Horror films dealing with slashers, spirits, and gods.
HER NAME WAS TORMENT II: AGONY (2016)
Soon after the release of his 2014 film Her Name Was Torment, writer/director Dustin Wayde Mills started an IndieGogo campaign to raise funds for a pair of sequels - in fact, when I wrote about Her Name Was Torment in October of 2014 I included a link to that IndieGogo campaign. It was a success, both sequels were made, and Her Name Was Torment II: Agony has since been released on DVD and Blu-ray.
These movies focus on a young woman whose real name is actually a mystery. She was arrested and institutionalized for murdering twenty-seven people, twenty-four of whom have never been identified, and the authorities also haven't had any success in figuring out who she is. Like the previous movie, Her Name Was Torment II is built around interviews with this mysterious woman (played by Allison Egan) and her psychiatrist (the voice of Mills) as the doctor tries to learn more about her and why she killed all those people. The interviews in this film take place around three months after those in the first movie, and the woman has made a lot of progress during her stay in the hospital. While she was monosyllabic and withdrawn in the first, here she is upbeat and talkative. She has even made a friend while in the hospital, bonding with a fellow patient named Rachel (Joni Durian).
It's fitting that the sequel gives the woman a friend in the hospital, because the interviews and footage from the hospital are intercut with footage of some of the murders she committed, and this time we see she had an accomplice - another mysterious woman, this one played by Haley Jay Madison. Only one victim met a slow, torturous, gruesome end in the first movie, but in this one we see "Torment" and "Agony" kill multiple victims.
With more money to work with and the aid of special effects artist Marcus Koch, Mills was able to make these torture sequences even more disgusting and disturbing this time around, including a gut-churning moment of genital mutilation that looks shockingly realistic.
The torture scenes are truly appalling, and if these women were just serial killers torturing random people I would not be into it at all. But that's not what it is. Mills is actually crafting a very interesting mythology in these movies. "Torment" and "Agony" have no identities because they were abducted by angels that serve a god called the Overseer, and these angels took them apart, reassembled them, and put them back in our world to kill creatures that only appear to be human. What these creatures are hasn't been fully explained yet, but Overseer wants them to be dissected and disassembled, so that's what "Torment" and "Agony" do, chopping them up and collecting samples to keep in jars and buckets. I still don't exactly get enjoyment out of watching the torture scenes, but at least there's something deeper going on here than just murder.
When the woman talked about the Overseer and her victims not being human in the first movie, there was some question whether those were facts or if she was just insane. As the movies go on, it's looking more and more like she was telling the truth. The Overseer, its angels, these creatures, they seem to all be real. Her Name Was Torment II pushes the mythology a bit further, even revealing what the creatures look like inside their human shells.
The gross-outs and the sexual content (like the woman's relationship with the corpse of her lost love) are also taken even further.
The Her Name Was Torment films are very unique visually, mixing black and white with color and containing footage that is meant to come from sources like security cameras in the hospital and the camera the doctor used to record his sessions with "Torment" (who he likes to call "Lucy"). Some of this footage was degraded to make it look like it's taken a beating over time. It's an stylish approach to bringing some very dark subject matter to the screen.
Both Torment movies that have been released to date have been short; this one is just 56 minutes. There's a lot packed into those minutes, though, and if they were any longer they might be too heavy to sit through. Even as it is, a lot of viewers would probably be put off by the special effects and extreme content. If you can endure it, though, you'll find that Mills is doing something very interesting here.
GOD TOLD ME TO (1976)
Writer/director Larry Cohen's film God Told Me To is not in the public domain, but for some reason it was believed to be for a while, and that's how the movie first crossed my path. In a set of public domain movies. I was aware of the film and knew some of Cohen's work - I had already seen some, like Maniac Cop and It's Alive, at that point - but I still wasn't prepared for how strange this one was.
I'd probably like God Told Me To more if the original lead actor, Robert Forster, had stuck with it through the shoot, but Forster dropped out of the picture because he didn't like Cohen's way of directing (apparently he was a yeller on this set). Forster was replaced by Tony Lo Bianco in the role of NYPD detective Peter Nicholas, and while he did a fine job in the role I just don't connect with him the way I would have with Forster.
We follow Nicholas as he digs into a deeply disturbing mystery. All over the city, people are committing random acts of violence - shootings, stabbings, familicide - and when they're confronted about their actions, they say "God told me to." Each person seems to fully believe that they have actually interacted with God. The guy who murdered his family has no remorse because it was God's will, and God wouldn't have told him to do something that was wrong for his family. This guy wasn't even religious until the moment when he talked to God.
Trying to figure out what's going on here, Nicholas (who happens to be a devout Catholic himself) uncovers things that are even weirder than anything I imagined would be part of a movie with that set-up. I don't want to spill any details on that, but things go way out there in this story, especially when a character played by Richard Lynch steps onto the screen. It gets so weird that a scene featuring a cop played by Andy Kaufman going on a shooting spree isn't the most notable moment. That's saying something.
Kaufman's scene takes place at a St. Patrick's Day parade. Cohen obviously liked that parade, because he also wrote it into Maniac Cop.
God Told Me To isn't a movie I often like to sit through, but I think it's worth checking out just to see where Cohen takes the story.
The following reviews originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
INTO THE DARK: UNCANNY ANNIE (2019)
One year ago, Hulu and Blumhouse teamed up for a series called Into the Dark, the plan being that each season will consist of twelve feature films released on a monthly basis, each one having something to do with a holiday or notable date / event in the month of the film's release. Director Paul Davis kicked off season 1 last October with The Body, which was set on Halloween, so now that Into the Dark is moving ahead into a second year-long season it's very fitting that Davis is the first director up again, taking the helm for Uncanny Annie, another movie set on Halloween. Because why choose a different date when October gives you Halloween to play with?
Scripted by James and Alan Blake Bachelor, Uncanny Annie centers on a group of college students who have gathered together on Halloween to honor the memory of their friend Tony, who died under mysterious circumstances the previous Halloween. Since Tony was a gamer, they also decide to play one of his board games in his memory... They just make a poor decision when choosing which game to play. They go with something called Uncanny Annie, which Tony's friends don't remember seeing in his collection before.
Uncanny Annie is basically a horror take on Jumanji (which gets referenced within the film), as the gamers find that they're trapped in a dimension they won't be able to escape unless they finish the game, playing by the rules set out by the playful little girl known as Uncanny Annie (Karlisha Hurley), who has a whole lot of fun while the people playing her game die. Hurley did a great job of bringing Uncanny Annie to life, making her come off as a detestable little creep while she smiles and giggles at people's pain. Davis and Bachelor were also wise enough to use Annie sparingly; she's not on screen to torment the characters and viewers throughout, she only shows up when necessary.
The gameplay starts early on in the movie and continues right up until the very end, taking up around an hour of the film's 80 minutes. This allows for a good amount of tension and action, and the filmmakers crafted an interesting game for their characters play. Uncanny Annie seems simple at first, but of course it gets more complicated, scarier, and harder for the players to endure as it goes along. Uncanny Annie also has some creepy spirit friends who show up in certain rounds of the game to make things even more dangerous for the players.
Uncanny Annie isn't just a body count movie where we watch cardboard cut-out characters get picked off one-by-one. There is something more going on here. The story goes in directions that I did not predict at all, and the characters have some depth. There was a stronger dramatic story playing out among the action than I expected there to be, and I appreciated that.
Davis assembled a solid cast to play the characters trapped in Uncanny Annie's game. Dylan Arnold, who played the douchey boyfriend in Halloween 2018, is here to play another douchey boyfriend in a Halloween movie. His character's girlfriend, played by Adelaide Kane, steps up to become our heroine as the night goes on. Craig (Jacques Colimon) and his ex-girlfriend Eve (Georgie Flores) have been reunited by this Tony memorial, and they have some issues to work out. Evan Bittencourt played a character I enjoyed watching, and Paige McGhee makes an impression as the new girl who didn't even know Tony but still gets caught up in this mess.
The first season of Into the Dark had ups and downs, but I was a fan of it overall. I'm glad to see the series continuing for another season, and I felt that Uncanny Annie gets season 2 off to a great start. It has creeps and deaths and keeps the thrills coming, all while throwing in more twists than I thought there would be. I had a good time watching it. It's a nice little spookfest that makes for perfect Halloween season viewing.
TRICK (2019)
Ten years after teaming up to make a really fun new version of My Bloody Valentine, and eight years after gifting the world with the "Nicolas Cage from Hell" action flick Drive Angry, director Patrick Lussier and screenwriter Todd Farmer have finally gotten a third collaboration off the ground, the Halloween slasher Trick. The fact that they've made a slasher that takes place on Halloween (a few Halloweens, actually) brings to mind that Lussier and Farmer were once supposed to make a 3D follow-up to the Rob Zombie Halloween movies, but fans shouldn't expect to see anything left over from their Halloween 3D in Trick. The Halloween script is likely owned by someone else, and Trick is an original story that Lussier and Farmer built from the ground up.
That said, some of the movie does feel as if it's an answer to the question, "What if Michael Myers hadn't snapped until he was in high school?"
When smart and quiet teenager Patrick "Trick" Weaver (Thom Niemann) goes on a stabbing spree at a Halloween party in 2015, he claims several victims before getting shot multiple times and falling through a second story window. Somehow Trick finds the strength to get up from that and disappears into the night - and for the next four years, the masked slasher returns to the same basic area to kill more people around Halloween. Detective Mike Denver (Omar Epps) worked the Trick case in 2015, he was one of the cops who shot the kid, and he's the one who becomes obsessed with stopping Trick, convinced that he's still alive while everyone around him tells him the other murders have to have been committed by someone else.
So you've got Michael Myers and Doctor Loomis stand-ins, but Trick and Denver are thoroughly their own characters. And since Trick covers the span of five Halloweens instead of just one, that means much of this movie moves along at a breakneck pace, rarely taking a breather as Denver and Trick play cat and mouse while the murders and massacres pile up. Trick is so capable at what he's doing that the viewer may eventually start to wonder if there is something supernatural going on here. Maybe Trick is the personification of evil after all.
Halloween 2019 is the setting for most of the running time, as this is the year when Trick plots to get his most complete revenge. This time he doesn't just intend to kill some random people and torment Denver; his targets also include Sheriff Jayne (Ellen Adair), who shot him right alongside Denver, and a few survivors of his first killing spree, including heroine Cheryl (Kristina Reyes) - who is also given a dramatic subplot involving her ailing father. There's a lot going on in this movie, and I haven't even mentioned the presence of genre icon Tom Atkins as a shotgun-toting badass who hosts an all-night horror marathon and runs a haunted corn maze attraction. Scream's Jamie Kennedy also turns up in a few scenes as a doctor.
Trick isn't likely to be heralded as a new classic by many, but it has enough bloody action and Halloween spirit that it's almost certain to be warmly embraced by a legion of horror fans who will be gladly adding it to their annual Halloween season viewing lists. My only true issues with the film started to emerge at the end, as I wasn't entirely convinced by a certain turn of events, even though this was something I had suspected earlier. It makes the Trick character and the movie stand out from other slashers, but it also came off as a bit silly.
Despite that, and the movie starting to wear out its welcome for me due to the way things were handled in the last few of its 101 minutes, this was an entertaining watch, and I think it will be worth revisiting on a yearly basis. Nitpicks aside, it delivered exactly what I was hoping it would: bloody mayhem in locations that are all decked out for Halloween.
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