I Like Slashers But I’m Normal

Themes: 2.5/5. Stalking is bad, BPD Baddies are insane freaks, and rich people are self centered. Those themes are present and, in my opinion, fairly offensive on the BPD front as someone who IS borderline.

Storytelling: 3/5. It was coherent and the comedy was well paced. That’s pretty much all I can really say for it. The basis of the story itself was incredibly ableist as well. I think there are ways to write an obsessive stalker that, if ableist, are at least still fun to watch.

Acting: 3.5/5. The actors were on the good side of solid! I especially liked the main guy’s performance and the french girl. The rest of the cast was just fine, but those two were really putting their whole pussies into it and you could tell they were having fun.

Horror: 0/5. Don’t watch this if you want a horror movie. The only thing I think that qualifies this for horror is the stalking, but he’s so “adorkable” about it that it isn’t really scary as much as it is silly. He’s LITERALLY just getting silly with it, your honor. I also think for a horror movie it should have used a LOT more blood. It felt like a TV show amount of blood, and the movie was too scared to have any of the “good guys” actually die, so the stakes don’t actually feel high.

Personal Taste: 2.5/5. I’d consider rewatching this, but it’s not really what I wanted out of the premise. 

Themes: 3/5. As a commentary on bad horror movies, it manages to do that very solidly. It doesn’t bring anything new to the table, but you can tell the movie was more supposed to be fun than anything else.

Storytelling: 1/5. The premise is creative, but the entire point of this movie is to be bad, so a low score is honestly a success for them.

Acting: 2/5. The acting was fairly bad for most of the characters, although the two survivors did okay. Not good, but okay. The worse side of okay, but okay. Everyone else did so horribly that it was great.

Horror: 2/5. The dismemberment was cool and the suspense was attempted for sure, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it executed horror well. Then again, it wasn’t trying to, it was trying to rib on bad horror movies more than it was trying to succeed in horror.

Personal Taste: 3/5. This was an INCREDIBLE bad movie and probably a fun rewatch if I’m not sober, but the badness was too curated. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it just means it’s not as fun as something totally batshit where no one has ever acted a day in their life and talks like an anti drug PSA. I definitely recommend it though!

Themes: 4.5/5. I’m being incredibly biased, but I think this was an excellent example of the way cycles of abuse can present, taken literally. I either have to give this a 4.5 or a 2, because it was either horrible or great and I’m not sure which! I vote great because I enjoyed it. I think the ending serves this theme well. Some of us are incapable of breaking the cycle, and all it really takes is someone saying “then I’ll climb in with you and we can get you out together”.

Storytelling: 2/5. I may love the themes, but the story is really not great, and it barely holds itself together. You have to do some thinking to figure out how to make the ending cohere from a plot standpoint even if it’s excellent thematically, and I don’t think this movie was trying to be thematic. It stumbled into good themes. So if it wasn’t intentional, then the ending doesn’t entirely make sense. Why would a ghost who can’t leave their place of death go to college?

Acting: 2/5. It’s not great, but I’ve seen worse. There weren’t really any standout performances, but most of the bullies were played pretty flat.

Horror: 3/5. That’s a horror movie alright! We got ghosts, we got blood, we got haunted medical facilities, what more can you ask for? Quality? Sorry, that’s a different movie. 

Personal Taste: 5/5. I adored this movie. It was ridiculously fun, but not a comedy. There’s nothing I love more than dissecting the themes in a movie that was NOT built for being dissected like that. I liked several of the parts that made no sense. I love the goo. What is the goo even doing there? Being goo. How does the plot even fit together? Badly! I cannot recommend this movie enough, it sucks so bad.

Themes: 3/5. The base theme present in all copaganda is handled in a very run of the mill way, and that’s the undercurrent telling you that the cops are trustworthy. It handles the copaganda element the same way every other movie of its style does. Everything about this movie felt derivative of Silence of the Lambs but without the cunt. You could also argue that the film is trying to present complex father son relationships which, while very emotional for me personally, I can objectively say was handled in much the same way everyone writes fathers that are impossible to please and sons who reject them but still try anyways.

Storytelling: 3/5. It’s fine and it’s coherent, but it’s incredibly unoriginal. Given the release date, I’d say this is one of a thousand movies trying to fit the same niche as Silence of the Lambs but with none of the creativity behind it. I’ve seen a thousand and one copaganda movies with serial killers and pacing that moves almost identical to this one. The ending is exactly what you expect out of a serial killer movie. It’s just fine. There are certainly worse movies of the type out there.

Acting: 3/5. The acting wasn’t actively bad, but it wasn’t anything to write home about. It was about what the movie deserved. Any better and it might have made me overlook the mediocrity of the story, but it was on par with the storytelling in a way that was fairly seamless. 

Horror: 3/5. Being derivative of every other copaganda horror movie of the era made it unoriginal and left it feeling less like a horror movie than it had the potential to be, but it still did a solid job at executing what it set out to do.

Personal Taste: 4/5. The movie was perfectly mid and a little dry at several parts. Hell, since it was so derivative, it felt dry in a lot of parts. That being said, this is the category where I’m rating with my utmost personal bias. My personal bias says this movie will haunt me. If a serial killer told me I was my father’s golden boy (the man who was impossible to please growing up and who didn’t support me when I followed in his footsteps in his career so I built everything I had on my own without his support since he never gave it to me anyways) while he was about to kill me and when my dad saved me he held me, probably for the first time in years, I would turn into the Joker. That would be it. It’d be over for me. I’d go nuclear.

Themes: 2.5/5. There’s something to be said about fearing the mundane. It’s just a cornfield, we think, but the rustling can still disarm us if we’re not prepared for it. It’s just an artist collective, a small town, a neighbor, a coworker, but is it really so simple, or is it something scarier? Failure to approach that theme with intention lowers the score here, but it does a simple, clear-cut approach to the topic that suits the rest of the movie.

Storytelling: 3/5. CORN is the best thing I’ve seen put to film. I love their little fancy party. The story is coherent and simple. They didn’t try to do anything outstanding with it, and because of that, they excelled in the story they told rather than poorly executing something bigger. Unfortunately, it’s a bit flat of a story. The non-essential characters, excluding the members of CORN, exist solely as living props for the rest of the story. They have no personality. They’re cardboard cutouts of people. They’re not grounded. They’re horror fodder. That’s something I don’t mind, but objectively it’s a quality issue that I can’t super ignore. If you removed every nonessential character other than the members of CORN from the movie, it would actively be a better movie.

Acting: 2/5. Most of it is fine, but a couple performances are lackluster or actively bad. For the record, I think the bad acting is a plus here. The scenes set during the CORN party while the artists were milling about? Incredible. No notes. I love how you could tell the taxidermy actors were humans and not props because they were breathing or swaying.

Horror: 3/5. I wish there had been more gore in a movie centered around taxidermy, but the gore we did get in those last ten minutes? Pretty solid! I think human taxidermy is a fun angle to play with in horror. 

Personal Taste: 4.5/5. I love you, Collective Order of Recreational Necrophilanthropists. I wish those party scenes were longer. I wish you had the time to shine. This movie could be PERFECT if the CORN was a hair campier (I know, hard to do when it’s already super camp) and if there was more dissection gore. Definitely rewatchable for the collective alone.

Themes: 2.5/5. It could have handled the idea much better, but the focus was centrally on love and death, with attention paid to how the two intersect. It leaves with the question, “can we really escape fate, or are we always going to make the choices that lead us to our inevitable downfall?” and I like that.

Storytelling: 2/5. Conceptually the story goes hard, but the execution fell flat.

Acting: 2/5. Really subpar at best. There were moments, but overall it was on the worse side of fine.

Horror: 1/5. Not nearly as much bloodshed or slashing than I’d like out of a slasher. I know the budget seems pretty low, but so was the budget for A Bothered Conscience, and that movie had great special effects!

Personal Taste: 2/5. On paper, it’s exactly the kind of movie I want to watch. Genuinely so many parts of this movie sound incredible! The execution was just so disappointing.

Themes: 4/5. How well do you know the people around you? How well would you handle a crisis? How do your answers change when you’re viewing this from the comfort of your home? With other genres, they have different ways to approach these themes, but with found footage, it can emphasize the discomfort of having to think about those questions in application to reality. The Blair Witch Project handles them well even within the genre itself, making it a good example of those themes not just in found footage, but in horror as a whole.

Storytelling: 5/5. I know I reserve 5’s for those truly original, standout movies, and The Blair Witch is incredibly trope heavy for the genre. The thing is, those tropes had to come from somewhere, and The Blair Witch was at the forefront of the genre when it was released. Leaving aside the fact that it’s one of the earlier found footage movies to really take off in popularity, the pacing was well done and it was an objectively well crafted story with how the suspense built.

Acting: 5/5. I was really thrown into the world of this movie. Found footage can come across as deceptively easy to act - after all, you don’t need to deliver lines professionally. You’re delivering them conversationally. The problem boils down, then, to horror. Acting naturally scared when you’re safe. Making the audience believe that you 100% are frightened and that they’re watching someone’s camera they picked up off the street. I think the actors did a phenomenal job at both the conversational acting at the beginning, faking amateur acting when the characters needed to be delivering lines for their documentary, and conveying both the slow deterioration of their sanities and the growing horror of the Blair Witch. 

Horror: 5/5. The suspense building through the film is well done. Most of the movies I’ve watched for this project haven’t made me feel genuine unease like this movie did, perhaps because the last time I watched it I had less life experience and didn’t fully grasp the terror just of being lost in the woods with people you’re fighting with, and that’s not even mentioning the horror elements brought in by the witch herself. I often critique movies for not having enough gore, but even though this movie was a little conservative with the blood, I think any more and it would have pulled me out of the story.

Personal Taste: 3/5. I’m not always going to be in the mood for this movie, but I’m really glad I gave it a second chance after disliking it the first time a few years ago. 

Themes: 2/5. The idea of a benevolent ghost trying to protect you from something malevolent in your life and you mistake the malevolent thing for the ghost is a classic trope that, in this instance, really sends home the idea that loss of a loved one can bring a pain that you need in order to move forward. This isn’t handled well, but it’s present.

Storytelling: 1/5. “Agoraphobe in a haunted house” is a fun enough premise, but they really flopped on execution. 

Acting: 2/5. None of these people can act well, but at least the protagonist is passable and her husband was bad but fun to watch, if only in the last scene.

Horror: 2.5/5. They wanted to build suspense with her inability to leave the house, but the real suspense to me was the idea of being mentally ill and not having any of my loved ones actually support me effectively. The ghost was present, and that’s about all I can really say for the thing. 

Personal Taste: 1.5/5. Just watch Gaslight.

Themes: 3/5. This movie could potentially be described as having the theme of loving the life you have instead of wanting what others have. It does that theme well enough, although I wouldn’t go so far as to say it does the theme well or excellently. It’s fine.

Storytelling: 3.5/5. The story is fun and the characters mostly enjoyable, if racist and classist. Much like the themes, it’s fine. Some of the jokes land and it coheres, although it could be a bit braver in every single one of those departments. It’s safe.

Acting: 3/5. You might notice a running theme with the review, but it’s fine. The actors were believable and didn’t clash with one another.

Horror: 0.5/5. This movie shouldn’t call itself a horror comedy. The only things I’d consider horror about it were the cryptid (though not handled like a horror element at all) and the dead body. There was mild suspense from time to time and I thought it was going to get more interesting with the introduction of the body, but that’s as intense as it gets.

Personal Taste: 2/5. Some of the jokes were funny and White Morpheus made the whole movie. I’d maybe consider rewatching as a comedy, but absolutely not as a horror. The clickbait theme was charming, since I haven’t seen that much in found footage, but it’s not got an insane amount of rewatch value for me and the joke to laugh ratio was definitely not in the movie’s favor.

Themes: 1/5. As with many horror movies about serial killers, it’s about the disruption of the status quo and stranger danger. It was derivative and empty. The racism didn't help.

Storytelling: 2/5. The dialogue was nothingburger and the plot was trite. 

Acting: 2.5/5. It was better than bad but not solid or good. Half the cast were reading lines as if you had given the script to a high school theater class full of only freshmen who just need to get their arts credit out of the way.

Horror: 1/5. The horror barely breached that of a TV crime drama, which is exactly what this movie felt like: a feature length tv crime drama that was allowed to swear and show a bit of gore.

Personal Taste: 0.5/5. I didn’t care about this movie at all. No rewatch value, no fun was had, this one was absolutely nothing to me.

Themes: 1.5/5. The movie villainizes the illuminati as a vague add-in. They say the name and use tropes, but it feels shoehorned in and not like a natural part of the story. Then again, they had to reference it at least once if they’re going to rip off a Qanon theory with such sloppy execution. Blood Libel: The Trip.

Storytelling: 1/5. I respect movies designed to look like a fuckass trip and I will defend that to the death, so all the people who say “stoners should just stick to getting high and stop making movies” should eat shit and die. That being said, the central plot is just so flat. You couldn’t get me to care about the protagonist if you put a gun to my head, and the antisemitism doesn’t make me like the story more. 

Acting: 2/5. Most of them are flat, but Charlie was fun. The lead actor was very nothing to me.

Horror: 3.5/5. The cannibalism was hot, but there wasn’t enough of it for me. I loved the scribbles and the more hallucinogenic scenes, but every dip into realism was just so flat for me.

Personal Taste: 1.5/5. The antisemitism of an illuminati movie combined with the racism and pro-military protagonist ruins the whole thing for me. The eroticism of ripping out flesh to eat it and get high wasn’t worth it.

Themes: 1/5. Like many ghost movies, this story seems to focus on the theme of moving on from tragedy and how that tragedy can stay in a location for years to come. Unfortunately, I can only say that much because it’s a fundamental theme to many hauntings, and this movie is no exception.

Storytelling: 1.5/5. It can be a little clumsy at times. The sections that were filmed like a normal documentary were great and I love the use of found footage or fake amateur documentary in low budget films to mask the video quality, I think it’s charming. You can tell they were trying to be a little surreal in the parts that aren’t filmed in the same style as the mock-interviews, but it sometimes comes across as just feeling like watching a music video with the film style and the way the camera lingers on the actress’s movements. There are more clever ways to do that and I wouldn’t hate it in a movie about a ghost stripper, but it doesn’t do that well.

Acting: 2.5/5. The parts that were shot like interviews were well done and the actors felt like they were actually interviewing in a ghost hunting TV show. It got sloppier when it left interviews and tried to be legitimate. Pretty much anything with Lady Zee in it and a lot of the non-interview scenes with Baby Doll.

Horror: 3/5. The inclusion of the Romani woman was abysmal and the horror itself was clumsy, but in a few shining moments it felt like watching a bad ghost hunting show, like Ghost Adventures. Those moments were charming, and I loved the interview with Baby Doll.

Personal Taste: 3/5. I had fun and wouldn’t mind watching it again for the camp factor, but I’d rather watch Ghost Adventures. Edit: actually I think it would go hard right now specifically for the camp factor. Bumping it up a point from 2/5.