VOD Review: L.A. Slasher (2015)

This isn't going to be a very long review. For starters, the movie wasn't very good, and that doesn't inspire me to write about it at all. Even worse, it felt like it was almost the same movie as #Horror in many ways, and I'm still trying to get over having to sit through that mess; I need closure, and watching this movie didn't help me get it!

I'm so tired of these "highbrow" Horror movies that try so hard to be some sort of clever indictment of the ills of society, that they never quite figure out how to be a good movie in the process.

How far up their own asses are the people that make this shit?

Pissed off by Reality TV, and Celebutard culture in general, the self-named L.A. Slasher has had enough! He dresses in white suits, wears an androgynous mask, and goes around kidnapping, and then lecturing, the talentless dregs of Hollywood. Sometimes, he even stabs some of them to death. Not sure why he doesn't just kill them outright though; if you're going to do it, go big or stay home. No half measures, Mr. sexually ambiguous Serial Killer with the annoying voice of the sexually ambiguous Andy Dick!

"OH REEEEALLY?"

Will The Actress, The Socialite, The Heiress, The Mayor, The Pop Star, and The Teen Mom (the characters have no names in this movie, only titles) all fall victim to the L.A. Slasher? Will The Reporter ever find love on the mean streets of L.A.? Will Andy Dick ever not be annoying, in sight or in sound?

Who cares. Honestly. WHO?!?

YOU USED TO HAVE A CAREER, MISCHA. WHAT HAPPENED?

L.A. Slasher tries to bash Reality TV culture by way of slick satire, which it does, but it does so in a very clumsy manner. Its tone is all over the place; its humor didn't ever quite make us laugh; its characters are all throw-away archetypes that made us feel nothing but disdain for them; the generally bad acting doesn't help the characters much; and the equally horrible script doesn't help the actors much.

It looks pretty enough, and there are some good ideas going on somewhere in there, but much like #Horror (and I hate to keep making that comparison), it just makes a total mess of things.

IS SHE READING OFF OF CUE CARDS?

The editing might be the worst part of the movie. Much like the aforementioned #Horror, L.A. Slasher tires to integrate Social Media into its framework, visually, via on-screen texts, Social Media Posts, TMZ-like news flashes, on-screen graphics, cartoons, split-screens... And added to the random loud colors & bright lights, and the random jump cuts that come and go at will, the movie plays like an amateurish, schizophrenic mess.

THIS IS HOW WE WISH WE HAD WATCHED THIS MOVIE.

Even the scenes that play like they're "normal" make little sense. One minute, Mischa Barton is sitting in a car in the middle of the desert, and the next, she's gone, presumably taken by the Slasher, only to turn up again in a Cop car at the end. In another scene, the Slasher allows a girl to escape, only to chase her down with his van, while some somber, too-deep-for-you song plays solemnly over the action. And then there's a support group for Serial Killers, ala AA?

And honestly, how fear-inspiring is Andy Dick's whiny, nasally, twat-like voice supposed to be?

What in the hell was this movie doing?

We'll at least give the movie this: It had a killer soundtrack. We love 80's music, even at its cheesiest, and this movie gave us a solid fix of that.

THEY LOOK AS CONFUSED AS WE ARE...

Look, we hate Reality TV (and untalented idiots being propelled to ridiculous levels of fame for doing absolutely nothing) just as much as the next guy, but if you're going to make a movie bashing such things, then put some damned effort into it to make it at least a bit coherent or compelling. In the end, L.A. Slasher isn't funny, it's not scary, and it's nowhere near as clever or as edgy as it thinks it is.

If you want to see a movie that actually pulls off this exact conceit in an entertaining and effective way, then go check out God Bless America (read our review HERE), and avoid this piece of shit.

D-

L.A. Slasher is available now on DVD and VOD.

This movie was not short on the hot chicks. That's for sure.

VOD Review: Unfriended (2015)

We skipped seeing Unfriended when it hit theaters back in April, for the simple reason that we thought it looked awful. Sure, it puts an interesting spin on the typical Hand-Held/POV offering by using the Internet as its setting, but the whole thing just looked like it was going to be a mess that only teens would react positively to.

And that's basically what it was.

I'm a bit baffled at how so many Horror Critics raved or even semi-raved about this movie. Personal tastes aside, Unfriended wasn't a very good Horror movie. Sure, the demographic that the movie was aimed at probably loved it to the tune of "OMG it was literally the scariest movie ever!" but adults who have seen 100's, and potentially even 1000's of Horror movies thought their lives? I just don't get it.

Unfriended went on to make $54 million Worldwide off of a $1 million budget though, so what the hell do I know?

Unfriended is the story or a group of kids who are harassed online by the ghost of their former friend, Laura Barns, who killed herself after being bullied online. A year after Laura's suicide, Blaire, her boyfriend, and a group of their cronies are hanging out on Skype, having a chat, when a mysterious person named billie227 joins their group. bille227 is talking to them through Laura's old accounts, and knows things about each of them, like deep dark secret things. When she begins to post videos and pictures of them doing horrible and embarrassing things online, they quickly find that they are at her mercy.

So yeah, haunted Skype.

THE BULLY WHO WAS BULLIED TO DEATH.

Try as they might, they can't get billie227 to go away, and they find themselves having to play her twisted games or be killed... which happens anyway, so I'm not really sure why they just don't unplug their computers and run like hell. As billie227/Laura begins to kill them off one by one, they scream into their webcams; call each other names; freak out; juggle communications between multiple people at once via video chat, text, IM, and cellphone; and sit there glued to their screens like idiots. So they pretty much do what most people do when they hang out together nowadays.

Cybernatural terror ensues.

PLEASE JUST STOP SCREAMING.

We have to give Unfriended points for at least trying something original with the Found Footage conceit (which in this case, is more of a Live Footage sort of thing.) The movie also does one hell of a job of marketing itself, as Skype, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Chatroutlette are all used liberally to give it a relevant and timely setting. No Twitter though. Wonder why that is?

Some of the acting was pretty good here too, even if the material the actors was working with wasn't so hot.

RENEE OLSTEAD IS A SUPER QT.

Technology has been used in Horror to great effect in the past, One Missed Call and Pulse being the best examples (and we mean the J-Horror originals, not the half-assed American remakes.) Those movies were effective enough that they actually made us wary of computers and cell phones after watching them. At least for a little while.

Unfriended though really isn't very effective or scary at all; oh, it's clever in its mechanics, and so in that way it's fairly effective, but it didn't scare us. Not even a little bit. Unlikable characters probably didn't help matters much, but the whole "we've got to keep chatting or we die!" thing felt silly to us, and that premise barely built up any tension or dread to make us fear what was coming next. 

Truth told, the most terrifying part of the movie was trying to come to grips with the idea that teenagers can navigate a desktop with 30 open windows spread across the screen at one time. The teen melodrama was horrific too, but only insofar that we had to endure it for 90 minutes. Are there really groups of kids out there who all get on video chat together and "hang out" online with each other? And are they really that annoying when they do?

THAT WAS PRETTY MUCH US WATCHING THIS MOVIE.

It's really hard to take this movie or its premise seriously. I get that the ghost has basically trapped them at their computers under pain of death, but they honestly do nothing besides sit there waiting to die. If you're screwed like that, it doesn't matter what you do, because whatever is out to get you is going to get you, but come on. The whole movie was basically watching a group of friends chat on Skype, with a cheap jump-scare thrown in every once in a while to keep things scary.

REALLY? THAT'S THE BEST YOU CAN COME UP WITH?

And as loud as the movie blatantly screams "Cyber-Bullying is bad!" at the top of its lungs, that message really doesn't ever hit home as being poignant. Maybe that's because all of the kids involved are made out to be one-dimensional jerks, not one of them having any sort of redeemable quality. Even the girl who was bullied to the point of killing herself was made out to be little more than a horrible asshole in life.

A bully is bullied to the point of suicide, and then her ghost comes back to bully the people who bullied her, before killing them. Exactly who are we supposed to have sympathy for here?

I KNOW, WE'RE ALMOST DONE RANTING.

There were a few specific things stood out to us as making no sense.

• Where were the parents of all these kids? They spend the entire movie screaming, having fits, smoking weed, and dying horrible deaths, and no one hears them? Were they all out bowling together or something? 
• Again, a "Footage" movie that makes things freeze and go all pixely whenever something "scary" is supposed to be happening. Of course. 
• Why did we not see more of the death scenes? As uneventful as this movie was, when something grisly does finally happen, all we get is a quick flash of it, or we only see the aftermath? 
• Aside from some of the language, this could have been a Lifetime Movie of The Week. It was far more about teen melodrama and dysfunction between friends than it was Horror.

WHAT IS EVEN GOING ON?

If the goal of this movie was to make us cheer, and even beg, for all of its characters to die painfully, then job well done. When those deaths do come however, they were more laughable than gory.

You'd figure that a movie about a bunch of idiots Skyping with one another would at least have some boobs or something, but no such luck.

THE CYBER-SEX SCENE THAT NEVER WAS.

So much of the movie is spent staring at chat screens while Blaire debates what to type, or watching countdowns, or waiting for videos to buffer, that we're not sure what's supposed to be scary about it. I mean, at the point where the movie actually turns into a game of Never Have I Ever, where everyone is forced to reveal "earth-shattering" secrets about themselves and each other, I asked myself who is actually supposed to enjoy watching this shit?

Then I abruptly realized, teenagers. You know, the demographic that this movie was made for to begin with.

STOP WAVING ALREADY, THEY SEE YOU!

Unfriended is a movie that deserves credit for taking the whole "Haunted Technology" idea to a new level, at least in a way. It's not scary at all, and at times it was actually laughable, but it took its story in a relatively new direction, and that's at least something.

The bottom line though is this: if you're a kid who spends a lot of time online, then this movie will probably terrify you to no end. If not, then its strong points, and there aren't many, will probably be lost on you, like they were us. In the end, it was just impossible for us to take this movie seriously enough for it to work.

D+

Unfriended is available now on VOD.

One thing that can not be debated is the fact that Unfriended features a wealth of Eye Candy. If you want to see more of The Ladies of Unfriended, then check out their Hottie Post HERE.

VOD Review: Girlhouse (2015)

When it comes to actor-turned-director Trevor Matthews, we weren't always a fan of his work. We hated his 2007 effort, Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer, and basically wrote him off as some no-talent hack that wouldn't ever do much after that mess of a movie... and then he wrote and produced one of our favorite movies of 2011, The Shrine.

We really loved The Shrine (our review HERE), and we had no problem immediately eating crow and admitting that we misjudged Mr. Matthew's talent. Now with Girlhouse, we're even more convinced that he knows his Horror business, because it was one of the best pure slasher flicks that we've seen in forever.

When two mean little girls convince a fat kid to drop trau and show them his little weenis -and then laugh at him and tell him it looks like an acorn- they unknowingly doom the poor kid to a life of social awkwardness, and killing whores.

CAT GIRL IS A LITTLE BITCH.

Years after the tragic acorn incident, we meet Kylie: a sexy, cash-strapped College student who decides to become a Camwhore so that she can pay her tuition and buy groceries and such. She movies into the Girlhouse mansion with a bunch of other Camwhores, and together they siphon the money form a bunch of hapless losers who are too stupid to realize that the Internet is full of free porn.

SHE'S HOT AND ALL, BUT I'M NOT PAYING TO WATCH HER DANCE AROUND HALF-NAKED.

Kylie is an instant hit with the masturbating masses, especially with Loverboy (the fat kid from the acorn incident), who is all grown up now, and still has plenty of anger issues towards women. When Kylie slights him by not being nice enough, he pretty much loses his shit and decides to track her down at the Girlhouse, presumably to discuss his feelings with her in a calm, rational manner.

HE CERTAINLY LOOKS RATIONAL.

Loverboy decides that rational discussion is for sane people, and instead starts killing Camwhores and anyone else who gets in his way. This whole situation is exactly why bullying is such a big deal, because it creates serial killers. Mayhem ensues.

THERE'S NOTHING NOT TERRIFYING ABOUT THAT.

We went into Girlhouse with high hopes, mainly because we loved Trevor Matthew's The Shrine, we're fans of Slaine, and we're all for slasher flicks that involve a gaggle of hot & naked chicks getting killed off in grisly ways. It's nice to be able to say that this one rose well beyond our expectations, and that we enjoyed the hell out of it from start to finish.

From the crazy opening scene that made us yell a collective "Damn!," we knew that Girlhouse was going to be a bit different. Sure, it's a slasher flick, and even the best of those don't usually end up being anything special these days, but Girlhouse is different. From script to direction, it was well-executed, and aside from some convenient plot devices, it didn't insult our intelligence. At least not too much.

The thing that really made Girlhouse stand out and work so well was its cast. Just about everyone in this movie acted their asses off and were way better than the acting talent you find in most flicks of this type. Ali Cobrin made for a great final girl, and Boston bad boy Slaine played Loverboy with the perfect amount of ferocity. Loverboy was a cool Movie Maniac, and a fairly terrifying one that genuinely skeeved us out more than a few times throughout this one.

I'm not trying to make it sound like Girlhouse is a perfect movie that got everything right, only drive home the point that it was a really solid effort in a sub-genre that usually tends to turn out sub-par movies.

"I DON'T ALWAYS KILL CAMWHORES, BUT WHEN I DO, I WATCH THEM DANCE FIRST FROM THE SHADOWS."

Aside from the opening scene, it took about an hour or so for anything to "happen." I know that's par for the course with a lot of Horror flicks, but I'm just saying that there was A LOT of build-up to the action of the third reel. The build-up was all good, it just felt like the killing came late and went quick once it arrived. It all comes down to the fact that we're selfish, and we wanted more action.

WORST SUICIDE EVER.

Why was there not more shameless, exploitative nudity in this movie? Given its premise, and the fact that it's called Girlhouse, is wall-to-wall smut really too much to ask for?

WHY ARE YOU STILL CLOTHED?!?

Once the violence starts, Girlhouse gets pretty nasty with the gore. Loverboy is an angry, exceptionally strong killer, and he lays waste to his victims in brutal fashion. Our favorite bit was probably the part with the bridge.

"STAY THERE, I'LL GO GET HELP!"

We get a few girls baring it all in this one, but for a movie about a house full of sluts that get naked on webcam for money, you'd think there would have been a bit more nudity. I know I just said the same thing above, but it bears repeating!

THIS IS WHY YOU DON'T GO SWIMMING AFTER EATING A FULL MEAL.

Don't be a Camwhore, or you'll most likely be murdered. Also, Hollywood needs to get off its ass and make some more Kenzie & Gennaro movies (ala Gone Baby Gone), because we need to see Slaine play Bubba again, and this time, more like he's written in the books. *Fact: the world need more Bubba Rogowski.

DEAD BABY, DEAD.

If you love a good slasher flick, then you owe it to yourself to see Girlhouse. This movie is lean, mean, sexy, violent, and above all else, it's pretty damn creepy. Give it a rent, you won't be sorry. *Don't blame us if you end up being sorry though.

B+

Girl House is available now on VOD.

Ali Cobrin may have been the heroine of the Girlhouse, but she wasn't the only Hottie that lived there. Check out the Hottie Post below to check out her sexy housemates.