Frogman is another found footage horror movie which surprised me. As I have already detailed in my Hellhouse LLC review, I am not a fan of the genre. Despite this, Frogman was a really good movie that pulled through after all the character development.
I mention character development because every found footage horror movie spends, in my opinion, too much time developing characters which are just going to be killed off with little pay off. Movies like Dark Mountain are guilty of this. In the case of Frogman, the cast was relatively small with only three main characters which was plenty compared to other found footage movies which have way too many. The main character is named Dallas with supporting characters being Amy and Scotty. Dallas is portrayed as unemployed and unproductive, living with his sister and boyfriend rent free. What he has going for him is a sighting of the loveland frog when he was a child. He then gets his friends Amy and Scotty to travel with him to Loveland, Ohio to get more footage of the cryptid. After a few interviews with the residents they realize there may be a cult that worships the frog, although they dismiss the thought for the time being. Eventually they get a tip from a resident for a place they could see Frogman. Once they arrive at the location and see Frogman, Dallas tackles him and reveals it was a man in a costume.
Despite Frogman seemingly being debunked, Dallas insists Frogman is still real and seeks out the only other man with a genuine sighting who warns him of a cult that worships Frogman. He then gives Dallas a genuine map. The movie then mirrors Blair Witch a little bit by having the characters camp out at the location and be stalked by Frogman who wreaks havoc on their camp and uses his psychic powers on Amy. As well as infecting Scotty with his slime. Narrowly escaping they return to the hotel which is empty. By this point Scotty’s face is becoming more green and leathery like a frog. Dallas then convinces the others to go through a secret passage underneath the hotel where they discover a cult that worships Frogman.
This is where the movie gets even more interesting, but falls somewhat flat. The depiction of the Frogman cult is just a typical cult with people in robes with candles. Compare this to a movie such as The Ritual which gives a much more chilling depiction of a Norse-Pagan cult which worships the bastard offspring of Loki for immortality. I will have to review that movie another day, it succeeds where Blair Witch failed in my mind. The Frogman cult is depicted as a fertility cult that is reminiscent of Aliens with labyrinthian catacombs of frog eggs and victims impregnated with polywags, a funny addition to the movie. The old man then returns to save Dallas and Amy, with Scotty seemingly disappearing. The movie then ends with the whole movie being revealed as a movie within a movie panning out showing a crowd watching the movie cheering with Dallas about to go on stage.
The movie is really great and has all the narrative elements the original Loveland Frog sightings had although stretched a bit for the movie. There were only two sightings for the Loveland Frog, so the movie took a few creative liberties. Speaking of the Loveland Frog, stay tuned for the Loveland Frog episode on the Fat and the Devious podcast. I have the script done.
In conclusion, I would recommend this movie if you are looking for something different. It isn’t every day someone makes a found footage horror movie about a fertility cult that worships a psychic bipedal frog. So if you are sick of found footage horror, cliches, and unoriginal horror characters, then Frogman is your movie. If you are looking for something genuinely terrifying, maybe watch something else. I can’t wait for the sequel and I am glad I found this movie.
Hobo With a Shotgun is the kind of movie you just have to see to understand what I am about to describe. It is the kind of movie where at no point could I discern whether the movie was serious or satirical. In retrospect, I think it is the latter. But the immersion of the movie hinges upon that uncanny sense of the director’s intentions to create such a bizarre movie.
While I would not put Hobo With a Shotgun on the same level as Eraserhead or Rubber in terms of absurdity, it definitely enters the ranking at least at a lower level. The premise of the movie is about a homeless man who has aspirations of starting a lawnmowing business and is a drifter going town to town who lands on a town run by a crime family run by a Kenneth Copeland lookalike. Although maybe not as evil as your typical televangelist. The hobo has to witness various violent acts carried out by the crime family and eventually ends up at the local arcade, because this is a 2010s synthwave exploitation film. And witnesses a prostitute about to be harmed by one of the gangsters. After beating up the gangster he brings the man to the police station only to learn the police station is run by the mob. He narrowly escapes with his life and stays over at the prostitute’s house to recover from his injuries.
The next part of the movie involves the hobo going around town with a shotgun he stole and brutally executing anyone who goes against his moral values. This catches the attention of the leader of the crime family who puts a bounty on him, eventually he gets caught at a hospital after giving a goofy monologue and is taken to an arena of sorts to get decapitated by a moving car. The prostitute then comes armored with a lawn mower and narrowly rescues the hobo who sacrifices himself to kill the guy who looks like a crime boss. Then the movie ends abruptly.
While there are other bizarre moments in the movie, such as killing a pedophile dressed as Santa Claus, that is the jist of the movie. It is definitely a product of its time capitalizing on movies such as Drive which defined the synthwave aesthetic. The movie also has music from several synthwave musicians as well. I would recommend this movie for anyone who wants to watch something truly insane with other people. It is the kind of movie that needs to be turned on with no context just to watch the insanity unfold.
A movie that I watched recently that pleasantly surprised me was Hellhouse LLC. The movie is a found-footage horror movie about a group that runs haunted house attractions on Halloween who bought a legitimately haunted property. I am somewhat in the minority that I think that found-footage horror isn’t very good. I think that it is very easy to make one of those movies, but very hard to do it right. The Blair Witch Project set the standard for the genre, although I have a low opinion of that movie too. Paranormal Activity was another lame one in my opinion. But I will save my thoughts on those movies for another day. My point is that the genre is often cliche, lacks originality, and rarely shows anything scary at all due to budget constraints. Hellhouse LLC is similar in that it doesn’t directly show much, similar to Blair Witch, but it goes much further with it.
The movie begins like a lot of found footage movies do by spending the first half of the movie developing characters that will be killed off instantly. Although this movie isn’t beyond this, it gradually adds more horror elements until it culminates at the end. One of the first paranormal occurrences on the property is one of the characters talking to the camera while a figure walks by, he brushes it off as one of his friends and goes to sleep. Later it is revealed that it was not anyone living in the house.
The movie also frames itself as a documentary and has various points where it switches from the camcorder footage to various experts being filmed for the documentary. It is revealed that the Abaddon hotel is possibly named after Abaddon in the Bible and that the previous owners were occult practitioners.
Abaddon within Judaism and Christianity is a bit convoluted, so I should probably explain who or what Abaddon is before I go forward with the review for this movie. In the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, Abaddon is synonymous with Sheol which is basically the Jewish underworld. Although keep in mind that the interpretation of Sheol changed over time eventually becoming synonymous with the Christian perception of Hell. So Abaddon went from being another word for Sheol to eventually being identified as an angel which guards Sheol, or Hell. Interestingly, Mandaens, the last original group of Gnostics on Earth, believe in the Abbadons as being different levels of the World of Darkness. Similar to different levels of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, or a kind of inverse of the Gnostic aeons in the Apocryphon of John. Also of note, there is a pseudepigraphical text from the 700s called Investiture of Abaton which gives some additional details about Abaddon as well as a creation myth for Adam. I wrote that down for the podcast so stay tuned for that.
With that out of the way, the explanation of Abaddon guarding Hell is somewhat true biblically although it wasn’t always the case. I should also mention that this movie falls flat with its occult references. It mentions Satanism multiple times but gives no exposition towards the subject. Ironically, Satanism isn’t even a real religion in the traditional sense. Temple of Satan and Levayan Satanists are all atheists and reject any belief in Satan. So that should be a relief for Christians. Satanism is more so a countercultural movement against Christianity pushing the boundary for religious freedoms, although they aren’t even good at that. So seeing Satanism in movies unironically is the same as seeing the Church of the Flying Spaghetti monster in a serious context in my mind. Compare this with the movie Ghoulies which perfectly captures occult horror and mirrors mystical traditions such as Thelema quite well.
The next scare in the movie is one of the characters walking across the house and panning the camcorder past a clown dummy which moves while he isn’t looking. This is the start of way more paranormal occurrences throughout the rest of the movie. Eventually the same dummy starts moving around while no one is looking and pops up in increasingly bizarre places. One of the characters then goes back to sleep and gets attacked by a ghost of some sort which possesses him and puts him in a sort of a trance. He disappears and comes back but seems distant, the rest of the characters just brush it off as him being nervous and he just lays down for a while.
The attraction then opens and attendees quickly evacuate the attraction after various ghosts appear and attempt to sacrifice someone who was chained up for the attraction. This then combines the documentary part of the film with the found footage part where the girl who was chained up is being interviewed and the interviewers don’t know she is also possessed and fall for a trap she set to lead them back to the haunted house where she proceeds to kill them.
Overall, the movie doesn’t do anything revolutionary for the found footage genre or have too many scary moments, but it doesn’t have to. Some people think that every movie that comes out needs to reinvent the wheel when that is not the case. Sometimes more of the same is not necessarily a bad thing. I enjoyed watching Hellhouse LLC despite it not really doing anything different than any other horror movie. Despite this, I still think the movie was really well done and I am excited to watch the other movies in the franchise. As for whether or not I would recommend this movie to someone, that depends. It takes a while for the movie to pay off and it could be seen as somewhat boring to some. I think the ideal person I would recommend this movie to is someone who really likes the horror genre and is looking for hidden gems or something to watch they haven’t seen before.
Halloween 4 is my favorite Halloween movie second only to Halloween 6. While I like the Blumhouse movies, I think they are distinct in what they set out to do. In my mind, Halloween 4 is a great continuation for the franchise after Halloween 2.
The movie also carries itself well without Jamie Lee Curtis which could easily leave the movie on the wrong footing. Despite this, Donald Pleasance reprises his role as Dr. Loomis which really carries the movie. The movie begins with Michael Myers escaping Haddonfield Memorial Hospital between transfers, it is interesting to see how the hospital experiments on him given his supernatural properties. I won't spoil Halloween 6, my favorite Halloween movie, although it really adds to the scenes involving the hospital/sanitarium. Some criticize how many times Michael escapes, but this is later explained in Halloween 6 as well.
Michael then escapes to a gas station and kills a mechanic for his jump suit, prior to this Michael is just wearing bandages and a hospital gown from the hospital. Loomis then tracks him down and confronts him asking Michael to take him instead of innocent victims. As the Halloween movies go on, Loomis becomes more and more mentally unwell and his schemes to capture Michael become more frantic. A deleted scene for the first Halloween adds some context to this showing how being assigned to Michael has taken a toll on him.
The next part of the movie I would like to mention is the redneck lynch mob. This part of the plot is somewhat reminiscient of Halloween Kills although obviously it came first. Halloween Kills portrays the lynch mob moreso in the context of mob mentality while Halloween 4 portrays the lynch mob more in a comedic sense, mistaking a man urinating for Michael Myers.
After that, Loomis sets up a trap for Michael knowing he will return to his childhood home, although he sneaks past everyone guarded around the house and Rachel and Jamie narrowly escape, somehow Michael hitches a ride on the underbelly of the truck and the truck crashes and Michael lands on the ground and gets shot repeatedly before falling into an abandoned mineshaft and is pronounced dead, until Halloween 5. I think this was an alright way of explaining away Michael's dissapearance until the next movie, although Halloween 5 takes it in a strange direction. Although why the police didn't try to retrieve the body is beyond me. It is still better than some of the ways Jason Voorhees is defeated.
After Michael is gone, Jamie turns on Rachel and kills her mirroring the opening scene of the first movie. This was built up throughout the movie with Jamie having visual hallucinations of Michael Myers which were dismissed given that she is a child. Overall I think the movie is very underrated compared to the other Halloween films and it only gets better with the sixth movie.