Bogged Down With Ghosts

As a successful author of fantasy children’s books, the fetching Claire Holloway keeps having hot flashes about a spooky old house. Searching on the Internet, she finds the domicile of her nightmares in a small town and rents it. Once inside, Claire is visited by a little dead girl that looks like she spent too much time in the bathtub. Then there’s that teenager ghost boy with demon eyes and black gunk dripping out of his mouth. Typical teen.

These visitations are increasing, so she finds a paranormal investigator (most small gossip towns have one) and all steaming heck starts to break loose. The paranormal guy actually sees the ghosts, so any of Claire’s drinking-wine-and-seeing-things is ruled out. As she does her CSI bit, she discovers that years ago two bodies – that of a little girl and a teenage boy – were found in the local marsh, no doubt covered in dirty swamp leaves and bugs.

Back at the haunted house, the killing room re-shapes itself and suddenly becomes a replay of what the heckaroo happened that caused the ghosts to get all ghost-y ’n stuff. Seems some teens were having a party, smoking hard drugs and drinking bottles of the Devil’s Mouthwash (beer, to you outta towners). Two little girls were playing upstairs as the skank chick doing the partying downstairs was SUPPOSED to be baby-sitting. One of the sexually repressed teen boys tries to make out with the skank, but she won’t put out. (Now she decides to get morals?) Dejected and wearing his frustration pants, he goes upstairs to where the little girls are playing and… Take a guess.

A showdown between the ghost and Claire’s repressed memories boils over into a rather generic paranormal confrontation, with lots of blowing wind, yelling and sparks. Ghosts like sparks. The spooks look sufficiently creepy and the scene in the barn with the little dead girl had me believing a big pay-off was coming. Not so much. But hey, now with The Marsh (2005) you have a horror movie you can watch with your mom and not have to explain why girls who take their tops off are so important to the plot.

Sex Monster and Barnyard Horror

A couple of upcoming new ones that look old. But they’re not. They’re new. For reals.

First up is It Follows, due out March 13, 2015, probably before lunch, but definitely after breakfast. It involves a young girl who is plagued by nightmarish visions after an “innocent sexual encounter” in the back seat of a car.

OK, no sexual encounters are innocent. That’s what organized religion tries to drill into our horn dog brains. Secondly, who hasn’t had nightmarish visions after hooking up? Think Lair of the White Worm (1988) and go from there.

ANYWAY…after said hook up, 19-year-old Jay (chick with a dude’s name) can’t shake the sensation that someone – or something – is following her. As the threat closes in, Jay and her friends must somehow escape the horrors that are only a few steps behind.

I bet it’s organized religion.

An old school treatment for The Barn arrives October 1, 2015 in the form of some of those cool illustrated ’80s style horror movie posters. And the plot feels right out of that era as well. Behold…

“It’s Halloween 1989. Best friends Sam and Josh are trying to enjoy what’s left of their final Devil’s Night before graduating high school. But trouble arises when the two pals and a group of friends take a detour on their way to a rock concert, finding an old abandoned barn and awakening the evil inside.

Now it’s up to Sam and Josh to find a way to protect their friends and defeat the creatures that lurk within “The Barn.”

One can barely imagine the horrible creatures in a barn: pigs, horses, cows, rats, bugs, snakes, spiders, poisonous squirrels, stink beetles, electric eels…

Could this be the Old MacDonald version of Night of the Demons (1988)? I will ponder that over a nice breakfast of barn eggs, barn sausage and horse apples. OK, probably not that last one.