Not my best selection of flicks to watch for Halloween

Posted on November 2, 2025 by Daniel

Good thing there were dependable classics to watch in between watching these three new films on Halloween weekend, because they were mostly duds. Let’s find out why.

DR. GIFT (2025)

I have been waiting for this one to be released for a while due to Danielle Harris being in it. I kind of wish she hadn’t been in it…

There are some great visual moments of horror in this film, but perhaps the director would have been better off saving them for a video for an indie goth band or something, because they are kind of out of place here. This is simply a mess of a horror “comedy” that loses its way early on, with such an inept script (if there even was a completely developed one), that I gave up trying to figure out what was going on. Be warned that the audio is muffled and hard to hear, which doesn’t help matters.

The opener takes place in 1918. Cops bust into an insane asylum and discover that Dr. Gift has been experimenting on patients. There are some enticing horror visuals here, but the scene is shot in black and white and looks like home video quality. An aged film filter would have masked that a bit and captured the spirit of the tone better.

In the modern day, two brothers are opening a bed & breakfast in the old asylum. At first, I thought they were a gay couple, and it feels like such a cop-out that they weren’t. I mean…it’s a bed and fricking breakfast, and one of the brothers is virtually portrayed as gay.

Anyway, there are moments of humor as an assembly line of guests come to stay at the B&B, but way too much of it falls flat. We get a mysterious couple, a group of mediums looking to do a séance, a team of redneck ghost hunters that look like escaped convicts, a girl band led by Danielle, a biker gang, and a couple of inspectors, not to mention the pair of chefs that works in the kitchen. There are too many damn characters, so no one gets enough screen time, and no one feels significant. There’s also no plot. They all just get little vignettes of goofy behavior and banter.

Eventually (55 minutes in), Danielle becomes possessed by Dr. Gift, commits one murder, and is then gone and replaced by the doctor himself. There also seems to be a cult, there are a few apparitions, and there’s some sort of demon girl. It’s just a bunch of chaos with no rhyme or reason.

Thing is, the moments of horror feel like they were inserted from a much better, authentically scary and disturbing horror movie. There were opportunities to go two ways here, humor or pure horror, but instead we get them both, and they aren’t blended together as in a good horror comedy, so the two tones just completely clash. I was feeling little blips of the humor, but not enough, but I was really feeling the gruesome, practical effects, kills, and horror imagery. Not to mention, if it was a fake penis used in this scene, that’s one realistic looking fake penis. It’s also, like…a really pretty fake penis.

GLAMPING (2025)

For a movie that uses loads of thumping club music as its soundtrack, you’d think this one would be more exciting. Unfortunately, you also know that when a movie opens with a major kill scene that isn’t going to occur until much later in the plot’s timeline, there’s a good chance nothing is going to happen for a long time. 59 minutes in this case. Sigh.

We meet an aspiring influencer. Suddenly everything begins to go great for her. That is until one of the products she promoted harms a follower that tries it. Then her career crashes.

After way too much exploration of her career trajectory, she joins her friends for a trip to a cabin in the woods. On the way, they see stick figure dolls hanging from a tree. They find another one in the cabin. Therefore, they decide to stay. Naturally.

There’s relationship drama and infighting until finally the lights go out, and a masked figure appears and badly harms one of them. They all manage to get away, but as their friend lies bleeding, they…start fighting about relationships again.

There are only four characters, so death scenes are few. There’s a gay subplot, but it wasn’t the one I expected. My gaydar was way off on this one….as was that of the six other people I watched this movie with.

The twist basically just puts a little twist on the most obvious twist you could have expected, but that ends up making it a pretty weak twist. This wasn’t one of the better Tubi originals.

KILL ME AGAIN (2025)

If Happy Death Day was really boring and featured the killer repeating the day instead of the main girl, it would be this movie.

A killer enters a diner, spends a little time there, and then kills someone. And then he starts doing the same thing over and over again.

The film tries to inject humor into the situation to make it a little more interesting each time, but it doesn’t try hard enough. It takes way too long for the recurring sequence to become more playful and more like a slasher. The killer seriously uses a gun to kill victims half the time. Yawn.

Eventually, the killer gets bored, so he begins having fun mixing things up each time he returns, but it’s not until 52 minutes in that he ups the body count in a big way. That’s the best part of this 108-minute movie. That and the use of Air Supply’s “Here I Am” for one scene (but only once).

The big reveal moment at the end is clever, so it’s a shame it wasn’t attached to a more thrilling version of this movie.

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Chucky’s latest competition? It’s three creepy doll movies

Posted on October 29, 2025 by Daniel

I never get tired of deadly dolls, so I added three more to my watchlists for a triple feature. Let’s see how that worked out for me.

ROB1N (2025)

A killer robot doll with a number in the name of his spelling. Has to be a M3GAN rip-off, right? Not really, beyond those little details. This is a much more atmospheric little killer doll flick.

It opens with a massacre at some kid’s birthday party.

Next, we meet a young, engaged straight couple. He suggests they go visit his estranged uncle. That works out well, because the uncle lives in a big house and apparently had a car accident a while back that wiped most of his memory. He doesn’t even remember any conflict with the nephew so invites them to stay.

It does turnout, however, that the uncle has built a robot likeness of his deceased son. And don’t you know, ROB1N is one jealous doll. He viciously kills anyone that gets between him and his maker.

Here’s the thing, though. While the doll and his blinking, glowing eyes are definitely creepy, I guess budget constraints forced the filmmakers not to animate ROB1N at all in full view. You mostly see him standing there staring blankly, then his eyes blink, then we see a weapon making contact with a victim.

Somehow, it actually works to some extent and delivers plenty of blood, but as a result of the lack of movement and the fact that ROB1N doesn’t speak, he really has no personality. His inability to ever be seen walking also makes for a pretty awkward final chase scene…

Despite that, this one has a clever twist that, along with the good kills and stylish filming, made this a satisfying killer doll movie for me.

MORGAN: KILLER DOLL (2025)

 

It’s a lesbian killer doll movie! Yay! More like a lesbian obsession killer doll movie.

Michael Pare is the father of Astrid, a very nice teen girl who walks with a cane but somehow hangs with a very snotty and douchey clique of friends.

Astrid reconnects with her childhood friend Darcy, who is weird, has an abusive father, is in therapy…and is ready to admit she has always been in love with Astrid.

For Astrid’s birthday, Darcy gives her a big, creepy doll. Astrid’s friends, who despise Darcy, find a love letter in the box, so they make Darcy well aware that she’s a freak and doesn’t stand a chance with Astrid.

And then the killing begins. Here’s the really crappy part. The Darcy doll has plenty of shitty people to kill, but her first victim is Astrid’s Black maid. It’s literally the only scene the woman is in. She comes to clean the house and gets viciously stabbed. WTF?

The Darcy doll is freaky because she fricking appears human-sized whenever she attacks people. Eek!

The death scenes are great, with spooky setup shots of the doll and violent, bloody kills, which is a plus, because this is a pretty generic slasher otherwise.

There’s a very satisfying twist in the final act, but the denouement goes on way too long with a lot of excessive talk, which seriously slows down the pacing at the last minute. I’d also like to know why the inside of Astrid’s house is lit in neon horror colors like something you would see in my Dan cave.

THE RULE OF JENNY PEN (2024)

This is a different kind of doll movie, because the doll is actually attached to John Lithgow’s arm like a puppet, and he uses it to terrorize fellow patients at a rest home, often forcing them to “lick her asshole”. WTF?

This is just a nasty, mean-spirited, “elevated” horror movie that also stars Geoffrey Rush as the protagonist who is most targeted by Lithgow and the only one who stands up to him.

Cruel torture includes pouring piss on patients, yanking out a catheter, a spit fight, pushing elderly people down, sending them off into the woods by themselves, and even sexual assault.

It’s one big metaphor for the possible horrors of living in an old folks home (isolation, abandonment, neglect, abuse), and while it does have a doll with glowing eyes and there are some symbolic scenes of the doll being gigantic, this is more a horrific movie than a horror movie. I wasn’t feeling it at all. I’ll stick to the trashy, low budget killer doll slashers, thank you very much.

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Witch times six, just in time for Halloween

Posted on October 27, 2025 by Daniel

I love witches, especially in October, so I dug up six witch flicks on my streaming apps to carry me through the weeks leading up to Halloween. Let’s see how that worked out for me.

COVEN (2020)

This campy take on The Craft concept isn’t even good enough for SyFy, but it gave the hubby and I some good laughs.

A coven of sexy college witches immediately goes too far during a ritual to conjure a distant witch relative, leading one of the girls to die during a blood sacrifice. There’s also lingerie and boobs, so that tells you the kind of audience they’re going for here. This isn’t your guncle’s The Craft.

Only one of the remaining witches is even vaguely traumatized by the death. Even so, when a new witch shows up on campus, the PTSD doesn’t stop the witch from trying to recruit her to join the coven.

Meanwhile, the evil lesbian leader of the coven has sinister side plans. She wants power. She wants world dominance. She wants revenge on a redneck homophobe she encountered at a bar.

A lot of nothing happens. The “good witches” get some help from an occult shop owner and a college professor, there’s a cute guy as a love interest to the new girl, there are some low budget magical fights, the conjuring effects are funny, the girls show a bit of skin during rituals, etc.

Finally, the evil lesbian leader becomes possessed, and the girls battle it out with finger lightning on a city street. Like I said. It doesn’t even rise to SyFy level bad.

OUIJA WITCH (2023)

This is a simple witch revenge flick that could have been better if it leaned more heavily into its slasher structure. We needed more kills, we needed them to be more violent, and we needed them more often.

The opening scene is a goodie. Three teens are trying to summon a legendary witch that was hanged in their town centuries before. It works. The lights go out, they do some creeping around the dark house, and they encounter the witch.

25 years later we meet another young woman who works as a bartender. Her father has passed, her mother happens to be one of the girls from the beginning of the movie, and her coworker at the bar is a tough lesbian.

Too bad the lesbian isn’t around when the main girl walks home from work at night and gets attacked by some douchey male patrons that follow her from the bar.

It appears that the movie is supposed to take place in Salem (a shot of the Salem Witch Museum gives it away), so she runs right to the local occult shop, which is owned by fricking Sean Young, who whips out a Ouija, summons the infamous witch, and sends our main girl on her way.

While the main girl is at home having nightmares, the witch returns as a beautiful woman to hunt down the guys that attacked the main girl. Naturally, she’s not really beautiful, she just chooses to wear a sensual facade. It’s kind of weird considering she doesn’t use her magical hotness to seduce most of her victims. She actually scares them, which puts into question what kind of men these douchebags really are. And why aren’t there enough of them to up the kill count?

She finally does seduce the leader of the douchey dudes in the final act and transforms into her true hag form while they’re having sex. This is the moment you’ve been waiting for, when he gets what he deserves and gets it good, only…it’s a cutaway kill! This witch bitch doesn’t seem to want to satisfy our horror itch. That is until she finally rips out a heart. Awesome.

Mom and daughter join forces to use the Ouija board to stop the witch once and for all, but the ending is hokey and low budget, with no real battle and the simplest solution to taking the witch down.

THE NORTH WITCH (2024)

This is one of the most intense films in this bunch, and it feels like it’s inspired by Yellowjackets, maybe a little Evil Dead, and a good dose of witchery.

Freshly booted from therapy, our main girl calls her friend to ask if she can stay with her. The friend is going hiking in the woods with some other friends to search for a mysteriously, long-lost cabin, but reluctantly invites the main girl to come along.

As soon as they reach the woods, the craziness kicks in. The main girl is the only one who seems to realize they should turn back, but they persist. Before you know it, there’s a wicked storm, they get separated, and the main girl ends up taking shelter in the very cabin they’ve been looking for.

She finds a diary detailing the cabin’s witchy past, and mysterious occurrences in the cabin lead her to start documenting what’s happening on her camera.

When one of the other girls from the group shows up, the shit really hits the fan. She begins acting very odd, and her behavior gets worse—extreme and violent. The actress playing the role is fantastic, and the whole situation is disturbing and unsettling.

The movie definitely grabs a hold of you and keeps you riveted, but I do think that most horror veterans will guess right from the start what’s really going on here. Even so, we get a vicious finally, and there’s a great witch presence as well. This is one I would definitely watch again.

THE WITCH FILES (2018)

To me, this one was like Chronicle meets The Craft, with a heavy dose of catty camp and less budget. I actually had fun with it even if it is horror lite.

As with many “found footage” flicks, you have to put aside the fact that everything that occurs is somehow caught on camera and just go with it.

It opens with a bunch of girls in detention. This film overlooks the ostracized teens concept a bit, because despite them all coming from different backgrounds that would ensure they were never in the same cliques, they immediately bond over detention and the fact that the new goth girl in town is brazenly into magic. They all want in on it.

So, they do what these teen girls do in all these witchcraft movies. They begin with basic, simple spells and incantations to mess with people they don’t like. There are actually some fun flying scenes that are rather impressive for such a low budget film, including one girl dropping in on a broom! Awesome.

Things begin to fracture when the girls express different opinions on what is right and what is wrong. There are some inner group conflicts and magical fights, with one girl even making a quip about shooting lightning from her fingers. It’s this kind of subtle, self-aware humor and the personalities of the girls that made this one kind of charming to me.

A bit of a mystery unfolds, with veteran actor Paget Brewster of Criminal Minds investigating their intensifying mischief, and it all builds up to a battle at the school dance, where the humorous undertones really move to the forefront. This confrontation leads to the forest for the final fight, and we briefly get to see an old hag of a witch at last.

I liked the plot, I liked the girls, I liked the simple special effects. This is the kind of movie I would have watched constantly on cable back when I was a teenager.

WITCHCRAFT (aka: Hanna’s Homecoming) (2018)

Moody and atmospheric with a folk horror vibe to it, this German film is dubbed in English on Amazon Prime. It initially kept my attention as it treaded familiar teen-girl-angst-meshed-with-witchcraft territory, but the energy barely picks up, and the movie begins to run long without much in the way of payoff.

A teen girl comes home from boarding school to live with her father and work at his slaughterhouse. Her mother died in the marshes, as did three other men, which led the town to believe the mother killed them with witchcraft. So very quickly, some of the other young people in town assume she’s a witch, too.

At times, I thought she was as well, but in the end, I don’t think that’s the case. Weird stuff starts to happen around her, she sees a ghostly apparition near the marshes, and she befriends another girl who is somewhat of an outsider.

I expected them to begin practicing witchcraft together, but that doesn’t happen either. However, people do begin disappearing and dying.

She has several run-ins with douchey dudes, which leads to some male nudity, landing this one on the stud stalking page. Yay!

Even so, there’s no satisfying witchcraft revenge here against guys. The Craft this definitely isn’t. And it didn’t have to be. It just needed to be more enthralling than it is. In fact, the conclusion reminded me somewhat of the predictable ending of The North Witch, only a lot less horror slanted.

YORK WITCHES SOCIETY (2022)

What at first seems like the usual cliché plot about teen girls forming a coven and unleashing evil takes a unique turn in this film, and I was really feeling it. It is, however, a slow burn that also feels a little prim and proper in its depiction of the events that unfold. While there’s some dark payoff in the final act, the film restrains itself from delivering visually on the kills.

It opens with a good old-fashioned witch burning in colonial times. Naturally, the witch curses the townsfolk.

In modern times, a young woman comes to a new school. She immediately gets confrontational with a professor in class during a lecture on the history of the witch trials.

Yeah. Our main girl is a witch. She’s also pressured to join a coven by some classmates. The atmosphere is moody and spooky good as they begin doing rituals. There are a few early signs that their rituals are unleashing something evil, but the real fun doesn’t begin until they practice magic in a cabin in the woods about halfway through the movie.

Would you believe their next incantation leads to Evil Dead shaky cam POV through misty woods? Awesome.

I just wish the film had leaned a little harder into the terror of them being trapped in the cabin with more of the demonic presence that eventually shows itself in the last few minutes. There are some good death scenes, but they’re mostly cutaway and sterile, with just some blood and nor grisly gore.

The twist concerning the original witch they were trying to conjure is pretty fresh, and there’s some satisfying suspense once the demonic presence tries to enter the cabin to hunt them down, even if it does kind of resemble the emperor from the Star Wars universe…

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A woke and wacky family, a sexualized mutant, a towering killer, and expanded Halloween horror

Posted on October 25, 2025 by Daniel

I had varying degrees of fun with the latest foursome of flicks from my watchlist, one of which lands on the holiday horror page (kind of for the second time), another of which scores a spot on the does the gay guy die? page, so let’s get into them.

BRUTE 1976 (2025)

The director of Pretty Boy gives us an homage to grisly 1970s horror movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes that also seems to celebrate the onset of diversity in the 1970s. However, if you ask me, the film actually seems to be turning the usual social message on its head and serving as a warning to the “woke” crowd to rethink its approach to progress. Not that it’s right wing propaganda, but it isn’t exactly pushing the equality movement. I’d love to hear what others think after watching the movie.

The opening scene is a goodie. A lesbian couple gets stuck in the desert, explores an old mining cave, and then gets terrorized by freaks in masks. Keep track here. Lesbians are the first victims.

Next, we meet their friends, who are traveling in a classic Texas Chainsaw van, and the characters even have a conversation about that movie.

This is a pretty fun, likable group (especially the Randy type character who knows his horror movies), and they are heading into the desert to do a bicentennial photo shoot—a forward-thinking, interracial photo shoot featuring a white woman and a Black woman.

There’s also a sexy white male model with a pornstache wearing Daisy Dukes and not much else.

The male photographer seems to have the hots for him, so, when the group reaches a ghost town and everyone goes to explore, the two guys go off on their own.

Are you with me here? There’s homoerotic sexual tension between the two men. But then…it seems to get cock-blocked by an admission of heterosexuality and some self-inflicted closeting. But then, it seems like both men were lying about their lack of homosexual attraction. And then…it goes straight to a shit situation in a restroom to totally kill the mood and diffuse any homoeroticism. That, however, doesn’t stop a glory hole scene from unfolding next. Here’s the weird thing about this scene. It is gruesome and explicit, but there’s a little rectangular blur covering the full Monty!

I have no idea if the movie was made this way or if Amazon Prime chose to block it, but either way, when that wiener gets mutilated behind the little rectangular blur, even what you don’t see will make you feel the agony. I was in a room with three other guys, and we were all crying out in pain. While I would love to see a cut of the film without the little rectangular blur, what concerns me most is that it’s a little rectangular blur, so it doesn’t seem like it is censoring much of anything.

Meanwhile, take note that the second set of targeted victims in the flick were seemingly gay. Yep. All the queers die first.

Well, not quite all the queers. Here’s where the DEI comes into play, and ironically, it comes mostly from the psycho family that is doing all the killing. This turns out to be a mixed-race family with a gender-bending queer dude leading the pack. And he isn’t even proudly queer, for he gets defensive about his genitals. Yeah. This movie totally indulges in the trope of the era in which it takes place—psycho killer with gender identity issues.

As for the rest of the movie, there are creepy masks, violent kills, nasty gore moments, and plenty of scenes of everyone splitting up and getting chased, but the pacing does begin to drag. The film is 105 minutes long but probably would have benefited from about 15 minutes of edits. There’s also a point to the family’s madness, where the usual right wing extremist hillbilly psycho family trope is turned on its head. It’s actually pretty clever to break from tradition, even if it’s a message leftists won’t love. The real issue I have with the denouement is that it just isn’t very exciting or intense. It’s definitely no Texas Chainsaw family dinner.

One final thing you can learn from this movie if you never realized it before; if you’re ever in a horror movie, blocking a door with a piece of wood furniture when the guy hunting you down has a chainsaw isn’t going to do shit.

MATCH (2025)

This is my kind of nasty little horror flick. Everything about it is predictable for horror veterans, but the ride is so simple and smooth that I found it totally satisfying. It has a great deformed human, good gore, suspense, and a sense of humor.

Our main girl is trying to find a man online, but she’s connecting with one jerk after another. Personally, I would have swiped right on the guy who chose to send a dick pic.

She instead waits it out and finally strikes up a convo with a hottie, who she agrees to meet up with…at his house.

When she gets there, his mother welcomes her in, and it all goes horribly bad fast. This mother bitch is crazy. She is luring women over on dating apps to find one that her son can impregnate.

Would you believe her son isn’t the guy our main girl saw online? Let’s just say if you’ve ever played the GameCube remake of Resident Evil, he’s like the male version of Lisa Trevor. Eek!

There are plenty of gross-out situations involving the son’s deformed penis as he hunts our main girl down in the house to knock her up. Once she saw that thing, she must have kicked herself for passing up the guy with the pretty dick pic.

In the meantime, behind every door is a new horror for her to discover. For me, the deformed dick is definitely the most traumatizing.

The film builds to a great climax in which several other characters arrive at the house and have to work together to escape the insanity. The gore goes hard in the final act, as does the general wackiness, making this one a great midnight movie to watch with friends. My only real complaint is that there’s one dream sequence somewhere in the middle to add some shock value, and it’s just a cheap detour the movie didn’t need to take because the pacing was fine without it.

MAULER (2025)

This film flounders for most of its runtime, finally finding its footing in the last 25 minutes, when it actually gets more of a sense of humor.

It opens with a little boy beating his abusive father to death with a sledgehammer. You know a film is going to be a mess when the effect used to depict such brutality actually makes you and the hubby laugh out loud. Cheap CGI blood doesn’t help either.

The opening credits feature The Omen level demonic choral music. The film is still taking itself way too seriously.

20 years later, we meet a group of friends that decides to take part in a contest to win 25,000 dollars—they have to document themselves staying at a haunted location overnight. As they discuss the plan in their car, brace yourself for them to burst into an annoying chant song that goes on way too long.

What also goes on way too long is them standing outside the location they choose—the house where the little boy killed his dad. Turns out the boy still lives there and is now seven feet tall. He’s not very ominous at all because he’s kind of soft-spoken and spouts religious extremist nonsense whenever he informs victims that they are sinners before torturing them with his sledgehammer.

So, the friends spend a whole lot of time outside trying to figure out how to get in rather than just, you know, finding a haunted house that doesn’t have a live killer in it.

Eventually, one of them makes it inside and is terrorized by the Mauler while the rest of the group continues to stand outside trying to figure out how they are going to get in. This goes on for about an hour of the movie.

Eventually they all get in, and when one of the girls is bashed in the forehead with the sledgehammer and simply says, “I’m just a little woozy”, the movie seems to finally get into a groove and lean into a sillier vibe.

The camp escalates when a wannabe hero security guard comes on the scene and initiates a funny confrontation with the Mauler as if they are in a boxing match. The laughs continue when the final girl has to evade the Mauler until the end. The final act definitely saves this mostly disappointing film a little.

DIE’CED RELOADED (2025)

This is an expanded version of an original 50-minute Halloween horror film I cover here, which has been re-edited with new footage to run 80 minutes long.

I don’t remember the original enough to recall how much has changed, but I almost feel like the additions consist mostly of a higher body count and super gory kills with great practical effects. The opener alone in a mental institution has our killer absolutely mutilating a few people before escaping. I’m pretty sure it didn’t start this way the last time around.

As for the rest of the movie, there’s still a great 80s vibe, and the clown killer has quite a presence, but the tone with which he carries himself is all over the place. At times he wants to have a larger-than-life personality with a sense of humor, but at other times he’s going for totally sinister and silent.

I also don’t feel like the extra 30 minutes have added anything to the plot, because it’s still super thin and cliché. Killer escapes mental institution, tracks down main girl while killing some random people along the way, and eventually abducts main girl from a Halloween party and takes her to his lair, where a fight to the finish ensues.

I welcome all the great new gore, but a longer running time should have been utilized to not only add more of a Halloween vibe, but also to draw us deeper into the story and characters. Somehow, we still don’t get to know anyone, so we’re left with no connection to the main characters. It feels like most of the characters get about five minutes of screen time at most. Even the main girl fades into the background of a virtually nonexistent plot. There’s nothing to really absorb here beyond the cool new kills, which is probably why I can barely remember watching the original cut, which I blogged about less than two years ago.

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2025 HALLOWEEN HORROR ROUND-UP

Posted on October 19, 2025 by Daniel

I was beginning to think I wouldn’t have many Halloween horror flicks to add to the complete holiday horror page this year, but I scoured my streaming services for a handful of new ones I hadn’t yet seen, plus I purchased a new Halloween horror Blu-ray for my collection.

NIGHT OF THE REAPER(2025)

While there’s some outdoor fall foliage and Halloween decor around, plus a person or two sporting a hint of a costume, the holiday is completely irrelevant to the plot of this movie. I don’t even know if it actually takes place on Halloween, and despite the main girl babysitting a little boy, they never discuss the holiday, which is unheard of for a boy of trick or treating age. The boy does, however, play Centipede and watch The House on Haunted Hill, so he’s my kind of kid.

I assume the movie is taking place in the 80s, even though it’s never stated. There’s a synthy score, VHS tracking effect added to the film, and the first scene has a girl dancing around to Pat Benatar’s “Heartbreaker”.

Also, despite the movie opening with a satisfying cat and mouse game and an implied kill, this is not a slasher. It’s more like a home invasion flick for the majority of its run. However, the final act takes a turn that essentially negates much of what came before it, leaving me feeling bamboozled by the tense slow burn I sat through for an hour. At the same time, that surprise trajectory makes the film rather unique.

For most of the movie, we have our main girl babysitting a little boy in a dark house in the middle of nowhere. She’s constantly sensing someone is outside, and there are also signs of weird stuff going on inside the house. This one is definitely reminiscent of Ti West’s The House of the Devil.

The isolated suspense of the main girl’s plight is interjected with a side story. The town’s hunky, widowed sheriff is being led on a sort of scavenger hunt for videotapes that give him clues to several murders. While delicious daddy Ryan Robbins of Riverdale is nice to look at, his story isn’t very compelling until the final act, when it at last meshes with that of the main girl.

Once you embrace the refreshed plot in the final act, it’s entertaining for sure, and the killer’s cloak and skeleton mask costume is definitely a vibe. There’s even gore introduced that wasn’t offered at all earlier in the movie.

V/H/S HALLOWEEN (2025)

The long-running franchise finally takes on our favorite holiday, but there’s no discovery of any VHS tapes to watch as in most of the previous films. This one just jumps into a simple horror setup that is revisited between the full segments and is mostly a non-story. A company is doing a tasting trial with a diet soda that causes participants to experience gruesome side effects. It definitely feels like a nod to the horrors experienced by those that dare to don the masks in Halloween III.

The five main tales all take place on Halloween (yay!).

1st story – This is a freaky fright. Two girls about to enter adulthood decide to trick or treat, with the emphasis on the tricks. When they are beckoned into a house for a haunted walkthrough, they become trapped in a nightmare of mutant motherhood. So nasty good.

2nd story – This is an underwhelming tale, but it does have a basic but satisfying found footage finale. After a massacre at a Halloween party, the only survivor is taken by the police to the scene of the crime, where we learn what happened to all his friends when the detectives experience the same situation. It’s kind of a possession story.

3rd story – More aged-out kids go trick or treating, but in this sleazy sick tale, they end up in a warehouse where they are turned into Halloween candy. There’s even a chocolate covered dick and balls, which I imagine have a creamy white filling. Delicious.

4th story – This is a really fucked up tale that sucks the fun out of Halloween scares for a dose of the realities of Halloween dangers. An electronics store worker preys on young people, abducting them and fricking peeling off their skin while filming it in grisly, agonizing detail. I guess it gets points for mixing things up with a different subgenre.

5th story – This is definitely the way to end a Halloween installment of the franchise. A family that loves Halloween sets up a haunted attraction, but when they create atmosphere in their attraction by playing an old Halloween music vinyl record they find, all hell breaks loose, with killer creeps emerging. I can’t fathom what would have happened if they’d played the record backwards….

The highlight here is a classic witch that flies around on her broom hacking up trick or treaters. This witch bitch doesn’t get enough screen time. She seriously needs her own spinoff movie, just like the freaky-eyed bar girl from the very first movie.

THE KICK BACK (2025)

This is a 63-minutes attempt to make what turns out to not even be a Black Halloween slasher comedy. The promise is all there, but nothing delivers.

A group of friends is preparing for a Halloween party. There’s brief mention of a steel-toed strangler story that ends up having no relevance.

The funniest party is when a couple of the guys at the party meet a white Karen next door who is literally named Karen.

It appears that the killer slips into the party dressed in a ski mask and goggles, but don’t expect any death scenes. There’s a partying montage, but none of the hip hop used is horror or Halloween themed. Bummer. We need more Halloween hip hop.

There’s a psychic who does some psychic readings that don’t amount to anything. She has a voodoo doll that doesn’t mean anything. The lights go out. One guy gets knocked out. There is a gratuitous twerk scene that seems to be a guy just hallucinating. One guy is temporarily tied up. Everything is revealed to be a prank…but what was the prank? Nothing even happened.

55 minutes in there’s actually a kill. That’s the end. That’s it. 7 minutes of bloopers and credits fill out the remaining time.

HELLOWEEN (2025)

This movie forms its premise by embellishing on that true story from years ago in which creepy clowns were mysteriously being spotted in small towns everywhere. While that reality fizzled out with no real resolution…well…so does this Halloween horror movie.

If you could even call it a Halloween horror movie. Despite a perfect Halloween night opener with a little boy in a clown costume killing a woman, don’t expect anything Halloween related here beyond one brief scene with a jack-o’-lantern, as well as blatant references to the John Carpenter classic.

The idea is that a young boy who went on a murder spree as a child is now in a mental institution, still dressed as a clown. Michael Pare is a reporter that covers true crimes. He teams up with the killer clown’s psychiatrist to figure out if the patient is somehow pulling the strings of all the clown sightings around the country, like he’s the leader of some sort of killer clown cult.

The bulk of the movie focuses on the therapist and her daughter trapped in the mental institution and being chased by the clown…until they eventually move the game of cat and mouse to a house so we can get a jack-o’-lantern logically into a shot.

The scares and suspense are forced and flat, there’s no body count, and worst of all, there’s an in-your-face promise that you’re getting a sequel whether you like it or not.

COFFINTOOTH (2024)

This 75-minute movie follows Scream Team Releasing’s tradition of producing Halloween horror movies with a retro 80s vibe. Unfortunately, it’s an uninspired slasher with a weak plot line.

We are introduced to a psycho family on a farm—the mom is being accused of digging up her dead son, there’s a butcher dude lurking around that I think must be another son, and the two investigators that come to the house are killed after the discovery of a tortured, naked girl in the basement.

Jump ahead 30 years. There are fall harvest and Halloween establishing shots that do a great job of setting the seasonal tone, plus visual clues that it is now the 1980s.

The gist is that our main girl seems to have a past history of being abused by her father, but that back story is barely touched upon. The bigger focus seems to be that her brother, who is dating her best friend, forgot about the best friend’s birthday. There’s also talk of their plans for Halloween, and all three get into some form of a costume eventually, but we never quite make it to a Halloween celebration or any trick or treater action.

Instead, we get a masked killer torturing and killing totally random naked girls, the murder of two workers at a general store, what seems to be an attempt to recreate the scene of the old lady making a sandwich for her husband in Halloween II, and a shower scene highlighting the best friend’s fiery red bush, followed by a doggy style sex scene.

Eventually, the main girl is abducted for a sit down dinner with the crazy mother and her killer son. Once he removes his mask, I can only assume he was somehow resurrected 30 years ago when she dug him up, because he looks like death. Why was he killing random people? Why did he abduct the main girl? What happened to the butcher guy from 30 years ago? How was this family never caught when the mom was suspected of digging up her dead son and the two investigators sent to arrest her just disappeared?

It’s all quite generic and anticlimactic, right up to the final girl fighting back thanks to her underdeveloped sexual abuse PTSD storyline, with Halloween entirely dropped from any relevance by then. But props to the filmmakers for choosing to feature one random guy character wearing a shirt that says “real men eat ass”. He should have been the star of the film. To me, he was.

WNUF HALLOWEEN SPECIAL (2013)

I finally checked out this Halloween horror comedy mockumentary, which I see praised all the time online. I’ll give it credit for perfectly nailing the look of a live Halloween show on TV in the 80s, complete with cheap commercials you would swear are genuine, but other than that novelty, this one is agonizing to sit through. The “commercial breaks” most likely make up more of the duration of the film than the “Halloween special”, which features a dude hosting a show at a house where a guy hacked up his parents with an axe after chatting with a Ouija board.

There are segments about the killer and the murders, interviews with spectators on the street, protests by a religious group that thinks Halloween is satanic, kickbacks to newscasters in the network’s studio, and a tour of the house with both a priest and a ghost hunting couple clearly modeled after Ed and Lorraine Warren.

All the shocking events that are said to take place in the house while airing the show conveniently happen during the commercial breaks, as the host keeps explaining upon returning to the live broadcast. What to do when you have no budget to add genuine scares to your movie? Cut to commercial, of course.

Honestly, the offscreen, terrified meows of the ghost hunter couple’s cat, which they bring with them but we never see, is the funniest part of the whole movie. The best horror part is the out-of-left-field, brutal conclusion that is over in a flash after the “special” is abruptly cut short. Seriously, the ending is so satisfying. Unfortunately, everything that comes before it is as weak and crappy as that British movie Ghostwatch that supposedly terrified viewers in the early 90s but is unbearable to watch. I’m pretty sure this movie was making the terrible decision to try to mimic that film.

RL STINE’S PUMPKINHEAD (2025)

Imagine that. A movie called Pumpkinhead that actually takes place on Halloween. Although there’s no gore or kills, I’d say this Tubi original adaptation of an R.L. Stine story might be too intense to serve as a gateway horror for younger kids. However, it’s perfect for tweens…and, well, me. It’s also from the director of the queer zombie flick Slay, which appears on a television screen on Halloween night within the movie as a fun little meta moment.

We open strong with the cool looking creature Pumpkinhead chasing a boy through a field. Then we get fantastic outdoor autumn and Halloween scenes as a woman and her two sons come to live in a small town.

The younger son steals a gnarly pumpkin from a barn, and the next thing you know, his older brother disappears. Not only that, but no adult, including their mother, remembers the brother ever existing.

With the help of a new female friend and a quirky adult dude living in a trailer home, the main boy tries to find out what became of his brother, and how he can make everyone remember him again. A story of child sacrifices, the harvest, and a magical book unfolds, and a freaky, pumpkin-headed scarecrow comes to life and terrorizes our main trio as they try to stop the Halloween night madness that ensues. It even does the spider crawl. Eek!

This fun, light supernatural creature feature delivers several great chase scenes, and Pumpkinhead has a frightening jerky movement, but naturally there are no kills, the mythos and backstory are a bit messy, and the details are never fully clarified. What is quite satisfying and sad is the surprisingly dark outcome at the end.

10/31 Part IV (2024)

As is usually the case with indie Halloween flicks from Scream Team Releasing, the fourth film in this anthology series nails the holiday vibes and the spirit of 80s VHS horror, complete with a few faux horror trailers in between stories. However, the stories themselves have been getting progressively weaker with each sequel. The only standout story for me this time around is the first one. I think if the series continues, the filmmakers really need to start focusing more on writing stronger tales so the substance lives up to the style.

This time around, the horror hostess is totally animated, which is always a fun way to introduce a horror anthology.

We then get four different tales.

Story 1 – A dude buys an old slasher on VHS and invites a couple of friends over to watch it on Halloween night. The clips of the movie on the tape are cheesy and low budget, and I wouldn’t mind if it became a full-length feature of its own. But for the sake of this short tale, the killer, who is a Jason type, crawls out of the television to kill in real life. The death scenes are lots of throwback fun.

Story 2 – The general premise is interesting, but the horror element feels rushed. After the death of his daughter by poisoning, I assume from Halloween candy, a grieving dude who owns a candy factory offers to donate treats to the town for Halloween. He has darker motives, however, but those backfire when one of his victims shows up…after she’s dead. Unfortunately, that plot point is rushed right at the end, whereas him being terrorized in his candy factory by the dead bitch could have and should have been the meat of the tale.

Story 3 – After black and white flashbacks to a witch burning in 1969 (does no one study history anymore?), a group of modern day, celeb wannabes comes to the house of the long dead witches to star in a reality show. Brinke Stevens is their hostess, and she has devilish fun playing the role, but there’s not much to the plot and little in the way of witch action. Bummer. This could have been a witchy blast.

Story 4 – Despite a satisfying delivery of horror, there’s not much to this final tale. A dude working at a haunted attraction gets attacked and bit by something, becomes an incredibly realistic part of the attraction, and kills his coworkers. The end. Awesome.

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A fish man, a swamp man, and a werewolf

Posted on October 15, 2025 by Daniel

This trio of flicks from my streaming watchlists definitely delivers cool creatures, but only one of the three films had a story that drew me in.

MONSTER ISLAND (2025)

Two men trapped on a deserted island with a reptilian monster? It would be awesome if it were Brokeback Mountain meets Creature from the Black Lagoon, but these two dudes are enemies and never rise to the level of sexual tension. So, it’s more like Creature from the Blue Balls Lagoon.

During World War II, a Japanese slave ship is torpedoed. An American soldier and a Japanese soldier escape the explosion and wash up on the shore, with one catch…they’re handcuffed together. Sexy.

This movie doesn’t hesitate. The two enemies get into a fight in the surf (again, sexy), but their fight is interrupted by a creature that emerges from the water!

The game becomes survival, but the men don’t stay attached at the wrists, which would have been, you know, sexy. It also would have made their struggle to survive much more challenging. Hell, they even become separated for a stretch of the movie. Plus, neither of them ever gets shirtless. Blah.

The monster is cool and classic, the attacks are vicious, and there are some bloody moments, plus the final battle is intense, making for a fun popcorn flick.

WHERE THE SCARY THINGS ARE (2022)

Little Shop of Horrors meets Deadgirl in this mean-spirited flick. Based on the trailer, I was expecting something along the lines of Stranger Things, with a group of curious young teens getting themselves into a monstrous predicament. Instead, I got a film about monstrous kids who will do anything to go viral. Ugh.

Our group of unlikable friends regularly sneaks into a haunted attraction that’s closed until the scary season. With hormones raging, they are full of angst and on the verge of their sexual awakenings…which is unfortunate for a swamp-like creature they thought was only an urban legend but turns out to be real.

Conveniently, the kids were given a “create your own urban legend” assignment in school, so they fricking imprison the creature in the haunted attraction and exploit it—filming themselves regularly torturing it.

Just when they think they’re becoming internet famous thanks to their video content, they discover viewers are dismissing their videos as fakes. Sooooo…they begin luring people they hate to the haunted attraction and feeding them to the creature to make the impact of the legend all the more real.

The creature is awesome, but considering it’s the real victim here, this isn’t a frightening movie. It’s simply disturbing and cruel, not to mention rather slow. The most satisfying part is when the kids get what they deserve in the end, along with the irony of them becoming part of an urban legend they were trying to create.

FIRST MOON (2025)

Talk about beating a concept to death. This 98-minute werewolf movie waits until the final 17 minutes before having the werewolf transform.

So what happens before that? A young woman is abducted by a religious cult that believes she may have been infected with lycanthropy through sexual intercourse. They keep her imprisoned and torture her in an attempt to make her angry enough to unleash the beast inside her so they can kill it. That’s most of what happens for the entire movie.

Other than that, the girl also seems to astral project to recount what led to her possibly being infected, as we see a ghostly version of her spectating inside of flashbacks. Weird.

In the meantime, there are also several other possible werewolves killed by the cult.

When a werewolf is finally unleashed, at least it delivers a satisfying series of attacks, but this isn’t a classic hairy werewolf transformation. Cool creature design though.

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TUBI TERRORS: a killer mermaid, vamp camp, and a wrong turn

Posted on October 2, 2025 by Daniel

It’s a trio of indies from my Tubi watchlist, including a horror take on a Disney fave, a vampire buddy action flick, and a desert mutants splatterfest. Let’s find out if this was a triple win for me.

THE LITTLE MERMAID (2024)

If you’re hooked on the new trend of children’s stories going horror, expect to be disappointed by this take on The Little Mermaid, which is mostly romance, minimal horror.

First, we meet an undeniably sexy archeologist and his team in the Caribbean as they discover signs of an ancient civilization just as the landowner is pressuring them to leave. Tapping into this civilization seems to trigger the sexy archaeologist to have nightmares about a mermaid. He looks sizzling hot when he tosses and turns. I’d like to do the tossing for him, but it turns out he’s into fish.

There’s little to no buildup to the mermaid morphing into a human. She is caught by two fishermen and already has her legs, so we get no Ursula. She bites the fishermen and turns one into a fish man minion.

With no explanation, the mermaid is instantly a well-adjusted human posing as a rich businesswoman, and she begins seducing the sexy archaeologist. There’s virtually no other plot. Even when she appears to be going out to get revenge on anyone that wrongs the sexy archaeologist, there are no kills.

The most horror on display is in a nightmare sequence involving one character having his face peeled off by one of the fish man minions in a bad fish face mask.

The final ritual and confrontation when the mermaid abducts the sexy archaeologist’s men and reveals her evil plot to rule the world is super cheesy, and it just manages to make me angry that we never even get to see the sexy archaeologist naked during the course of the film. Bottom line is that the mermaid looks more terrifying in the poster art than she ever does in the actual movie.

BLOOD SHOT (2013)

This is pure SyFy level action horror comedy cheese with a dash of humor, and the hubby and I were all in for it. It also gave me flashbacks to the direct-to-video action horror flicks of the 90s, and it features several familiar faces, including Christopher Lambert, Lance Henriksen, and Brad Dourif, who plays a terrorist, complete with Middle Eastern black face. WTF? What were they thinking?

Our main cop is a hottie with a horrible hairstyle.

He’s having marital troubles, is immediately thrown into a furious fight with a monstrous hitman, and soon discovers that the hitman is a bulky, towering vampire loaded with campy one-liners. This Nosferatu on roids totally steals the show.

Just go for the goofy fun ride as the cop and vamp team up together to stop a terrorist organization from blowing up L.A. It’s a buddy movie! Awesome.

But it’s more involved than that, because Middle Eastern black face Dourif has an occult plan that leads to ritualistic chaos in the final act, and the unleashing of a new, monstrous presence.

Our main cop even gets in on the vampiric action, which magically makes his hair look so much better and him so much sexier.

DESERT FIENDS (2024)

Indie horror actor turned low budget director Shawn C. Phillips directs this desert mutants horror comedy, which starts quite strong and deliciously simple.

Two guys dumping a company’s chemical waste canister in the desert are mutilated by mutants. There’s even a nasty penis removal.

Savor that moment, because the kills, which include even more penis destruction, are the highlight. The film runs way too long at 107 minutes, and much of that time is padded with the kind of nonsensical banter and over-the-top behavior between too many characters that is meant to be funny but just falls flat while failing to establish any sense of plot.

So what is the plot? For her birthday, a girl gets taken to a desert concert by her friends, while a rescue crew is sent out to clean up the mess caused by the two guys in the opening scene near the same location.

There’s a major 80s style, low budget synth score, the gore uses grisly practical effects, and the mutants are nice and gnarly, but they talk, and when they do, they behave like Beavis and Butthead. So don’t expect anything about this film to be scary or intense.

There’s an array of familiar faces, including Lisa Wilcox, Michael Pare doing an awful British accent, Tom Arnold, Scout Taylor-Compton, Eileen Deetz (who gets the funniest death scene), Eric Roberts, and Bai Ling, but they all seem to Have been directed to give bizarre, quirky performances that just don’t land.

The highlight comes in the last twenty minutes, with a band performing a new wave song at the concert, which turns into a bloody massacre. Right after that, the final scene totally goes off the rails. In a good way. All I’m going to say is…dick syringe.

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Reanimating the Re-Animator legacy with The Resonator series

Posted on September 29, 2025 by Daniel

Veteran horror actor and director William Butler returns to his Full Moon roots with a “movie” trilogy that I, as far as I can understand, is actually just a bunch of short episodes of a show that have been combined to create three different film installments, none of which runs more than an hour. That’s perfect for me, because it’s just enough to give us a throwback to Stuart Gordon’s Lovecraft adaptations of the 80s, most notably Re-Animator.

Visually, the films are neon color eye candy more in keeping with From Beyond. They’re also loaded with cosmic creatures, most of which are created using practical effects. And what would a Stuart Gordon homage be without some sexy scary sleaze thrown into the mix?

THE RESONATOR: MISKATONIC U (2021)

The first feature is 63 minutes long. The plot involves a handsome young college student who tries to carry on his late father’s experiments, which involve connections to higher dimensions. In doing so, he drags a group of classmates into the insanity as he unleashes the cosmic creatures into the earthly plain of existence.

This also spawns a bunch of erotic dreams and visions featuring a seductive demon.

Elm Street alum Amanda Wyss makes a brief appearance as a teacher, as does Michael Pare, who plays a crucial role by the end of the first installment as he becomes immersed in the unleashing of the cosmic creatures.

The film ends with the arrival of a new student at the school: Herbert West. Awesome.

BEYOND THE RESONATOR (2022)

Classic Re-Animator character Herbert West moves to the forefront for the 48-minute sequel, in which he quickly begins to experiment with reanimating little animals.

Meanwhile, our main guy from the first movie is grappling with the horror he and his friends experienced first time around. He also has to deal with the fact that one of his friends has now blown out his own brains.

What luck for Herbert West. A human head with a huge bullet hole in it that he can experiment on.

The monstrosities and gore in this one are better than in the first as the friends tackle the cosmic creatures and Herbert West’s scientific mess-ups, plus, Michael Pare returns just in time with a sinister smile that sets us up for the final film.

This is definitely my favorite of the three films.

CURSE OF THE REANIMATOR (2023)

The remake truth is out as the final film drops the Resonator mask and uses Reanimator in the title.

This 49-minute movie easily could have been combined with the second film to make one full-length sequel to the first film, but then we couldn’t call this a trilogy, and that’s no fun.

But seriously, the first half is essentially repetitive filler of West’s experiments and the main guy’s manipulation of his father’s dimensional machine. The only bright side is that we finally see the main guy shirtless.

All the fun is packed into the last few minutes, when the students and West manage to resurrect a bunch of their dead friends, who turn into classic, shuffling zombies that turn on the seductive demon to end the madness once and for all.

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Follow along as I take on the Tag-Along movies

Posted on September 26, 2025 by Daniel

My limitless love for Asian ghost girl movies brought me here, but does this franchise live up to the best that Asian ghost girl movies have to offer? Let’s find out.

THE TAG-ALONG (2015)

I really liked this movie’s little ghost girl creature in a red dress. She’s super creepy, but she’s also heavily CGI when she moves, so the ghost feels a lot more disconnected from reality than those in classics like Ringu and Ju-on (that is…you know…if you believe in ghosts as part of reality). Not to mention, the film simply doesn’t build the kind of feelings of dread you get from those classics.

It also fails to build a good backstory for the ghost, and it just felt to me like the whole plot falls apart by the end, with too many confusing elements coming into play and an unclear finale.

We meet a young man and his grandmother. He leaves for work, and she is terrorized by something with little hands. He returns from work, she’s acting weird and leaves, and then his face is attacked by those little hands in what is possibly the best moment in the movie.

Meanwhile, he’s been pressuring his girlfriend to get married and have a family. She is totally resistant.

After some disturbing behavior, the boyfriend disappears, and the girlfriend delves into the supernatural possibilities of his absence.

She has nightmares of the girl in red, she has an uncle do a sort of cleansing of the boyfriend’s apartment (which is a kind of funny scene), and all roads of her very weakly unfolding investigation lead to a search and rescue team heading for a haunted mountain.

The plot is seriously lacking, the legend of the girl in red is poorly explained, some more ghostly creatures are thrown into the mix, and it’s suggested that the girlfriend has a secret past in which she either lost a daughter or had an abortion. I really could not figure out what was being implied.

THE TAG-ALONG 2 (2017)

Like most of these supernatural tales of ghostly girls, the sequel expands on the complexity of the back story, which is very welcome here—and the only real notable part of this overly long sequel. All the horror elements are just rehashes of the scares from the first movie, including the opening, which features the little girl in red’s hands infiltrating a guy’s face. Okay. That part never gets old.

What isn’t needed is the weird side story involving some sort of spiritual rituals in the mountains and a dude who fancies himself a tiger that sniffs out demons. It complicates the heart of the matter, which is the expansion on the themes of motherhood and guilt over giving up your child in one way or another.

We are introduced to several new female characters. First, there’s a mother who has been keeping her daughter hidden away in order to protect her from the threat of the girl in red and demon in the mountain using some sort of rituals.

There’s also a female social worker who gets drawn into the legend of the girl in red after she brings her teen daughter for an abortion, which is followed by the teen disappearing. This leads to a search team heading up the mountain to look for her. Now we learn there’s an abandoned hospital on the mountain (anything to expand that story), where they discover the main girl from the first movie acting grossly feral.

Inevitably, the three different women—original main girl, social worker, and ritual mom—join forces and head to the mountain together in hopes of finding all the missing people in their lives, getting closure on their failures as mothers, and fighting the demon and evil little baby creatures from the first movie. That’s the point where things start to feel like the Asian horror version of a melodramatic Lifetime movie.

Definitely go into this one for the enriched story details more than for a good charge of horror. You might also go into it for this pretty face. Damn.

THE TAG-ALONG: DEVIL FISH (2018)

Each new movie gets progressively longer than the movie before it, making it harder for me to remain focused and interested. Not to mention, more complex legends are introduced each time. And somehow, this installment simultaneously introduces more horror while moving farther away from the genre.

Would you believe demonic possession is unleashed by a fish this time around? Sigh. You have to know your franchise has gone off the rails when you have little kids bringing a goldfish in a clear plastic bag to get it exorcised. Right?

On top of that, the tiger legend from the previous film is more prominent, and it becomes the key to vanquishing the main demon in the mountain.

At the forefront once again is the theme of parent/child bond and separation. This time we have a sick mother and her son and a father raising his son after his wife’s death. The father also happens to be some sort of exorcist with ties to the “Master Tiger”. Ugh.

Having said that, there are several possession scenes that are quite creepy, plus a few jump scares. The girl in red makes more of a cameo this time around as other demons take center stage.

For the final act, it’s back to the mountain for more demon action, at which point the exorcist dad guy channels the Master Tiger, and this starts to feel more like a superhero movie. A fiery tiger ghost entity literally battles the bad demon for the final fight. I truly hope this is where the series dies.

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Demons, creatures, monsters, and ghosts

Posted on September 20, 2025 by Daniel

Three out of four of these flicks really brought me some horror happiness, so let’s find out which one was the letdown.

HOME SWEET HOME: REBIRTH (2025)

The hubby and I are desperate for something entertaining to watch together these days, and this movie (based on a video game I’ve not played) was a major surprise. It’s a stunning looking flick packed with action, monsters, creatures, and two hot leading men who both get shirtless.

A cop simply enjoying time with his wife and daughter in a mall gets caught in the crossfire as things quickly turn into hell on earth thanks to his shootout with super studly demon Michele Morrone.

As humans start turning into zombies (just a brief blip in the overall array of monsters in the movie), our cop gets separated from his wife and daughter.

Mom and daughter try to make their way back to their hotel room while dad tries to find them…as he’s pursued through the city by a giant burning skeleton!

He eventually teams up with a monk who knows just how the gateway to hell opened and how the cop can close it to save his family…and the whole world, but no pressure.

More monsters come out of the woodwork, including flying demons and critters that look like the crawling creatures from Cloverfield, and the nonstop action leads to a final battle that promises a sequel—a sequel I can’t wait for.

THE MOOGAI (2025)

This is the way I like my “elevated” horror; there’s an important social message being sent while still actually delivering on atmosphere and suspense. Plus, in the end there’s a freaky creature!

The opening was so intriguing that I had to Google the historical factuality of it and learn more. It’s a horrific situation I didn’t know anything about—the Australian government’s move to “breed the colour” out of the Aborigine population in the early 1970s.

The events are frighteningly timely and are melded into the generational impacts the country’s actions have on a family in the modern day.

A woman gives birth and then begins to suffer from nightmares and visions warning of something coming for her newborn. The dream sequences feature disturbing images like the Ring video tape, and she keeps seeing a young girl with her long hair down in front of her face, so this feels like somewhat of a throwback to the era of ghost girl horror.

There’s also a heinous scene involving eggs and dead chicks.

As the woman’s experiences intensify, everyone begins to think she’s suffering a mental breakdown, including family and friends.

Just when the movie feels like it’s losing steam, the husband sees something in the baby’s room, and before long the family ends up in the woods being chased by the Moogai, which is a legendary “stealer of children”.

Naturally, it’s a fight to the finish. The mother learns what she needs to do to take down the creature, which finally comes crawling out of the woods 70 minutes into the film. It has two faces, and one is wicked creepy. The other, unfortunately, looks like someone asked AI for a demon face and it scoured the internet to find the most common design. It’s a face we’ve all seen before. I just wish they had come up with two unique faces instead of using a default face for one of them.

IN ITS WAKE (2023)

Most will probably turn their nose up at this little indie creature feature, but for me it was a simple, satisfying throwback to direct-to-video flicks from the 80s.

There’s really not much of a premise. At a diner we meet a group of four friends and a trio of businessmen. What is a little weird is that the main characters are already together, but instead of them being terrorized by a demon creature in the diner, they all head off into the snowy night…and end up stuck on the same deserted road to then get picked off by the creature.

Meanwhile, we meet a priest preparing his apprentice for a confrontation with the demonic creature.

We are provided with some good killing of irrelevant characters as foreplay to get us in the mood for some monster mutilation, and then 35 minutes in the main characters find reasons to leave their cars, only to be hunted down and killed by the demon.

There are plenty of gory kills, and the wintery setting adds to the atmosphere. Not to mention, when the group of friends hides out in a house, it’s decorated for Christmas, although this little nod to the season isn’t enough to label this as a Christmas horror movie.

Naturally, the priest arrives to battle the demon in the final act, which is where we finally get a little more nuance to the plot. And as for the creature, it is actually kind of cute when it’s not flashing its big teeth.

Definitely check this one out if you need a mindless popcorn movie or midnight viewing with some friends.

THE DOGS (2025)

Don’t let the demon dogs on the poster art fool you—they’re just ghosts and get about a minute of screen time at most.

This is a supernatural drama about a mother running with her son from her abusive husband. They find a rental house in a rural area. The son inexplicably becomes immediately wary in the house, as if he’s expecting something scary to reside there.

He quickly starts to see a ghost boy and ghost dogs. Mom gets cozy with the handsome landlord. There’s a neighbor who seems to be hiding something.

The boy, played by the main kid from Spirit Halloween, is bullied at his new school, begins seeing dead bodies, and tries to uncover the truth of what happened to the little boy.

It’s all a metaphor for fracture families, the longing for a father, and the paranoia that plagues someone being haunted by the trauma of abuse. However, initial creepy moments are all we get before the movie becomes repetitive and generic.

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