Ten Days of Terror!: The Ritual

Film: The Ritual
Format: Streaming video from Pluto TV on various players.

The Ritual is one of those movies that feels like you’ve seen in pieces before. There are moments that are directly reminiscent of other films, places where other films have borrowed from it, and allusions to films that don’t on the surface have a lot to do with this one. Among the films that I could see shining through in The Ritual are The Blair Witch Project, King Kong, The Grey and The Descent. I also recognized films like Annihilation, Antlers and Midsommar, but these were released after The Ritual, making this a potential influence more than anything else.

We start out with a group of five guys in a pub deciding what they want to do as a group vacation. Every suggestion eventually gets shot down. The last one under discussion is a hiking trip through Sweden suggested by Rob (Paul Reid). Shortly thereafter, as Rob and Luke (Rafe Spall) go into a liquor store to buy wine, Rob is killed in a robbery gone wrong.

Mirror Mirror

Film: The Night House
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

Is there anything in the world more frustrating in movies than a film that doesn’t live up to the promises of the first two acts and ends with a lackluster third act? That’s the situation I have with The Night House, a film that is in that rare group of stories that in places made all the hair on my arms raise up. This starts with such a great premise and builds on it, going in some truly unexpected and wonderful directions, and then ends with such a tame conclusion that I ended up wonder how it could have lost such power.

Beth (Rebecca Hall) lives alone in a house on a lake. We learn soon enough that she is recently alone and that her husband Owen (played in memories and the like by Evan Jonigkeit) took a boat out on the lake and shot himself, leaving a cryptic note. She does her best to hold things together, but her friend and coworker Claire (Sarah Goldberg) and her neighbor Mel (Vondie Curtis-Hall) are concerned about what has happened and the toll it is taking on her.

Lament-able

Film: Hellraiser (2022)
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on Fire!

I’m always a little leery of remakes. Oh, sure, there are some really good ones, but you probably already know the obvious examples that I would cite here. It always feels like there are too many remakes, though, as if studios are much more comfortable going with a story they already know (or a property they already know) rather than doing something really new. So it is that we come to the 2022 Hellraiser, which is honestly less of a remake and more of a completely new story with the same name attached to it. I think the idea here might be to take a step away from the original series, since the original Hellraiser franchise went hard off the rails in the third movie.

It's honestly hard to say if this is the start of a new franchise or the continuation of the old one. We have a new Pinhead, though, so it does feel like a fresh start and a reimagining. The concept of the Lament Configuration and the presence of the Cenobites (all but two of which are completely new) is really the only carryover from the original film, though, so this probably should be considered a new adaptation completely separate from the originals.

Be Kind, Rewind

Film: V/H/S
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on The New Portable.

It’s time to dive head-first into that most horror-y of subgenres, the anthology film. V/H/S came out in 2012 to something like fanfare, at least in terms of horror anthologies. Truthfully, horror is one of the only genres where the anthology works at all, and really this is true only because it’s not that hard to get a good scare worked up in a few minutes. That said, the problems that other genres have with anthologies are still suffered by horror movies. There’s not enough build-up to really care about the characters, which means that deeper emotional levels are difficult to achieve. With horror, that means we’re going for the gross out rather than real terror most of the time, and I’m just not that interested.

Of course we’re going to have a framing story here. In this case, our frame is a group of guys who go out and commit a variety of crimes and film themselves doing so, and then sell the tapes of their work. These crimes include petty vandalism and a series of sexual assaults on women in parking lots. When the film starts, we learn they have been offered a large sum of money to break into a particular house and steal a specific video tape. When they arrive, they find a dead man sitting in front of a collection of televisions and a huge set of unmarked V/H/S tapes. And, of course, things are going to go downhill from here.

Your Face Picks Movies (Jason): The Signal

Film: The Signal
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla Digital on The Nook.

This is the fourth in a series of monthly reviews suggested by the guys at Your Face. This is Jason’s second pick.

There are two movies called The Signal released in the last ten years, both of which seem to have horror elements. I confirmed with Jason that this was the one I was supposed to watch, and I needn’t have worried. A couple of minutes in, I was pretty sure that picked the right one. It wasn’t too hard to figure out that this was the sort of film that Jason would not only watch and love, but would also want to share with other people.

Evidently, The Signal borrows pretty heavily from Stephen King’s book Cell, but never acknowledges this. My guess is that since this was made with a budget of about $50,000, they couldn’t even afford the meeting. Essentially, all of humanity’s electronic media, at least in the city of Terminus, have simultaneously begun broadcasting a signal that intensifies the negative emotions of whomever encounters it. Since it comes through the television, the radio, and cell phones, this means pretty much everybody.