VOD Review: The Dark Tapes (2017)

"For a movie shot for less that 70k, this one deserves some credit."

The Dark Tapes is a Horror Anthology that earned some high praise from those who caught it during its festival screenings, and I have to say that I'm not sure why they all seemed to love it so much.

It's decent enough, and it definitely puts a new spin or two on the V/H/S formula, but in all honesty it's a half and half effort at best.

Of course opinion being what it is and all, what we have to say is neither here nor there in the grand scheme of things, but I've seen a ton of Found Footage flicks since the boom began, and it just felt very average overall.

(The Wraparound) To Catch a Demon- This segment is actually divided up into two parts: the first of which involves two people on a smoke break (?) on what looks to be a rooftop (again, ?) finding a camera in a room where something odd went on. They push play and begin to watch.

The meat of the wrap involves a professor and his sexy student conducting an experiment based around the idea that trans-dimensional beings can be seen by humans while in the state of REM sleep. They have a guy record them as they sleep, and what they discover is a terrifying look into what night terrors can be.

This is the best segment of the movie.

CORTNEY "UNDERRATED" PALM IS ABOUT TO GET DEMONIZED.

The Hunters and the Hunted- A couple (who have recently lost a child) moves into a new house and begins to experience some terrifying paranormal activity, so they call in some paranormal investigators for help. Things get worse and worse, culminating in an ending which was both unexpected and fun.

A solid segment.

YEAH. YOU CAN HAVE THE HOUSE. I'M LEAVING.

Cam Girls- Two cam girls offer a poor schlep a private show which proves to be more than he bargained for.

This one didn't work for me at all.

SO EDGY.

Amanda's Revenge- The final segment (before we're taken back to the wraparound for the finish) involves a girl who is saved from a date rape at a party by her friends, and then begins to experience sleep paralysis of the worst kind.

Not a bad segment, it just didn't quite deliver the goods like it could have.  

AMANDA LOOKS TO THE CEILING FOR HER REVENGE.

First for the good stuff. The creature in the wraparound segment is awesome, and creepy as shit; Cortney Palm does her usual above-average-for-the-genre work here, and I still wonder how this girl isn't getting bigger roles. She can act; I really dug the story and the execution of he Hunters and the Hunted. It felt like a fresh take on a very tired FF story, and it was great. Most of the cast across all of the segments did a solid job.

Overall though, this is a decent but uneven anthology at best. First of all, I'm not sure where these Dark Tapes even come from. The people at the beginning find the wraparound tapes and watch them, so that makes sense, but the three segments in between are just kind of shown to us with no explanation as to where they come from? Were they all spliced together on the one tape? How? Why?

I don't know, maybe I missed something.

The Cam Girls segment had promise, but it didn't really do much with that potential, and the "dark" voice at the end was just bad. And Amanda's Revenge was interesting enough, but it petered out at the end.

YEAH, IT'S A BED. GOOD JOB.

There's some gore throughout this one, most of it in the Hunters and the Hunted segment. It does boast some pretty good creature FX though.

NO.

There's not skin to be found here, which is a shame because the Cam Girl segment could have delivered on that front had they pushed it a bit.

SIGH.

For a small-budgeted Indie flick populated with mostly unknown acting talent, The Dark Tapes is a pretty solid effort. If you hate Found Footage flicks, this one will not do much to change your mind for the better, but if you dig this sort of flick, then you're in for a mostly good time.

For us, the half of the movie that was good was worth watching the whole thing for. We'd probably wait to catch it for free on Netflix if we could do it all over though.

C

The Dark Tapes is available now on VOD.

The girls of The Dark Tapes. In segment order, no less.

Blu-ray Review: We Are the Flesh (2017)

"What in the Hell Just Happened?"

I'm honestly not sure how to even discuss this movie.

We Are the Flesh isn't a movie that you can really review in a traditional way, as it's not even really a traditional movie; it plays more like a surreal, abstract fever dream that offers equal doses of social commentary and exploitation. People are going to take away different things after watching it, and they're going to love it and hate it in equal measure.

I recently watched a German flick called Wetlands (it's on Netflix, if you're interested), and I was shocked at how fucked up and graphic it was. Well, We Are the Flesh may have just upped the ante in the WTF Sub-Genre.

The world has ended, becoming a filthy barrio in which people scrounge to survive. Mariano is an old, creepy man who spends his time in an abandoned building, making LSD out of chicken and banging a drum, so he's making the most out of the apocalypse. He's just lonely is all.

EL DIABLO?

A brother and sister (Lucio and Fauna) find their way into his makeshift home, where they seek shelter from the world outside. Mariano greets them with insane rantings, eggs, and poisoned meat. He also jerks off as the sister gives her bro a blowie, which leads to them doing some hardcore incestuous aardvarking, which leads the old man to dropping dead as he delivers the money shot, which leads Fauna to mount his dead corpse and ride him to orgasm, because she really misses him after only knowing him for a few days. Then she pees in the hallway.

And from there, things get even crazier and weird, to the point where I'm not sure what even happened.

It sure was something to see though.

KIDS TODAY!

This is a really weird movie.

We get a crazy old man who seems to be some sort of Post-Apocalyptic messiah, making drugs from chicken parts and chemicals; banging a snare drum like a maniac; and forcing a brother and sister to do all sorts of deplorable things while preaching all kinds of insane mumbo jumbo about the evils of society and the pleasures of the flesh, the pinnacle of which has to be the scene where he jerks off while watching the two of them have sex.

I'm pretty sure that the character exists to provide, we, the audience, with some scathing commentary about the social injustices of modern day life in Mexico.

IT'S A VISUALLY BOLD MOVIE.

The sister, played by the beautiful and very brave Maria Evoli, swallows her brother's pork sword in full, graphic view; stands above him and drips menstrual blood on his mouth; pees on the floor while chanting; forces a girl into having the creepiest threesome ever with she and her brother; and has sex with a corpse.

I'm pretty sure that her character was meant to show how easily young people are lead astray, or maybe how they have no morals and are destroying themselves with excess or something.

ARE THERE NO BATHROOMS IN MEXICO?

The bottom line is that this movie is surreal, sexually graphic, odd, nonsensical, disturbing on many levels, and possibly even brilliant. Then again, it may be self-indulgent trash. Either way, it's like nothing we've seen before, and anyone who watches it is bound to have a strong opinion on the matter.

And the ending -and I mean the very end, after the homeless gang bang (that's called a Soup Kitchen here in the U.S.)- well it puts a whole new spin on the entire thing.

LUCIO GENTLY WEEPS INSIDE OF THE GIGANTIC NEON VAGINA

Lots of blood in this one, including, but not limited to: throat slitting, cannibalism, and a severed head.

EASY, CONYO, YOU'RE ABOUT TO SERVE THE GREATER GOOD.

Everyone in this movie got naked, and they show everything in full graphic detail, including close-ups of private parts, oral sex, masturbation, lesbian sex, group sex, necrophilia,incest, and even a gang-bang.

FAMILIA POR SIEMPRE.

We Are the Flesh is either the most pretentious excuse to cram a movie full of gratuitous sex and violence ever, or it may be a work of genius that deconstructs the current state of Mexican society in a wildly visceral way, and I honestly don't know which one it is.

This is a stark and graphic movie, and it was interesting to see something so shocking and artistic, I just don't know if it was much else other than shocking. It sure hasn't left my mind in two days though, so that's saying something. I guess our middle-of-the-road grade directly reflects our indecision. 

If you like messed up, graphic movies that "go there," then this might be the best Blu-ray you've ever come across. We give it a

Maybe don't bring it to family movie night though.

C

We Are the Flesh is available now on Blu-ray and DVD.

Maria Evoli is as brave as she is beautiful.

VOD Review: Don't Knock Twice (2017)

"The Monster did it better."

Much like the excellent 2016 flick, The Monster (Review HERE), Don't Knock Twice is more of an emotional story about the relationship between an estranged mother and daughter than it is a Horror flick.

Now, this IS a Horror movie, and it's got all kinds of supernatural hi-jinks going on throughout, but the real strength (or weakness, depending on your point of view) of the movie lies in the dynamic of that troubled relationship.

For us, it was a good thing, and actually, given the fact that the supernatural story that is at play here felt uninspiring, it was the saving grace of the movie.

There's a house by the freeway that used to belong to an old lady named Mary Aminov, who people thought was a witch. If you knocked twice on her door, you'd summon her pet Demon, and then probably die. Mary Aminov was also suspected of abducting and murdering some local kids, which makes the whole knocking twice thing even more terrifying. The poor woman ended up killing herself because kids wouldn't stop knocking on her door at all hours.

MURDERERS!

Jess is an artist and former crackwhore who gave her baby up to foster care many year ago so she could party. That baby, Chloe, is all grown up now, and she's understandably pissed off at the world, and especially the mom who abandoned her. So when Jess decides that she finally wants to have a relationship with Chloe, the reunion isn't very happy at all.

THE LOOK OF LOVE.

After telling her estranged mother to piss off, Chloe and her childhood friend (maybe boyfriend) decide to head to Mary Aminov's old house and knock twice on the door in the middle of the night (why would you do that?), because why not. Shortly thereafter, some Baba Yaga-looking crone comes along and kills her pal, and comes after Chloe, her terrified for her life. Naturally, because it's in the script, this drives Chloe into the arms of her estranged mother, and both of them have to figure out a way to end the curse and survive the vengeful spirit of Mary Aminov... or the Demon Baba Yaga... or whatever the hell it is that's trying to eat their souls.

"HADOKEN!"

As uneven as the movie is, Don't Knock Twice gets enough right to make it a decent watch.

First off, it's a visually impressive movie, with director Caradog W. James making the most out of the mundane script by at least giving us some shadowy figures, creepy locales, and impressive shots to feast our eyes on.... which were greatly needed to make us forget about how much of what we were seeing was not only overly-familiar, but confusing.

The real strength of the movie, and what keeps it from being a totally unwatchable bore fest, is the performances by its two leading ladies. Any geek worth their salt knows and loves Katee Sackhoff. From Battlestar Galactica to Longmire; Oculus to Riddick, the sassy blonde has been ass-kicking her way into our hearts for years now. She plays the troubled mother here with conviction, and she always makes whatever she's starring in, more watchable.

As for Lucy Boynton, her character was a bit too angsty for our liking, but she delivered a fine performance despite the fact. The interaction between her character and her mom basically carried the film and gave it some weight, if not depth. She's also delivers a great performance in The Blackcoat's Daughter (Review HERE), which you should check out when it finally hits VOD in a few weeks.

THERE'S NOTHING QUITE LIKE A MOTHER-DAUGHTER BONFIRE TO WARM THE SOUL.

Why would you knock on the door of a creepy old house that was rumored to belong to a witch? And in the middle of the night, no less? You deserve what you get, dummies!

OH, SOMETHING TERRIFYING DWELLS THERE? WHAT A SURPRISE.

There are some twists and turns in the movie that aren't very exciting and don't make a ton of sense; mainly because we don't get a lot of backstory on certain secondary characters, and so the impact of those "Holy shit!" moments isn't all that great. The Demon, the old woman who may or may not be evil, the child murders... there were too many little threads that could have lead to some great horrific moments, but none of them was explored fully enough.

Without spoiling anything, how is it that someone is "chosen" by the Demon in the first place? We were kind of scratching our heads at the end wondering why they were so special, and for what reason. Did this person know that they would be chosen, and just decide to interject themselves into the lives of others for the chance?

And as far as the child murders go, that whole reveal was easy to spot, and it just didn't work. That whole plotline should have been given some more depth. 

DON'T GIVE US THAT LOOK, KATEE. YOU READ THE SCRIPT BEFORE YOU SIGNED ON.

Not much blood or gore in this one.

BUT THERE IS A WHOLE LOT OF BONDING.

Nope. Nary a boob or a butt cheek is on display here.

BUT THERE ARE MANNEQUINS. CREEPY, POTENTIALLY DEADLY MANNEQUINS.

Don't Knock Twice is a decent movie that could have been much better dad its script been stronger, and focused most of its energy on one of the dangling plotlines that it never managed to succinctly weave together. If you're a fan of the cast, especially of Katee Sackhoff, then knocking once on this one won't be a bad move. Just temper your expectations.

C

Don't Knock Twice is available now on VOD.

Katee and Lucy.