Sarah Hates Your Movie

A mostly formulaic ghost story, Kill, Baby… Kill! looks awesome, because it’s Bava, and the last twenty minutes are pretty great. It’s just a shame that it’s such a straightforward and, whisper it, kind of boring story.

Isle of the Dead is a crazed mashup of every other Val Lewton movie: there’s an aging authoritarian who’s slowly losing his grip on reality; a cataleptic terrified of being buried alive; a young woman plagued by the fear that she’s secretly an evil supernatural monster; a naive young man and a creepy old woman… and a set of circumstances which may or may not be supernatural that bring them all together and cause half a dozen deaths.

It’s nice to look at, and Karloff is great, but there’s a little too much going on for its meagre 72 minute runtime so it ends up feeling a little rushed and garbled.

Despite the (wonderfully) lurid poster’s suggestion that there’s some half-man half-leopard creature in this, there… isn’t. Instead, there’s a leopard, and a man. The “mystery” part of this murder mystery is sadly lacking; it’s obviously almost immediately who the baddie is. There are some wonderful sequences in this film, some brilliant images, and excellent use of shadows, but the plot is too clumsy, the dialogue too ridiculous, for it to come anywhere close to the genius of something like Cat People. Disappointing.

Surprisingly dull and by the numbers zombie movie. 

Tyler Perry plays Wesley Deeds in Good Deeds, a film written, produced, and directed by Tyler Perry. Deeds is a rich man with an apparently perfect life, but when he meets a homeless single mother he realises that everything is a sham and he really wants to travel the world and do, um, good deeds. It’s a bit too simplistic, a bit too saccharine, and the ending is totally unbelievable. But it passes the time.

Guy Carell is a haunted man. As a child he thought he heard his father clawing at the inside of his tomb, and as such he’s become terrified at the idea of being buried alive. His fear becomes all encompassing, and he even goes so far as to build a tomb with various escape routes built in. Everyone else in his life thinks he’s crazy, and they try to reassure him… but he’s still afraid.

And with good reason, because everyone else in his life is A COMPLETE FUCKING MORON. This film is a little too daft to be effective, though there are some creepy ideas in there.

A boy and a girl go on a date and end up stranded in a cemetery. Daft things happen. It’s all very overwrought and nonsensical.

Two middle-aged sisters start to inflict what they consider to be God’s judgement on a string of young women staying at their Spanish guesthouse. After accidentally murdering one guest by pushing her through a stained glass window, they kill several more girls and hide the bodies by immersing them in giant vats of wine, then using the juices in their cooking. It’s melodramatic, simultaneously too long and too short, and just bonkers, basically.

Y’know what, this movie isn’t terrible. It probably ought to be: it was rushed into production because Dimension realised they’d lose the rights to the Hellraiser franchise if they didn’t make a new movie, and the whole thing was written and shot in under two months. But taken in the context of the mostly terrible Hellraiser franchise, it’s not actually half bad.

Admittedly, it starts off badly. A couple of suburban teenagers run away to Mexico with a video camera, taping their exploits as they get drunk and hire prostitutes. The handheld camerawork is awful and illogical; supposedly we’re watching the footage found on the boys’ camera after they disappeared, and the camera was returned to their families, but there are scenes no-one could have been filming, including one where you can see one of the boys fiddling with the camera. It’s hard to have much faith in a movie that daft.

But when one of the boys mysteriously returns home, shaken and confused, the story gets a bit more interesting. A lot of the elements of the first Hellraiser movie end up getting thrown into the mix: the mysterious vagrant with the puzzle box, a bloody mattress, murder and skin-swapping, and a deal struck with the Cenobites. It’s very short, and very gory, and as the director is primarily a special effects artist, all the gore is fantastic.

It’s not an amazing film, but it’s watchable, and it gets points purely for actually being an original Hellraiser script - V - VIII are all repurposed thriller scripts with Pinhead shoved in at random. This, at least, isn’t as bad as any of those.

Not to be confused with Hill House or any of its myriad hauntings, Hell House is a legendarily haunted house that has, reportedly, driven many a psychic investigator insane. So, obviously, a team of three investigators decide to hang out there for a week to find out whether there really is life after death. Obviously, bad things happen to them.

The set design is immaculate and the cinematography is gorgeous but sadly the script isn’t up to it and the ultimate conclusion is totally ridiculous.