Dir - Mikhail Red
Overall: MEH
Moody, void of humor, and with a harrowing finale, Filipino filmmaker Mikhail Red's Eerie still ventures into schlocky terrain with a scary monster-faced schoolgirl ghost in a bad wig, as well as a criminal amount of cheap jump scares, (Are there any other kind?). The premise proves to be as generic as the presentation since we have another haunted Catholic girls school where tight-assed nuns engage in corporal punishment, both allow and partake of bullying and cover up the details surrounding a student's suicide, which provides a mystery for Bea Alonzo's benevolent counselor to uncover. There is nothing unique in the plethora of details here as it touches upon simple minded themes that have been done countless times before, ultimately just culminating in a bullied girl who comes back for supernatural vengeance because no one tried to understand her and her parents were abusive assholes. With no compelling revelations anywhere and incessantly lazy scare tactics that anyone who has seen a horror movie before will spot and roll their eyes at a mile away, what we are left with is merely a well-shot and well performed ghost story. Sadly, such a thing is not worth much when done so generically.
Dir - Danishka Esterhazy
Overall: GOOD
The sophomore effort from Canadian filmmaker Danishka Esterhazy, Level 16 is a disguised boarding house thriller that carefully plays with the audience's expectations while gradually peeling off its disturbed layers. Shot on location in a former police station in Toronto, the premise of isolated young women who are groomed to adhere to cleanliness and "feminine virtues" from an early age is immediately established within the opening scene. As things play out, there is obviously something even more sinister at play than the already sinister scenario that we are presented with, and Esterhazy does a fine job incrementally dishing out clues and revelations. Some of the minor plot inconsistencies concerning the girl's abilities to break the militant rules when every move that they make is presumably monitored can be explained by a one-off comment about this mysterious establishment being understaffed and underfunded, but it still undermines the threat that they are under where it seems that somewhere along the line and under such loose conditions, someone would have figured out what was going on sooner. Such squabbles aside, it is a conventional yet gripping work with enough surprises to keep one invested.
Dir - Michael David Pate
Overall: WOOF
An aggressively bad found footage abomination, Haunted Hospital, (Heilstätten), finds German filmmaker Michael David Pate relentlessly abusing and then ignoring any sort of plausible rules within a sub-genre that works on shaky footing to begin with. An identical premise was utilized the same year on the other side of the globe with Jung Bum-shik's far superior Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, where a group of YouTubers venture into a dilapidated and off-limits location to bump up their likes and subscribes. Save Sonja Gerhardt's character who has some alleged psychic abilities, the gang here is obnoxious and unlikable, so we hardly care once they get lazily trapped and horrible things start happening to them. Speaking of lazy, Pate and co-writer Ecki Ziedrich's script is painfully unsophisticated, pathetically if at all establishing its characters while bulldozing through its premise as everyone seems to have seventeen cameras on them at all times, which are edited together in such a way that this may as well not be a found footage movie at all. The fact that it is renders the whole thing misguided at best and insulting at worst, which does not even take into account a moronic twist ending and a final tag that seems to assume that everyone watching this garbage is as stupid as the people making it.
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