The Horror of bad Horror films (an Oculus movie review)

F.Y.I this post will probably have horror movie spoilers/images so deal with it :p

ahh movie logic

I Love horror movies, I've been watching them since before I was actually allowed to :D

I don't remember where my parents were, but somehow I got a hold of an "Evil dead 2" VHS tape, and watched it. It scared the everlasting crap out of me, but it was one of my first horror movies. 

A few years later, I'm around 13, and the "Scream" series came out, and those, while also terror inducing, (to a sheltered 13 yr old girl) are much beloved by me. (despite the fact that seeing the ghost face mask still makes me a teensy bit uncomfortable)

 

shudder

Despite being "easy to please" when it comes to movies in general, i'm very critical of my horror movies, I have a set of prerequisites for what I consider to be a "good" horror flick.

1-No killing kids or babies

Nothing is worse than being pregnant and watching "the Omen", so I've made a point to avoid/disown all horror movies that kill children, (doesn't include movies where there are kids present but nothing happens, or where the kids are ghosts who are already dead.)

2-No killing everyone in the movie!

Seriously how hard is it to leave one person alive? Huh "cabin in the woods"? (which was really good besides that) WTF? To make my 2 hours not feel like a complete waste of time, at least someone needs to be hobbling away saying "yay I'm alive!" at the end.

3. The antagonist is successfully defeated

With the exception of franchise films, (Scream, Nightmare on Elm street, Halloween, etc) I HATE watching a stand alone movie where they beat the bad guy/thing, everybody is happy, then right before end credits BAM! It's still there.No sense of closure for the watcher, jerks.

4. No supernatural Alien movies

Ok this one is just a personal preference. I love horror movies, I like the "alien" movies, but combine the two plus base it off a "true story" and you get "the Fourth Kind". Never again. Plus I'm religious/christian and this movie just rubbed me the wrong way on a spiritual level, so I avoid movies that aren't strictly sci-fi alien.

5. Don't be predictable

Seriously, when they show the viewer a creepy ass doll and then expect us to be surprised when it gets possessed later, c'mon now.

Those are my basic ingredients for a great horror flick, a movie that is original, doesn't need to resort to baby killing, isn't predictable, has a satisfying happy ending, and doesn't involve aliens. Personally, I also prefer suspense over gore, but that's just me. 

Also no movies with plants for antagonists, such as "The happening".

The Current Offender:

Oculus 

Here's the IMDB description:

A woman tries to exonerate her brother, who was convicted of murder, by proving that the crime was committed by a supernatural phenomenon.

That's actually a terrible description, the movie begins with her brother being released from a psychiatric facility after he's finally deemed "all there", the description makes it sound like he.s in prison or something.

Ok, saw the trailer for this on IMDB, and it looked interesting, so last night we gave it a go, here's what I thought.

Anyway, so the "phenomenon" is a possessed mirror that can alter your senses so you see and hear what it wants you to, not a bad concept I thought.

The pacing was good, the acting was good, it was slightly predictable, 

but not to the point of being annoying

(as in, she hangs a weighted anchor in front of the mirror as a fail safe to where she has to reset a timer every hour or it will impale the mirror.)

seriously, who didn't see this coming?

The movie would have gotten my nod of approval had it not been for a few things:

1.They don't destroy the Mirror, which was the whole point.

see rule #3

2. The mirror makes it appear as if the brother went crazy and killed her, and exonerating him was the OTHER point!

 So now he's in jail, re-considered crazy, his sister's dead, and the mirror is still alive and kicking. Utterly. Pointless.

Complete waste of time! Nothing gets my goat more than movies that had the potential to be great, but the ending ruins it.

 There are a few more that are like that but I can't remember which ones they were.

Here's some of the best and worst in the horror genre

(I'm not including monster or zombie movies since it's really a genre of its own)

Worst Offenders:

The Wicker Man

The Omen

Dark Skies (stupid creepy aliens)

The Fourth Kind

The Saw movies after #2 (really, we didn't need five!)

Mama 

Paranormal activity Movies

Sinister

The woman in black, AKA Scary Potter

Human centipede movies 

(If you want to be in therapy for the next several years, watch these, if not....)

Don't be afraid of the dark

The last exorcism

splice

A nightmare on elm street 

(remake. Don't mess with the classics)

The Ruins

The Descent

The Happenning

Teeth

(just...dont)

The Orphanage

Pan's Labyrinth 

Hills have eyes 

(cannibal hillbillies? my worst nightmare, and not in a good movie kind of way)

Hostel 

(tortured while travelling abroad? Also on my worst nightmare list. No!)

The Skeleton Key

House of Wax

Jeepers creepers 1&2

The blair witch project

(a movie about how how not to be a cameraman)

Horrifyingly good;

The Ring

(scare the crap out of me)

The Grudge

 (scares the crap out of the man)

The Purge

Odd Thomas

Signs

The Village

The Conjuring 

(loved this one!)

Insidious 1&2 

(sort of breaks rule #3, but it gets a pass)

The Awakening

Prometheus + the Alien series 

(AVP; requiem not included, implies rule #1 is broken)

The cabin in the woods 

(broke rule #2 and #3, but was really original)

Daybreakers

The haunting in Connecticut 

Sweeney Todd

Sleepy Hollow

1408

Silent Hill

 (ugh pyramid head *shudder*)

Slither 

("We're itchy")

The classics: Nightmare on Elm street, Friday the 13th. Halloween

 Scream series

The Amityville Horror

(this one was too good, it scared me so bad I cant watch it again)

Willard

(yay, its creepy thin man!)

Darkness Falls

Dreamcatcher

The Mothman Prophecies

(scared the crap out of me)

13 ghosts

The Others

Urban Legends

Stir of Echoes

Final destination

House on Haunted hill

The Haunting

The Faculty

I know what you did last summer

Phantoms

The Shining

So, to wrap this all up, I'm going to watch beauty and the Beast to make myself feel better :D

and here's hello kitty as thor and loki

Happy Friday!

WinCo

Ok, so after much review reading and asking friends and relatives, we decided to try WinCo for grocery shopping this month.
                                                      ````````````````````````

We live in "Tiny Town" and Tiny Town has all of 2 major chain grocery stores,
 (super fancypants, and ew there's a worm in my apple) not including places like dollar tree, Kmart, etc, so there really isn't much competition, nor choice of store. Personally, I wouldn't choose either one, but I digress..
So, due to the lack of any options, many residents of Tiny Town split their purchases between local and making the 45 ish minute drive to "Big Town", where the options are considerably larger.
We've shopped at W-mart, where it's slightly cheaper than Super fancypants, but not really cheap enough to buy the majority of our groceries, so we just used it as our fancypants substitute.

Many of our friends kept referring us to WinCo, so after extensive researching (a.k.a asking Facebook and reading yelp reviews) I convinced the man that we should try it at least once.

Before I go into detail about our trip, here is a little foreward regarding my feelings on grocery shopping;

Grocery shopping is usually my least favorite thing to do, for the following reasons;

-Crowds make me anxious and ..."grouchy" so to speak

-bug bug always has to go #1 and #2....at different times.

-it's cold in the store

- I have serious problems with decision making, and will spend 10 minutes trying to figure out what size/type/brand of something to get, so unless I have a specific preference (like Heinz ketchup) it takes a while, and makes the man and bug bug "grouchy".

so accurate 

Usually the longer I'm in a store, the worse my anxiety and grouchiness gets until I'm near meltdown, and all I can think about is "dear glob I just want to get what we have and go NOW!", and everyone else is grouchy due to my grouchiness, and a perfectly good evening is ruined by grocery shopping.

WinCo, however, went a bit differently..

We left Tiny Town directly after I got off work, about 6:50 pm, got to the store about 7:30 ish
I had been all over their website earlier, trying to look at prices and whatnot and I found you could select your location and print out a map of the store's layout, so I did.
It was super handy considering we weren't familiar with it and it's a fairly large place, it made for much more efficient shopping.

We crawled our way through the produce department, then stopped for what was probably around 45 minutes in the bulk bin section.

just to give you an idea

 Let me tell you, that section made the whole trip worth it.
Literally every dry good you can think of was either in a self serve dispenser or bin, and there was a ridiculous amount of common and uncommon candies and treats as well.

There's oatmeal, cereal, granola, flax products, every kitchen dry good you'd need, seasonings, spices, *eeek pumpkin pie spice in bulk!!!!*
dry sauce mixes, sugar, nuts, dog food/treats, pasta, all with a bunch of varieties of each kind as well.
Oh, they also had recipe cards for making things with the goods! So neat!

We got;

-dark chocolate covered coffee beans (me)
-chocolate covered pretzels (bug)
-flavored taffy type candy (the man)
-corn flakes (the man)
-frosted flakes (me)
-coco puffs (bug)
-maple some kind of nut granola (everybody)
-rotini
-bow tie pasta
-fettuccine
-penne
-blueberry muffin mix

I think that's it, we tried not to go overboard given that it was only the 2nd section we'd been to in the store, and most of it wasn't on our list for this trip.
But seriously, it's amazeballs.

Then we hit the coffee self serve section.

not from our location, but you get the idea

Not only did they have your everyday arabica, they have Flavored coffee <3

We decided on:

-cinnamon swirl (me)

-buttery pecan (the man) *side note; the man loves everything butter pecan flavored

Next time we'll get a big bag of whatever brew, but this time we decided to splurge a little.

not an exaggeration

Sooooo.... cut to 10:30 pm, (see? I wasn't exaggerating for once.) we've finally made it through the store,

bug has made bathroom trip #2, we checkout, bag our groceries, buy some ice, and we're ready to go, the groceries are loaded, I've got some BBQ Corn nuts for the trip home, the keys are shut in the trunk, we're ready to go home, unload, and gt some much needed rest so the man can get up at 5am for work.

...what I did there, did you see it?

Poor the man, he did so awesome through the whole store, no one had meltdowns or got crabby, but when helping me unload the fewd, probably the ice chest items, he set his lanyard in the trunk :(

After a lot of praying and trying to get our other keys to somehow trick our car into unlocking, I went to the customer service counter in the store, told them our situation and asked if they had any suggestions.

The conversation was as follows;

me- " Hello, my husband accidentally locked the keys in our trunk, do you have any suggestions?"

guy-" do you have AAA?"

me- "nope."

guy- " is there anyone you can call who has a spare key?" 

*inner monologue- I'm pretty sure I would have thought to call them if there were, bub...plus the spare was on the lanyard :( *

me-"nope."

guy-"well, i'm sorry but those are the only suggestions I can think of."

me-" okaaayyy, thanks anyways." 

*inner monologue- for nothing!!!*

Then after more praying, a great idea by me, (I'm positive it was divine inspiration, no joke)

and x1 divinely placed utensil, we got in, no broken windows or anything! 

so, it's now 11:30 pm, and we're headed home feeling very grateful and blessed.

(no broken window, God is great!!!)

Despite the late return and almost having to bust out and replace a car window, the trip was a total success.

We're still going to get produce at Super fancypants, just because they still have the best quality, and essentials like bread, eggs, milk, and meat we will get at There's a worm in my apple, because they aren't too bad and they're still cheaper there.

Oh, and the store wasn't even that busy! Considering the late hour there weren't many weirdos either!

TLDR: WinCo has amazing bulk dry goods, candy, coffee, and a whole bunch of other awes-sauce stuff, and we locked our keys in the trunk.

back to brainwashin.....oops I meant school

Not school for me, but bug bug is about to start, today we go get her registration packet for what I'll refer to as: "crap school". So far, she's still 3rd in line to go to "awesome school", but it looks like we may have to wait another year before she can get in. As long as she gets in before 5th grade, I'm fine with waiting another year.

Farewell, my days of whine fest-free sleeping in mornings, hello early bedtimes and homework protests, and nibbled at carefully prepared lunches, and hole ridden stained clothes (that I just bought.) I hate school.
Hopefully her teacher this year at crap school will send instructions with her homework, instead of weird pages with vague instructions.

On the plus side, she has gotten amazing at super mario on her DS, (better than me, I'm terrible with platformers) and she can now read movie subtitles much better, (now we can watch english subbed anime instead of dub) and when playing games with alot of text, she no longer needs assistance, except with words she isn't familiar with..

I've completely forgotten what my whole point of this post was supposed to be, I'm watching battleship at the same time and it keeps distracting me. So far it's actually not as bad as I've heard, but apparently I'm not hard to please when it comes to movies, according to my other half. I see a new movie trailer and I' like, "OMG AAAARGGGG WE HAVE TO SEE THIS!!" and he's like, "Meh, it looks ok."

We saw guardians of the galaxy last night, and needless to say, it was just as good as expected.
Admittedly, I know nothing about the comic series, I'd never even heard of it before the movie, but i'd say it definitely warrants some further reading, especially regarding Thanos. Aaaaannd I'm curious as to who peter's father is.

I'm so impatient for KH3, it better be worth the wait....

ok welllll i'm getting nowhere with this now, I gotta do laundry and the movie is distracting me heehee.