Hokum

 I took a break from trying not to spend money, and went to see HOKUM with an old Horror-loving friend of mine who I hadn't seen in a while. Having loved director Damian McCarthy's previous efforts, CAVEAT and ODDITY, I was really looking forward to this.

 I don't think I liked it as much as I liked those films, but it was still VERY good. I'm not a fan of Adam Scott, at ALL, but...much like Clark Kent and Superman, he wore glasses in this film, and it made his punchable face look different enough that I didn't mind him. Scott plays Ohm Bauman, an insufferably prickish bestselling author who visits a hotel in Ireland to scatter his parents ashes. While going to his room after checking in, Bauman notices that the Honeymoon Suite is closed off by a locked iron gate that the owner and manager are fussing over and checking. Upon inquiry, Bauman discovers that the room has been closed for years, because it is "haunted by a witch"....

 HOKUM hit what has been a sweet spot for me over the past six months or so. Since losing my job, I've found Ghost stories and Folk-Horror have been excellent tools to calm my anxiety and help me concentrate on a story and not my worries. McCarthy has crafted an excellent cross between the two genres. The film is a slow burn, but once it kicks in, it is absolutely spellbinding. I'd give it a solid 8 out of 10. My friend just said "That was strange...", and left it at that. She jumped and screamed quite a few times, though, lol. As a pointless aside, there was a huge, hulking guy sitting a row ahead of us who fell asleep as soon as the movie started, and he snored loudly and hilariously throughout the entire film. Usually people making noise can really bother me and ruin the whole film, but this, for some reason, really tickled me.

A word of warning: A really unfortunate spoiler photo is cropping up in most online reviews that reveals WAY too much about one of the central mysteries of the film, so be careful about that image if you're reading about the film online.