, Dimension Films, 1992
The previous movie “based on a short story by Stephen King”, 1992’s The Lawnmower Man, bears so little resemblance to anything King wrote that the horror master belatedly sued to get his name separated from the film.
The latest flick spawned by one of King’s short works, Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice, is more fairly based on his 1977 “Children of the Corn” tale, but he should still sue its makers over this worthless piece of cinematic dreck.
Corn II is so despicable that it makes the lowly Children of the Corn flick from ’84 look good.
Now that’s a scary thought.
The movie opens with tabloid journalist John Garrett (Terence Knox of TV’s Tour of Duty) and his rebellious son Danny (Paul Scherrer) driving their van into sleepy Gatlin, Neb., where the bodies of 50 dead townspeople have just been discovered. It seems that the dim Garrett, a former Newsweek reporter (yeah, right), is covering the story for a rag called World Enquirer, but it’s the town’s young people who appear to be the culprits—not some evil alien offspring of an abducted Elvis—and Garrett finds that hard to believe.
Meanwhile, Danny—who resents his dad for abandoning his family when he was just a child—is semi-intrigued by the leader of the kid cult, Micah (Ryan Bollman), and his anti-grown-up preachings. Micah and his followers believe that it is only by wiping out the older folks in their midst that they can eradicate sin from the earth, so in the name of He Who Walks Behind the Rows (of corn), they give a church-goer a killer nosebleed, poke a doctor to death with his hypodermics, and crush an elderly lady with her own house!
While all this is going on, the newshound and his son are busy romancing the only two women in town who appear to be available. Dad hits the jackpot with the owner of the local bed-and-breakfast (Rosalind Allen), but while Danny is making out in a cornfield with teen bombshell Lacy (Days of Our Lives’ Christie Clark), a dismembered hand gets uncomfortably lodged beneath her and breaks up the party.
The two gals eventually get captured by the kids for the climactic sacrifice scene, but a big corn-husking machine saves the day and makes red soup out of the loud-mouthed Micah brat.
The director of Children of the Corn II is David Price, who made his feature debut last year with the direct-to-video horror sequel Son of Darkness: To Die For II. But Price is not alone in his ascension to the title of He Who Makes the Crappy Movie, because he got a shipload of help from this flick’s lame-brained writers and emotionless actors.
Save your money and wait till Corn II comes out on videotape.
Then don’t rent it.
Watchers, Universal Pictures, 1988
When novelist Dean R. Koontz was asked, after reading a screenplay based on his book Watchers, how he thought the film would turn out, he said, “I think they’ve done a good job with the [scary] throat-clutching parts, but the rest of it I’m not sure about.”
Well, Dean, sorry to tell you, but they didn’t do a good job with any of it. Watchers is a real mess, and it’s only a couple of steps up from the dismal Maximum Overdrive, the last Stephen King story to be slaughtered on the screen.
Things don’t even start off well. As the movie opens up, we see an exterior shot of a building at night–but why is the camera shaking ever so slightly? Could it be that the cameraman is trembling in anticipation of a huge explosion that will demolish the place? Probably, because that’s just what happens.
It turns out the building is a top-secret government lab where animals are genetically programmed to become the perfect killing machines in time of war. In the blast that opens this flick, a golden retriever equipped with near-human intelligence and a hybrid creature called Oxcom (Outside Experimental Combat Mammal) are set loose. The Oxcom is after the dog, and so is government agent Lem Johnson (Michael Ironside of Visiting Hours and Scanners), and neither wants to feed it Alpo.
Typical teenager Travis Cornel (Corey Haim) adopts the brainy mutt, and the rest of the film is taken up with him and his mother (B.C. native Barbara Williams of Thief of Hearts) trying to keep “Fur Face” safe from harm. The people who sold fake blood to the Watchers effects crew must be happy, though, because plenty of people get offed in the crossfire.
But even the fright sequences aren’t much to scream about here. Hackneyed horror tricks like the head in the clothes dryer and the body through the window have been done to death by the likes of Jason and Freddy. Ironside doesn’t evince any of the menace that made his other baddie roles so effective. And the film’s humour–which is essential to offset the terror in a good fright flick–is not funny.
I doubt if even the most starry-eyed Corey Haim fans would chuckle at his phony one-liners.
About the only decent thing about Watchers is the fact that it was filmed in B.C. at locations in Ladner, Port Coquitlam, Buntzen Lake, the Seymour Watershed, and Lynn Canyon. As such it employed a lot of area talent, including local theatre stars Blu Mankuma, Norman Browning, and Suzanne Ristic.
The local settings are interesting, but it’s still not worth $6.50 to see a poster of local pop-rockers Go Four 3 on Corey Haim’s bedroom wall.
To read more than 350 of my reviews of horror movies released theatrically in North America between 1988 and 2018, go here.
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