bastian-kreuzer Reviews

American Terror Story (2019)

Low budget junk

[2/10 · 16 August 2019]

That's the best words I can find to describe it.

I am fine with movies that have certain limitations due to budget constraints. As long as the people involved at least try to get past those limitations with imagination and creativity. This is not the case with this movie. There is zero imagination and creativity on display. The lack of talent in front and behind the camera is painful to observe.

There's a bunch of technical issues that are caused by the low production values. The cinematography is not that great. The lighting could be better. The sound is a disaster. There are unintentional echoes. Lips moving but nothing can be heard. Words come with a delay.

I could forgive the technical issues if the movie wasn't so boring and lackluster. Its just one of many generic ghost "horrors" that are floating around these days because they're easy and cheap to make. It has no name actors in their mid 30s posing as college kids, uninspiring bland locations and some generic gore. Like most of them this one isn't scary either.

The ghost in this one is a young Chinese girl wearing a wedding dress and she makes people commit suicide. The reason for it is explained in a few short scene because the director and writer just couldn't be bothered to come up with a decent backstory. And its not just the ghost's backstory. They just didn't bother to come up with a decent story and a script for the entire movie.

The most creative part of the movie is actually the title. The movie is insipid, predictable and boring. There is no tension, surprising twists, excitement, interesting scenes or conversations, or any horror in this movie. It is just a pile of slow moving stinking garbage.

It was hard to sit through this one. I felt bored and numb. The one emotion it inspired was a feeling of anger. Its frustrating to see that junk like this gets produced and is peddled around as a legitimate horror movie. I would stay away from it if I were in your place.

Pentagram (2019)

The Pentagram of Boredom and Nothingness

[2/10 · 9 August 2019]

The movie is fine for about 15 minutes until the protagonists get caught inside the titular pentagram and you realize there won't be much more to the movie than that.

There's not much mystery about the evil entity as we see it a few minutes later. There's just some shaking and a badly designed CGI demon Asmodeus appears and drags the English guy to hell. Lucky for him. You're still stuck with an hour of the movie left to go and four people left alive. I wish the whole thing had just ended right then and there.

According to the synopsis these people are teenagers. Yeah, right. Well, at least they behave like they're 12 although they look like they're on the wrong side of 30.

Candles play a big part in the movie. The gut wrenching sequence of fetch the candle was so tense it had me on the edge of my seat. I thought they were dead for sure when they lost that last candle. But, hey, the junkie girl saved the day with her tiny tealight. Well done, girl. Who knew that small tealight was gonna burn as long as the foot tall and three inches wide massive candles.

I kinda thought that the bad guy was making the most sense the whole time. At least he was trying to resolve the situation. He should have just shot them all and left. But what the hell do I know. He was clearly the bad guy here.

What do you do when you get trapped inside a cursed pentagram? You go to sleep. What else would you do? Luckily no one had to use the toilet for the entire night.

On the whole this movie has much too little to offer. It looks cheap. It is shot in almost exclusively one location and that is just an ordinary room. The characters are weak and shallow. I found myself not really caring about what happens to them. The dialogue is monotonous and boring. Some of this is on the script, some on the wooden acting. There's almost zero tension. The horror element is not present. The CGI demon is not scary and is only a distant threat.

It probably seemed like an interesting idea for a low budget movie. Unfortunately that is all that remains. An interesting idea. The movie turned out to be an uninteresting dull affair. I would avoid this if I were you.

Blood River (2019)

Unbelievably Bad

[2/10 · 21 July 2019]

That should be the whole review but I'm supposed to write more.

Maybe there is one reason to watch this. You could get a few laughs at the expense of the ridiculous plot and wooden acting.

There are some things that really boggle one's mind though. A serious filmmaker shouldn't make so many dumb mistakes in one movie. There is so much nonsense in this movie that you have to wonder how it got funded and produced.

Right off the bat you know what you're in for as far as acting is concerned. The dialogue is wooden and slow. These people wouldn't be able to act if their lives depended on it. Linnea Quigley doesn't care. She's there for the check. She didn't even bother to remove her upper lip piercing even though a part of the story happens during the American Civil war. There's a bunch of female nudity in the movie but none of the women are attractive.

Blood River is a town that consists of three shacks and has six inhabitants in total. Two of them are vampires. There's a bar, a garage and a boarding house. There's a lot of woods.

One of the girls gets turned into a vampire. Her fake dentures look like horse's teeth. The second girl that gets turned winds up without her nose. The vampire queen has a couple of extension cords coming out from her lady parts and she sucks blood with them. The guys who fight the vampires just happen to have holy water in their pockets. Things like that happen throughout the movie for no reason whatsoever.

Its hard to find the right words to describe just how bad this movie really is. The acting is terrible. The plot is inane. Things just happen for no reason. The special effects and gore aren't that special. This is an example of pure schlock coming from director Christopher Forbes. Its only watchable for the so bad its actually funny factor. Just make sure you don't pay a single penny to watch it. That would be exactly one penny too much.

Blood Child (2017)

Bellow average horror with a boosted rating

[2/10 · 19 July 2019]

Over 80% of people who rated this movie gave it at least a 9 out of 10 stars. That means that they think this movie is Oscar worthy. Or at least that it is one of the best horror/thrillers ever made. If you watch 5 minutes of the movie you will see that this is completely untrue. Good job on the fake rating, crew and whoever else was involved. It should be at least 2 or 3 points lower.

I'm calling BS on the whole based on a true story myth. At least it didn't happen the way the movie portrays the story. Its about a ghost child who feeds on blood and shows itself through phones and computers. It is responsible for a few deaths as well. Gimme a break.

Everything about this movie screams average or bellow average. The direction, cinematography, editing. It definitely has the look of a low budget or a TV movie. Most of the movie is shot in a house and it looks very bland and boring. Like a soap opera.

The plot, the script, the acting...The movie is filled with B or C list actors that no one has ever seen or heard of before. The female lead is not up to her task. She whimpers away with her annoying voice through the entire movie. It was just a weak character. The male lead is just a generic man character. They have zero chemistry between them. The other actors get lost in the blandness. The characters are all pretty much generic and overall unlikable so I didn't care what happened to them at all. The only one who stands out is the maid Siti who gets to speak in an accent and is the only likeable character in the movie.

The blood child is a blonde little girl in a red dress who pops out from time to time to scare people. The only problem here is that the blood child isn't scary at all. She's just a bit pale and blotchy. So the whole horror aspect of the plot goes out the window. Not that I found the plot that intriguing anyway. Its a standard slow moving ghost child story. It is filled with gaping holes and contrivances that push it to the climax. I guess the one good thing I can say about the overdone twist ending is that Siti, the maid who is treated like crap by everybody, is the only one that survives.

I guess I just wanted to say that it is not as good as the rating suggest. It is not good at all is my personal opinion. You've been warned.

The Dark Within (2019)

The Boredom Within

[2/10 · 10 July 2019]

This movie really does its best to confuse the heck out of you. The director/writer rely heavily on flashbacks for exposition. On top of that time jumps and warped reality are standard parts of the messy plot. Instead of asking myself the question: "I wonder what will happen next?" I found myself wondering "What the hell is going on?" for the most part of the movie. Instead of building suspense and mystery the director/writer seem hellbent on confusing the s--- out of their audience. As well as boring them to death.

It starts well enough with a scene in a military research facility where they're testing subjects for their psychic abilities. Something goes wrong and a bad looking black CGI smoke starts coming from one of the subject's mouth. It turns out that subject 142 and the lead scientist's son had made a psychic connection with an evil entity. We jump to the present and the son is all grown up and a mess. He doesn't remember anything about his childhood. Not even what happened to his parents. We know that something bad has happened to him recently because his shrink tells us. His girlfriend has left him because of that. The shrink suggest that he spends a couple of days in his parents cabin. He does and finds a vial containing some kind of a green liquid hidden under a rock. He decides to drink it on a whim and the fun begins.

This is where conventional storytelling is abandoned and we're thrown on a roller coaster of visions, flashbacks, time warps, dreams, hallucinations...The antagonist finally shows up. Its an ordinary looking CGI monster. I have no idea what its motivation or purpose is. All I know is that it is linked with our protagonist Marcus ( Paul Flannery ) and the green liquid woke it again. It sometimes comes in a shape of a human just to screw with him. At this point in the movie we get a lot of scenes of our hero running around scared and confused. We also get a lot of tedious exposition via flashbacks, dreams and hallucinations. I wish I had counted how many times Marcus suddenly wakes up as if from a dream. The movie plods along with the pace of a snail. The screenplay finally stops torturing the hero and the audience and shows us what really happened to the parents. Marcus decides to get rid of the evil entity because its constantly playing tricks on him. And the movie ends to the relief of everyone.

Final verdict: Not worth watching. It starts interestingly enough but soon becomes boring and tedious. This has a lot to do with the messy, convoluted and confusing plot. The movie relies too heavily on flashbacks and visions as storytelling devices instead of actually telling the story. There's a grand total of zero interesting characters in this movie. The monster isn't scary or interesting either. Its a badly designed CGI that has no clear purpose or motivation. It just appears from time to time and makes strange noises. The scenes with the monster should be a highlight of a movie like this but in this one they just felt oddly irrelevant.

Deadsight (2018)

Boring and annoying...

[3/10 · 5 July 2019]

My guess is the makers of this film just thought: Hey, lets make a zombie movie and have a blind guy and a pregnant woman as the main leads. That should be interesting enough so we don't really have to write a script. Or have a plot. Or have reasonably developed characters. Or any other characters besides the zombies. Right?

Wrong. This movie is boring, annoying and irritating. Most of the movie its just the partially blind guy stumbling around aimlessly. Occasionally a random zombie pops out of nowhere and attacks him. He somehow survives all of this and makes it to a random house in the middle of the woods. For some reason that I cannot recall the young and extremely pregnant police officer winds up at the same house. So now we have a couple of people stumbling around, doing stupid things and occasionally getting attacked by random grumbling zombies. We still don't have a plot though. Or well developed characters. Or a script. There's exactly one more character that has more than one line in the movie and he is there to provide exposition on the zombie outbreak. The reason for the outbreak is very weakly explained as well. But I guess there's your plot.

By all the laws of evolution the two main characters would have never survived the messes they manage to get themselves into. The decisions they make are absolutely horrendous. But since this is a movie they survive till the end just so movie can have the heroic uplifting memorable ending that can actually be seen coming from about a thousand miles away. The ending comes equipped with the sort of annoying music score you would expect.

My advice is don't watch. There is nothing worth watching. You have seen it all before in other better movies.

Amityville: Mt. Misery Rd. (2018)

I laughed a lot.

[1/10 · 14 June 2019]

This "movie" is an equivalent of someone editing their vacation footage into an hour long clip and adding some digital visual and sound effects. Its fine if you do it for your own amusement. In any other way this "movie" is a giant failure. It is laughably bad, amateurish rubbish. Trying to sell this to other people as a genuine horror movie is disgraceful and dishonest. The same can be said about all the positive reviews on here. Adding the name Amityville to the title makes it even more despicable.

Basically everything has already been said by other reviewers. A middle aged guy and his young foreign wife decided to make a movie and shot this thing on their cell phone.

The movie is hilarious although everything about it is beyond awful. It is supposed to be a horror movie but it turned out to be a decent comedy.

The movie was shot on a cellphone and edited by the only two people involved with it. You should know what to expect when it comes to the picture quality, sound effects and special effects. It is truly amateur hour in every way.

There's a couple of songs in the movie written by the director himself. It features some gems like The Buzi Song and Shake Your Booty. Worth a listen if you need a laugh.

What makes this movie so brilliantly horrendous is the acting. There's no script or plot to talk about. The guy is obviously very proud of his wife and she is the centerpiece of many scenes. All the actors in the movie are clearly amateurs and it shows. Its fine. I understand that. What makes the scenes with Karolina/Buzi so bad and just absolutely hilarious at the same time, is that she's obviously trying so hard to act and yet she fails so bad at it. Her accent does not help at all. Buzi might have a nice booty but she is clearly not a talented actress.

Watch this only if you realize this is a horrible movie that has a few so-bad-its-actually-funny moments and you can get it for free. Do not watch if you expect a decent horror movie or if you have to pay even a penny.

Recovery (II) (2019)

Boring & bland. Not worth the rating (warning)

[3/10 · 10 June 2019]

Recovery is a hopelessly bland, boring and confused little movie. It takes place in one location. Inside a secluded rehab center. Apart from a few outside shots of a snowy forest and a house in a forest all you get is the inside shots. Every room just basically looks the same as the other. The trailer is edited to show the viewers anything but that fact. And, yeah, the secluded rehab center has conveniently been cut off from the rest of the world by a raging snowstorm.

The movie centers around the female lead Ronnie (Stephanie Pearson), a former soldier suffering from PTSD. That's the reason why she's turned to drugs. She is also an aggressive, arrogant and obnoxious person that spends half the movie picking fights with other people. There's nothing likeable about her. Ronnie acts as though this were a prison and not a rehab center. She constantly butts heads with others for no apparent reason. She also gets recurring visions of a dead man. These visions tease a supernatural mystery but nothing comes out of that. The dead man she keeps seeing is not part of the main "horror" plot at all. The mystery of the killer is resolved quickly and is as unimaginative as the rest of the movie.

There's other characters in the movie but they're almost not worth mentioning. There's a female doctor and an almost catatonic girl that are in the movie solely because every hero/heroine of a movie needs someone to save. There's no other purpose for them. They are also slightly less unlikable than our lead so maybe the writers thought the viewers might at least root for those two. The killer turns out to be one of the patients. Her explanation: I have some bad habits. I do drugs and I'm a serial killer. That's all we get. The big reveal just sort of happens about halfway into the movie. There is a love story jammed in there as well. Its clumsy and doesn't work. The rest of the cast is there to fill in the empty space. They inevitably get into a fight with our obnoxious lead Ronnie and then get murdered in a very boring way. The director could as well used some cardboard cutouts, splashed some fake blood on them and that would have worked just as fine.

There's really not much blood and gore in this "horror" movie. The poster and the trailer tease you with it but what you get is far from that. Just some stabbings and a few blood stains. This is not nearly enough for a slasher which this movie turns out to be. Again this aspect of the movie is another disappointment.

The conclusion: The screenplay is boring and ordinary. There's absolutely no suspense, tension or mystery. There's precious little blood and gore. The lead character is arrogant and obnoxious. The killer has no real motivation. She is not scary or menacing. You won't care what happens to the characters. The actors do their best with what they're given but it is not much so don't expect any brilliant acting performances. Most of the action takes place inside so it all looks the same. Bland and colorless. The background music is horrible and annoying. It does not help to build the nonexistent suspense and tension. It will only annoy you. Mark my words.

My vote is 1 out of 10. The horror enthusiasts will hate this confused little flick. It is more of a bad drama than a horror.

EDIT: The rating of this movie somehow exploded to 6.9. Talk about undeserved. You have been warned.

Camp Dread (2014)

Dreadful

[2/10 · 26 September 2014]

The fact that Eric Roberts seems to be one of a few competent actors in this movie should tell you something about the quality of acting in Camp Dread. To be fair to the other 'actors' in Camp Dread, I should say that they didn't write the screenplay and the cringe-worthy dialogue by themselves. Someone else did. Director/writer Harrison Smith did. And he botched it. Also the stretch from a has been actor to a has been director is not that big of a leap for Mr. Roberts. He really didn't have to act in this one and collected a paycheck for it. Well played, Mr. Roberts, I guess.

The plot is pretty simple as it should be in a slasher movie. A washed up and penniless horror movie director Julian Barret (Eric Roberts) decides to dabble in reality TV to make some money. He enlists the help of his former scream queen, who is now conveniently a licensed youth counselor, and another old friend of his who gets killed off in about 20 minutes into the movie. I can only assume because he seems like a decent actor and they were going for total incompetence or bust. Add about a dozen stereotypical youngsters as cannon fodder. Explain the rules of the Summer Camp reality show. The fake killer, the insane amount of money that goes to the winner, drop a hint or two about the presence of a real psycho killer and we should have a solid setup for a fun slasher movie.

If you are a horror fan you've probably seen worse ideas turned into good movies and vice versa. You've seen this done before, right? Summer camp, lots of young good looking people and a psycho killer on the prowl. The movie has some good gory kills and a bit of a surprising twist at the end but it still fails to deliver.

The movie is just dull. The setup is solid but once Summer Camp starts, boredom ensues. The kills are few and far between, the fights between the contestants are long and boring. The director tries to generate tension using gimmicks like strange noises outside the cabins, doorknobs jiggling for what seems like an eternity, wrong people showing up in wrong places, etc. I didn't expect any deep character development in this one but it would have been nice if they'd make decision based on logic and common sense. Instead they all seem to have left their brains at home. I've touched the subject of acting already and it seems the big chunk of the acting budget went to Mr. Roberts and Danielle Harris for her ten minute cameo appearance. Some gore and the surprise ending, which really isn't that much of a surprise, don't fix that. The characters just seem to have the memory of a goldfish because they seem to keep forgetting what happened just a few seconds ago. The acting is atrocious at times. The cast is comprised of scrapings from the bottom of the barrel of acting talent. Add a bad screenplay that makes the characters utter some dumb and corny lines and the whole thing results in some cringe worthy dialogues and sometimes monologues. So bad that I had to pause it, rewind and cringe again just to make sure I wasn't hearing things. Annoyed the heck out of me. Even if I'd start to follow the plot and get involved into the story a bit something dumb happened or being said and it just snapped me right back to reality. This is a horrible movie.

Camp Dread doesn't have a lot going for it. It seems like its banking on having two known names in Eric Roberts and Danielle Harris, who's in it for about 10 minutes, to lure people in. Then it just goes through the motions of slasher horror until it ends with a surprise twist. And it isn't much of a surprise anyway. A fun throwback horror movie? Just throw it in the trash. That's exactly where it belongs.