"The Girl Next Door"

Jack Ketchum is one sick man. "The Girl Next Door," based on Ketchum's book but ultimately inspired by the brutal torture of a 16-year old Sylvia Linken by the woman she had been staying with in Indiana. This is considered to be one of the worst crimes ever committed in Indiana.

As far as the film...

It focuses on "Meg," also a 16-year old whose parents had just passed away in a car accident which also severely injured her little sister in the process. Now they are forced to stay with their Aunt Ruth who is clearly psychotic and gets all the neighbor boys (and girls, even) to turn against Meg by means of just blatant and horrible, horrible torture.

For the record, this is one of the sickest movies I've seen, much worse than "Megan Is Missing," which I have blogged about a few posts pre-dating this one.
As a side note, I don't think anyone really enjoys (while I do think it interests people such as myself)movies like this, so I don't want anyone getting the wrong idea about me or anyone who watches movies by Jack Ketchum (which are all extremely disturbing and gorey). It's just having the realization that while things like this might haunt some people to their very core, things like this happen and it's real and we shouldn't blindfold ourselves to tragedies in this world just because we're afraid.
David Foster Wallace once said, "...good fiction's job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." While Wallace said that in relation to his writing and others' writing, it applies to all forms of storytelling, as well as film-creating.
Back to the movie, it's all told from the point of view of a local neighborhood boy who witnesses what's happening to Meg, but is scared (understandabley) to stand up for her or to get help, until it is too late and Meg succumbs to all the torture she has endured and dies of blunt force trauma as well as malnutrition.
Very reminiscent of "The Woman" (the movie in which my first blog focuses on, check it out below!) also by Ketchum, and of the book "A Child Called It" by Dave Pelzer which I read in secret, because my mother despises stuff like that and movies like this too, when I was about thirteen. This film gives a disgusting peak into the world of extreme child abuse and also even adolescence as a whole.

 I would so tell any of my horror-loving gore-devouring friends to check this movie out, but hey it's not for everyone and that's okay too. It's sick, sad and wrong...but whoever said the world was right, huh?

"Chernobyl Diaries"

The one good thing I can say about Chernobyl Diaries: Jesse McCartney was not as horrible of an actor as he usually is. But...that's about all that's "shocking" in this not-so-horrific horror movie.

It's sad too because there's so much to work with here! Scripted by the same writer who wrote Paranormal Activity, the movie Chernobyl Diaries falls short of expectations of what a good, scary movie should be like, but also of any post-disaster film that's based on a true event.

The main story line is predictable and we've all seen it a zillion times:

Group of college-aged adults go somewhere secluded to find that it isn't so secluded after all aaaaand they all end up dead.

A little more specifically, these kids are going to see the city of Chernobyl, or what's left of it to take pictures and just basically check it out. They take some ho-dunk tour given by a local man with a shitty van.

Good plan, right?

Here's a clip of the tour guide finding something he didn't expect to in a supposedly abandoned building in Chernobyl:

Well, he shows them around and who would of thought...he ends up dying leaving them to fend for themselves in this not-so-abandoned chemically infested wasteland of what used to be Chernobyl.

The biggest downfall of this movie besides the constantly overused plotline is the disappointing and almost nonexistent images of the "mutants" that still reside in the town. Even now I am researching for even just one photo of them or a short clip and there's none to be found.

This is the only picture I found and it's the only inhabitant of Chernobyl that we didn't get to witness her face.

In the movie, the only shots of the mutants were very short, sparse, and in the pitch dark. Disappointed doesn't begin to describe my feelings when leaving the theater after seeing this one.

Prometheus

A little clip for your viewing pleasure:

I'm not really sure how to feel about this one.

Effects: Awesome, epic, sick, impressive. The storyline? Not something to brag about.

Prometheus is a ship where all these brainy-scientists are summoned to find our (being the human race) "makers," if you will.

They find where they used to be and are disappointed that they're too late and their makers aren't going to be able to answer their questions. Though, there are bigger problems. Not only did these life forms create us, but they also created these alien squid-like creatures. Here you can see one of them growing in a character because he drank some of their black goo!:

Sick, right?!

Anyway, like I said, I'm still unsure about my overall rating of this one. I'm just going to put it this way: If this movie were a food that I ordered; I wouldn't spit it out or regret trying it, but I wouldn't order it again.

Here's a long trailer I found to be impressive.



Arachnophobia

This is way less gore-filled than my usual choices, but John Goodman was on the list of actors, so I had no choice but to check it out.

It's definitely creepy, you can see for yourself why in this long trailer that basically shows and tells the whole movie in one 2-minute video.

John Goodman is funny, as usual. The spiders in the movie are strangely real-looking so that was surprising for a movie as old as Arachnophobia, which was released in 1990.

The story is, predictabley, about a young family who moves from the city to a rural area where they are in this big, country house. The dad is terrified of spiders and, to nobody's suprise, has to have an epic battle with the queen spider in the end of the movie to save his family, himself, and the whole town.

There's the classic "hot girl in shower smiling and washing her hair like it's the best time of her life" scene, which is no surprise in any movie anymore....

All in all, a fine movie, John Goodman is obviously the best part of the whole thing, and not to spoil it, but he's pretty much the under-appreciated hero throughout the whole film, so, kudos, John.

To wrap it up, here's a 2:59 minute video about the The Top 10 Most Venomous Spiders In The World to get your skin crawling, if it hasn't already yet! :)