Dahlia DeWinters - Author

Quirky Heroines, Happy Endings

Horror Movie Review: Session 9

Title: Session 9
Genre: Horror
Director: Brad Anderson
Writers:   Brad Anderson, Stephen Gevedon
Stars:   David Caruso, Stephen Gevedon, Paul Guilfoyle
IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0261983/

HERE MAY BE SPOILERS

Portions of the movie may or may not be revealed.

 

Synopsis:
Tensions rise within an asbestos cleaning crew as they work in an abandoned mental hospital with a horrific past that seems to be coming back.

Session 9As you can probably tell, I do love some movies.  Older movies, awesome.  Newer movies, not so much.  I take that as a sign of the times.  Most of the movies do not target my demographic as a woman of a certain age, so I don’t fault them in the fact that they don’t reach me.  I’m no longer part of the teenage early twenty crowd, and many of the actors I admire and look for in a film are, gulp, retired.

But sometimes there comes a movie that’s not so flashy, not so over-promoted to the point where you’re sick of it.  It’s a quiet movie someone mentions on social media and gives just enough hints to draw one’s interests.

Session 9 is one of those movies.  I saw a online friend of mine mention it in a post, and I had to check it out.

David Caruso is the biggest name in this movie.  I’m no Caruso fan, but “abandoned mental hospital” had me hooked right away.

The film involves an asbestos removal crew comprised of pretty ordinary Joes.  The company seems to be on the edge of folding – there is a lot of talk about shut downs and how the asbestos business is drying up – regular folks with regular problems and families.  The catalyst is the mental hospital where all these bubbling personal issues come to a head.

While I do enjoy the movies which take the most cliched characters of all time and dump them into trouble within the first ten to twenty minutes of running time, there’s something to be said about a slow bulid of horror/disquiet coming at the expense of a character who works for a living and hefts a beer at the end of the week.  Chances are, if you asked this guy if he believed in ghosts or spirits, he would laugh in your face.  The only thing this guy believes in is a steady paycheck.

This is what’s at play here in Session 9.  These are hard working men, barely able to pay their bills and the air of desperation to finish the job in record time is thick around them.  However, the mental hospital (much like the Overlook Hotel), has other plans for them, and these plans have nothing to do with asbestos abatement.

The setting couldn’t be a better one.  The hospital is  eerily frozen in time, as if everyone was ushered out of there at once, with no time to pack their things or tidy the rooms.  Some of the patients rooms still have newspaper clippings and disturbing illustrations pasted to the peeling walls.  Operating rooms still hold the tools for surgeries other procedures performed on the mentally ill at that time.

The performances by the (mostly) male cast are quite good, and their working class chatter and sniping at each other rings authentic, adding another layer of reality.  I mean, this hospital is just a place where they’re taking out the asbestos, right?  There shouldn’t be anything to fear….just another job that might put them in the black for the time being, right? Right?

I won’t give too much of the movie away, but suffice to say Session 9 delivers on creepiness, shadows, jump scares and gross-out factors.  It’s slow,  but it’s steady and satisfying.

 

Grade:  A:  recommended!!

 

 

 

Horror Movie Review: Final Girl

Title: Final Girl
Genre: Horror/Thriller
Director: Tyler Shields
IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2124787/

HERE MAY BE SPOILERS

Portions of the movie may or may not be revealed.

 

Synopsis:

A man teaches a young woman how to become a complete weapon. Later she is approached by a group of sadistic teens who kill blonde women for unknown reasons. The hunting season begins.

 

final girlFor goodness sake.

I knew it was all going wrong when Wes Bentley appeared on my iPad screen.  That deadpan expression and that draggy way of talking he has.  So, I was eye rolling within the first few minutes of the movie.

Then the training sequences began and I became intrigue.  Was she going to be a spy?  Was she going to hunt serial killers?

This movie was highly stylized and seemed to take on the characteristics of a play being presented on film, much like Glengary Glen Ross or Oleanna.  The staging was stilted and the costumes and sets were very….play like.  But I stuck with it.

These four guys in tuxedos are supposed to be serial killers. They take blondes into the forest, give them a head start, then chase and kill them.  Apparenlty, no one cares about these girls enough to report them missing  – high school girls no less – and there is not one whisper of a police presence in the town.

killers from final girl
Who dry cleans their tuxes after a night out hunting?

Okay, I think, suspending disbelief.  No problem, I wanted to see how she was going to fight all these strapping young men and become “FINAL GIRL” (roll credits).

Boy, was I in for a sorry disappointment.  The concept was good, but the acting and the sets and the lackluster fight scenes…I couldn’t suspend everything.

I will say this.  I did like the style of the movie, the use of color and the bizarre lighting of the forest.  The visuals did keep me interested in the end.  However, the story didn’t hold enough water for me.  The dialogue was rather boring.

I don’t regret watching it, but it left me kind of meh.

Grade: D

Thriller Movie Review: Bound to Vengeance

Bound-to-vengeance-copy
Title: Bound To Vengeance
Genre: Thriller/Horror
Director: Jose Manuel Cravioto
IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1230213/

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS. HERE THERE BE SPOILERS. HERE THERE BE SPOILERS.
Do not read this review if you don’t want portions of the movie revealed.

This movie was recommended to me by an author friend of mine. Given that I don’t shy away from the sometimes terrible thriller/horror movies on Netflix (except the ones that are CLEARLY Lifetime movies), I didn’t hesitate to give this one a shot.

Synopsis: A young girl, chained in the basement of a sexual predator, escapes and turns the tables on her captor.

First of all, the protagonist was a young woman, not a young girl. Young girl implies to me a ten year old. Second, after I viewed the movie, I went back to the imdb listing and discovered that two men wrote the screenplay, which didn’t surprise me at all.

One big thing for me with this film: Black woman dies first. WTF? We haven’t got past that yet? Seriously? Enough with this already.

Basically, young woman escapes, then realizes dude has women trapped up all over the place. He tells her, if he dies, they all die since he’s the only one who knows where they are. So, young woman makes the choice to try to rescue all the women.

One complaint I read about the movie was that if she’d just escaped, she’d be all about going to the police. I give the movie a pass, because, her decision to go rescue the other girls hooked me into the movie.

So, like I said previously, she goes to rescue the black woman first, and she dies by accident. The second rescue goes just as badly. But even as stuff went down, I found myself asking “Why are you letting the psycho dude do all the talking? You know these women must be a little nuts…at least TRY to talk some sense into them, don’t just sit back and let him run his mouth.”

These two incidents happened at the beginning of the action and kind set me against the movie. The flashbacks are interesting, but reminded me of Cloverfield. As a woman of a certain age, I was like “why the heck is all this being filmed, how boring”, even as I knew it was being filmed for a payoff at the end. Chekov’s video footage, if you will.

The confrontation with the secondary villain was just strange and not very compelling.

I will say that the main actress played the part to the hilt and she did an excellent job. The issue of sex trafficking and kidnapping is made real without being super obvious. The material itself, however, was not up to par and parts of the movie had me scratching my head.

This could have been much more than it was. I wouldn’t give it a second viewing, but I don’t feel it was a waste of time.

Grade: C

Movie Review – Flashback – Stir of Echoes

Title: Stir of Echoes
Genre: Thriller/Supernatural Horror
Director: Davis Koepp
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0164181

Hey there lovelies!

I’m taking a little vacation for the month of the December, which means I’m cleaning house (literally and figuratively) and sussing out my goals for 2016. Which in turns means movies and music galore! It’s a relief sometimes to take a step away from the pen and paper….but that doesn’t stop the ideas from bubbling over.

0509008_BRWrapv4Back to the movies. I took a little step back in time to screen Stir of Echoes. I remember watching this back in the day when it first came out on DVD. It’s based on a novel by Richard Matheson, who, as you must well know, wrote Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, I Am Legend and a few other horror/thriller stories. (I use the word “few” as being funny. Matheson was pretty prolific.)

I must say, for a film from the 90s, it holds up pretty well. I enjoyed Kevin Bacon’s younger incarnation – he’s got the loveliest clear blue eyes. I could have done without the “magical negro” trope and the only non-white people in the film were located in a crappy part of town, but other than that, the narrative surrounding Kevin Bacon’s hypnosis by his sister in law (played by a cool Ileana Douglas) and the resulting plot madness is pretty good.

I’ve read the original Matheson story, and because of the dated plot, the screenwriter took some liberty in changing the plot that I don’t really think affected the overall tension and theme.

Also, a slightly tattooed (on his back)  Kevin Bacon, sweaty and shirtless. He’s kind of thin in this movie, but it’s still kinda hot in a trailer park kind of way.

stir-of-echoes-kevin-bacon-digging-yard-shirtless

Watch or not to watch?:

If you like supernatural thrillers and messages from the other side visited upon a common group of folks, I’d recommend this movie. Screen it for the story and remember it takes place in the 90s when cell phones were NOT commonplace. If you put yourself back in time and watch the movie for what it is, you’ll enjoy it. I know I did.

Grade: A minus

Horror Movie Review: Unfriended

unfriendedTitle: Unfriended
Genre:  Horror, Thriller, Drama
Director: Levan Gabriadze (as Leo Gabriadze)
IMDB link:  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3713166/

Synopsis according to IMDB:
A group of online chat room friends find themselves haunted by a mysterious, supernatural force using the account of their dead friend.

I might be getting too old for this, I admit this up front.  I did not enjoy this movie on any level. Though I thought the story and the premise was excellent, the thirty year olds playing high schoolers did nothing to elicit my sympathy.  I couldn’t even enjoy it on the “so bad it’s good” level because there was little to no physical action. You couldn’t say “don’t go in there” or “stay out of the basement”.  Nope.  The entire movie took place on a laptop screen.

As I said, this was an interesting concept and on some level, it was well executed.  Since I watched the movie on a laptop, it was easy watching and some intriguing things happened.

The actors themselves were annoying.  The screaming, crying, cursing and yelling did nothing for the movie.  I won’t spoil it here, but in the end the viewer is left unsatisfied.

I’d say see it once, just to experience it.

As always….YMMV.

Grade: D