Halloween horrors and a creature for Christmas

Posted on April 14, 2026 by Daniel

Time to take on a foursome of flicks to add to the holiday horror page. Consider this a post about three for the halfway to Halloween season with a short Christmas flick as a bonus.

SUPER HAPPY FUN CLOWN (2025)



I couldn’t look away from this odd and quirky portrait of a crazy girl, which also has plenty of autumn and Halloween atmosphere.

We meet a young girl obsessed with clowns and horror. Her mother despises her interests and punishes her for indulging in them. Naturally, the trauma of being denied what she desires means she carries her fandom into adulthood.

Now she’s all grown up and still dresses like a clown, entertaining people in the park in “whimsical” clips that make it clear she’s not right in the head.

She first snaps and kills someone at the 25-minute mark, so the film doesn’t waste time in bringing her over to the psycho side. Yay!

She then gets invited to a Halloween party, which triggers a gleeful need to kill. There’s even a nasty scene of her masturbating with the blood of a very relevant victim.

Come Halloween night, this turns into a long, fun, devious montage of her going on a killing spree, beginning at the Halloween party. Once she’s done there, she continues to live her best Halloween, heading over to a haunted cinema event and haunted attraction, where she starts taking out all the haunting actors before having a standoff with law enforcement.

If you’re going to make yet another movie about a killer clown on Halloween, this is how you do it. It’s a unique, indie treat that is a perfect watch for the Halloween season.

THE SPACE RODENT (2025)



When you make a horror comedy called The Space Rodent about giant alien rodents with glowing eyes invading earth, and you even have a campy cool rodent design, you need to exploit your creative creature. Unfortunately, this film instead leans heavily on banter between its main characters to fill the time, leading to an 80-minute movie that will give you a chuckle now and then but starts to feel more like a 150-minute movie.

It begins with rodent aliens speaking in their own language (with subtitles) about having no resources left and having to escape their planet. This sets up the humorous tone perfectly, even if the rodents themselves are never funny again.

We next meet two main dude bros and their girlfriends. The girls are getting dressed in costumes for Halloween, but the guys aren’t into it and don’t even want to answer the door for trick or treaters.

The girls hit the road, the guys stay home, and this movie makes the huge mistake of having the two pairs spend most of the movie apart contending with the space rodents every now and then…in between all the talking.

The few alien rodents we get are introduced early on, but the guys and girls don’t actually begin battling them—at separate locations—until about 54 minutes into the movie. The girls eventually end up back home to team up with the guys to escape the alien invasion, which amounts to a mini alien home invasion.

The comedy has its moment, like a space rodent jerking off and cumming all over one guy’s face, and the cast is spot on with their comedic timing, but the material they have to work with just isn’t strong enough fill the gaps in between the space rodent action. And the space rodent action isn’t strong enough to make this one a good time. If the guys had been the focus, the film could have gone harder with a buddy comedy routine, especially since there is an underlying sexual tension to their friendship that could have been explored for laughs.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN (2024)



It may be a fairly typical holiday slasher, but this one is loaded with fantastic Halloween atmosphere and décor, has a likable cast, and delivers some tightly executed kill scenes. Its weakness comes from the fact that the story, back story, and character interactions are too complex for their own good and just aren’t interesting enough to propel the movie forward. It often feels like aimless filler to pad the runtime, which isn’t even that long yet feels like it should have been shortened because of the filler!

The opener totally grabs you, with a dude in a corn maze being targeted by a masked killer who gets a thrill out of carving victims into holiday displays. Awesome.

The Halloween season also marks the 300-year anniversary of the town in which the movie takes place. There’s supposed to be a big celebration, but I seriously never got the sense that there was one going on considering the only characters in the film were all the main characters. You never really see any background extras to demonstrate that there are other people in this town.

Our main girl is suffering PTSD from an attack by her ex-boyfriend a year ago. He’s in prison, and she’s trying to move on with her life. Her plan is to just party with her friends on Halloween. Why do these movies always have a final girl who has already suffered trauma on Halloween agreeing to celebrate the season again?

To fill the time in between the cool kills, the main girl and her friends are investigated as suspects in the string of murders, the details of what transpired a year before come out, the main girl’s friends have some conflicts with another group of kids from school, and there’s focus on a local election that has no bearing on the plot. The most enjoyable part to me was the main girl’s budding relationship with a big boy high school quarterback.

Finally, the friends head to a haunted corn maze attraction, where most of the killing takes place. The setting is great, but again, there’s no one else around! Where are all the townsfolk??? I guess it’s that pesky curfew.

The final sequence provides plenty of chaos, but it’s just that—chaos. The unfolding of the action is not well-executed, so the killer’s main rampage fails to much in the way of dread or tension.

MIND LEECH (2023)



This one takes place at Christmastime, and there is some Christmas décor around, but the holiday is not the focus of the film. However, there is plenty of snow, since most of the movie takes place outside.

This had so much potential to be a cozy little b-movie about a parasite turning people into crazies in a small, isolated town, and what we get totally works in a creepy way, but the film runs only an hour, so the horror moments just aren’t plentiful enough! I wanted more!

Two dudes dump a container of chemicals in the water in the woods, which results in a monster leech. This large leech first leaps out of an ice fishing hole and attaches itself to a dude’s head, making him into a mindless murderer. Awesome.

That’s it. That’s the plot, and it’s all we need. The leeched victim goes around killing people, and if the host dies, the leech latches on to someone else. The film has a great low budget late 70s/early 80s vibe, with an exaggerated leech model and some modest gore, but there just isn’t time to deliver enough kills or leech transfers. I’m talking only once does the leech transfer from one person to another. But it does look hella freaky when a victim is walking around like a zombie with a leech attached to its head—an old school, practical effects leech.

The face every bottom has made at some point in his life.

The story is straightforward, with a sheriff and his deputy following the trail of bodies in an effort to track down a killer, and it all leads to a simple shootout once they encounter the leech. It really is a tight production that was perhaps kept to only an hour long due to budget constraints. Whatever the reason, I’d love to see this one expanded into a full-length, more intense feature.

Posted in Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Demonic entities everywhere

Posted on April 9, 2026 by Daniel

It’s a trio of dark flicks about the occult and possession, so it definitely made for a good, themed triple feature. But did the power of these films compel me? Let’s find out.

THE COVENANT (2017)



If you are itching for an exorcism, this is yet another basic, possessed woman movie.

After her daughter dies and her husband commits suicide, a woman moves into her family home with her estranged brother. Healthy.

Weird stuff begins happening around the house, and soon after, the main woman starts acting weird. Various people also seem to be trying to warn both the brother and sister to leave the house. They seem like either they know something…or are up to something.

The sister becomes more erratic, we get some flashbacks to the real story about her daughter and husband, and eventually she goes totally Linda Blair.

A priest is called in, and the usual bedside treatment is administered. The demonic possession makeup does its job, and there’s a nasty little birth-giving moment, so those are both welcome highlights in an indie film, but there’s really nothing outstanding or unique happening here—unless you count the house crumbling at the end like something out of Carrie.

THE MORTUARY ASSISTANT (2026)



I’ve never played the video game this movie is based on, so I can’t address how it works as an adaptation. As a movie, it’s just one of those flicks with a cheap funhouse of horrors approach, meaning everything thrown at us to scare us feels like a disjointed fever dream of delusions, making most of what happens feel not so terrifying.

The movie is about a woman working at a mortuary overnight. Naturally, she has emotional and psychological baggage that she has to contend with by the end of the film.

She also has a boss who reveals to her that the crazy shit she starts experiencing is the result of a demon that hides out in the dead until it can attach itself to the living. The boss offers up rituals that might contain it, but that shit just doesn’t seem to work as the main girl encounters various ghouls, creatures, and walking dead people as she tries to dodge possession.

It all ends with a creepy creature in the final scene, but honestly, the moment that was most chilling to me comes near the beginning when a corpse smiles underneath a sheet.

Eek! If only the rest of the film had lived up to that horror eye candy.

BLACK GOAT (2025)



This dark woods occult film has a banger of an opener—a straight couple camping in the woods encounters the black goat antagonist, and it levitates the dude before he’s torn in two…starting at the crotch. Ouch.

I’m not going to lie. The film is kind of tedious after that. Our main guy is an environmental investigator sent into the woods on a new project. He sees signs of occult rituals. He encounters a creepy dude. He is confronted by the black goat, repeatedly.

Much of this movie involves nightmare sequences that get little in the way of a reaction from the main guy, so despite some chilling setups and great atmosphere, you just never quite feel a sense of dread—although, the scenes shot in total darkness with light only appearing on the subject of the scene are incredibly effective.

Once the main guy brings a friend with him into the woods and they spend a lot of time basically reciting urban legends about the area, things really slow down.

There are some intense scenes here and there, but they all feel very trippy and surreal, right down to the final act. However, practical gore effects are mostly great, with just one really bad green screen scene. And the final battle is a good representation of the horror the film could have delivered all along if it had been better paced.

Posted in Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Leave a comment

The knives are out with this foursome of kiddie classics

Posted on April 2, 2026 by Daniel

One director is responsible for this batch of four flicks based on popular kiddie characters, continuing the public domain craze that’s going on these days. Let’s find out if these children’s faves work as frightening freaks.

MINNIE’S MIDNIGHT MASSACRE (2026)

This Minnie Mouse movie delivers a familiar slasher scenario, some good kills, a cute main guy, and a gleefully evil Minnie Mouse killer.

20 years ago, a group of bullies locked a young girl down in a basement to never be seen again.

Now, those same four friends are going to a cabin in the woods for the weekend.

Once they arrive, we get traditional killer POV and heavy breathing. The group sits around talking about their pasts, futures, and hookups, one of which includes a flashback to the only guy in the group getting pegged by one of the girls. Quite an interesting choice for character development.

Each of the friends begins getting glimpses of someone in a Minnie Mouse mask. Seriously, I have no idea if Minnie is supposed to be a ghost of the bullied girl or the actual girl still alive and wearing a mask.

There are some weird moments that make it seem like she was somehow “possessed” by (CGI) mice while trapped down there, and she never does take off the mask, so in the end I wasn’t sure what it all meant.

Pretty soon, Minnie abducts one of the main girls and kills her after doing something really nasty to her with a pile of shit.

Once the girl is considered missing, cops show up, mostly to ensure a higher body count. The kill scenes aren’t particularly gruesome, and Minnie always goes old school with a knife, but it still managed to scratch my slasher itch.

Naturally, there’s a twist, but again, the legend of Minnie isn’t fully developed at all. There is, however, a nod to Steamboat Willie, the cartoon that basically introduce the world to Mickey and Minnie Mouse.

BETTY’S REVENGE (2026)

Running only 75 minutes long, this one only has three main characters, and that simply doesn’t sustain even a short flick when Betty Boop is walking around with a knife looking to kill people. But that’s not even really what Betty is looking to do. In fact, my hubby and I weren’t even sure what she was looking to do when the movie concluded. Yes, I subjected my hubby to this disappointment for our Saturday night movie. My bad.

The opener promises a conveyor belt of kills, with a female being called to a giant mansion for a “wellness check”. Considering she dies, you have to wonder why there’s never any follow-up wellness check to check on her…

Anyway, two girls and a guy show up at the mansion, formerly a club owned by Betty, which is now abandoned, yet somehow beautifully and perfectly preserved. They are college students doing a story on the legend of the club closing down.

They are immediately welcomed in by Betty, played by horror queen Hannah Fierman. Hannah is great in the coy, squeaky-voiced role, she just deserved a stronger script. Hell, Minnie didn’t even talk, and she got to lean into her freaky feistiness more than Betty does.

The kids think Betty is weird, but what they don’t seem to think is why is this woman who looks like she’s from the 1930s alive and looking like she’s 30?

They somehow lose Betty in the mansion and spend most of the movie trying to decide if they should just leave. A storm hits, and they contemplate whether they should stay in place or hop in their car and go. Their car disappears, so that decision is made for them. They read Betty’s diary, and this is the part that’s supposed to give the story some depth.

It all leads to Betty tying the three main characters up and finally killing one of them at the 54-minute mark. They’re sitting ducks and there are only three of them, so this isn’t a slasher. The only good gore involves Betty plucking out a pair of eyes with a knife. And her big soliloquy in which she explains her motivation is the part that leaves you saying, “Huh?”

ALADDIN (2026)

Damn. This one is a mess. It begins with a bloody, medieval battle with a short narrative about the power of the infamous magic lamp.

Then a couple in modern times comes to a cabin in the woods because the woman has mental health issues and needs to “rest”. They invite another couple to come hang with them. They find a lamp that clearly looks like it will grant a wish if you rub it. So…one of them rubs it.

If you’re expecting a killer Aladdin to come out of the lamp, forget it. One of the girls wishes to be pregnant and gives birth to a demon baby overnight. We only get a fleeting glimpse of this devilish baby face, and the face later appears again on one of the adults. Is it supposed to be evil Aladdin reborn? I guess.

They do a whole lot of talking—about the lamp, its history, how they can reverse their wishes, etc. Eventually, they somehow reverse things to before they rubbed the lamp. It now requires a sacrifice, so the main girl who needed rest has to fight back against her man and her two friends as they hunt her down in the final act.

It’s a weak script and rather dull viewing experience, so naturally, I watched the sequel.

ALADDIN’S REVENGE (2026)

The nonsense of the first film just digs itself into a deeper hole with this sequel. Despite the lamp being tossed into a lake at the end, it shows up in the backyard of someone else’s house for the opener of this one, leading to a murder/suicide. This opening kill has no bearing on the rest of the movie.

The final girl from the first film somehow got cleared of any wrongdoing in the deaths of all her friends, but she has been ordered to seek group therapy at a large house in the middle of nowhere.

This group therapy includes her, another girl, a guy, and a therapist. Cozy group. The lamp somehow finds its way into the house, someone uses it, and then everyone starts acting weird and murderous, just as they did in the first movie.

One of the guys seems possessed, so the main girl calls him Aladdin and has arguments with him in a battle of wits. Lasers shooting from mouths come into play in the sequel as well, because, why not?

The demon face we saw mostly (but barely) on the baby in the first movie makes a few more brief appearances, and the main girl once again has to clean up the mess the wishes make and destroy the lamp.

An influencer girl finds the lamp at the end, but I refuse to watch a third movie. Minnie’s Midnight Massacre is definitely the only one I’d suggest giving a try from this bunch if you’re looking for another cartoon character slasher to watch.

Posted in Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on The knives are out with this foursome of kiddie classics

Revisiting Resident Evil: Code Veronica on GameCube

Posted on March 31, 2026 by Daniel

My journey through my old survival horror games continues. Code Veronica is the game that bumped the Resident Evil series up to the next generation of graphics. Awesome. Claire looks so much more defined than she did in the original RE2.

With this game, your cleared data only affords you the infinite rocket launcher, not infinite weapons across the board as in RE3. The rocket launcher takes up two slots, and you don’t have that many slots to begin with. Argh.

There’s also an infamous glitch you can use to make the item in one particular slot infinite at the beginning of the game. I don’t know how the hell anyone ever figured this out, because there are numerous steps that involve arranging your inventory in a certain way and then using certain items before it works. I followed the instructions to get infinite green herbs, but because my game began with the rocket launcher in my inventory and using the slot I needed for the item I wanted to make infinite, I couldn’t get it to work. Oh well. Luckily, I was able to hide behind my infinite rocket launcher the whole game to stay alive.

Since I just played RE3 on the GameCube, I was thrilled to find the controller layout was exactly the same for this game. I wasn’t so thrilled to find that once again, you can’t aim the rocket launcher up and down, just straight ahead. What felt really weird is that even when you have to go up short staircases, you have to press the action button to climb them. Not ideal when you’re trying to run from an enemy.

Beginning at an island prison, the game quickly thrusts a load of zombies at you in a cemetery. This whole section has a load of zombies, as well as a load of items to pick up…with only 8 slots (6 if you have the infinite rocket launcher), and no item box in sight. Dammit.

In fact, when you leave the starting area, you quickly pass a table with a typewriter and ink ribbon–that has only 1 save instead of the usual 3! I panicked, fearing that was going to be the norm in this game (it’s been so long since I played that I couldn’t remember), but the next time I reached a typewriter, it had the usual 3-save ink ribbon.

There’s a lot of running back and forth in this section, and lots of fun jump scares, plus some zombie dogs. In other words, tread lightly, because zombies and dogs pop up around corners. Also, beware of the patches of fire you encounter, because they will hurt you if you touch them.

There’s also a very unnerving section that forces you to put all your metal items in a box in order to pass through a shutter door. That includes weapons, first aid sprays, the lighter you always have on you in a separate item slot, and…ink ribbons! No! This means remembering what you left there, and hoping you can get them back before you leave this area for good. Seriously, I didn’t quite plan correctly and ended up leaving a few things behind (not my ink ribbons), including the handgun. But who needs a handgun when you have an infinite rocket launcher?

The next area, “the palace”, has dogs, zombies, and…bats. Here is the thing you wouldn’t know without a walkthrough. There are two rooms you enter in which there are bats and items to collect. If you equip your lighter before you enter them, the bats won’t bother you. Wow. Another part that will leave you having no idea what to do or where to go unless you read a walkthrough involves a guy yelling for help and you having to find him and save him from being crushed. WTF? Good news is, you finally find a save room with an item box. Yay! And you will also score two sets of ink ribbons in this section. Wahoo! Plus, you find an expansion pack for your inventory that gives you 2 more slots. Sweet!

One of the most memorable storylines of all the games to me is introduced in this section, because it has to do with siblings and gender identity. Awesome.

Next, you’re off to a military facility. Eek! The moment you enter it, you meet the dreaded, giant ground worm. Dreaded if you don’t have the infinite rocket launcher, that is. See, you run through this open area repeatedly and have to just dodge this bitch unless you have the infinite rocket launcher. Then you just shoot him a few times when he pops out of the ground, and he’s dead for good. Awesome.

You also meet the Bandersnatch in this area. This big lug’s stretchy arm whips out and smacks you upside the head from a distance. However, that arm couldn’t cover as much distance as my infinite rocket launcher!

But I didn’t have my precious weapon when I was suddenly switched over to Claire’s new friend Steve. You briefly play Steve with just a pair of guns, and you have to go through three rooms and clear out all the zombies with your limited ammo. Beware. The first door you go through has the most obscured view ever. You can barely see yourself and the zombie standing right in front of you. Basically, just start shooting immediately or you will get grabbed and bitten. Also, watch out for the exploding gas barrel right next to the gate. Sure, it takes out a few zombies, but it also knocks you down to danger level health if you hit it. And there’s no health for you to find in this short section, so if you are badly wounded, you have to drag your way through the next two rooms of zombies and kill them all without being bitten. Yeah. Learned that the hard way.

You also meet a new crawling life form in this level that electrocutes you if you run into it. The first time you encounter it is in a bullshit moment where you are warned you have to retreat back to the lobby of the area before a shutter closes you inside the contaminated area. You get 45 seconds, but the crawlers are all over the floor, which hinders your progress, plus, the fricking timer continues during the slow as fuck animations of doors opening! No fair! Realistically, you’d be throwing those doors open and running through them in seconds!

You eventually find a secret passage, which delivers a Bandersnatch jump scare, and this leads to a covered bridge that takes you across to a mansion, with an epic approach that is so fricking atmospheric. You also encounter two Bandersnatches right away. Walkthrough told me not to kill them, but I very vividly recall what happened to me the first time I ever played the game and they were still there later (I’ll get to that memory momentarily).

My walkthrough author also told me not to bother going into a certain side room when I first entered the mansion, because there’s a Bandersnatch in there and it’s not worth it to get some ammo and a fricking ink ribbon. I would die for more ink ribbon…but I didn’t have to because I took the Bandersnatch out with my infinite rocket launcher.

This mansion is where we first spy on the brother and sister twins, who are bourgeois creepy and are adults but still have the rooms of children. Eek!

After this, we get to explore some new areas while passing through some old ones that have new zombies in them. Argh. The biggest challenge is the “morgue” section, because it leads you into a room with a statue holding a sword. Would have been nice if the walkthrough had warned me to backtrack and save before this part, because even with the walkthrough, I didn’t know what to do. It turned out to be a lot easier than I realized. You take the sword, the door locks, and poisonous gas starts filling the room. My infinite rocket launcher wasn’t going to save me here. I died the first time and then watched a YouTube video to see what I was actually supposed to. It was simple…just spin another statue in the room 180 degrees and the gas stops and unlocks the door.

Things really pick up when you get the chance to get higher up into the mansion to learn the truth about the twins. This is one of my favorite parts of the game thanks to the big reveal, but it’s also the part that was a nightmare the first time I played, because the trip back to the mansion was now covered with zombies and Bandersnatches, and I didn’t have the ammo or health to fight them all. My entire posse of friends happened to be present for this segment, and we were laughing and screaming as I escaped this section dragging my way around lunging zombies and getting smacked from across the screen by Bandersnatch arms. It was one of the funniest and most terrifying moments in my video game playing history. This time around, I just fucked them all up with my rocket launcher on my way to the mansion, so they weren’t even there when I left. Suckers.

Soon after that, you encounter fricking Tyrant! I’d say eek, but one shot with a rocket and he was dead. Then I teamed up with Claire’s buddy Steve to escape this section of the game in a plane on a five-minute timer. Naturally, things don’t go smoothly, and Claire volunteers to backtrack and do what needs to be done to get the escape plane running. I would’ve had no idea what to do without a walkthrough. That includes how to kill Tyrant again when he shows up on the fricking plane after you take off. There’s no one-shot rocket launcher kill this time. You can shoot him a bit to weaken him, but the goal is to avoid him in the cargo hold, lure him in front of a bunch of crates, and then hit a lever that launches the crates at him and knocks him out of the plane. The catch is, if he’s not worn down enough, he leaves skid marks on the cargo hold floor as he stops the crates before they can knock him out. Fucker.

While I originally played this game on PS2 on one disc, the GameCube requires two discs, and this is the moment you have to switch them. I was so afraid my old console was going to fail during the disc swap, but thankfully, the game lets you save before the disc switch. Awesome. The disc switch went smoothly, and then we were in Antarctica! You can feel the cold in the facility you end up in. Steve leaves you alone to explore, and one of the first things you have to do is get the electricity working for light. The walkthrough I used made it very clear which doors to avoid going through, so I’d say a walkthrough is crucial at this point.

The bane of my Antarctic existence was the moth hallway. It is covered in cocoons and filled with moths that attack you, lay eggs on your back, and poison you every time you run through it. Worst of all, it’s the hallway that holds the only save room in this section. Oh. And if you kill all the moths, they just respawn the next time you run through the hall. Double oh. The blue herbs you need to heal after being poisoned? There are barely any in this section. There are, however, plenty of other items, but you are unlikely to be able to see them until after you get the lights working, at which point you might want to retrace all your steps and collect everything you missed. Antarctica tosses plenty of zombies at you, along with giant spiders and more zombie dogs. Definitely not an easy section.

When you finally get to leave Antarctica, you have to run through that damn moth hall again. Ugh. Here is something crucial. When you are in the save room gathering your things before this final exit, you absolutely must put anything crucial in the item box, because you are about to switch characters, and if you don’t leave things like, say, an infinite rocket launcher in the box, when you switch from Claire to her brother Chris for the next portion of the game, he will not have it.

Unfortunately, this means you do have to fight a boss without the infinite rocket launcher as Claire before the swap. You get a sniper rifle for this bitch of a battle, but I also took a grenade launcher and extra ammo I’d picked up along the way. This boss is on a platform with you. He has tentacles. If he hits you with a tentacle, chances are he’s going to knock you off the platform, which is instant death. Even with the grenade launcher, I had three instant deaths. Good news is, you get a “retry” option rather than being forced to load your last save. The point of the sniper rifle is to hit the boss directly in his heart, which delivers a one-hit kill. However, you only get seven bullets, it’s foggy, which means you have to wait for the boss to get close to you so you can see him, looking through the sniper scope takes time and now the boss is on top of you and about to knock you off the platform, and, most importantly, I fucking suck with the sniper rifle in video games. Therefore, I just ran up to the bastard with my grenade launcher and laid into him.

Once you defeat him, you are in Chris’s shoes. You only have a handgun, but luckily, a typewriter and a storage chest are nearby, so I immediately grabbed the infinite rocket launcher Claire left for Chris (aka: I left for me). I needed it, because in the next room you have to fight another damn giant underground worm. If you kill it fast enough (I did with one infinite rocket shot), he spits out a dude who gives you a lighter. Why is that crucial? Because you need that lighter to open a secret panel in the next room that scores you a submachine gun. Of course, if you have an infinite rocket launcher, does a finite submachine gun even matter? I can answer that. No. It doesn’t. At all.

Here’s one snag with changing over to Chris. You don’t have the expansion pack for your inventory, so you’re stuck with only 8 slots. Argh! Good news is, it’s not too long before you find another pack and bump back up to 10 slots.

There’s a lot of back and forth on multiple levels in this section, plus moving stairs that are manipulated by a shotgun on or off a rack, so I don’t see how you would get past this section without a walkthrough. We also meet up with the good old hunters, and there are surveillance spotlights in hallways. Run into them and hunters appear. We also meet poisonous hunters for the first time when we play as Chris, meaning you will need blue herbs to heal if they hit you.

This game always confused me, because there are certain points where you’ll like go through a door in a section and end up in a section from way earlier in the game, and it’s like…did I just go from one continent to another simply by passing through a door? This whole section feels like that. However, you do take a plane back to Antarctica as Chris, where you discover that those buggers in the moth hall are no longer around because the place has been overrun by the cold and they couldn’t survive. Yay!

You get to explore new areas of Antarctica with Chris as you solve more puzzles and collect new items. And oddly enough, you come to an area that is an exact copy of a room from the original Resident Evil. This game is so trippy. You also get to face something very big that you noticed moving under an ice pool earlier in the game when you were playing as Claire…an enormous spider! The walkthrough said to just avoid him and run onto the ice to grab the shiny object waiting there and get out, but fuck that suggestion. Since I had infinite rockets to spare, I blasted the fucker to smithereens with one shot. Awesome.

My arrogance about my infinite fire power was immediately squelched as I neared the end of this section. It’s a section I remembered well but not fondly, and it’s even worse than I remembered. It’s unfathomable how many instant death moments you are faced with before you finally get another save.

My walkthrough guy warned me to save right before the shit hit the fan, as if I don’t save every chance I get anyway. Even so, it’s important to note at this last save before moving on to a new area that you are about to play briefly as Claire, but do not leave anything crucial like the infinite rocket launcher for her, because you don’t play as her for long, and you don’t want to lose such crucial items to her when you revert back to Chris. As Claire, you can just grab a some shitty guns from the item box to kill the few zombies and tentacles she runs into during her very brief but very challenging return.

So, as Chris, you end up in what looks like a very familiar mansion, find Claire, and have to hunt down a serum for her since she’s been poisoned. When you get back to her and administer it, there’s a cutscene, after which you’re playing as Claire. Despite having been given a serum, your health is in danger mode. WTF? You are in a room with plenty of supplies (including herbs you will need to heal), a secret panel you can open for more supplies, an item box, and NO fucking typewriter. And you are about to encounter several instant kill challenges in a row.

First, theres a crushing cement block. You must trigger it by turning a handle, then run under it before it stomps you, grab a crystal on the other side, then run into a bright circle on the floor under the stone to drop the crystal there to be crushed. The good news is that you automatically step out in a cutscene before the crystal is crushed. The bad news is that you now have to get right back on that bright spot on the floor to pick the crystal up. Do it in time and the stone will not fall. Thing is, it is such a tight spot, and it is really easy to overshoot the bright spot and get crushed. Six fucking times I had to redo it. Thankfully, it’s a “retry” moment, however, it puts you back in the room without the save just to rub it in, and you have to recollect all the items you collected already.

What happens next? You go through a few doors, walk to the end of a corridor, and after a cutscene, have to quickly turn and run back to the exit while a monster with a huge axe is chasing you. If he hits you twice, you die. He doesn’t die if you shoot him, so you just have to run. My walkthrough told me to take numerous healing items and save every time he hit me. Seriously, this is not a long corridor, yet it feels miles long. I don’t know if you get a “retry” if you screw up, because I actually made it out the first time, but I did have to heal twice.

Next, you play as Chris again…right after a cutscene with a fiery boss only inches in front of you. If she touches you, it’s instant death. Good news for me was that I just panicked and immediately used my rocket launcher without creating space first (knowing my habit of letting terror get the better of me, I would have run directly into her if I tried to distance myself from her). One rocket took her down. YAY. I’m not sure if this moment would have offered a “retry” option, because if it didn’t, I would lose my shit if I was sent back to item room before Claire has to use the crystal crusher.

Finally, after going through a few more rooms, you end up in a save room with more ink ribbons. What a relief. After that, there’s just a bit more scavenging to get a few more items to progress to the final boss.

I was surprised out how fast I killed the final boss. The shitty thing is you only have five minutes, and the countdown begins before you even reach her. Then you’re on a platform with her and Claire. There’s a cutscene, and when it ends, you have to quickly shoot the boss once or she will immediately knock Claire off the platform and it’s game over. That didn’t happens to me thanks to my infinite rocket launcher. After I saved Claire, I just had to shoot at the boss until a nearby linear launcher finished charging. The idea is to grab the linear launcher, which has infinite firing power, and hit the boss twice with it. Problem is she’s now a flying bug, and every time you target her, the POV switches into sniper view, and the whole damn screen turns green, making her hard to see. You sort of have to shoot wildly and hope you hit her while also keeping on the move so she can’t hit you with her projectile powers. I couldn’t even tell if I was hitting her, but within a minute, she was dead. Wow.

After that, I gripped my controller in panic that every cut scene was going to put me back into control for something else. Shockingly, it doesn’t. There are like ten minutes of cut scenes that close out the game. No more fighting, no running to catch a helicopter during a countdown. Amazing and well deserved after that long stretch I had without any save.

For me, all the game completion rankings and stats don’t even matter. What made me most proud was that I finished the game with eight ink ribbons to spare.

Posted in The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror, What I'm Doing With My Joystick | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Revisiting Resident Evil: Code Veronica on GameCube

Crazy cat people, a psycho couple, and a killer board game

Posted on March 30, 2026 by Daniel

This trio of flicks offers Halloween horror, gays against psycho straights, and yet another board game of death. Let’s see if they kept me entertained.

DON’T LET THE CAT OUT (2025)



This one takes place on Halloween night, and the opener has a dude arriving for a house-sitting job in a scene so perfectly Halloween that it earns a spot on the holiday horror page.

A couple is going out for the evening, and they leave our main, cute guy with a list of instructions for taking care of the cat. There’s really not much in the way of signs that something is off at this house, and in fact, the entire movie somehow fails to deliver any sense of urgency or suspense, despite a lot of crazy stuff eventually happening.

Without any build-up, a dude in a cat mask appears suddenly, and our main guy is immediately thrust into a chase scene, which is perhaps the best scene in the movie.

He’s caught, brought back to the house, and tied up like a BDSM bitch.

It turns out he is going to be used for a ritual involving a cat, so his goal is to escape captivity. There are plenty of “action” sequences and psychotic cat situations, but for me they just didn’t hit the mark enough to make this one a thrill ride, despite the weirdness of the cat storyline and what it entails.

GATLOPP (2022)

 

This is a playful and quirky take on the killer board game movie subgenre. Four friends gather together to hang out at the house of one of the guys, who is about to sell it after a messy divorce.

They reminisce about their pasts together in flashbacks, and then they decide to play a board game. The cards ask questions that begin to get very specific and personal as the friends continue to play. Like, these cards know details about each of them that they don’t want revealed.

If they lie in their responses, inexplicable and weird things happen. The board game starts moving on its own. The cards talk back to them. When they say things, those things come true. Like literally, people they mention will magically appear in the room with them.

As crazy as it becomes, it’s all handled with humor, and the comedic timing and delivery of the cast make it quite entertaining for a while. They even get themselves into an insane jazzercise sequence once they learn that they have to play the game all the way through or they will die.

There isn’t any hardcore horror here, and much of it is about the psychological trauma each character is put through. After a while, I actually began losing interest in the plot, in part because it got a bit convoluted and silly by the final act.

HANDS OF HELL (2023)



This one is straightforward and cliché, but the gore and brutality are amplified noticeably in the final act, which definitely tickled my terror bone.

The first scene sets the tone. A murderous straight couple shows up at an isolated motel and kills off the couple that owns it. The actors playing the crazy couple are really perfect in their roles, which benefits the basic premise.

Next, we meet several couples heading to that very motel, which has now been secretly taken over by the crazies. Two of the couples are straight, and the other is gay and comprised of a Black dude and a Spanish dude.

Guess who the first victim is. Not only is it predictable, but the gay couple is not a happy one. They are arguing with each other from the very first moment they appear on screen until, well, you know. You never once see them show any affection for each other. Either way, their presence lands this one on the does the gay guy die? page.

There are a few scenes involving two detectives discussing previous murders by the crazy couple, but none of it is really necessary, and neither are the detectives, who merely show up at the end of the movie after all the killing is said and done. There’s also a big, intellectually disabled dude roaming around near the motel playing with a jack-in-the-box, but he’s also irrelevant to the plot and doesn’t add any fear factor since we know who the actual killers are. He doesn’t even get a redeeming hero moment to show that not all inbreeds are evil.

The fun doesn’t truly begin until the crazy female partner seduces one of the straight guy guests. And it is fun. This guy doesn’t show straight guys in a good light either. First, he easily decides he’s going to cheat on his girl with a stranger. Second, this strange bitch bites him immediately, drawing blood, and he continues to lust after her. And third, when she tells him to turn around, he says he’s not into “that” yet proceeds to immediately assume the position…and gets impaled through the ass. Awesome.

For a while, it appears that the Spanish gay dude might be one of the final survivors, and he even fights bravely against the crazy male partner, but in the end, after he’s called a gay slur, it’s only straights that live. However, the chase and fight scenes are definitely the grisliest parts of the movie, so at least there’s some good pay-off.

And in one of my favorite moments, the female baddie puts intercepts one of my biggest horror movie pet peeves—when she’s on top of one of her victims on the ground and the victim reaches for a nearby weapon to fight back, the baddie sees the move (like anyone hovering over you actually would) and puts a stop to it.

Posted in Johnny You ARE Queer - Gay Thoughts, Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, Scared Silly - Horror Comedy, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Crazy cat people, a psycho couple, and a killer board game

Be Afraid when He Kills at Night at The Inn

Posted on March 27, 2026 by Daniel

Or should you be afraid? It’s a trio of psycho killer flicks—at a motel, at a cabin in the woods, and on the road, and two of them take place on holidays. But are they scary? Let’s find out.

THE INN (2025)



This 65-minute, indie slasher goes harder than most modern slashers in terms of brutal kills, and they were so satisfying that the hollow plot didn’t even matter to me. It also effectively captures the grindhouse filter look. However, these days that look doesn’t come across as 70s/80s horror as much as it does like the days when 00s horror was trying to look like 70s/80s horror.

This is how you start a movie. Without wasting any time, things kick off with two girls having a creepy close encounter with a dude on a dark road at night. They arrive at a motel for a party, and a fricking masked killer shows up and just starts mutilating the fuck out of everyone. The practical effects in this flick kick ass.

After the initial massacre, the film takes its time setting up a typical slasher. Turns out the killer is known for hitting up motels. Therefore, we meet a bunch of characters at another motel for the next round of kills.

I wasn’t really vested in the characters introduce or the police investigating the previous case, because none of it is developed enough in the short runtime to add much weight to the masked killer aspect. I just sat back and enjoyed the pacing taking its time this go around to deliver more evenly spaced kills as the killer tears a new bunch of characters apart.

The silly tag scene after the credits doesn’t quite fit the tone of the rest of the movie, but it does promise a sequel.

AFRAID? (Aka: What Are You Afraid Of?) (2025)



This is an odd little indie horror flick. There’s a lot going on yet not much going on. It takes place at Halloween time, yet when the main cast goes away for the weekend, the holiday is totally forgotten, so it doesn’t satisfy the criteria for a Halloween-themed horror movie. And the ending left me scratching my head.

First, we meet a white trash young woman and her white trash family. There is some violence and abuse, then she simply goes to school the next, where she has strictly all Black friends. They decide to go away for the weekend to a cabin in the woods…meaning she leaves her little sister alone with her abusive father. Weird.

There’s plenty of stuff going on to fill a literal hour before the first kill. The guys pick up liquor for the weekend. Once on the road, the group gets stopped by a white cop, and one of the Black guys has a daydream sequence imagining how this encounter could go. They then have an actual encounter with racists at a convenience store. Following that, they get a flat. A weird dude who looks like he’s wearing clown makeup appears out of nowhere and helps them change it.

They get to the cabin, and after a while, the lights go out and the group starts getting scared. The creepy clownish dude from the road shows up momentarily but there’s no clear point to his appearances. The group goes swimming in a lake the next day. They have individual conversations about their futures and their relationships.

Someone finally gets killed at the 1-hour mark. There are suddenly dogs outside. The friends are trapped inside. It’s all kind of chaotic, it doesn’t quite find a typical slasher groove, plus you can’t really see the kills because everything is filmed very dark.

Eventually the action moves to the lair of a dude wearing a welding mask. There’s not much in the way of a final battle with him, but the white girl does something so incredibly unexpected that it adds a whole new dimension to the movie…just as it’s about to end.

Nothing is explained. The killer isn’t revealed. There’s a final scene that reminds us that it’s Halloween time and also seems to imply that the film is trying to reveal something to the audience, but I had no way of substantiating my guesses, so in the end, I don’t know what any of it meant.

HE KILLS AT NIGHT (2025)



For a movie that is mostly about two people stuck in a car together, this film manages to feel totally disjointed. It also manages to deliver a lot of Christmas spirit, believe it or not, so it earns a spot on the holiday horror page.

There are reports of a killer on the loose. It’s Christmas Eve. A woman dressed in festive clothes stops on a dark, snowy road to take a piss…and gets murdered.

Then that same killer hops into the car of another woman and demands that she help him get away.

There’s a lot of talking, they listen to Christmas music on the radio, they try to steal another car, she tries to get away a few times, and seemingly random, unrelated scenes are injected into the movie, including one that takes place on Halloween.

In the end, the movie tries to tie all those intrusive scenes together with a twist, but I honestly didn’t get it.

Posted in Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Be Afraid when He Kills at Night at The Inn

Kids in cabins, men in leather, zombies, crazies, and more

Posted on March 24, 2026 by Daniel

I can’t fully call this a foursome of horror comedies, because the comedic content isn’t consistent, but they are all quirky enough to work as a movie marathon.

ANKLE BITERS (aka: Cherrypicker) (2020)



Not sure why this film about four little bad seed girls was originally called Cherrypicker, but I much prefer the Ankle Biters title.

This is an odd film with black humor, sexual content, some gore, and four young sisters (played by actual sisters) that are simply evil little bitches who decide they want to kill their soon-to-be stepfather.

In his plan to propose to their mother, the main guy takes the family to a cabin by a lake for a weekend getaway. He is totally oblivious to how much the girls hate him, despite them constantly scowling at him. As a result, there’s absolutely no tension for a majority of the film.

The girls aren’t just indiscriminate killers either. They just want the main guy dead. They pull one stunt involving spider eggs that gets a freaky pay-off later in the movie, but this isn’t one of those films in which humor is derived from them constantly trying to kill him but just missing every time. They seriously don’t intensely target him until the final act.

There is one unfortunate causality along the way, and it’s a disturbing scene since it involves children, but a majority of the film has the main guy hanging out shirtless in his Speedo (not complaining), without any real sign of the girls slowly escalating their attacks on him.

The final act does deliver a few twists, and the inevitable battle between the main guy and the four little girls is a lot of fun, but there’s just not much meat in the middle of this movie.

DON’T GET EATEN (2023)

I’m shocked at how much fun I had with this one. I anticipated a silly, family gateway “scary movie” based on its premise. In essence, that’s exactly what it is, and I’m still a sucker for those types of films anyway, but it also delivers some unexpected surprises in the final act that really enhanced my enjoyment.

The plot is simple. This fun and cute dad (with great thighs) and his three young daughters make zombie survival videos for his online channel. His obsession with creating content, however, is really testing his wife’s patience.

A therapist suggests they take a family trip to a cabin in the woods. No cameras, no social media, no making videos.

Easier said than done for dad, especially when he has an encounter with an actual zombie outside while the rest of the family is inside on their very first night at the cabin. He tries to keep it a secret at first (while recording with a camera he naturally snuck up there), but eventually the number of zombies outside grows.

Before long, the whole family has to join together and put dad’s survival tips to work in fending off zombies. This is where the family fun part really kicks in, including using big, air bubble balls to keep the onslaught of zombies at a distance. This also means there’s no contact, no flesh-eating, and no zombie mutilating. This is gore-free horror.

Even so, I was unprepared for the turn the film takes in the final act. It is quite clever and breathes new life into the movie, providing a refreshing plot trajectory.

A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO SNUFF (2016)



This is mostly my kind of fun, but it doesn’t steadily deliver the level of humor I expected based on the title, and it becomes repetitive, with little forward momentum at times. It also balances a very queer vibe with a misogynistic message and throws in a hint of a political statement if you pay attention to the décor on the walls of the home of the two main characters.

We meet two cute brothers—one who spends most of the movie in his tighty-whities (yay!). They are broke and need to make money fast. They are also totally oblivious to how gay their landlord is, but viewers aren’t, so this one lands on the does the gay guy die? page.

The landlord makes them aware of a filmmaking contest with a big monetary prize. So…they decide to make a fake, found footage snuff film. This means an immediate comedy sequence of them auditioning actresses. It’s one of the most common tropes in horror comedies about hacks making a movie, so it really does nothing for me.

During the casting call, the brothers find the perfect girl and then decide they can make the movie even more realistic by actually kidnapping her so she doesn’t know she’s in the movie.

This leaves them with mounting problems as they try to figure out what they can do to her once they have her strapped down in an old warehouse. The landlord, who supplied them with the location to shoot their movie, warned them that there’s a serial killer on the loose in the area who’s cutting off the penises of his victims. You would think that could have a huge impact on the events that unfold, but it doesn’t really come up until late in the movie.

Instead, the focus is on the main girl being a strong woman who isn’t scared of her captors (they’re wearing a gimp mask and an Obama mask). Their attempts to terrorize her begin to wear thin after a while, and there are only 30 minutes left when the main girl at last turns the tables on them.

This is the highlight of the movie, with the return of the landlord, penis humor, the promise of dick sucking, one of the brothers in leather, and the main girl going batshit crazy. She’s awesome. As fun as this final act is, it just feels like the whole movie needed a little bit more excitement…and humor…and suspense.

SLEEP. WALK. KILL. (2022)



While this is listed as a horror comedy, the humor is very dry, very dark, and subtly imbedded in a sinister plot.

The opening grabs you right away. There’s a man in leather fetish gear, a napping woman, a knife, and a lot of blood.

Immediately after that, we’re introduced to the street on which the film takes place. I absolutely loved the moody vibe and atmosphere, because to me the neighborhood where the film is shot holds an incredible sense of nostalgia, as if it comes from a simpler time. There’s nothing that screams modern day.

The film itself feels like creepy horror from the 1970s, in particular, The Crazies. It begins with the neighbors hearing a weird sound outside their houses. Pretty soon, individuals start walking—and killing—in their sleep. Eek!

This film manages to be effectively eerie despite being shot in daylight. It’s more like gray light, actually, and the cloudy conditions really work to the film’s advantage.

Our main guy quickly realizes that people are becoming homicidal maniacs when they fall asleep, so the warning to everyone becomes, “Don’t fall asleep!” I see what they did there.

While there are moments that will make you chuckle, I found the film to be successfully unnerving. There are also some incredibly disturbing kill scenes, including a brilliant segment involving the connection between her mother, the fetus in her belly, and how sleep affects them both.

A group of survivors eventually gathers in the main guy’s house in hopes of staying alive (the pace slows down a bit here), but we all know nobody can stay awake forever. Shit hits the fan eventually, and the film pulls a horror subgenre switch that also gives us a clue as to what it is that’s actually causing people to go psycho in their sleep. It revitalizes the movie just when it feels like it’s beginning to lose steam. If you like the ominous feel of the type of 1970s horror that gets under your skin, I’d definitely check this one out.

Posted in Scared Silly - Horror Comedy, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Kids in cabins, men in leather, zombies, crazies, and more

THE BIG D TIMES 3: in bed with demons

Posted on March 18, 2026 by Daniel

While none of these films might be the best that Tubi has to offer, they sure did work well together as a trilogy of the occult.

DEADLY DEALINGS (2022)



This is a very indie release, but I was drawn to it by the showy demon in the trailer, who was most definitely a highlight for me. However, my feelings towards all home-brewed indie films are the same. No matter how much energy and pride you put into creating it, you simply have to watch your own movie back and ask yourself, “If I wanted to sit down to watch a horror flick, and this was what I got, how would I honestly feel?” Better yet, ask third-party eyes to watch it and be brutally honest with you about what you might need to fix before releasing it to the public.

There are parts of this 71-minute movie I appreciated, but most of that comes at the end. With over forty minutes of mostly filler beforehand, there’s a good chance that many people won’t stick around to see the final act. In cases like this, it’s not the common low budget issues that are the problem…it’s the fact that too many filmmakers have an idea for a movie, but they simply don’t know how to structure a story or write a script. For instance, the filmmaker here co-directs, co-stars, and wrote the script. You don’t have to do it all for it to become your vision.

Whether AI or filters were used for the visual outdoor scenes, I do love the color palette chosen for them. It really captured a feeling for me, and it is on display from moment one, when our main girl is at the cemetery visiting her dead brother’s grave.

Then the film gets bogged down by poor dialogue. Her queer best friend reads her Tarot cards. They watch an occult talk show, but the audio quality on these clips is terrible, so you can barely hear what’s being said. The main girl talks to her therapist. She has dinner with her parents. She has a group therapy session. Much of this does nothing to develop a story or characters in an interesting way, and it definitely doesn’t propel the plot forward.

Finally, her queer friend suggests they use a Ouija board to contact her brother. This is where things get cheesy fun. A queertastic demon visits her bedroom in cool horror lighting and offers to bring her dead brother back in exchange for her dreams—dreams that have little impact on what’s left of the movie.

It’s like a campy horror drag show drenched in glitter and neon light as the brother returns and some odd little twists essentially shift away from the character perspective we’ve been following for the whole the film. You just have to go with it, because the final act is quite fun. I just wish the first half of the film could have met its energy, or at least ramped up to it smoothly, because it kind of feels like two different films as is.

DEMO_N (2024)



This 75-minute movie is another one of those webcam flicks in which most of the events take place on computer screens as four friends have an online reunion from the comfort of their own rooms.

This time around, one dude scores a free demo of a horror video game before he begins chatting with his friends. It’s a 2D side scroller that looks like it’s from the SNES/Sega Genesis era, and some of the most fun I had with this movie was watching the parts where he plays the game to try to save his friends.

See, for no good reason, when he plays the game the first time, he apparently unleashes a demon that then begins possessing his friends once they connect. But don’t expect to see much of them being possessed, because the movie is riddled with fast, choppy editing, scrambled video, and total blackout moments.

The ending is my favorite part. After our main guy fights a final boss in the game, suddenly the movie switches to both his POV and standard third-person view when his friends show up in demonic form and chase him around his house. Awesome. We also get one of the biggest butcher knives I’ve ever seen in a horror movie.

THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLES (2024)



IMDb doesn’t even make note of it, but it turns out this movie is a “recut” or “revised” version of a movie called Disciples that the filmmaker made in 2014. I covered it here, but I don’t remember a thing about it, so it was like watching it for the first time. However, since I couldn’t remember it, I also have no idea if this simply removes scenes, adds content, or removes some material and adds new footage, because it runs 10 minutes shorter than the original cut.

What I can say is that based on my previous post about this film, nothing has really changed in terms of it being a hot mess, and I shouldn’t have bothered to watch it a second time.

I feel like I’m repeating myself, but the cast of horror veterans is awesome: Angus Scrimm, Debbie Rochon, Tony Todd, Brinke Stevens, Linnea Quigley…

None of them helps make this a good movie. We get a chaotic plot about a variety of ghouls, humans, and Satan lovers coming together to prevent a prophecy from coming true and destroying everything. These kinds of epic concepts always seem to fall apart in a low budget environment, because there’s only so much you can do with simple sets and loads of dialogue.

There are too many characters, too many random scenes, the dialogue is dull, and there is no clear story structure. Everything that happens feels random as scenes jump all over the place right from the start.

However, a myriad of sadistic violent, bloody, and sexual scenes and visuals that use practical effects are awesome and were the one saving grace for me.

Posted in Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on THE BIG D TIMES 3: in bed with demons

TUBI TERROR: the creatures are coming for you!

Posted on March 16, 2026 by Daniel

This threesome has a couple of very cool monsters and one disappointing monster (although, he has a nice bod). For me, one film in particular was a total winner. Let’s find out which one.

INTO NIGHTMARES (2024)



This English language, Italian film is somber and moody with plenty of eerie atmosphere, but it’s also a fairly familiar concept. However, it tries to deliver a zinger in the end…which is also a familiar concept for horror veterans.

After the death of his daughter, an older man is sent to live in a home for seniors. The place is desolate, the head nurse is creepy, they put the man in a room with an empty bed facing his bed (eek!), and when he begins having nightmarish episodes, the in-house doctor tells him it’s just sleep paralysis.

The sequences are haunting and spooky, with a corpse-like woman lurking in the shadows in his room, the door knob jiggling, and plumes of ghostly forms floating through the room.

As creepy as it is, like most of these types of apparition flicks, it becomes repetitive since the cheap scares never lead to any actual horror. I guess that’s why a big spider inexplicably appears on the man’s bedroom ceiling at one point during one of his episodes. It makes no sense in the context of the film, but it definitely introduces something different for a moment.

The man begins to believe the nurse is keeping someone or something locked away. This sets the film up for something really freaky and substantial coming out to roam the halls at night, and if this had been a pre-1990s film, there probably would have been.

Instead, the building mystery opts for more of a psychological twist. It’s a twist in terms of this movie, but it’s not all that surprising for anyone with a long history of watching horror films.

THE COVENANT (2026)



I love movies about kids going to stay with their creepy grandparents, and this one has a really dark and sinister vibe, so it’s astounding how terribly slow and uneventful it is.

The main sisters aren’t exactly angels in this instance, especially the older of the two. She intends to loot grandma and grandpa’s place because she feels like they neglected her.

As soon as they arrive, they are met by a creepy woman who is spouting crazy stuff…and it’s not even grandma. This wacko is perhaps the scariest aspect for a majority of the runtime, specifically when she ends up crawling into the bed of the younger sister… 50 minutes into the movie!

So, what happens before that? They explore some old ruins and have a dream-like encounter in a cave. Seriously, that’s the most exciting thing that happens before the cheap thrill at the 50-minute mark.

58 minutes in, the older sister seems to get attacked by something in a river, and soon after, the younger sister apparently has her first period while taking a bath, which grandma calls a sign of her purity. There’s also talk of a creature out in the wilderness. Uh-oh.

In the final act, the “creature” comes out to play…basically a feral man with long claw fingers. There’s a creepy doll room, and the older sister whips out a chainsaw, but this is really a low-key horror flick that didn’t quite hold my interest.

THE WELL (2023)



This is like a classic gothic horror flick with fricking gruesome, brutal, hard-to-watch kill scenes, and it also reminded me of some of my favorite, unsettling survival horror video games of the last three decades, in particular, Haunting Ground.

Actress Lauren LaVera of the Terrifier movies has the perfect look for the lead role. She plays an art restorer who comes to Italy to repair a large painting in an old mansion.

The woman hosting her has that old school, welcoming yet menacing presence, she has a creepy young daughter, the restorer begins to have nightmarish dreams as she uncovers hellish looking figures in the painting…

Oh. And there’s a big bald goon in a lair somewhere keeping people imprisoned, killing them one by one, and then tossing them down a well in the middle of the room to feed them to something.

I warn you, these kills are gruesome. It’s the kind of practical effects gore that makes you squirm. There’s a lot of mutilating before the goon even throws victims down the well, and they are not even dead yet when he does. And they scream the whole time they are being tortured. It’s hard to watch and listen to all at once. Yikes!

The whole supernatural premise is highly entertaining as well, especially if you’re into traditional occult themes, and the overall atmosphere is perfect.

The final act doesn’t let up, and we do get to see what’s in the well, so the movie never falters. I seriously ordered it on 4K disc as soon as I was done streaming it.

Posted in Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on TUBI TERROR: the creatures are coming for you!

Horror, humor, retro fun, and practical effects

Posted on March 11, 2026 by Daniel

This was quite an enjoyable triple feature for me, and—BONUS!—each film pulled off the fun in 85 minutes or less.

THE LAST VIDEO STORE (2023)

 

This 78-minute horror comedy is a love letter to the bygone era of video stores and those that still lament the loss. More specifically, those of us who used to work at a video store. It is a total 80s nostalgia trip in style, substance, script, and score, with a touch of heart and a totally quirky, 80s sci-fi/horror vibe.

We meet the owner of one of the last video stores. In comes a lone customer returning old video tapes. Her facial expressions throughout the movie are one of its humor highlights.

The owner tries to get her to appreciate the joy of videos by popping in one of the movies she returned. Turns out it’s a cursed video tape, and it begins unleashing the horrors contained on the tape into the store, beginning with an alien creature.

The owner and customer discover they are trapped in the store—first with the alien creature and then with a backwoods killer—and must take these threats on to stay alive.

The horrors are presented with practical effects, and eventually our main characters extract a hunky b-movie hero from the video to help them survive. He’s delicious. Delic-ass, even.

There’s also a cool final boss situation, and I actually wish the movie had been a little longer and featured at least one more throwback horror monster.

Even so, it’s straight up retro fun from start to finish, and the conclusion is a nod to those who just can’t let go of the past and their longing for the video rental days.

MARK OF THE WEREWOLF (2024)



Quirky, self-aware acting and editing give this one the perfect B-movie feel, and the practical effects, colorful horror lighting, and hokey hairy werewolf costume make it 80s throwback bliss. Add an array of subplots, and it’s messy, camptastic fun from beginning to end.

Our main girl is a model who travels with a team to a cabin in the woods for a photo shoot. Turns out this cabin is built on ground that is sacred to a cult. So, the leader of the cult enlists a witch to conjure a werewolf to take care of the intruders.

No time is wasted in introducing the werewolf, which looks great drenched in red and blue light and haloed by mist. He mutilates people indiscriminately, with plenty of satisfying blood, gore, and fake body parts.

There’s also sex and nudity as the group at the cabin parties and hooks up before getting slaughtered. Awesome.

More characters are introduced to up the body count, which is where the movie begins to falter. A large group suddenly appears after a scene change, and there’s absolutely no clarification of who they are or why they are there.

The final fight between the main girl, her new man (who has a nice axe), and the werewolf and witch is funny, but instead of tying up the plot, the movie goes off the rails a bit, leading to a confusing conclusion that seemed to be trying too hard to be different Or perhaps we’ll get a sequel?

WITNESS INFECTION (2020)



It’s a mobzomcom, and it has an adorable leading man, some playful humor, and nasty, skin-stretching carnage created with practical effects.

The opening is rather bizarre. Two totally different types of guys are hunting together when a lone zombie situation occurs.

We then meet our main cutie. His dad is a mobster, and to keep the peace, he demands his son marry the daughter of another mob family.

Zombies get in the way of that. It can be deduced that eating a certain food is causing people to turn into zombies…after they suffer from a lot of gas. The reason for the infection is definitely underdeveloped, for even when it’s explained how the infection originated near the end of the film, it’s not really explained how the infection was born or why it turned people into zombies, so you just have to go with it.

This isn’t a movie with nonstop laughs, but the cast is totally charismatic, and the actors know their comic timing and delivery, which makes all the difference. The zombie scenes are fantastic, but there’s a lull in the middle of the movie before the infected action really kicks in, which does slow down the pace for a while, but it’s worth the wait.

The plot is basic. Members of each family begin turning into zombies with nasty pustules on their faces, and it’s up to the uninfected to stay alive. Our main trio of survivors eventually joins forces with a Cleopatra Jones type who drops plenty of meta lines.

Like I said, the events that unfold are nothing new. They battle zombies at the home of one mob family before doing the same at the home of the other mob family. Despite the blood, guts, and some toilet humor, this one really doesn’t push boundaries, so it’s an easy watch that feels more like horror comedy lite.

Posted in Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, Scared Silly - Horror Comedy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Horror, humor, retro fun, and practical effects