Scarecrow's Blog From the Darkside

*** In the aptly titled Creep (2004), Franka Potente gets trapped in a subway as a grotesque freak man kills unfortunates that come in contact with him (a junkie couple living in a secret hideway, subway employees in the sewage system, a person Potente’s journalist knows who mistakes a faux advance as a legit proposal for possible sex). Potente spends most of her time trying to avoid the freak, stay alive, and get the fuck out, but this wouldn’t be a horror show without complications. The atmosphere of the subway station and dark, eerie tunnels, the hideous malformed freak man (he screeches and hobbles), and some potent violence make up for moments where characters (like Potente) behave irrationally and stupidly (Potente falling asleep while boozing on small bottles of liquor, missing a clear blade shot to the monster man’s face while he’s pinned down by a subway worker, simply dropping the weapon and running, the subway worker breaking windows and allowing himself to be vul

*** The Monitor (2011) is n ot a bad little Norwegian psychological thriller that kind of left me a bit miffed by the time it was over. It didn’t wind up making a whole lot of sense to me by the time the film concluded. Nonetheless, not surprisingly, Noomi Rapace is really good as a mother barely holding herself together as she deals with the possibility of losing her son and once again contending in court with her abusive husband (who tried to murder her son). Also her grip on reality seems to be slipping as she is hearing something horrible (screams and violence) across a baby monitor she has in her son’s room so she can keep tabs on him during the night. This paranoia seems considerable because of what she claims her ex attempted to do to her boy (drowning attempt). But the husband, it seems, claims that her testimony against him is questionable. Also going against her are the “caseworkers” who seem to be questioning her mothering skills and emotional ability to raise the

 A Japanese city is in terror as kids are being kidnapped by a "boogeywoman", an urban legend known as the Slit-Mouthed Woman. While it is believed that someone is merely masquerading as this character told around campfires to scare children, a few locals soon learn that this is anything but imaginary. ** ½ I was quite unsettled with Kōji Shiraishi’s Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman , particularly because of the child abuse involved. Kids punched and kicked left me enormously bothered. The slit-mouthed woman is an urban legend that is often discussed by the schoolchildren. An earthquake occurs and the ghost of the woman with the slit-mouth arrives in a city to kidnap kids. A cellar in the red roof home of a male schoolteacher, Noboru--who was a serious victim of child abuse thanks to a psychotic mother that murdered his brother and sister--seems to be where the kids are taken to by possessed mothers, locals who begin coughing before ultimately being invaded by the s

After inheriting a club on a seedy part of the city, a young woman with a difficult past tries to put her life together, but she doesn't realize that this won't be exactly easy due to the past and the relative that left the place to her. **** ½