AnonymousCoworker

Every year Mrs. ACW rents us up some movies from Netflix, and not just the same old tired pablum that YOU suckers are used to watching (seriously, everything you like is stupid, unless I’m something that you like, and then that one thing is awesome, but it’s not enough to redeem your otherwise terrible taste), but the After Dark Horrorfest.

Now, some people aren’t into horror, so they employ other tactics to select movies that would make other people squirm and to provide themselves an ample amount of self-loathing. Us? We choose horror.

You may have heard me mention previously some of the movies we own: Barn of the Blood Llama (bad), Cannibal! The Musical (hilarious), or Dead Alive (awesome movie from when Peter Jackson was a horror director). But don’t get me wrong. I love some of these movies, but they are TERRIBLE. Just completely unwatchable. Blitheringly, mind-meltingly, horrid.

So I hope you understand when I say the movies for the After Dark Horrorfest are even worse.

The 2006 selections featured some real stinkers*, so unwatchable that Mrs. ACW and I chose to watch some of the movies in fast-forward rather than spend the time to see it at regular speed.

So far the 2007 Horrorfest has been about the same. The first movie we watched, Lake Dead, was just kind of stupid, but not quite bad enough that we watched it in fast-forward. They seemed like they were doing a cheap rip-off of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and House of 1000 Corpses. It was the same old, tired, played out theme of sexy 20-somethings going into the country and being killed by a family of inbred yokels for some reason.

The second movie, Tooth and Nail, was actually not too bad, but it could have been saved by not being a blatant mash-up of 28 Days Later and Firefly. Also, Rider Strong AKA Shawn Hunter from Boy Meets World, was in it. Also, all the “good” characters were named after cars, and the “bad” characters named after dogs. Now that I think about it, it was actually really ham-handed and kind of stupid.

Last night we got about 30 minutes into Mulberry Street, and the movie just couldn’t make up it’s mind about whether or not it ever wanted to get started, so we popped the ol’ DVD player into fast-forward. It reached the point where Mrs. ACW was reading Harry Potter and I was watching the screen flick by while narrating, “Okay, now there’s a rat. And the one guy’s upset. I think the rat bit him. Now he’s a rat. Now he’s trying to bite people. Oh, and the girlfriend just got bit. Now the daughter is on a bike. She’s biking home. Nothing’s happening. Nothing’s happening. There’s a rat. Nothing’s happening,” and so on. It finally reached the point where even in fast-forward the movie was still taking way too long to get to the end, so I started looking around to find something else in the living room that might be interesting to look at.

The thing that gets me is, these movies are advertised as “the content of these films are considered too graphic, too disturbing, and too shocking for general audiences,” when actually I think the problem is that the movies are either too stupid or too boring, which is really saying something considering how much money the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie made.

That said, I’ve got a real crap-factory at home right now in the form of SS Hell Camp. I wasn’t even aware of the genre of Naziploitation before I got this movie from Netflix, but apparently it’s just all around horrible. According to Wikipedia, it’s still banned in the UK! I have a bad feeling that once I begin to explore this super-niche sub-genre, I won’t be able to scrub its contents out of my brain. I’ll let you know how it is.

*Dark Ride, Unrest, and Wicked Little Things redeemed only by their special effects, Penny Dreadful being the stand out best, and The Gravedancers and The Hamiltons being unwatchably bad. I wasn’t even really interested in watching them in fast-forward.