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Eight Terrifying Places Horror Games Should Visit, Part 3

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If the thought of leaving your house to get groceries, go to work, check the mail, etc. doesn’t instill a deep sense of fear that’s on par with the fear someone experiences before they die horribly and very painfully, then I really haven’t done my job. I want you to be terrified to go anywhere, and I’m talking about a level of fear you experience when you look into the wide crazy eyes of that guy or girl you just brought back to your place after a swell first date and you realize they’re a total psycho who’s about to fucking eat you alive.

There’s a myriad reasons you shouldn’t leave the safety of your home — I’ve even broken them up into couple easy-to-read lists, which you can find here and here. We’ve traveled all over the world, looking at some of the most shit-out-your-spine terrifying places this world has to offer. Just when you thought it was safe, here are eight more.

8. Hellingly Asylum

If there was ever a list of words that don’t belong before asylum hell really should be at the top of that list. Hellingly sounds like a term you’d use to describe a night of snorting rails off dead hookers, or “we had a hellingly good time last night abducting the homeless so we could use them for sex before we slit their throats and tossed their bodies into the lake,” or something like that. It’s common knowledge that every asylum in existence is an awful place, even if it has a far less creepy moniker like the Happy Asylum or the Fluffy Bunny Sanatorium and Coffee Shop, but it’s the abandoned asylums you really have to worry about. This one’s been empty – assuming you don’t count the demonic spirits that roam its dark halls searching for a living person to impregnate with evil — for close to two decades, so it’s had a decent amount of time to reach the level of terrifying all run down asylums strive for these days.

Perfect for: Fatal Frame. I’d very much like to fight my way through its empty halls with nothing but a flashlight and a camera.

7. Helltown

If you thought Helltown sounded like a place Satanists went to unwind after a busy night of virgin sacrifices and bathing in the blood of children, you weren’t actually that far off. As its name implies, crazy shit *supposedly* happens in Helltown. In fact, it’s tagline is What happens in Helltown, stays in Helltown, mostly because you and your friends have been brutally raped, murdered, and had your corpses defiled multiple times leaving no one to speak about what happened in Helltown.

The tagline is a work in progress.

In the 70’s the government bought the site and evicted all its residents so they could turn the land into a national park. Obviously, those plans never came to fruition, and the result is an eerie ghost town where the buildings that haven’t been burnt to a crisp — did I mention the local fire department used the town as practice? – have since been boarded up.

There are also several legends about Helltown that take all this to another level of creepy. The road that originally led to the town has been closed off and has since been given the ominous title The End of the World. Linger here for too long and there’s a very good chance you’ll find yourself at the mercy of the Satanists, Ku Klux Klan members, escaped mental patients, a massive snake, mutants, ghosts, a moving tree, and other miscellaneous freaks that are rumored to inhabit the surrounding woods.

Perfect for: Alan Wake. Maybe Mr. Wake needs some inspiration for his next horror book so he decides to take a trip to Helltown, only when he arrives all those urban legends start coming to life – as they do in the Alan Wake series.

6. Matsuo Ghost Mine

The Matsuo Ghost Mine is a long abandoned mining town that looks like Silent Hill if it were real and exponentially creepier. The mine closed in 1972, and for the last four decades the surrounding area has been hard at work on becoming one of the eeriest places in the world. The only remaining structures are 11 apartment buildings used by the 1,500 people who used to live there, including the mine’s workers and their families. Now it’s all empty and more often than not the area is hidden in a thick mist that hangs over the place pretty much all of the time.

Perfect for: Siren. The original game took place in a mountain village in Japan, and this mine can be found secluded atop a mountain in Japan. It’s perfect. Just throw in a xenophobic village and some creepy-as-fuck villagers to fight.

5. Mines of Paris

In the first batch of terrifying locales we visited were the Paris Catacombs, a series of underground tunnels filled with the bones of the dead. You want to know what’s more terrifying than that? How about a separate series of labyrinthine tunnels, roughly 400 miles long that snake hundreds of feet below Paris and are also filled with the dead people. They were created to collect the large deposits of minerals housed beneath the city, and once a majority of the minerals had been taken what was left was a complex of mostly unmapped tunnels. Take a wrong turn and you could find yourself in a flooded tunnel, or better yet, a tunnel where the ground is covered in the bones of hundreds, or even thousands of dead people.

Perfect for: Doom. The fourth game is already rumored to take place on a post-apocalyptic Earth, so why not have part of it in the Paris Mines? There are actual rumors the mines lead to the gates of Hell, so I say we take that urban myth and run with it. Imagine fighting off hordes of those creepy flying baby bastards inside those claustrophobic tunnels, and to make matters worse, id Software decides against attaching flashlights to every gun, forcing you to use the pistol the whole time.

4. The Icelandic Phallological Museum

What’s worse than a maze of underground tunnels that are almost definitely brimming with the restless souls of the dead? How about a building full of animal cocks? Since it was established in 2004 this Icelandic museum has collected an impressive arsenal of close to 300 penises and penile parts, taken from the (hopefully) dead carcasses of over 46 different species of animals. Oh, and they got their first human penis last year, so if you’re in Iceland and have never seen one of those, now’s your chance. It doesn’t sound that bad, that is, until you enter its homely interior and you realize just how terrifying and rapey most animals’ members really are. You could poke an eye out on a majority of them and impale yourself on the rest.

I should also mention the blue whale penis they have measures 67 inches long. However, this is just the tip, as the full thing would measure a terrifying 16 feet. I dare you to try and shake the thought that a severed blue whale penis is hiding under your bed when you go to sleep at night.

Perfect for: Condemned. Bloodshot took us on a fairly creepy excursion into a museum to investigate a murder, so in the threequel I’m thinking we could go to this museum to investigate another crime scene where someone was impaled on one of those massive beastly members.

3. Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park

Imagine a dense forest filled with countless creatures that live in harmony, protected from the outside world by a thick wall of trees. Beautiful, right? That sounds like a place you’d like to spend a day or two.

Now replace all those trees with massive limestone spikes armed with serrated edges that are perfect for impaling you should you slip on the rough terrain. I’d also like you to replace those harmonious inhabitants with countless unidentified species, all potentially harmful to any humans that are stupid enough to wander into their home. There could be a flying scorpion hawk that injects bear mace into your unsuspecting ass after it sneaks up on you using its Predator-like camouflage, then it drags you kicking and screaming into its home where it feeds you to its thousands of hungry babies. That could be a real thing.

Also, “tsingy” is a word taken from the Malagasy language that when translated to English means ”where one cannot walk barefoot.” This national park is 666 square kilometers – no joke – of rocky needles. If the Earth had a mouth, this would be its teeth.

Perfect for: Dino Crisis. The only reason a place like this exists is to hide dinosaurs that without the protective wall of massive spikes would immediately escape and eat us all alive.

2. Unit 731

I’m of the opinion that inside of all of us is pure, undiluted evil. We all have a capacity to be total psychopaths, and if you doubt that opinion I’ll ask you to do two things for me. First, I want you to jump on Xbox Live and play any game online. Once you’re done with that, I’d like you to check this out:

Unit 731 is a place in Pingfang, China where terrible things happened. It was a biological and chemical warfare research facility that made the Umbrella Corporation sound like the Red Cross. Behind its doors some of the worst war crimes in history took place, including lethal human experimentation where people from the surrounding areas were taken against their will and used in some truly horrifying experiments. The prisoners were subject to vivisection without anesthesia, and that was after they had been infected with Anthrax, Cholera, Smallpox, Botulism, or the Bubonic fucking Plague.

Other fun activities a Unit 731 prisoner could look forward to included having a flamethrower used on you, grenade testing from multiple angles and positions, and having horse urine injected into your kidneys.

Perfect for: The Suffering. In that short-lived series the monsters you fought were twisted manifestations of the way they were executed when they were prisoners, so taking that concept to a place where thousands of people died in some of the most horrific ways imaginable could make for an intensely scary game.

1. Detroit

All that’s pretty bad, but you know what’s worse? Fucking Detroit. The Motorless City is the most dangerous city in the country, with 1,220 violent crimes for every 100,000 people. Every second you spend in this city increases your chances of being raped, mugged, murdered, or some sort of combination of the three. Package this with a high foreclosure rate, a bunch of miserable people, and roughly 13.7% of the city’s 700k+ citizens being unemployed, and now you have unemployed homeless people who are more than willing to kill you so they can take your iPhone and sell it to fuel their black tar heroin habit.

Perfect for: Manhunt. Say the third game takes place in the near future where the crime got so out of hand the government had to close off the city and let its inhabitants fend for themselves. I say we’re about six to eight months away from that really happening anyway.

If you aren’t currently curled up in the fetal position nose-deep in a puddle of the urine you fear-peed while reading this list, than you are a much braver soul than I am. Let me know if I missed anything in the comments below, and feel free to let us know what you’re bringing with you when we take an official Bloody Disgusting road trip to each of these locations.

Toss Adam an email, or follow him on Twitter and Bloody Disgusting

Gamer, writer, terrible dancer, longtime toast enthusiast. Legend has it Adam was born with a controller in one hand and the Kraken's left eye in the other. Legends are often wrong.

Editorials

‘Amityville Karen’ Is a Weak Update on ‘Serial Mom’ [Amityville IP]

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Amityville Karen horror

Twice a month Joe Lipsett will dissect a new Amityville Horror film to explore how the “franchise” has evolved in increasingly ludicrous directions. This is “The Amityville IP.”

A bizarre recurring issue with the Amityville “franchise” is that the films tend to be needlessly complicated. Back in the day, the first sequels moved away from the original film’s religious-themed haunted house storyline in favor of streamlined, easily digestible concepts such as “haunted lamp” or “haunted mirror.”

As the budgets plummeted and indie filmmakers capitalized on the brand’s notoriety, it seems the wrong lessons were learned. Runtimes have ballooned past the 90-minute mark and the narratives are often saggy and unfocused.

Both issues are clearly on display in Amityville Karen (2022), a film that starts off rough, but promising, and ends with a confused whimper.

The promise is embodied by the tinge of self-awareness in Julie Anne Prescott (The Amityville Harvest)’s screenplay, namely the nods to John Waters’ classic 1994 satire, Serial Mom. In that film, Beverly Sutphin (an iconic Kathleen Turner) is a bored, white suburban woman who punished individuals who didn’t adhere to her rigid definition of social norms. What is “Karen” but a contemporary equivalent?

In director/actor Shawn C. Phillips’ film, Karen (Lauren Francesca) is perpetually outraged. In her introductory scenes, she makes derogatory comments about immigrants, calls a female neighbor a whore, and nearly runs over a family blocking her driveway. She’s a broad, albeit familiar persona; in many ways, she’s less of a character than a caricature (the living embodiment of the name/meme).

These early scenes also establish a fairly straightforward plot. Karen is a code enforcement officer with plans to shut down a local winery she has deemed disgusting. They’re preparing for a big wine tasting event, which Karen plans to ruin, but when she steals a bottle of cursed Amityville wine, it activates her murderous rage and goes on a killing spree.

Simple enough, right?

Unfortunately, Amityville Karen spins out of control almost immediately. At nearly every opportunity, Prescott’s screenplay eschews narrative cohesion and simplicity in favour of overly complicated developments and extraneous characters.

Take, for example, the wine tasting event. The film spends an entire day at the winery: first during the day as a band plays, then at a beer tasting (???) that night. Neither of these events are the much touted wine-tasting, however; that is actually a private party happening later at server Troy (James Duval)’s house.

Weirdly though, following Troy’s death, the party’s location is inexplicably moved to Karen’s house for the climax of the film, but the whole event plays like an afterthought and features a litany of characters we have never met before.

This is a recurring issue throughout Amityville Karen, which frequently introduces random characters for a scene or two. Karen is typically absent from these scenes, which makes them feel superfluous and unimportant. When the actress is on screen, the film has an anchor and a narrative drive. The scenes without her, on the other hand, feel bloated and directionless (blame editor Will Collazo Jr., who allows these moments to play out interminably).

Compounding the issue is that the majority of the actors are non-professionals and these scenes play like poorly performed improv. The result is long, dull stretches that features bad actors talking over each other, repeating the same dialogue, and generally doing nothing to advance the narrative or develop the characters.

While Karen is one-note and histrionic throughout the film, at least there’s a game willingness to Francesca’s performance. It feels appropriately campy, though as the film progresses, it becomes less and less clear if Amityville Karen is actually in on the joke.

Like Amityville Cop before it, there are legit moments of self-awareness (the Serial Mom references), but it’s never certain how much of this is intentional. Take, for example, Karen’s glaringly obvious wig: it unconvincingly fails to conceal Francesca’s dark hair in the back, but is that on purpose or is it a technical error?

Ultimately there’s very little to recommend about Amityville Karen. Despite the game performance by its lead and the gentle homages to Serial Mom’s prank call and white shoes after Labor Day jokes, the never-ending improv scenes by non-professional actors, the bloated screenplay, and the jittery direction by Phillips doom the production.

Clocking in at an insufferable 100 minutes, Amityville Karen ranks among the worst of the “franchise,” coming in just above Phillips’ other entry, Amityville Hex.

Amityville Karen

The Amityville IP Awards go to…

  • Favorite Subplot: In the afternoon event, there’s a self-proclaimed “hot boy summer” band consisting of burly, bare-chested men who play instruments that don’t make sound (for real, there’s no audio of their music). There’s also a scheming manager who is skimming money off the top, but that’s not as funny.
  • Least Favorite Subplot: For reasons that don’t make any sense, the winery is also hosting a beer tasting which means there are multiple scenes of bartender Alex (Phillips) hoping to bring in women, mistakenly conflating a pint of beer with a “flight,” and goading never before seen characters to chug. One of them describes the beer as such: “It looks like a vampire menstruating in a cup” (it’s a gold-colored IPA for the record, so…no).
  • Amityville Connection: The rationale for Karen’s killing spree is attributed to Amityville wine, whose crop was planted on cursed land. This is explained by vino groupie Annie (Jennifer Nangle) to band groupie Bianca (Lilith Stabs). It’s a lot of nonsense, but it is kind of fun when Annie claims to “taste the damnation in every sip.”
  • Neverending Story: The film ends with an exhaustive FIVE MINUTE montage of Phillips’ friends posing as reporters in front of terrible green screen discussing the “killer Karen” story. My kingdom for Amityville’s regular reporter Peter Sommers (John R. Walker) to return!
  • Best Line 1: Winery owner Dallas (Derek K. Long), describing Karen: “She’s like a walking constipation with a hemorrhoid”
  • Best Line 2: Karen, when a half-naked, bleeding woman emerges from her closet: “Is this a dream? This dream is offensive! Stop being naked!”
  • Best Line 3: Troy, upset that Karen may cancel the wine tasting at his house: “I sanded that deck for days. You don’t just sand a deck for days and then let someone shit on it!”
  • Worst Death: Karen kills a Pool Boy (Dustin Clingan) after pushing his head under water for literally 1 second, then screeches “This is for putting leaves on my plants!”
  • Least Clear Death(s): The bodies of a phone salesman and a barista are seen in Karen’s closet and bathroom, though how she killed them are completely unclear
  • Best Death: Troy is stabbed in the back of the neck with a bottle opener, which Karen proceeds to crank
  • Wannabe Lynch: After drinking the wine, Karen is confronted in her home by Barnaby (Carl Solomon) who makes her sign a crude, hand drawn blood contract and informs her that her belly is “pregnant from the juices of his grapes.” Phillips films Barnaby like a cross between the unhoused man in Mulholland Drive and the Mystery Man in Lost Highway. It’s interesting, even if the character makes absolutely no sense.
  • Single Image Summary: At one point, a random man emerges from the shower in a towel and excitedly poops himself. This sequence perfectly encapsulates the experience of watching Amityville Karen.
  • Pray for Joe: Many of these folks will be back in Amityville Shark House and Amityville Webcam, so we’re not out of the woods yet…

Next time: let’s hope Christmas comes early with 2022’s Amityville Christmas Vacation. It was the winner of Fangoria’s Best Amityville award, after all!

Amityville Karen movie

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