One Star Classics

At heart, I am a completionist, and as the heart wants what the heart wants, I felt the need to do a short write-up on Hell House LLC: The Director’s Cut. For added context, here’s my previous coverage of the trilogy:

• The original duology – Hell House LLC and Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel.
• Hell House LLC: Lake of Fire

This first movie remains the best of the three, with its relatively grounded gates-to-hell story. Good as the other two are – Lake of Fire is the better one – they lose much of its believability, with characters that are more forgettable than this film’s likable bunch. But I digress.

In the director’s cut, we get additional scenes, as well as a reshuffle of original ones; both make for a more coherent story. Often I’m not big on removing fill-in-the-blanks elements of films, but Hell House, LLC benefits from it.

It’s not that there is a lot of new material in the cut, but what’s there makes a difference. Exactly what happens during the beginning and end of the movie becomes a lot clearer, as does key character Paul’s fate. Small details about the Abaddon’s history shed some light on the grander lore, too. None of it is necessarily major, but it’s enough to make for a fuller package.

The director’s cut won’t change anyone’s minds about the Hell House LLC franchise, but it’s a good holdover for fans until the promised The Abaddon Tapes TV series makes its way to some streaming service. From my perspective, the changes and additions are enough to make an already good movie excellent.

Extras!

Actual movie aside, there are also about thirty minutes of included extras. (Remember those?) Highlights include rehearsals – which are unexpectedly illuminating – and location scouting. The latter provides a surprising amount of added context to the film.

The Trailer

With roots in Creepypasta – basically, horror memes before we used the word meme – comes 47 Hours to Live, a movie a whole lot better than most of its ilk.

The premise is as simple as most Creepypasta stories are. We follow (alleged) teenagers Rose (Annie Hamilton) and Cadence (Allie Marie Evans), who, in a fit of boredom, play a game they find online. In it, the players set a phone’s photo timer and pass it back and forth while reciting a chant. The person holding the phone when the camera flashes is cursed to die within forty-seven hours unless they play and win the game against someone else.

It’s a predictable – some might say a bit tired – conceit, and it should surprise no one that one of the characters believes the story while the other doesn’t until creepy things start happening. Can they lift the curse, or are they destined to pass a phone between them every other day for the rest of their lives?

Within 47 Hours to Live’s simple shell lies a surprisingly entertaining and heartfelt gem. I doubt anyone will jump behind their couch in sheer fright from it, but the film still works as straight horror entertainment. There are slick visual scares – Cadence seeing herself on a movie screen is a highlight – most more fun than scary. I would imagine the film would have worked well in the theaters with look behind you!-level audience participation.

More unexpected is the quality of the basic high-school drama. Straitlaced Rose and Kurt Cobain-reincarnated Cadence are vastly different on the surface, but the bond they share through experiences with abuse make for multi-dimensional characters rarely seen in Creepypasta movies. Hamilton and Evans both put in convincing performances, leading a pack of unknown but competent actors.

There’s a lot to like about 47 Hours to Live, then. Would I run and proclaim it to be a great, unsung horror gem for the masses? Maybe not quite, as it’s still a niche movie in the Creepypasta realm. Yet it certainly doesn’t deserve to rot in Prime Video’s darker corners, which I suspect is the case. 47 Hours to Live is well made and is a whole lot more A than B-grade. I’ve watched it twice, so consider that a fairly firm endorsement.

About that central conceit

I am fuzzy on the titular forty-seven hours, a number that seems somewhat random. Does it mean you have forty-seven hours and fifty-nine minutes, and then you die? Or do you die at the exact forty-seven-hour mark as a giant psych! to anyone who thinks they have two full days to live? The movie does not seem interested in delving into these details, so maybe I’m an outlier here.

(I mean, is the evil spirit just so playful it decided to go with one hour less than two days? What is its motivation? OK, I’ll stop.)

From our Creepypasta archives

Butterfly Kisses is another unexpectedly decent Creepypasta romp. Slender Man? Not so much, and let’s just forget about The Tall Man.

The Trailer

Max Fist (Joe Manganiello) is a hero – superhero according to some – from another dimension. Buy him a drink, and he will dejectedly tell the story of being pushed into our world by his archenemy, where he is left with no powers.

Burgeoning video journalist Hamster (Skylan Brooks) sees Max as his ticket to the big time. Here is a massive, hulking man with a story that is almost designed to go viral. It’s well worth the price of a bottle of cheap whiskey.

Hamster’s sister Indigo (Zone Griggs) is having less luck. Running an errand for drug lord The Manager (Glenn Howerton sleazing it up like only he can), things go awry during a money pickup. Instincts kick in, and Indigo realizes she can take hundreds of thousands of dollars and make a run for it.

This all takes place during Archenemy’s first act, and while it is an interesting setup, the first thirty minutes are also a bit of a slog. Fitting the main elements into about half the time would probably have worked just fine. Things pick up when The Manager figures out what Indigo has done and sends two of his goons to take her and Hamster out. Max intervenes and deals with the flunkies very much like a superhero would. Maybe Max isn’t a schizophrenic addict after all?

From there, we follow the trio trying to figure out how to deal with The Manager and his mysterious boss. Max is violent and cranks up with methamphetamine, which very well could be the source of any strength he still has. Or?

Archenemy is Adam Egypt Mortimer’s follow-up to Daniel Isn’t Real, one of last year’s greats. Much like Archenemy, it delved into our perceptions of reality while still playing as a straight genre movie. The balance worked well.

For all intents and purposes, Archenemy successfully follows Daniel’s formula. The themes are similar. While this is a deconstructed superhero movie, it’s still a movie that isn’t ashamed of its roots.

Things do, as mentioned, pick up during the second act, but maybe a bit too much so. There are hard cuts between action-packed scenes that make it hard to determine if what we are watching is sequential, flashbacks, or if there is some sort of dream logic at play. It’s somewhat jarring, but not enough so that it gets in the way of an otherwise enjoyable movie.

Because Archenemy is entertaining. Mortimer has created a weird, believable world which looks gorgeous through its dirt and grit. The cinematography is of a high caliber.

The characters, too, have enough depth to be at least a scooch more interesting than superhero tropes. There is a backstory for Hamster and Indigo that easily could be explored in a second movie. The cast does a great job, particularly Paul Scheer making a great appearance as the unstable Krieg.

There are pacing and flow problems, but Archenemy is, in the end, fascinating. It is as strange of a movie as one would expect the follow-up to Daniel Isn’t Real to be. If nothing else, it’s worth watching as another step in Mortimer’s journey to what likely will be something larger than his current indie stardom.

SpectreVision Watch!

Archenemy was produced by SpectreVision, making this the fourth movie we’ve covered from Elijah Wood’s production studio. The rest:

• Color Out of Space
• Daniel Isn’t Real
• Seven Stages to Achieve Eternal Bliss by Passing Through the Gateway Chosen by the Holy Storsh

The Trailer

Filmed back-to-back with the kind-of, sort-of Sleepaway Camp sequel, Unhappy Campers, comes Teenage Wasteland. This is the third and final entry in the true Sleepaway Camp timeline, but there still has been plenty of unofficial sequels and spin-offs from the original movie. More about that some other day.

Feeling optimism and inspiration and, frankly, hubris during the filming of Unhappy Campers, the writing team decided to jump straight into a third script. The chutzpah paid off, and Teenage Wasteland started filming even before its predecessor had hit the theaters.

Unhappy Campers was objectively a bonkers movie, teetering on becoming a parody of Sleepaway Camp. Yet, it did work. At least in a sense. As far as being a horror-comedy, I don’t feel like it was a million miles away from Scream, albeit with significantly lower production values.

This third entry opens with Angela (Pamela Springsteen, once again killing it (no pun intended)) stealing a garbage truck with which she plows down a camp-bound troubled teen. With her new stolen identity, Angela heads to Camp New Horizons, where high-class teens are supposed to mold inner-city kids into productive members of society. I get the distinct impression that the writers didn’t spend much time on the story during their mid-shoot writing sessions.

It’s all a setup, of course, for Angela to start killing again. Rich, poor, good, bad, it doesn’t matter. Campers and counselors alike feel Angela’s wrath. For all intents and purposes, Teenage Wasteland is a remake of Unhappy Campers and also an entirely unnecessary movie. But! It’s still fun. For god’s sake, you get to hear Angela rap.

That’s worth at least something.

I’m not sure the humor would have succeeded was it not for Springsteen, whose timing and mannerisms are spot-on.

That’s about what Teenage Wasteland has to offer. If you enjoyed Unhappy Campers, you will probably get a kick out of this one, too, particularly seeing it streams for free on pretty much every platform.

The real tragedy is that Springsteen has done preciously little acting over the years. She has instead gone down the photography route and has worked extensively on record covers. (Not surprisingly, brother Bruce Springsteen can be found in her portfolio.) She’s also married to television director Bobby Roth, who, frankly, should feature her more in his work.

As for Sleepaway Camp, there were two more in-name-only sequels produced and halfway released. The character of Angela was featured in some unrelated films, too. Really, though, this was the last of the true Sleepaway Camp movies. Maybe that was for the best, seeing the twist in the first movie was the peak of the franchise.

Still, I can’t help but love all three of them.

The Trailer