March-April Wrap!

Wow, what a crazy couple months here at Rock, Paper, Hatchet.

First, we received our first ever comments!  Thank you to those readers who left notes--it's personally encouraging AND it confirms that our comments function is working.  So that's a double win which we needed badly because . . .

Second, we watched some soul-crushingly awful movies.  Ranking them is sort of like weighing the relative merits of poison ivy, athlete's foot, head lice, and dry socket.  After you've had all four in a two-month span, talking about them again is as appealing as wading into a pond of leeches.

But since it must be done (does it really?  what's wrong with us?), let's jump right in!  Come on in, the water's fine and full of parasites ready to relieve you of all of that blood you've been hoarding.

Paul's Rankings (with links to his reviews):
1)  The Veil:  What the hell?  How did The Veil win?  It's like the Donald Trump of horror movies--and Donald Trump is already the horror movie of democracy!  Still, The Veil had its moments and a single effective jump scare.  It probably helps that the visual quality was so dim that it was like watching a turned-off TV.

2)  Curve:  A young woman drives off a cliff.  That's the beginning of the story.  It probably should have also been the end.  But at least the basic rules of space and time are adhered to.

3)  The Diabolical:  Ali Larter lives in a house with monsters.  When a strange man shows up asking to buy the house, she sells it and lives happily ever after.  Err.  No.  I mean she doesn't sell it, thus ushering us into a world in which the laws of space, time, and real estate no longer apply.

4)  The Hollow:  Could possibly be useful in "enhanced interrogation" procedures. 


Joe's Rankings (with links to his reviews):
3)  The Diabolical:  It's a three-way tie for third, out of four! I just want to be clear that there are no winners here, and not even any runner-ups. Instead, there are movies like The Diabolical, where a bleeding booger monster causes one child to step on a dinner plate, and prevents another from breaking a window. THE HORROR.

3)  Curve:  A woman makes a series of terrible decisions and winds up bumbling her tormentor to death.

3)  The Veil: Features the best jump scare, and the most cockamamie plot. But...it's kinda racist. And half of the movie is watching other people watch a bad movie.

4)  The Hollow:  One of the worst tropes in horror is the screaming woman who can't calm down. In this movie, there are three of them, and they're up against a monster that's attracted to loud noises. I SAID, IT'S ATTRACTED TO LOUD NOISES.

CURVE (2015) [Joe's Review]

. . . She winds up eating a rat, trying to drink her own pee, and feebly trying to saw her own leg off . . .

A woman on a road trip decides to give a handsome hiker a ride, but when he turns out to be a psycho, she drives her truck into a ravine. Stuck in her truck with the psycho on the loose, she’ll have to fight to survive!

CURVE (2015) [Paul's Review]

. . . Is it fate?  Is it destiny?  Nope, it's a sadistic predator with a knife! . . .

When stalked by a homicidal psychopath, do you ever pause to think: is this all my fault?  Or is this just fate?  At the center of Curve, which is in almost every other way a paper-thin and derivative thriller, is this abstract question of free will and culpability.  Don’t get me wrong, Curve ain’t a thinker by any means (e.g.  minutes into the film the cute actress is rendered shirtless by being hilariously defeated by a can of soda, followed by a meet cute with the hunky actor who, not to be outdone, loses his own shirt in what we can only imagine is sympathetic stripping).  But by making bad decisions and unlikely timing into the theme of the film, all of the individual plot contrivances seem less like flaws and more like cosmic symbolism.