Today may be Halloween, but for a lot of us, the holiday is already over. Today is just October 31, the day we pay bills and dread the final week of this nightmarish election. That’s because everyone already had a chance for fun last Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. They showed off topical costumes, got drunk on weird seasonal mixed drinks, got hung over, got over it, and finally got ready for work again. And now they’re in the office, and Becky from HR is wearing cat face paint and wants everyone in the conference room for orange cupcakes. Ugh, damnit Becky, don’t you understand people just want to work? To move on? Trying to recapture the magic of last weekend in this shitty corporate reality? It just will never work. It’s too late. Just because that Jurassic Park party was an incredible success doesn’t make this OK.
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How appropriate to end my Shocktober with yet another overrated entry from Netflix. Again, there are admirable qualities to Mike Flanagan’s Hush, released exclusively to Netflix last March, but its still just your run of the mill slasher. Don’t let the low body count fool you, this is another by the numbers stab-a-thon.

Maddie Young (Kate Siegel) is an author living alone in the deep woods. She lives a relatively happy life with one inconvenience… she’s deaf. Which means she isn’t going to hear the strange man in an expressionless mask creeping around her home. She can’t even hear her own screams!

It’s not a bad setup and they do have fun with it in the beginning. Maddie doesn’t hear her neighbors being horribly murdererd, nor is she ever aware a killer is creeping up on her, but she has advantages too. Maddie can set ear-shattering alarms to distract and abuse the killer and has the potential to outsmart him. The film without a doubt has inspired moments.

The problem with Hush is it reaches a certain point where it feels like many other forgettable slasher films before it. There’s only so much you can do with the premise, eventually, it will just boil down to a primal struggle between the two. The slasher genre is becoming harder and harder to reignite. If it was ever that good to begin with.

The idea for Hush barely has the legs for a feature, even an 81-minute feature. I’m not sure what so many others are seeing that I’m not… or hearing? See what I did there? Anyways, it’s still good fo a laugh. Check it out if you want and have a Happy Halloween!

Something Sean has brought up a few times in his reviews is that fact that he hasn’t felt like he’s been reviewing horror movies a lot, and I was kind of expecting to write off The Invitation as one of those cases, as a lot of the film does carry more of a thriller vibe for much of its running time.  However, like a lot of horror movies it upends whatever real-world believability it had by the end, as things go way off the deep end into crazytown.  And after re-watching Rosemary’s Baby a week ago, I’ve been reminded that a lot of my favorite horror movies often don’t feel like horror movies, as they create a believable world for it’s characters to live in, before inevitably letting the blood hit the fan. Continue reading →

This may be the most mildly pleasing month in Mildly Pleased’s history. Out of the 28 movies we’ve reviewed for this Shocktober, only a few have received more than three out of five stars, and only one has received a four-star review. Maybe that says something about Netflix. It has a lot of movies but can’t afford the best, just the average. We Are Still Here is the definition of average.

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They Look Like People is like a well made student film. It looks good, the acting is good, but you can’t help but feel like every aspect of the story was made to reduce costs. They Look Like People deals with big ideas in small places; apartments, basements, rooftops, but never builds to anything to satisfy those ideas. It’s cheap. Now don’t take that as meaning They Look Like People looks cheap, it has striking images. My problem is those images are never weaved into a satisfying viewing experience.

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We come now to my last assignment of Shocktober 2016, The Guest, a film that, in keeping the tradition of what I’ve written about this year, hardly deserves to be called “horror.” Although writing that makes me feel kind of terrible about myself, because the events depicted surely are horrific. But give me some credit guys, I’m not some desensitized monster, it just sounds like the last episode of The Walking Dead was way more grotesque and terrifying than this entire movie.
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