Three Films Make A Post: NO SEA MONSTER OF MYTH OR LEGEND IS HALF SO DEADLY AS ONE THAT ACTUALLY EXISTS!

Demon Possessed aka The Chill Factor (1993): Christopher Webster’s spam in a cabin movie could be a perfectly okay genre entry, with somewhat okay acting, a degree of visual competence, and some snow, but until fifty minutes in or so there’s little of interest happening in it at all. Too much time is spent on letting characters you couldn’t care less about interact, and once the mandatory murders start, it’s all pretty tame and generally indifferent stuff, leaving this one with little going for it.

La bambola di Satana aka The Doll of Satan (1969): I’m not exactly expecting every Italian sort of Gothic, sort of mystery to be terribly great, but Ferruccio Casapinta’s film not only suffers from the usual troubles of Italian genre cinema of its time but really loses out on everything that usually works well even in the lesser of these films. So the score is bad and so bland it’s barely worth mentioning, the acting’s bland instead of weird, the direction is bland instead of stylish and/or weird, and the script is pretty awkward when it comes to mystical techniques of filmmaking like transitions or constructing a mystery but in the blandest possible manner. I could cope with the whole affair not being exactly good but there’s no reason for it to be quite this, well, bland.

The Museum Project (2016): To the rescue of this rather dispirited post comes a short item from Australia directed by Dion Cavallero and Paul Evans Thomas. It’s your typical POV movie set-up about the usual trio of film students doing a project about some haunted place and getting quite a bit more than they bargained for. However, said haunted place is highly atypical, for it takes the form of a railway museum haunted by a dead serial killer, which certainly provides the film with a more interesting setting than the forest usually expected in this style. The directors put the museum to good use, too, with some nice moody shots of empty train cars at night, and a thematically appropriate and nicely timed haunting.


Thanks to a running time of just 44 minutes, the film doesn’t overstay its welcome and loses nothing by it but potential filler, ending up as a nice little ghost story told effectively.