Ultimately Saturday was disappointing in our viewing choices. We’re trialing Shudder UK on Amazon at the moment so we hoped this would open up a larger choice of horror for us.
Our first choice was the ABC’s of Death. My husband has wanted to watch this for a while and I thought we’d seen it, confusing it with another horror anthology. Anyway, we agreed we hadn’t seen it, we like horror film shorts so we gave it a go. The premise for the film is directors from around the world are given a letter from the alphabet and then have full rein in how they portray death. So it multicultural too and with subtitles making us feel all hipster and superior until we watched F is for Fart. It went downhill from there. Honestly, I did enjoy some of the shorts at the beginning. It is just they started to descend into the absurd and the crude. For some people (namely my husband) they would find this funny but he knows it’s not my cup of tea. I don’t appreciate watching a story about a rogue poo or Japanese girls farting. I don’t like toilet humour. It was such a mixed bag that we gave up about letter J. Many of the shorts were incredibly surreal and if you like that it may be worth trying but it’s not for me. We enjoyed Dogfight and Bigfoot but things just got weirder as we got further in.
It’s always hard for us to come to a mutual decision and it was getting late so I choose Seance . I’ll admit I make the worst choices but I can be a brat so it’s best to let me get my own way.
It starts with the basic premise of two girls and two boys, that look too old to still be in college. One girl (Sarah) is now teetotal because of some nameless “big trauma” that happened in her wild party days. The other girl (Eva) is a medium and witch, annoyingly making her born again Christian friend have a tarot reading. The boys include a wild boy whose in a band (Joey) and Marcus who is a security guard at the local morgue. Joey says Eva is making up her abilities and wants to film her contacting the dead. They bet that if she proves it then he has to join a church choir and give up his band and if he proves she’s faking then she has dance in a bikini on stage at his gigs for the next year. The morgue is obviously the place to film this. Marcus obviously doesn’t value his job.
You know what happens. Seance goes wrong, somebody breaks the circle and one of them gets possessed. Only one gets out alive. It’s standard. Son number complained about the acting from the beginning and the characters abilities to carry on walking around with injuries you need morphine for. It’s cheesy. I don’t mind some cheese but the message behind the movie really got my back up. The medium/witch dabbled with forces she couldn’t put back so Christianity is the only way of saving the day. Not only that throw in some pro-life propaganda. We wondered if there was an index in their bible that directed them to the exorcism rites or is there an exorcism for dummies section in their edition. Christian girl seemed to be suddenly an expert on exorcism which I don’t think they cover in standard Sunday school. So my opinion, one big nope to this one. It offended me and not in the right way.
Once Upon The Wytching Hour 