There are so many of these we ought to give them their own genre. Perhaps we can call them Faux Horror, Wannabe Horror or Mock Horror. Whatever we call this crap they are in reality dramas with a sprinkling, a little touch of horror. Midsommar, Black Swan, Hereditary, Send Help and others all fall under this category.
You can now add The Cure to that list as the film is mostly scenes of chronically sick teen Ally (Samantha Cochran) hanging out with her new and only pal Brooke (Sydney Taylor) doing what teen girls do, I guess. You see, mom and dad (David Dastmalchian and Ashley Greene as the Brauns) won’t even let Ally out of the house because of the autoimmune disease she has suffered from since birth. Right from the very start we are sure there is something not quite right with Ally’s parents as if the multitude of weird vials in the fridge weren’t clues enough that something is very wrong with the Braun household.
The big reveal is so obvious you can probably guess what it is just by reading this review or the premise on IMDB. That is how unremarkable and pedestrian this story is. And to top it all off, there are barely any scenes that qualify as true horror. The only Cure anyone should be interested in is one for all of these Artificial Horror movies.
Watch: VOD, Theatres
Do Not Enter was originally a book entitled The Creepers by Canadian writer David Morrell. He is the dude who created Rambo, The Brotherhood of the Rose series and has been an author for 54 years. In his book, it is a serial killer who is stalking two rival groups of urban explorers in an abandoned hotel. Probably because the idea that he was molested and pimped out by his own father would turn potential audiences off, the serial killer has been replaced by a supernatural creature in the film.
Our heroes are a squad of fledgling YouTubers who explore abandoned sites for fun and clicks. Right out of the gate one of their own is booted from the group for breaking the rules and we just know he will be back later for revenge. Sure enough, while the group is parkouring their way through The Overlook Hotel 2.0 with a tag-along reporter chronicling the adventure, the outcast returns with his new friends and they are a little too unbalanced and antagonistic, even for him. They aren’t there to increase their follow count either. Rumour has it there is massive fortune hidden away in the hotel and they want it.
Once all of our players are in what amounts to an urban arena a monstrosity simply known as Pale Creature, begins hunting and ripping the hearts, throats out of everyone and anyone because it doesn’t care which side anyone is on. It just wants them dead.
Do Not Enter serves up enough action, adventure and horror but it is all horribly underdone. The script is so scrambled that it ends up looking like the breakfast your young children made for you one fateful morning complete with soggy cereal, incinerated toast, rubbery eggs and crispy charred bacon with coffee that has the consistency of Venom and you aren’t even sure how that is humanly possible based on the gadgets and appliances available in your kitchen. Avoid Do Not Enter and eat out instead.
Watch: In theatres.
Rod Blackhurst’s Dolly is his take on Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It’s got that grindhouse, grainy look full of high contrast lighting, scratches, imperfections that make it look like a documentary and in a way, more realistic. It’s got the mind of a child in the body of a lumbering, mute giant. It has a heroine who is put through the proverbial meat grinder and therefore is grimy, blood-soaked, blood-stained manic, delirous mess by the end of the film. It has an old farm house in the middle of nowhere, the perfect location for a psychopath to play with their food. There’s even a scene taken right from Chainsaw. You will know it when you see it. To make the homage complete, there is even a character named Tobe.
In Dolly, a young couple (Fabianne Therese as Macy and Russ Tiller as Billy) are brutalized by a hulking, disfigured woman (the wrestler Max The Impaler as Dolly) who is dressed as a porcelain doll complete with a Little House on the Prairie dress and a cracked mask. The get-up doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense considering Dolly’s entire modus operandi is to abduct Kate and treat her like a child including putting a diaper on her, rocking her to sleep in a crib, spanking her when she is “bad’ (tries to escape, fights back) and yes, even breast feeding her. Why isn’t Dolly dressed up as a mother if that’s the role she wants to play in her sick and twisted mind? I don’t get it. While Macy is in a really messed up situation at least unlike Sally Hardesty she isn’t on the menu, if you know what I mean.
Therese pushes herself physically and psychologically to the brink as the battered, beaten and blugeoned Macy. As the focal point, she holds this movie together as Max’s experience as a pro-wrestler and having to be so over-the-top expressive at times that those in the nose bleed seats understand what’s going on in the ring comes in handy since Dolly has no lines to speak of. Things go a bit too far when Dolly begins dancing with glee and gesturing, pouting like a kid would but for the most part, Max just might have a future in the movies whenever they are done beating the snot out of people in the squared circle.
Despite all the Chainsaw trappings Dolly doesn’t have the focused intensity that it did. While both movies moves from set-piece to set-piece, one encounter after the next, with very little plot or backstory to get in the way, Dolly lacks the relentless pacing that Chainsaw had. It doesn’t careen from one unpredictable moment to the next, it lumbers along. Hooper’s Chainsaw was a moment in time that cannot be duplicated or replicated. Dolly honors the spirit but doesn’t nail the precision.
The best thing about Ready or Not 2 is that it begins right after the first one ended. Today’s top Scream Queen, Samara Weaving, returns as Grace MacCaullay who is sitting outside the Le Domas family mansion as it burns to the ground. Emergency workers have arrived on the scene but Grace is literally oblivious to it all as she has her victory smoke. She just hacked and slashed her way through her fiance’s family who tried to kill her as part of some twisted wedding tradition. If any of the cult members would have been successful in killing her they would have secured for themselves an undisputed position of power.
In Ready or Not 2, Grace is reunited with her estranged younger sister Faith (Up and coming scream queen Kathryn Newton from TV’s Supernatural, Ant Man’s daughter in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, the Lisa in Lisa Frankenstein and Sammy / Jessica Hurney in Abigail). Grace has no time to catch her breath or heal up as the sisters immediately find themselves fighting for their lives in a new lethal game of hide and seek as a family led by the brother and sister team of Sarah Michelle Gellar as Ursula Danforth and Animal Kingdom’s Shawn Hatosy as Titus Danforth who want to fill the power vacuum themselves.
It is rare that in the horror genre a sequel outperforms the original but Ready or Not 2 does that in a big way. A lot of that has to do with the fact is there is no set-up for us to sit through. The outlandish, very messy and grisly Battle Royal kicks off almost immediately and the wonderous brutality doesn’t let up until the very end. Faith and Grace are double the fun pitted against the ruthless Danforth siblings. There are other Danforth brood horning in on the action, mostly to up the kill/body count, but it is the sibling warfare that captured my attention although dude who gets washed, rinsed and dried in an industrial-sized washer and drier was memorable as well.
Binge News 