The Undertaker (1988)

When Pam Hayes talk about necrophilia in her class, student Nick sticks around afterwards to speak to her.  He asks her to meet him that night and says it has something to do with the class topic. Pam has a healthy ego and thinks Nick is asking her out so she turns him down. It’s odd she wasn’t more concerned about his insistence it had something to do with necrophilia.

Nick’s uncle Roscoe is the local undertaker, who he believes is murdering women and having his way with them.  Nick calls his teacher and convinces her to go to the funeral parlor.  They sneak in the back, but when they search the office, his aunt comes downstairs so they flee.

The police are stumped about why so many women are going missing. They’ve found blood in various places but no bodies.  When a couple of men disappear, the police get more confused. However a man who works at the movie theater thinks he can solve the crimes. 

This is a slow moving, icky movie about an unappealing character. The cover is about as attractive as the movie.

There is an error in the scene where Pam is using a pay phone.  The cradle that holds the receiver is down, which is the equivalent of hanging up. So she can’t be making a call.  But she is and while she talks, the cradle slowly starts moving, before it pops up to reveal a piece of plastic or tape was holding it down. The only reason I can think to do that would be to avoid having the dial tone sound while they were recording the scene.

Ridiculous dialogue

I’m sorry to call you at home but I must meet you.

You think just because I’m a security guard it means I can’t solve a crime? I cant make arrests?

That counter has no drawers

If this is down, the phone is hung up

As she talks, it slowly starts going up. When it lets go,
you can see the clear plastic that was keeping it down

Why do we need this shot of the greasy burger?

Body Count (1986)

 Aka Camping del Terrore. 

Ben, a young man in a military uniform, is standing by the side of the road when an RV pulls over to offer him a ride. Inside are a group of young people looking for a place to camp. Ben is heading home and his parents own a camp ground so he offers them a place to stay.  

Meanwhile a couple in an SUV, along with a friend on a dirt bike, arrive at the camp ground and the owners tell them it’s closed. They ask if he’s serious, which is odd since business owners don’t usually turn away paying customers when they’re open.

Fifteen years ago there were several teens murdered there by an old shaman. He was never caught and Ben’s father Robert thinks the shaman is back. So he’s setting traps in the woods.  The Sheriff is afraid someone will get hurt, but he’s also having an affair with Robert’s wife so he’s a bit distracted. 

The kids in the RV and kids in the SUV set up one big camp together.  The girls find an old abandoned bath house and say they should clean it up so they can take shower. They don’t ask the camp owners about the building or if it’s okay to use it. It’s not near the main house or barn.  When was it last used? Do the fixtures still work? Is the water still on? They never ask.

The next day one of the couples takes a hike and someone pushes them off a cliff.  The boy is rushed to the hospital but it’s not clear if they ever found the girl. The other kids continue camping and having fun.  The body count begins to rise since it was not a good idea to clean up the isolated abandoned bath house.  Is the masked person with a knife the shaman? It is one of the campers? Is it an unknown entity? 

The scenery is beautiful. Bruce Penhall, who was in the tv show CHiPs is riding the dirt bike and I assume he did his own stunts since he used to race.

Ridiculous dialogue

You know what I think about democracy, let alone campers.

There’s a bath house or something over there. But it’s filthy. Why don’t we clean it up?

Not now.

Yes now and tomorrow we can all take a shower.

You guys, come on out. The joke’s over.

No one expects bodies to be hidden in the wall

Hot dirt bike action

Yes, let’s clean up this filthy bathhouse at a
place we are only staying a few days

The girls are uncomfortably giddy about trying on Ben’s military cap

Death Day (2018)

Aka The Campus

Robert heads to the desert with two assistants and goes into hidden ruins which have Aztec markings about the devil.  The Aztecs say the human soul has five pieces, and the devil needs all five to take your soul. While one man in the expedition says they should leave, another other says let’s continue, thus sealing their fate. Robert is able to survive by making a deal with the devil. Oddly enough the devil let’s him keep the wand he stole.

Around fifteen years later, Robert’s daughter Morgan heads home for his funeral. Her sister Natalie still holds a grudge due to Morgan leaving and not reconciling with dad before he died. Natalie is a hypocrite since she tells Morgan to let go of her hate, yet seems to hate Morgan for leaving and even slaps her at the funeral.

Later that night, Morgan goes back to the building to open her dad’s safe and retrieve the want. Three guys in weird masks walk in, she kills one of them, then walks outside and asks where the others went, which is really dumb since now our main character is dead.

Except here she is again, back at the gate where she broke her phone and cut her hand.  So what we’ve got is a time loop or alternate reality going on. The second time she has a head wound from purposefully crashing her car without wearing a seat belt. The third time she has a sinister vision of her sister telling her not to go into the building. The fourth time it’s a zombie invasion and the fifth time she’s up against the devil. I hope he wins.

The most mindnumbing scene is when she tries to fight off the zombie horde. She sets up three stools with a weapon on each. She opens the door, lets about twenty zombies in, goes to the first stool to grab a knife, stabs a zombie, and puts the weapon down. Then she goes to the second stool, grabs that weapon, and so on. After three kills she’s overhwhelmed, tries to run, but trips and can barely walk.  What was her plan?  Why would she move from stool to stool, picking up and putting down weapons? It makes no sense.

Honest to god this movie is not worth your time.  There’s a generic musical score. Morgan is an idiot. She learns nothing from each interaction.  Also did they have their fathers funeral in his office building? Or were we not supposed to notice that the funeral parlor and her fathers office and safe are in the same building?  

Ridiculous dialogue

I heard you were living in the rotten apple.

Those are lame masks, but yeah they’d be scary at night

Does Morgan usually wear this outfit to funerals?

The cave that looks like it’s made of papier-mâché 

The wand looking like a Sid and Marty Krofft prop

Johnny Gruesome (2018)

Johnny is a metal head with a cool car who gets suspended after fighting with a kid on the track team who’s bullying him. Later that night Johnny, his girlfriend Karen, his best friend Eric, and his druggy friend Gary go out driving around.  Johnny starts driving way too fast and the others think he’s going to kill them. So Gary grabs him by the neck, which is not a real smart move to do to the driver and then… oh the car safely stops when Karen pulls the emergency break. Trouble averted.

Well other than Gary is a raging lunatic and he pulls Johnny out of the car and strangles him.  After Eric confirms Johnny is dead, he wants to call the police. But Gary says they need to stage it to look like an accident. Karen agrees and eventually Eric goes along with it.  While this is playing out, Johnny’s ghost curses them all and vows revenge.

After the funeral - which Karen didn’t attend- she starts getting calls from Johnny’s number.  The kid who got Johnny suspended ends up dead in the gym.  Eric thinks he sees Johnny in the upstairs window of his home, and teacher Mrs. Crane is attacked by Johnny in her bathroom. She doesn’t mention it to her cop husband because she thinks he won’t believe her. 

The rest of the movie is Johnny stumbling around, the body count increasing, and Eric trying to figure out what to do. I don’t think they ever explained how Johnny is a revenant.  Sometimes the score is piano music which is more attune to a drama, than a horror movie. The makeup sometimes makes Johnny look like a clown.

How does the blind guy know what a corpse smells like? Why didn’t Johnny kill the woman who hit him with her car and took off? Why didn’t Karen block Johnny’s number when she was getting harassing phone calls after his death? Why did they arrest the janitor for the death of the kid in the gym? Did they ever figure out he was innocent? Did Eric have a conversation with Mrs. Crane? He said he lied earlier in the day but I don’t remember him speaking to her, other than maybe at the funeral. And this isn’t the day of the funeral.

Ridiculous dialogue

If I hadn’t pulled the emergency brake, we’d all be dead right now.

He’s haunting us because we killed him. Gary choked Johnny to death. Me and Karen helped. Make it look like an accident.

 I have never been so humiliated in my life, picking up my son from a police station.

I don’t understand you Carol. You’re married to a cop for Christs sake. You know damn well you can’t exhume a corpse without a court order.

Wait, these are the cool kids?

Never put the driver in a choke hold when you’re going 90.

The least observant grave diggers with no peripheral vision

Guy on the left eating the scenery

Yelling “what the hell is wrong with you” to a person you  
drove into is ridiculous

The photo of the cop and his wife is so distracting 

An arm is under his throat similar to how Gary choked Johnny,
plus it looks like two disembodied heads

Sharkman (2005)

Aka Hammerhead

Biologist Amelia, her boyfriend and head of IT Tom, their boss Feder, his girlfriend Julie and the rest head out to the island laboratory of Dr. Preston King. King has been doing stem cell experiments in an effort to find a cure for cancer.  He’s been called crazy and he almost ruined Feder’s business, but since there is the potential for lots of money to be made, Feder is all about his experiments.

After a tour of the facility, the group is horrified to find King did not cure cancer, but instead spliced shark DNA with human DNA, specifically on his son Paul.  As Paul’s former fiancé, Amelia is surprised to discover he is still alive since she’d been told he died.  She’s even more surprised when she finds out Paul is half shark, half human and out for blood.

The experiments are outside scientific standards and no one is happy, except King, who now has a number of people trapped on his island. King tells them he’s targeting people who ruined his life and refuses to acknowledge his mad science was the cause of his ruin.

The most ridiculous part of is the hammerhead shark man doesn’t seem threatening because he’s still called by his human name. “Oh look out, Paul is coming” doesn’t quite strike terror in your heart.  It’s a partly boring but partly humorous movie.

Ridiculous dialogue that made me laugh

Now I’m just a biologist, but I’ve always assumed falling stock prices are a cause for concern.

He’s not responding to treatment. It’s a dead end. Now he’s more shark than human.

By mutating the cells, I created the perfect organism, embodying the advantages of both the sea and the land

As a scientist, he thought this was a viable option

Even the wrap around shades can’t hide he works in IT

How did they manage to sneak on the boat
when the captain has a 360 view from the top?

Ouija Japan (2021)

Karen, who has been in Japan six months, prays every day at the shrine to be able to understand Japanese. Maybe she should put that time into learning the language. 

She joins a neighborhood group, but the chairwoman doesn’t like her and makes fun of her.  Karen is not helping herself by volunteering to do a community survey when she can’t speak or write the language, or understand what anyone is saying. Satsuki, her only friend, helps her by interpreting for her and pushing back on those who make fun of her.

Due to the language barrier, Karen agrees to go on an overnight trip without realizing it. When the chairwoman makes fun of her, Karen says she’ll have to ask her husband if she can go, which prompts even more abuse.  Karen’s husband is kind of an idiot as he says it may help her learn the language. If she hasn’t done it in six months, two days with women who dislike her won’t help.

The village they visit has a fox guardian and if you offend it, it will drag you to hell. On the way in, the chairwoman makes fun of a rundown building and a villager starts screaming at her for her disrespect.  So the chairwoman decides they’ll do ouija because she wants revenge.  One of the girls grabs a coin from the shrine box to use as the planchette. That can’t be good.  Karen is such a pushover. After meekly protesting she isn’t interested, she puts her finger on the coin to play. 

The next morning one of their group is dead and they send Karen, the girl who can’t speak Japanese, to get help.  Someone in a fox mask appears and says only one of them will survive. Everyone panics and they find an app on their phone where they can track others in the game and get weapons. People start making teams, and it’s all out war, although Karen keeps saying they should talk and work together, not reasoning that if someone has already tried to kill you, then you cant trust them.

My main question is can they not leave this town? No one even tried. They just accepted that they had to play this game because they called Kokkuri-San through the ouija board.  The other thing that drove me nuts is they’d kill someone, but never grab their weapon.

The first part of this movie was like watching a drama about an awkward woman who gets married and moves to a county where she can’t speak the language, and makes little effort to do so.  Karen is a nice person, but she is so uncomfortable with herself and so easily pressured into doing anything to fit in that she is infuriating.

If you’re covered in blood, the ouija has gone horribly wrong

Did they explain how they got this on their phone?

A Townfull of Ghosts (2022)

Mark is documenting his plan to purchase the ghost town of Blackwood Falls with his wife Jenna and make it into a tourist attraction. It will be a family destination with rides and restaurants.  There are three original buildings and the others were built later. So not a real ghost town then.  

Along for the trip is Mark’s cousin Justin, who brings his girlfriend Lisa.  Justin has a drone and video equipment and Mark believes his footage can increase their production value and get them more subscribers.  Mark claims he’s got an online presence and each video gets more views so soon he’ll be able to monetize.

The town is three hours from anything.  There is no electricity, running water, or cell service.  Mark is counting on an investor to help him finance his dream for the town.  He and Jenna are going to sign the papers today, and with only $300 left in the bank, they need the money. 

When the investor arrives and sees the town, he is not happy. He predicts it would take two million to fix the buildings, add plumbing and electricity, and most importantly, it’s not a real ghost town due to only three original buildings.  And why would anyone drive three hours to see it?  He also asks if Mark is aware two teens were murdered here three weeks ago. Mark says that’s not true.

While looking through the buildings, he finds an old projector and some film, and watches one about Blackwood. In 1893 it had 200 residents, but there were rumors of witchcraft at the brothel.  When a child disappeared, the town burned down the brothel, killing everyone except the owner, who then killed everyone in town with an ax.

Jenna is mad because Mark spent all their money and she never wanted to live here. Justin is mad because the check Mark gave him bounced, his girlfriend is missing, and Mark cares about neither. Mark only cares about the town, and he’s started acting really weird.  It’s found footage. Someone’s possessed. We know how that goes.

Questions abound:

1. If there is no electricity, then why is there a light-switch and Christmas lights in a building?
2. How did Mark get the projector to work without electricity?
3. Why would Mark sink all his money into a town three hours from nowhere? 
4. Why isn’t Jenna being honest that she absolutely hates this idea?
5. Why didn’t Mark get the investor to sign off on the money before agreeing to purchase the town?
6. How did no one notice the trail of blood going to the car?
7. Why do we have so many shots up Marks nose?
8. If Mark doesn’t have enough viewers to monetize yet, how much money can he really make?
9. What was he planning to live on until the town was up and running? He only has $300.
10. How was he going to do a digital signature when there is no cell service or electricity?
11. How did Justin get an overhead drone shot of the maze at night? There are no lights. It would be pitch black.

Ridiculous dialogue

I heard some noises and I want this to be totally transparent.

Time’s standing still. A day feels like a month and the longer I’m out here I feel like I don’t even exist any longer. [Jenna after one day]

You know what your problem is, Mark? You’re too much of a salesman. You over promise things, lie and then give shit for results.

Investor - Did you know that two teens got murdered her three weeks ago?

Mark - What? No. That’s fake news.

The ghost town of unoriginal buildings

The amazing drone night shot of the maze

This is a woman who doesn’t want you to purchase a ghost town.

There is a missing woman but no one noticed the trail of blood

Still looking happy one hour into arriving

Gotta perform for the views

Why is there a light switch and Christmas lights
in a town without electricity?

Continuity - reddish brown hair and….

 ….dark brown hair

Deadly Still (2018)

Friends driving to a house in the middle of nowhere hit a deer which goes through the window.  They think the house is nearby, but also need help with the car. One heads back towards the road to get help, and the others look for the house.

They stumble upon a home which looks different than what they expected. But since it’s the only thing they see, they head inside and  look around. In one room they find a wall full of Polaroids, including a photo of the deer on the hood of their car.  They are far too cavalier about the photo.  How did it get there? Who took it? And where is that person now? And how did they get the photo after they left the car, yet post it on the wall before they got here?

The photo is so odd that one of the guys decides it must be a TV show. So there must be a film crew waiting for them at the car. Then they find the Polariod camera in the house and take a photo, and two of them head back to the car.  This group is split up all over the place.

While waiting for them to return, one of the girls finds film and a projector in the other room.  Oddly enough she knows how to thread a projector.  She starts watching a reel and learns learns the Polaroid is a temporal restructuring camera. It changes the space time continuum by removing any changes and destroying the object.  Why would anyone invent this? Things do not go well for our intrepid colleague students.

Ridiculous dialogue

Pal, I’m very happy you took photos of each other but I need to find Vera.

Not only did you kill Steru, but I spent fifteen years in prison and on top of that you stole his camera.

A deer comes through the windshield

Don’t do this while you’re driving.

What a fun trip.

Urban Myths (2017)

Jess’s teacher inexplicably gives her and her friends a one of a kind ancient map to use on their ghost expedition.  The group is visiting houses rumored to be haunted.  Since the homes still have doors, windows and trimmed grass, I kept waiting for them to get arrested for breaking and entering. 

At the first house, something is moving in the window.  If you don’t own a house and something is moving in it, don’t go in.  It could be the owner or a squatter. But in this case it’s something supernatural which sends them running out of the house. Will we see what it is? No, we will not.

While deciding where to go next, one of the girls says it should be somewhere more exciting than the last place.  She offers no opinion on what would be more exciting than a ghost.

They pull up to a house where no one is home, find a key and decide to stay the night. What the heck?  The next day they stop for a meal at a local diner, and are warned to keep away from the Indian graveyard.  We’re fifty five minutes in and the only thing that has happened is an off screen ghost. Later we’ll see Native American spirits while the group gets high near a lake.

There is a side plot about Jess’s father seeing a doctor due to a serious illness which is never identified. But it does cause him to have visions while asleep and a fear that Jess is in danger.  Joe Estevez plays the doctor, who is never onscreen with the patients he’s counseling. 

There are scenes that go nowhere and end abruptly.  The time line is also in question when at one point, Jess’s family is concerned because they haven’t heard from her.  Didn’t she just leave? Also when father has an emergency, Jess’s mother is asked if she wants to ride along in the ambulance or follow them to the hospital, she responds, “I don’t know where my girls are.”  So she’s going to randomly drive around trying to find Jess, who is on a trip, and her sister who is also driving around looking for Jess. Your husband is being transported in an ambulance, good god, go with him and call your kids on their cell phones. Don’t just randomly drive around the state.

Questions you’ll ask are plenty.  Why does Mike think getting high is a personality? How did Jess’s mother locate them?  Why didn’t her mother call her cell? Why did they steal a dog? Who’s dog is it? Why does no one listen to waitresses who warn them of local areas where bad things can happen?

Ridiculous dialogue:

Dad: Anything you can give me to take for the pain?

Doctor: Just take the…. Pain medication that’s been prescribed.

The prognosis of pushing through the pain could be fatal.

The witch was actually very powerful and she cursed herself.

I have a one of a kind, ancient map that will get you where you want to be. It’s very old so be careful with it.

EMT: Do you want to ride with us or follow us to the hospital?

Mom: I don’t know where my girls are.

Joe Estevez as the doctor who isn’t on  
screen with his patients

The patients who were definitely in a different room

Let’s just break into this empty house. It’s fine.

Her parents give her their SUV for an overnight trip.

No one’s home? Let’s stay here.

It looks like their muscles are drawn on, which is
odd since they seem to be in good shape

Sure, we’ll just drive up on the lawn