Dir - Yoon Een-Kyoung
Overall: MEH
While it does not attempt to reinvent the wheel in any capacity, South Korean filmmaker Yoon Een-Kyoung's Lingering, (Hotel Leikeu), does a compelling job within its supernatural formula. A few logistical leaps and jump scares notwithstanding, Yoon creates the correct steady mood where a luxury, vacant hotel keeps wielding strange and spooky secrets that revolve around a dysfunctional family where everyone seems to kill themselves, go missing, or are just plain crazy. Se-yeong Lee's trouble past makes her ill-equipped to take care of her now orphaned young sister, yet having her "aunt"/dead mom's best friend look after her at the aforementioned hotel also seems problematic from the get go since arbitrary ghost things happen as soon as they get there. Yoon piles on the freaky set pieces and never lets any humor into the proceedings, managing to make some cliched scares less schlocky than they have any right to be. The strong performances carry a lot of weight in giving everything a serious tone, and Lee's building dynamic with her estranged little sibling, (played with the right amount of aloof trauma by Park So-yi), keep one invested even if the pay-off is more bog-standard than satisfying.
Dir - Ricky Umberger
Overall: WOOF
Indie filmmaker Ricky Umberger follows up his little-movie-that-could debut The Fear Footage with the apply titled The Fear Footage 2: Curse of the Tape and it is yet another wildly frustrating and uneven pile-driver into the found footage sub-genre. Once again, Umberger finds an effective angle to kick things off, going meta with himself and another actor from the first movie who play versions of themselves that have seen said first movie and are confused as to why, (and more importantly how), they could have possibly been in it. Forgoing the anthology route then, it follows a linear path where an investigation goes underway, except that both the characters and the audience leave the proceedings with more questions than answers. Unfortunately, the audience is also going to depart with either a feeling of annoyance or uncontrollable laughter at how the material is handled. Umberger has an admirable sense of exuberance towards his chosen genre, but his work comes off like that of a nine year old horror nerd who got his hands on a couple hundred bucks and a camcorder while having no idea what logical behavior is or that all of his ideas are more embarrassing than cool. That said, there are several moments sprinkled throughout that might make a fun YouTube Creepypasta short, but as a full-length film that really wants to be The Blair Witch Project for Halloween, it is more adorably stupid than anything.
Dir - Adam Leader/Richard Oakes
Overall: MEH
Music video directors Adam Leader and Richard Oakes's full-length debut Hosts is an off-beat home invasion movie that gets stuck in the muck from the second act on. One could call the tone imbalanced, but it actually serves to keep the viewer on edge up until a point as we watch characters behave as if they are in a quirky comedy before a never-explained demonic and/or alien force starts inhabiting them. The violence comes in brutal bursts from there and while they provide an effective jolt at first, the movie degresses into a mundane series of miserable set pieces where characters are both psychologically and mentally tortured within a slasher, "picking everyone off" framework. The family who are terrorized have their own baggage to be exploited by the evil "hosts" of the title; a young neighbor couple who come over for a Christmas dinner and act zombie-like from the onset. No one notices this which provides some plausibility errors, and more typical behavior continues that sticks to the trope of people in horror movies doing things, (or not doing things), that the audience will be annoyed by. Sadly, the otherworldly ambiguity is too half-baked to be interesting and the same can be said about our crop of characters whose grueling ordeal ultimately falls on deaf ears.
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