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Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (1981) / Things Unknown (2015)






The first flick I watched was this early 80’s horror thriller about a 17 year old and his neurotic, overprotective aunt, who will do just about anything to keep him home with her.












High schooler Billy Lynch has been living with his aunt Cheryl ever since his parents were killed in a car accident when he was a young child. As a gifted basketball player, he’s up for a scholarship to attend a University away from home, but aunt Cheryl doesn’t want him to go. One day, she tries to seduce a television repair man who rejects her advances. Enraged, she stabs him to death. Billy walks in just in time to see the murder, and Cheryl tells him that the repair man was trying to rape her. When the police are called, Detective Joe Carson is skeptical of their story. He eventually begins to suspect that Billy was the killer, and that Aunt Cheryl is covering for him. With the heat being turned on them both, Cheryl grows more and more neurotic, desperately trying to keep Billy from leaving home, and tries to dispose of anyone who stands in her way.











This movie was very cheesy and just straight up weird as hell. The actress who plays Aunt Cheryl really hams it up, coming off like a complete nut, with her personality swiftly changing from minute to minute. The murders are funny, the subplot about the television service man is ridiculous (it comes to light that he was gay and in a relationship with Billy’s basketball coach, so the detective assumes that Billy was having an affair with the  repairman and killed him in a lover’s quarrel), and the entire thing plays like a demented soap opera. It’s an amusing ham fest that will appeal to most b-movie lovers.









The next one I caught was a found footage tale about three web show hosts who encounter extraterrestrial phenomena while camping out in the desert.












Brad, Anne and Neil host a web show called WUZZUP.COM where they travel around the country and document their adventures, hosting clips and live feeds. After attending the Burning Man festival and getting lots of footage, they decide to camp out in the desert at a place where Anne used to visit a lot as a kid with her Mom. Once they get out there, they see a meteor shower, followed by some flying discs, and then military planes. Excited that they filmed all of this, they start planning to upload the footage, looking forward to the fame it may give them. However, they soon start to suspect that something is lurking in the area and watching them, and their night becomes increasingly tense and filled with terror.













This movie was so bad! All three of the main characters are annoying as hell, constantly yapping with manic, high intensity. The CGI special effects, including the UFO and alien scenes, look really cheap and laughable. The beginning of the film is filled with rapid fire quick cuts and through the point of view of their website, and it’s irritating and jarring as fuck. Even after they see some weird things, they continue yelling enthusiastically like a bunch of low I.Q. teenagers. Once the abysmally unscary stuff starts happening, the camera glitches often in a desperate attempt to heighten the non existent tension and hide the cheap effects. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted main characters to die so badly, they were that obnoxious. The ending is simply lame and I just shook my head at how absurd the entire thing was. This is arguably the worst found footage “horror” film I’ve seen, 100% grade A hot garbage.













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