(movie) The Red Book Ritual (2022) – not really successful anthology horror!

The Red Book Ritual evolves around three young people. One night in a house supposedly belonging to the missing witch, they play a game asking questions to the ancient book with red covers which has been in the house since forever. They open the book and read sentences from it like answers to their questions. They get scared and ask the book how do they get out of the game. The book’s answer is read me! So, they start to read the stories from the book as segments of this anthology horror movie. For starters, I must say that even main storyline in this anthology, or the binding story premise is stupid and three main characters are so lame and thrashy that you can’t really build your sympathy for neither of them. The four-five segments or stories in this anthology are done poorly and although they build up in me some interest and some scary moments these are so few and far between. I must say that the Asian horror segment is most interesting to me, I wondered all the time whether it is so poorly synchronized with characters’ voices purposefully or is it just thrash like other things in this movie. This one doesn’t last long, hour and twenty minutes but sometimes feels like a drag and some of the segments are just not ended or looks like they have not been written until the end. The ending is like the movie as a whole, confusing, done in a hurry, for what is worse made in a thought that it is cool and it is super, but this one is under the radar for us horror fans. One of the not so good that came out in recent times.

Gore effects: 3/10 axes – there are couple of full frontal nudity scenes and couple of bloody and carnage scenes, but in all very poor.

Acting: 2/10 axes – all of the actors are unknown and no one stands out from thrashy over acting or under acting. Just plain bad.

Conclusion: 3/10 axes – I will give this one three out of ten, simply because I love horror and I love horror anthology subgenre, but this is one of the lousy ones. Rather spend hour and twenty watching or doing something else. Go get better movie or a great horror book.

(review) The Pond – ‘Pond Music’

The Pond is also, as I can understand a one girl band from San Francisco. When describing the music, they use the term gay girl synth pop. In fact it is a mixture of synth pop and pop punk leaning more into synth pop side of things with fast tracks like ‘Rock In My Shoe’, being dancable and having such haunting melodies like ‘I Like U’. In all, this is a short one, five songs in no more than six minutes record with short and sweet pop punk/synth punk songs and eerie, at times haunting vocal melodies. This would sound average with guitars, but this way it sounds more interesting. This one is definitely not for your every day listening. Different, yet interesting and lasting just long enough not to get boring.

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(review) Possessed Politicians – ‘War With Myself’

Possessed Politicians is currently a one man band from Frederick, Maryland, USA. You know, sometimes when you sail through the sea of great and good bands you step on a mine. This is one of such mines. There are six songs on this one, This is really a short one with longest song being just one minute thirty seconds long, all others are shorter. The music is not so bad melodic hardcore punk with many rehashed riffs and nothing special, but not bad. Vocals are just killing me, man. The guy sings through some electronic effect or bad microphone and although there are songs like ‘I Can’t Understand The Lyrics’ or ‘Rambo Hates Vietnamese People’, which are pretty funny titles and lyrics are all about humor and black humor, this one is plain bad. Hope it will improve with future releases.

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