Two young men who are either 16 or 25 discover they like kissing. Their parents don’t like them kissing. So they call the gay exorcist, the kind that exorcise the gay out of gays, not the normal type of gay exorcist. The zealous christians who adhere to the Old Testament beliefs about gays use witchcraft (which they seem to be fine with) to curse the two mates with a sex demon.

I was interested to see how they would handle the deep and complex issues of religious trauma for gays. Unfortunately, they handled these issues as clumsily as a back of the bus handjob between two teenagers. There really didn’t seem to be much depth behind the characters or relationships that would have made this movie really interesting.

Instead we get a repetitive and oppressive reliance on the gimmick of the movie revealed in the trailer. A supernatural entity that appears as the person you lust over to lure you in, so that it can harm/kill you. If you are expecting more, it’s not here.

There are a couple of lines in the movie that act as ciphers for interpreting the message of the film, but they don’t give much depth to the themes.

I’m sure that this movie will be meaningful to many people that watch it, and it being released during pride month is obviously intentional, but for me it was a miss.

4/10

In South Korea there are 7 super-haunted locations, and Gonjiam the abandoned asylum is one of them. This movie follows a team of ghost hunting live streamers as they attempt the biggest stream of their lives. Picking up 3 female volunteers and one bro volunteer, the Horror Time crew breaks into the haunted asylum and begin streaming it to the world. But things do not go as planned for the jaded paranormal investigators, and they are quickly in over their heads as real occurrences present themselves. You could even say they are experiencing some sort of incident in a ghostland.

This is my second viewing of Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum. I first heard of this movie from our facebook group a while back and checked it out with zero expectations and was pleasantly surprised. For a movie I had never heard of before, it was actually pretty fun to watch. Coming back to the film about a year later I am able to see some of the flaws a little clearer. Mikayla mentioned that found footage is hard for her because the camera motion makes her feel nauseous. Well that really becomes a problem for this movie as there are like 20 moving cameras switching back and forth. Each character is equipped with a go pro looking directly at their face, a pov cam, and some of the crew even have handheld cameras just to bump that multicam number up. One of the dudes has a wide fisheye camera that is so confusing to look at that you literally can’t even tell what’s going on when they cut to it. It also takes about half the movie’s runtime for anything scary to really happen. With those negatives out of the way, I think this movie provides some seriously scary scenes, creepy atmosphere, and visuals that will stick with me for a long time. I still like this movie, it just isn’t quite as good as I remember it being. If you like found footage style horror and foreign films it’s worth a watch in my opinion.

Score 6/10

Picking up 26 years later we see our four original characters Brenda, Cindy, Ray and Shorty reunited but for all the wrong reasons. They are once again being targeted by a masked killer. With the introduction of some new characters and new spoofs, the audience is taken on a journey to find who the killer is before it’s too late.

Scary movie 6 being released after the longest gap in the franchise with the return of the Wayans brothers was promising a lot, I’m not quite sure if we got all that was promised

The movie does deliver with with multiple parodies of more recent popular horror films like the substance, weapons, smile and a lot more but some jokes fell more flat than others

I find it really hard to give a score to a comedy as it is often super subjective and I’m just not into the scary movie franchise all that much, not really my kind of comedy

It wasn’t a miserable experience and just for the nostalgia I’m sure there are plenty of people that liked this film but for me it was a major miss

There were plenty of bits/points that I found funny but more that weren’t than were

4/10