Three Films Make Me Grumpy: One Day After A Million Years It Came Out Of Hiding To... Kill! Kill! Kill!

Big Bad (2016): So, some kids are locked into an abandoned jail for a fundraiser (don’t ask me, I didn’t write this nonsense), and are attacked by a hairy, scrawny monster. Supposed hilarity ensues, or as I call it, an unending series of jokes which turn out to be neither funny nor timed well. To be fair, Opie Cooper’s film also contains horror parts so mild they shouldn’t disturb a sensitive child, tedious plotting, and lots of feet dragging to get the thing to length, but that’s not exactly the sort of thing to make a film sound any better.

Turns out a horror comedy kind of needs to be funny. Who knew?

Ghost Team (2016): On the plus side, at least Big Bad doesn’t have a cloyingly corny moral like Oliver Irving’s film about a bunch of losers going on a ghost hunt and stumbling into a really crap Scooby Doo episode without even a talking dog in sight. The moral of the tale of course is that nobody’s a loser, except for the audience confronted with a bunch of jokes so obvious, my grandma is complaining they aren’t fresh enough – which actually is just as funny as ninety percent of the jokes in Ghost Team.

Shall I also complain about the boring and obvious characters and about the dearth of imagination on display? Done.

Bastard (2015): This is what you get when you randomly mash the visual style of one horror sub-genre with the soundtrack style of a different one, and include everything plus the cannibal/kitchen sink in your script, including the old ultra violence and some particularly random moments of “irony”. It’s a really pretty looking mess with fine practical special effects in search of a script that would either actually know how to connect all the different bits and pieces from a thousand horror sub-genres included here, had something interesting to say about them, or did anything else but demonstrate that directors Powell Robinson and Patrick Robert Young have seen a lot of horror movies. As it stands, it’s one of the best looking films that ever kept me quite this disinterested in anything going on in it.