#240 -- Wake Wood (2011)

Rating: 3 / 5
Director: David Keating

Going into this, I wasn't really sure how it was going to go. The synopsis on Netflix said that a grieving couple get the chance to see their dead daughter again, and that it doesn't go quite so well. That didn't tell me for sure that this was going to turn out to be about a killer child, but it doesn't take long to figure that out.

Patrick and Louise's young daughter, Alice, was killed by a German Shephard. Patrick was a veterinarian, told Alice about the dog, and she decided to visit it on her way to school. She tried to feed it some kind of meat, but it wanted her instead. In their grief, the couple moved to a small town called Wake Wood, where Patrick continued working on animals, and Louise worked as a pharmacist. One night, their car broke down and they

red something very strange going on in the backyard: some kind of ritual. Louise was so afraid that she ran home, but they were confronted soon after. Arthur, Patrick's boss and the leader of the rituals, tells them that they can see their daughter again for three days.

For the ritual to work, there are a few things that had to be done. First, the person they wished to raise couldn't be dead for more than a year. They needed a fresh corpse (and since one of Patrick's co-workers was killed by a bull, that was no problem), and some kind of relic that was linked to Alice. That was also no problem, because if it meant they'd get to see her again, Patrick and Louise had no qualms about digging up their daughter's grave to retrieve a locket they gave her for her birthday. The problem was that Alice had been dead for more than a year, but they thought it was worth the risk to lie to Arthur about that. That wasn't a good idea. Some rules are made to be broken, but some are in place for a reason. The reason was that, if the person had been dead for over a year, the ritual wouldn't work quite right.

Alice seemed fairly normal at first, aside from the fact that she returned with a different eye color. But then she turned bad and starting killing everything. She started with their dog, then a pony, then the bull that killed the man I spoke about earlier. She then moved on to the townspeople. There was a certain kind of necklace that could calm the returned people, but it didn't work on Alice. Nothing would calm her. There was also a rule that they could not leave the town once she returned, and if they tried, she started to die again. I don't see why this would fail too, since nothing else about her was the same. But that's just me. With other people, it was easy to get them to return to the land of the dead once their three days were up; but with Alice, they had to work to get her back into the ground.

I thought Wake Wood was a fairly good movie. It was interesting--kind of like a new take on Pet Sematary--and it was done well. The atmosphere was creepy an the cinematography was wonderful. All of the actors and actresses did wonderful jobs portraying their characters, and the effects--though limited--were good. It wasn't scary at all, though. If you're looking for some fear factor, you'll have to look somewhere else. I think the most interesting aspect of this story is how the couple dealt with the grieving of their lost child, and what they were willing to do to get her back. Though I would have liked a little more action, and a little more scares, I thought it was an enjoyable movie.

#234 -- Bloody Birthday (1981)

Rating: 3 / 5
Director: Ed Hunt

You can pretty much tell the basic idea of the movie by looking at the poster. It's got something to do with kids, and a birthday. If you read the synopsis given to you by Netflix or IMDB, you'll know that these children enjoy killing people. Don't be mistaken by thinking that they mean "kids" as in teenagers; no, these are little kids. Like, ten years old. They're Debbie, Curtis, and Steven, and they were all born on the same day in  1970. The first murder happens when a couple is having sex in a grave. The boy is beaten in the head with a shovel, and the girl is strangled by a jump rope. They don't show us, at that point, who the murderer is, but from then on we know exactly what's going on.

The story mostly follows another ten year old boy, Timmy, and his older sister Joyce. Their parents are away on vacation, which leaves Joyce in charge of her little brother. When people all over town start dying, they get pretty nervous. Joyce knows that the kids have something to do with it, but the kids are way too smart for her. A well-placed prank makes all the townspeople believe she's crazy, so there's no way the kids can get caught. At least, not right away. After killing the two teens in the graveyard, they kill the town sheriff, who happens to be Debbie's father, followed by a group of other people. Later on, Curtis acquires the sheriff's gun, so he becomes even more dangerous. I think the kids just like killing people; it doesn't seem like they care who it is, as long as they get some blood on their hands. If something stops them from killing one person, they'll just move on to the next. But the ones they really want are Timmy and Joyce, because they're the ones who can expose them.

It seems that Debbie is the brains behind the operation, Curtis is the muscle, and Steven is just kind of there. They all play their own parts in the murders, though, so don't think there's only one to blame. They even keep a scrapbook of all the people they kill. Creepy, huh? It seems, throughout the majority of the movie, that they're killing people for no reason. But it's all got to do with horoscopes and astrology, which Joyce discovers through a project she's doing. The day the kids were born, there was an eclipse that blocked Saturn. Joyce said that Saturn controls emotions, so the kids should have something missing from their personalities. It could be their conscience, their morality, or their sanity. Maybe their compassion. Or, perhaps, maybe they're all just incapable of feeling anything. Who knows.

Call me a nerd one more time!

So, are the kids any good? I think the little actors actually did a pretty good job. Steven looked crazy, Curtis looked like he didn't belong with them at all (even though he ended up being the worst of the bunch), and Debbie looked exactly like I would expect a killer child to look. She was perfect on the outside; she was sweet and polite and a perfect little "angel face." But on the inside? Cuckoo for cocoa puffs. To me, she was the creepiest one of them all. Would I put them in my top five creepiest kids? No. But I can 't deny that they were creepy, and those actors did a great job.


Bloody Birthday was an okay movie. There wasn't very much suspense, though, since we know all along who the killers are. I think it would have been better if we hadn't known, so we could have that shock value of realizing, "Oh, shit! It's little kids!" I also think that someone would have heard the gunshots as Curtis was shooting his victims down, and that a ten year-old boy with a gun would have been suspicious. So that seemed a little unrealistic to me. But overall, it was a pretty good movie with some creepy little kids taking people out just for shits and giggles.

#212 -- Daddy's Girl (1996)

Rating: 3 / 5
Director: Martin Kitrosser

There's something about killer children that's terrifying; everyone knows that. But there's something about this child that was annoying. I thought it was going to be better than it was; from the synopsis Netflix gave me, I thought it was going to be about a scary little killer child killing everyone in sight. But I was wrong.

It was about Jody, a sweet little 11 year-old girl with some dark secrets. When she was four years old, she watched her mother shoot her father. After that, she was between foster parents. Her first foster mother was killed when she fell down the stairs. She was taken away from her family and sent to a new one. Her new family loved her very much, especially her new father (William Katt, Greatest American Hero). She really loved her Daddy too, and she would do anything to make sure that she didn't lose him like she lost her last daddy. Jody got in trouble a lot at school for fighting with other kids and  misbehaving. Her principal was going to try to send her to boarding school so they could help her. But that meant that she wouldn't be able to live with her Daddy anymore, and she didn't like that idea. So she snuck into school and pushed a bookshelf over on her principal.

Her grandmother didn't like her father, because he was a toymaker trying desperately to make his first sale. He wasn't bringing any money into the house, and Grandma wasn't happy about it. It took her a few tries to kill Granny, but she finally got it right after a while. Her mother wasn't happy with her dad either, because she was tired to being the only person bringing in money. She was talking to her friend, who was a divorce lawyer, because she wasn't sure she could handle the marriage any longer. Jody knew the lawyer friend had to go as well. But Mommy still wasn't sure if she still wanted to be with Daddy, and she was thinking about leaving and taking Jody with her, so Mommy had to go too. And the social worker who was probably going to take Jody away again? Well, he had to go too, of course.

The only person who really thought Jody was up to no good was her father's niece, Karen. Karen did some digging on Jody to figure out if anything in her past could help figure out what was wrong with her. Jody didn't like that Karen was causing trouble. Instead of killing Karen, she told lies about her to make it look like Karen was the crazy one. She said that Karen wanted to be her mommy, and that Karen was killing all these people so that she could have Jody all to herself.

This movie was okay; it definitely wasn't great by any means, but it wasn't horrible either. Jody wasn't really terrifying, as I'd hoped. She was just a badly behaved little girl, and her fear solutions were irrational. The only reason she might have been taken away from her family was because she misbehaved; so everything would have been fine and she just started being a good little girl. But instead of behaving herself, she decided she'd just kill everyone. That's why I thought she was a bit annoying. She was just a little brat who didn't want to behave. Of course, she was troubled by watching her mother kill her father, but she was given more than enough love by her new family. With some help, she would have been able to learn to deal with that.

The end was disappointing, because nothing really happened. I don't know if Jody got to stay with her family, or if she was maybe sent to an institution. I don't know what happened to her, or what happened to her mother (because, like Granny, the first murder attempt was not successful). It was abrupt and gave no resolution to the problem. Overall, it was an all right movie that could have been a lot better.

#144 -- "B" Challenge: Bread Crumbs (2011)

Director: Mike Nichols
Rating: 2/5

I had pretty high hopes for this. It claims to be a dark twist of the classic Hansel and Gretel story, which it is in a sense. But sadly, it just falls short. It had so much potential, but it didn't live up to it at all. What we have is a group of porn film makers at a cabin in the middle of the woods. They spent their first night there getting drunk and acting stupid, and planned on getting their movie started the next day. They never got very much filming done, though, because they all started dying off. There were two children out in the woods, and it seemed as if they were the culprits. They were, of course. They were siblings Henry and Patti. Patti was the brains behind the operation, and Henry was the muscle. Patti would hum a creepy little tune to inform Henry of the actors/crew members whereabouts, and he would show up and take them out. They all acted pretty stupidly. One, once they figured out that the kids were trying to kill them, they decided to go to the kids' house for help. What kind of logic is that? Anyways, Patti says that they live in a house of candy, and that she saw and understood the terrible things that were happening there. I guess "candy" could symbolize temptation in this situation. But I think it means many different things. It could be any of the seven deadly sins. It could be any number of things. The tagline is "we all live in a house of candy." So I guess we're all sinners, and it's up to these two kids to punish us. I'm not quite sure, because it doesn't get that much into it; it just leaves you to form your own conclusion. One thing that really bothered me was the fact that everyone called Patti and Henry little children. I don't know how old those actors are exactly, but I would guess they're around my age (22). They weren't children at all. I think this movie would have been a whole lot better, and a lot creepier, had they cast actual children. There really is something scary about evil children, but adults pretending to be children? It's just stupid and annoying. I also didn't like the lack of an explanation. All the explanation we got was that they lived in a house of candy. That gives us nothing, really. I would have liked more. It was a dark twist on a fairy tale we all know and love, but it failed on so many levels. First of all, it wasn't scary at all. It wasn't even creepy, really. The tune that Patti would hum to call Henry was a little spooky, but it wasn't enough. I hate to see such great potential go to waste, because I believe this movie could have been completely terrifying. Instead, it was boring and disappointing. The ending was stupid, and there was no real suspense leading up to it. Some parts were funny, but sadly, the best character was the first to die. In conclusion...Bread Crumbs was a huge let-down. What I thought would be a scary fairy tale turned out to be a yawn-fest that failed at being even remotely creepy. The killers were a couple of unintelligent 20-somethings pretending to be little children, and it was just poorly thought out. On the drawing board, this probably looked fantastic. But once it was put on film, it failed to be anything other than a one-time view for people who are bored.