The Next Day: The Boy (2015) Edition

That's right, it's another episode of The Next Day! And this time, it's also a movie called 'The Boy', which I agree is a little weird!

Enjoy!

Next time, a movie not called The Boy!

New Video Project! The Next Day: The Boy (2016)

That's right, 'The Next Day' is back - in video form! The stars of TheAvod bring the aftermath of prominent horror films to life, or at least audio!

The first installment is 2016's 'The Boy'!

The Next Day - Creep Edition

The film Creep ends with the villain, one Mark Duplass, revealing that he's been killing videographers and other random people for ages.

He's even on the phone as the credits roll, planning his next murder.

The Next Day: Intruders Edition

Welcome to 'The Next Day', a recurring feature which explains what happens immediately after the end of films with ambiguous finales!

This time we're talking about Intruders, the film about (spoiler alert) a home invasion which goes awry when the house's inhabitant, a shut-in, turns out to be a crazed serial killer!

At the climax of the film, after she's murdered all of the Intruders (hey, I just got the title!), and the house she hasn't left in a decade is set on fire, the serial killer wanders off into the woods as the credits roll and police sirens approach.

Yeah, turns out that I'm really fond of auto-balancing.

So, what happened next?

She was immediately arrested. Like five seconds later. This is a 23-year-old woman who hasn't left her house in a decade. She can't drive, has no social skills, resources, or idea how to avoid the police. Also she was pretty badly beaten during her fights with each of the three home invaders.

Honestly, it would have made more sense for the character, and been a better ending for the movie, had she stood at the front door and looked out into the world, then walked back into her burning house, going down with the ship. Whether it was because she honestly couldn't leave or because burning to death was preferable to life in jail could have been up to the audience, who would have left with a more logical, character-based resolution.

How To Ruin Your Own Movie: The Intruders Edition

The Intruders is the story of a father and daughter who move into a spooky new house, and the events which follow after. Spooky events! Doll heads appear and disappear seemingly at will, there are eerie noises in the night - fairly standard stuff.

So the audience is placed in a position of uncertainty - is the house haunted? Is there someone hiding in the walls? Is the main character an unreliable narrator due to mental instability? This would all be a great foundation for mystery and drama, except for one thing-

The movie tells us that it is, in all likelihood, the second option. Right up front. Here's the first thing that happens in the movie:

Sorry about the low quality - the image was super-dark, so I just used the auto-balance.

A beaten woman is tied up in a dingy basement.

Another Fun Thing About Chainsaw Killer

Chainsaw Killer is low budget in the best possible way - by which I mean it doesn't care for a second that its budget is showing, it's going to get its point across with whatever tools it has at its disposal. In this case, those tools are:

A - Footage of the Chainsaw Killer chasing people through the woods in the late autumn.
B - Footage of those victims being chased in the early spring.

Now, you might think that having only those two things would in some way baffle or foil Chainsaw Killer's editors, but no - it doesn't even slow them down. Allow me to present my proof!

Chainsaw Killer - Bad Filmcraft or Unintended Plot Revelation?

Allow me to reintroduce baffling film 'Chainsaw Killer'.

Seemingly an attempt to use existing footage from an abandoned project, Chainsaw Killer tells the story of a horror geek with a vodcast who is obsessed with tracking down a copy of the obscure horror film 'The Force Beneath'.

Also, there's a guy with a chainsaw, wearing a catcher's mask, who spends his time cutting people up with said chainsaw. Not in such a way that it would require any gore to be shown on film, however. This is not a film with an extravagant budget. The kills tend to be along the lines of-

Chainsaw goes offscreen.

Blood thrown on face.

Then cut away to the next scene. It's never super-clear what the Chainsaw Killer's connection to the obscure videotape is, almost as if they're appearing in two separate movies right up until he turns up and kills the main character.

So, keeping that extremely low budget in mind, allow me to show you pictures. First is the face of the chainsaw killer-

The Next Day: Scream Park Edition

The film Scream Park concerns an attempt by the owner of a theme park to arrange the murder of his staff in the hopes that the publicity surrounding the massacre will turn the park into a major tourist attraction. Setting aside whether or not this would work (the film seems to think it would), it's one of the most inept examples in recent memory of a film struggling to obtain a 'the killer wins' ending that I've ever seen.

These are the film's two survivors. Woman and her Boss. After a terrible struggle against some killbillies, Woman manages to save the day, while Boss hides in a closet the whole night. Then, right at the end of the movie, it's revealed that Boss was in on it all along, and murdered Woman's would-be boyfriend because he was romantically fixated on her.

Filmmaking errors and their effects on narrative.

So imagine a movie that opens with a child being kidnapped. That kidnapping sets the plot in motion, and the search for the child is the main action of the film, with the identity of the kidnappers being a central mystery. Now imagine, two minutes later, a scene in which the mother, before the police come to tell her about her missing child, is talking on the phone in her living room, and in a mirror on the wall, the child is plainly visible getting a drink of water in the kitchen.

If you saw that, wouldn't you spend the rest of the film wondering what the mother's connection to the kidnapping was, and how the child was back at home after we saw them being abducted? Wouldn't it be a little infuriating if the film never addressed it?

Of course, from the filmmakers' point of view, none of this screwing with the audience was ever intended - during the editing process, they moved the kidnapping up to the start of the film, but they needed the content of the phone call to set something up in a later scene. Feeling that a flashback might be confusing, they just edited all of the shots of the child from the phone call scene, and then pretended that the phone call scene was taking place after the kidnapping, but before the mother finds out about it. Unfortunately, they missed the reflection in a couple of the shots, and they wound up leaving a deeply confusing image in the film.

Can an observant viewer be blamed for letting the awareness of that reflection colour their impressions and expectations of the rest of the film? This isn't like seeing wires attached to monster heads, or a boom mike drifting into the top of frame. This is an error that doesn't look like a mistake, and has the potential to drastically change the meaning of the film - possibly the most severe kind of mistake.

Which brings me to Curse of Chucky.

How to ruin your own movie: The Victim Edition

Michael Biehn made a movie! He wrote it and directed and starred in it, then cast his wife as the female lead, because hey - he's the one making the movie. That alone makes giving it a look, since it's fairly common for a character actor stalwart to produce a film they're passionate about appearing in, they almost never just go ahead and write/direct them as well. The main character is even named Kyle, because Michael obviously wants us all to know that he knows why we're watching the movie, and he's okay with that.

It's not a bad premise for a movie, either. Biehn plays a loner who lives in a cabin in the woods, assiduously keeping to himself, and attempting some personal improvement with the assistance of self-help tapes. His life is turned upside down when a woman in tattered clothes shows up at his door armed with a horrifying story - her best friend has just been brutally murdered by a corrupt, drug-snorting cop, and now that cop and his partner are out to silence her for good! Hell, Michael Biehn's probably in danger just for hearing the story. If that weren't bad enough, when the cops turn up looking for the woman, they have a very different version of events, in which she's a dangerous criminal on the run from the authorities. Also, apropos of nothing, there's a serial killer on the loose in the area.

As anyone can see, this is a potent formula for drama. Who is on whose side? What dangerous secrets are people hiding away? With everyone's life on the line, who can be trusted? Michael Biehn certainly built himself a potent starring vehicle - except for one fatal flaw.

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet

Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet is not a movie about Lizzie Borden. I can't stress that enough. Is it a movie about a young girl who murders her parents with a pair of scissors and a hatchet? Yes. Is her name Mary Hatchet? No. That's just something people call her because of the involvement of a hatchet in her murder spree. She's actually named Mary Mattock, which proves happily coincidental because her daughter later uses a mattock (sometimes called a pickaxe) in a tangentially-related murder spree some years later.

Why have I spent all of this time establishing that this is not a film about Lizzie Borden, despite being clearly inspired by that famous case? The answer follows, in the fake headlines that appear during the film's opening credit sequence:

Wow, was the film ATM stupid.

Here, broken down into categories, are things that are wrong with the film ATM.

Reality problems:

No one parks that far from an ATM. Especially at 1AM.
If it's cold enough that their lives are in danger, why can I see no one's breath?
If it's so cold, why aren't your hands in your pockets all of the time?
Why is the water so terrifying? By virtue of it not being ice it must logically be warmer than the air you've been complaining about all night. Yes, water can suck the heat right out of you, but it's less scary than -15 degree weather.
And if it's less cold than that outside, what are you complaining about?

Stupid things people do:
You saw the killer get into your car and sabotage it - how do you think you're going to be able to drive away? Just grab the purse and get out of there.
Okay, so you made your friend walk a hundred feet to the ATM just to be a dick - when you also have to go to the ATM, why aren't you driving up to it, rather than also walking 100 feet?
What woman leaves her purse in an unlocked car at 1AM? I don't care how empty the parking lot is.
How did that janitor make it past all the dead bodies and wrecked cars without becoming alarmed?
If he was alarmed, why did he lunge into the ATM kiosk without saying anything or yelling? Why didn't he say or yell anything while he was being held on the ground?
Why wasn't someone always watching for the killer? Isn't knowing where he is priority 1?
When the security guard sees a car with broken windows and people waving from inside an ATM, why does he not radio it in? Isn't the broken window alone worth a police report?
How did he miss the body lying in that pool of light?
After becoming alarmed, why does the security guard get out of his car rather than driving up to the ATM? Is this parking lot mined or something?
Why didn't the characters run out to the security guard? He has a working car, at least a club, and possibly a taser. Wouldn't running to him, waving your arms the second you see him, be your only sane choice?
The ceiling of that kiosk is not so high that you can't simply hold the burning trash can over your head. Why are you messing around with this 'climbing on shoulders' nonsense?

Here are things that had to happen for his plan to work (and why they couldn't have):
More than one person had to stop at an out-of-the-way ATM in the middle of the night - had just one person stopped, the plan falls apart. (Already a stretch.)
All of the people in the car have to go into the ATM kiosk. (This doesn't happen - people wait in the car with the motor running while someone runs in.)
Despite it being winter and freezing, none of the victims can be dressed for the weather. (Which... how?)
None of his victims can have a cell phone. Or a lighter. (As if.)
His victims have to be unwilling to physically assault him, despite the fact that he's alone and unarmed to begin with. (Why don't they do this?)
His victims have to be unwilling to simply run away since, as is established time and again, he's alone, and could only chase one of them - catching that person is not guaranteed. (Yes, one of them would have hit the tripwire, but the rest would have escaped.)
He must have laid the tripwire after the victims arrived, an activity that would have taken some time and been plainly obvious, since it necessitated standing directly under street lamps to wrap the wire around their bases. (So why didn't they see him do it?)
It has to be believable that one of the victims could have spent a half hour breaking into the back of the kiosk. (But the characters were on the ATM camera for all four hours, other than a couple of 90-second gaps when only one of them ran outside, and a thirty-second gap when one ran out to rescue another injured victim.)
For the end of the plan to work, he had to crash a car into an ATM kiosk and somehow be sure that the remaining victim inside wouldn't be hurt. (Which he absolutely couldn't be sure of.)
The police have to be immediately certain that the sole survivor they find in the kiosk is the killer, and be completely unwilling to listen to his story about the real killer, who's just a few feet away. (The cops have no evidence of his guilt, and no reason to jump to that conclusion.)

The Next Day: The Tapes Edition

Welcome to the first installment of a new feature here at TheAvod: The Next Day! What is the purpose of this feature, you ask? Simple - as I'm sure most cineastes are aware, horror movies only have one ending - the monster gets away - despite the fact that studies have conclusively proven that everyone hates open-ended horror movies. The plague of open-endedness went so far as to drive producers to alter the TV version of 'The Thing', adding a blatant 'the monster gets away' ending to the film's famous ambiguous one.

This assumption that all horror films must be so rigidly formulaic has caused the people who make them to grow incredibly lazy when constructing their narratives, ending every film by tacking on the 'and then the killer got away with it' resolution even when the facts presented in the film in no way allow for the possibility of that happening.

The ridiculous part is that there's no need for this ending - if a situation with believable characters is crafted with enough skill, it's scary enough when they wind up getting killed by a monster. The experience of watching that happen is what people go to horror movies for - not to have the filmmaker - at the supposed 'end' of the story - announce "And the creature is still out there... maybe standing right behind you... right now!" It's as if somehow William Castle became the template for every horror filmmaker's career.

So the methodology of this feature is as follows: I establish the facts of the plot, relate the film's ending, and then explain what would have logically happened next - despite the film's claims or implications.

Now our Inaugural Film: The Tapes!

Paranoid Activity 2 - Brilliant Fake Documentary?

In a surprisingly rare departure for these 'found footage' horror movies, the main character of Paranoid Activity 2 claims to be an actual 'documentary filmmaker', rather than an A-hole who just happens to have a camera on him when awful things start happening. So, if this is a documentary he's making, what is the documentary about?

Removing the labels from bottles before a party!

Setting ineffective tripwires!

And, of course, vomiting!

Also, theoretically, there are ghosts. But not actually.

Tips for Low-Budget Filmmakers: 8213 Gacy House

There are things you can do to improve your movie - things that cost no money whatsoever, and markedly make your film less stupid, and show a little respect for the audience watching it. Take, for example, 8213 Gacy House which, according to the opening title cards, is set in Des Plaines, Illinois, on March 6th, 2006.

Yet when we see the world of the film, it looks like this:

Note the manicured lawns, lush trees, blooming flowers, and complete lack of snow. The characters' breath isn't visible, and they all wear weather-inappropriate clothing considering that it's a cold month in a cold state. Heck, an internet search of the weather revealed that Des Plaines' mean temperature on the day the movie takes place was 34 degrees (which is one degree for non-Americans like myself).

Is there anything gained by setting the film on March 6th? Not that I can see - it's not like it was the anniversary of Gacy's death or anything. According to some title cards, that happened on May 10th.

So why not make this tiny change to make the film look less ridiculous? Or is it possible that a simple transpositional error created this problem? What do I mean? Take a look at these two title cards.

So the house was abandoned on 6/3, and the bodies were found on 3/6 - is it possible that the people putting together the title cards simply got the two dates backwards? Or is that a lack of care that even the Asylum couldn't manage?

Then again, I don't know how much I should have been expecting when the absolute first image in the movie had something wrong with it-

This could just be a typo, but I'm fairly sure that Des Plaines' District Attorney's office is not an adjunct of the police department.

Skeleton Crew Thinks Your Time is Valueless

The end credits of Skeleton Crew roll at the 90-minute mark. This will be important information in a moment.

The movie opens with a car crash, after which a woman and her boyfriend are forced to find refuge in a creepy medical clinic run by a man who, sadly, is not Jeffrey Combs.

The woman quickly realizes something creepy is going on, and tries to free herself from the clutches of the psychopathic hospital staff - while I realize that this movie has the exact same plot as something we covered on theAvod, although the title eludes me at the moment - anyhow, the point is that she gets chased around the hospital until the 22-minute mark, at which point we arrive at the twist:

Up until this point we've just been watching a movie being made.

Path of Evil is Just... Well... (Sigh)

Path of Evil opens with a long helicopter shot of the Oregon shoreline.

From this we can learn one of two things: A) The producers rented a helicopter or 2) They invested in some stock footage. Either way, it goes on for thirty second before someone starts talking, but don't worry - they've got time to kill. At 112 minutes, this film is twenty-six minutes longer than the previous entry, and nearly half-an-hour longer than it has any right to be, and they had to pad out the running time somehow.

The puzzling thing about the opening is not the fact of the monologue, which talks about how when the main character was a child, he heard evil voices telling him bad things were going to happen, and that his parents told him to say a prayer to keep things sunny and positive.

That seemingly didn't work out too well for them. Also, since the parents died in 1984, I can't really blame Jake for this, but couldn't someone have sprung for something more expensive than styrofoam for the comically small tombstones? Setting aside for a second the insanity of burying someone at the edge of a cliff (isn't that basically solid rock a foot down? And if not, aren't you encouraging a landslide?), what's going on with the little white crosses next to the little grey tombfoams? Were their pets also murdered?

Here's a tip for aspiring low-budget filmmakers who can't afford a convincing fake tombstone: film a real tombstone from a reverse angle, with the character looking down at it sadly. That way the wrong name isn't in the shot! Also, go at night, so people don't get all up in arms about you filming in their graveyard.

You know, I just realized that I've written four paragraphs about the first three shots of this film, at this rate (and seriously, given the content of this movie, I could keep going at this rate), we could wind up being here for twenty pages, so I'm going to move into another format now, addressing some of the issues the film has, point-by-point.

Path of Evil is a Sequel to Harvest of Fear... or Maybe Not

Oh. How disappointing. Well, not disappointing, entirely - but I feel kind of silly for building the movie up so significantly in my imagination before seeing it. In my defense, the reason I was confused by the IMDB and DVD box synopses is that Path of Evil isn't really a sequel to Harvest of Fear, so much as it's the sequel to the movie that the filmmakers behind Harvest of Fear wished that they'd made.

Yes, much in the same way that the novel 'The Lost World' was a sequel to the movie version of Jurassic Park, as opposed to the book, Path of Evil is a sequel to a hypothetical version of Harvest of Fear that we, the audience, didn't actually see. Also, confusingly, despite the fact that the plot largely doesn't make sense if you haven't seen the first film, Path of Evil only works for people who haven't previously watched Harvest of Fear. I'll explain why momentarily, but first, allow me to delineate all the ways in which the the events of Harvest of Fear have been altered to become Path of Evil.

There is no way 'The Last Horror Movie' would ever have worked.

There's plenty of ways to attack a review of 'The Last Horror Movie' - the preposterousness of much of the premise, the fact that the main character's shaky understanding of ethics leads to any number of dull diatribes on morality (seriously, this is the kind of blather you expect to hear coming from a slightly tipsy and wholly obnoxious first-year college taking an intro to philosophy course), most importantly, though, is that the film's very nature sabotages any chance it has of successfully creeping out an audience. Since that creeping out in the last five minutes is the film's only goal, this is a fairly key flaw.

That's the DVD cover. In moments, you'll understand both why the film reel that replaces the 'o' and the fact that this movie has a DVD cover at all are fundamental mistakes.

Chain Letter Doesn't Make Even a Little Sense

Hey, remember when I was complaining about the terrible anticlimacism of Chain Letter, well, while I was typing that up I noticed everything else was wrong with the movie as well, so let's take a look at some of it, shall we?

1 - There's parental negligence, and then there's just bad writing.

As mentioned the last time around, the film opens with its ending, as the main character is murdered by her parents. On first viewing this sequence works as a heavy-handed message about the lack of interpersonal connection in all these people's lives. The unknown victim's parents are so out of touch with their child's life that they can watch a news story about murdered teens and not even see a connection to their own daughter.

When taken in its proper context, however, this scene makes absolutely no sense.

These are not the parents of some random teenager in town. Over the past week every single one of their daughter's friends has been brutally murdered by a madman, and all signs point to her being the next on the killer's list. At this point in the movie they shouldn't be headed to work in their sports cars, they should be putting their daughter on a plane to the farthest location they can afford to send her. Which, given their house and cars, might well be the moon.

Hell, they don't even check in with her before leaving for work. Because that's plausible in this situation.