Halloween Triple Feature! Happy Death Day, The Nightmare, and We Are Still Here

It's officially November, which means I'm FREEEEEEEEEEE. Well, almost. Here's my reviews for my Halloween all-out triple feature.

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First up for the Halloween extravaganza was a movie I've been wanting to see really bad for no discernible reason other than that the trailer is awesome (see below): Happy Death Day. Now, let me preface this by saying that I expected little from this movie other than an entertaining popcorn slasher that didn't need me to think too hard. I didn't think it was going to be a masterpiece of modern cinema. Really, overall, Happy Death Day fits that bill pretty well.

If you've ever seen Groundhog Day and thought, "Man, I wish this movie had more irritating sorority girls and a vicious knife-wielding murderer," then hey, Happy Death Day is totally for you. I jest, but really, it's totally just Groundhog Day, to the point that in the final scene of the movie they just own it and poke fun at it. The movie is a good time and that's really all it needs to be: the main character keeps waking up to her uber-cliched sorority girl life, trying to find out who keeps killing her at the end of each day. The twist is decent enough, the killer brutal enough, and the movie manages to make a pretty solid joke at Groundhog Day's expense: after making her day perfect, helping everyone out, and making amends for how much of a POS person she is (like Bill Murray), she still wakes up the next morning having died the night before. Ultimately the message of the movie is, "The good stuff you do doesn't matter!" Rosy message, but pretty damn funny.

I do have a major pet peeve though: the song that made the trailer so awesome, 50 Cent's In Da Club, isn't in the movie AT ALL. Lies upon lies, ya bastids! 

 Oh, and the main character doesn't know who Bill Murray is. She deserves to keep dying every day.

7.5/10

My second film of the evening was something a bit different: a horror-documentary, The Nightmare. I was looking for some good films for Halloween and this kept popping up on lists. I wasn't super in, as who wants to watch a documentary for Halloween, but I figured I'd give it a chance.

Hol-y sheet, The Nightmare is a terrifying film. I stand absolutely corrected. The movie follows eight individuals afflicted with crippling sleep paralysis. In case you don't know what that is, science says that sleep paralysis occurs when someone wakes up while in deep REM sleep. They are usually unable to move, and sometimes this is accompanied by the sight or feeling of a dark presence(s) in the room (often sitting on their chest). This can manifest in different ways and knowledge of the phenomenon goes all the way back to the middle ages.

See? Screw that.

Yeah, real life is way more terrifying than horror films. Well, most of them. Looking at you, Dead Girl (seriously, that movie still haunts me). Interviews are interspersed with reenactments of the horrifying sleep paralysis episodes these poor people have been forced to go through and it is chilling. it's hard for horror movies to get under my skin but this one had me going to be terrified that I would have my own sleep paralysis episode (one of the stories followed a man who was told about sleep paralysis and immediately began experiencing it himself. F. That). The scariest part of the film, and something that was corroborated by multiple of the interviewees, was that sleep paralysis seems to go beyond the scientific explanation for it. Several explained seeing the figures that tormented their sleep in the real world or others seeing the figures as well. One particular story of a man who saw a shadowy, red-eyed figure telling him was going to kill him was accompanied by his wife in the bed next to him seeing a black red-eyed cat on her chest yelling ominously in an unknown language at her husband. At the same time. I say again: F. That.

This movie truly is horrifying and embodies the phrase "Stranger than Fiction." Sure, the movie is missing the other side of the argument by not interviewing scientists/experts in the field, and it can sometimes be heavy handed in it's reenactments. For what the movie is attempting to be though as a bridge between horror movie and documentary, it's immensely successful. I highly recommend this movie, if for no other reason than that I think other people need to now be as scared of sleep paralysis as me. I actually don't want to go to sleep tonight. 

And F that.

9.5/10 

To close out Halloween night I watched We Are Still Here, a twist on the haunted house movie. It starts the same as almost any movie in the genre: a couple moves to a rural home after losing their son (yeah, never do that. You want to get haunted? That's how you get haunted). They begin being tormented by a flame demon family thingy, crazy town residents, and the new-age-y hippie "big guns" they call in.

I've seen this movie before (figuratively, not literally), but the surprising bloodbath nature of this movie saves it. You will go "damn" several times. Do the motivations of the villagers make sense? Not even a little bit. Does everything stack up and make sense? Yeah, no, not at all. But I got to see a lot of blood and gruesome killings by both flame demons and weird old dudes, so I'd call this relatively successful horror. Plus you get to see the moronic hippies bite the dust in elaborately bloody ways, so yeah, that's fun.

Honestly the thing that's keeping this movie from being more noteworthy is the acting, which is atrocious. I have a feeling that this was a directorial choice perhaps,  but still, damn. The extent of the female leads acting is a dead eyed, I've-been-crying-for-hours stare, which actually makes her husbands over the top Leave it to Beaver attitude look like Anthony Hopkins pushing for an Oscar. Add into a mix the cliche hippies, the even more cliche creepy old dude who cryptically doesn't make sense, and the moronically motivated townspeople,  and you have BINGO on your badly written/acted characters card. I don't know why this was the angle taken on an otherwise pretty well-shot, desolate, and entertaining film, but man, it drags it down. Not a ton, I'm used to bad acting in horror films, but still... why?

8/10

See you for the wrap-up post.