Talk to Me: Alright / Great
A bunch of late teens/early twenty-somethings have gatherings during which they make light of summoning spirits via the severed hand of an ostensible medium. Because literally playing with the dead is a horrible idea, things obviously take a turn for the worse, and shit gets real...
My bad. I saw the ratings, heard quite a few good things about this film, so my expectations were high, but this one fell quite flat for me. Had I not expected better, had I just stumbled on it and watched it without any expectations, this would have been a decent find, but given I was excited to be both shocked and scared, and was neither, this one didn't work for me. There was a lot of horror potential here, but it's kinda wasted on the softer storylines of precarious interpersonal relationships between the main character and her friends/family. The horror was simply an ingredient, and not a reason for the film; this was a dark drama with a few quick shots to mutilated ghosts. Then it ends with what was supposed to be a "shocker," but one you figured out and are underwhelmed by minutes before the credits roll.
Watch if you want to, but since I was still trying to get my "scary" fix, I started...
The Nun II: Stupid / Great
The Conjuring nun haunts a convent filled with nuns. That's all I got, and that's all they had.
Not sure where this lands in
The Conjuring universe it stems from (nor can I be bother to care,) but this was just really dumb. I actually fell asleep, and didn't even finish it. If jump scares are all ya got, ya ain't got much. I'm also tired of horror films that keep falling back on the same antagonists. Freddy Kruger, Jason Vorhees, Michael Myers, this fucking Nun, etc., it's no longer scary when the same entity just keeps doing the same schtick two, three, TEN fucking films later. Makes me appreciate movies like
Smile all the more, a movie with a new threat whose menace isn't diluted with a iterative suffix in the title. That said, I expect
Smile II will be announced any day now
.