February Horror Movies

February may be the month of love- valentine’s day and all, but for someone who is addicted to horror movies, romance takes a backseat. If anything, I probably watched more horror movies than in any other month. So, here’s the list.

1. Eloise-- Past and present get twisted in this horror movie. Basically, a guy is about to inherit a lot of money from a relative he didn’t know existed. There is a snag, however. The death certificate is in a mental asylum that has been shut down and a court order to get the certificate would take months. Without another thought and with the help from his best friend, a bartender and her brother, the guy breaks into the asylum.

Of course, the asylum is haunted, but what the guy and bartender don’t know is that they have always been connected by an incident in their childhood. Turns out the guy is actually the child of a psychotic psychologist who conducted illegal experiments on his patients. The bartender was the daughter of a nurse who helped smuggle the illegitimate child of the doctor and patient, out of the hospital. It had been the bartender who had carried the baby out of the asylum and out of harm’s way from the dangerous doctor.

The background score was distracting. The past scenes intercut with the present was confusing and the climax was far from satisfying as it barely tries to make sense of what had happened. Has the bartender gone crazy? What of the sketches? Is the guy forever trapped and doomed to torture? None of these answers are given.

Despite that, the story did move at a good pace and there were some decent jump scares.

2. Don’t knock twice-- A mother tries to reconnect with her troubled daughter that she had given up a long time ago. Of course the daughter wants nothing to do with her, but the minute she knocks on a witch’s door- the one assumed to be haunted- she runs to her mother to seek shelter from the hauntings.

Her mother doesn’t believe her at first and knowing that her daughter dislikes her, blames her for every mishap in the house. It isn’t long before one of the mother’s clients, forewarns her of an evil presence around her mother. That is when things take an unexpected turn and the legend of the witch comes to light.

A knock on the door, awakens the evil witch. A second knock brings her to the door and she enters with the help of a person who wears an amulet. As mother and daughter try to find a way to stop the spirit from snatching the daughter, they start to suspect the person responsible might be someone very close to them.

No, it’s not the detective. It was the client all along who wanted the mother to be the beare of the responsibility to invite evil into the house.

The movie wasn’t all that bad, the explanation of the legend, though, was a bit obscure. It was a decent watch. Not too many scares and not predictable. That is a good thing.

3. Don’t hang up—The thing about slasher movies is that they always show characters that are so highly unlikable, you don’t sympathize with them. Yes, they are humans and don’t deserve that kind of fate, but why do these sort of movies portray characters in such poor light, that you kind of want to cheer the attacker?

Kind of makes me feel mean.

Anyway, the movie is about a bunch of friends who run a prank site. Basically, they call up random people, make them believe that terrible things are happening to them and when they freak out, it is all captured on camera and uploaded. Of course one of these pranks go horribly wrong, but these guys don’t know it until the two friends receive a call.

Here’s where it gets more sordid. These two friends are supposed to be loyal to each other, but one of them has a girlfriend, who cheated on him with his best friend. This is only revealed toward the end when the poor guy is trying to save his girlfriend.

The attacker is basically a bereaved husband whose wife and daughter are killed because of the prank. He wants revenge and threatens them to not hang up on him. Yes, it is all done over the phone. Exactly like those miscreants had done. They are given difficult choices to make- the parents or the friend, one friend for another, girlfriend or best friend. Their limits are tested and throughout this whole process, you find yourself cheering on the mysterious phone caller. Yes, he ended up killing the parents of one of the guys, and that was wrong, but when we are shown that the guys had scared the victim so badly that she had accidentally shot her daughter and then in her grief, herself, we are willing to look over all that.

Seriously, these movies need to stop testing our humanity and our ability to differentiate between wrong and right.

The ending was kind of the best. The attacker doesn’t kill one of the guys, but frames him for the murder of his girlfriend and best friend. Rot in jail, you scumbag!

In the end, the attacker has now become sort of a vigilante who seeks people playing dangerous pranks on innocents. Do not hang up on this guy!

4. Bornless Ones-- After the death of their parents, a sister takes up the task of helping her brother who suffers from cerebral palsy. With the help of her boyfriend and friends, she moves into a new house that would be closer to the institution she intends to send her brother to.

That house is haunted. There are evil spirits lurking by and soon, they take over the brother, promising to heal him. The evil in him is consuming and the sister realizes, that until she doesn’t figure out a way to get rid of it, all of them will die.

The house windows are all boarded up with weird symbols that the friends, unwittingly start pulling out. What they don’t realize is that it was these very symbols that had kept all the evil in. People start dying. First the doctor, then the friends, who are possessed by the bornless ones- the evil spirits.

The sister, finds the symbols, and using her blood, sticks sketches of them all over the windows. But before she succeeds, she is hurt and must now use a wheelchair. Apparently she was paralyzed after being hit in the head. Before leaving, the bornless ones give her an offer- they will heal her, just like they did with her brother, if she stays. Of course, she doesn’t. Now she has her brother to take care of her.

Okay, so this movie was kind of cheesy. The premise was good, but it was hard watching this with a straight face. I suppose some of the scenes were intentionally funny. Like one of the spirits using a staple gun to fix a guy’s knee so that he could stand. Some body/vessel he chose. The ending was too contrived and seriously? Blood? Using blood to stick paper on windows?

The ending ruined the whole movie for me simply because it wasn’t executed very well.

5. Fender Bender—Another slasher movie, but this time, you will like the characters. A seventeen year old gets into a fender bender with a guy who quickly starts stalking her. The poor girl was already having a rough day to begin with. She finds out her boyfriend was cheating on her, the guy rear ends her mother’s new car, her trip with her parents to see a show is canceled and to top it all, someone has been taking pictures of her while she’s showering.

One of the best parts of the movie is that the main character seems like a pushover in the beginning, but we slowly find out that she is anything but. She uses a baseball bat when she feels like there might be an intruder in the house. Uses the baseball bat to threaten her ex-boyfriend as he tries to barge in and manhandle her and when the stalker tries to intimidate her, she stands her ground, grabs a knife and stabs him. Then later, she sets him on fire.

She should have won right? The guy was stabbed, hit on the head and body with a crowbar and was on fire. But nope, the poor girl makes a huge mistake running into the house and not locking the doors. Because like in every slasher movie, the stalker gets up and kills her.

Moral of the story: Keep your phones in your pocket, if you are a parent, don’t ground your kids and leave them all alone especially when they are going through a rough patch. There’s more: don’t eat cake you don’t know where it came from. Always lock the door. When you hit someone, push them further in and lock them inside a room. Oh and always wear a fireproof shirt.

For me, the one thing I did notice in the ending scene was that the girl sets the man on fire, who is carrying her iphone in his back pocket. He may be wearing fireproof clothes, how did the iphone not burn and melt?

The movie reminded me of ‘The House of the Devil’. In terms of treatment, I mean. It takes its time to build up the suspense. You expect things to happen that don’t. Then when it does, you are at the edge of the seat and have your breath taken away by the events.

Fender Bender is exactly that.