TV Review: The Exorcist, Pilot Episode

"FAR BETTER THAN EXPECTED."

SUBMITTED BY: An Anonymous commenter who seemed to really like the first episode.

It's not like remakes are new or anything, but lately it seems as if they're remaking everything. Movies are one thing, but when it comes to TV shows, creators at least have a chance to stretch their wings and give the stories that they're "re-telling" room to breathe.

When we heard that FOX was making The Exorcist into a TV show, we had the same reaction that we always do when it comes to remakes: "Of course they're remaking it, why wouldn't they?" Add to that the fact that The Exorcist is an excellent and highly-nuanced movie that no one has come close to duplicating over the past 40+ years since its release, and it sounded even worse.

We just knew that they'd make it safe and glossy, and fill it with plenty of diversity and whatever else the Twitter voices of the moment were demanding. Diversity is a wonderful thing, but I truly had visions of them saying "Let's remake The Exorcist, only with a woman exorcist this time!" simply because that's what people "want."

Well, we watched episode 1 of The Exorcist, and were really pleasantly surprised at how great it turned out. It's nothing close to the movie, mind you, but it did its own thing pretty well, and we're excited to see more.

Father Tomas is a priest who has himself a small Parrish in Chicago. He's an up-and-comer in the priest world (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean) and he loves his work. He's also plagued by terrifying dreams of another priest, Father Keane, performing an exorcism on a little boy in Mexico.

Then we have Angela, head of the Rance family. Her husband is in the beginning stages of dementia, and the eldest of her two daughters (Kat and Angela), is a handful herself; Kat is moody and troubled ever since being in a car accident that claimed the life of her best friend. Of course this leads Angela to believe that something spooky is going on in the house (?!?), and so she goes to Father Tomas for help.

To avoid spoiling the episode, let's just say that from here on out Father Tomas goes to see Kat to determine whether or not she's got a Demon inside of her, and then is driven to seek out Father Keane to help him with the possessed Rance daughter. 

DON'T GO UP THERE.

The first episode of The Exorcist was far better than we thought it would be. I was fully expecting to turn off the TV in disgust and not have any desire whatsoever to come back for Episode 2, but And Let My Cry Come Unto Thee did enough right to keep me interested.

I daresay it was even a good hour of TV.

There was an underlying tone of impending supernatural doom throughout the episode that played well; the scene in the attic was creepy, and the twist unexpected; the exorcism scenes, even though they were dreams/forced flashbacks, were done really well; and the cast all did a solid job with their roles. Their characters were all a bit cookie-cutter, and some of them came off as predictably stiff, but the actors made them likable. Geena Davis and Ben Daniels were the standouts.

That's not to say that the episode didn't have its issues. They crammed an awful lot of backstory into 43-minutes, which made some of it feel rushed. The back and forth between the two priest's worlds never really allowed us to get to know either of them enough to really care about their plight. Same goes for the Rance family; we get that they have it rough, but they kinda felt like caricatures to me. Also, I really hope that they don't rely on cheap jump-scares going forward. The show is solid enough to get by without that kind of crap.

The first episode did a great job of setting an eerie tone though, and we're definitely interested to see where the story goes from here.

THE ATTIC. THAT'S WHERE THE STORY IS GOING.

FOX has a chance to do something really special with this TV series. We're not expecting it to push boundaries like Hannibal did, but if the first episode is any indication, they aren't exactly going to play it safe like the big networks tend to do with their hour-long dramas either. Let's just hope that going forward, FOX takes the time to let the story unfold naturally, let the characters grow, and cut out the damn jump-scares.

We liked the first episode, and if you have yet to see it, you should give it a look.

B-

The Exorcist airs Friday nights at 9, on FOX.

Both of these girls are possessed... by beauty.

Random Streaming MOTW Review: The Amityville Legacy (2016)

"Clocking in at a whopping 66 minutes, this movie was about 80 minutes too long."

Every week, we sit down, surf through the Netflix and On Demands of the world, find ourselves a random, B-Grade Horror flick that we've never seen, and watch it. Sometimes we're surprised with how well they turn out, and sometimes they're just as bad as we expect them to be. 

Either way, it makes for a good time. This is one of those films.

You could argue that after the first one, there were no good movies in the Amityville Series. The 2nd one had its creepy moments, the third one was a bit of cheesy-bad 80's kitsch, and the remake was solid enough for a glossy Hollywood money grab, but entries like Amityville Theater, Amityville Asylum, or The Amityville Haunting were just abysmal.

We came across The Amityville Legacy while browsing Amazon Prime for something cheesy to watch, and being that one of us is an absolute Amityville fanatic (yes, she even loves the really, really bad sequels), we had no choice but to give it a go.

All I can say after watching it is that it's honestly not even right that this movie has the name Amityville in its title.

40 years after a red-tinted flashback that shows the original DeFeo murders (or at least some guy walking from room to room in a red hallway, shooting a shotgun), we see a bunch people driving to an isolated farmhouse in Nebraska (?!?) to attend a family reunion. Or maybe it's Dad's birthday. I think it might be both.

Everyone gives Dad his gifts, one of which happens to be a cymbal-banging monkey toy, which came from the Amityville Garage Sale (movie coming soon, I'm sure), and is possessed.  Or cursed. Either way, once Dad gets his presents, he starts to act irritable and is visited by the ghost of his dead father who urges him to kill everyone, because, haunted monkey.

Nothing Amityville-related at all ensues. 

WHY.

I really try not to rip on small, micro-budget movies like this that someone obviously spent their weekends off from their real jobs making, because even the worst of movies take time, effort, and passion to make, but man, this was a bad one. We spent our time watching it, so we're allowed to rant.

• First off, aside from the fact that the there was a model of the Amityville house used in the flashback at the beginning, there is nothing about this movie that has anything to do with the Amityville story. A cursed monkey toy bought at a garage sale that came from the DeFeo house? Listen, if you are going to make a cheap movie, that's fine, but if that cheap movie has Amityville in its title, at least have it be set in the house, or directly related to the original story.
• Also, if you're going to make a Horror movie where someone loses their mind and kills everyone around them, maybe show the murders. Almost none of the deaths in this movie happen on-screen, and there's barely even any on-screen blood, which would have at least made the movie somewhat redeemable. Hell, squeeze some ketchup on someone and film them laying there playing dead. At least that would have been something.
• The acting in this movie is really bad, not that anything else about it is particularly good, but given that so much of this hour-long flick is nothing but talking, the lack of quality really stands out. And hurts. I'm pretty sure that someone in the crew got their Nana to star in this one. I really mean that.
• No violence, no nudity, bad actors working off of a bad script... what exactly is supposed to be the draw here? I'm not even trying to be an asshole about it, but what was the point?
• Without the 6-minute long credit crawl at the end, and it's a sloooow crawl, this movie would have been 57-minutes long. I guess that pretty much says it all.

"KILL THEM OFF-SCREEN!"

These Amityville sequels really need to stop, or at the very least, they need to get a metric shit-ton better.

SO ZORRO REALLY IS THE GAY BLADE. HUH.

Look, making a movie is a labor of love, especially when it comes to small, micro-budget flicks like this. I'm sure everyone tried real hard to do their best here, and I give them credit for that, but The Amityville Legacy has no connection to the original, isn't very well-made or acted at all, is devoid of Horror, and it just doesn't have much of a point.

Even for fans of bad movies, this one is a tough watch.

The Amityville Legacy is available now on VOD and streaming free via Amazon Prime.

The ladies of The Amityville Legacy.

VOD Review: The Blackcoat's Daughter (2016)

"Maybe the best Genre movie that we've seen all year."

(aka February.)
Release Date: TBA.
Country: USA.
Rating: R.
Written by: Oz Perkins.
Directed by: Oz Perkins.
Starring: Kiernan Shipka, Emma Roberts, Lucy Boynton, James Remar, and Lauren Holly.

Every year, there's one or two Horror movies that everyone hails as being "transcendent" or "genre changing," or something to that effect. Whatever the tag-line that gets attached to them, movies like It Follows, The Babadook, Cabin in the Woods, You're Next, and We Are Still Here end up being critical darlings, and find themselves on everyone's Must See list.

So far this year, the critical darlings seem to be The Witch, Green Room, and The Invitation. All three are great flicks in their own right, and they each deliver their own brand of chills, but I'm going to throw The Blackcoat's Daughter into that mix and say that it's every bit as good as those other movies. In fact, it very well could be better.

*The Blackcoat's Daughter (February) was supposed to be released today as an exclusive on DirecTV. It's not on DirectTV, and there has been absolutely no promotion or mention of the release by A24 (its distribution company), DirecTV, or on the film's Twitter or Facebook pages, so at this point we have to assume that its release date has been moved. IMDB has it listed as coming out on Sept. 30th in the U.S., so maybe we'll see it some time this fall. We've been sitting on the review since two of us caught a screening at the CCFF back in late May (because I wanted it to coincide with it's DirecTV release), but there's no point in waiting until September to post it.

It's hard to talk about The Blackcoat's Daughter (formerly titled February), without ruining it for the uninitiated, so we're going to have to be as vague as possible here.

This is a movie about three girls, two of whom are stranded at their prep school over winter break, and one who is desperately trying to get to the school herself. One of the stranded girls, Kat, fears her parents dead, and withdraws inward to cope; while the other, Rose, is terrified that she might be pregnant, and is even more terrified oh how creepy Kat is. As for the girl who is making her way toward Bramford Prep, Joan, well she's obviously been through something traumatic, and yet she stays focused on her goal.

It's also about Satan, who appears as a shadowy bunny-like figure, intent on possessing one (or more) of the girl's souls.

I know that basically tells you nothing, but that's good. You need to see this one as uninformed as possible. In fact, don't even watch the trailer if you can help it. 

WHO WAS PHONE?

The Blackcoat's Daughter is a slow-burn Supernatural Thriller that took us to places that we didn't expect. I know that sounds generic as hell, and the term slow-burn is used far too often these days to describe slow and boring movies, but this one really had it's own quiet, eerie thing going on, and it left one hell of an impression on us.

The Blackcoat's Daughter is as much about loss as it is anything else, and the way that it handles the subject is superb. The movie twists and turns around its three main characters (who are all related in some obscure way) in quiet fashion, and brings them all together in the end in pretty shocking, and dare we say fresh, way. I'd really love to talk about that ending, and what it meant for the movie as a whole, but it would kill the entire thing, and it would be a shame for you to not experience that build-up and resolution for yourselves.

I guess it's safe to say that loss is the key word here; some of it creepy, all of it tragic.

"NO I HAVEN'T CHECKED THE CHILDREN. WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?"

It was interesting how they handled Satan in this movie too (it could have been a plain old Demon, but we got the strong sense that it was Old Scratch himself.) His presence and appearance was all very shadowy and ambiguous, as if he were more of a feeling or ideal than an actual physical being. Oh, he was there at times, but it's as if his presence was a shadow that was always draped across everything and everyone, whether you could see him or not.

This is director Oz Perkins' debut feature behind the camera, and it's about as impressive as a first movie can be. Horror is obviously in his blood (he's the son of Norman Bates himself, Anthony Perkins), and If this is the type of thing that we can expect from him as his career moves forward, which it most certainly will, then we're in for some good times.

I'm not sure who truly stole the show in this one; Kiernan Shipka or Emma Roberts. Both ladies played their tortured parts equally well, and their performances took an already great movie to the next level. Lucy Boynton was on top of her game too, even if her character wasn't quite as prevalent. Even Lauren Holly and James Remar seemed to dig deep for this one, although with James Remar being one of the best character actors ever, that's really no surprise.

THIS IS NO TIME TO BE PLAYING BLOODY MARY!

So was the school used for Satanic Rituals, or was that just a rumor started by the kids? Were the nuns Satan's Whores? Was it all in someone's head? Who was phone?!?

SHE'S COME A LONG WAY SINCE MAD MEN.

What the hell is a Blackcoat, and who in the hell was his daughter?

WAS IT HER?

It might not show up until the end, but when it gets there, the gore is solid.

IT'S ONLY A HAND WOUND. RUN!

No nudity in this one, but Emma Roberts does appear in a towel, if that's your kick.

CREEPY, NOT SEXY.

A teenager in love is a fierce creature. So is Satan.

OH, SHE KNOWS. SHE KNOWS.

The Blackcoat's Daughter isn't a perfect movie, and it's probably not going to garner as big of an audience as The Witch did earlier this year, but it's an excellent film and one of the best possession flicks that we've ever seen. Very few movies these days stay with us as long (and as powerfully) as did this one, and we can't wait to watch it again to further dissect it. 

This was a near-perfect movie-watching experience for us, and you should absoloutly check it out when you get the chance.

A

The Blackcoat's Daughter was originally scheduled to be in limited theaters and on DirecTV now, but it looks as if its release has been delayed. We'll keep you posted.

Emma Roberts is fast becoming one of our favorite Scream Queens, pun intended.

Theatrical Review: The Conjuring 2 (2016)

"The first one was better."

(aka Amityville: Enfield.)
Release Date: June 10th.
Country: USA.
Rating: R.
Written by: Carey and Chad Hayes.
Directed by: James Wan.
Starring: Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Frances O'Connor, Franka Potente, and Madison Wolfe.

The first Conjuring (review HERE) impressed us, and solidified James Wan as one of the best Horror directors working today, at least in our minds.

While this sequel is every bit as competent a film as the original, and it pretty much follows the same familiar blueprint, storywise, it just didn't scare us all that much. Oh, the Nun was great, but she was added in post-production, so really, the best part of the movie was an afterthought of sorts.

The Conjuring 2 is a solid movie, we just expected way more from it.

Ed and Lorraine Warren are in Amityville, NY, circa 1976, investigating the whole Amityville Horror thing. While doing so, Lorraine slips into a trance, relives the murders, and witnesses a creepy Demon Nun impaling her husband. After Ed snaps her out of it, she decides that she needs a break, and decides to take no more new cases... at least for a while.

YEAH, THAT'S NOT HELPING HER AT ALL.

A year later, across the pond in the Enfield borough of London, a family of five has a run-in with an angry spirit named Bill who insists that their flat is his. The spirit starts doing spooky things like moving furniture and yelling "My house!" in a demonic voice, presumably to scare them off. The second-oldest daughter, Janet, seems to be the focal point of the haunting, becoming a conduit for the ghostly happenings. The media gets wind of it, and Lorraine and Ed are called in by the church to observe the situation.

WHO YA GONNA CALL?

Is Janet faking her possession? Is the whole thing real? Is there a more sinister force behind the whole Enfield Haunting, that is determined to eat Lorraine and Ed's souls? Far be it from us to spoil anything for you here, but of course it's all real! It's based on a true story, after all.

NOPE.

Fresh of the massively successful Furious 7 (which earned a tidy $1.5 Billion worldwide), James Wan returns to his Horror roots with a sequel to his most successful Horror effort, The Conjuring. The guy knows how to scare an audience, and even though The Conjuring 2 feels a bit too busy and runs a bit too long, he still knows how to get the job done.

As short as it was, we loved the Amityville opening, and wished that it would have been longer. We also liked everything involving The Nun, as she was super creepy, and we're happy to know that she's getting her own movie, which is already in the works. Vera Farmiga is also on point in this one, as she's turning into one of the Genre's finest, and classiest, Scream Queens.

DON'T. TURN. AROUND.

The Conuring 2 runs a good 20-minutes too long, and its plot was over-complicated. The first Conjuring movie felt lean and mean to us, like James Wan trimmed all of the excess fat away, and made every shot, every second, count. With this 134-minute-long sequel, it felt like he did exactly the opposite, and added so many sub-plots to the movie, that it killed the scary ghost story that made up its core.

There were also a ton of jump-scares, which is to be expected, but it just felt like there were too many. And every time the camera focused on something scary, and then panned away, only to pan back and reveal something jump-scary, it did nothing for us. James Wan is obviously a big fan of The Rule of Three. 

It really felt like two different movies running concurrently. The first involved Lorraine and Ed, rightly so, and the visions that she keeps having of the creepy Nun, and of Ed's potential death; the second involves the family in England whose house is being haunted. The story jumps back and forth between the two, and while it brings them together towards the end, it felt like neither storyline got the full attention that they deserved. 

THEY SHOULD HAVE JUST STUCK WITH THE NUN STORY.

What was with the Starsky & Hutch posters all over that little girls wall? I mean, it was a cool show and all, but who knew that they were heartthrobs in 1970's England?

MOM IS APPARENTLY NOT A BIG FAN OF STARSKY & HUTCH.

As with most of James Wan's Haunted House flicks, the gore is kept to a very small minimum in this one.

Nope.

Demon Nuns are fairly terrifying.

VERA AIN'T HAVING NUN OF THAT.

The Conjuring 2 is a really good movie that we expected a lot more from in the scare department. It's clear that James Wan is on top of his directing game at this point in his career, but it also feels like he's losing sight of what got him to this point, which is knowing how to deliver stripped-down, effective scares. This sequel is already a worldwide hit, but it just didn't live up to the first one for us.

It's a decent watch though, and we're not mad that we gave it our time.

B-

The Conjuring 2 is in theaters now.

Oh, Vera...