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Cherry Tree - Irish horror. Whereas The Hallow was pretty good, this one is a disappointment overall. Acting is quite standard, effects are meh, but what fails most is the story: it is just so non-exciting. A schoolgirl called Faith has a father with leukemia and while he was recovering, the doctors discovered that he was sick again and only had a short time to live. Faith wants to save him and her new hockey coach at school offers help: Faith just has to deliver a baby to her and all will be well. Of course the coach is a witch, planning to use the baby in a way too specific ritual to take over the world or something, and Faith gets betrayed from all sides. The wicthes plan was one of the stupidest I had ever heard but she executes it quite well. The witch/satanic cult classic is also there: when you have finished watching, you will wonder who in town was not a member or a minion of the coven. Stupid. So I'd say skip this one and save yourself from ~85 minutes of nuisance.

Thanks, keep the reviews coming.

Apparition - it was a struggle to get through this movie. It started out OK, with a couple about to get married, and they have a "fixer-upper" in the country: an old house that is said to be haunted. On their engagement party, the bride's ex-boyfriend shows up and he spoils the atmosphere badly. On their way home, the couple has an argument and then an accident: she dies. He tres to find solace in fixing the house anyway, because she would have wanted it. He teams up a nice woman, whom he had helped before with a flat tyre. She tries to help him move on, but he gets more and more influenced by the house and he starts seeing things. This is where it gets boring, tedious and predictable. The annoying thing is, that reality and vision are blending in, but in a nasty way: everytime something noticeable happens, it turns out to be a dream again. I actually got a bit angry with the film, for putting me through such garbage. How it plays out is again very predictbale, there are some tiny surprises, but I was glad when it was over. Please skip this one.

The Editor - after the recent crap I watched I wanted to have a good time, so I went for The Editor, of which I knew it was an Astron-6 film (these guys also made Manborg and Father's Day). The story is about an editor, working in 1970s Italian cinema, and all the cliches about those days of cinema in Italia Bella are being portrayed and/or exaggerated in this movie. There are a lot of references, like black leather gloves, close-ups of eyes (with a knife pointing at it one time, nice), lots of needless nudity, a wink at nunsploitation and some nice splatter. Especially Argento and Fulci get many rerefences in this film, which is a nice nod to the masters of Italian cinema in the 70s. The editor of the title has to work hard to complete a film for his director, but this director changes views almost every other day so he has to cut and recut, and things don't get better when some actors start to turn up dead. Roles have to change and then the film has to be recut again. There are some nice kills, the music is superb, there are some great oneliners and some funny scenes, like the one in which Claudio is watching a scene in which he plays the lead role, while an actress is trying to have sex with him: he keeps pushing her away in order to be able to see the screen with himself on it. I laughed out loud regularly, I simply love Astron-6 and their films, I hope this one will be available on DVD for a nice price shortly. Highly recommended, especially for fans of Italian cinema.

Beneath - creature flick, which on one side piles up all cliches we know in the genre, but on the other side it gives you that good feeling of watching horror movies back in the golden age. A bunch of friends go on a trip together. Highschool is over, they will all go their separate ways, and this is their goodbye to each other. Upon arriving at the lake, Johnny meets up with a friend of his grandpa, and this old man warns him about the lake: Johnny promises to not let anyone go into the water. Of course, while rowing across the lake, some of them jump in, to take a little swim. It doesn't take long before the creature arrives: the thing the old man was warning about. After the first kill and losing the oars, the friends have to decide what to do in order to get to the shore and survive the ordeal. Soon their friendship is under high pressure, and when it comes to surviving, they turn out to be capable of unthinkable things. Acting is OK, nothing very special. The creature doesn't really look alive, but since it is mostly in the water, it is not a very big deal. I had fun, even though it was pretty predictable overall. If you wanna have some old school fun, pick this one.

Once Bitten - the 80s comedy with Jim Carrey. As usual with horror comedies, it is one or the other and this one is not a horror. The vampires are gimmicky, they are never scary but they give several reasons to have a good laugh. A good thing is that this movie is not overloaded with jokes, so it doesn't get too corny (although the level of corniness rises to majestic levels in the super 80s dance duel scene). Some jokes are quitre OK, like the one on the school dance: "I am not wearing a costume". Overall it is very, very 80s and you should give this a watch if you are a big fan of either Carrey, the 80s or if you are feeling nostalgic.

Smothered - supposedly this was also a comedy, but I thought it was just a mediocre timefiller. A bunch of horror icons (who are so iconic I only knew one of them - because most of these "icons" didn't star in the classics, but in one or more of the sequels, usually parets 6 or 9 or something like that) get a job to scare some people in a trailerpark. When they arrive, they feel that something is fishy about the park, and when they start finding their friends dead, they know for sure that something is really wrong. The jokes are bad, they usually are reference jokes and they are only (half) funny the first time. Some situations are quite OK, like when the big guy gets pierced by a pole in the RV, that whole situation was quite thought through, although of course it didn't match any of the more classic horror scenes. Finding out who the killer is, isn't even a question: you will know before the first victim is there, because they showed you a little flashback-like scene in wich you already can see who has done it all. The ending was quite OK, but I don't think I will ever watch this again.

Lily Grace: a witch story - 80 minutes film, which, apart from a few shots, doesn't get to the horror part until 10 minutes to the end. Everything before that is a drama/thriller, about two guys meeting up more or less coincidentally. Ronald, a guy whose father just died. He didn't have a good relationship with him, as he never got a call or a letter when he graduated somewhere. Now he is in his father's house and finds out more and more about his old man: he had encounters with a wicth, and therefore never got to build up a normal reltionship with his son. Jake, a guy who suspects that Ronald is the guy who took a purse he is looking for, knocks on the door and from that moment on the two men's lives are entangled. They aren't particularly made for each other, but they will need each other to get to what they want: Jake wants the purse and Ronald wants to capture the witch. In a subplot, a bunch of criminals are also on the hunt for the purse, which apparently contains a large sum of money. Together, jake and ROnald build a large trap in order to get the witch, but it does take molre than sweat and toil before they will succeed. Low budget, it shows in the number of characters and in the lack of variety in location. But in the acting department it does what it can do (only the Jake character has some real hickups from time to time). It isn't evn such a bad movie, but the lack of horror made me not like it so very much. Decent attempt, I hope this guy will make a more horrorish movie next time.

Dead Still - gave it a try, and although this wasn't very good, it was better than I had expected. Central theme is the photography of the dead, which was popular around the end of the 19th century. Brandon Davis, a wedding photographer, inherits an ancient camera from his great grandfather. As you can guess, this camera was used in the photography of the dead. What Brfandon doesn't know, is that the camera makes the people it photographs, die in a horrible way. So after having made some pictures at a wedding, he happily goes to plan a session with his son and (ex)wife. When his son disappears after the session, Brandon knows that he is trapped inside the camera. Now the movie goes a bit Insidious, as Brandon is gonna go inside too to rescue him. Of course they find out why the camera does this stuff, as it turns out that great grandfather wasn't such a nice guy after all and didn't only photograph the dead. The premise is quite cool, the demons look a tad cliche and the dead people look really fake. Ray Wise on the castlist made me curious, but his role is very gimmicky. Nothing very special, but not as bad as I expected, which is nice.

The Boy - good movie. Yesterday I wrote that Lily Grace had a few characters and only one location and therefore it was clearly low budget. But: The Boy also has a few characters (6 which actually matter), and also just one location (the estate where The Boy lives), but this is clearly a high budget production. Lauren Cohan (Maggie from The Walking Dead) stars as Greta Evans, an American young woman who is hired as a nanny in a big estate somewhere in the UK. She should babysit Brahms while his parents are away. There is just one oddity about Brahms: he is a doll. At first, Greta thinks it's a joke, aftrer that she refuses to act like a babysitter to the doll, but then things start to move: the doll is not in the same place where she left it, her clothes disapear and then reappear. With help of the errant boy Malcolm, Greta tries to find out what is going on with Brahms, to see if he is actually alive. Simultaneoulsy, she tries to cope with her past, where a violent boyfriend left a permanent mark in Greta's life. Acting is good, Lauren really got me into the story and I forgot about her being Maggie to me most of the time. Atmosphere is also good, the estate really helps of course. But what was most surprising, was the plot, as it made a turn which I didn't expect. It's not like I had never seen it before, and maybe I could have guessed it if I had been 110% sharp, but getting this surprise entertained me more. One of the better films of the past few weeks. Highly recommended!

X Moor - starts out as a monsterflick, in which an American couple gp to England to search for some big cats which presumably hide in the moors near the small village of Exmoor. They meet up with a local guy who used to date the American girl, and of course this brings some tension between her boyfriend and this English man, Fox. When they go out on the search, they end up in a forest, where they set up some 40 cameras in order to catch the big cats on film. When they walk through the forest, they discover something gruesome, which will change all their plans

Spoiler:

they find a bunch of dead bodies, so it must be a serial killer's dumping place

This part, and the part immediately after, are the best parts of the film when it comes to tension. You really feel a bit of a scare, but it's very dark and that is sometimes a bit annoying. The story develops nicely, but after a while the characters start to make superdumb decisions, which are so hard to believe that the film almost completely lost me best example being

Spoiler:

the Romanian girl not killig the serial iller who was lying in front of her, ready to receive the final blow, but nstead she attacks the American girl who was trying to help her, yeah riiiight

The ending was OK, I predicted the final shot halfway thorugh and I was correct, but the beautiful imagery of the moors and the forest made up a little for that. OK, nothing really special, not a complete waste of time either.

Hell Fire - forgot to write a review on this one, perhaps because it was quite uninteresting. The story is simple: a group of hookers are setting up to steal a large sum of money from a gang of pimps and dealers. When all their captives are dead except for one, they take him on a trip (presumably because he is going to show where the money is, but I'm not sure, I guess I missed it while watching). Too bad that this guy happens to be the antichrist, and as the son of Satan, he can do stuff, you know. So he is gonna possess all the hookers one by one so they turn on each other, or, as in some cases, on themselves. This leads to a film where the largest part consists of a part of the hookers yelling at each other about where hte money is, and one or more of them doing violent stuff always ending up dead. I must say that the ending, the final scenes, were quite nice and had some funny twist, but it sure wasn't enough to save the 80 minutes of crap which come before that. Acting is below par imo, and although effect were cool, the film had little to no effect on me. Forgettable.

Holidays - now this, this was way more interesting. An anthology centered around our holidays, it may sound a bit dul, but it has become a pretty cool film. Of course you might have seen several christmas horrorfilms, a bunch of Halloween films and maybe also a Valentine's Day horror film or two, but who has seen New Years Eve horror, or Mother's/Father's Day horror, or St Patricks Day horror, or Easter horror? Well, there are eight little stories on these holidays and of course some of them are better than others. Some of them don't deal so much with the holiday (like the Halloween one, which had a great story, btw), but others really depend on it (like the Easter one, which is one of the sickest). Father's Day has the best drama, Mother's Day was a bit meh but some great acting, Christmas was one of the funnier, a bit Lovecraftian, St Patricks Day was a bit like The Wicker Man and also had a big touch of Lovecraft over it, Valentine's Day was a nice opener but nothing really special, Halloween like I said the best story (the revenge is bittersweet), Easter the sickest and New years Eve the best twist. I had a great time, and I can safely recommend it to any type of horrorfan.

The Amityville Playhouse - aka The Amityville Theater aka Amityville Legacy (not to be confused with the 2016 film "The Amityville Legacy"). Fawn Harriman inherits an old theater from her parents, who died in a fire while being on vacation. She wants to spend the weekend there with a bunch of friends, to see what it's like and maybe to think of what to do with the old building. When they are inside, they start seeing strange things, they meet up with a girl who has been living there for a while and ultimately they discover a supernatural force which threatens them all. This film is quite bad, but you can still have some fun with it. At first: acting is really atrocious. Some castmembers act like they are very stoned/high/under the influence, with slow voices and a seemingly lack of interest in what is going on around them. The Asian girl has a hissing tone of voice, exaggerating all s-sounds and pronouncing them like an -f: "fomefing if really wrong here guyf!". There is one character wh starts all sentrences with "I don't know", which is funny the first few times but gets annoying quite fast. The effects are cheap: the first "ghost" we get to see is a girl with blue facepaint. The other effects are just a tiny bit less ridiculous, and together with the acting, this makes for some hilarious scenes. The story is pretty uninteresting, so the lack of interest of some of the castmembers is not totally misplaced. The ending is quite stupid even. I had only seen Amityville 1 and 2 before, but this product can't even stand in the shadows of those two. Only recommended if you want to have a laugh at bad filmmaking.

Lumberjack Man - retro slasher, with lots and lots of nudity. In fact, topless girls are running around so often, I was wondering if this wasn't a horror but something else maybe. The story is flat and simple: a bunch of teenagers go to prep a church camp. Of course they want all sorts of sex related stuff, some want it because they know what it's about, others act totally dumb and are just biological wallpaper. The story behind the slasher is being brought up by Michael Madsen in a very unconvincing role, but his story is quite OK, the animation in which it was told was also pretty cool. The kills are sometimes quite funny and inventive, others are pretty straightforward. I had some goold funwatching this, the only drawback is it's running time. This could have been done in 15-25 minutes less and the film would have been even better. Recommended, though, especially for fans of the old-fashioned slasher-genre.

The Demons - the 1973 Franco movie. A nunsploitation in the classic sense: it has some sort of background story in the past (16th/17th century England this time), it has nuns, it has lots and lots of nudity and sexual acts, and it has torture. The story is not so bad: after a witch is burned, she of course curses the people who put her there. Years later, two nuns turn out to be the daughters of the witch, and in order to prevent them from executing the curse, they are tried for witchcraft themselves. Shocked by this fact, the nuns try to get out of it. One is being arrested, the other one escapes and is hellbent on helping her sister. In the meantime there is some underdeveloped subplot about William of Orange invading England (which means it must be 1688), which actually doesn't amount to anything. The acting is what you might expect in a sleazy exploitation from the 70s and the sfx are laughable, especially the ones in which plastic skeletons are used. The version I watched is a UK release with English audio dubbing, some parts are in French, and the dubbing is quite bad indeed: there are some scenes in which you can see mouths moving, but only backgroundmusic is being played, quite stupid imo. Apparently this is one of the more complete releases, though: it runs for some 100 minutes. If you are new to nunsploitation and wanna know what it's all about then check this one out.

Exit 14 - pretty cliche film with a short running time (76 mins). Bunch of college kids go on spring break, take a wrong turn and end up in the house of Roy, the guy who helped them with their broken car. Roy is being played by Tom Sizemore, and he is clearly over the hill, as you can witness while watching this movie. The female eyecandy is nice, the male characters (besides Roy) are annoying and obnoxious, so you'll hope they will die fast. What follows, is a dumb ghost story, and of ccourse the kids are gonna do a fake seance thing and then all hell breaks loose, although: nothing much really happens, just some tortured looks and some disappearances and so on. It is all kind of predictable, and it takes too long to reveal it, you feel like you are the one telling the cast that they are f*cked, so no surprises at all. Forgettable film.

The Hatching - crocodile film from the UK, and since I didn't have subs, it was hard to follow sometimes. I like crocodile films, and this one had a nice twist to the cliche story, with a crocodile in the moors (escaped from the zoo way back when) terrorising the local villagers. I think the croc was cgi (at least in some shots) but it wasn't irritating. Acting was so-so, some of the cast really just got their money by looking weird. The subplot, about how the croc was able to do all this terrorising, was quite interesting. As far as I could follow them, dialogues were pretty simple and straightforward. All in all it was an average film, not garbage, but not a complete waste of time either.

Bite - Casey is soon to wed her boyfriend Jared, but before she becomes a wife, she goes on a trip to Costa Rica with her best friends Kirsten and Jill. On that trip, they drink a whole lot, have fun, dancve and Jill films it all. When they meet a guy who tells them about a beautiful spot in the woods, they go for it and when they find it they take a swim in the water. During this swim, Casey gets bit by something in the water. Back home, she starts thinking about the wedding, her soon to be mother-in-law (who is also her landlord) makes her life miserable and she starts checking out the footage from the trip. It looks like she had more than just a little fun with one of the guys over there, but what is worse is that the bite on her leg seems infected: large bubbles with pus are all over it. Slowly but steadily, her entire body starts to change, and she becomes less and less human. Her new instincts tell her a lot about her boyfriend and her friends too, so she starts acting out of self preservation. Nice bodyhorror, with a slow start and some drama which is a bit over the top, but effects were nice and gory. The whole shapeshifting could be interpreted as a metaphor for Casey changing her mind about the wedding, but maybe I'm overinterpreting that. Some character actions were a bit unlogical like

Spoiler:

Jared having sex with Jill immdiately, while he thought he and Casey should wait until marriage

but overall it was good enough to entertain me. Nice job, next time more gore and less intro drama please.

Zombie Resurrection - pffft, another UK horror without subs and indistinguishible accents. As far as I could follow this, the story was like this: a few months after a zombie break out, some survivors are in what is supposed to be a school, but the room they stay in most of the time resembles a church pretty much. The group is varied like always, and they are trying to figure out how they could escape the building without being easten by the mass of zombies which is elsewhere in the building. What makes this flick stand out a bit, is the Jesus-theme they have going, with one superreligious survivor and one bearded zombie which acts a bit like Jesus: when he lays his hand upon someone, they get uninfected. A myriad of dumb actions by characters crash this film for me, however. They insist on doing the most stupid stuff throughout, so it's no surpise that the number of survivors dwindles towards the ending. Acting was so so, some of the cast were overdoing it a little. Overall nice try, but not anything groundbreaking.

Sharkansas Women's Prison Massacre - title says all: very, very light entertainment which actually doesn't take place in a pison at all. Story tells us that some blasting in Arkansas woke up prehistoric sharks who are superbad cgi, but since we domn't get to see much of them, it is quite bearable. The women from the prison have to do some chaingang work, without being in chains. Instead, they are in a special prison uniform: short tight jeans and a small top to emphasize the size of their boobs. When one of them disappears, the guards (only two of them, very safe) think about an escape. While searching for her, they encounter another woman who actually wants to help the women escape. The sharks don't really cooperate with this plan, though. There is some subplot about a cop (also with big boobs, maybe it's a treat of the region) and her partner looking for some robbers in the area, but their meaning to the story is minimal. I had fun watcing this, because it has so many stupid and dumb things, the eyecandy is aplenty of course, with all those boobs dangling in your face from time to time. Acting was so so, especially some of the prison women overdid it way too much. Some details were rather nicely done, like when one of the women loses her newly acquired love interest, she is still crying about it in later scenes, instead of instantly getting over the traumatic death of the young man. Overall this was quite some fastfood-like film, watch it if you wanna have fun and don't intend to stretch your brain.

Club Dead - vampireflick about a club in LA which is super exclusive, you only get in when "Madame" thinks you will fit. When a bunch of friends, who have been trying to get in for over a year, bring a new girl, they finally get through, but only after having been warned by the local shopkeeper that Club Dead is a portal to hell. Of course, "Madame" is a vampire boss and she has several minions walking around the club who feast every night upon the visitors. When you finally get in, you can't leave, because the exits have disappeared and the friends can only try to escape by being resourceful. Of course there is also some sort of a ritual that has to take place in order to make the vampires reign supreme or something, but upon sunrise everything ends., like it should in a vampireflick. Nice passtime, but nothing really special.

Mammoth - the monsterflick from 2006, not the Moodyson film from 2009 While everyone in this scifi channel film does his or her job, the film never reaches up from the pits of averageness, if even that. The story is outrageous: aliens send a probe which lands in a frozen mammoth, who comes to life because of all this. So yes, we have a resurrected mammoth possessed by an alien. And this alien blatantly announces that his race will "reconquer earth and rule once again", while totally forgetting that if you send a scout to a remote planet that it would be way more useful to land it in something completely different from a frozen prehistoric mammoth! Some actors differ from the grey mass of averageness, some by looks (Leila Arcieri) and some by acting skills (Tom Skerritt). I laughed frequently, at stupid stuff like when someone dies, he is beheaded. They take his body, but when one of them asks "What about the head?", the other one repies "Leave it". Riiight. They also keep firing at the mammoth while they know after a few bullets that it doesn't help at all. CGI mammoth looks pretty bad, but that was something you would have known before pressing Play on this one. Brainless and unintentionally funny. Only for bad moviefans, I guess.

Luciferous - a movie about a family, starring a family. By that I mean that the family who are the main characters, are a family irl too: father is actually mrried to mother and their daughter is really their kid. They emphasize it in the beginning of the movie, and I wouldn't have known if they hadn't done that. So that's a little plus, I like that kind of details. The story takes a long while to get going, but when it does, you might be intrigued by it: the father has had an accident in his past, killing a friend's family. Now he has an accident himself and he ends up in a coma in the hospital. When he wakes up, his behavious has changed. Is it the head trauma, or is he being haunted by the ghost of his friend? He has to fight the injuries, the disbelief of his wife and the doctors who just wanna prescribe more pills. The film is lacking horror a bit, but the ending was quite OK. While you might feel cheated by the fact that it sounds like a demonic possession film and it really is not: it actually turns out that all

Spoiler:

supernatural stuff is manipulated by a guy, so in fact this is some sort of a sadistic psychological slasher

A film which is a bit different, but also sports a bunch of cliches. Nice timefiller, but nothing very outstanding. I can recommend it to those who want to see something else from what they are used to watch.

Kill or be Killed - was advertised as a supernatural western with horror elements, but it isn't. It's just a western with some gore. Not really bad, but quite middle of the road. If you want horror plus western, skip this.

Blood Moon - Instead, go for this one. Also not a special film, but at least here is some real horror to be seen in the form of skinwalkers (the werewolf-like creatures) and the western setting is worked out quite OK, with ghosttowns, cowboys, outlaws, etc. The subplot with the outlaw brothers is OK-ish, I liked the (minor) twists the best

Spoiler:

the Indian girl being a skinwalker herself, and the pretty wife secretly being an ex-prostitute

Effects are meager and most of the film plays out at night, acting is so so, the women were doing a great job, the Calhoun guy looked like he had smoked some grass. The story was superflat, but the cast succeeded in making na little something out of it, not too much, though. For bad moviefans there are some things to enjoy (esp in the sfx deparment) but this isn't a crowdpleaser even for them. Serious horrorfans should steer clear anyway.