A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)

1985
Directed by Jack Sholder
Starring Mark Patton, Kim Myers, Robert Rusler, Clu Gulager, Hope Lange and Robert Englund

Longtime readers of the blog (all seven of you, by last count) are well aware of my longtime fascination with the Friday the 13th franchise.  Like, to the point of psychosis.  While it's hard for anyone to believe who has heard me wax rhapsodically about Jason Voorhees and his many, many sexy exploits over the years, there was a time when I was absolutely obsessed with Nightmare on Elm Street.

Everyone who knew me during my sophomore year of high school is well aware of this, as I escalated into the full-blown sad sack fan fiction phase and concocted various ways that the series could continue in the 1999 world that no longer seemed to give a shit about Freddy Krueger.  It all started with New Line re-releasing the movies in DVD and VHS box sets that year; I'd never seen most of the movies before, and I was all over that shit.  Like a misguided sheep.  On the first day that I had that badass VHS set (with artwork, by the way, that absolutely destroyed the DVD set with all of its fancy-dancy extras and documentaries) I watched the first three movies, highly re-enjoying the first and being utterly blown away by Dream Warriors.  In the middle of that...was Freddy's Revenge.

And what a weird movie it is.  Still to this day, this is just a fascinating little flick.  Released a little over a year after the original, Wes Craven balked at bringing this movie to life himself because he didn't care for the plot involving the hero of the movie to become possessed by Freddy and do his evil deeds for him.  It's undoubtedly the black sheep of the series in that regard, although it IS kind of forgivable.  At this point, Freddy wasn't a household name yet, and the rules of the series hadn't been firmly established.  Even with this caveat, the movie is a zillion times weirder than anyone would ever expect, so let's get to it.

It's been five years since Nancy Thompson bested Freddy in the finale of the original film, and now, a new family is living in the (in)famous Elm Street house.  And what a family this is.  The dad is played by Clu Gulager of all people, and he gets to give us classic lines like "You know what he used?  He used a goddamn cherry bomb."  The adorable kid daughter really enjoys cereal toys.  And then we meet our main character for the film with the girliest scream this side of Ned Flanders yelling about purple drapes, one Jesse Walsh.

Played by Mark Patton, there has been entire essays written about this character and the supposedly hidden subtexts contained within this movie regarding the character's sexuality.  Truth be told, there is quite a bit within this movie to support the idea that it's all some sort of extended metaphor for Jesse trying to come to terms with his gay side.  I only mention this because it's mentioned in every other online review you're likely to find out there on the interwebz, but...it's there.  Trust me, and there's a hell of a lot to support the theory.  At any rate, Jesse is actually a pretty likable main character, a somewhat geeky but overall really nice guy who has quickly become fast friends with local hottie Lisa (Kim Myers, who kind of looks like an '80s teen version of Meryl Streep if you cross your eyes) while also inexplicably befriending school bully Grady (Robert Rusler).  And catching the eye of his new school's sexually sadistic gym teacher.  Wait, what?

Now, Freddy's Revenge spends a LOT of time with these characters.  This was back in the day when the goal of horror wasn't specifically to make audiences dislike every character and cheer for their demise; they wanted you to care about the characters, and no matter how unsuccessful the attempt was, it was there.  They REALLY tried with this movie, and that's both a plus and a minus.  A plus because the kill scenes do carry some weight, but a minus because there ain't much Freddy Krueger in this movie.  You've probably noticed by now that his name hasn't popped up yet, and that's no accident. 

See, Freddy is popping up in Jesse's dreams every so often making vague allusions about the "special work" that they have in store for Elm Street...and the entire town of Springwood at large, I guess.  They escalate more and more, the idea being that Freddy is gaining more control over Jesse's actions by the minute.  The climax of this plot development?  A scene where the aforementioned gym teacher is stripped naked and whipped to death by towels.  Yup.  The scene is there.  I promise.

That's where this flick really suffers.  It's not scary in the least bit.  The first movie, despite its faults, has this almost kind of dingy, flat ability to disturb you with its low-budget grittiness.  The third has such a powerful story that losing a character feels like losing a family member.  This one has Jesse, but everyone else is milquetoast, so they're all pretty disposable.  And the actual death scenes are lame to the nth degree.  Example: Before said gym teacher bites it, there's this extended sequence where he's terrified by flying basketballs (ah!).  Another example: the endless scene where the Walsh family runs in terror from the pet parakeet run amok, just before said parakeet explodes into flames (the horror!).  Methinks that screenwriter David Chaskin had other things on his mind when writing this screenplay than attempting to horrify audiences with his horror screenplay.

Now, the movie DOES pick up traction in a big way when the finale hits, a pool party where Freddy fully assumes control of Jesse's body and murders everyone left and right.  We eventually wind up at an abandoned building where Freddy supposedly worked, and all of this truly bizarre Lovecraftian shit that Lisa overcomes as she tries to save her new boyfriend from a fate far worse than death.  I guess.  This is one of those movies where Freddy is never given any sort of exploitable weakness, so when his death comes, it comes in such a weird, unexpected way that it doesn't have much impact.  And then we get a post-climactic denounment for the ages that tops the first movie in its "WTF?" quotient.

So...yeah.  Upon giving this movie another watch many years after my original obsession phase, it's a really interesting movie that unfortunately has LONG spells of boredom.  It's got a fascinating little yin-yang juxtaposition between Jesse and Freddy, and both Mark Patton and Robert Englund were more than up to the task of making these parts work.  As a horror flick, though, Freddy's Revenge doesn't amount to much.  There's a reason why the hardcore ANOES fans never show this one to people first to try and convert new fans, because it's so different from the rest of the series, and it's also not bad in the "so bad it's good" way. 

** out of ****.  It's definitely worth a watch if you're remotely interested in the Nightmare franchise.  Avoid otherwise, because the fun factor just isn't here when compared to the rest of the franchise.

Curve (2015)

2015
Directed by Iain Softley
Starring Julianne Hough and Teddy Sears

Alright, folks, time for some off-topic bitching. 

The Lick Ness Monster is a huge pro wrestling fan.  Having said that, WWE has just been an increasing chore to watch for the previous ten years or so, and I know that my sentiments are shared by a great many people on the great, grand interwebz.  There is no other entertainment company that I can think of that so actively goes against the grain of what their audience wants, seems to hold such outright disdain for anyone who takes their product more seriously than the casual Twitter reaction crowd that they crave so much, and can take performers that are white-hot over with their live crowds and make it so that those very same people don't care about them in the least bit within a matter of months.  Lo and behold, a lot more people besides myself are starting to tune out.  The ratings have taken a giant hit in the last year alone, dropping from the 4.2 million range all the way down to the 3.2-3.3 zone with regularity.

Fortunately, for 10 weeks every Spring and Autumn, I have an excuse to take the ol' Monday Night Bore off my DVR.  That excuse, of course, being my other guilty pleasure: Dancing With the Stars.  Now there's a hard segue.  I first discovered this glorious show after moving back home from college (my parents, along with seemingly everybody else in the 50+ age demographic, watched it back then), and, no joke, it's everything Raw isn't these days.  Entertaining, unpredictable, and satisfyingly scripted, the show is just 100% sliced awesome.  The fact that it boasts an endless array of gorgeous professional dancers doesn't hurt, either, as the current crop might be their best ever.  From edgy ballroom queen Witney Carson to Aussie stunners Peta Murgatroyd and Sharna Burgess, it's endless eye candy and talent on display every single episode.  Which brings me to one of the main things that hooked me on the show back when I first started watching, and the star of the movie in question today:  Julianne Hough. 

Insanely talented and certifiably hot, she was THE must-see attraction of the show for years.  Nonetheless, I followed her movie career pretty closely.  So far, I've been impressed.  The remake of Footloose pretty much sucked, but she was aces as the groupie in Rock of Ages.  Here, she's legit carrying a movie.  Regardless of the relative quality of Curve, there's no denying that, since she's the ONLY performer on camera for a good deal of the brisk running time.  That, folks, is probably the longest and most segue-tastic intro I've done in a long time, so let's get to the movie.  Be prepared, because this one is going to be spoiler-riffic.

This is yet another movie that more or less passed the theatrical stage and has gone straight to Netflix.  It's an example of "less is more" that isn't quite played to perfection, but it most certainly has its moments.  Here's the setup: Hough plays Mallory, a young woman on her way to Denver for her wedding rehearsal, traveling across the back roads of Colorado in her fiance's vehicle.  We learn from an early phone conversation with her sister that the guy she is marrying is kind of a dick: he's a career-driven person who is ditching their honeymoon for work reasons, something that Mallory is none too pleased about.  To say nothing about the porno stash that she finds in the car at one point, ramping up his unseen asshole quotient to the nth degree.  And then Mallory takes the metaphorical, Bugs Bunny-esque wrong turn at Albuquerque.

Well, Mallory's car breaks down after deciding to take the scenic route to Denver, and that's when random passer-by Christian (Teddy Sears) shows up.  After getting her vehicle going, he sends Mallory on her way...but something pushes her back to offer him a ride.  It's done subtly enough, suggesting that Mallory is considering this guy for a pre-marital affair.  A bit of pleasant conversation follows, and then Christian turns darker than midnight, pulling a knife on Mallory and giving her directions to an abandoned motel.  Noticing that he isn't wearing a seat belt, she attempts to kill him by driving her car off the road.  Upon waking up, Mallory is stuck inside the car, upside down, while Christian is outside, laughing, mocking, and ready to play a game with Mallory.

A good portion of the flick is just this, with Mallory pinned inside the car and doing her best to survive.  Again, I have to give Hough all kinds of credit here.  The material is admittedly pretty boring - it's your basic Hatchet level survival crap, as she lights fires, kills rats, eats, drinks her urine...you know, the usual.  What ISN'T usual is the level of desperation that she manages to portray during the whole ordeal.  Folks...she's completely believable in this role, and does a fantastic job getting the audience on her side.  Even moreso when creepy Christian periodically shows up again to laugh at Mallory and play more strange mental games with her.

It's weird.  Whenever Christian shows up, I think the movie actually LOSES a little bit of steam.  There's an old bit that I saw on Unsolved Mysteries about the case of Christine Scoobish, a mother who died in a car accident similar to the one depicted here whose three-year-old son survived for days only to be rescued when a figure believed to be the mother's spirit appeared to random passer-by.  That segment gave me a major case of the skin-crawling willies...picturing surviving in a similar predicament for days is just universally scary.  What ISN'T is the acting of Teddy Sears here.  It's just...I don't know what it is, he kind of Daniel Day-Lewis's this movie, overacting at some points and hamming it up at others.  While Hough is believable, I didn't think this dude was in the slightest, and he just comes off as a cartoon character.

Fortunately, the flick redeems itself in the final trimester, as Mallory is able to rescue herself and find her way to a farmhouse where Christian has been playing a decidedly DIFFERENT game.  I'll leave it up to you to discover how that turns out, but suffice to say, this flick has one of those stand-up-and-cheer endings, a rare thing in and of itself in horror these days.  So +2 points to the movie there.

Thus, while there isn't anything minty fresh here in Curve, it's definitely got enough to warrant a watch.  It's got some harrowing stuff featuring little more than survival techniques and a climax that pops pretty well enough to overcome its Dick Dastardley-for-the-sake-of-being-Dick Dastardley villain.  And it's got Hough in what I consider a truly star-making turn.  And since she was one of the reasons that I have a show that keeps me sane twice a year, she gets a pass for life anyway.

** 1/2 out of ****.  It's not a mind-blowing experience, but it's worth a shot.  Better than seven out of 10 episodes of Monday Night Raw, even.

The Monster Squad (1987)

1987
Directed by Fred Dekker
Starring Andre Gower, Duncan Regehr, Stephen Macht, Stan Shaw and Tom Noonan

Most kids in my age bracket know about this flick.  Released in 1987, some people actually consider The Monster Squad a better version of The Goonies then, well, The Goonies.  I can't say that I watched this movie a ton as a kid; I think I caught it once on TBS in the early '90s, liked the hell out of it and swore to the very heavens that I'd record it the next time it popped up.  Two weeks passed, and I forgot about it.  Now, here we are some 25-odd-years later and I'm a grouchy 32-year-old.  Does it hold up? 

The eagerly awaited answer to that question: Yeah, pretty well.  I don't think it's QUITE as good as The Goonies, myself.  But if I'd watched this movie constantly as a kid, I probably would have liked it better.  These were kids who were into all of the stuff that I was.  Comic books, movies, video games...you name it.  And they got to drop a lot of four-letter words, shoot guns, and kill stuff.  As such, this is still a movie that has a massive cult following after its initial box office disappointment.  In that vein, it's very similar to Night of the Creeps, which was also directed by Fred Dekker.  In addition to Dekker, we've also got Shane Black co-writing the screenplay - he of Predator, The Last Boy Scout and Iron Man 3 among other things.  Folks, remember the days when movies aimed at children weren't completely pussified and had an edge to them?  The Lick Ness Monster remembers.

This is yet another one of those movies that practices the "less is more" approach, and I love it.  82 minutes long, and that's including the ending credits, so we've got no time for bullshit.  Meet the Monster Club, led by wise guys Sean (Andre Gower) and Patrick (Robby Kiger), cool kids who spend their days debating how to kill werewolves and vampires and discussing the merits of old Universal monster movies.  In addition to that, the first time we see Sean he's wearing a shirt that reads "Stephen King rules."  Rounding out the group is Horace (Brent Chalem), a scaredy cat dubbed "Fat Kid" by everyone else in the movie; Eugene (Michael Faustino), a rather nondescript kid who brings his dog to all of the meetings; and new recruit Rudy (Ryan Lambert), junior high rebel who rocks the '50s retro thing like a boss.

Back when I first saw this movie, I thought Rudy was purely and simply the shit.  If I'd managed to commit The Monster Squad to VHS tape back then, I probably would have wanted to BE Rudy just like I wanted to be Corey Haim's character in Watchers.  Even these days, this guy is undoubtedly the coolest thing that the movie has going for it.  More importantly, Rudy gives the group a good balance of different personalities, which makes the action stuff pop better once it starts to hit.

When this movie came out, it was a much-ballyhooed renaissance for all of the classic Universal monsters together in one movie.  We've got Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Gill-Man and the Wolfman all on the bad guy side of things.  Well, mostly, but you'll have to watch the movie for yourself to find how that works out.  It seems that Abraham Van Helsing failed in his attempt to rein in evil at the conclusion of Bram Stoker's novel (which was a nonfiction book, I guess, according to this flick - it isn't really spelled out), as some sort of way-out-there ritual involving a virgin reading German incarnations must be utilized to throw the bad guys into a temporal vortex.  And it's...almost as confusing as that last sentence reads, but it doesn't matter.  At any rate, these guys are now in the present day of 1987 looking for an amulet that will let them take over the world, and only the Monster Club can stop them.

The flick doesn't exactly hit its three-act beats like a Spielberg movie; at times, it is a little all over the place, as we get some protracted bits of humor involving Rudy peeping on Patrick's hot sister and all of the stuff with Sean's policeman father that repeatedly goes nowhere.  I can't say that it matters much.  All of the child actors here do a pretty damn good job with their characters, so much that the batshit insane and occasionally illogical story is easily overlooked.  Once it comes time for them to take the amulet back, steal some wood stakes and arrows from shop class and go monster hunting, the movie is firing on all cylinders, and the climax is pretty damn thrilling.

And it's got Dracula openly calling a five-year-old girl "bitch."  The things we don't get in movies these days.

If there's only one other complaint that I have about this flick, it's that the dude playing Dracula didn't really hit a home run.  I personally think it would have been really cool if they'd managed to get Christopher Lee to play the role, but then again, that wasn't the Universal studios incantation of the character, it was Hammer, so what do I know?  Fortunately, the movie DOES have Tom Noonan as Frankenstein's monster.  Noonan is well-known (okay, by movie nerds like myself) as one of the all-time great creepy villain actors out there, and he's aces here once again.  Get this guy a gold-star for selling Francis Dolarhyde and the Last Action Hero Ripper like a motherf**ker, because he's dynamite.

That about sums it up.  I'll give The Monster Squad *** 1/2 out of ****.  This flick has cool kids, cool action sequences, and a pretty decent story backing it up.  And it's easily available via handy-dandy Netflix instant streaming.  You can't go wrong with 82 minutes of prime '80s goodness here, and it's well worth a watch.

Fire in the Sky (1993)

1993
Directed by Robert Lieberman
Starring D.B. Sweeney, Robert Patrick, Craig Sheffer, Peter Berg and James Garner

Funny story about this movie - it took me something like 20 years to watch it.

Sometime in 1994, I tuned in to an HBO showing of Fire in the Sky due to the fact that I was a bona fide UFO fanatic.  The ads for this movie were something else for a ten-year-old who had checked out every UFO and paranormal book that the public library (remember those?) had to offer, and this movie didn't disappoint...for about 90 minutes.  The movie's money sequence was ticking by, this insanely creepy alien abduction scene depicting the main character attempting to escape from an alien craft only to find another human onboard with his innards ripped out.  The conclusion of this epic tale is that the Lick Ness Monster's mommy told him to shut the movie off. 

Go ahead and laugh.  But don't f**k with mom.

I couldn't tell you why it took me all this time to track down a DVD copy of this movie, because this flick has more than stood the test of time.  I can also report that having finally seen the rest of that alien abduction scene, it has every bit of hype that it's built up as one of the creepiest alien-related things ever committed to film, which more than justifies my decision to put this movie in my horror movie blog.  Dammit.

For the uninitiated, this movie purports to be based on a true story.  More specifically, a book titled "The Walton Experience" by one Travis Walton, who allegedly endured this experience in 1975 while on a logging job.  Walton is played in the movie by D.B. Sweeney, who does an absolute slam-bang job.  Chalk Sweeney up into the "why didn't this guy make it bigger?" file, because I've liked him in just about everything I've seen him in.  At the very least, surely, this guy has more charisma and likability than, say, George Clooney.  Yeah, suck on it, Cheshire Cat.  Interestingly, while Walton gets a lot of screen time here, it's actually his best friend Mike Rogers (Robert "T-1000" Patrick) who is the star of the show.  A family man with two kids and a younger sister who happens to be dating Travis, it's Patrick who gets the unenviable task of making the emotional part of the story pop, and he's more than game for the task.  The script springs us right into the intrigue, as Rogers and his team of loggers speed back from the wilderness for reasons that we aren't aware of yet.  Before long, they are telling their incredible story to the town Sheriff and Lieutenant Frank Watters (James Garner), a cowboy-hat wearing scenery chewer who serves as the chief representative of law enforcement throughout. 

That story begins with scenes establishing Mike, Travis and the rest of the team.  There's bad seed Allan Dallis (Craig Sheffer), sensitive guy David Whitlock (Peter Berg), Texas transplant Bobby Cogdill (Bradley Gregg) and 17-year-old Greg Hayes (Henry Thomas), all of whom instantly recognizable in their traits, and each actor fitting each one like a glove.  While the script gives a decent amount of time to each dude, it's Sheffer who shines the brightest whenever he's on screen; you totally buy him as this guy with a long rap sheet who totally despises nice guy Travis for no apparent reason, and the tension that they project is palpable through the screen.

And then, the abduction sequence.  On their way back from a cutting assignment, the guys see fiery red light in the forest sky.  Thus begins the strange odyssey of Travis Walton, who gets out of the truck to investigate a bizarre hovering craft overhead only to get jerked around (but not jerked off, as Jim Ross would say about a ladder match-interfering Lita) by an invisible force.  Believing him dead, Mike speeds away, a choice that he comes to regret dearly as the movie goes on.  The panic subsides, and eventually Mike drives back to look for Travis, only to find that he has disappeared from existence.

Of course, nobody in the town believes their story.  Even if you don't know anything about this real-life case, none of the stuff in Fire in the Sky will shock you.  A decent portion of the middle of the movie concerns the police investigation into Mike Rogers and his team, with Frank doing his best Jim Rockford routine as he sweats Mike.  Most of the townsfolk suspect Dallis, the guy with the criminal rap.  And never trust a white guy who wears a do-rag.  While none of this stuff is minty fresh, it really does hit hard just how much the disappearance eats away at Mike's soul.  The soft-spoken tough guy role is one that Patrick has done on more than one occasion, but I've never seen it done better than here.  There's a great "climax before the climax" bit as Mike and the boys agree to undergo a lie-detector test, which reveals that all of them are telling the truth. 

And then Travis shows up again, naked, traumatized, and suffering from frequent flashbacks that get shown to the audience.

Now, the movie really is a big build-up to the abduction scene.  Having seen that first bit, where Travis escapes from a cocoon-like pod and bumps into the aforementioned dead body was scary enough to me as an 11-year-old kid.  Now, at 32, I can wholeheartedly report that my mom made the right call back then, because the rest of the abduction scene would have absolutely f**kin' traumatized me as a kid.  Even now, it's some pretty disturbing stuff, although I do recommend that everyone track down either a copy of the book or the episode of Paranormal Witness that deals with this incident for Walton's actual version of what went down on the ship.  It might be slower-paced, but it actually might be a little MORE disturbing specifically for that reason. 

This is a movie that definitely qualifies as a cult film.  I'm actually surprised that it didn't do better in theaters in 1993, since this was smack dab in the middle of the UFO/conspiracy/paranormal gobbledygook boom.  But in the previous decade, a small but loyal fanbase has found this flick and come to admire it for all of the reasons outlined above.  It's slick, it has fantastic acting, and it's buildup to that one money scene is another one of those things that shows that no matter how many jump scares Michael Bay and his Platinum Dunes team throw at you, nothing beats a protracted case of dead silence followed by disturbing imagery.  It beats goddamn explosions every time.

*** 1/2 out of ****.  It's a 20-year journey that was well worth the wait, and this is a flick that I highly recommend to all horror and sci-fi fans out there.

Visions (2015)

2015
Directed by Kevin Greutert
Starring Isla Fisher, Anson Mount, Gillian Jacobs, Jim Parsons, Joanna Cassidy and Eva Longoria

Time for everyone's favorite segment of this blog that has literally two dozen readers on a weekly basis - the boring life and times of Jon Lickness.

Now, there's a lot of things that I do to pass my time, but one of my recent favorites (as in, I just picked this up a couple of years ago) is coming up with murder mystery stories.  And when I say "coming up with," that's what I mean.  I don't actually write a full story; it's just a base framework, a cast, and a brief write-up.  You know, the kind of shit you'd find on the back of a DVD box.  Sometimes they're Joe Eszterhas-style potboilers (that I dub "Murderotica" - creative, I know), sometimes they're straight-up Sherlock Holes-esque detective stories, and sometimes they've got a whole lot of cops and forensic mumbo-jumbo.  You want volume?  I just counted, and I've done 288 of these in the last 18 months.  That's lots and lots of titles.  And since they all have somebody dead and a crime to be solved, it's a massive list of titles like "Dead Weight," "Cold Sweat," "Hidden in Sight."  You know, very by-the-book 1940s serial crap titles. 

But let me just say that if I ever come up with a title as lame and uninspired as "Visions," I'm quitting writing.  For good, forever.

That long-ass intro out of the way, here's the background info:  it's directed by Kevin Greutert (the editor of a lot of the Saw flicks), it's got some cast for a movie that went straight to Netflix, and it's just as by-the-numbers as its title.  For the most part.  Don't ask me how you make a movie with women as hot as Isla Fisher and Eva Longoria boring, but this flick manages to pull it off.  Hell, it has Jim Parsons in it and I didn't even hold this fact against the movie, so nobody can say that I didn't give Visions a shot.

I'm going to try to make this review as brief as possible, just to spare everyone else of the experience of sitting through something this tepid, so here goes.  The movie starts with a car accident involving Eveleigh Maddox (Fisher), a pretty horrific wreck where a baby is killed.  Flash forward a year, as Evie and her husband David (Mount) are now living in the country.  But it's better than the regular ol' country.  It's wine country, as Evie wants to make a go of it as a vineyard owner.  She's also expecting a baby, and that's essentially your setup.  We've also got a major guilt complex for Evie that is mentioned in the few scenes that she shares with her close friend Sadie, as she's wracked with pain over the accident and the death that she's connected to. 

And that's not just lip service - Fisher is really good in this movie, as are all of the other name actors attached to the marquee.  It's just a shame that the material is so vanilla that it pains me to type this. 

Anyway, the country house that Evie and David have moved into is a very old one, but this isn't your typical haunted house movie.  Evie starts having Visions (capitalized because title, dammit) at random intervals involving all kinds of creepy stuff happening.  Think glass breaking and mannequins.  It's horrifying.  David chalks this up to Evie going off depression medication after finding out she was pregnant; Evie isn't so sure.  See that last sentence?  That's like half an hour of Visions condensed.  Even at 82 minutes, this is a movie that doesn't have much to say.

This movie actually treaded into laugh out loud territory for me early, because I called who the villain would be within the first trimester, what the motivation and villain final speech would consist of, and how it would be revealed immediately after the character relationships were established.  Not to brag but...correct.  Umundo.  I might be zero-for-lifetime in guessing Dario Argento mystery killers, but my accuracy rating on Visions was spot-on.

And...that's pretty much it, folks.  Fisher is pregnant, starts seeing stuff, big final twist.  Now, this flick was filmed in 2013 and slated for a 2014 release, but apparently test screenings were so brutal that they held off on it.  I can see why.  There is nothing worse than a boring, by-the-numbers film, and it's why I will give almost any slasher movie - regardless of how cheaply filmed and technically worse they might be - better reviews than a film like this.  Those movies at least have a heart and soul to them (well, most of the time), and even at their worst are MEMORABLE.  This one is exiting my brain as we speak.  It's so barren of heart and soul that I haven't even mentioned Jim Parsons' character, because he contributes absolutely nothing to the movie and could have been played by a cardboard cutout holding an EKG meter.

Judgment time.  I award this movie * out of ****, only because the previously mentioned performances are actually pretty good.  But that's it.  Case closed.  It sucks.

P.S. - I actually like Jim Parsons.  I find him to be a good actor.  Having said that, I utterly hate The Big Bang Theory.  Not because it's a bad show or anything (from what I've seen of the 5 or so episodes I've caught, it's a'ight), but because I've heard this manifesto no fewer than ten times in my life: "You know, YOU should really watch that show.  Because I think YOU would really like it."  Which translates in my mind as "yeah, you're a nerd like those guys, so watch that show, you nerd."  Well, f**k you.  I ain't watching your stupid show with all the big words.