Hold Your Breath (2012)

“You call that a friend? He was ready to rip you a new asshole with a pitchfork!”  Happy Maniac Monday ghosts and ghouls!  Tonight’s murderous feature was brought to the silver screen in 2012 by director Jared Cohen and is entitled Hold Your Breath.

The overall gist of the flick is that if you don’t hold your breath when passing a cemetery, evil spirits (that are ‘so bad even hell won’t take them) can possess your body. As a group of college kids rolls past a cemetery on their way to go camping, one of them takes a large toke on a pipe while the rest hold their breath. He gets possessed – and wackiness ensues.

Obviously after the possession, the viewer is completely aware that these murders are coming. The opening of the movie shows a mass murderer being electrocuted, and we see that the prison he was sentenced to death in is now abandoned, so we can only assume it is his wicked soul doing the possessing (which is later confirmed).

The death toll begins immediately in the flick, and doesn’t stop throughout its entirety. Most of the deaths are done with ingenuity – we have a girl being ripped in half with chicken wire, a cop that gets his jiblets fried when jumper cables are attached to his pants and the engine – he tries to get away from the guy pouring gas on him, starts the car, and gets immediately fried.  It also becomes clear by the third death that this director clearly is enamored with eyeball gouging. Almost every character gets something shoved into their eyeball at one point or another.  Though I’ll be honest the death by cake mixer could have been a bit more intriguing. I mean…really? After those two awesomely gruesome deaths?  But here I go getting off track.

Anywho, perhaps the best character in the film is the old man McBride, who knows a little too much about the insanity happening at the graveyard. He has the most excellently hilarious lines: “Are you paying somebody to help you misunderstand me?” – L O L. Portrayed decently by Steve Hanks, he is hands down the most memorable character in this film. Aside from him, the acting was decent, though none of the actors were people I recognized from other features.  Aside from McBride, the best actor in my humble opinion was the second to get possessed - Tony (But with a real name like Brad Slaughter, should anyone be surprised by this revelation? haha! You just can't make this stuff up!).  

The cinematography was also done well, there wasn’t too much use of ‘shaky camera’ technique, and some of the shots of fog in the dark cemetery were shot very well. The soundtrack wasn’t super memorable, but it was decent and went along with the action of the flick.  The gore…well…CGI is definitely NOT my preferred style of gore.  It has its place, but personally I think this movie could have used a lot less of it. The girl getting cut in half, for example, could have been much more realistic with handmade gore. The specter battle, however, pretty much required CGI to pull off. It was decent, if not a hair campy.  I will say that what WAS done by hand in this film looked great - the girl's scars on her face in the beginning and most of the eye gouging were what appeared to be handmade gory goodness. So I was at the very least somewhat satiated. 

But I know what you’ve been waiting for - so here comes the ratings fiends!  Body Count: 7 or 9, depending on if you think that McBride dies at the end (doesn’t exactly show this), as well as the last female left (whom we also have to draw our own conclusions about). Number of killers? Well…you could I suppose technically say one (the spirit of the murderer) but I totaled up each person who killed while possessed as well – so my total came out to seven.  Boob count? Two. Cheap thrills? Two. Actual creeps endured? One. Raven’s Scream Meter says: 3 out of 5 Screams. I’d say this is worth a watch, but try not to take it too seriously or expect too much of it or you may wind up disappointed. Feel free to leave comments and opinions below, and stay spooky my fiends!  

Satanic (2006)

Hello fiends and welcome to Satanic Sunday!  Today’s devilish feature is called Satanic, and was brought to us in 2006 by director Dan Golden. The feature film opens in a great way – a car wreck.  Generally speaking, if someone dies within the first ten minutes of a flick, I’m hooked and want to know more. That, my friends, is suspense.  Though I will say that there was a lot less gore than there could have been for such a bad wreck.  But I digress.

So the gist of this production is that a young girl, Michelle (Annie Sorell), has gotten into a terrible car crash. Her father died, and her face was completely destroyed.  When we first meet her, her face is totally bandaged.  On the bright side, the doctor (portrayed by Angus Scrimm) believes that he can re-create her face like new, so even though she is facing a few grueling surgeries she should come out of this OK (though lets be honest, most doctors would totally not assure a patient prior to surgery that she would look exactly as she did before her face was wrecked…that part kind of threw me, truthfully). The bad news…she has completely lost her memories and has no recollection of anything that happened to her before or during the accident. 

Anywho, once her face is back and she is free to leave the hospital, Michelle is put in a halfway house for ‘bad’ kids.  The hospital gives to her what is left of her ‘belongings’ which consisted solely of a satanic talking board and pentagram planchette. Before taking her to the halfway house, Mr. Bisson (amid lewd jokes and stories) takes her to her own home to collect some of her things.  She grabs a diary (also with a pentagram on it) from her room which appears to Bisson as if it were decorated by Charles Manson. But after fondling a few garments from her panty drawer and letting her get her things together, they head to the halfway house where all the real fun begins.

The family that fosters has quite an odd dynamic. The wife appears to be super religious, calling the girls “Whores of Babylon,” and expecting prayer before bed, and so on. But she smokes, drinks, and we find out confiscates things from the boarders to sell on ebay – and also requests prescriptions for the boarders but keeps them under lock and key ALSO selling them out the back door. Mr. Bisson is clearly a nasty character, usually quite raunchy.  When left to their own devices, however, Michelle and her roommate Dalia (Eliza Swenson) decide to mess around with the talking board to see if they can contact Michelle’s father.  Things heat up, and before you know it Dalia is dead with her wrists slashed.  What appeared to be a suicide to everyone in the house did not convince the detective on the case, but unfortunately he lacked the skills to save…well…any of them.

I won’t give away the ending of the film in the case anyone should wish to indulge, of corpse.

But lets talk about the film itself. The acting was mediocre at best, but the cinematography was actually decent. The plot had a few great points to it but mostly was a bit drawn-out for my taste. Get to the gore already!  The gore itself was actually dissed online, loads of people saying that it was cheap or cheesy gore. To me, it was just clear that the people who made the film were less into CGI and more into handmade gore – and I myself prefer the handmade stuff anyway so the gore didn’t actually bother me at all, I thought it was decently done. The soundtrack was lame, as was the actual sound itself…there were many spots where I had to turn the film up…and up…and up…because I couldn’t hear the characters, but then the music over them was so loud it was vibrating my sub woofer.  They could have done that better. Further, there was one scene in which what was supposed to be a satanic pentagram was painted on the wall with ‘blood,’ though it was pointing the wrong way. Two points up for Satanists, one point up for Pagans. The girl fight at the end was totally lamesauce, and unrealistic...as was the ending.  The ending was actually a total disappointment for me, and I had actually gotten super involved in the story by the last 20 minutes of the film, so I was pretty sad about that.

One awesome thing though was that the doctor brought up a famous psychological case in which a man (they don’t say his name but it was Phineus Gage) got a steel rod to the dome. It went right through his frontal lobe and caused him to go from a nice, normal guy to a completely angry and violent individual. I always thought that case was fascinating so I was pleased it was referenced in this story.  Good show, writers!

So lets get down to it fiends!  Body Count?  This film came in with a nice round eight. Number of killers? Two. Boob count? Three. Cheap Thrills? One. Actual Spooks Endured? One. Raven’s Scream Meter says?  One out of Five Screams – if the ending didn’t totally suck, it would have scored better, but the ending was such a fail I detracted overall points from it. Sorry not sorry. Anyway, it wasn’t the worst film I’ve seen but unless you are super into horror or Satanic stories, you probably won’t dig this film much.  Thanks for tuning in ghosts and ghouls, and feel free to comment below!  Happy Sunday and stay spooky!