Dir - Trevor Matthews
Overall: WOOF
Producer turned director Trevor Matthews' Girl House is an insulting slasher movie in many of the ways that all slasher movies are insulting, despite its feeble attempts in the first two acts to go somewhere singular with the inherently tired formula. The "Girl House" of the title is a camgirl version of the Big Brother reality show where young women can earn extra cash by being filmed anywhere in a spacious mansion doing one-on-one cam shows, stripteases, having sex with customers who pay top dollar, or just parading around in skimpy outfits. Problems arise when one of their best customers goes AWOL and decides to track down their location which is supposed to be impossible to find yet two different characters manage to do so with zero difficulty. We open with the killer's origin story, (he was a pudgy kid who was picked on by girls), and follow his civilian trajectory instead of having him be a mysterious masked madman. By the time that the movie gets to its inevitable bloody rampage finale, any good faith that Nick Gordon's script has been able to muster is obliterated by gaping logical holes, prerequisite moronic character behavior, tonal issues, and weak performances. Too many narrative blunders transpire in rapid succession of each other to name here, but they are enough to sink the ship and slap the viewer in the face by treating anyone watching this as an idiot who just wants to see some boobs and gore. There is not even that much boobs and gore, the whole thing even failing as the piece of exploitation trash that it is trying to side-step being in the first place.
Dir - Adam Green
Overall: MEH
There is plenty to salute in Adam Green's meta mockumentary Digging Up the Marrow; a movie that simultaneously bites off more than it can chew while also barreling through many of found footage's prerequisite stumbling blocks. The concept is fun; what if a B filmmaker with a built in fanbase who frequents the horror convention circuit was contacted by a person that claims to have found real monsters and wants someone who matches his enthusiasm to document it. Green plays himself, (as do a slew of notable genre faces), and Ray Wise portrays the cooky old retired police detective who has discovered an underground society of creatures. Putting a known actor in a found footage movie is a mistake on paper, but Wise is such a pro and knows the assignment so well that he bypasses this faux pas and becomes the film's most interesting presence. Aside from Wise's sympathetic performance as a broken, desperate, and shady man that is collapsing under the pressure of never being taken seriously, (as well as some agreeable creature designs, obnoxious screechy monster noises notwithstanding), the structure of the movie is consistently problematic. The unbelievable is caught on camera, it is all edited together as a finished and polished docu-drama, and the ending creates an insulting logical gap for shock value's sake. It also grows redundant instead of suspenseful, but it almost does something unique within its tired framework, and that is more than can be said about most of these films.
Dir - David Ruehm
Overall: GOOD
Lighthearted and shamelessly goofy, Austrian filmmaker David Ruehm's Therapy for a Vampire, (Therapie für einen Vampir), manages to fit Sigmund Freud into a narrative that address the theme of female independence within a period-set, romantic, and glossy framework. Cornelia Ivancan portrays a cocksure woman with a boyfriend, (Dominic Oley), that wants her to stop wearing trousers and change her haircut, a centuries-old undead Count, (Tobias Moretti), who is convinced that she is his long-lost love and wants her to look and behave accordingly, and even the Count's lacky, (David Bennent ), who becomes smitten with her due to one of the plot's amusing botched schemes. Ruehm cherry picks the blood-sucker tropes that he wants to utilize; sunlight, garlic, wooden stakes, and crosses are all still bad, but he also applies the old folklore gag where demons are uncontrollably compelled to count anything that spills. Shapeshifting into animals, the ability to fly, and especially casting no reflection in a mirror are all put to good use, with Moretti's embittered spouse Jeanette Hain becoming determined to get her portrait done so that she can finally see what she looks like again after countless years. Both Oley's performance and character are wooden by design, and the aesthetic is too digitally pristine to evoke much gothic atmosphere, but this is still delightful and inventive in equal measures.
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