VOD Review: Bedeviled (2017)

"It might not have anything new to say, but it sure says it well."

Anyone who has a smart phone knows that installing new apps can be a dicey game sometimes. Bloatware, malware, huge drains on the battery, and hours wasted trying to get the high score on games like "Where Did Grandma Hide that Zucchini?" are all very real things, and can be terrifying in their own right.

So just imagine an app that loads a haunted virus on your phone that learns your deepest, darkest fears, and then uses them to scare you, and kill you to death.

That's what Bedeviled is all about.

Mr. Bedevil is a Siri-like app for the ages. It will make witty comments, turn on lights for you, and help you organize your life is a fun and efficient manner. It will also kill you, because it's haunted. I mean, doesn't the name kind of give you the impression that it's creepy right away? Why would you even install it when it randomly shows up on your phone? Ever hear of spyware?

YOU'RE CUTE, BABY, BUT YOU AIN'T VERY BRIGHT.

After young QT Nikki falls victim to Mr. Bedevil's haunted shenanigans, her friends are reeling, so much so, that they have to stop texting and tweeting for 5 minutes to grieve... which they have no idea how to do, because all they do is text and tweet, and they have no emotions.

HANGING WITH FRIENDS IN 2017 IS SO MUCH FUN.

They all receive invites to download Mr. Bedevil, which they do, because you should always install any app that mysteriously makes its way onto your phone without you actually downloading it. The app instantly starts messing with them, turning their deepest darkest fears into reality... which if it was truly evil, all it would need to do would be to cut them off from Internet connectivity for life, and watch them die slow, agonizing deaths.

IF ONLY HE WERE ALLOWED TO BROWSE REDDIT, HE'D STILL BE ALIVE.

One by one, the friends are killed off by Mr. Bedevil, and it becomes a race against time for those left to figure out how to uninstall him from their phones so that they can live, and live-stream the VMA's which are tomorrow night!

Scary smart phone stuff ensues.

LIKE SHE COULD EVEN HACK THE MATRIX!

Movies like Chain Letter (review HERE), Unfriended (review HERE), and #Horror (review HERE) have all tried to capitalize on the current state of teenagers and their tech-obsessions, but they sucked. Bedeviled isn't all that great either, but at least it's well-made, the cast is able enough, and it offers up an interesting villain in Mr. Bedevil, even if the story he's stuck in is silly at times.

Here's the problem with most Teen Terror flicks like this: everyone is model-level gorgeous; they all live in beautiful homes that make us wonder what do their parents do to afford all of that; and those same parents never seem to be around much as their kids are being terrorized and brutally killed. I also never understand how in these movies when someone dies, their closest friends mourn them for like a minute, and then it's back to laughter and normalcy, or they dive into some intense investigation. Real emotions don't work like that, at least not with human beings they don't.

I guess what I'm saying is that most of them exist to show some pretty people in scary situations, and there isn't much depth or realism to most of them. Just like Bedeviled.

THOSE DEAD EYES...

For an R-rated movie, there sure isn't very much gore to be found here.

BUT THERE IS A HAUNTED DANCE-OFF. THAT WAS COOL.

Again, an R-rating with no R-rated action.

YEAH, US TOO.

Bedeviled is a decent enough movie in its way. It's well-made, has an interesting villain, and it looks pretty. It's also overly-familiar, tame, and not very scary. If you can live with those drawbacks, then give it a go and enjoy the pretty sights.

I'm probably being generously giving it a C, but we actually didn't hate watching it. Rent with caution though.

C

Bedeviled is available on VOD now.

Bedeviled's eye candy game was on point though. There's no disputing that.

Theatrical Review: Wind River (2017)

"It's movies like this that make us love movies."

Writer/Director Taylor Sheridan is best known to us for playing Deputy Hale on a little TV show that we loved called Sons of Anarchy.

Turns out that he's also one hell of a writer too, penning scripts for the excellent Sicario, and the even more excellent Hell or High Water, which was one of the best movies that we saw last year. He also directed a Horror flick called Vile back in 2011, so as far as we're concerned, he rocks.

Wind River marks the first time that he's directed something he's written, and it's maybe the best work he's done on any front.

Cody Lambert is an agent of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. His days consists of shooting wolves and tracking hungry mountain lions, which keeps him in a bit of a somber mood. The fact that his daughter died a few years earlier, which helped destroy his marriage, probably doesn't help much either. And the bleak, snowy surroundings...

LIONS DON'T MAKE SNOW ANGELS... DO THEY?

When he finds the barefoot body of a local girl out in the wild, things get even bleaker. The girl was best friends with his daughter, and so old wounds mix with new pain to make Cody even more quiet and somber than he normally is, which even for the backwoods of Wyoming, is way too much.

HE'S SEEN SOME SHIT.

With no one knowing the local terrain better than Cody, it falls to him to help a rookie FBI agent track the killer down and bring him (her, them?) to justice. It also falls to him, by way of a promise to the dead girl's father, to kill the son of a bitch when they find him, so you just know it's all going to end with bloodshed.

LOTS OF BLOODSHED.

Where we expected Wind River to be a Serial Killer flick, we instead got a murder mystery wrapped in an emotional blanket of social relevance and heartbreak, and we couldn't be happier about it.

This is a stark and desolate movie that gives us real characters acting in ways that didn't once make them feel like they were characters in a movie. That makes the emotional weight of everything that unfolds around them that much heavier, and as the intensity grows, which it does, we couldn't help but be on the edge of our seat not only wondering what they'd find, but what would happen to them in the process.

We loved the sub-plot with the lion, and the climactic scene at the end was crazy intense, giving us a perfect resolution.

Jeremy Renner turns in what I think is an Oscar-worthy performance as a quiet, broken man who is tasked with finding the killer of a young girl, and every step of his journey shows that he's as adept at his job as he is isolated from everything else in his life. He's a bad-ass, but he's also very human, which made his badassery play even better. He killed us in this one.

Equally as good, but in a different and lesser way, was Elizabeth Olsen as the rookie FBI agent sent to find the killer in the wilds of Wyoming. She's in over her head, but she goes full bore in her pursuit of the killer, especially once she is sucked in by the emotion of the case, and the people involved.

The two of them have great on-screen chemistry, and they both shine in this one. 

LIFE IN WYOMING IS TOUGH.

 She's way too hot to be an FBI agent.

COME ON!

The statistic about Native American women shown at the end is horrifying.

“While missing person statistics are compiled for every other demographic, none exist for Native American women.”

Taylor Sheridan had two attorneys spend three month's trying to compile statistics on the subject but to no avail, because "No one knows how many there are." Shame on us.

THEY DESERVE BETTER.

The violence in this movie isn't gratuitous at all, but it's there towards the end.

WHO WOULD DARE BLOODY THAT ANGEL'S CHEEK?

Aside from a quick shot of some underwear, this in not that kind of movie.

THERE'S NO TAWDRY SEX OR NUDITY IN THIS ONE, ONLY LOVE. SWEET, TRAGIC, FORBIDDEN LOVE.

This movie is filled with some truly fantastic dialogue. The speech that Jeremy Renner gives about pain was special.

Also, "You really didn't see it, did you?" and "He went out with a whimper."

"SAY THAT SHIT AGAIN, YOU HALF-ASSED JASON BOURNE!" WAS A GOOD ONE TOO.

Calling Wind River the best movie of 2017 is a bold claim, I know, but honestly, no other movie that we've seen so far this year has affected us quite like this one did.

Wind River is an excellent movie from start to finish. Its script is air-tight, it has cold and deary atmosphere to spare, and the cast is top-notch. It's one of the most engaging thrillers that we've seen in a long time, which is saying something given how sparse and quiet it is overall.

See it on the big screen.

A+

Wind River is in theaters now.

The traumatized beauties of Wind River.

Giallo Month Review: What Have You Done to Solange (1972)

"No one did anything to Solange. She did it to herself!"

Italian for "Yellow," Giallo movies are Italian Thrillers that are rife with gratuitous violence and nudity; shadowy, black-gloved killers; absurd plots; bad dubbing; and intense atmosphere like no other. The Gialli films of the late 60's/early 70's helped give birth to the Slasher film as we know it.

Krimi films, which are lesser known than Gialli, are German Thrillers that are based in some way on the books of Edgar Wallace. They're usually set in England, and are essentially murder mysteries, with some random sex and violence thrown in for good measure.

What Have You Done to Solange? is a Giallo/Krimi hybrid, which may be why it feels so different from the standard Giallo fare, and may be why it was so entertaining overall.

While sexy Professor Enrico Rosseni and his 16-year-old lover Elizabeth are floating down the lake in a rowboat, inappropriately kissing and fondling, Elizabeth notices the flash of a blade on the bank. Enrico assumes that despite his magnificent beard, that she's just trying to spurn his attempted statutory rape, and so he gets all pissy about it, and they leave.

HOW COULD ANY UNDERAGE GIRL RESIST THE SEXY APPEAL OF THAT BEARD?

The next morning on the news, Enrico hears that the body of a girl was discovered on the riverbank, and he races to the scene only to discover that his little Lolita wasn't just trying to avoid sex with a much older man after all; she really did witness a murder, and one where a girl was stabbed to death in the vagina. Like it always happens in these films, Enrico begins to investigate the murder, which the Cops have no problem with at all, despite him being a civilian.

HE'S ABOUT TO SEND HER TO DETENTION IF SHE DOESN'T LET HIM FINISH.

As more girls show up having been stabbed to death in the vagina, Enrico becomes the prime suspect, because he dropped his pen at the scene; his wife learns he's a cheating man-whore who like little girls; and he must work frantically to discover who is murdering his potential lovers, before it's too late... which he'll do once he discovers just what happened to Solange.

VAGINA KILLER.

What Have You Done To Solange? might be the classiest Giallo that we've ever seen. As much nudity and murder as there is in this movie, it's not really all that gratuitous or sleazy, which isn't exactly par for the course for the average Giallo movie. It feels almost sanitized in a way, and yet even with that level of restraint, it doesn't lose any of its bite.

All of the familiar trappings of the standard Gialli are here: A shadowy, black-gloved killer that is out for some sort of retribution; shocking, gruesome murders; an ordinary guy who has no business investigating the murders who is forced/compelled to do so; sexually promiscuous girls; plenty of nudity; and that feel... that Italian Horror movies of the 70's feel. We have to give Solange? credit, as it didn't feel anywhere near as cheesy, melodramatic, or non-sensical as most Italian Horror movies of its time did.

This was also Camille Keaton's (I Spit On Your Grave) first movie, and she did a good job playing the troubled Solange. The gorgeous Karin Baal was also good as the wife of the cheating Enrico. Despite her husband's adulterous, age-inappropriate assholery, she was a down ass bitch to the end. We liked her.

WHOSE HAND IS THAT?

The accents in this movie were atrocious. Were we really supposed to believe that they were all British? And the black dude... could they not have at least dubbed him better?

"DON'T JIVE ME, MAN!" REALLY?

I'm not sure how things work in Europe, but here in America, if a teacher has sex with his underage student, people don't just call him a "Sex Maniac" and give him stern looks. No, they fire him, and then he goes to prison.

Bravo, Europe, for not putting such silly restraints on lust true love!

SURE, HE MAY BE EYEING THEM LIKE A HUNGRY WOLF EYES A FLOCK OF INNOCENT, VULNERABLE SHEEP, BUT THAT TRACKSUIT IS FANTASTIC.

A bunch of girls get killed in this one, and the scene that gives the movie its title is fairly disturbing, but none of it is very graphic.

THAT IS JUST WRONG.

This movie is full of naked young girls having sex, taking showers together, and being murdered. One of those situations is of course as un-sexy as it gets, but hey, naked is naked.

NOT ROMANTIC AT ALL.

Arrow Films just doesn't know how to make a bad disc, and in fact, their releases are consistently excellent. This 2K restoration is visually stunning, and it's amazing how great the movie looks compared to every other release that its had. The Italian Language Audio track is stronger than the English one (the former has a better mix, and the latter sounded tinny to us at times), but it didn't bother us all that much.

It's also got plenty of Supplemental Material for fans of the film to sort through.

Overall, this is an excellent disc.

HER PUSSY LOOKS SOFT AND CUDDLY.

What Have You Done To Solange? may not be a typical Giallo film in many ways, but it certainly is one of the best of them that we've ever seen. It's above average in its storytelling and its characters, and it retains its nasty edge despite being mostly blood-free. We'll even go so far as to call it a poignant story about the loss of innocence.

It's a great movie, and one worth checking out, especially in its current Arrow Video Blu-ray form.

A

What Have You Done To Solange? is available now on Blu-ray.

There are so many gorgeous ladies in What Have You Done To Solange?, that we've even given them their own Retro-Hottie post HERE.