STITCH FACE (2014) – Two grieving parents are struggling to cope with life without the young daughter, so go into the desert with friends and try something ritualistic to help her rest, and ease their depression. Unfortunately, this seems to conjure up demonic forces and the adults develop horrendous wounds which are even worse when they are inexplicably and painfully repaired with gruesome stitches.
THE WATERMEN (2011) – A trio of girls head into the middle of the Atlantic with a wealthy playboy Amanda in a fight for their lives with sadistic fishermen (the titular watermen). Some of this is ridiculously stupid, befitting a film with Jason Mewes in a major role, and some of it is actually quite tense. It's nothing special, but I can see myself watching it again next October.
KNOCK KNOCK (2008) – Members of a high school football team are brutally killed by someone in a mask leaving the message 'knock knock'; the police are useless, but some old man who enjoys whiskey and his own company is clearly the key to solving the puzzle. This is just about watchable with a fascinating appearance by Lou Ferrigno. It's nasty, but not as nasty as it should be, nor as sleazy or original.
RESURRECTION COUNTY (2008) – A group of twentysomethings travel through the titular locale into Enoch, a remote town. There, shit gets nasty and it is surprisingly downbeat. I guess this was riding the very end of the 'torture porn' wave because there is a lot of attention paid to brutalising and killing people who are lucky if they are two-dimensional, but by the ending I was surprised at how much I was rooting for them!
LOVE OBJECT (2003) – Kenneth, a socially inept office worker, finds out about somewhere that will make a lifelike love doll, so he contacts them and has one made and delivered to his apartment. Unfortunately, Udo Kier is the building manager, and anyone who knows anything goes nothing goes well when Udo Kier is around. In this case, the doll (which he names Nikki) seemingly becomes sentient, sending him to work with bondage straps on his wrists and the two have blazing arguments. After that, things get even worse when he begins a relationship with a co-worker, Lisa, who encourages to dress and style her hair to resemble Nikki, finds out about her latex lookalike.
SATAN'S LITTLE HELPER (2004) – A nine-year-old boy, Dougie, who is addicted to the titular video game, strikes up an unlikely friendship with someone he finds dragging a body around in town, thinking it is the incarnation of the main character in his favourite video game. There is a weird dynamic at play because Dougie is naïvely complicit in gruesome murders, which he thinks are fictional, so this seems to be trying to comment on the age of criminal responsibility, but I didn't watch it for social commentary. This could be why I enjoyed it because of the twisted relationship between a young boy and a shape shifting Demon.
MONSTER MAN (2004) – This felt like something which was an inspiration on the (superior) Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010) with its mix of buddy comedy and extreme violence. The main male characters are an unlikely pairing of Adam, a shy virgin who wants to crash his ex-girlfriend's wedding so we can tell where he still loves her, and the extremely antisocial and insensitive Harley, who just likes annoying people. This kind of works and I liked Adam a lot more than I thought I would at the beginning, and Harley became less annoying as it went on. That was one bonus and the other was the Duel-inspired killer monster truck.
THE SLEEPER (2012) – I'm not sure whether this is supposed to be a homage/pastiche, the fact it's set in a sorority in 1981 with a killer targeting the sorority girls, means it has more than passing similarities to Black Christmas, A Stranger Calls, Halloween, and Scream. As such, most of it is devoid of tension because it is simply recycling plot devices from other, better, films.
THE HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW (1983) – The only film mentioned here which was not bought for £1 from Music Magpie and one which, despite having owned it for about a decade, I haven't seen in a very long time. This is a shame, because it is a very neatly constructed and influential piece of cinema, drawing on films like Les Diaboliques, Black Christmas and even The Exorcist (watch how the scene with Katherine exploring by candlelight echoes Chris McNeil in the attic). It's something which I watched with fairly low expectations, which it easily surpassed and has been given an excellent release from 88 Films, looking and sounding better than I expected and with an informative commentary by The Hysteria Continues, which I'm enjoying right now.
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