Sunday, November 2, 2014

7 REALLY Bad Horror Films

     I am a fan of horror movies. I simply love them. When you usually think of horror, you think of movies like Scream, or Halloween, or A Nightmare on Elm Street. These are all great examples. Sadly not all horror movies are great. Here's a list to prove that.


House of the Dead
     If it isn't hearing Uwe Boll directed is enough to make you not watch it, it is everything else. The acting, the script, editing, everything. As well as a really bad horror film, HotD is also a video game movie, which most are notoriously bad in their own right.  Fun fact, the first time I had to watch this, it took me a world record five minutes to watch it before changing the channel. The second time was a strength of endurance. I was really hyped to see it in theaters and thankfully I didn't go see it when it came out.


Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare
     One of the bad things that happened with the sequels of some of the greatest horror movie franchises of the 80s and 70s was that some of the plots often venture into crazy WTFness of explanation. Case in point, evil dream demons that at the point of his death, granted Freddy the power to haunt the children of Elm Street in their dreams and killed them. This and the crappy 3D glasses tie-in didn't make this movie very good. It also didn't help that over the run of the original franchise, Freddy Kruger had devolved to your literal worse nightmare into a really charred Looney Tunes character. New Nightmare was redeemable though.


See No Evil
     This not only marked the debut of WWE Films, but it marked the debut of WWE wrestler, Kane, in a film. Wrestlers don't make good actors period. From Hulk Hogan, to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, to  John Cena. They must have been hit hard in the head too many times with the chair to think acting is a good idea. See No Evil did too many of the slasher film cliches. Teens being hunted and killed by huge brawny serial killer, gore-porn, and in the case of the Kane's character, Jacob Goodnight, the serial killer with mother issues, ala Jason Voorhees and Norman Bates. It tried to borrow most of the stuff from other horror movies and it ended up being a jumbled mess.


The Amityville Horror (Remake)
     Most remakes are bad, and Amityville Horror is one of  them. With the original, what worked was the fact that it did the less was more method in horror until the end where things really got fucked up and the house was bleeding. The remake didn't. The remake is a simple case of when overuse of CGI ruins everything. CGI is cool, but too much of it is a bad thing. It went the opposite of scary and went in the direction of outright ridiculousness by doing what most horror movies did with that era, add in sort-of-creepy-not-really CGI, mostly with the scenes with the supposedly creepy ghost girl. Thank goodness for the shirtless Ryan Reynolds though.


Jaws 3
     The thing that made the first Jaws movie scary was that you never got to see much of the shark. This along with the technical difficulties of the mechanical shark led to a great move. This is a technique that works great in horror as it leaves you, the audience to imagine what happens. Jaws 3 decides to sorta ditch this technique and deciding to cash on the franchise as well as the 3D trend too was what made this bad. The 3D scene with the shark moving towards the camera just came off as hilarious instead of scary.


The Ring 2
     I am a big fan of both The Ring, as well as the original Ringu. There are a few parts of Ring 2 that are scary, but the reason Ring 2 is on this list is due to the fact it's not like its first film. The reason behind this is due to how the sequel was made. Instead of the first film which was an American adaptation of a Japanese horror film, Ring 2 was completely 100% American made, an original script. Taking out the key components that we loved from the first film, Ring 2 just comes off as generic and lifeless.


Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
     Even though some won't agree, The Blair Witch Project was scary. Again, going back to what I said with Jaws, the technique of leaving the audience to imagine the fear is a very powerful thing and that is what Blair Witch did. You had to imagine the fear of the witch hunting and stalking the three college students in the haunted forest, picking and killing them off one by one. The first film was a hit, being the most profitable film ever until the release of a film that drew a lot from it, Paranormal Activity. To quickly cash in on the success of The Blair Witch, a sequel was made and went a different, route, to Hell. Book of Shadows decided to ditch the formula from the first film and try to go the route of traditional horror films. It didn't work. It ended almost having little to do with the original film and was almost a parody of it. The moral of the story is, let's not stray away from the winning formula.

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