"The Invitation" (2015) d/ Karyn Kusama

Tonight's arthouse study on distrust of strangers and human politeness comes from director Karyn Kusama, the gal who most recently brought you 2009's Jennifer's Body.  Can't recall how I felt about that one and I'm too lethargic from radiation treatments to go back and see, so...chop, chop.  There's been a great deal of positive internet press about this one of late, causing me to set aside whatever disdain I'd already developed towards it due to a weak, unengaging trailer I'd already checked out a while back, and give it a look. Afterall, a shitty trailer does not a dumpster fire movie guarantee.


This snob fest could use David Hess and Johnny Morghen.
Will (Logan Marshall-Green) and his new squeeze, Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi...say that one five times fast), pull up outside David and Eden's (Michael Huisman, Tammy Blanchard) swanky digs in the Hollywood Hills for a dinner party, after wiping out a coyote with the car on the ride there. Eden is Will's ex-wife, who previously attempted suicide after the accidental death of their young son together. David is a fellow she took to during a grief-support group, having spent two years together away from their friends, some of which in Mexico, where the couple picked up Sadie and Pruitt (Lindsay Burdge, John Carroll Lynch) , two new age oddballs who share their bizarre notions on pain management. Besides experiencing painful flashbacks from their time together while noticing Eden hiding away a sizable bottle of pills and noticing that David has locked all the doors behind the guests. And where the hell is Choi, anyway? He should have been here by now.


If a hipster hides in a high end joint, would anyone bother to find him?
David pops in a promotional video for a group called 'The Invitation' that deals with pain and grief on a spiritual hippie level, as evidenced by footage of the head kook talking a dying woman through her final moments of life. If that hasn't weirded out enough guests, a parlour game of 'I Want' turns into Pruitt's impromptu confession of having accidentally murdered his wife. Will's suspicions are temporarily put to rest when Choi finally does show up, but then there's that pesky laptop, left open to files concerning 'The Invitation'  and their true motives, just waiting for an inquisitive partygoer to stumble across while sneaking about the place. Don't drink that wine! Instead, pass it this way so I can put myself out of my misery. I've seen scarier episodes of Quantum Leap, ferchrissakes.


"Mexican suicide cults are all the rage these days. Join one, reaaaally you should."
In the arthouse world, you'll find two approaches to cinema, more often than not. One is overly excessive, the other is purposely minimalist. Either can make for an effective film, if utilized properly, with heaping doses of self-awareness and artistic flair, but I can't help thinking that tonight's movie might have served itself better had it chosen the former instead of the latter. For a film that many are calling "one of the best horror movies of the year", there really isn't any horror to speak of. The script is smart, the cinematography is excellent, and there's some tension early on, but the plot reveal is obvious a lot sooner than it ought to have been, and the pay off is weak and shockless. Interesting, but rarely engulfing. Worth a look for those aforementioned elements, but ultimately forgettable. You could have had something here. Two wops.


In distress? Or just yawning. I think we know the answer.

"Animal" (2014) d/ Brett Simmons

When enthusiastic indie filmmakers shop their movie ideas to potential investors with the promise of perks and those familiar huge returns at the box office that inevitably dry up into a Video on Demand run on sites like NetFlix and Hulu before the initial hype has fully evaporated, it reminds me of a delicate balance that goes unquestioned and is maintained within the industry. It is because of this balance, one of copycatted topical familiarity and recognizable face-based drawing power, that nothing truly original or groundbreaking ever sees a decent release. Take Animal (2014), for example.


Looking for a coherent script? Gonna need stronger flashlights....
After seeing two couples fleeing for their lives through the forest at night, no doubt from an unclassified thingie of unequalled aggression, homicidal to humans and not above snacking on the first bimbo who trips over her own feet and falls (such tropes are easy prey. And delicious.), we're then introduced to a gaggle of self-important, collegiate humps fixing to wander off into the same woods for an all-day hike. Don't get lost looking for an elusive waterfall you visited as kids, whatever you do. Oops. There's the cadaver of Barbara the Clumsy (Eve. Yes, THAT Eve) to stumble upon. Jeff (Parker Young) soon joins her as the latest member of the bodycount, thanks to that aforementioned "animal". The survivors make it to a not-all-that remote cabin that is in the process of being fortified by the three survivors from the initial attack. One, Douglas (Amaury Nolasco), is a cynical prick, only concerned with saving his own miserable hide. One is Joey Lauren Adams, former favorite of that fat comic book nut from New Jersey that dabbles in movies. Has it been that long?


"Finally free of the patriarchy out here, and all I can think about is cooking flapjacks..."
Next comes the heroic escape attempt that Douglas nearly puts the kibosh on, getting him tied to the stairs for all his worst efforts, and then the late Jeff's squeeze, Mandy (Elizabeth Gillies) reveals that she's been carrying his unborn baby. Sean follows that up with the revelation that he and Jeff had also been buttcheek buddies together. At least the "animal" isn't playing with it's food (Matt) directly below them, in the cellar. Oh wait, it has. The group manages to spring Matt from the jaws of the beast,  while Carl eats heroic death running interference for them as they escape upstairs. Doug puts out the suggestion that they all escape while it finishes off Matt, then breaks loose and beats him to death himself when they refuse. Whatta guy. He's next. The remaining yobs plot to trap the "animal" while they raze the place to the ground, which is effective until the second one appears and further thins the herd until Mandy drives over it's dome, a la Phil Leotardo, to safety. At least there aren't any more...


"No, Ike, any damned thang but those reptile loafahs of yoahs!", pled a hysterical Tina Turner.
Tonight's effort was produced by no less than the delectable Drew Barrymore herself,  and still scores significantly lower than "marrying Tom Green" on the Bad Idea-O-Meter for the sultry celeb, no stranger to genre flicks, having lent her image to such films as Cujo, Cat's Eye, Firestarter, and Scream, throughout her career. The movie is brief, with a running time of less than ninety minutes (leaving out elements like plot and character development will do that for you), but fails ultimately in delivering anything at all that horrorhounds won't have encountered better examples of,  hundreds of times already ("Feast" comes to mind, instantaneously). O solo Woppo.


"Heeeey youuuuuuu guuuuuuuuuuys!" That was an Electric Company/ Rita Moreno reference, if you're keeping score at home.

"Indigenous" (2014) d/ Alastair Orr

My expectations weren't nearly as high as I was for the screening of tonight's review, a schizophrenic dollar store Descent clone for the impecunious; packed with less flavor than a rice cake, disorganized dialog delivered within the one note range of rank amateurs and with the truth of a reality show. It took me two sittings to get all the way through this mutt of a monster movie, having passed the fuck out on one prior attempt. That's never a good sign, in my experience...


"Stroke of luck we stumbled upon this discreet, Panamanian fuck-lagoon, eh?"
Five obnoxious twenty-somethings (Four Americans, one Australian) of little virtue and less character have uprooted their "horns up, breeh!" attitude for a vacation in Panama, if by vacation you mean "endless body shots, gay jokes, and ignominious pick up lines", that is. Several uninspired partying montages later, Trevor (Pierson Fode) has made the acquaintance of local honey dip, Carmen (Lauren Penuela) and her amigo, Julio (Juanxo Villaverd), and when she isn't blueballing her new American love interest, she's teasing he and his steak-pussed friends about an alleged breathtaking waterfall and mystic pool combo somewhere in the Darien Gap, off limits to gringos since the last group of teenagers got waxed by chupacabras, who also take  time off from sucking the blood of Texas livestock for some much needed R n' R in Central America, it would seem. After some righteous surfing, Julio again warns the entourage to steer clear of the jungle gap,but Carmen decides to round them up the next morning and drive them there, any old way.


"Let's sync up our flashlights, and show these bastards what they're messing with!"
After a fruitless private liaison in a nearby lagoon, Carmen and Trevor get separated while scoping out weird jungle noises (you know the kind that always preempt sex in movies like this), and before too long Carmen disappears amidst some blood-curdling screams, leaving behind only a pulverized smart phone. Fleeting glimpses of prowling beasts of unknown origin become more frequent as the survivors climb towards ground high enough to provide cell phone service, and as the forest grows darker the vacationers are subtracted in ones from the equation by this pale race of murderers, who are but a cave system away from being a flagrant rip off of Neil Marshall's subterranean sinners in his 2005 effort, The Descent. Is that a cave?? You've gotta be kidding me. Many unremarkable circumstances pack the final reel right up until the end credits, and though I'm not gonna elaborate further upon them here, you can imagine exactly what most of them entail by this point in the piece, I'm sure. Let's wrap it up already.


"...you gonna accept my Candy Crush Saga request or what?"
Tonight's movie kind of plays like the aforementioned Descent, if it was tackled by MTV Studios ultra-leftist propaganda machine, and cast from that show where skateboarder Rob Dyrdek entertains an audience of catatonic hipsters with video clips that are readily available to anyone with a Wi-Fi connection that knows how to use a browser. Even America's Funniest Home Videos had more appeal than that, ferchrissakes. These characters are abrasively self-absorbed and shallow as a vomit splash, nobody's rooting for any of them, besides maybe Lauren Penuela's Carmen, who's hot enough to stay tuned long enough to chuckle at her total disregard for common sense while speaking highly of her own virtue at every juncture. Other than that, there's really nothing out of the ordinary here at all, and on the scale, a single Wop is par for this particular, repetitive course. Avoid.


"Blew it! You shoulda picked the Wet Willie!"

"Graveyard Shift" (1990) d/ Ralph S. Singleton

Props go out to the Doctor, whose timely suggestion of Stephen King fear fare the other day provide us with some reviews of his cinematic creature content that we've yet to examine here at the Wop, starting with this 1990 entry, based off of his short story o' the same name. Lead baddie and Philly native Stephen Macht has also shown up in things like Nightwing (1979), Galaxina (1980), and The Monster Squad (1987). Interesting to note,  Ralph S. Singleton's other directorial credit to date, has been a pair of episodes of Cagney and Lacey, and though I've never seen either one of them (or any other episodes of that specific show, thankyouverymuch), I'd wager that they've got more bone-chilling jump scares than this movie. Onward...


"I'll be providing extermination services and laughable Vietnam facsimiles of Quint's U.S.S. Indianapolis speech...", notes Tucker (Brad Douriff).
A driftah...errr, drifter named Hall (David Hall) finds himself seeking employment in a skeevy New England textile mill overbrimming with rodents, and overseen by a fascistic, misogynist of a boss named Warwick (Stephen Macht), who pays off inspectors to keep his plant open and bullies his workers into gritty graveyard shifts when he isn't laying the female ones down on the work couch for some horizontal side-boppage, despite secretly being married. While Warwick gloats over and mocks his sweaty, exhausted staff relentlessly at every opportunity, they seem to be meeting gruesome ends, whether by unsafe, antiquated machinery or something else entirely, as witnessed by the thousands of rats that overrun the mill. To alleviate matters, drop one-liners, and keep the health board off of Warwick's back, is a cartoony Vietnam vet-turned-exterminator named Tucker (Brad Douriff) and his trusty rat terrier, who's been prejudiced towards the little furry bastards since he's seen the Vietcong force live ones into the abdominal wounds of captured prisoners during his tour of duty, as he so dramatically relates to fellow characters and audience alike, a single tear streaming down his cheek.


...and Kelly Wolf as the hard luck, blue collar mogambo.
There's also a lass of earthen, salty beauty named Jane (Kelly Wolf), a former conquest of Warwick's that takes a shine to the new guy in town, much to the dismay of their over-the-top supervisor, who jealously rewards the new couple with a week of overtime graveyard shifts cleaning up the basement of the mill with a skeleton crew of miscreants that include an unhinged fatso named Brogan (Vic Polizos) who screams like Rambo as he blasts scrambling rats with a power hose, Carmichael (Jimmy Woodard), the token black guy and his ghetto blaster, and Danson (Andrew Divoff), a mullet-topped crybaby. But hey, who's turning down double pay in this economically stressful time, I ask you. When Hall discovers a trap door amidst the old waterlogged garbage, he leads the crew into a subterranean Hell, inhabited by a giant bat that hasn't gone hungry in ages, judging by the massive piles of bones in its cavernous home. At least Warwick hasn't gone mental, shaving down the payroll one employee at a time, letting them stumble into the winged freak's clutches, with sewer-caked mud all over his face, though. Might have spoken too soon, there, honestly.


"Yoah lovebehd is a slampig for shoah, a biddie with an empty pockabook!", exclaims Warwick (Stephen Macht).
Make no mistake. There have been a few decent big screen adaptions (and a made-for-television example, I don't mind adding) of Stephen King's work over the years. Look no further than Carrie (1976), Salem's Lot (1979),  The Shining (1980), or even Creepshow (1982) for quantifiable validation of that statement. Beyond that, his stuff is really hit and miss, and the films born from it are even more so. This one in particular is a silly, sloppy, shambles of sweat and shrill New England accents culminating in a limp yield of latex, stage blood, and improbable motives that insults the intelligence of anyone bearing witness, save for the "horror for horror's sake" set, who'll watch and like anything with a genre stamp. I've never been that guy, and one Wop on the scale ought to reinforce that statement for doubters. Watch at your own risk.


"Ah-yuh! Wheyah does a fellah go for a decent grindah down heyah?"

B.W.'s First 10 VHS Tapes I Ever Bought

With the arrival of August upon us, and the end of VCR production by Funai Electric, the last company still producing them, announced due to declining sales, I thought it might be a fitting tribute to the format's long run by listing the very first ten movies I bought for my collection, popped eagerly into my Panasonic PV-1270 VHS, which, for the record, ran over seven hundred bucks at the time. As you'll see, it wasn't just the players that were pricey back then.
  

1) Halloween (1978) Media Home Video
Fifty bucks later, I had my favorite movie at the time, to watch repeatedly, which I certainly did, over three hundred times over the next decade or so. I still remember the faulty tracking as Michael pulls down his mask and Loomis feeds him a chamber full of late night lead-based Halloween treats. Useless trivia for you, Halloween would be the first movie I bought when I finally switched formats, to dvd, in the late nineties. I'm nothing, if not consistent...


2)The Fog (1980), Magnetic Home Video
Just under ten sawbucks (ninety-two, if my memory serves me correctly) at an electronics outlet on Wyoming Avenue got me a Carpenter favorite. The apex level Magnetic Video title card with it's TSR-80 graphics and elevatory shmaltz will stay with me always.


3)Night of the Living Dead (1968), Media Home Video
At one point in the nineties, due to the perceived public domain status this movie had, there were dozens of different cheap VHS releases available for purchase for as low as a dollar. Fifty-two different ones at the time of this writing, to be exact. Media's release, the original, cost me fifty bucks at the time I bought it. Worth it back then to a thirteen year old horror nut, I guess.


4)Dawn of the Dead (1979), Thorn-EMI Home Video
My first clamshell (not  Enter the Dragon (1973) as some close friends might speculate) was this Romero splatter opus which cost me sixty-five bucks from a source which escapes me at the moment. Wyoming Valley Video, mebbe? We watched this one all the time, and my Ken Foree impersonation remains impeccable, to this very day.


5)Blood Feast (1963), Cult Video
I snagged this title and the next one from a Violent Videocassettes magazine ad in Fangoria, which was my bible at the time, for sure. The order cost me just under a hundred clams despite the reduced "Merlin Mail Price". Looking back, actually pretty steep for Herschell Gordon Lewis movies, if you think about it, though there are some of you out there that may have just dumped over two bills on a UK blu-ray box set that might disagree with me, unaware of the irony of H.G. and "hi def" being used in the same sentence...


6)2,000 Maniacs (1964), Force Video
By the way, my name's Haaaarper.


7)Basket Case (1982), Media Home Video
Snaked this one in the glorious video section of Joe Nardone's Gallery of Sound store at the Wyoming Valley Mall for fifty spondulix, money well spent for the opportunity to see Frank Henenlotter's cult classic midnight movie for the first time, and several more afterwards over the years.


8)Zombie (1980), Wizard Home Video 
Another mail order score, that I recall being produced in the small box long before ever seeing it in the trademark Wizard Video big box, so savory to the neck-bearded, man-bunned, late-to-the-party dork knobs out there these days. How do I know? I was fucking there, you bell ends. Plus, mine was of the small variety, so...


9)Gates of Hell (1980), Paragon Video
Another sixty-five clams well spent at the Gallery of Sound. Classic Fulci at his brain-squeezin'est, innard-chuckin'est, head scratchin'est best, with those signature Paragon trailers preceding the feature and accentuating it perfectly. We watched the shit out of this one.


10)Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Wizard Home Video
At this point, I had already taped over the recording tab on my bootlegged copy of the Hooper classic, and put something else on it. Probably some MTV videos, a Saturday night kung fu movie, or Billy Sims running all over the Vikings, knowing me. Either way, I shelled out the obligatory forty-five bucks, and added this to my shelves, meager at the time, but growing steadily as the mid-eighties approached, with the advent of Mom and Pop video rental places and mail order mayhem yet to come.

"Ich seh, ich seh AKA/ Goodnight, Mommy" (2014) d/ Veronica Franz, Severin Fiala

To get the aftertaste of the latest overhyped sci-fi dud out of my mouth a few nights ago, I returned to my comfort zone by way of this nasty little Austrian number co-directed by Veronica Franz and Severin Fiala that features unforgettable performances from Susanne Wuest and the Schwarz twins, Lukas and Elias, in effectively delivering the genre goods in glorious 35 mm. After enduring two plus hours of  recycled dialog, characters, and entire scenes in some instances at the theater, all of which were cringingly applauded by the spaz army in attendance all around me (yes, even the trailers of coming attractions, minus The Jungle Book live action remake for some reason that I haven't quite figured out, since it was all shit), it was just what the Dr. (Butcher) ordered, and I was instantly glad I did.


"Are you in here eating tafelspitz after bedtime, boys?"
We meet twin ten year old brothers Elias and Lukas (Elias and Lukas Schwarz) as they carelessly play out an endless summer day in their countryside estate;  trodding through the surrounding fields and forest, sampling the nearby lake and exploring foreboding caverns with their flashlights. That is, until their mother (Susanna Wuest) returns from a cosmetic surgery that's left her looking more than a little like a bloodshot-eyed Amenhotep I. To compound matters, she's suddenly mistaken authoritarian rule for good parenting, demanding the house remains in darkness at all times, turning away any and all visitors, while creepily goosestepping around the shadows, and ignoring poor Lukas altogether, in the process. The boys, convinced that they're in the presence of an impostor, naturally proceed to spy on and prank their sour-pussed mom with hidden baby monitors and hissing cockroaches from Madagascar.


Subconjuctival hemorrhage. Try cold compresses... and no selfies for thirty days.
When a ragged stray cat the boys have adopted turns up dead in the cellar, they blame their gauze-faced matriarch, whose short fuse gets progressively shorter with every new stunt they play upon her. She especially doesn't appreciate the fishtank with the dead stray floating in alcohol they've propped in her bedroom, angrily adding the boy's pet roaches to the mixture amidst their protests.After being locked in, starved, and forced to urinate in jars, they finally run away from home, but are eventually returned unharmed, by the local do-goodnik priest. Then, one morning, she wakes up to find herself bound with ropes and rigidly taped to her bed by her now-bellicose boys, both in papier mache masks and very inquisitive as to the whereabouts of their real mother. It doesn't take a behavioral psychologist to predict the tortures she's about to endure in her sons' hunt for answers, and that's when the real truth begins to make itself apparent, and fittingly, it's a lot worse than any of us might have guessed. See it.


While Elias enjoys spending his days... with cockroaches,  papier mache, Lukas only digs the sport a boy can find in Klagenfurt...what a crazy paiiiiir.
Still working on the podcast and YouTube videos, by the way, should be up and running soon, my ever-patient woprophiles. On the other hand...Beautifully shot, intelligently written, and absorbingly acted, Goodnight, Mommy is a well-crafted, unnerving shocker from newcomers Franz and Fiala, and one you ought to love right away if you like your genre films meticulously executed with artistic flair. I can only hope these two have future collaborations in mind, as such could only result in more excellent movies for the viewers' enjoyment. On the scale, Mommy is a solid three Wop movie, and stands as highly recommended horror fare that you won't soon forget. Grab a copy.


"We're ready for our screen tests, Herr Buchanan..."

"We Are Still Here" (2015) d/ Ted Geoghegan

...Actually wore my glasses out yesterday while running some errands, and despite looking like an egghead the whole time, I'm sure,  I managed to pick up a handful of movies along the way, tonight's review included in the day's bounty. I'd put it back on the shelves once or twice on previous outings, thinking it was maybe just another ghost-laden haunted house movie,  heavy on the cg, light on the scares, because frankly, that sort of thing really does nothing for me and many of you, I'd imagine, and is nearly as unimaginative as fucking zombies by now. My horror preference is primarily vintage seventies and eighties fare, and due to that, I'm reluctant to give anything new much of a chance, like a high chair baby sending a bowl of broccoli crowns spiraling to the floor with a well-placed shove.Not the case with this, the first full-length film directed by Ted Geoghegan, a well-crafted, splattery modern homage to one of my favorite directors, Lucio Fulci (of course), and very reminiscent in style and atmosphere to his own Quella villa accanto al cimetero aka/ The House by the Cemetery (1981).


Leanna felt a strange calm wash over her as she planted the claw hammer in Victor Newman's skull.
The Sacchetti's, Paul and Annie (Andrew Sensenig, Barbara Crampton) but no Dardano/ Danny, have recently moved into a new home in a remote New England village, still coping with the sudden death of their son Bobby in a car accident some months earlier, but things go from bad to worse in the former funeral parlor of a man called Dagmar, who's own luck went tragically south over a century earlier, when the villagers suspected that he was burying empty coffins and selling the cadavers to Chinese in Boston (!), according to visiting neighbors, Dave and Cat McCabe (Monte Markham, Connie Neer). Despite nearly getting Joe the electrician (Marvin Patterson) electrocuted in the cellar, the Sacchetti's invite close, pot smoking, psychic friends of the family, Jacob and May (Larry Fessenden, Lisa Marie), to stay for the weekend. Their son, Harry, is also driving up with his girlfriend, but the cellar is ungodly hot, and there's something down there in the smoky shadows that's possessive of the old place to the point of brutally violent murder.


"The candles! A perfect note of pear, plum, and grape with hints of spice and cardamom!"
While the folks enjoy a meal at the town's only eatery/bar, complete with xenophobic stares from every other patron in the place, Jacob's son and his squeeze arrive at the house, make themselves at home with some whiskey and FM radio goodness, and get killed, causing May's psychic lightning rod to go haywire. The next day, when the girls go into town for groceries, the fellows stage a secret seance, and unwittingly get Jacob possessed by the spirit of Dagmar himself, who, after eating a sock that Paul has stuffed into his yap as a gag, and spittingly stating his case to the horrified mortals, jams a fireplace poker into Jacob's eyesocket as an exclamation point. When they try to flee, May gets her headpiece Gallaghered by a shotgun-wielding Dave, who's arrived with most of the townsfolk, to make sure that the darkness nestled in the cellar of the old place gets its thirty year hunger sated, one way or the other. The final reel, well, you're going to have to find out for yourselves how it all turns out, and if I'm any judge of these type of movies, I think you'll be glad you did.


"Bumpus...hounds...got into... our strawberry...preserves..."
You'll remember the delightful Barbara Crampton from things like Re-Animator (1985), Chopping Mall (1986), From Beyond (1986), and more recently, Tales of Halloween (2015), though she'll always be Leanna Love from Young and the Restless to me, thanks to the television set on the bar in the kitchen that Mom always had on while she did her thing everyday. Lisa Marie, on the other hand, is a model/actress you've seen in things like Ed Wood (1994), Mars Attacks! (1996), Sleepy Hollow (1999), Silent Night (2012), and the aforementioned Tales of Halloween, while Lancaster native, Sensenig turns up in Dylan Dog: Dead of Night (2010) and Don't Look in the Basement 2 (2015). Did I just type what I think I typed? Sequel to a big screen remake of a cult tv classic that never had a sequel. What the actual fuck, as they say these days. Anyway, I shouldn't have to tell you (but will, regardless) how much I enjoyed Still Here, it's a potent blend of atmosphere, jump scares, excellent effects work from Cat Bernier and company, effectively moody cinematography from Karim "Subconscious Cruelty" Hussein, and competent performances from the cast, all mashed up into a very good horror movie, indeed. One Fulci'd be proud of. Three Wops. See this.


...I'm livin' for givin' the devil his due, and I'm burnin', I'm burnin', I'm burnin' for youuuuuu

"It Follows" (2014) d/ David Robert Mitchell

Next up, we'll close out another Friday the 13th by covering a recent indie horror flick of much critical acclaim, made in the home of my sports-heart, Michigan, and built on an original premise with significantly powerful potential, perhaps a parable of these sexually promiscuous times, and the inevitable std's that sometimes follow such carnal recklessness. Add to that an evocatively muted frame in the tradition of cult classics like Carpenter's Halloween (1978), and a genuine creepiness at certain points very reminiscent of genre films made during that period. There's even a touch of gore, albeit an exclusive peppering, if that. Young actress/ kiteboarder extraordinaire, Maika Monroe looks good, while acceptably purveying a sense of impending dread enough to merit a "scream queen" tag, for sure. What could go wrong with all those factors in it's favor, you ask? Well, that's a pretty good question, but one I'm willing to answer for you, right here...


Wilt Chamberlain's satisfied customer number twenty thousand and one.
At the outset, we watch a scantily clad young lady tearfully fleeing her house and calling her father, only to end up dead n' twisted on the beach by morning. Shit happens. Enter Jay (Maika Monroe), a Michigan college student dealing with a pushy date named Hugh (Jake Weary) who's paranoid about something or other, and after they rock an old school backseat fuck, he chloroforms her (!), and she groggily awakes, tied to an office chair in her drawers, and now, allegedly relentlessly pursued by "It", which can take the form of total strangers or loved ones in it's tireless goal of twisting you into a deceased love-pretzel. Hugh was it's previous target, but he was able to pass it on to Jay, and spare himself the agonizing death, in the process. Nice guy, this Hugh, who then disappears at the sight of a naked woman, clearly, It's latest disguise. After spotting It a few times in different gross guises, and enlisting her sister, Kelly (Lili Sepe) and friends, Paul (Keir Gilchrist), resident awkward spaz,  her womanizing neighbor, Greg (Daniel Zavotto), and Yara (Olivia Luccardi), in locating Jeff Redmond (Hugh's real name), and getting the whole story from him about what she now faces.


This pool needs Chloe Sevigny and the dude in the bunny ears. 
At Greg's lakehouse Jay learns how to fire a gun, but It makes the scene before too long, causing her to wreck Greg's car in cornfield, and breaking her arm, in the process. At the hospital, Greg volunteers to take on the curse himself, and porks Jay in her hospital bed, much to Paul's dismay. Days pass before It takes the form of Greg himself, as it breaks into his house, takes the form of his own half-dressed mother, and rapes him to death. What a way to go. Paul still can't get laid. In the end they lure It to an abandoned-yet-awfully-clean-somehow public pool, and try to electrocute it with plugged in electrical devices.It takes the form of Jay's father, and tries to brain her in the dome by chucking the devices at her in the pool. Paul, unable to see It, manages to shoot Yara while trying to hit it with bullets, as it pulls Jay underwater. Is this the end for her or will she cheat death to live another day? See for yourselves.


Insert your own backseat/backdoor joke here, you're on your own.
In the year of 2015, I'm afraid I'll have to be the bearer of bad tidings in being the one to report that invisible isn't scary. It simply isn't. I'd be willing to bet that people weren't all that frightened by it in 1933, either. Barbara Hershey's invisibly-pawed hams in The Entity (1982), excluded. And when the invisible premise gives rise to an utterly scareless, yet laugh-packed finale in the public pool, you have to think you've failed on some level, or at least, that's how I see it. Unless you're Michigan-born genre lord, Sam Raimi, who's always been a master of mixing scares with laughs, in my estimation. The horror of sick-looking folk approaching slowly from the background, was also well-covered for years, by George Romero, I think. People attend horror movies to be horrified by the sight of something horrible, or at least, the promise of something horrifying to come. At the end of this one, I just walked away expecting slightly more than I got. Still, you should check it out, just the same, and show support for Michigan-based indie filmmakers. I'm sure we'll see more out of them in the future, and I look forward to it. Two Wops.


It's nice to see Martha rehabbing that surgically reconstructed hip. It was never the same after the "tragic sock hop of '52 ".