BadChristian

Ashburn Waters is an Australian take on the "ultra-low budget slasher movie made by a couple of friends over a weekend" genre. Let's not start pretending that we have high expectations or have set a high bar for a movie like this; we know that at best, the acting is going to be a C+, the effects/costumes are going to be a C-, and if we are lucky, someone on the crew understands how to capture sound. Ashburn Waters is on the better side of movies of this ilk, but that's not saying its good. The acting is mostly kind of okay, but there are some really bad deliveries, but no one here does bad enough to specifically call out; everyone seems to be at least trying. The story is boilerplate and although it's only an hour and twenty minutes, it feels so long. I understand the goal was to create characters that we care about before they start getting sliced, but I really don't; every character is an obvious horror cliche and I found them all annoying. While nothing is particularly good, there is one piece that is bad enough to be noteworthy, the monster/demon. I get that there were budgetary constraints, but I'm not freaking out about a ghillie with light up eyes. They have a good enough camera that I can see things clearly and then they expect to carry a horror movie with somebody looking like a rejected Pokemon cosplay slapping people to death. No. No. No. Just paint some dude's face red and we're already better off. There are exactly two things I expect out of a slasher movie, cool kills and a creepy looking bad guy. Ashburn Waters gives us shots of dead bodies with some blood on their faces and walking seaweed. Every Friday the 13th movie was terrible, every single one, but at lest there was a scary man and we got to see a guy get his head chopped off; we got something out of the movie. I got nothing from Ashburn Waters. The only thing I can compliment it on is that the sound was very good for a movie of this budget. I didn't notice any ADR and although there were a few times where the sound level dropped dramatically enough that I had to turn the volume up just to hear the dialog (not that I could understand everything because every man in this movie has a very thick Australian accent), overall is was well done. Maybe if you really want to support Australian Cinema, check it out, but otherwise I can't say I recommend it at all.

Deeflowered barely qualifies as a movie; it's about an hour of terrible acting in a series of nonsense scenes that are only tangentially related in that they star the same characters. The "story" makes zero sense and the whole thing feels like something an edgy teenager would make trying to be offensive and cool. All of the locations look like they just found abandoned buildings. Deeflowered is just a blender full of unrelated junk with zero redeeming qualities. I think Deeflowered wants to be something like the Polonia brothers made, but it is certainly not; it's just regular bad.

All I wanted from Baby Blues is another killer doll movie, whether is be like Chuckie or even Annabelle, but it's not. Baby Blues is about a cursed doll who's power is to curse movies with awful and unnecessary CGI. Seriously, they animate a leaf falling, a guy breaking through a car window, and so many other things that would be much easier and look much better with practical effects. Wouldn't it be so much easier to drop a real leaf instead of animating a terrible looking CGI leaf? This is confusion is the main theme of the movie. Is it supposed to be a comedy? There are objectively stupid and goofy lines and scenes that seem to be attempts at humor shoved between ultra serious ones. The acting is pretty bad, although I guess Raymond Lam is okay, but every character is badly written and motivations make no sense. Characters just kind of do things. Even the characters relationships make no sense. There is a homeless man that lives across the street in a ramshackle shelter, who the male main character calls his uncle, his wife and sister in law seem to have no idea who he is and the male main character certainly doesn't act like that's his uncle. Even the audio is wrong as the dialog often doesn't match the character's mouth movements. Audibly, I can't tell it's ADR, but visually, is clearly doesn't match. The story itself is probably the worst part and everything I've mentioned so far is absolutely terrible. A young couple moves into a new house and the old tenants left behind a single box of random things (just because I guess) and the wife decides to keep a weird looking doll from the box. The trailers and even the back of the Blu-Ray make it seem like the doll is going to run around and kill people like a Good Guy Doll, but instead it kind of just psychically makes bad things happen? Nothing it does is cool or interesting. None of the movie is scary or compelling. Everything is just awful. Could it have been made with the intention of being a "good bad movie"? Sure, maybe, but it isn't; it's just a bad bad movie.