The Shallows (2016)

Surfer Nancy finally finds the beach that her now-deceased mother loved. She enjoys some surfing but then pushes her luck by staying out for one last run though the other surfers are packing up. She winds up hurt and trapped on a small bit of rock, unable to get back to shore because of a nearby shark.

Even with a short runtime, Blake Lively was not a compelling enough presence to keep my attention. There are a couple of decent surfing shots but they're not enough.

C-

The Howling (1981)

We start off -- with almost no explanation -- watching a woman who is going to meet a guy who's been stalking her. We gather that she's a newswoman and she's doing this for her show. She's got a team listening in, but the wire goes dead like they do and she's suddenly on her own in a sex shop with movie booths. There's a BDSM porno playing and a man with a truly repellent way of moving his tongue in her booth and then cops show up and start shooting and I didn't know what the hell was going on, just that I was having no fun at all. But, good news, she can go on a retreat with her husband to recover. But, wouldn'tcha know it, it's not so much a retreat as a werewolf convention. Womp womp.

Though the end scene was pretty smart, on the whole this was a ridiculous, disjointed film with some truly hilarious special effects (my favorite of which was the poorly animated werewolves fucking by a fire). I mean, was this ever cutting edge?

D-

Gaslight (1944)

After her aunt/guardian is murdered in their London home, Paula relocates to Italy. Several years later, she meets and falls for the charming Gregory, who has always dreamed of living in London so, despite her trauma, they move back to her English home together. But Paula becomes forgetful and paranoid -- misplacing items, imagining things, and hearing noises in the closed-off floor above. Her husband is impatient and she's frightened.

Now that the term "gaslighting" has entered into common usage to mean psychological manipulation -- basically denying a person's sane observations -- one can easily guess what's going on here by the title. It's a cruel story that I would've doubted could ever actually work just 20 years ago, but having witnessed the way that so much of the population now simply trusts what Fox News, internet trolls, Trump, podcasts, etc tell them rather than hearing out sources beyond their own bubble, I now know just how accurate this method can be, which makes this even more scary now than it was in the 1940s. Yikes.

B

The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014)

Deborah and her daughter Sarah agree to having a documentary crew chronicle them as they deal with Deborah's Alzheimer's disease. But Deborah seems more than just confused -- and the cameras capture some inexplicable happenings.

Ugh. It's just another one of those reliant-on-jump-scares, too dark, too in-your-face, too loud, shaky-camera messes. There's some lore about a serial killer doctor who may have been murdered himself, but that's just more fluff that means nothing. It's a confusing waste of time.

D

Three Strangers (1946)

Three people who've never before met agree to be bound to each other by a mutual agreement, in hopes that lore of wishing before a goddess statue at the stroke of the Chinese New Year will reward them. 

The set-up is pretty great. But, once we start following the individuals, the "magic" dissipates and morphs into three small stories of people entangled in unsavory circumstances. I'm not saying that I wasn't entertained, but it quickly became something other than the spookiness the first act got me primed to enjoy.

C+