Really Awful Movies: Ep 266 – Blair Witch

The original Blair Witch Project was a cultural juggernaut, an explosive hit right out of the gate and on a minuscule budget. The movie put found footage horror on the map, and the conceit has survived to this day in various guises – adopted by indie filmmakers because they’re incredibly cheap to produce compared with conventional film.

Blair Witch (2016) is  It is the third film in the series ignoring the events of Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, which is probably for the best as that one was a real piece of crap.

As for this one? Well, let’s say that Creep, Cannibal Holocaust excepting, there are few found footage flicks that we find compelling.

So, we come in prejudiced. But to give ourselves credit, we went in hoping for the very best. After all, what else can you really do?

A young man, James, and his friends venture into the Black Hills Forest in Burkittsville, Maryland to uncover the mystery surrounding his missing sister, Heather. Many believe her disappearance 17 years earlier is connected to the legend of the Blair Witch. At first the group is hopeful, especially when two locals act as guides.

They set up camp, and then…things start to go haywire.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 35% based on 192 reviews, with an average rating of 5.1/10. That’s probably being charitable.

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Really Awful Movies: Ep 259 – Mountaintop Motel Massacre

On this episode of the Really Awful Movies Podcast we turn to another regional horror, this time from the state of Louisiana. This one is called Mountaintop Motel Massacre (the massacre bit was added later when Roger Corman bought the movie to get it distributed). And boy are we glad he did, as this one is a total hoot.

It’s not often you get to see an elderly lady in a mediocre 80s slasher movie, but here, the proprietor of said hotel is our killer.

Evelyn is a septuagenarian who’s just been released from a mental institution. Everything is easy-breezy as she tends to her garden.

Then, a series of events put motel patrons in harm’s way (at the risk of divulging too much here).

Evelyn, as you may have guessed, is handy with a sickle. Disparate travelers end up at her place of business, and like a really bad version of Psycho, meet their demise.

This one is a slow-burn. Some would call it meticulous. Others would spare the obfuscating language and call it was it is: dull. Sure, it’s dull. But given what the directors and actors had to work with, they didn’t do half-bad a job.

This is regional horror after all. There’s no major backer behind it, no big-time names, certainly no large Hollywood studio.

One host of the Really Awful Movies Podcast as a younger, tried to amass as many movies with massacre in the title as he could. For whatever reason, this one escaped. It’s very possible Jumbo Video or some now-defunct VHS chain simply didn’t stock Mountaintop Motel Massacre.

The movie has attained sort of cult status, which is just the way we like it.

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Really Awful Movies: Ep 246 – Reefer Madness

Finally, we get around to tackling one of the most infamously bad movies out there, Reefer Madness. A dim-bulb overly melodramatic propaganda film (Snarky Editors’ note: like Forrest Gump or Titanic), this 1936 crap-show suggests that “men die for it.”

A middling morality tale about the supposed dangers of weed, the film is now (of course) watched ironically.

Recreational marijuana became legal in our home country (Canada) in mid-October. It’s an interesting time to be living here, to say the least…

So on this episode, we (sorta) delve into the film, watching it in real time (what other kind of time is there?).

So, is this film as ridiculous as it’s cracked up to be? Certainly, but it doesn’t inspire gale-force laughter like some of the insane duds we’ve covered on this program, the likes of Shotgun, One Tough Bastard, Birdemic, etc.

We divulge probably more than we should of on this episode of the Really Awful Movies Podcast. We don’t usually record as we watch, preferring instead to do a bit of (gasp) research…but we thought this would be a perfect opportunity to change the format, if only temporarily.

Some of what we discuss:

  • The perils of buying weed as a teenager
  • Investing in marijuana stocks
  • Drug scams that take place in Toronto
  • The use of jazz and the perception of it during this time
  • Laws, potential hazards of Canadian marijuana legislation

(and probably a lot more that we can’t recall).

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