Amazon and Blumhouse teamed up for Welcome to the Blumhouse, where they put out 4 no-budget movies for Halloween.
Bingo Hell:
This one has a pretty good cast, Adriana Barraza (Babel) is the lead, and Richard Brake is the villain, both are very strong with what they are given.
The basic plot is a neighbourhood that is middle of getting bought out for gentrification. They wake up one day to see their local Bingo Hall taken over and given a makeover with now bigger cash prices. The lead of the movie knows something isn't right while, while everyone else gets suckered in by the cash prices and they want to escape from the reality.
From there goes how you expect, those that win start dying, the lead saves the day but learns the lesson that a neighbourhood isn't where a place you live but the people who live with and they burn the bingo hall down.
Over, the movie was awful. The best way to describe it would be a Full Mon movie that came out anywhere between the mid-2000s and now, just with more locations and a better overall cast. The deaths feel like a joke, it's clear they are trying to go for Nightmare of Elm Street style deaths but they had no ideas apart from must have lots of green slime.
While the script isn't groundbreaking, with better editing and direction could have been a fine movie. Overall have to say it's the worst made of the four but not the worst movie.
2/10
Black As Night:
This is the worst of the butch. the plot from imdb "A teenage girl with self-esteem issues finds confidence in the most unlikely way, by spending her summer battling vampires that prey on New Orleans' disenfranchised with the help of her best friend, the boy she's always pined for, and a peculiar rich girl."
The movie is very racist, a lot of fuck white people, white people are scary from the stereotypical gay Mexican character, but also lots of jokes about how dark-skinned the lead is, and the movie outright says her melanin makes her a super vampire. It comes across as someone trying to do ironic racist comedy but all they know about comedy is one random youtube video they found.
None of the characters stands out at all, outside Keith David who is the main villain but you really don't see him much in the movie. His backstory is of an ex-slave turned into a vampire and is fed up with seeing how black people have been treated, wants to start an uprising.
The movie is very ugly, in order to see anything I had to turn up my brightness and contrast to the max, this is a first for me. The movie is full of pointless shit most of which go nowhere and is dropped, such as the two good African vampires or the one white character who at one point just says pretty much "I'm done, going off to study, good luck killing vampires".
2/10
Madres:
Of the three so far, this is the best-made one, the production side of the movie it's everything you would expect at a minimum. With that said, it's not good by any means but it's not incompetent such as Bingo Hell and Black As Night were.
"Expecting their first child, a Mexican-American couple move to a migrant farming community in 1970's California where strange symptoms and terrifying visions threaten their new family."
The movie is really about why all these Mexican women are losing babies, is it a curse, pesticides or something else. Spoiler, it's something else, which is a racist Doctor getting Mexican women who don't speak English to sign sterilization letters and the guy running the farm was also in on it using pesticides to cause rashes and sending them up at that racist doctor.
Could have maybe worked as a 40-minute episode of an anthology horror show drawn out at 90 minutes. The movie ends by saying it's based on a true story but gives very little of the details. Looking up pretty sure they mean the Madrigal v. Quilligan lawsuit, but the only question I ended up having is why didn't they just make a movie of that instead.
3/10
The Manor:
And this was, alright. Nothing stand out, but not badly done by any means. "After suffering a mild stroke, Judith Albright reluctantly moves into a historic nursing home where she becomes convinced a supernatural force is killing the residents."
Lead was played by Barbara Hershey, who I was shocked to find out is older than the 70-year-old she is playing this movie. The movie also overall good cast, the only weak link is the guy playing the grandson, who the character is also the weak part of the movie and he comes across he wrote to be much younger than he is in parts of the movie.
You can see where it is going, and never breaks new ground but at the same time, it never does anything wrong. Is a couple of story points they could have done more time with such as one guy trying to get with Barbara Hershey. The grandson character needed a total rewrite because, in this movie, his relationship with his grandmother is downright creepy at points.
5/10
Overall, feels like a dumping ground for movies Blumhouse can't anyone to put in cinemas. The only one that isn't bad The Manor, still doesn't feel like it would have much of a market.
