Monday Matinee: Horrible Horror

Much like me when I was a teenager, my daughter is the maven of horror movies.  In my case, the slashy-er the better.  In her case, she doesn't need sharp kitchen knives and blood.  She'll watch anything.  


When we were visiting my parents in Indiana, one of the kids' fun activities is to rent movies from the local rental shop (they are a dying breed).  You can rent what seemed like about 30 movies for about $7.  My son grabs all the Westerns, mob and war flicks. My daughter gets cheesy horror.  I can't watch them all, but I did get sucked into a few.  I figured, why not share a couple of them with you?


Quarantine:  The premise is this.  Chirpy, ridiculously skinny and unprofessional reporter is assigned to shadow a fire department for an evening of "behind the scenes" footage.  They get called to an apartment building where something has run afoul.  They discover that a number of the residents are running around insane, frothing at the mouth and biting people, zombie-like.  Soon the entire building, including Chirpy and the fireman, are locked inside, as the "virus" is considered infectious.  They will be shot and killed if they attempt escape.  Everything goes from bad to worse, as you might expect.  


This movie actually did get some marketing behind it.  I saw enough showings of the trailer to wonder if I'd get dragged to it at the theater.  I'm glad I didn't.  This is one of a billion movies that spawned from The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, where they think it is still cool to shoot the movie as if by handheld camera.  Yes, that does give a sense of being IN the action, but in this particular instance, especially towards the end of the film, you have no clue what is going on.  It is just a big blur with a lot of screaming.  The only interesting takeaway for me was that the symptoms displayed by the apartment tenants are actual symptoms of rabies.  Beyond that?  Don't even waste your time.


1.5 out of 5 stars

The Ward:  A young woman, Tammy, who burns down an abandoned farmhouse, is captured and put into an asylum because she is acting all wackadoo.  She joins a group of other young women who all look like they walked off the pages of Teen Vogue...all cute and clever and very lucid.  Soon Tammy is convinced she is being stalked by a girl demon/ghost who used to be a patient.  Girls keep disappearing, in theory being picked off by the ghost, and Tammy constructs a plan to fight back.


OK, this movie was directed by John Carpenter so I figured it HAD to be good!  But between the snappy mean girls and an ending that has been so overused I had to laugh that someone thought it should be used AGAIN, this film was pretty lame.  If you like overused twists and psych wards, though, you might be entertained.


2.5 out of 5 stars