This Is Not an Odd Book Discussion: An e-Epistolary Review of Crappy Horror Films

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

This is an e-mail I sent to Mr. Oddbooks and he thought it might be fitting for a non-odd book discussion over here. These may be the most succinct reviews I have ever written.

Mar 27 (7 days ago)

My beloved husband,

I heard you speak of needing space on the Apple TV. I believe I have found a way to get a small chunk of space. Consider deleting the following Horror titles:

Ominous looks like it was cast by a blind man, shot with a cell phone and sound mastered in the dishwasher. Wanted to die after ten minutes.

Removal sucks more than anything has ever before sucked. It’s got the Fight Club trope of OH NO IT WAS ME but no one can act and for some reason Elliott Gould has a ten second cameo. It needs to go away.

The Task was so awful I now have cancer. Of the butt.

Trapped Ashes is a collection of assholes telling unscary stories (one involves cannibal breasts) to get out of a scary house. It could only be worse if my mom had directed it.

Urban Explorer had zero plot and was offensive to every sensibility. Nazi tunnels in Berlin, yay, let’s visit them with nary a gun to defend us from the racist chunnel dwellers we are sure to find there.

Vlog… words fail me. Seriously. I almost want you to keep it so I can dare you to watch it.

Last Breath is what happens when people decide to write a hackneyed script that no one cares about, cast their friends who cannot act, and decide to film it and call it indie horror instead of a homemade piece of amateurish crap that could interest no one with access to a Rubik’s cube.

Grave Encounters sucked the rancid teat of TV’s Ghost Hunters. Oh no, there are real ghosts in this here place that crooked paranormal researchers are exploring. Who would have thought such a plot turn could happen? Who, I ask you? But more to the point, we need to ask, “Who cares?” No one, that’s who.

Fingerprints stars two sisters who look about as related as any two random people might, features an actress who got her start on Laguna Beach on MTV and “acts” via showing her legs and guest stars the animated corpse of Sally Kirkland wielding an axe.

Exorcismus is the sort of film wherein you want the girl to remain demon possessed. You may wonder why the hell the movie wasn’t about the girl on the the promotional cover – I can’t answer that but I suspect it would have been a far better movie than the piece of shit I watched. You also want her parents to die and her boyfriend to grind himself into hamburger, but neither happens so why bother.

Episode 50: See Grave Encounters.

Dario Argento’s The Card Player involves cutting edge computer technology from 1987, a plot so simple Gertie probably wrote it, and it’s mining a trope so overmined the shaft is gonna collapse.

The Cottage features the dude who played Gollum and I couldn’t last longer than ten minutes to see if it featured anyone else because it was all full of “Who fucking cares?” during the first few minutes.

Credo ( The Devil’s Curse ) is plotless, pointless, and you sort of want all the crappy-acting kids to die. Also seems like the sound was mixed in a Port Authority toilet.

Coffin features two living people buried in a coffin who are fighting for life and yet somehow the film still lacks tension. Oh, it’s a ransom film. Oh, it’s a “punish the adulterers” film. Oh, it’s a piece of fucking shit.

Bitten has Jay from Jay and Silent Bob fame when he was still clearly in the throes of some sort of drug addiction and a whiny, often naked vampiress with one of the most interesting overbites ever seen in a leading lady (note – twas not caused by tooth prosthetics). Lots of bodies stuffed in trunks and no one smells a thing and I think if you decide to keep this one, you should have to watch it with me as I mock your pain.

Bereavement makes no fucking sense, is horrible and exploitative (because making kids watch sex murders is a fresh, new, interesting hook, amirite?), and also who fucking cares?

Beneath – I will contact a lawyer if you don’t delete this piece of made for MTV shitburger. Don’t test me on this.

Bane is a bunch of really unremarkable British women tortured and killed for some sort of stupid project involving what looks like an animatronic roach with fangs sporting a large Giger-style hat. Someone inexplicably cast their boneless aunt, the one with the frizzy perm, and I also suspect these women were not given a script.

Amusement is the touching story of a kindergarten vivisectionist who decides to stalk and kill the three girls who were sickened by his mouse-torture exhibit for the school diorama contest. He tracks them down and kidnaps them as adults in a Rube-Goldbergian manner and takes them to what appears to be a disused grain silo with interrogation rooms. Four idiots enter, only one survives, and it’s the one who decided to go to sleep in a room with a human-sized clown doll in a chair. Hardly seems fair.

Medium Raw features a hottie psychologist in an asylum for the extremely criminally insane where people have sex against the walls of cells containing superhuman killing machines for the thrill and people bring their small daughters who wear red coats to work. The sexy psychologist’s husband sounds exactly like Ryan O’Reilly from Oz and there’s a whole subplot with him that involves lotsa flashbacks. The best part of this film was the cannibal lady who, sadly, failed to eat the protagonist, which would have been the best possible ending, in my book. So stupid that if you don’t delete it, you owe me ten bucks on general principle.

Needle is Saw with needles, combined with the first Hellraiser, with even worse actors.

The Quiet features Jack Bauer’s daughter as a bitch cheerleader with Kenny Power’s baby-mama as a best friend. We have beloved character actors Martin Donovan and Edie Falco selling their souls for a paycheck. There’s also a brunette pretending to be deaf and she’s, like, key to the plot but she’s not naked enough for the target market for this film. Incest, murder, who fucking cares. Notable only because of boobs, some of them Carmela Soprano’s.

This should clear up some space.

As always, your devoted wife

5 thoughts on “This Is Not an Odd Book Discussion: An e-Epistolary Review of Crappy Horror Films

  1. I need to know this: are cannibal breasts (1) the breasts of people who are cannibals, (2) breasts that eat humans, or (3) breasts that eat other breasts?

    1. You know, now that I think of it, the cannibal breasts would need to be eating other breasts in order to be cannibals. Maybe I should call them carnivorous breasts. A vacuous actress thinks she needs bigger boobs to land roles and gets them from a creepy MUAHAHAHAHA evil surgeon! The boobs crave flesh and eat men she sleeps with. She eventually feeds them and her areolae looked like a combination between the plant from Little Shop of Horrors and a mammary version of the vagina dentata.

      Worst part? This stupid clip was directed by Ken Russell. Not even God knows why.

      1. totally LOL’d @ this:
        an animatronic roach with fangs sporting a large Giger-style hat

        also: i remember reading that ken russell was making crappy horror movies @ his home with a videocamera not long b4 he died.
        if you torrent, theres a pretty neat BBC doc about him.
        🙂

  2. This is the best set of movie reviews I’ve read in forever. Now I can rest easy not having watched ANY of this.

  3. This is the funniest thing I’ve seen all day! Can you make it a regular feature on IROB? 😉 Also, I’m so thankful that the only movie on this list I’ve seen is Grave Encounters, because the rest are going on some kind of “to avoid” list that I will now have to create…

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