Blogs Against Humanity - Adventures in Sympathetic Misanthropy

Go rafting, he said. It'll be fun, he said. Well, now he's DEAD, and I'm not having fun at all. "If you people want to survive, you better start looking and thinking like the forest." Filmed in 1981 (save for the tacked-on prologue that was shot almost 2 years later), this flick sat on the shelf until finally earning a theatrical release in 1983, which was after Daryl Hannah and Adrian Zmed had gone on to make names for themselves elsewhere. Elsewhere being 'Blade Runner' and 'T.J. Hooker' respectively.  Yes, I said Daryl Hannah . And yes, I alluded to William Shatner.  Directed by Andrew Davis, who would later go on to direct the likes of 'Under Siege' , 'The Fugitive' and 'Holes' , 'THE FINAL TERROR' didn't make much of a splash at the Box Office and the critics were less than kind, but the advent of the home video era made it a stalwart shelf-warmer of Mom-and-Pop video stores across the nation, and anothe...

What ye sow, so shall ye reap, or some shit like that.  "Name's Buck. I'm rarin' to fuck." So, when the first line spoken in a horror film is the above quote (spoken by a baby-faced Robert Englund) you'd be forgiven for double-checking to make sure that you hadn't rented a porn flick instead. After that, you really shouldn't be too surprised by the batshit lunacy that follows when you remind yourself that this is the second film made by director Tobe Hooper, creator of the legendary 'TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE' , and it became one of the first films to be labeled a "video nasty" in the UK. Scuzzy lunacy of the batshit variety is exactly what you get here. While 'Chainsaw' is definitely the more harrowing and grimier of the two, this one is definitely bloodier and sleazier than its predecessor, and just as bizarre.   Part of that is down to the fact that this film is stage bound, which makes it feel rather artificial in a way that...

Surely my online interactions won't bite me in my ass in a literal sense. Right? "Drifted apart? Is that how you remember it?" Yeah, yeah, it's been forever. Read up anyway! 😆 The overall idea driving this film is somewhat simple and boils down to "Slasher-flick but over Skype" which is one of those notions that could certainly go either way. As with pretty much everything else, it all comes down to the execution, doesn't it?  'UNFRIENDED' is a film that garnered some bad reviews and mentioning it in places like r/horror can still drum up a contingent of naysayers. I agree with some of the criticism, but a lot of it seems like reflexive disdain for "these kids today and their bliggetty-blogs and their facey-spaces and their tweety-pages" (my apologies to Denis Leary) rather than any genuine observation and analysis of the film on its own merits. So, let's get the bad out of the way, and then we'll talk about the good.  When it...