WARNING: This Article May Contain Spoilers
I mentioned in the last article of this kind that I hoped the films for part 3 would be better than those for part 2 as I was unable to recommend any of those from before. Well, thankfully I got my wish as there’s not a single film below that I wouldn’t recommend to someone else and there’s definitely a few that I would happily watch again…
12 Hour Shift
Outside of the obvious drug use and organ harvesting, the film starts out reasonably light-hearted. Interestingly, it’s referred to as a black comedy horror, a little like Black Sheep for example, but there’s very little humour in the film as far as I’m concerned. Having said that, there’s very little horror as well. Yes people die, yes there’s blood and gore but there’s nothing scary or disturbing about this film in my opinion. Part of me was expecting something to involve the kidney mutating and taking over the hospital, especially with the way the camera focuses on it after Regina leaves without it. The film as a whole isn’t actually that bad, and the plot with the black-market organ trafficking is pretty good but I just don’t see it as a horror film on the whole. The singing also takes away a little bit of the darkness around the murders.
Locker 13
I guess this is the kind of film that would be referred to as an anthology horror (several stories in one). Each story is connected by lockers, each of them numbered 13, but we don’t actually see the number until the end of the story of Tommy Novak, we just see the janitor hand him the gloves. Because of those gloves, I had the suspicion that each story would also be connected by some sort of possessed item that came from the locker, especially as items seem to trigger the telling of the first couple of stories but that does not end up being the case. I expected each story to get progressively darker but I actually found the idea of the boxing gloves making Tommy kill darker than the following stories about a club initiation or a suicide club – especially as the suicide club is there to save people, instead of kill them. It’s actually a shame that the best story of all and the only one with the remotest horror undertone, is the first one.
14 Cameras
It’s really rare that I’ll use a sequel as part of an article but it was pretty hard to find any horror films with the number 14 in it! Funnily enough, this film is also known as I See You. With the first film being referred to as a psychological horror, I assumed we see Gerald very little – however because his character has already been established, we see him more in this. In my opinion that makes this more of a voyeur-horror, if that sub-genre actually exists. I guess the main question here is whether you need to watch the first film or not in order to understand this film – and I would say yes and no. I don’t feel like we need to have an understanding of Gerald’s character for him to be any more or less creepy. The only real confusion for me was the time line of the film as I couldn’t tell at first if the woman Gerald had kidnapped was part of the family we were watching or if it was happening at the same time as him watching them.
Range 15
I went in to this thinking, this film is going to be really cheesy! A bunch of soldiers looking for a cure to the zombie virus but you know what – I don’t think it was supposed to take itself seriously. Especially as the soldiers are happy there’s a zombie apocalypse and all the main characters seem to just be playing themselves. This film is proof of the ability for a film to be so bad that it’s good because it doesn’t try to be something that it isn’t. What made it funny for me is the fact that certain scenes when they’re shooting the zombies reminded me of video games like House of the Living Dead. Unlike 12 Hour Shift, this is what I would call a comedy-horror – I’m just not sure how I feel about Rocco having sex with a zombie though, probably not the kind of thing you would see in any other zombie apocalypse film though!
Sweet Sixteen
You can never go wrong with a slasher film, especially an 80s one. The fact that most of the murders take place leading up to Melissa’s sixteenth birthday, I thought there was a chance the killer was her father, trying to protect his daughter’s innocence from the boys in town. I guess even with the actual killer that the motive could be the same especially given their background (that is explained during the final reveal) but the actual reason feels much darker. The funny thing is though, you could easily fall into the trap of also believing that Melissa is killing all of these boys as she doesn’t seem too affected by the fact that each boy she goes on a date with gets killed. If this was made nowadays, she would be avoiding going on more dates for the safety of the boys in her town. I’ll be honest, there are two characters in this film that I actually feel deserve their untimely demise because of their attitudes towards Jason and Greyfeather but this film didn’t come across as “racist” towards the Native American characters as I was expecting from the some of the write-ups. Strangely, the ending seems to set us up for a possible sequel OR was this a hint that the revealed killer, isn’t the real one?
Route 17
Now, this is going to be the first foreign film to feature in one of these articles. What confused me a little about this film is the run time – from looking it up, supposedly it is 2 hours and 19 minutes but the version I watched was only 1 hour 52 minutes so I wonder if something was cut? The opening to this film is so dark that I felt set up for quite a scary film once things kicked off. What’s funny is the scenes between the opening and when the trouble starts are so blissfully happy that it made the horror feel much darker. Especially compared to your typical dance scenes, that feel completely out of place with the rest of the film. You know the kind? The ones referenced in a previous article. Maybe some were cut as they didn’t quite fit the film – hence the short run time? I honestly think they could have gone without the scenes of the police as it slightly takes you out of the whole horror feel of the film, especially as they cut away at the most inconvenient times. From the very beginning I felt there was something supernatural about our supposed antagonist (no normal person can run or move the way he does), and we know from a previous article that Indian cinema is pretty good at that style of horror.
