LogFAQs > #979814709

Watched two of Shudder's original films from 2024. I had been meaning to start on them for a while, especially since @PrivateBiscuit1 has been saying good things about the two most recent. But I felt I needed to watch one that came out a couple of months ago now, History of Evil, first. So last night we did just that... and boy oh boy, this did not leave me feeling that Shudder was on the right track with their originals at all. I have no idea who signed off on this.

To start, the film has an interesting enough premise, even if it does make me feel a certain sort of way. If you've seen the trailers for the upcoming movie Civil War, then it's basically that. You have this setup to where the government has been overthrown or perhaps just changed into that of a heavily Christian authoritarian state, at least that's what the movie tells you at first. But what it actually seems to be is more based on race, because any time a non-white person is on the side of this new government, they're referred to as "converts" specifically. Like only white people were originally part of this new order, even though that's never explicitly stated. Anyway, the horror aspect of this film is that a wife, husband and their daughter are on the run and part of the uniquely named "The Resistance", and while on the run they take refuge in what's essentially a haunted house. The wife is supposedly this big time leader of the group and she's recently escaped prison, though the way this film is written you'd never know she was supposed to be any sort of leader. Her relevance to the plot amounts to making two speeches over the radio that could have been easily created better by AI. Hollow nothingness.

The actual main character is her husband, and well, this is one of the worst written characters in horror recently. It's sort of like someone watched The Shining and then did a supremely shitty job of copying it. There's no nuance, no building of character, nothing. Just total horse shit and forced everything. It's infuriatingly bad writing to a level that's hard to put into to words. There is nothing good to say about this movie after the first 15 or 20 minutes. Plot points are introduced and go nowhere, but time is devoted to them anyway. Ghosts appear with no sort of explanation about who they are or what they represent; the one ghost that does get the most screentime just makes no sense. It's so poorly explained and again, the writing is just so shit it's hard to believe anyone put money into making this movie. I feel bad for everyone who was involved in making this. One of the worst horror movies I've ever seen.

The second one we watched is Baghead, though it's the newer of the other Shudder films it's what Genny picked so after me having picked what I did, I couldn't make any argument. It's a pretty good offering, definitely needed after what we had to watch before it. It was successful with some good jumpscares, especially early on. I did like the "villain" here the film has a 'dark end', which is something I typically don't like in my horror movies. But with this one I felt the 'witch' had really been screwed over here and didn't deserve to spent centuries locked in a basement and abused for her powers. So looking at it from her point of view, I suppose this wasn't a 'bad ending'.

But yeah, very competently done and definitely solidly enjoyable.