A horror anthology, a supernatural slasher, and a home invasion flick

Posted on January 15, 2025 by Daniel

I take on three more I watched on Tubi that, despite being pretty basic and unoriginal, each delivered a few thrills…and one featured two gay leads!

WORST LAID PLANS (2022)

This 78-minute anthology is just 3 short films assembled together to make a full-length feature, with no wraparound. It consists of two tales that have cool monsters, and a third story that is too determined to deliver a deeper meaning to actually deliver any scares…or monsters. The good news is that all three stories have attractive leading men.

1st story – this one features a gay storyline, landing it on the does the gay guy die? page. A cute guy, who bears a striking resemblance to singer Robbie Williams (the man, not the CGI monkey) and is way too old to be on a trip with his parents…is on a trip with his parents. His dad is a right wing douche, his mother is determined for them to have fun together.

They go on some underground tunnel tour, and the tour guide is also gay, so there’s some nice flirtation. But then, because of an underdeveloped script, it seems as if the tour guide dude basically leads the tour group right into a death trap! WTF? Good news is that the “trap” is a giant killer catfish created old school style, not with CGI. Great monster, great gay characters, weak script.

2nd story – two friends on a road trip encounter a young girl who appears to be in distress at a diner. They end up at a hotel where the RV of the girl and her “father” shows up in the parking lot.

So, the sexy main guy sneaks onto the RV to see if the young girl is okay. This one delivers another cool monster pay-off, plus the simple kind of twist anthology stories need.

3rd story – this final tale is almost twice as long as the other two, and it’s mostly because it consists of too much unnecessary footage a guy takes while on a vacation with his woman.

The gist of the story is that he thinks someone is sneaking into their hotel room at night and filming them, a plot done before in other anthologies with tension and scares, which you don’t get here. This one appears to be more about a man coping with grieving the loss of his son by getting lost in his own footage. It’s dullsville.

HUNTING FOR THE HAG (2023)

This one covers familiar ground, but it’s fun ground, so I was happy to have something easy to watch with some cheap thrills…and with more witch than The Blair Witch Project ever delivered.

A combination of standard third person perspective and found footage, the movie focuses on a group of young women staying at a country house in hopes of catching the legendary “hag” of the woods on film.

We learn about the hag’s backstory during a fireside discussion, and then the friends decide to do a little incantation to conjure her.

This is where the movie takes a turn for a while, but it serves the purpose of delivering a higher body count. A group of scummy redneck hunters shows up, and before you know it, they’re terrorizing the girls. This is the perfect time for a hag to arrive and stand up for other women, but this hag don’t give a shit. She’ll cut a bitch just as soon as hack up a misogynist.

Just note that the hag doesn’t come out to play until 59 minutes into this 85-minute movie. Her look is perhaps just haunted attraction level of creepy, but it served its purpose, especially since we usually only get quick glimpses of her in a flashlight beam. There are also a couple of satisfying kills, my favorite being a head squish. However, the need to add typical found footage camera glitches during all the standout moments—like the head squish—is super frustrating.

SORRY, CHARLIE (2023)

Cutie Colon Tran directs this simple home invasion film that consists of basically two characters and one location.

The idea is that some evil dude is luring women out of their homes using the sound of a crying baby.

It starts on Halloween night as a girl getting drunk and watching Carnival of Souls takes the baby bait and is attacked by a guy with a mask and top hat who very much resembles The Black Phone guy.

I wish the movie had stuck to Halloween night, but instead it’s just an ordinary night from then on. The focus is on a crisis line phone operator trapped in her house and trying to protect herself from the man she believes is after her.

There’s a lot of talk with callers to develop her character, as well as the backstory of “The Gentleman”, as the stalker is known.

There are also plenty of moments of the stalker lurking outside and inside the house, which starts off suspenseful but quickly becomes repetitive since there’s only one character to terrify. It’s not until there are only 13 minutes left that the main/only girl finally takes him on, and based on the twist, this feels like it could have and probably should have been a short film in an anthology rather than a full-length feature.

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TUBI TERRORS: killer mermaids, a killer creature, and a death plane

Posted on January 9, 2025 by Daniel

I made the hubby sit through all three of these with me, and for what it’s worth, he thought two out of three were pretty good.

MERMAID ISLE (2019)

Director Jason Mills hooked me with some of his earlier horror films, which I even purchased on DVD, but I haven’t been captivated by his later stuff. Mermaid Isle is a bizarre film that only runs 70 minutes long, has loads of filler consisting of characters just walking through the woods, and feels kind of like an incomplete script.

We jump right in with four people arriving on a deserted island. Apparently one guy brought them there to propose to his woman.

They miss the big sign that warns them not to swim in the lake, so one girl gets pushed in and then gets bit by something…in water a few inches deep.

Is there supposed to be a mermaid in the lake or is it something else that carries a mermaid virus? Because it seems like that’s what is going on here.

The wounded girl feels sick, so they look for shelter in a house the come upon. An old lady living there warns them at gunpoint that the wounded girl needs to die or she will kill all of them. They think the old lady is crazy. The old lady keeps repeating her warning and even says, “You don’t understand!” Problem is, she never explains it to them!

Don’t expect anything to be clarified. My guess is that the wounded girl was bitten by a mermaid (not sure how a mermaid was hiding in five inches of water), and just like a zombie virus, she then turns into a mermaid. But if it is a mermaid bite and not something else in the water, what becomes of the initial mermaid that bit her? I have no idea.

We do see one character that gets bit slowly crawling towards the water while turning green in the face, and there is a character splashing around in the water with fins, but that’s it. No other mermaid action. The old lady’s son, who also seems to know what is going on in the water (then why the hell do they continue to live there?) shows up, and then everyone dies with little fanfare.

During the closing credits, we see that another group of people has come to the island a few months later, but there’s no horror pay-off to watching them roam through the woods for a few minutes. WTF? Why was this old lady living alone on an island with a killer mermaid in the water? Why didn’t her son get her the hell off that island long ago? Is she supposed to be like the guardian of the lake? If people come to this island and die, why do people keep coming? How do they even find out about this island? If people keep getting turned into mermaids, wouldn’t there be a lake full of mermaids? Yeah, this one really feels underdeveloped.

ALL EYES (2022)

This is such a bizarre and quirky movie that kept my attention despite being slow-paced.

It opens strong, with a cute podcaster who speaks with strange people who do weird things losing his job after something tragic happens while he’s broadcasting live.

He then gets a request to come to an isolated farm by an old man who claims there’s a monster living in the woods that he wants to capture. The time they spend together staking out the property for the beast’s arrival has a whimsical charm to it, and the old man is a hoot.

There’s plenty of eerie blue and red horror lighting but be warned—things don’t kick into high gear until the last 25 minutes of the movie.

Booby traps the old man has set backfire big time, which becomes one of the brutal highlights of the film, and also a bigger threat than the beast, which we finally see fleetingly near the end of the film.

My one disappointment is that after all the anticipation about the beast, it’s all over and done with way too fast. My favorite part is that the main guy spends the final act shirtless, and his bod is tight.

FLIGHT 7500 (2014)

Somehow this one passed me by a decade ago, which is surprising since it has such a great cast of horror veterans, including Leslie Bibb, Scout Taylor-Compton, Amy Smart, Ryan Kwanten, and Johnathon Schaech.

We meet a cast of characters boarding a fairly empty plane, and we learn of each of their quirks and flaws—some bordering on sinful if you want to be totally judgmental in a Biblical sense. The flight experiences some turbulence, and then things take a weird turn.

One guy has some sort of attack and dies. They move the body to an empty part of the plane. There’s more turbulence, and the plane temporarily fills with some sort of smoke. Soon, passengers start to go missing…and so does the dead body. There are also what seem like attacks by something that comes out of temporary and smaller scale returns of the smoke. It’s like The Fog on a plane, but don’t expect to ever see what’s in the smoke.

There’s even a freaky as fuck, moving doll that they find in the belongings of the guy that died, but that plot element never takes off. Bummer.

Something supernatural seems to be going on, and it’s compelling enough to keep you watching, plus the atmosphere is spooky and often very dark. However, there aren’t tons of thrilling moments with any pay-off, and the turn the film takes at the end is one that might seem unique to newbies, but it was being used quite often at around the time this movie came out, so I wasn’t blown away by the clever conclusion like some might be (including my hubby).

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Back to the beginning of the new millennium

Posted on January 7, 2025 by Daniel

Hard to believe that the Bush Jr. era now feels like a better time, but here we are. Those were the days when the hubby and I would indulge in cheesy SyFy creature features regularly, so I was excited to find three on Tubi that I’d never seen that fit the mold, whether or not they actually aired on the network.

BLOOD PREDATOR (2007)

 

I didn’t expect a movie that was eventually going to make the hubby and I chuckle when this one started. The opening is deceivingly suspenseful, with a man exploring an empty cabin after his snowmobile breaks down. He goes deeper and deeper into a basement as spooky music with a late 70s/early 80s vibe plays, and eventually he encounters a slimy, spider-like creature.

Next we meet a group heading for a skiing vacation in a plane. They crash in the snow, and moments later they are walking through the woods…with absolutely no snow. In fact, this film jumps from scene to scene with either tons of snow or absolutely no snow.

The characters, who are mostly obnoxious, come upon the same cabin as the first guy. They sit around killing time, have sex (including some lesbian action), and eventually discover something in the basement.

What initially appears as a practical effects critter quickly dissolves into a bunch of hilariously overlayed CGI critters that look like ants walking on a glass window that was then placed in front of the camera.

I seriously can’t comprehend how bad the “effects” are, right down to the green screen as the survivors escape the cabin right before it explodes behind them.

I do think, however, that the biggest flaw here is the pacing. This is the kind of movie in which the group should have started peeling off one by one to be killed off without anyone else knowing before they discovered the threat. Instead, virtually the whole group encounters the critters together for the first time…67 minutes into the movie!

FEAR THE CREATURE (aka: Creature Unknown) (2004)

Now this is my kind of SyFy level creature feature…and there isn’t even CGI! This is good old rubber monster material, and we see him a lot. Awesome. On top of that, there are plenty of cuties in the cast, a staple of early 2000s SyFy flicks.

After an opening kill, we meet a dude who is bringing his friends back together at a cabin in the woods where his twin brother died a year before. Typical horror movie therapy that’s totally unrealistic. But who cares? It works.

There’s some drama between the friends, and one girl storms off into the woods, immediately kicking in the monster attacks.

This is a sort of reptile/man hybrid creature, and as the movie progresses, friends go missing, there’s an old school T and A shower scene, and the attacks get fast and furious.

Eventually the creature invades the house, the gore ramps up, and the truth of what happened to the brother is revealed, and it’s a classic plot point.

MANDRAKE (2010)

 
This creature feature stars hunky Max Martini and 80s fave Betsy Russell as part of a team that heads into the wilderness to retrieve a dagger from a burial ground, an expedition being paid for by a rich dude.

They find a coffin and corpse with a warning of death to anyone that removes the dagger, so…they remove it.

Soon, they are being terrorized by vines in the woods as well as a tribe of primitive men looking for sacrifices to what we eventually see is a huge plant creature. Eek!

There are some cool kills and some monster lore, but this is a very cliché flick, and rather than focus predominantly on the threat of the cool monster, too much time is spent on humans warring with each other. Also, there’s some really bad green screen action that distracts from what is otherwise a pretty polished production.

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Harvests and Axes

Posted on January 2, 2025 by Daniel

In my latest movie marathon, I was only disappointed by one choice from my streaming watchlists. Let’s find out which one and why.

BLOOD HARVEST (2023)

This 80-minute film is astonishingly uneventful and offers absolutely no chills or thrills. It’s like someone had a good idea for a plot but then didn’t figure out a way to make it unfold with any sort of tension or suspense.

There’s not much to say, considering not much happens. A woman, her two teen kids, and her second husband come to stay at her family home in a small town. The kids begin to suspect weird things happen in the town, in part because a man confronts them and tells them they should leave.

The kids find a CB in a barn and communicate with what sounds like a child, but they can’t extract enough information from the child to piece anything together. There are numerous flashbacks allowing viewers to know there were sacrificial rituals in this town…where there don’t appear to be any children. It’s Grown Ups of the Corn basically. I just don’t understand how life continues to go on in this town if they never let children reach procreation age.

Even so, that plot could have made this a terrifying ride for the two teens as they try to escape a cult of adults, but it’s really bland and over before anything actually starts to happen.

NIGHT HARVEST (2024)

Indie director Charlie Steeds’ movies rarely disappoint me, and this little slasher was another goody. It’s sort of like a Pumpkinhead concept with an actual pumpkin-headed killer.

The first scene is shot in black and white and has a farm family torturing and killing a goon who lives in the mountains after he commits a heinous act. It takes place on Halloween night, and the rest of the movie appears to be set in the fall, but this isn’t an official Halloween-themed horror movie, for the holiday is never mentioned again. However, the music used for the opening credits is clearly inspired by John Carpenter’s Halloween theme.

Next, a group of young people is traveling in an RV. They are soon being pursued by the police, because it turns out one of them has pyrokinesis and accidentally caused a devastating fire.

Just for the hell of it, we are introduced to the scarecrow-like killer in an awesome scene in which two young dudes make a pitstop in a cornfield to pee. There’s something almost gay about their connection, but they aren’t around long enough for us to really get a sense of any character traits.

In classic slasher style, the main group finds somewhere to crash for the night, has sex, and is stalked and viciously slaughtered by the killer. Awesome. If only there were more victims for a higher body count.

There’s no actual explanation as to why the killer came back for revenge, but he’s obviously supernatural, and he can also get inside the head of victims and make them see and hear things. It’s definitely an underdeveloped killer concept, but it’s fun purely for the slasher aspect, and of course, the main dude’s pyrokinesis comes into play for the final battle.

#CHADGETSTHEAXE (2022)

I’m not usually a fan of the most cookie cutter found footage films, which this essentially is even if it’s actually supposed to be a live stream, and I loathe obnoxious influencer movies, but this one worked for me simply because it had a few clever and unique death scenes. I just wish there had been more of them.

There’s a small group of irritating as fuck influencers (do people in real life actually enjoy the over-the-top shtick of these shallow people?), and their chronic need for attention leads them to Devils Manor, previously a home of a satanic cult that committed murders.

As they explore the location, split up, and piss on a pentagram they find on the floor to entertain the masses that keep them “employed”, we are subjected to all the viewer comments scrolling up the side of the screen. Ugh. The constant text posts don’t do the otherwise pretty good atmosphere any favors.

There are a few creepy death scenes, and eventually our leading man Chad finds himself alone and being chased by someone in a mask and hooded robe and carrying an axe. What’s so satisfying about the final act is that we get to watch one of these self-important influencers receive backlash…911 knows who he is and hangs up on him, and online haters cheer on the possibility that what they’re watching is real and that Chad is actually going to get murdered. Teehee.

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STREAM QUEEN: they came from Hulu, Prime, and Tubi

Posted on December 29, 2024 by Daniel

The latest trio of films I watched were plucked from three different streaming services, and it was quite a variety.

THE INHERITANCE (2024)


This Hulu selection is somewhat of a slow burn, and it’s not a terrifying experience, but I actually had fun with it.


A 75-year-old man assembles his estranged children together at his secluded mansion and informs them “something” is going to come for him that night, so he locks them all in the house to stay safe, an option that never ends well for anyone.

Naturally, these uppity siblings are at each other’s throats, but they try to play nice and go along with daddy’s delusions because of all the money they each stand to inherit.

Then something supernatural starts stalking, terrorizing, and killing the siblings. The first kill from the perspective of under the water in a pool is a perfect sequence to grab your attention.

There are plenty of suspense scenes, ghostly entities crawling from paintings Ringu style, a room full of creepy collectibles (including a huge statue of Pazuzu!), a dark twist, and best of all, someone actually asking another character in a horror movie, “Why are you sitting in the dark?” FINALLY.

DON’T LOOK AT THE DEMON (2022)

Ever watch a movie that just throws so much chaos and plot points at you that you get exhausted and simply go for the ride for the horror scenes? That’s how this one was for me.

Fiona Dourif plays a psychic medium in a group of paranormal investigators that also includes horror hottie Randy Wayne.

They head to a house to start investigating ghostly disturbances, and before long this turns into a possession film.

In Evil Dead fashion, the possession has a domino effect, hitting one person after another until it finally settles in a shirtless pretty boy. I was jealous that the demon was the one inside him.

We get loads of action, plenty of freaky and bloody horror moments, a nasty fetus extraction scene, and the unfolding truth of how Fiona’s character has encountered this demon before.

NOWHERE LAND (2022)

I’m a big fan of the indie flicks of the Crum brothers, so I was looking forward to this one. However, it ended up being their most disjointed venture yet.

Did you ever watch a movie, and you hear every word of dialogue and see every action of the characters, but you haven’t a clue what they’re talking about or what they’re doing? This is that kind of movie. Somehow, it keeps moving forward, but I have no idea why or how.

It has something to do with a kid’s TV show. A few barely developed characters set out to try to figure out what has happened to their children…I think. It appears they were mutilated by or possessed by something that comes out of the show. Again…I think. Not sure.

The characters bounce from location to location speaking with different people about the troubling power of the TV show, and eventually they start clashing with some visually awesome, hideous looking mutants. Unfortunately, it is just hard to grasp how these monsters are materializing as they do.

According to the IMDb description, “Children’s TV show puppets come to life, but take a sinister turn. Following the dark events unfolding as the initially cute puppets wreak havoc in reality”. I’d say the hard-to-follow composition of that description bleeds into the structure of the movie itself, because neither one is easy to comprehend.

I was intrigued by a brief flash of shirtless men looking as if they’ve been impaled on posts in Cannibal Holocaust fashion, but how it relates to anything else that happened in the film is beyond me.

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Three strung out animal movies, three different drugs of choice

Posted on December 27, 2024 by Daniel

Naturally, Cocaine Bear triggered a bunch of copycats, so I watched a marathon of three more. No, I don’t know why (but at least I didn’t subject my hubby to them). It almost wasn’t worth it, but one film saved this from being a total disaster. So, which one gave me the best horror high?

COCAINE COUGAR (2023)

This is bottom of the barrel jungle junkie horror. It runs 51 minutes long, has 10 minutes of closing credits, and perhaps five minutes of time-filling montages in between, including one really long one of rides at an amusement park.

A cougar escapes a lab, attacks a druggy in the mountains, busts open a bag of coke, and then attacks anyone who wanders by.

There’s red cougar POV, snarls that I’m convinced are the sound sample from Janet Jackson’s “Black Cat”, and a CGI cougar that looks like something out of a late 90s video game. It even floats off the background at times…like a glitch in a late 90s video game.

There are mostly off-screen kills with no cougar/human contact (probably because they couldn’t get the CGI cougar to stop floating above victims), but there is gay representation, with a dude heading into the woods to meet an online hookup.

METH GATOR (2023)

Despite jumping on the whacked-out wildlife trend, Meth Gator offers absolutely no humor, so the meth eating aspect is irrelevant. It’s simply a “giant gator terrorizes a small community” movie, giving this a very 2000s SyFy movie vibe.

It opens with a drug bust in the wilderness. A bag of meth falls into the water, and what alligator can resist a bag of meth? He gobbles it down and immediately gets red-eyed.

This one takes place in hillbilly land, so our Black sheriff has to contend with lots of American flags and white trash while he and his team search the swamps for a hidden meth lab in order to break the gator’s addiction. He’s even forced into a slap fight with a redneck.

The gator looks pretty cool despite its CGI construction, and there are plenty of irrelevant characters thrown in just to serve up dinner for the gator and blood splatter for us. Yay!

The only downside to this paint-by-numbers movie is that despite the mayor demanding that the big parade coming to town not be canceled, there’s no parade massacre! What the hell?

CRACKCOON (2024)

If I have to watch an indie cash-in on Cocaine Bear, this is the one. This sleazy, bloody, silly, crass, low budget flick nails it, and is perfect for a watch party. Best of all, it has a gay hero of sorts!

It does its trashy tone right, with loads of rednecks and druggies being taken down by a raccoon puppet thrown at them from off screen. There’s comedy, sex, female nudity, some toilet humor, and plenty of practical gore effects with buckets of blood. The raccoon puppet is an evil looking bugger that resembles a baby version of the American werewolf in London.

So, a gay drug dealer starts selling a new drug to his customers (blame it on the gays), and immediately they turn into infected with yellow eyes, foaming mouths, and violent urges. I was feeling it and momentarily wished that this wasn’t going to turn into a drugged-up raccoon movie.

Thankfully, the raccoon is a blast, and I quickly forgot about the infected people…and so did the movie. Once the raccoon shows up, it’s a fast-paced streak of people being devoured.

There’s even more than one gay guy in the movie, and one of them helps take down the raccoon in the end, landing this film on the does the gay guy die? page.

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BOUGHT ON BLU: from the 50s, 60s, and 80s

Posted on December 26, 2024 by Daniel

These three were all blind buys for me. I’d never seen any of them before, and only one disappointed.

ATTACK OF THE GIANT LEECHES (1959)

This creature feature came as a double feature with my Blu-ray upgrade of Night of the Blood Beast. It’s another lost treasure that is clearly a precursor to so many tried and true tropes of horror to this day. It’s an absolute gem, beginning with the awesome old school horror organ music and a fisherman in dark, murky waters at night when he spots something horrific in the water.

Quite contemporary in presentation, it has a sexy as hell cop with a furry chest on the case as people go missing, a slutty bombshell who is cheating on her slovenly husband with a hot young man, and some eerie underwater segments with the giant leech monsters.

Rather than killing victims, the leeches bring them to an underwater lair, where they then suck the blood out of them, slowly draining them of energy in the process. Eek!

There’s a scene of dead bodies floating to the surface (awesome), an underwater rescue mission to find survivors, and a plan to take out the leeches once and for all. Perfect.

EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960)

 

While it’s not terrifying by today’s standards, if you watch this French film within the scope of the year in which it was released, it will shock you that the movie goes where it does and is as graphic as it is. It is so clearly the precursor to so many horror movies we’ve been treated to since.

The story is simple if not somewhat slow. A mad scientist is delving into transplanting organs…and skin. His daughter’s face was terribly disfigured in a car accident, so he keeps her hidden away and wearing a mask until he can perfect face transplants. He also rewrote her accident as a disappearance.

Now, his devoted assistant lures young women to his isolated home so that he can attempt to peel off their faces and transfer them to his daughter’s face. And he does, in graphic detail. I really can’t believe this movie was allowed to be released in the early sixties.

While the daughter’s mask is creepy and “faceless” for good reason as she lurks around her home and father’s lab trying to learn what he is really up to, just like Frankenstein, the scientist is the real monster.

Meanwhile, there are detectives closing in on the truth.

The concept is truly horrific when you realize that not only is the daughter suffering from the loss of her face, but she is also being re-traumatized each time a transplant fails, further damaging her fragile psyche. Naturally, the only recourse is for her to stop the madness. By today’s standards this might seem like a cookie cutter concept, but this one actually made the mold and is a must-see for those dedicated to horror history.

VENOM (1981)

This is one you definitely don’t want to blind buy, even if you are obsessed with 80s horror as much as I am. This is possibly one of the weakest “nature strikes back” flicks of the era, despite starring both Oliver Reed and Klaus Kinski.

They are part of a trio that plans to abduct a boy from a wealthy family. However, due to a mix-up at the pet shop, the boy brings home the wrong snake…a deadly one that immediately gets out.

This all happens so quickly, as does Reed panicking, shooting a cop outside, and leaving us with a movie about a trio of kidnappers trapped in a building with a deadly snake slithering through the vents, complete with snake POV.

Much of the time is filled with conflicts between the kidnappers and the police plotting how they are going to infiltrate the building. There is very little in the way of snake attack action. It’s a total bore. And naturally, there’s a cliché, hatched egg final frame. Yawn.

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These human monsters are like fish out of water

Posted on December 23, 2024 by Daniel

They morph with humans and become blood-thirsty creatures! Awesome. Let’s get right into this feeding frenzy.

CROCODYLUS (2023)

Half-man, half-croc? I’m in! On top of that, Crocodylus opens with first a lesbian couple then a little boy getting attacked! Now that’s how you start a hybrid human-croc party.

No one cares about the lesbians, but a search is immediately on for the little boy. A team of experts is assembled to determine what the threat is. The mayor doesn’t want to close the lake for the holiday weekend. You know the drill.

There’s also some lore introduced about how the Crocodylus came to be, and I think it’s more nightmarish than the Crocodylus main storyline, which is basically similar to any SyFy original plot from back in the day.

The movie, sadly, doesn’t show the creature until the last four minutes, and it’s only briefly. Plus, the kills are all off-screen, with just blood splatters coming into frame. Good news is the “director’s cut”, as it’s labeled on Tubi, is only 70 minutes long, so the pacing is pretty good. Unfortunately, the big climax is not so big. It’s really anticlimactic.

The one funny part of the movie? The missing boy’s last name is Dingle, so everyone keeps referring to him as “the Dingle boy”. All this trouble just to locate a dingleberry?

CROCODYLUS: MATING SEASON (2024)

How do you fix a franchise about a human-croc hybrid after the first film was underwhelming? Make it an all-out comedy creature feature with plenty of scenes featuring the rubber suit creature.

Two connect the two films, one guy from the previous movie appears in the opening attack, where the farcical tone is immediately established.

Next, a woman hires a private detective to find her brother, who she’s convinced has become a Crocodylus. They become somewhat of a comedy team, and the countless kills are pure camp. Love it.

The Crocodylus even ends up in a bra at one point, there’s monster mouth POV, there’s a shirtless hottie, there’s a slapstick sex scene, there’s a kooky scientist, and there’s a tag after the closing credits that promises a sequel…and it looks like it might be Crocodylus vs. Bigfoot. I’m so there for it.

BAD FISH (2024)

This indie effort is another water creature/human hybrid movie, and it has a trippy, Dagon-like vibe to it, so I kinda liked it.

After a drunken fisherman says his crew was attacked by something inhuman and body parts start washing up on the shore, an investigation is underway.

There’s a mermaid angle to this one, but it’s really about a human-fish legend and a sort of cult protecting the creature’s existence, culminating in a nasty cannibalism/sex scene. Eek!

We once again get an awesome rubber suit monster, and the ending is quite dark, twisted, and satisfying.

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TUBI TERRORS: masked killers!

Posted on December 20, 2024 by Daniel

It’s a trio of slashers flicks, and I had a major favorite. Let’s find out which one.

BAD CONNECTION (2023)


This is the kind of simple stalker/slasher fun I needed in my life right now. Bad Connection is a blast, with a nonstop chase, a sinister masked killer, a determined main girl, and plenty of blood and violence.

After a douchebag customer ruins her phone, a waitress is gifted a new one by her sexy boyfriend. Actually, it’s not a new one…it’s used and hot off the street because they’re broke.

The main girl discovers a video on the phone of a woman being murdered. Within minutes, a masked killer starts relentlessly pursuing her through a seedy side of town for the remainder of the film. Awesome.

There are plenty of victims to hack up along the way, great suspense scenes, an appearance by scream queen Tiffany Shepis, and Perez Hilton in a minor role as a gay doctor (landing this one on the does the gay guy die? page).

The only real miss in this film is the silly final frame scene. It’s just so derivative and pointless.

KILLER INFLUENCE (2024)

Yet another slasher that relies on the lowest common denominator of current trends…influencers gathering together in a house to get hacked up. I just want a movie where someone kills every influencer through some sort of computer program so we can be done with this era of societal obsession already.

It’s almost an hour before the killer actually kills someone. Until then, a group of multiple female influencers and one male influencer deal with relationships (mostly the main lesbian one), body image issues, and the pressure of being successful by creating the shallow-assed content that people crave these days.

We do get one sex scene with plenty of tits (because it’s a lesbian sex scene), and the group sits in a room full of candles and tells some scary stories. The weird thing is, the girl hosting the party promises it’s going to be the scariest night of their lives, but there’s no pay-off to that promise. I mean, were ghost stories the most creative thing an influencer could think of to entertain and scare viewers? It feels like a whole crucial part of this party is just completely missing.

The real theme here is that influencers have to be really careful of revealing their location because stalkers exist. Yep, that’s it. The masked killer shows up, and in the final act kills a bunch of them, has a body count party, and then chases and fights the final girl. There’s no killer reveal, and no specific motivation.

If you must watch, I’d suggest just hopping over to the fifty-minute mark and starting from there…or a little earlier if you like lesbian sex.

GO AWAY (2024)

I was so excited when this one started at a family Christmas party. But alas, only the opener takes place at Christmas, so this isn’t a holiday horror flick. However, the first sequence has some great low budget charm, with masked home invaders tying up victims and forcing them to decide who dies. It’s a backstabbing hoot, so to speak.

The main focus of the film is a guy going with his girlfriend’s family. Tuesday Knight plays the mom, and Felissa Rose plays the loud-mouthed aunt, providing plenty of mean-spirited humor.

There’s family drama and infighting for a while, discussion of a bunch of murders years before, and a hot bear shirtless in a sex scene.

42 minutes in, there’s a very cool intro to the home invasion. There are knocks on numerous doors all at once. Eek!

Masked invaders bust in, and the killing begins immediately. All I’m going to say is that my three favorite people in the movie all die first. WTF?

After that, the killers release the rest of the victims and force them into a cat and mouse game, promising that if they can get away, they live. The tone of the film shifts, with none of the over-the-top tone presented earlier.

The gore is really good, but there’s not much in the way of suspense or tension, and the low budget look and feel doesn’t allow for much atmosphere. However, despite it being an underwhelming home invasion flick, there are several twists that keep things interesting.

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Backwoods horrorthon

Posted on December 18, 2024 by Daniel

It’s a foursome of fright flicks in the forest, with masked killers, unmasked killers, vampires, and Bigfeet. Let’s get right into them.

WOLF MOUNTAIN (2022)

This is a really uneven slasher. A young man is struggling with suppressed memories of what happened to his parents, so his therapist (played by Tobin Bell) recommends that he return to the spot where they fell off a cliff.

He, his brother, and their friends head into the wilderness. One friend happens to be played by Matt Rife. You’ll be shocked to know he plays a douchebag. His versatility as an actor is amazing.

Meanwhile, Danny Trejo and some other dude are a couple of criminals traipsing through the woods. Trejo is also the first murdered.

The main group has a run-in with some park rangers, including one who is supposed to be some sort of comic relief, but his shtick, while funny, is totally not in keeping with the tone of the rest of the movie.

It takes a while for the kills to kick in, but once they do, they are about the only upside to this weak flick. The cast spends lots of time walking around the woods, we only see the killer’s mask fleetingly, and despite falling off a cliff during the final confrontation with the main guy, the killer (who is a mere mortal) somehow comes back for another sequence at the end…completely unscathed.

ANOTHER CABIN IN THE WOODS MOVIE (2024)

Based on the title, you’d think this was going to be an over-the-top slasher comedy spoof. That isn’t the case. Virtually the only comedy and spoofing here is that if you pay attention, there is often a television or a radio on in the background, and the dialogue or song lyrics are literally telling you exactly what cliché is about to occur in the movie.

Unfortunately, the slasher aspect of the film isn’t all that thrilling either, despite good production values and some bloody kills. Predictably, a group of friends goes to a cabin in the woods, this time for a newlywed celebration.

They meet the weird old caretaker (of course) and actually invite him to party with them. Another apparent joke has his voice going from normal to demonic every time he speaks, and no one seems to notice. Don’t expect it to hold any significance, because it doesn’t.

Instead, the movie plays out with the usual tropes. There’s infighting, couples have sex (yay!), they split up, people begin to disappear, etc. We never see the killer, and there’s no mask.

Once we find out who the killer is during the final battle, there’s a twist that requires basically the whole movie to be recapped in flashbacks for it to make sense. Eh.

VAMPIRE LAKE (2024)

I can’t believe this film comes from the director of Midnight Screening, which had some standout moments for a low budget slasher. Vampire Lake is just void of anything engaging.

A couple of women and teenage girls are having a girl weekend at a cabin in the woods. They mention a legend about summoning a vampire by the lake. After lots of talk, one of the teenage girls finally heads down to the lake alone and does the ritual.

40 minutes in, the vampire appears to her. No atmosphere here since his appearances are always in the daytime. Not to mention, he’s not all that menacing. The characters spend the rest of the film running around the woods. The most blood you see is dripping from the vampire’s mouth and occasional on a victim’s neck.

Despite the film being flat with no onscreen horror to speak of, the ending twist is clever. I only wish it had been attached to a better movie.

FEET OF DEATH (2024)

If this Bigfoot film had been about 80 minutes long instead of 105 minutes long, I probably would have enjoyed it more. Not even several bearded rednecks in uniform helped kill the time. I prefer my bearded rednecks in uniform when they’re all action, no talk, but it’s the opposite here.

It opens strong with a young woman finding a missing influencer dead in the woods. Then a park ranger grieving from the loss of his woman has to get himself together to investigate with the local sheriff.

Seems there have been numerous cases of people getting attacked or going missing in the woods, and legend has it that Bigfoot is the culprit.

Do not expect any major Bigfoot thrills. This is basically a mystery movie, with the lead characters investigating the murder by speaking to various “experts”, including an animal behavior expert, a coroner, etc.

The final act is where all the fun happens. There are several twists, and while they are goodies, I’ve actually seen them in other Bigfoot movies, so it’s nothing new. There’s some very brief Bigfoot action, but the plot takes a final turn that is so not a happy ending, and I just love that kind of thing. This movie simply needed more Bigfoot attacks and less talk.

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