Blacker Than the Night
(★★½)
Pro tip: If you have a bunch of snotty and entitled roommates and you inherit a grand old house from your aunt… Don’t move your roommates into the house with you.
Especially if: the made fun of the house, are rude to the housekeeper, if owning the house requires you to care for your aunt’s cat (and the roommates hate cats), and if they are just all around ungrateful…
Otherwise, as Ofelia finds out, her friends Aurora, Marta, and Pilar are bad roommates for the cat and, once the cat ends up dead, the deceased aunt has some issues with that.
Not particularly interesting or entertaining, but it was alright.
Rawhead Rex
(★★★)
A pub called The Tall Man with a creepy tall man sign. A strangely demonic stained glass window with burning red eyes in the old church. An ancient stone pillar sticking up out of a field.
Signs of the kind of spot in the Irish countryside where you should think “hmm, maybe I shouldn’t mess around here?” Especially that stone pillar…
But no, the farmer wants that pillar out of his way… So, even as weird steam starts coming out of the ground as he tries to pry the damn thing up, he just doesn’t stop…
A pretty entertaining tale of an ancient evil unleashed in a little village, featuring: priests gone bad, dismemberment, mind control, burning red eyes, and the demon (or is it a god) Rawhead Rex, which, while it is one of the better monster names out there, the appearance of it leaves much to be desired, especially since they have no qualms showing him clearly, and often.
Poison for the Fairies
(★★★)
After a murderous start, we hop to a school where the new girl, Flavia, meets up with Veronica, whose parents are dead and who says she has a spider at home, also named Flavia?
Flavia is from a skeptic family, educated folks who pride themselves on their modern rejection of old beliefs and who don’t believe in religion or spirits or anything. Veronica, however, lives with her grandmother and has a stuffed owl that tells her things at night and, in fact, says that she is actually an old witch!
Well, they kind of befriend each other and it’s all fun and games. Until Flavia asks Veronica if she can cast a spell so that she doesn’t have to take piano lessons anymore…
From that point, things starts getting south. Turns out that witches and fairies don’t get along and Veronica sets them off on a path top make poison for the fairies. She is rather intimidating and plotting and and Flavia doesn’t know what to do but gets dragged along for the ride.
It wasn’t super engaging, but I did appreciate how they basically never show the faces of adults, leaving it feel like it is really just about the kids. And I did love the ending.
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