Riley on Film

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In this episode, I’m going to walk you through Braid, well sort of a semi walk through, not as thorough as some of the other ones I’ve done, but if you do not like spoilers, then you might not want to tune into this one because there’s gonna be plenty of them.

First, a quick synopsis to wanted women decide to Rob their wealthy, psychotic friend who lives in the fantasy world they created as children to take the money they have to take part in a deadly perverse game of make-believe. I almost don’t feel qualified to talk about this film because a, it’s about young women who had childhood make believe that continued until adults and two, it’s just very disturbing and not usually the kind of film that I would probably do a walkthrough of. However, it’s recent, it’s out there. It’s on prime, and so I’m going to go ahead and do this one, recommend it to you. (Transcription of audio below may have errors, it is done automatically from the audio file)

01:31 Ironically, during the feel good Christmas season, I’m handling brewers in this and we have seen her in the Handmaid’s tale. He’s the one that loses her eye and her character is named Janine Lindo. He’s extremely disturbing. He’s a very beautiful young woman. But in that role it’s kind of hard to tell cause she’s got an eye poked out. There’s usually something bad to happen into her all the time. But the Handmaid’s tale would be a whole nother show. So I don’t want to get too on to that. She’s also in cam, she plays Alice and Lola and I recommended that in the past. I said, good, good movie. It’s on Netflix. So that’s another fail. I believe I did a show on that. If I have it in the archives. See what happened is I moved my show to a different server and it just took forever to do each show.

02:28 So not every show got moved over. But as I mentioned them, and as I see that I’ve done them, I’ll put them up. So I’ll try and put the cam show image in Waterhouse’s in this. She reminds me a lot of, she sort of reminds me of sort of like younger Jessica chasse, Dane or smaller Jessica Chasteen. I think she’s got a lot of work ahead of her and movies and she certainly shows a lot of potential and she’s one of the masterminds of this crazy plot. He’s also been in nocturnal. We may see a lot more from her. She does a great job in this and you have Sarah. Hey, one of the other girls, she’s in flesh and bone black Swan. I’m dying up here. Room one Oh four he did a great job in this and she herself is the actual master mind of this group.

03:17 Then we have Scott Cohen took me about four minutes to try and remember what I had seen him from and then thanks to my wife and daughters, I have a keen recollection of Gilmore girls. That’s right. He is the English teacher. Beau of ms Laura lie. They date and they have issues and they have conflict and if you’ve seen yo more girls, you know exactly what I’m talking about. That’s the guy he looks like he’s aged a little bit. I think they tried to make him look older because these girls are supposed to be older as well, so they made him look really older. What happens with him is quite interesting. The whole movie is interesting. So without any further ado, let’s go ahead and get into braid and what it’s all about.

04:13 How’d you know? I’m very fond of horror, so I’m always doing searches of whore and this was a search of a more recent horror. I came up with a few that I hadn’t seen but aren’t gee honest. I think I’ve kind of wiped it out. I need to see the light house. If you’ve seen the light house, send me a little message on that or make a comment or reply on Twitter. Just what do you think of lighthouse? Because it got such great reviews. However, friends of mine that I respect a lot are saying and not good sucked, not even worth the money. Anyhow, let me know what you think of the lighthouse. But having said that, this was a modern horror that I had not seen and it was streaming on Amazon prime. Ding, ding. Little light goes on because I have Amazon prime.

04:59 In fact, I just paid my annual membership. I believe it was $80 but I’m not quite sure. Such a good deal. You get free shipping on anything you buy, even if it’s just a pencil. It’s free shipping. You get the movies too, of course. But as I looked at this film, I did not like the short plot synopsis. I thought, Hmm, this doesn’t sound like one I’d probably like. So actually I’d actually put it on my watch list, but kind of bumped it down and wasn’t really looking forward to see it. But finally, when I ran out all these movies from 2019 I figured it was time to go ahead and give braid a try. I watched it and here’s what I got. Petula and Tilda live as young artists in New York, but make a living as drug dealers and were brought right into this. We see them counting money, we see them rubbing cocaine or meth or whatever it is, they sniff days on their top front teeth. I mean these girls are bad girls. The irony of it is they’re both hot. They’re in jeans, they’re very trendy looking

06:10 And they’re talking about all the money they’re going to make paying back their student loans. So in a way it’s like saying, yeah, these are smart criminals. Well, as they talk about it a little while and kind of share some gazes off into the the sides of the screen, you know, making you wonder what are they thinking about? What are they pondering? Something’s up here. And it’s definitely something they would get totally busted for. And it’s taking place in kind of an old beat up house that, you know, the fridge, there’s no furniture in it. It’s just a squatters place really. And then all of a sudden, bam, bam, bam, open the fucking door. Yep, that’s right. It’s a drug bust and you’re almost thinking, geez, I was just getting to like these girls, but they’re going to jail. There ain’t no way they’re going to get out of this.

06:58 I think they said the amount of money they had, there were somewhere around $70,000. Have to check my sources there. If I’m wrong, let me know. Let me know you’re alive by correcting me. But I think it is about $70,000 which you know, it’s a lot of, a lot of cash. So they barely escaped themselves from this drug West. They had to leave all the drugs and all the money behind. So they are now fugitives and also in debt with their drug supplier who we hear about. And that just seems scary cause you know he’s going to hunt them down. So now they’ve got that on their plate. So right. There should be an example to young viewers to not deal drugs. Well what can you do just to get $70,000 together? Not much. I mean I guess you could Rob a bank. You could Rob a family member, you could Rob an old friend from childhood who is mentally ill and pretends that she’s living in a house with a full on family. But she’s all by herself. Yeah, that’s right. A long sentence, but yeah, they have a, a friend who has gone mentally deranged and some for some reason she has gathered together a lot of cash and these two girls know about it. Her name is Daphne and she plays the role of a mother in a childhood game they used to play. The only difference between them and Daphne is that Daphne is still playing it. She’s lost her mind

08:37 To reconnect with Daphne and keep her distracted while planning the robbery. Petula and Tilda engage what names there are. I mean there’s weird names of 2019 but Tilda and Petula, my mind, mind,

08:56 They engage with her and they’re all childhood games. They go on and they start playing the games. She kind of makes a side view, look what she hears them come in wondering what the hell is going on, but she wants to play obviously so she plays along and I assumed at this point they’re going to be looking for the money somewhere in the house. Apparently one of them knows where it is in a safe and how to get into the safe. So they start to engage with her in their old childhood games. The one comes in, hello mother. I’m home from school and it’s very creepy, just the way they’re playing house. It sort of reminded me a little bit of Pleasantville what was going on there or the wife was supposed to do all the cooking and stuff, horrible times for, to be a woman in the 50s, but it looked like a 1950s place. And he was talking to the girl just like she was. Her daughter looks like it had nothing had ever passed since the time of their childhood, but little did she know this was going to take a very sadistic turn.

10:07 Yeah. [inaudible]

10:21 The local police, detective Siegel, who knew all three of the women as kids, which I found that very interesting. He’s a little older than them. He tracks down Petula until de to Daphne’s mansion when he shows up to arrest them and by that interrupts their game. And we’re skipping ahead a little bit. All three of them unite to murder him. Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we practice to DC and then they continue the game afterwards.

11:02 There is definitely some excitement in this film. There are some beautiful colors in the drug scenes where it appears as if PCP has made their vision go to tone blue. That stuff is pretty cool. Not because you should take drugs or that I take drugs is that I’d want to take drugs but it’s just cool the way they made it. Look on screen, it’s bloody, there’s a lot of stabbing that goes on cutting that goes on. It’s not always a pleasant will be to watch. It is rather disturbing. But as someone told me a long time ago, that is an aspect of horror, not just jump scares but sometimes disturbing content and is definitely there. If you also remember Brittany Murphy in girl interrupted, which was in 1999 a very, very well put together film and of course may Brittany Murphy rest in peace. He was too gorgeous to die and it’s just really sad that she left this planet so early.

12:11 We would have liked to have seen a lot of those eyes on screen. Again, it’s similar to that kind of twistedness how crazy this girl is and ultimately it ends up being a just fucked up movie. It’s a messed up movie. It does have horror. It was born teetering. I think it’s, it’s fitting that they got the guy from the Gilmore girls because it is teetering on being like a WB thing but it’s so violent and the subject matter is so dark that it sort of works its way out of that. Thank God it’s a little trendy but definitely something different and horror like I haven’t seen and weirdness like I haven’t seen really since I think tusk now this movie is not my favorite movie. Like tusk is my favorite horror movie. Like tusk is an insidious AR but it’s kind of creeping up there for being so original and that’s really what I liked about braid. So super enjoy it. If you managed to get her, you still haven’t seen it. I left a lot out, so I think you’re really going to enjoy the plots and terms and I didn’t give away the ending. So yes, there are some spoilers, but I didn’t go too crazy on the spoilers. I definitely would recommend it for me. This one earns a seven out of 10

13:40 Thank you for listening to Riley on film. I’m your host, Damian Riley. You can find out more and subscribe always for free at rileyonfilm.com now have a great day.

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This got so much praise. I did enjoy it but in that it was a comedy. It had some great gore! As a serious horror it doesn’t work for me but that’s ok, that’s not what it’s trying to be. Anyway, have a listen to what I think on this episode of my podcast. 6/10

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In Today’s episode I take on “Mercy Black: a Netflix horror tv movie and Daniela Pineda face sex worship.

Mercy Black is produced by one of our horror favorites: Blumhouse. They have been very consistent in turning out films that are quality horror and many of them are atmospheric.

Our first actor is a Mexican starlet named Daniela Pineda, Marina. She’s from California here where I am, a place called Oakland. She’s got the chops, the body, The Madonna space between her teeth,  and yes … the eyebrows to make the money shots. I am certain we’ll see much more of her. She’s got a great look.

Austin Walking Dead, Will, is with us her as well. He’s ugly but has a certain charisma. It’s weird to see him without the charred scar along his face as in the Walking Dead. Remember him? The hater then love then hater again of Neegan? Yeah, here’s here in this, giving it more credence as a horror maybe than a new episode of the Vampire Diaries.

Here’s what IMDB says about the story. A woman is sent to a mental institution after stabbing her classmate in an attempt to conjure an evil spirit called, Mercy Black. Fifteen years later she’s released, and must save her nephew, who has become obsessed with the phenomenon.

Urban Legend vs Made up story. The child Marina babysites asks the librarian about Mercy Black. She tells him not to worry because sometimes people make up stories because we have so much information on the internet. When you “Know all the answers, the mystery’s gone.” I thought that was well put. I came from a generation where libraries had all of our knowledge. Now, they are pale in comparison to the internet.

The search from Mercy Black. Marina is very disturbed thy the appearance of Mercy Black. Will suggests she exploit what she saw and go on tv talking about it. She accidentally cuts him with an electric saw.

Her older sister hears something in the barn and goes out armed with a rake to get it. Tough sexy girl? Maybe. Unrealistic, probably.Tension building, yep spot on.

Mental illness is brought in. What if the one seeing the ghost is NOT mentally ill. It’s a spooky concept. When you embrace it it makes you wonder if the crazies are the sanes and vice-versa. I don’t particulary like this theme in a stotry but it works ok here. Will is trying to cash in on Marina’s experiences. 

Plot (from Wikipedia)

As a teenager, Marina and Rebecca stabbed a classmate because Marina believed a ghost called Mercy Black would cure her mother’s illness. Fifteen years later, Marina is released from a psychiatric hospital to her sister, Alice. To Marina’s dismay, urban legends about Mercy Black have spread on the internet. Alice’s son, Bryce, soon becomes obsessed with Mercy Black. While facing her past to help Bryce avoid the same fate, Marina questions whether Mercy Black is merely a delusion of her own creation. When she goes to visit Rebecca to talk about what happened when they were children, she discovers that Rebecca attempted to hang herself and is now in a catatonic state. When looking around Rebecca’s room, Marina discovers an old map and Rebecca attacks her.

Bryce is brought home by the librarian after tearing up library books. When he is involved in an incident with his “friend,” he says “she told me to do it”. Meanwhile, Marina follows the map through the woods, discovering old clues along the way that lead to a nuclear fallout shelter. Inside, she finds “the book you cannot read” and remembers that they created Mercy Black. While Marina now believes that Mercy never existed, Bryce falls deeper into the delusion. While alone in the house, Bryce and Alice have an encounter with Mercy Black, leading to Alice falling over the stair rail. After Marina arrives, Mercy Black attacks her. When Bryce flees out the door, he runs straight into the arms of the librarian, who turns out to be Lily, the girl Marina and Rebecca attacked to sacrifice.

Lily is angry that she lived and Marina didn’t finish her off as she promised. She admits to hurting people to make Marina remember but Marina tells her that they made Mercy up. Lily stabs Marina and threatens to slit Bryce’s throat. Marina tackles and begins choking her but releases her. Bryce then stabs her in the eye and says “I promised.” Mercy Black then appears behind them.