Paranormal Activity - 6/10
Surprisingly, this wasn't as bad as I was expecting. It had all the makings of the kind of film style that bores me cross-eyed. Hand-held shaky cam horrors made on shoestring budgets with minimalist principles haven't interested me since I saw The Blair Witch Project, and I enjoyed that one mostly for its novelty (and to date, it's the one of few of these kinds of films that understood the principle of putting characters you can enjoy for 90 minutes...which is extremely important when you're making a documentary-style flick). On that point, Paranormal Activity doesn't exactly deliver gold. But the goober husband and the housewife never really lost me, and though they do their part selling the young couple with a ghost problem routine (although to refer to it as a ghost problem is misleading) they don't make it boring. It does follow formula, of course. There is a twenty minute introductory section or so where we meet the couple and get a sense of what's to come, the middle-section where the meat of the movie occurs, and the climax...which never seems to be worth the wait in any of these movies. Granted, the film isn't a bust with the ending. But it certainly doesn't end strong. At the beginning we know that "this is a true story" and that all these events have been recorded before hand and "found" later. Never a good sign for the protagonists. With the exception of say, Cloverfield, I went into this expecting the YouTube budget...so there was always a sense that my foreboding could only have possibly extended to a certain point. And surprisingly...this one maintained a certain kind of suspension there in the middle, at least for me. I can't say I was truly scared or frightened (C'mon. Really?), but I was definitely intrigued with what was happening in a morbid kind of candid camera sort of way.
Phenomena - 7/10
You might know this as Creepers in the states, and if you do then you also know that this was probably Jennifer Connolly's biggest role before she starred opposite David Bowie in Labyrinth. As a big Argento fan, a big Connolly fan, and a big Donald Pleasence fan...it's easy for me to ignore the obvious cheese factor in this mid-eighties slasher, so my thoughts on it are admittedly biased. I saw this originally in my youth in its trimmer, American cut (which means they chopped the fat out of the boring parts and a few precious seconds in all the gross scenes). But even then I enjoyed it. This film is notable for having a bunch of really crazy scenes towards the end and excessive plot points. Besides the fact that jailbait Connolly is attending a boarding school where a killer is on the loose that murders girls with...a harpoon, dart gun kinda thing, there's also a subplot about her character being able to communicate telepathically with bugs. Yeah. It sounds bad. But it's not. It's awesomely bad. Emphasis on the awesome. Hosting an oddball soundtrack of eighties synths and awkwardly timed Iron Maiden and other pop-culture tracks, the real reason to watch this is for the climax...which just has the most spontaneous crap occur out of nowhere. Yep, it's a guilty pleasure.
The Satanic Rites of Dracula - 5/10
Known under a different title in America, this is one of the last (or the last) Dracula movie with Christoper Lee in the starring role. I'm a big fan of Lee, and of Peter Cushing, who stars opposite Lee as Van Helsing. But it's clear that whatever steam Lee built up in his stint as Dracula in the two decades or so he portrayed him had been spent by this point. He basically spends this one sitting out, and when he is there all he really does is a whole lot of looming, a bit of monologuing, and then closes the film by strolling into a thorny bush to be toe-tagged in a very casual manner by Cushing. It's not a bad movie, especially...and I emphasis especially...given the material. The script is well enough, and because it's a largely English cast they of course spend most of the film standing around, talking...and drinking tea. Boring comes to mind. They flash some nudity in there to wake you up, and there are some fleeting moments of decent kill shots. But for the most part it's pretty ho-hum.