Will Twerk For Horror Movies
My quest to watch all the horror movies...yes. All of them.
Look All I'm Saying is That, I Do What I Want
Hidey-Ho, Horror Nuts! Welcome back to another edition of WTFHM!
So, I know I said that this week, I might review A Quiet Place 2. Well, I didn't get around to it. What? I never said I would definitely review it. I said I MIGHT review it, okay?
This is my blog, I'll do what I want. :P
So, anyway, while A Quiet Place 2 isn't a thing this week, I did, however, check out a movie that popped up on my Netflix about a month ago that looked pretty good and, at the time, I'd been putting off watching it because I haven't really been in the mood for haunted house movies lately.
Welp. Guess that's over. This week's movie:
His House starring Sope Dirisu, Wummi Mosaku, Malaika Wakoli-Abigaba, Javier Botet, Yvonne Campbell, Vivienne Soan, Lola May, and the Eleventh Doctor - Matt Smith.
So, okay, this story opens with a refugee couple fleeing war-torn Sudan with their daughter. Their daughter dies along the way, but the couple, Bol(Dirisu) and Rial(Mosaku) make it to England and are put up in a government-assisted home that is apparently the envy of all the white government workers…
...cuz they keep saying the house is bigger than their houses, you see. Not because of the poolside view or anything.
Anyway, Bol and Rial are happy to get started with their new lives. Since they're refugees they have to adhere to strict guidelines, which they're all too happy to stick to because they and Bol, in particular, are committed not to return to Sudan.
Very quickly ghostly stuff starts happening around the house. The two of them start seeing and hearing things. Rial gets the script pretty quick and tells Bol, in story form, her thoughts as to why they're seeing ghosts in their new house.
See, there's a legend of this dude that steals from a witch or an "apeth". As penance for his theft, the apeth haunts his home and, generally, everywhere he goes.
Yes, she thinks that an apeth has invaded their home. Bol, who's totally into assimilating into the culture they now live in, tells Rial that's there's no such thing as ghosts, blah, blah.
And like a scene later, the apeth goes, "Hold my beer".
Bol starts seeing his dead daughter Nyagak, only she has a monster mask on and she's hiding in the walls.
Oh, and there's also, like, a literal ARMY of other ghosts trying to kill Bol. After a particularly hairy encounter with them that ends with him hammering holes in the walls, he shows up to his caseworker and tells him, "Um...we got rats. Move us."
Mark (Smith) the caseworker tells him that that's going to take a lot of paperwork and why do they want to move anyway (your house is bigger than my house, etc.), but Bol insists...crazily. Mark relents and tells him that they would be out to have a look.
So, Bol comes home and Mark and another caseworker come through and see all the giant holes in the walls and they're like...you got some big rats, bruh.
Bol starts in with the vermin lie when Rial comes in and goes, "No, not a pest problem, an APETH problem" which leaves the caseworker looking at them like,
They're pissed and Mark gives them his "you-were-supposed-to-be-one-of-the-GOOD-ones" face. Bol begs them to give him a chance to fix the walls and everything will be fine and Caseworker Mark's like Ooookay.
So. Rial lets Bol know that at this point she could give a sweet and spicy barbecue fuck about living there and that she's going to leave. Bol does what any haunted horror movie protag does to his wife and locks her in the house.
And, like, all the while, the apeth is telling both of them that he'll give Nyagak back if Bol takes his own life. He even shows up and tells Bol that he needs to repay what he stole or else.
What did he steal? We-hell, lemme tell you.
Rial manages to escape the house, but she wakes up back in Sudan, surrounded by her family. We're then taken into a flashback where Rial and Bol are trying to escape their village in which lots of people get massacred.
They try to get away by bus, but the bus only has enough room for people with children. In a straight-up Titanic villain move, Bol grabs a kid and secures passage on the bus and thus, his and Rial's escape.
Yeah. He stole a whole kid. A kid with a mother who gets left behind and gunned down. A kid who died at sea while they were trying to escape. No wonder they've got an Apeth haunting them.
So, Bol finds Rial in the really real world and brings her home. The both of them are pretty resolved in what needs to be done, so Bol takes it upon himself and cuts himself to summon the Apeth to take his life...which works spectacularly.
The Apeth works to get into his skin...literally, but wait, here comes Rial for the win!
Rial comes in swinging and jumps the Apeth, slitting its throat. Bye, bye scary monster witch!
And so, Caseworker Mark comes back ready to pull them out of the country for all the fuckery, but hey the wall has been fixed and everything seems to be okay.
My favorite thing? Mark's all, "Wow, what happened?" And Rial's all, "We killed the witch" and we laugh and laugh, end credits.
So, what did I think of this one? Real talk, this was a great movie. Look, I know a lot of your horror nuts are plugged into the American horror scene and that's cool and everything, but for all of you sleeping on foreign horror, maaan, it's time to:
This one is legit high-level second-tier horror. Yes, there's social commentary, but, really, isn't the best horror the stuff that mirrors real life?
High praise for His House. A definite jewel.
Okay, so next week...
We're going to look at the 6th most popular movie on Netflix...at least as of the time I'm writing this. The Seventh Day. Yes, another possession movie...but Guy Pierce and Stephen Lang are in it, so, I'm there I guess.
O~
Posted by Ophelia Crane at 12:00 AM No comments:
Conjuring Out Here Making Me a Liar
Hey, Hey, Horror Nuts! Welcome back to WTFHM!
Back in July of 2018, I reviewed The second Conjuring movie and, despite not being impressed by most of the movies in the Conjuring universe, I had to admit that the second Conjuring movie was actually pretty frickin' good, thus proving that my heart is not totally black most of the time.
I know, I know. All y'all out there love these movies and for the most part, I gotta tell you, I don't get it. Most of these movies are, in my humble opinion, okay at best.
Before you at me...I said most of these movies. As I'm sure I've said before, I have watched a lot of horror movies over the course of a lot of years. I could be a little jaded.
Which brings us to this week's movie:
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It starring Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Sarah Catherine Hook, Jullian Hilliard, Ruairi O'Connor, John Noble, Eugenie Bondurant, Ronnie Gene Blevins, Steve Coulter, Shannon Kook, Keith Arthur Bolden, and Vince Pisani.
So, first of all, as with all current movies, I have to issue a spoiler alert. I'm gonna be running down the whole movie, here, so close your eyes if you don't want to see it.
Second of all, I want to note that in the Conjuring Universe, there's apparently a timeline between all these movies. If you're at all interested in watching them in chronological order according to the plot, here you go.
If you've been keeping up on the movies, though and you're worried you're watching them out of sequence, don't sweat it. This movie turns out to be the latest in the timeline as well as in release date. In other words, you're not missing anything.
Okay, so in this installment, our heroes, Ed and Lorraine Warren are in the middle of exorcising a demon from a young boy, David(Hilliard). During the ritual, his older sister's boyfriend, Arne(O'Connor), entices the demon to take him instead, which it does, as demons are wont to do.
Fast forward to some time later, Ed is recovering from a heart attack that happened during the exorcism. He wakes up from it and tells Lorraine that she has to warn the family about the boyfriend.
She calls the police, but by then it's too late. Arne went ham on his landlord while he's in the middle of partying pretty hard at 3 pm on a Tuesday.
Okay, so. Arne is arrested and Ed and Lorraine get him an attorney that will plead the case of him being possessed, thus becoming the first case in history to use the argument of demonic possession.
As per the tagline, The case of Arne Johnson is a real thing that happened and the real-life Warrens were involved. Here's a link to details on the real case, if you're interested.
So, anyway, the Warrens are tasked with looking up how David became possessed in the first place. They go to the house, do a little flashbacking which leads them under the house where they find a "witches totem".
The Warrens do a little research and find that the totem comes from the disciples of the Ram cult, (which you might remember from one of the Annabelle). So, now, they need to find out WHO from the cult is involved.
They decide to look up a defunct priest, Kastner(Noble) who dealt with them before. Kastner explains that somebody was using the totem to possess a demon to possess a person to commit a human sacrifice which seems like kind of a Russian Nesting doll kind of way of doing a thing, but, whatever.
Anyway, the Warrens are like, Okay, so we should look for other cases similar to this one and they find one. In Massachusetts, they investigate a missing girl, who, it turns out, murdered her…
K, they don't say it, but the girl appears to be her lover, maybe? Anyway, the story goes that the girl lures her bestie/girlfriend out into the woods and stabs her 22 times before throwing herself off a cliff. We know this because Lorraine does the psychic thing she does and it gets real dramatic, there.
Y'all saw the preview.
So, while the detectives are recovering the missing girl's body, Lorraine gets a psychic preview into what's going on with Arne. See, the occultist doing the whole possession puppet show is trying to convince Arne to kill himself while he's in prison. It's fine, though. Lorraine stops her psychically-wise.
But, see, NOW, the bad guy knows who she is and that's real bad for the Warrens.
The occultist decides to possess Ed and Ed almost stabs Lorraine which makes me think that is some love for your ass, folks because I'm asking for a divorce if you try to kill me, demon or no demon.
But, really, that's probably just a Tuesday for the Warrens, so…
Anyway, they find another totem in their house and threw ghost detective ingenuity, figure out that they have to get to the occultist's altar and destroy the totem on it to break the curse plaguing Arne Johnson and, well, them too, now.
Lorraine goes back to Kastner's house and finds out that the occultist is Kastner's kid, Isla(Bondurant).
See, she became fascinated with the Ram Cult while Kastner was investigating it. Isla's curse breaks down like: She needs three sacrifices - The Lover (The missing girl), The Child (David and now Arne), and A Man of God (Ed).
Kastner shows Lorraine where the altar is, Ed shows up in there somewhere and gets himself possessed again, Lorraine goes all, REMEMBER YOU LOVE ME and he snaps out of it, destroying the idol and the altar.
And the cup from the altar is added to the Ed and Lorraine museum of creepy shit.
So, once again, the Conjuring series has proved me a liar...sort of. Apparently, in the Conjuring Universe, the Ed and Lorraine chronicles are legit. I can't say for the Annabelle/La Corona/Nun stuff…(well...yes I can, actually)
But so far, I'm actually kind of invested over here. Seriously debating taking a day and watching the entire series in order at this point. So, yeah. Jewels all around.
Okay, so next week! Not sure what I'm going to watch. Gonna try A Quiet Place 2, but we'll see.
See you next week!
Ophelia Crane
Spiral: From the Book of ACAB