Three Films Make A Post: Record it all, I want you to know why we did this

Scarlett (2020): The titular Scarlett (Melanie Stone) has to use all the asskicking techniques her spy daddy taught her when he is kidnapped. And whenever John Lyde’s film gets around to showing that, the film is a perfectly decent and pretty fun bit of cheapo action, shot with a degree of verve and with enough reversals in situations to keep interest up. Alas, the film suffers from a series of pointless flashback sequences which try to hit home about Scarlett and Dad’s relationship what a viewer will have understood in the first couple of scenes, destroying pacing and patience in the progress.

La cueva aka In Darkness We Fall (2014): A Spanish group of annoying assholes and nitwits on vacation manage to stumble into a cave and get lost there. Unfortunately, one of them carries a camera, so we have to suffer through eighty minutes of bickering, cannibalism, shouting and moaning, POV-style.

I know, I know, “people are the worst” nihilism is always a thing to bank on in horror, but in the case of Alfredo Montero’s film, people aren’t the worst because the film makes a convincing argument concerning this, but because its script makes them perfectly unlikeable and annoying; they fall towards cannibalism with the thorough enthusiasm of a conservative cutting social budgets. The characters also act like idiots throughout, even once they’ve gotten lost never bothering to mark where they’ve already looked for an exit,not  trying to preserve water instead of starting on the cannibal holocaust, and so on and so forth.

Untitled Horror Movie (2021): And welcome to the present of POV horror, another Zoom horror movie brought to you by The Pandemic™. Nick Simon’s movie is trying to find its own niche as a very meta kind of horror comedy, where actors from a fictional The C&W-style urban fantasy series trying to shoot a horror movie via Zoom before the inevitable axing of their show (and conjuring up a demon in the process) are indeed played by actors actually working in that field. The humour isn’t very deep or complex, and a lot of the Hollywood jokes are exactly the ones you’d expect, but the actors clearly have fun making light of themselves and their world. The film is also well directed, generally doing at least one thing that must have been at least partially difficult to realize under lockdown per scene. Even though the horror elements won’t keep anyone awake at night, they’re not boring either.