Three Films Make A Post: Be careful who you click with.

Friend Request (2016): There aren’t really too many social media based horror movies that work for me (and don’t get me started on “Black Mirror”), so Simon Verhoeven’s decent attempt at one here is something of a highlight of the sub-genre for me. It’s also a pretty decent supernatural slasher. To wit: the main character (as played by Alycia Debnam-Carey) is somewhat more likeable than is typical; our tragic undead villainess tends to murder her victims with the help of goth-inflected magical murder dioramas; and there are even some interesting ideas on how to transfer some old witchcraft tropes to the late internet age. That’s more than enough to keep me entertained for ninety minutes.

Pentagram (2019): How easily I am entertained is further demonstrated by how okay I was with this ultra-cheap little number directed by Steve Lawson. Four thieves find themselves trapped in the works, well, the pentagram, of a painfully incompetent occultist (soon deceased), while a demonic force lurks outside. Badly written and very earnestly played heart to hearts between talking clichés ensue, as well as scenes of people angling for candles with the help of tied together pieces of clothing, underwear, and so on. Obviously enhanced to hilarity by ill-advised dramatic slow motion. But hey, I wasn’t bored, so I’m not complaining.

Midnight Thunder aka Guntur Tengah Malam (1990): Over in Indonesia of three decades ago, A. Rachman tells us this very traditional tale of an aunt losing the ownership of the family mansion to her nephews and nieces and proceeding to hire a black magician to take care of these house robbers. There’s quite a bit of very mild sex, a couple of “visions” of people with badly pulped faces, a handful of attacks by an invisible force, and even a bad martial arts fight, all enhanced by one of those synthesizer scores that won’t ever stop repeating the same chords and “atmospheric effects”.
It’s neither as crazy nor as good as many other Indonesian horror movies made before (or after), but, which is today’s refrain, there’s enough of the fun and mildly spooky here for the film to be entertaining enough. And at least the big pool dunking scene is properly great.