October Horror Movie Challenge 2020

AKA “Dead Kids”

After several teenage boys are killed, including the mayor's son, a big cop in a small town is determined to find the killer. When he catches a break in the case, he's soon to find that the kids are not alright in this sleepy little town.

At 1h30, this film still has a lot of filler and it's not hard to figure out what's going on. It's painfully obvious that the writers know absolutely nothing about behavior modification science, but still use it as plot device. The twist requires a bit of word vomit back story in the last 30 minutes and it definitely lands right in the realm of fantasy - if Peter didn't know about how his mom died, how would he know anything about Dr LeSange? Makes no sense, but the beginning is a decent slasher film at least. The shadow puppet murder scene in the first 10 minutes was brilliant.

As social media influencers flock to a convention at a hotel, the staff finds they've double booked and are forced to rent out a room they believe is haunted. AKAshley is tired with the whole scene, but is forced to play along by her manager. Things start to go sideways for the influencer when Bobby wants to be friends.

I wish there was actually an ending to this film or maybe just an explanation. Is Bobby a ghost or demon? Who's the whistling man? Why doesn't the room have its own number? The movie has no climax; it's all rising action character development. Ultimately, it would be an ok killer ghost story or whatever if we knew what was going on and maybe how it was resolved.

When Abby leaves for parts and reasons unknown, Hank drinks and fixates on winning her back. Meanwhile, something terrifying claws at Hank's front door each night, coming a little closer to getting inside with each visit.

This is what Occulus tried to do, but After Life does it successfully, jumping from present to ten years prior and back again smoothly. Jeremy Gardner (also wrote and starred in The Battery) is equal parts sweet and sympathetic. Henry Zebrowski (of Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell) plays the goofy comic relief friend. I loved every minute of this movie, including the ending which, OK, yeah, is a little ridiculous, but it's still a monster movie!
I'm fading so I'll probably revisit this review in the morning to make it a little less nonsense, but the main takeaway is that I really enjoyed this one. It’s got a great soundtrack and the set is pretty interesting even in its simplicity.

AKA Guai Guai Guai Guaiwu!
Mandarin with Subtitles, from Taiwan.

Relentlessly bullied, Lin Shu-Wei does what he can to clear his name when he's accused of stealing his classroom's fees. Volunteered for community service by their teacher, Shu-Wei watches as his bullies, lead by Duan Ren-Hao, torment elderly pensioners instead of him for once. Later, they return to rob a veteran and stumble across the path of two cannibalistic monsters. When the smaller of the two is hit by a car, they take it to their secret meeting place above the school and subject it to unimaginable cruelties. Meanwhile, the remaining monster searches for its lost partner.

(Spoilers, a bit...) This is listed as a horror comedy and there are a few comedic moments in it when the movie isn't focusing on the kids, but, good goddamn, is this one mean and gloomy! I guess we're supposed to be rooting for Shu-Wei, but he's just as bad, if not worse. Ren-Hao comes across as the sociopathic result of a poor upbringing and surrounds himself with those who are equally cold and cruel. The sisters eat people, but it could be argued that they're simply surviving in a world that created them as they are whereas Ren-Hao and Shu-Wei are the real monsters - one for his wanton cruelty and violence and the other for his complicity. I actually really liked this one despite how bleak it is. There is no happy ending, no redemption, no one wins. And I'm OK with that.

Three friends travel to a heavy metal concert taking place somewhere in the Bible Belt where they meet three guys and take them home. Unfortunately, rumors of a serial killer satanic cult racking up 18 kills weighs heavily on one of the girl's minds.

I don't hate this one, but there's nothing really entertaining about it either. Madeline Hasson tries so hard, but absolutely no one is helping her carry this awful movie. It seems director Joe Dante peaked in the 90s with the sole notable exception being Burying the Ex which I strongly suspect is only due to my enjoyment of Anton Yelchin.
We Summon the Darkness could have been good, it's got a good idea at the heart of it, but it never does anything fun with it and the twist is just lame. I think I would've preferred it if a Satanic cult had just shown up and Scooby-Doo'd the group of six, chasing them all over the giant house and property.
Johnny Knoxville shows up for a scene and that's OK... is he dying? He looks like he's dying.

After his 39th kill, Aaron has lost his joie de vivre. What do you do when stalking and killing your target becomes a thankless job, a boring task to accomplish? Just when he thinks all hope is lost, Sara answers his want ad for a videographer and seems very supportive of his eccentricities.

I love this set and I want his house, it's gorgeous. Who knew serial killing was so lucrative?!
I really enjoyed the first, but it dragged in some points. The second was a much better offering in terms of pacing and it definitely feels like it could stand on its own, but, story-wise, there's really nothing to differentiate the two movies outside of victim. I guess I just wanted something more than what we got in the first.

When her sick mother finally succumbs, Charlotte reaches out to her old mentors at the Bachoff music academy and meets up with them in Shanghai only to find that they've replaced her with a new protégé, Lizzie. After a brief romp, the two cellists decide to tour the local villages, but Lizzie becomes increasingly sick, infected, it seems, by a highly contagious virus.

I was expecting body horror and wasn't thrilled at the prospect of watching yet another bugs under the skin movie. Instead, what I got was Black Swan's Revenge, Cello Style and I am 100% here for that shit. However, as hot as Logan Browning is, that sex scene is painful and dull - leave it to heterosexual white women to ruin a good lesbian sex scene...
OK, away from the sexy Browning and back to the story. Every time there's a twist, they rewind to the point where it first became relevant in order to explain it. Not everything needs an explanation - between the matching tattoos and flashbacks to a creepy room with a stage, it doesn't take a genius to figure out Lizzie and Charlotte share more than just talent and a bed. The frequent flashbacks and rewinds take away a little of the action at the end, but it's otherwise a very enjoyable film. Again, the inside sets are gorgeous and the costuming, particularly the red dress at the end, was superb.

College kids rock up to their friend's lakeside house to engage in some fun in the water. But, suddenly, sharks!! In the lake!! How many college kids can the sharks eat before the day ends and will they ever get the athlete to a hospital?!

Ugh. No, no, no. Uuuuuuuggghhhh. Now that's a professional review right there.
Cabin In the Woods came out in 2011 and I swear I thought we were about to see an elevator pop up, toss a few more sharks into the mix, and then stealthily retreat under the water. We've got the athlete who's trying to avoid getting sent back to the projects and his mamacita Hispanic girlfriend, the slut, the stoner, the narcissistic pretty boy, the good guy, and the final girl. They even have a stereotypical run in with the local yokels at the run down convenience store snack run. Final girl reveals local yokel with the scar on his face used to be her boyfriend and recounts how he tried to kill her for leaving for college. For some weird reason, she totally forgets that he's a murderous sociopath when she lets the slut and the stoner go with him and shark teeth yokel.
At one point, after having lost an arm and a ton of blood, Athlete hears that a shark has eaten his girlfriend, Token Ethnic, grabs a stick and shouts something about "they take one of yours, you take one of theirs!" and then he wades out to the lake, trailing his bloody sleeve with its poorly pinned arm underneath, and proceeds to beat a hammerhead shark with a stick. I kept thinking, this shark is going to tear off his other arm and then we're going to have a Monty Python reference. Sadly, he kept his other arm...
No mention how salt water sharks can survive in a freshwater lake. I guess nature found a way because the writers sure weren't bothered.

On the side of a long stretch of highway sits the Church of the Black Rock of Redemption which faces an unending stretch of tall grass. When Cal stops the car between the church and the grass so his pregnant sister Becky can be sick, they hear a boy call for help from inside the grass.

(Spoilers further down)
I just watched this and I still don't know if I liked it. Towards the end, night never ends so we're treated to a perpetual blue filter that I kind of detest, but I guess there's got to be a reason the climax has to take place at night, I just don't know the reason.
I don't really like any of the characters. Tobin is weird and gangly and (spoiler) if you can't leave after you touch the rock, how did he leave?? Or was that another Tobin who touched the rock and that's why he wanted Cal to touch it? Ross is a jerk from the start so no surprise there. Natalie is meh for how short she's on screen. Becky is a wishy washy whiner and her character is annoying. Cal seems off from the start and I kind of pegged him for being the gay brother, not the pervert hoping for incest brother. And Travis is every redemption arc in every Stephen King movie ever. I'm sure there's a lot more to the story and nerds will be analyzing it shot for shot for years to come, but I'm pretty sure I'll have forgotten it by the end of the month. Sorry for the spoilers, but there's not a lot to this movie unless maybe you're knee deep in King mythology and I've just never found his writing to be all that entertaining. I guess this one is just my loss.

I still don't know if I enjoyed it or not. It was a movie. I don't really get it - ooooh, it's a circular plot! (Spoiler) But, if Becky and Cal never go into the grass, then Travis would never go into the grass which means Tobin would never go into the grass which means the Tobin in the car would cease to exist which means he wouldn't be there to stop them from going into the grass - that's the problem with time travel paradoxes. It's silly. But, if what Ross says (and shows with multiple Cal bodies) is right about alternate choices spawning alternate outcomes all at the same time and that each choice spawns a physical body that can live or die, maybe it's possible that those physical bodies can occupy the same approximate space and work together or against each other...? And, if that's the case, why wouldn't all alternate choice Travis's (Travi?) create a diametrically opposing army of those who want to protect Becky versus those who want to go home and be a bar room rockstar? And then you have an Army of Darkness scenario where good Travis fights selfish Travis and everyone dies! I don't know... it just seems so meh.

While training to be a caretaker for the elderly, Lucie meets Mdm Jessel, a ballet instructor who now lays comatose on the top floor of an aged mansion. Lucie's trainer, Catherine, casually mentions Mdm Jessel's wealth and hints at a treasure hidden somewhere in the house that has yet to be found. At the end of the day, Lucie reveals what she's learned to boyfriend William and friend Ben who convince her to let them break into the old woman's house on Halloween night.

Let me first say that I hate the ending. Hate it. It's stupid. But! There are moments of magic in this movie that work so well and I give a lot of credit to Chloé Coulloud (Lucie) and Chloé Marcq (Anna) for those moments. The house is, again, a spectacular set with just the right amount of atmosphere and decoration to truly convey the creep factor, but it also lends an otherworldly feel where monsters hiding in shadows are commonplace. In all honesty, this is a really good movie with the exception of the ending, but I want more of Madam Jessel and Anna. I would totally watch a prequel...
The little nods to other horror movies were particularly nice - I caught the Halloween III jingle and the American Werewolf in London sign, but missed the Suspira reference.

After the death of their mother, twins Annabelle and Norman make their way to Australia to find Mary Pierce, the mother who gave them up as babies. Unfortunate timing, they get to Two Heads Creek just in time for her funeral, but something doesn't quite sit right with Norman. The accommodating townsfolk seem all too eager to allay their concerns and see them off.

I enjoy horror comedies. Sometimes, the campier the movie, the better in my opinion. However, the problem with horror comedies is that most of them are rather terrible. Well done horror comedies that are entertaining and cohesive, fulfilling both genres adequately, are rare little gems. Two Heads Creek is not a rare little gem. Instead, it's more of a communal toilet movie. The jokes are easy and juvenile and the gore is more in line with Herschell Gordon Lewis' films which makes me happy because some practical effects company obviously put a lot of effort into casting faces for severed heads and limbs and other random gore. Could've done without the random green screen during the fight though... it was a really awkward inclusion.
Story-wise, it's OK. You could totally do worse for 85 minutes. Surprisingly, the movie has a really nice pace.

All Sebastian Suydum wants is a hooker with a birthmark on her butt to crown her the chosen bride of Cthulhu and bring about the end of the world. Meanwhile, Riley, said hooker, entertains the romantic notions of a virgin artist who thinks she's the special girl he's been waiting for.

"There are some things man was never meant to understand."
"Yeah, and I call them women."
Filmed in Maryland, this low budget schlock fest got 3 out of 4 skulls from Fangoria. Working almost exclusively with etsy artists, Midnight Crew didn't do a terrible job. The beginning is rough as the actors in the first couple minutes are particularly awful, but David Phillip Carollo (Carter, the virginal artist) and Melissa O'Brien (Riley, the birthmarked call girl) are kind of OK. It's a surprisingly cohesive storyline with side characters and everything. I nodded off at the end so had to rewatch the last 20 or so minutes for a conclusion that isn't exactly satisfying, but stays true to the spirit of the source material. It's definitely not bad. There are several references to the mythos that most people will get so that's fun. It falls under horror comedy, but there isn't much in the way of slapstick or jokes or whatever, it's more just the absurdity of the material, but that's all Lovecraft stuff so take it for what you will.

As the Americans fight the British, a lone Brit, Joshua, tries to convince a handful of Mohawk natives to join the fight against the Americans. Far too impulsive, Calvin disregards his mother's (mother in law's?) admonishing and attacks a garrison of American soldiers while they sleep. Pursuing him, a group of American scouts track Calvin back to his squaw, Okwahu and their British beau. Their only hope of escape is to meet up with Ok's uncle and cousins at a nearby mission.

OK, Spoilers, because this one is terrible. Okwahu literally spends most of the movie running and being generally useless against a garrison of half a dozen men. After they're whittled down to three and most everyone is dead, suddenly she's got almost superhuman powers and day turns to night in the space of one character turning around.
When Lachlan and Yancy were questioning what would happen if they were caught by other tribes or the British, Holt yells out that they've killed all of them and that they were the only monsters in the forest. I guess that's as poignant a message as we can expect because the movie quickly goes off the rails into goofy supernatural land and ends on a confusing sentimental note after the final showdown. I just don't get what we're supposed to take away from this movie other than "heh, mystical showdowns are cool". Which, OK, yeah, if that's your thing, but it takes forever to get there.

Home from college for Halloween, six teens break into an abandoned mansion to party and quickly find themselves trapped by an apparition who seems intent on picking them off one by one.

Freaking A man, this is freaking tame for so called mature audiences. Outside of some gnarly finger and sleeve effects, most of the gory stuff apparently happens off screen. The ghost or whatever she is feels like a callback to the 90s remake of The House on Haunted Hill where an ominous cloud chases characters through a large house. Granted, Haunted Hill's house was a lot nicer - Annabelle could stand to hire a maid or two, but she'd probably try to kill them so I guess that's a no go.
So much running! Next movie is going to feature zero chase scenes. Overall, the set is pretty generic, the characters are plug and play, and the ghost is ho hum boring. I won't remember half of these movies by the end of the month.

I'm not even halfway through this and I wish I would've watched something else. I'm big grump face as I finish this. I'll do a review, but I'm not going to be happy about it.
Ok, it's been a couple days since I watched this so I'll suck it up and write a review. I'm still big grump face so... yeah.

Lead by his favorite professor, Nate and his friends at Miskatonic University create a time travel device. When the adult version of their childhood bully appears and decries their device as satanic, Nate's friend, Ryan, hops in the device, setting in motion a crawl through time as Nate's life up to that point is examined.

I hate time travel movies. Let me fix that. I fucking hate fucking time travel movies and their goddamn stupid as shit plot holes that don't address paradoxes said time travel would cause. It's just lazy writing and it's annoying.
Beyond that, this particular time travel movie takes for-fucking-ever to even get to the time travel part and hyper focuses on the romance aspect.
It's like the writers wanted to squish Memento and every schmaltzy doomed will they won't they romance together to come up with the absolute shittiest sci-fi they could possibly muster. I hate this and everyone involved. I expected more Cthulhu and got fucking Dr Who At The Lake House Writes Letters to Juliet Which All Read PS I Love You.

Ted lives at a motel that's seen better days with his dad. He collects roadkill for change as he hopes to one day find his mom in Florida. When the roadkill cash dries up, Ted has to bring in more business for the motel in the only way he can.

The pacing is grueling and slow and I'm not entirely convinced it's unintentionally so. Ted has no friends or classmates and his dad is little more than a coworker. Things pick up with each new customer, but it really just shows Ted's desperation to make a connection and then lashing out when that connection fails to somehow provide escape from the tedium of his life.
As a side note, I hate when posters spoil movies.

When developers come for the church that's been in his family for generations, a priest has to make the decision to sell or stay. A few less than honest board members hope to sway the decision in their favor.

Honestly, I was dead tired when I watched this and quickly realized it was not going to be the movie that kept my attention. I tried valiantly to focus and I think I got most of what it was about, but there are a few scenes that stick out in my memory where I have no clue how or why they're related.
Apparently churches can never be sold or demolished because it angers the Holy Ghost, but then there was something about cheating spouses and witch burnings and I just don't know. I'll probably have to watch it again for it to make sense, but the acting is subpar with most actors over emoting and even features some delayed reactions. The special effects are particularly cheesy - people stand directly in front of a black door way or whatnot and get pulled into a separate space after dissolving into a black cloud. Meh...

OK, so, watched it again and I'm pretty set in the fact that it's a terrible movie. The acting is awful, especially from the two guys with accents, and a lot of the scenes end in a way that doesn't really make sense. Nothing matters anyway because the ending retcons everything back to the decision to sell or stay anyway so none of the immoral people are punished and no one learns a lesson, but a crumbling church with dwindling membership is saved and that's enough for the spooky cloud that was kidnapping everyone.
I don't know. I don't care, I'm not watching it again to figure out if I missed some key point that explains it. My guess is altar guild lady slipped them some bad LSD and they all had a shared hallucination.

Following the funeral of a child, Montgomery Black must deal with a job seeker by the name of Sam who demands to be entertained by the aged mortician's stories. With each story, they come closer and closer to the overarching moral which may hit closer to home than they realize.

I really enjoyed this anthology. The sets are really fantastic with the little details that successfully set the mood and the soundtrack by The Mondo Boys is ridiculously awesome to where I now want to pick up their other music. The acting is better in some segments, but it's consistently solid throughout and the shorts are cohesive and entertaining. At just under 2hrs, it didn't really drag and the wraparound segment is OK, ending on a nice note.

Hoping to restore their mother's memories lost to dementia, Hee-yeon moves her family to a small village near Mt Yang. Unfortunately, a dangerous entity stalks a nearby cave and calls out using the voices of the dead.

My heart. Even when an Asian movie gives you a happy ending, it's still pretty much just a double middle finger surrounded by cake so, y'know... yay, cake, but also double middle fingers. Shin Rin-Ah is adorable even by South Korean kid standards - like super adorable even as a creepy kid.
The leads are sympathetic characters, having lost their son and only barely holding it together for themselves and their daughter. When two kids who have lost their dog mistake their lost dog for one at the vet clinic, Hee-yeon and her husband follow them out into the woods where Hee-yeon finds a little girl. It's not hard to understand why Hee-yeon gets attached so quickly - she immediately begins associating the found little girl with her lost little boy and the girl acts as sort of a stand in.
I really enjoyed this one, but the ending causes a heap of emotional pain. The setting is gorgeous even for just being a forest, cave, and house.

Seventeen years after a brutal attack, Caroline's son Michael is in the hospital dying from a possible genetic disorder. Determined to help their boy, Caroline and husband Eli return to the small town where she was raped in order to find the man responsible. Meanwhile, Michael is no slouch and is soon up and walking around again which may not be the best idea for the crooked Curwin family.

It's an 80s creature transformation movie. The acting is pretty consistent for the time and the story is simple and straightforward - pretty much what you can expect when the screenwriter gets tired of waiting for the book it's supposed to be based on to be written and writes the entire thing themselves.
The creature reveal is awful and even the transformation scene gets goofy. They focus way too much on cicadas and the makeup doesn't really convey insect.
Meh, it was a movie.

When Darlin arrives at a local Catholic hospital, the staff is at a loss for what to do with the feral girl. Befriended by an orderly, she becomes docile enough for the Bishop to see opportunity in taking her into his home for girls. Little do they know that the Woman is not too far behind and is desperately looking for her daughter.

Darlin’ is a sequel to The Offspring (2009) and The Woman (2011). In the first movie, we see a nomadic family of cannibals terrorizing a local community. By the second movie, the family is gone and the Woman, the mother figure, is captured and subjected to terrible cruelty at the hands of the family who “rescues” her. Pollyanna McIntosh plays the titular Woman in all three and I like how they give credit to Jack Ketchum for creating the characters when they’re pretty clearly based on Sawney Bean.
Spoilers...sort of.
It’s ok. Bryan Batt plays slimy really convincingly and the others are consistently good, though I was disappointed with the lack of gore that characterized the first two movies - it’s hard to forget Coke can teeth cunninglingus. We still get kills as the Woman tracks Darlin’ down, but they’re absent the malicious creativity I’ve grown accustomed to seeing with this group. It’s a tame sequel to be sure, but the story is decent even if the ending is a little meh.

When Josh's dad leaves him alone with Gail at the house where Josh's mom Becky died, Gail decides to put the ol' child psychotherapist degree to work by analyzing Josh's recurring nightmares about his mother. But spouting off random psycho babble nonsense doesn't seem to be doing the trick because Josh's nightmares are getting worse and he's acting up while awake. Could there possibly be some other reason that Gail suddenly doesn't feel so safe in her boyfriend's old family home?

Ugh. Should I be happy that all the nonsense bullshit Google based psycho babble that spews from Radha Mitchell's resting bitch face turns out to be utterly useless in a possession movie? I don't know because (spoiler) the one person I wanted to die ended up surviving (maybe) despite all her horrible ineptitude at her professed profession and at being a stand in mom next to an absent father and a dead mother. Literally, all she has to do is humor the kid for five seconds, listen to what he's saying, and not dismiss him and his concerns for once. Would it have killed her to spent whatever on a goddamn dreamcatcher to make him feel better?? What kind of therapist doesn't understand placebos?? She clearly doesn't understand transference or environmentally fucking induced stress which is psychology 101. I loathe movies that give characters careers that the writer obviously didn't research. Goddammit, make her a psychology student - at least then her smug self important bullshit would make sense.
Angry!! There are even failures on a technical level - there's some pretty crap CGI in the first 20 or so minutes followed by a camera focus issue where the camera can't figure out if the background or foreground is supposed to be in focus between shots and that totally doesn't get edited out or reshot... and I don't care what part of a hatchet you get hit with, if it hits your head, you're dead. The makeup effects were OK at best - a muddy face prosthetic with hanging eye and finger extensions that look held on with masking tape. They couldn't even get a simple makeup. Just skip it. I suffered through it so you don't have to.

Two brothers and their significant others rent a luxurious cabin for the weekend to celebrate the business success of one brother and the other brother's girlfriend. When they arrive, the girlfriend accuses the AirB&B owner of racism and gets a second helping for her trouble. As the first night draws to a close with drunken and drugged debauchery, the discover someone may be peeping in on their fun.

First thirty seconds are jarring as boyfriend brother shows up and we realize girlfriend and married brother aren't together, but that's OK because they're just platonic business partners. Uh huh... and married brother sees nothing wrong with lamenting to wife about how perfect girlfriend is and why would she ever date a loser like boyfriend brother?! If you can't see where this is going to end up, you may need situational awareness glasses.
As the audience, we know they're being watched, but they have no clue until about the last 20 minutes when the killer finally shows up in a rubber mask and just starts whacking them with a hammer. It's like the writers wanted a relationship drama but they could only secure the rights to a moody and ominous soundtrack so they cut the ending and shoved in a killer. As such, there's very little in the way of tension or gore or anything remotely interesting outside of relationship drama for the majority of the movie. It's OK, but not really what I was looking for when watching a vacation home invasion movie.

When a car accident wrecks her jaw and leaves her with half a face, fashion designer Rose lets herself get talked into experimental stem cell surgery which miraculously fixes her face and makes her hot and confident. The only side effect is now she craves raw meat and might be infecting the city with a mutated strain of rabies... but she looks great while she's at it!

This is a retake on David Cronenberg's 1977 film of the same name. The explanation is still ridiculous, but at least they made it more vampire-y or zombie-like instead of the armpit monster from the first movie.
Rose is an assistant fashion designer for an eccentric German who humiliates her in front of all her coworkers. Her foster sister Chelsea is a flawless model who works for the same German and tries to get Rose to come out of her shell by convincing her work crush to ask her out. When Rose discovers that she's the subject of office gossip, she flees the date and is creamed by oncoming traffic when she fails to look both ways.
Channeling Jack Nicholson, she demands a mirror as soon as she wakes up in the hospital and is unhappy with her new monster face.
When I was fourteen, I had both my jaws broken and reset and then wired shut. The liquid diet was the least of my concerns compared to managing the actual drinking part around my wired teeth. Rose has a moment where she tries valiantly to down a smoothie with only half her lips intact and that gave me big feels.
Outside of that, however, the whole movie is just sort of meh. I'm not a huge fan of the original and often get parts of it confused with Shivers, another David Cronenberg movie, for some reason. But I'll take the remake over the original any day if only to avoid armpit vampires.

After their son turns zombie, his family tries to get him help and, failing that, they try to keep him locked in his room. A documentary crew arrives hoping to cash in on the strain it puts on the community to have a resident zombie they can't dispatch.

The zombie makeups are pretty standard for a low budget film with the bite wounds even looking like pasted on prosthetics. The documentary angle isn't anything new and the characters aren't incredibly endearing so it just ends up being a countdown for when everything goes sideways. I feel for the parents who insist that their son is still in there somewhere and try to carry on as normally as they can while simultaneously sacrificing even their bodies to keep their son alive in whatever way they can. In a way, by refusing to let him go, they refuse to mourn him and are stuck in limbo with him. It’s not a good movie by any measure, but it has some rare moments where a better film can be seen peeking through.