Welcome to Smiling Demon Double Feature! I already reviewed Truth or Dare (2018) Director’s Cut and now I’ll be reviewing Smile (2022). Warning: SPOILERS . Dr Rose Cotter, a psychiatrist dealing with her own trauma, finds herself haunted by a smiling entity after a terrified patient kills herself in front of her. As she tries to find out what’s happening to her, she learns that she’s not the first person to go through this and that it always ends the same way - death. The premise isn’t exactly original - It Follows (2014) has a similar concept and Truth or Dare (2018) has a similar demonic look - but the beginning was promising with Laura’s story, her gory suicide, and first glimpse of the titular smile. However, the rest of the movie never fulfils this promise. It was a wise move to add smile-free hallucinations to the entity’s very limited bag of tricks, because apart from Laura and later a nonexistent woman at Rose’s nephew’s birthday party, the demonic smiles that signal the e
Sister Death | Hermana Muerte (2023) is a Netflix prequel to Spanish supernatural horror movie Verónica . I know I’ve watched that one, but I don’t remember much of it save that it may have involved a Ouija board session gone wrong. It doesn’t really matter, though, because most of this movie takes place in the 1940’s and it’s only in the very end that there’s a short scene that serves to link it to Verónica . Warning: SPOILERS . The year is 1949, and Sister Narcisa is a novice who arrives at a convent to teach poor girls. A decade earlier she became famous for being at the centre of miraculous events, but now that she’s about to take her vows, she’s beginning to have doubts. As she struggles with her lack of faith, she becomes aware of a dark presence who’s been haunting the convent. The other nuns may not believe it, but the children know that if you play one of the hangman’s games that turn up scribbled on the walls and your name appears on the black board, you’re next… The conven
I’ve recently watched The Cellar (2022) and decided to write a review. Warning: SPOILERS . A family moves to a weird-looking house with suspicious symbols engraved everywhere. It doesn’t take long for things to get spooky and one of them disappear in the creepy cellar. Even spookier? The exact same thing happened to the family of the previous owner… People really should start being more careful about suspiciously cheap houses. Especially when they look like that. Sure, it’s not as bad as the Crimson Peak manor, but it’s still obviously a place where weird shit happens. And that’s before Ellie and Steven find a strange recording on a gramophone that was hidden in a secret room. Oddly, their parents don’t seem to have a problem with that, nor do they explore the house in search for other secret rooms. However, that’s nothing compared to the sequence in which Keira insists that a terrified Ellie go into the cellar with only a flickering candle and her mobile phone for light to check th