Grizzly (1976)

1976
Directed by William Girdler
Starring Christopher George, Andrew Prine, Richard Jaeckel, Joan McCall and Joe Dorsey

When I was a kid, I didn't watch He-Man or Transformers.  I was all about TBS creature features, baby.  For those of who too young to remember, TBS used to regularly have marathons of horror movies featuring all kinds of "nature run amok" stories.  Killer spiders, bees, fish, you name it.  Still to this day, if you make something like spiders or snakes scary, you'll get me every time.  But my favorites back then were undoubtedly the "giant killer bear" movies, especially the film in question today.

Folks, I used to friggin' LOVE Grizzly when I was younger.  Amazingly enough, I wasn't even really scared of it (with the exception of one scene, which we'll be getting to in due time).  Just like Gremlins, the impression I had was that this was a really, really big important movie.  Where I got THAT idea is entirely up for debate, but you're reading someone who also thought Wade the Duck from Garfield and Friends was a massive pop culture icon.  I actually thought that this flick was just as big of a deal as Prophecy, and that movie starred Adrian Balboa.  So I guess what I'm trying to say is that Giant Killer Bears = Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley combined in the childhood of Jon Lickness.  I reviewed Prophecy a while back on the blog, and while that film was legit a big-budget, big-star production, this was was not.  Does it hold up?  Well, take a stroll back to 1976 with me and find out.

Ever seen Jaws?  Well, if you have, I reckon you've already seen Grizzly, because it follows pretty much the same plot beats word-for-word.  The charge that it's a Jaws ripoff isn't exactly an original assertion.  Hell, the producers themselves pretty much readily acknowledged it at the time after they were able to scrap their $750,000 together to shoot this thing in the middle of the woods.  As far as Jaws-on-land movies go, though, it ain't too bad, even for a curmudgeonly 33-year-old horror fan.

Your star character is Michael Kelly, and this would be your Roy Scheider guy.  Played by Christopher George, he's a good-natured national park ranger in charge of overseeing a huge spike of tourists headed to the woods for the weekend.  Which works out fantastically for the script, since it means we get plenty of murder victims.  We're introduced to pretty much every side character in the first ten minutes, including the remainder of Kelly's ranger staff.  Of this bunch, the only one who sticks out is the Token Hot Girl who will give us a Token Hot Death soon enough.  The others are photographer Allison Corwin (Joan McCall), source of lukewarm romantic tension and also the daughter of the resort's restaurant owner, along with helicopter pilot Don Stober (Andrew Prine) and naturalist Arthur (Richard Jaeckel), a dude who likes to wander around in bear costumes because reasons.  Hey, I don't write these screenplays.

It doesn't take long for the movie to give us some grizzly action, as two female vacationers (one of them wearing a fantastic mid-'70s halter top) bite it after some vicious paw swipes.  This leads to Kelly having the mandatory scene with the park supervisor that essentially amounts to the police officer in Shane Black movies getting berated by his superiors.  This guy's name is unimportant.  What you need to know is that he's basically Mayor Vaughan from Jaws.  Not long after this, the search is on for the bear, which then leads to another bloody scene as the Token Hot Ranger decides to take a break from searching for the bear to strip down to her underwear and take a dip in the river.  It ends just as well as you'd expect.

I gotta give some credit to the flick as far as how it managed to seem like a much bigger deal than it actually was.  The screenplay says that the bear is 15 feet tall.  Of course, I bought this hook, line and sinker as a little bastard, but I scoffed at this upon re-watching some 20 years later.  I was stunned to learn that the bear in this film was actually played by a real-life captive bear that stood some 11 feet tall.  Yeah, it's a 48-inch difference, but with some camera tricks it really wasn't too difficult to make the thing seem like the Jolly Green Giant.  Also, man...11 feet tall.  That's the reason why I sit on my ass and play Zelda on the weekends.

Amazingly enough, we're not done.  Kelly starts hamming it up more and more in his "tortured soul" scenes as the bodies begin piling up, leading to this amazing bit of chewing the scenery where he drills his boss about why the park is still open.  The death scenes themselves start getting more gruesome.  There's blood flying, limb-ripping, chunks soaring, you name it.  All the more hilarious that this flick was rated PG.  They don't make 'em like they used to, folks.  Some of the special effects here get a little hokey, and we only see it in "less is more" shots just like that giant killer shark movie up until a certain point...that point being where it comes time for the fur-wearing naturalist Arthur to bite it.  And it's something else.  He gets attacked, knocked out, and half-buried in the ground to be eaten later.  Upon waking up, he digs himself out...only to get immediately brutalized and killed again.  This was the aforementioned scene that scared the crap out of me as a kid, because man, what a nightmarish scenario.

When it comes to the horror stuff, I commend the film-makers on what they were able to accomplish here with their limited budget.  The pace on this movie is very fast, and while it doesn't clock in around 75 minutes like some of the dreck that I review, it still feels very lean and mean.  The bear scenes with the live-action bear are top notch by 1976 standards.   However, the acting is not.  It's nothing like Ricky from Silent Night, Deadly Night, but it's still pretty bad.  Even the main dude playing Kelly is pretty cringe-worthy in spots, but the worst offenders have to be the three dumbasses hunting the giant bear who think it's a good idea to use a kidnapped bear cub as bait.  Kids, if you find a baby bear in the woods...get the hell away.  I know this and I never go outside.

Also, it has a finale that I thought was the pinnacle of kickass when I was a little kid.  It's only slightly funny today.  Quite an accomplishment considering the stuff that I grew up on.

Time to hand out a rating.  I award Grizzly *** out of ****.  That's higher than just about any other review you're likely to read, but hey, I have respect for people who set out to copy Jaws with .5% of the budget.  Clearly, it worked at the time, as this was actually the highest-grossing independent flick ever for a brief spell before getting beaten by Halloween a couple years later.  And that's some pretty good company.  Check this one out for some good rampaging monster action.

Goth (2003)

2003
Directed by Brad Sykes
Starring Phoebe Dollar, Laura Reilly and Dave Stann

Longtime readers are well aware of my hometown Greatest Video Store Ever.  One thing that I haven't expounded on nearly as much was the Second Greatest Video Store Ever, namely the Hollywood Video that was in my college town.  I don't know how many stores in this particular chain there are around the country, but nonetheless, THIS place was boss.  I was a regular customer from 2004-2007, and they still had a huge stock of VHS tapes, just about every classic ninja movie you can name, the entire library of Charles Bronson, and an old-school horror aisle to die for.  I was able to find quite a few hidden gems at this store throughout those years...and Goth, a little-known direct-to-video...um...gem...from 2003 was not one of them.

Ah, yes, Goth, a certified POS in every sense of the word.  I honestly don't know what I was expecting when I brought that baby home from Hollywood Video.  Honestly, I think a good, scary flick about the whole Goth subculture being taken too far COULD be made.  This, however, was not that movie.  The acting is terrible.  Well, actually that might be a bit much - the characters are terrible.  It's low-budget, but definitely not in the admirable or charming way, looking like it was lit by an itty-bitty book light for much of its sparse running time.  Watching the flick close to ten years ago was an interesting experience to say the least, as I sat there for 90 minutes slack-jawed at the almost complete lack of narrative, arc, or anything close to compelling.  But, I remember it, so I can't quite award it zero points.  With ringing endorsement, let's dive into the meat and potatoes of the cinematic opus that is Goth.

Meet Chrissy and her boyfriend Boone, played by Laura Reilly and Dave Stann, respectively.  These are two dark creatures of the night who are about to head out for a very dark, dark night on the town.  Be prepared to read the word "dark" a whole lot in this review, because this movie pours it on, both figuratively and literally.  All things considered, these two actors aren't terrible in the roles of Chrissy and Boone, although the camerawork and framing in these early scenes that's meant to endear this relationship to us is definitely far from captivating stuff.  I don't know exactly how well these characters rate on the authentic Goth dark-o-meter, but you're reading a guy who has religiously shaved every day since he was 17 and gets a crewcut every four weeks.  Hell, I think the darkest I ever got was when I once bought a pair of camouflage pants at J.C. Penney when I was in college.  Long story short, I'm not the authority on the subject. 

Cue clubbing montage, and from here our heroic dark teens (can you tell they're dark?) run into a like-minded idealist.  Someone who shares their values, and has not only the Hot Topic costume jewelry that Chrissy and Boone rock but a whole slew of face paint and tattoos.  And said character's awesome name...is Goth.  I kid you not.  Now, I gotta give it to Phoebe Dollar, the actress who played Goth (in the movie Goth).  She definitely didn't mail it in.  Having said that, she goes way over the top to the point that the movie quickly becomes unwatchable pretty much from this point forward, as you can pretty much tell where it's going from here and it doesn't get any better.

The general gist of the movie is this - the two main kids think they're dark but don't take it far enough.  Goth...she takes it all the way.  As in, she likes to rape, murder and torture, and she wants everyone to join in the fun.  Goth is f**ked up.  For the next sixty minutes, this is your life, avid watcher: Goth guides Chrissy and Boone through her dark world (that's the last time I use the word, I swear), and it doesn't take long to escalate.  There's lots of tying people up.  Lots of LONG scenes where a camera holds in on close-up as Goth cuts somebody's face with a gag knife that squirts blood from the tip, complete with this soul-destroying dirgy soundtrack in the background. 

Oh yeah, there's no less than two sex scenes featuring some very overweight strippers.  Consider this the REVERSE SKEEVY PARAGRAPH.  But I gotta say, even if they HAD hired smokin' hot chicks to be in the scenes where Goth forces Boone to have sex with people for Chrissy's cuckolding pleasure, this stuff still would have been the opposite of titillating.  So if you were at least looking for a good guilty pleasure movie to satiate your Goth fetish, this ain't the one for you, daddy.

I honestly can't remember how the movie ended.  I think we got something like a two-minute sequence where Chrissy grows a pair and stands up to Goth, leading to a twist ending that I DO remember that somehow manages to out-dumb everything that preceded it by a landslide.  If you get the impression that this was a bad movie, you're right.  Still...while I've never once felt the urge to go back and re-watch this one for obvious reasons, I have to state that it's oddly a flick that I would recommend.  I've told you that it's bad.  Still, you can't appreciate just HOW bad it is until you experience it for yourselves.  And it had a trailer for Terror Toons before the main feature.

Wow, a very lean and mean review.  Now THIS is a trend that I can get behind!  Rating time: Goth gets * out of ****, and that * comes from the fact that it's occasionally unintentionally hilarious.  Otherwise, me no likey.

A Film Exists. Watching Not Required.

Time for another different kind of movie review this week.  I apologize in advance - this one is going to be pretty scatterbrained, and there's a strong possibility that I might veer off into hardcore Twilight Zone territory at some point.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

There's a philosophy that I have literally just discovered in the past, oh, six months or so that has changed my life.  No joke.  It's made me happier and more productive.  Let's start with this story: I know somebody who, like a lot of people (myself included) thought that the Ghostbusters remake looked absolutely godawful.  Every bit of evidence from the trailers and TV spots seemed to indicate that this was a loud, obnoxious flick rife with bad jokes and that truly irritating self-congratulatory modern movie tone.  But that didn't stop this somebody from being there in the theater on opening night with his girlfriend, which was then followed by him bitching about how bad it was nonstop the following day.

Like...this is a phenomenon that just confounds me.  He knew that he wouldn't like the movie.  He knew this going in.  No, actually, he knew it BEFORE going in.  And yet he still watched it.  Why?  Because it was there. 

Well, allow me to present the Lick Ness Monster Life-Changing Philosophy: Just Because a Movie Was Made Doesn't Mean You Have To Watch It!

To be fair, this has been a long process for yours truly, because I used to be just like my aforementioned friend.  I used to go to just about everything that hit the multiplex, especially the action blockbuster and the 2-3 superhero movies that we would be blessed with every year.  For a long time, I actually ENJOYED these flicks.  John McClane, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Batman, Sam Raimi's amazing first two Spider-Man flicks, it was truly a great time to be alive.  But no good thing can last forever, and gradually, it started happening.  Everything started to get either overblown or "dark."  James Bond turned emo.  Gotham City got plastered with a dark gray color palette and nonsensical plot twists.  Spider-Man and the X-Men both had awful third movies in their franchises...and the former again went emo.  That Superman movie that I anticipated so much in 2006?  Yeah, it sucked. 

And now, many years later, I've pretty much officially given up on blockbuster movies.  I really didn't intend for this post to be so much about superhero flicks, but since these things have essentially replaced action movies as the modern "event" films, they kind of go hand in hand.  Want to know what did it?  Avengers: Age of Ultron.  Now, I haven't seen it since I watched it in theaters, so forgive me if my memory is sketchy, but IIRC this is the movie where Iron Man creates this technological monster - against the wishes of his teammates and pretty much the entire freakin' world - which promptly escapes and causes wonton death and destruction.  140 minutes and $200 million of explosions and CGI later, the good guys destroy the tech terror run amok, but that doesn't exactly change the fact that they MADE the thing in the first place.  So...what?  The public who just suffered all that raping and pillaging just goes "well, yeah, these guys created this thing that murdered the f**k out of us, but hey, they stopped it, and they wear cool costumes, so, EH, it's all good."  Apparently.  Seriously, these guys can't even tell their own damn stories effectively anymore, and when you've got movies where the heroes are responsible for like 90% of the bad stuff that happens in it, you've lost me.  So until these movies calm the f**k down and maybe dial it back with HOW MANY of them are released every year, I'm out.

And I'm not alone.  I know plenty of people who complain about the state of modern blockbuster cinema, who echo my sentiments that these movies are all flash and no substance, emotion, or genuine power.  The only difference is...they still go, instead of hitting these guys in the wallets and making producers realize that story is still important. 

You might be wondering how this relates to horror.  Well, I'm getting to it.  The movie business is a copycat league, and horror is no different.  Anything that succeeds gets a whole bunch of like-styled imitations.  In the 2000s and up, we've had all kinds of mini-waves - Japan-style ghost thrillers, Saw and torture porn, the never-ending barrage of slasher remakes, and now demonic ghost flicks.  That's a pretty wide variety in a pretty short amount of time, all things considered, and it's no accident.  The reason is a simple one: horror fans actually do vote with their wallets.

We're a dedicated, educated, and savvy bunch of film-goers, so feel free to pat yourselves on the back just like I'm doing right now in my masturbatory online outlet.  When something gets old, we let the powers-that-be know it.  Post-Scream intentionally self-aware films wearing thin?  Well, this Ring movie looks pretty kickass.  Saw series burning out?  Eh, we'll pass on the last few sequels...but Paranormal Activity looks like it could be interesting.  Seen too many movies about evil ghosts?  Hey, there's no ghosts in Don't Breathe, let's give this a shot.  As a result, we seem to continually get pretty fresh, inventive stuff every few years.  Well, discounting all the remakes, but pretty much every franchise has already suffered that raping, so we're safe from that until Michael Bay inevitably gets his grubby mitts on the Halloween franchise.  Mark my words, it's going to happen at some point.

The horror community enjoys the benefits of being hardcore, including what we choose to not see.  If only the rest of the world would follow suit.  But they don't.  They just keep going, even if there is data (that doesn't just exist in my own mind, I swear) that show that people by and large aren't really that excited about the slew of megadoom action flicks.  But, again, they still go.

It's not hard.  Don't Watch.  You know that movie that you thought was just okay?  Now there's a sequel?  Don't Watch.  TV show starting to go south on its success rate?  Don't Watch.  Trust me, I know from many painful years of following WWE that it ain't going to get any better.  So just Don't Watch.  You don't owe these guys anything.  You want better?  Plant your eyeballs elsewhere.

Hey, it works for us.

My Five Favorite Horror Movie Babes

Lately, I've been throwing something into almost every review that has been met with rabid applause by all three people that read these reviews: The Skeevy Paragraph.  Generally speaking, it goes like this - I'm going through my routine, in the opening "describe the characters" section of the review when we get to a really, really Hot Girl.  Said mention is then followed by me utilizing the proverbial "record scratch" keyboard equivalent, putting everything else in the review on hold, and throwing out five or six sentences where I do nothing but fawn over said Hot Girl.  Some observers might say that this is sexist, but then again, nobody reads these things anyway.  All kidding aside, this paragraph is just done in good fun, something that just kind of happened to hit me a few months back as I seek to at least try to keep these reviews fresh.  Because...Christ, I've done almost 300 of them!  So give me a break, people.

However, this does not mean that the Lick Ness Monster doesn't appreciate an attractive female onscreen.  Far from it.  So, I'm just going to dedicate an entire post to the women of horror movie history, and what a genre this is if you're into such a thing.  There's no other type of movie that proudly features as many beautiful women as the horror genre.  Usually in various stages of undress, even.  So, with that, it's COUNTDOWN TIME.

Note that this isn't necessarily purely and simply my picks for the five most physically attractive women in horror movie history.  I tend to have a soft spot for people who stick around and play roles in a LOT of horror movies.  Ditto for people who are able to actually act, because that's the sexiest thing of all.  Having said that, if you're into hot women who have done their fair share of gratuitous nudity, you also won't be disappointed.

Cue the Cinemax After Dark muted trumpets...

5.  JENNIFER LOVE HEWITT

In the words of 311, I've said it before and I'll say it once more - it's an absolute shame that Love didn't do more horror movies, because she truly could have been that generation's Jamie Lee Curtis.  The only reason she isn't #1 on my list is because she called it quits after the two I Know What You Did Last Summer movies, but those were more than enough to tide me over and make me a fan for life.  Jennifer just had it all - she could scream, she was likable, she could act, and she was gorgeous.  Imagine, say, a Halloween remake in 1998 instead of H20 and everything that came after with Hewitt as Laurie Strode.  Now that's money.  Now, she's still pretty damn hot these days, so maybe it's not too late.  Maybe a Dream Warriors redux with her in the Heather Langenkamp role?  One can only hope.

4.  PAMELA FRANKLIN

A veteran of a whole slew of movies that have been praised by critics and audiences alike, the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie definitely did her fair share of horror films.  And in every case, her appearance in something is the goddamn gold seal of quality as far as I'm concerned.  After that little aforementioned film from 1969 that garnered her a whole bunch of rave reviews, she embarked on a career that consisted of a lot of atmospheric, foggy British horror movies.  Some of them are bona fide classics, including The Legend of Hell House, Necromancy and And Soon the Darkness.  In most cases, you also get to see her naked.  But the thing about Pamela that's truly hot is her charisma, as she is someone that reaches out through the screen and projects her character like few women in the genre ever could.  +2 cool points for her.

3.  CHARLIE SPRADLING

Simply put, I simply cannot post a picture of Ms. Spradling from her absolute best moments on film, so I'll just post the picture that immortalizes what she truly was/is - Miss Full Moon!  I've proclaimed my love for the gloriously cheesy and low-budget factory that was Full Moon Features on this here blog before, and Charlie was their de facto spokesperson.  Her character (and tasty nude scene) in Puppet Master II was so popular with fans that she became the host of the "Video Zone" features that accompanied their releases, and let me tell you something...hearing her ungodly sexy voice extol the virtues of the 1992 Full Moon calendar sells me on it and it's 2017.  And then there were her movies.  From Puppet Master to Bad Channels to To Sleep With a Vampire, this busty vixen was always a crowd pleaser in everything she appeared in.

2.  ELIZABETH KAITAN

The first true-blue slasher film that I remember watching is Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, and even as a snot-nosed eight-year-old, I knew the insanely hot redhead from that flick was something special.  A former model from Hungary who broke into acting in the '80s, Elizabeth has definitely been in her fair share of horror films and B-movies: Silent Night, Deadly Night 2, Assault of the Killer Bimbos, the masterpiece Vice Academy series and Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity are a few personal favorites of mine.  Simply put, Elizabeth is one of those rare women who just stops time whenever she's the focus of a shot - she's simply that gorgeous.  She's also done her fair share of nude scenes which can easily be tracked down with a handy-dandy Google search, but I still love the red look from Friday VII the best.  Call it glandular.

1.  DARCY DEMOSS

Rare glimpse into the sad life of the Lick Ness Monster - again, there are pictures that I CAN'T post on this here blog or elsewhere on the interwebz, and...many of them are located right on my hard drive.  This is especially the case for Darcy DeMoss.  While there are definitely actresses who have been more prolific in the horror genre, boy, did she ever make an impression on this reporter.  Starting with Friday the 13th Part VI and then continuing with the remake of Bucket of Blood and Pale Blood (along with a whole bunch of softcore mid-'90s Cinemax stuff), Darcy is just simply instant caffeine.  Why, you ask?  Well, in addition to her striking beauty, she also plays a fantastic stuck-up bitch.  And just like women with the bad boy, the bad girl is always hotter.  Check out her modeling scene from Bucket of Blood for proof.

As always, of course, those are just my picks for the five hottest horror movie women.  Honorable mentions should also go to Jamie Lee Curtis, pretty much the iconic "final girl" of the genre, as well as her modern-day equivalent Katie Cassidy and scream queens such as Lynnea Quigley.  So, does this mean the end of the Skeevy Paragraph?  The answer to that question is...we'll see.  You might be seeing it LESS, but it still may Pop Up (hee hee...mature, I know) from time to time.  Happy horror-watching!

Lights Out (2016)

2016
Directed by David F. Sandberg
Starring Teresa Palmer, Gabriel Bateman, Alexander DiPersia, Billy Burke and Maria Bello

I've reviewed plenty of James Wan movies before, so you know the drill - he's the guy that introduced/unleashed Paranormal Activity on the world and has done a whole lot of ghost movies since.  That should about do it for the background information.

Which brings me to Lights Out.  Produced by Wan and with a screenplay by Eric Heisserer - a pretty prolific writer in the genre for the past few years all things considered - this is a somewhat different twist on the usual Wansploitation material.  There's a ghost, yeah, but it's no demon.  And there's no hidden cameras to be found, but I actually think horror has fully moved on from that particular subgenre, so huzzah for that.  Nope, what we get from this flick is a straight-up ghost movie that is very light on running time at 81 minutes and also a little light on scares, but we'll get to that in due time.  Fortunately, it's a got a few saving graces up its sleeve, so it's worth your time to track it down at the Redbox or download it on Amazon Prime or whatever the cool kids do these days.  So ends my laziest, shortest introduction in quite some time.  I'm very proud of myself, and hopefully you are.

The flick opens up with a prologue kill involving a textfile factory, a shadowy apparition, and the classic instance of the "dude who doesn't believe what's going on only to get tragically offed" come to life.  The twist that gives us the rest of our plot: said shadowy figure appears when the lights are out (what a clever title).  From here we meet our star character of the movie - Rebecca, the stepdaughter of the man who was just killed, played by Teresa Palmer. 

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time for the Skeevy Paragraph.  Longtime readers (you know, the ones that exist only in my own mind) are well aware of my love for the Ju-On/Grudge franchise.  The American Grudge 2 is a truly underrated gem in my book, in no small part due to the unreal quintology of hotties: Amber Tamblyn, Sarah Roemer, Misako Uno, Arielle Kebbel and...Palmer.  In that flick, she was the resident "bitchy blonde girl" who tormented the shy, sweet Kebbel, and her hotness has not diminished in that time.  I'm not going to list her entire filmography, but suffice to say she's stolen the show in her fair share of fairly crappy movies.  Fortunately, this isn't exactly a crappy movie that we're dealing with here, but she's still the best thing about Lights Out.

Well, the plot isn't going to unspool itself.  Looking back at it, this was actually a VERY lean and mean movie.  In addition to the aforementioned short running time, there's really only four characters in it of any substance.  Rebecca - that would be Teresa Palmer for those who remembered before I went back into full-fledged skeeve mode - is the daughter of the dude who bit it during the prologue kill.  She has a mother, Sophie, played by the always awesome Maria Bello, and said mother has been afflicted with mental disorders ever since the tragic death of Rebecca's real father.  There's also the little brother Martin played by Gabriel Bateman, and the boyfriend, Bret, played by Alexander DiPersia.  Any movie with a cast this small needs the roles to be nailed, and fortunately this movie has this quality.  I'm not talking Academy Award good or anything, but the supporting actors from Bello on down don't mail it in, which is more than you can say for some movies like this.

Caution, ahead be spoilers.  Soon enough, little brother Martin begins seeing the same mysterious figure, and he and Rebecca have a few close scrapes with death.  Gradually, the back story is given to us that the ghost is "Diana," a former friend of the Sophie's who had a horrific skin condition that made her terribly sensitive to light.  Cue sequence that shows her being roasted alive in a rather unscrupulous experiment, and that's why she's your star villain.  Now, maybe I'm just an idiot, but her EXACT motivation for killing off Sophie's family was a little unclear to me; supposedly, she's back to make sure that no one else "takes" Sophie, presumably back to an asylum, but I fail to see how her son and daughter have anything to do with this.  Who knows, I probably missed something and one of this here blog's nine subscribers can rightly call me out on it.

As I mentioned previously, this movie ain't scary.  Really, not at all.  It's got its fair share of BOO scares and a whole bunch of creepy shots of the "Diana" ghost skulking around in backgrounds that are meant to evoke a paltry sense of dread in the audience, but I was able to hit the sack immediately afterward with no problem at all.  I also think that the script doesn't follow its setup very carefully, which is kind of a theme with screenwriter Heisserer.  This guy also penned the Nightmare on Elm Street remake, the movie where we were told that the character would start having "micro naps" as their forced fast from sleep progressed, thus making it possible for Freddy to cut their asses up at a moment's notice.  Except for when it was convenient for the script to forget this for other stuff.  This movie also kinda does the same thing with its "the ghost can only attack in the dark" rule.  I'm not going to get into specifics because I don't want to bore readers to tears, but trust me...it's more than just a nitpick.  It's there.

Fortunately, what this movie DOES have going for it is the emotional investment factor.  Rebecca, Sophie and Martin are a pretty likable and engaging little familial unit, all things considered, with Palmer and Bello really digging into these roles with every ounce of the scale wage that they were no doubt paid on this $4.9 million-budgeted film.  Amazingly enough, the boyfriend also manages to not be too big of a douche, a welcome change of pace after last week's film, Don't Breathe. 

The movie has a pretty damn exciting final 15 minutes.  Not scary, but exciting.  And it even ENDS, definitively, with no final BOO scare and no setup for a sequel that is almost certain to happen anyway being that this film grossed the equivalent of a WWE fiscal quarter on its miniscule budget.  So, if I'm going to sum up this admittedly craptacular review, I guess I just have to say that it's not scary, but it's certainly a fun watch.  In an era of TV-dominated pop culture where every single show on the tube seems to revolve around post-traumatic stress - the worse the better - a nice, fun little horror flick is definitely a welcome change. 

Alright, rating time.  Let's give Lights Out *** out of ****.  It definitely won't leave you pissing yourself in terror or anything, but it's a damn entertaining movie that manages to feel quite a bit different from the usual James Wan story.  It even reminds me of the early 2000s wave of Japan-style thrillers on occasion, and there's definitely worse charges that can be leveled.  Give it a shot.