It’s time for my second annual look into the past! Yay! Party!

Does your long term memory module help you recall the old days back when they used to do a yearly release of the After Dark Horrorfest eight movie collections? Eight films to die for I think was the tag line. I remember I used to buy those suckers every year for a while and honestly I don’t remember any of them being that good. I’m trying to think of some of the old titles but sheeeeit that seems like a long time ago. I remember there was one called Dark Ride and one about a girl trapped inside a car and one with Lena Headey before Game of Thrones. I think Frontier(s) might have been one of them and that was a great movie. I think maybe something about some transplanted eyeballs and some ghosts and I think Rider Strong was in one but overall I think they all were just kind of so-so except Frontier(s) but I remember really liking this one for some reason and I randomly saw it the other day out to rent for cheap in HD so I watched it and I guess my long term memory module was wrong because this one was not so good. And by not so good i mean not very good and I even watched it in HD and it still kind of looked like shit and I didn’t remember everyone being non-US which I don’t really care about unless they’re horny Greeks or Frenchmen because they have no place in society but the international cast in small town USA was odd and distracting. The editing was also irritating in what seemed like a 90s sort of way with a real choppy style and loud noises – maybe that’s not good description but it felt like they were trying to edit a long music video into a horror movie without a catchy song. Does that make any sense my guess is probably not so we’ll see how this goes. Also – I can’t find any pictures for this thing other than the featured image i used and the movie poster so I guess Steve and I will have to make our own. Wheeeeeee.

A bald man awakens. He seems to be perpetually pissed with a scowly brow. He looks scowly into a room with a half played chess game on a table. Through choppy flashbacks we see he used to play chess with his son there but now we can correlate scowliness is because his son is missing or dead or something so maybe that’s why he’s perpetually scowly and pissed. He puts on his cop uniform. He goes downstairs and starts eating spaghetti out of a cooking pan that’s been left in the fridge. He grimaces and scowls at his teenage daughter. His wife comes in the shot. She is a pretty French woman but you can see she is haggard and perpetually frazzled. “I need an office for my desk and compact disc stand” she cries. “Not yet” he vetoes, shoving food in his angry lips. “Why the sour puss??” She says, crying. “Don’t you know this is the ten year anniversary of the day the first child was abducted slurp slurp chew chew??” “Oui I mean yes” she weeps and adds “I’m going to go ball a random stranger in the filthiest hotel in town because you’re a scowly faced dick who won’t give me a desk for my fax machine and telephone” “whatevs” he replies and puts his right palm facing outward in front of his face. “Talk to the hand cuz the face ain’t buying it” and does some finger snaps in the air.

Later, at the police station, as he is drinking on the job to help satisfy his deep, crippling sadness and hunger for revenge, he’s goes to check on the inmates in the holding cell. One is the town drunk slut and the other is some doctor no one on earth has ever heard of before who happens to be missing a fingertip that happens to be what Scowly Policeman’s son bit on when he was being taken from inside his home. Please note that I have no idea how Scowly Policeman could know this since we are shown near constant slo-mo flashbacks of him hearing his son scream and then he runs up the stairs into an empty room with blowy curtains and then out into the yard screaming. Nevertheless, he knows this is the guy who stole his kid so he drunkenly and hatredly calls in a scowly favor from his old buddy at the cop station to go break into this guy’s house and snoop around. “I can get fired for this and ruin my pension I’ve worked so hard my entire life for” he agrees. “Eat my shorts!” scowls our main guy. Oh wait is that not 90s enough maybe? How about “why don’t you go down to the corner and look me up in the phone book and stick a dime in a pay phone and call me back and tell me your problems, G?”

Now this is where I remembered things getting interesting and I guess it’s spoilers although it happens at about halfway in but if turns out that mysterious doctor who lives in town that no one has ever heard of in their lives ever was INDEED the culprit and doing child kidnapping. Further, he is keeping them all in cages like animals and pumping them full of PCP. Now that may seem pretty unbelievable or stupid and maybe it is but he’s doing this to get back at the cops who never solved his parent’s murder, see? Stealing everyone’s children over ten years and drugging them with PCP. All right. Calling upon a case of severe and dreadful bad luck, the snooping cop lets all of them out do they go around town killing and eating everyone and setting things on fire.

Which maybe that’s cool and twisty but what was super irritating was that every time they showed one of these rabid and junked up kids it was either super shadowy so you couldn’t tell what was up or it was really bleached and saturated – maybe overexposed is the adjective – but it sucked. There were also some times when the ADR sure didn’t fit and the use of that one guy from I think Danzig didn’t really work for me. Nice rat tails bro.

I think the thing I liked the most out of this entire thing was the part in the hotel. That seedy and grimy hotel I mentioned earlier that the wife was going to have illicit and mopey French sex in with some dude because her husband is scowly and opposed to buying desks. So there they are in this dumpy shithole, making It, when thus rabid teenager comes in and cock blocks the shit out of everything by killing the guy and ripping him to shreds. “Ay oui non!” Screams the lady and runs to hide in the bathroom where, we get some fun overhead camera views that actually seemed way too creative for this crappy movie but you always have to be able to say something nice about someone even if you don’t think you can. But otherwise this thing is pretty sucky Especially when angry cop man sees his son out there eating someone and he’s all “don’t kill him he’s my son, my son!” but really doesn’t seem to give two shits and carries on with what he was doing before he saw his kid in the first place. Kind of like that time you went to help your coworker lift that box because you were all moving desks and you honestly accidentally farted and you hope no one heard and that it wouldn’t smell so you were all “heh heh heh think you’ll like the building heh heh heh” and then you realized it did smell like eggs and tried to pass it off like nothing had ever happened ever because that type of thing doesn’t happen in real life to real people.

Has this post reached 10,000 words yet? We’re going for a record. This is how it ends boys!

“Soy… infermo….” I hear you whisper meekly, feebly…

After the uneventful scene with my son my son don’t shoot my son everyone ends up back in the police station. “We gotta kill those fuckers and I don’t care if it’s your son or not” mumbles someone edited over with bad dubbing. “Don’t kill my son only I can kill my son” weeps the scowly cop man. “I’m going to crawl through the air ducts to drop into another room and steal car keys from evidence bags and then crawl back through them and give them to you so you can lead us all to freedom Pierre” whispers his French wife and adds using a terrible sense of foreshadowing “surely our son won’t kill me because he’s been fed pcp for an unknown number of years, oui?” “My name is something like Hopper lady” he agrees and then he also fails his foreshadowing exam and says “my son will not at all kill any of us at all by the end of this movie because he is my son and I love him especially he will not kill his mother father or sister!”

Spoiler! Before too long, everyone is dead at the hands of the rabid and PCP-ed son and the movie is over. I guess he didn’t give two shits about his family after all. Womp womp womp.

FILED UNDER: INCORRECT MEMORY MODULES AND WOMP WOOOMMPMP WOOOOMMMMMPPPP AND IMPROPER FORESHADOWING