Horror Movie Micro Reviews

Halloween season now officially begins in September, according to a guy who puts stick-figure drawings on the internet, and Halloween season means watching lots of crappy horror movies! The thing with horror movies is that about 14,000 of them come out each month, so your odds of picking a bad one are stupendously high, and the odds of my girlfriend picking a bad one (such as most of the crap baskets below) are nearing death-and-taxes status.

Thankfully, I love bad movies every bit as much as I love cheesy book covers. I’ll be watching a lot of them between now and Halloween, and posting reviews of all of them here, so keep an eye out for updates! (Don’t literally take one of your eyes out, though.)

All movies receiving a Mountain Time Micro Review will be graded on two five-star scales:
The Movie Score, a measure of how genuinely good a movie is. Movies tend to be awful, though, which is why we have:
The Schlock Score, a measure of enjoyably bad a movie is.

That said, here’s

Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Despite a kickass premise, really interesting music choices, good gore, and well-developed characters, I can’t help but get stuck on one question: Why the hell was that one biker-raider guy so intent on checking his blood pressure?
Movie Score: 4 Stars
Schlock Score: 1 Star

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The Hanged Man (2007)
The Hanged Man is about people who don’t kill themselves. They’re supposed to, but you know the whole time they won’t. Then, the “twist” ending is basically that they don’t. Wow?
If you’re going to make a movie up as you go along, you should at least have better dialogue than this:
(2 characters stand amidst the charred remains of a backwoods house)
Woman: This used to be my house.
Man: What happened?
Woman: It burned down.
Gotta say, I already figured that one out. Thank goodness the movie never expounded on why the house burned down, or on anything else that’s supposed to seem important. If it did, I might care.
Movie Score: 0 Stars
Schlock Score: 1 Star

Office Killer (1997)
Just like an actual office job, Office Killer manages to make 82 minutes feel like 3 hours. And, just like in a real office, all the interesting things are left to your imagination. And nobody likes the copy editor. And everyone has a cold. And Molly Ringwald should aim higher. And the copy editor is psychotic. And everybody is bad with email.
While it has a moment or two, Office Killer demonstrates that if your movie is only 82 minutes long and still moves slower than a robo-tripping turtle, you should probably make a different movie.
Movie Score: 1.5 Stars
Schlock Score: 2 Stars

Chain Letter (2010)
Packed with all the intelligence, sophistication, and nuance of a RadioShack commercial, Chain Letter is the perfect movie for anyone who struggles with the concepts behind tic-tac-toe or remembering the lyrics to “Bingo Was His Name-O.” The plot doesn’t so much “develop” as “loudly reiterate itself every couple minutes,” which is convenient in that it distracts you from wondering what the hell kind of internet café places its restrooms at the far end of a dark alley. To borrow from the movie’s lexicon, what the FUCK?! This is BULLSHIT! What the FUCK?! BULLSHIT! SHIT-FUCKITY-DAMN-SLAPPY-SHIT-KANGAROO!
Ok, that last one was way too creative for Chain Letter. And this RadioShack commercial might be too cerebral:

Movie Score: .5 BULLSHIT Stars
Schlock Score: 2 SLAPPY-SHIT-KANGAROO Stars

Witchboard (1986)
This feels strange. Witchboard definitely isn’t a great movie, but I don’t feel any loathing toward it at all. It’s basically a pretty average movie whose biggest flaw is that somebody dropped it in a big bowl of ‘80s. Sure, the lead character says that “everything is dangerous,” which makes me wonder what I haven’t been told about rainbows. And apparently ghosts can cast shadows and tend to carry boom mics around. And the psychic medium is rendered about as subtly as Hollywood from the Mannequin franchise. But I didn’t hate it.
Maybe this is the movie that I should review – and this has been suggested – as a duck. Here goes: quack, quack quack, quack Hollywood quack Mannequin, quack quack.
Movie Score: 3 Stars
Schlock Score: 1.5 Stars

Sick Nurses (2007)
Like most Korean horror flicks, Sick Nurses has a hair monster. Unlike most Korean horror flicks, Sick Nurses is a Thai horror flick. The gore is pretty good, and one of the nurses fights off a horde of hair monsters with a pregnancy test, so I can’t help but like this movie. Add in the fact that it made me think twice about eating a donut while brushing my teeth — which is something I hadn’t even thought once about before — and I’m ready to call Sick Nurses a personality-expanding experience.
Movie Score: 3 Stars
Schlock Score: 3 Stars

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5ive Girls (2006)
There are 5 girls, and I guess there’s something notably “ive” about them. Or maybe the letter F has undergone some rebranding to update its image. Anyway, 5 girls, who are basically extremely weak, catholic X-Men, are locked in a school. Then there’s a demon, they give the blind girl a 5lashlight, and any scene that comes close to being suspense5ul is drowned out by aw5ul music 5rom the mid ‘90s.
Movie Score: 2 Stars
Schlock Score: 3.F Stars

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Silent Hill (2006)
The game had better play control.
Movie Score: 2 Stars
Schlock Score: .5 Stars

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Jacob’s Ladder (1990)
Jacob has an angelic chiropractor who gives inconsistent advice. It doesn’t matter much, though, because ol’ Jake is too busy being completely disdainful of any of his children who are not blonde. Having said that, Jacob’s Ladder is actually a pretty good movie. Having said that, a lot of other movies are better at being Jacob’s Ladder than Jacob’s Ladder is, so it was kinda laborious to watch. I’m giving it a gentleman’s C.
Movie Score: 3 Stars
Schlock Score: .5 Stars

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Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)
Some tourists with entitlement issues decide that they have every right to stay in some random house in the middle of nowhere, and even go so far as to boss around the weird jittery guy with huge knees who watches over the place. Then there’s nightgown wrestling. Oh, and some kids are making out in a car the entire time. They might be making out for several consecutive days; it’s hard to say.
Actually, it’s hard to say anything about this terribly edited sinkhole that hasn’t already been said 200 times before, so I’ll just offer you this clip:

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Movie Score: -2 Stars
Schlock Score: 2 Stars

The Telling (2009)
Starring Hugh Hefner’s ex-girlfriend Holly Madison’s breasts as the breasts of a bitchy sorority queen, The Telling is a bad movie. If I’m the first one to tell you this, you should probably devote more attention to your internal monologue. Anyway, it’s a series of three vignettes tied together by a sorority-pledges-telling-scary-stories framing device, and it includes a creepy doll (yeah, that’s new), Eastern European stereotypes, and a classic urban legend about young women making prank calls, apparently after receiving lobotomies.
Movie Score: .5 Stars
Schlock Score: 2.5 Stars

Gothika (2003)
Halle Berry is a genius psychiatrist who’s also a blithering idiot. She ends up a patient in the asylum she works at, and no one can figure out why the hell this movie is called “Gothika”. Also, murderers are let out of prison if torture porn exists.
Movie Score: 1.5 Stars
Schlock Score: 1.5 Stars

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Dark Corners (2006)
Thora Birch is having nightmares, and that’s just too bad. Some really gross stuff happens, things get confusing, I never really liked Chinese food, and Satan might be a psychoanalyst? I don’t know what to say about this one, really, which may be why I like it.
Movie Score: 4 Stars
Schlock Score: 0 Stars

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Nine Dead (2010)
Melissa Joan Hart and 8 non-Nickelodeon stars are handcuffed to poles in a warehouse. Despite this, Nine Dead manages to be a bad movie. For one thing, even a goldfish’s memory would be insulted by the gratuitous flashbacks. For another, that same goldfish could outperform several of the actors. And, of course, there’re all kinds of plot holes, which, you know, goldfish.
Movie Score: 1.5 Stars
Schlock Score: .5 Stars

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Hack! (2007)
Hey, remember that one episode of The Twilight Zone where the guy breaks his glasses? Of course you do; that’s the thing everybody remembers about The Twilight Zone. Hack! spends 83 minutes making insulting, shallow references like that, and even Danica McKellar exclaiming “fiddlesticks!” can’t save it from sharing a score with The Telling.
Movie Score: .5 Stars
Schlock Score: 1.5 Stars

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