The Year in Horror (2016) – The Worst of Times

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2016, B.C. Butcher, Bunni, cinema, Darkweb, Dead 7, Den of Darkness, film reviews, films, Ghost Team, horror, horror films, JeruZalem, Martyrs, Movies, Paranormal Sex Tape, The Before Time, The Boy, The Final Project, The Forest, Voodoo Rising, worst of 2016

There’s no denying that 2016 was a great year for horror cinema but every coin has two sides. Before we get to the very best that the year had to offer, it bears taking a look at the other side of the coin: the very worst of calendar year 2016.

Out of the 179 horror films I screened in 2016, I classified 40 of them as terrible: of those 40, I’ve managed to whittle the list down to the top 15 offenders, the group of 2016 horror films that I would classify as the “worst of the worst,” at least based on what I screened. Bear one thing in mind: none of the films on this list committed the sin of being merely humdrum, dull or average: this were overachievers, in the same way that the top 20 films overachieved. In that spirit, then, I present you with the 15 worst horror films of 2016, in no particular order. View at your own risk.

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The Forest

This came out at the beginning of the year and set the tone for the worst that 2016 horror would offer: glossy visuals, lame jump scares, loud musical stingers, zero genuine frights, unlikable characters and reckless squandering of great concepts/locations. There’s something so generic and processed about this lifeless story of a woman investigating the disappearance of her sister in Japan’s legendary Aokigahara Forest that you might feel as if time has stopped if you’re unlucky enough to sit through it. While there were certainly gems to be found in this year’s crop of mainstream, multiplex horror films, The Forest was most certainly not one of them.

JeruZalem

Found-footage nonsense that somehow manages to make a Biblical apocalypse in Jerusalem as interesting as paint drying. Loathsome characters run around the city, fleeing from angels, demons and any semblance of common sense possible. This reminded me of As Above, So Below, which is definitely not a compliment.

The Boy

Even without the astoundingly terrible “twist,” The Boy would proudly represent the nadir of mainstream horror in this calendar year if it didn’t have so much competition. This was the kind of goofball thing that began as a head-scratching concept (a naive young woman is hired by the kind of sinister old couple that belong in House of the Devil to babysit their young son, who happens to be a wooden doll), devolved into dumb Blumhouse jump scares and then came full circle to a resolution that is so howlingly stupid, I fully expected the cast of SNL to jump out and start doing the robot.

The Before Time

Another dead-on-arrival found footage film that would be casually offensive if it weren’t so thoroughly inept and forgettable. Irritating reporters head to the desert, uncover evil, yadda yadda yadda. Like most of the film’s on the list, this was an absolute chore to get through.

Martyrs

Proudly taking the title of “Most Pointless Remake” from Gus van Sant’s shot-for-shot Psycho redux, this American redo of the classic New Wave of French horror gut-punch manages to bleed all the power, intensity and repulsive beauty from the original, leaving nothing but a hollow shell and the basic story beats. The original Martyrs might not have been everyone’s cup of tea but the remake isn’t even a cup of warm water.

Abattoir

I fully expected Darren Lynn Bousman’s Abattoir to be one of my favorite films of the year and yet here it sits on my least favorite list. What went wrong? The film starts with a fantastic concept (a genteel madman, played by the formidable Dayton Callie, goes around and “collects” various rooms that have hosted terrible crimes in order to build the ultimate haunted house) and then works as hard as it can to destroy any good will garnered from said killer idea. At the end, we’re left with a piss-poor imitation of John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness when we could have had a completely new, totally cool horror franchise for the new millennia.

The Final Project

Another found footage film (notice a trend here?) that details the exploits of a group of obnoxious film students on a haunted plantation. The lack of scares wouldn’t be a problem if anything else in this worked. As such, though, we’re pretty much left with video cam footage of a bunch of young jerks goofing around, followed by some cheap, dollar store effects.

Bunni

No-budget dreck about a mama’s boy and his killer mama feels like a bad student film (the lighting, in particular, is atrocious) and does nothing in its relatively short run time to alleviate that impression. I’ll be honest: I could elaborate but that’s just about what this particular situation calls for…short, sweet and to the point.

Ghost Team

Painfully unfunny “comedy” that features people like Justin Long, Jon Heder and Amy Sedaris (who really should know better) mugging their way through a tissue-paper-thin haunted house story that isn’t so much Scooby Doo as Scooby Dumb. As bad as the films on this list might be, there were few that I disliked as immediately and intensely as this waste of resources.

Darkweb

This film satisfies a very small but, I’m sure, extremely dedicated niche market: those folks who revel in the humiliation of Danny Glover. If you harbor some sort of pathological hatred for the esteemed actor, Darkweb will be like manna from heaven. For anyone who doesn’t want to watch poor Danny Glover shout, flail his arms, cuss like a sailor and generally act like a complete idiot, however, this pathetic Hostel clone will offer nothing more than odd ethnic stereotypes, unconvincing performances and some truly goofy setpieces. Awkward, to say the least.

B.C. Butcher

Impossibly stupid Troma goof about a Cro Magnon killer who targets a group of cave women, this features Kato Kaelin in a loincloth diaper, which should tell you all you need to know. The only redeeming feature to this mess is that it clocks in at under an hour, which is pretty faint praise, indeed.

Dead 7

Asylum-esque horror-Western that features former members of ’90s-’00s-era boy bands fighting zombies in a post-Apocalyptic setting and is about as convincing as a kindergarten presentation of Glengarry Glenn Ross. I’ll admit that I’m not the target audience for something like this and I did, for a time, try to keep an open mind. At the end of the day, though, this is in the same wheelhouse as the Sharknado movies and there’s only so much intentional stupidity I can take.

Voodoo Rising

Many films that I screened in 2016 shared similarities with Voodoo Rising: amateur actors struggling to deliver lines in a convincing manner, an inability to propel the story forward in a timely fashion, a tiring familiarity that telegraphed every single “twist” and “turn” in the narrative. Few films managed to double-down on these failings with as much conviction as this one, however, earning it a spot with this esteemed group of peers.

Den of Darkness

The “den” in the title refers to a Girl Scout troupe and the “darkness” refers to the hysterical blindness that has befallen the den mother after one of her college-age (?) charges accidentally falls off a cliff. The house she moves into might be haunted or her shithead husband might be trying to gaslight her. If you have any doubts, after reading the above, that Den of Darkness is a truly terrible film, let me lay them to rest: it is a truly terrible film.

Paranormal Sex Tape

This bears the distinction of being the first film in years that I haven’t been able to get through without judicious use of the frame-forward button, so at the very least you know this left an impression. Only nominally a film, this is actually a loosely edited series of walking scenes, broken up by really bad softcore porn and non-actors improvising awkward “dialogue” that makes Ed Wood read like Chaucer. I have no idea what it was about, a fact that I doubt would have been clarified had I managed to watch every one of its 70-some minutes.

The 31 Days of Halloween (2016): 10/22-10/28

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31 Days of Halloween, 8989 Redstone, cinema, Dead 7, Evil Souls, film reviews, films, Halloween traditions, horror, horror films, horror movies, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, Movies, October, The Funhouse Massacre, The Interior, The Pack, Within

As we near the end of this glorious month, I now present you with the eight films screened during the 4th Week of October: this features some of the most extreme highs and lows of the year, so enjoy the roller-coaster. After this, we only have the 30th and 31st before we can close out this year’s festivities. Fire up your Dragula and feast those blood-shot windows to the soul on the list below.

Within

Another well-made but thoroughly pedestrian and obvious haunted house film, this one is saved a bit by an absolutely batshit, brutal finale that comes out of left field. A newlywed couple and the husband’s sassy teen daughter move into a house with a bad reputation and run into lots of scary bumps in the night. If the house doesn’t get them, maybe it’ll be the pervy next-doot-neighbor, who also happens to be the neighborhood locksmith: gotta love a creep with a strategy! Well-made and acted but absolutely everything up until the last 20 minutes or so feels about as old as Stonehenge.

8989 Redstone

The hot-headed, casually racist host of a home renovation show and his obnoxious daughter have a new project, deep in the decaying heart of Detroit’s worst neighborhood. Turns out the house may be a bigger threat than the area, however, as weird things begin to happen and various workers suffer injuries ranging from bad to worse. When Rebecca begins to see visions of the house’s original owner and architect, her dad has to determine whether this is a recurrence of a previous mental breakdown or something much darker and more insidious. Despite a cheap look, an occasionally silly script and some strictly amateur acting, this actually had ideas and imagination to spare (the central concept seems to exist in the same wheelhouse as The Dark Tower and House of Leaves, which is pretty fuckin’ rad, if ya ask me) and the chaotic finale hits Fulciesque levels of insanity that were only hinted at earlier. Yeah, the ultimate resolution is a bit muddled (if I’m reading it right) but it’s a bumpy ride with some undeniably cool moments.

Evil Souls

Incredibly sleazy, often unpleasant and throughly gonzo throwback to old-school Italian horror maestros like Fulci and Soavi, Maurizio and Roberto del Piccolo’s Evil Souls definitely won’t be for everyone but it sure as hell got me nostalgic for those old grindhouse days. An insane madman named Valentine (the all-the-way-in Peter Gosgrove, doing frighteningly good work) kidnaps two women and holds them captive in his dungeon. He’s an eloquent sociopath who dresses like a turn-of-the-century gentleman and thinks he’s the Marquis de Sade. He also has some kind of a larger plan, one that involves his drug-addicted, insane prostitute sister (he’s also her pimp) and his childhood best friend, who’s now the local priest. Did I mention that his plan also seems to involve the kidnapped women’s sons and, possibly, something occult? Because it does. Or seems to.

To be honest, it’s a little hard to tell: like the best Italian horror films, this exists on pure nightmare logic, right up to the thoroughly head-scratching finale. Like the best, old-school Italian horror films, Evil Souls works splendidly despite (or even because of) its handicaps and shortcomings: it’s a film that commits to a central tone and runs with it fearlessly. Even when the film doesn’t work (which is often) or becomes almost unbearable nasty (there’s quite a bit of graphic torture and realistic practical effects), it still manages to show a rare level of restraint that keeps it from pitching wholesale into trash cinema: it just toes the art-house line, if barely. Individual results may vary but for someone who grew up on a steady diet of Italian VHS fare, this one felt right at home.

The Funhouse Massacre

Arthouse, slow-burn horror will always be my personal favorite but, sometimes, you really just need a good, old-fashioned blood-n-guts slasher: with that in mind, Andy Palmer’s The Funhouse Massacre was just the film that I needed this October. This endlessly inventive, genuinely cool, outrageously gory little jewel is an obvious love-letter to horror, in all its era, and that’s something that’s always gonna hit me hard. The plot is simple: a collection of nefarious serial killers are sprung from the local maximum security nut-hatch (think Arkham Asylum but with mild-mannered Robert Englund as warden) and take up residence in the local haunted house attraction, an attraction which happens to feature individual exhibits based on the killers’ exploits. The real killers move into the attractions, people really start dying in the middle of a crowded carnival and the whole thing builds to a truly insane Grand Guignol finale on the terror-stricken midway.

I dearly loved everything about this film, even when it veered hard into the cheese (the obvious Harley Quinn substitute was pretty silly, in a cosplay kinda way). The references to other horror characters and franchises could be really clever (the cannibal chef was named Ramsey, ala Blood Feast and Rocco the Clown was an obvious Leatherface stand-in) and the high-energy, good-humored and gory proceedings reminded me of nothing less than Waxwork, one of my all-time favorites from any era. The Funhouse Massacre is an ideal group or party, fill of quotable lines and plenty of genuine laugh-out-loud moments. Easily one of my favorites of the year and sure to be a seasonal rotation, in the future.

Dead 7

The cast list on this one should give you a pretty good idea of what to expect: Backstreet Boys Nick Carter, Howie Dorough and AJ McClean; NSYNC’s Joey Fatone and Chris Kirkpatrick; 98 Degrees founder Jeff Timmons; O-Town members Erik Michael Estrada, Jacob Underwood and Trevor Penick; TV host Carrie Keagan; Jon Secada; Everclear’s Art Alexakis. Behind the scenes, we get SyFy in the producer’s chair and Nick Carter with a screenplay credit. Plotwise, it’s a “comedic” zombie-Western take on The Magnificent Seven, featuring the boy band members in all the pivotal roles, both good guys and bad.

As someone who avoids purposefully campy and stupid films like the plague, I can only give my personal, unbiased opinion: Dead 7 was, without a doubt, the absolute nadir of a year that has seen plenty of stinky cheese. I stretch to think of another film that was so effortlessly tedious and obnoxious, so cheap-jack, manic and utterly tone-deaf: at least B.C. Butcher was under an hour…this monstrosity felt at least twice that, if not more. I’m obviously not the intended audience for something like this but, even in this case, I really did try to find something worthwhile, anything. At the end, the best that I could say is that it finally does end, eventually: that’s really the best I got, I’m afraid.

The Pack

Despite all of the tedious haunted house and possession clones, there were still plenty of absolute treasures in the 2016 horror roster and the Australian killer dog film The Pack was one of the very best…maybe Top 5, even, if I were forced to draw up a list today. Expertly plotted, beautifully shot and full of endearing, empathetic performances, everything about this sleeper is top-notch and virtually flawless. With a supremely simple set-up (a pack of uncannily intelligent wild dogs terrorize an Australian family on their isolated sheep ranch) and perfect balance between pulse-pounding action setpieces and genuine horror, this is as lean and mean as it gets. Like the best films, the less said the better: just take my advice and seek this one out ASAP.

The Interior

Easily one of the most inventive, odd films I screened this month, writer-director Trevor Juras’ full-length debut, The Interior, is pretty impossible to classify. Think of it as an odd, sardonic mash-up of Into the Wild, Dead Man and The Blair Witch Project but that’s probably as far in a box as I can put this one: a cooly blase office drone (Patrick McFadden doing magnificent work) receives some sort of bad medical diagnosis (we’re never really told what) and decides to retreat into the woods, alone, to find some sort of peace within himself.

He doesn’t quite find that but what he does find is certainly open to interpretation: one of the best things about Juras’ confident debut is that there’s no hand-holding, whatsoever. He establishes a consistent mood (helped immensely by the gorgeous forest location and some of the creepiest night scenes ever), gets us to like his main character and then lets the rest develop organically. The Interior is a slow, methodical film but it’s never boring or tedious: as with the best filmmakers, you trust that the destination will be worth the journey and, depending on your level of patience and frustratability, Trevor Juras absolutely does not let down. Eerie, smart and full of surprising humor, The Interior is definitely one of the year’s better films.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House

I was fully prepared for Oz Perkins’ second film, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, to vault right to the top of my Best of the Year list: after all, his still unreleased debut, The Blackcoat’s Daughter (nee February), received almost universal praise on the festival circuit, with the filmmaker being credited as the next-big-thing in atmospheric, slow-burn horror. Since that’s my favorite flavor, I was ready and willing to dive in with both hands.Spoiler alert: it’s not making the list.

While I Am…looks gorgeous, sort of like a Merchant/Ivory take on the Waniverse, and features more creeping dread and leisurely pacing than a funeral procession, it’s also completely empty inside, so devoid of genuine meaning and impact as to be the equivalent of cinematic cotton candy. Ruth Wilson’s constant, tedious voiceover is a huge part of the reason the film didn’t work for me (I don’t mind a good voiceover but this was just lazy writing, the equivalent of a white noise machine for sleep problems) but the biggest issue is that the film is just so damn dull. There are plenty of good ideas, here, and no shortage of striking, beautiful imagery: Perkins’ grasp of filmmaking mechanics seem pretty solid, no two ways about it. The revelation is also strong, if simultaneously open-ended, leaving the film on a satisfyingly hazy note.

On the downside, I spent almost the entirety of the film looking at my watch, which is never a good sign. Keep in mind that I’m also the target audience for this type of film: they were preaching to the choir and I still rejected the sermon…that says quite a bit, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t mind style over substance: that can produce some truly unforgettable results, in the right hands. In this case, however, the most that I can say is the film looked great and featured a refreshingly different point-of-view and focus. Next time, I’m hoping that Perkins manages to match those awesome visuals and mood to something with real substance. Call this a near miss but a miss, nonetheless.

Coming up: the final two days of the 31 Days of Halloween, including the main event! Stay tuned!