A haunted attraction, purgatory, and a psycho family

Posted on May 15, 2025 by Daniel

Each of the films in my latest selection of flicks for a movie marathon had something that kept me watching, but was it worth it in the end? Let’s find out.

NIGHT OF WRATH (2025)

This is an all-around cliché-riddled, 73-minute flick that doesn’t deliver any thrilling takes on any of those clichés. The most confusing part to me is that it takes place in a haunted attraction and there are plenty of jack-o-‘lanterns around, but there is absolutely no mention whatsoever of it being Halloween, and the holiday has no bearing on anything.

However, Sleepy Hollow gets a random mention as well, and therefore, I’ll add Night of Wrath to the holiday horror page since it gives off visual Halloween vibes inside the attraction.

We meet a group of kids in a series of melodramatic, dialogue-driven exposition for each character. They are then invited by some sort of secret invitation to a haunted attraction.

They’re the only ones there. An animatronic figure talks to them and gives them a very Saw-like ultimatum—do what it tells them to do or their darkest secrets will be revealed.

The group walks around the attraction a lot trying to figure out how to escape, however, it doesn’t look like much effort was put in to making it feel like an authentic attraction, probably due to budget constraints.

We don’t get anything in the way of horrific things the friends are required to do to survive, there are very few juicy secrets revealed, and there are no death scenes. Not to mention, the person behind the plot is revealed at the 43-minute mark, so there isn’t even much mystery here. Just a really underdeveloped script and plot all around.

GOD OF PAIN (2023)

There’s plenty of disturbing imagery, eerie visuals elements, and gore in this flick, but rather than an actual plot arc with main characters, this is basically a series of vignettes featuring various people being sentenced in purgatory for their crimes against humanity.

Sort of like a horror anthology of people just doing bad things and then getting tortured. It runs its course quickly, but a few twists in some of the “cases” add a hint of interest, although not enough to make this an approach to telling a story that I’d want to see again.

The funniest thing to me was that the “god of pain” is literally wearing the same exact mask I use on a mannequin that stands in my bushes for Halloween. It’s definitely a freaky mask—I purposely bought it to scar trick or treaters for life—so it should creep out most viewers of the movie, but for me it will always be a Halloween prop I bought online.

Who wore it better? Top image: movie. Bottom image: my house.

Top image: movie. Bottom image: my house. Who wore it better?

Anyway, here’s a breakdown of the baddies on trial:

— a dude who kidnaps and kills women, and his opening case is perhaps the creepiest of all, partially because we don’t actually yet know the premise of the movie

–a dude that dismembered and buried bodies

–a woman who cracked under the pressure of motherhood and killed her own kids

–a guy who killed his whole family

–a woman who killed people who did bad things (one of the twists)

–a guy wrongly accused of crimes and the guy who accused him (the second twist)

My absolute favorite part of this movie was when the god of pain kills a dude by breathing fire on him. Awesome.

WHAT THE WATERS LEFT BEHIND: SCARS (2022)

This is a sequel to What the Waters Left Behind, and it comes from the same director. However, the first film was in Spanish, and this one is in English…sort of. We have a rock band that speaks English and ends up in the same desert ruins of a town that the characters in the previously film did, and they encounter the same “backwoods” style, crazy family.

However, the family speaks Spanish, and there are no subtitles for them, at least none available on Tubi, where I watched this. I’m not sure if that was intentional to make English-only speaking viewers feel fear due to the characters’ inability to communicate with the crazies, but it made me more frustrated than frightened, because I felt like I missed like half the movie because I couldn’t understand it.

Even so, there’s not much to miss, I guess. Just like the first film, this is the same crazy psycho family formula, just with a new group of victims. And as with the first film, all the classic elements are included, but it’s all missing any edge, so it wasn’t very scary, suspenseful, or disturbing. For instance, when the family members first abduct the members of the band, they have animal skull masks on, but once they’re all tied up in the family’s lair, there are no masks, just hillbilly-looking crazies.

This sequel has a weird, homoerotic vibe to it, with lots of a flesh, sweaty man bods, tattoos, beards, and arm pits.

There’s also an implied male rape (one of those instances when the film holds back instead of actually showing us anything fucked up), landing this one on the does the gay guy die? page. Oddly, the prettiest male member of the band also calls one of the family members a faggot, which felt very out of place.

The kills and battles are quite generic, and even the surprise at the end isn’t all that surprising. This one simply doesn’t take the psycho family subgenre anywhere new.

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Been there, done that, but did these three make it worth doing it again?

Posted on May 12, 2025 by Daniel

I’m all for familiar frights, but none of these films hit the mark for me. Let’s get right into them.

CHEAT (2023)

I was at first totally engrossed in this throwback to girl ghost movies of the early 2000s.

After we see a man sacrifice a girl in the old days (no, I don’t mean the 1980s), we meet a young woman in the present who is going away to school in a small town. She soon begins seeing a girl in a white dress wherever she goes.

She learns from her new school friends about a town curse—a high rate of suicides, and anyone who has a cheating affair is doomed to death.

Cue the cheating and affairs.

There were some plot points that had me intrigued. For instance, adulterers find themselves bleeding from their private areas. Now that’s the kind of terrifying, supernatural revenge I’m talking about.

Unfortunately, that’s not at the heart of the horror, and this turns into another basic ghost girl in white horror movie that steals from The Ring but simply isn’t very scary. It’s the typical premise of the main cast of characters investigating the backstory of the ghost to learn how to vanquish her.

There’s a hella confusing chase scene in which one of the terrified characters just breaks off from her friends for no reason and ends up alone, running through a bunch of locations that make no sense—for instance, she runs into the ground level of a building, runs up approximately ten flights of stairs, gets to the top…and then runs out onto a ground level street. What the hell? Was this building supposed to be built into the side of a mountain?

The final battle with the ghost is so silly that I actually laughed, and the final scene basically has our main girl just doing what most other people would have done before all their friends began dying…she just leaves town…and leaves a trail of dead bodies behind. Awesome.

WHEN IT RINGS (2023)

This is a plot you’ve seen before, usually in bigger budget films, and it’s longer than it needs to be, with little in the way of chills and thrills.

A young man returns to his home with his dad when it’s time to sell, because his mother, who still lives there, has pretty much shut down ever since their daughter died at a young age in the family pool…or so it seems.

The son finds a toy phone that used to belong to his little sister and is very quickly plagued by nightmares and visions of the phone and his (still alive) mother terrorizing him.

The house definitely feels haunted, but this isn’t a very haunting experience. The phone keeps popping up and ringing, the son is struggling to remember his life in the house, and the dad and mom both seem to be harboring secrets.

As the son and an old female friend from the neighborhood reconnect and try to uncover the truth of what happened to his sister, things at last pick up in the final act—but not much. The plot starts to feel like a mashup of elements of The Grudge and The Sixth Sense, only without a ghost in sight.

MALICE (2024)

This film comes across as an homage to both the original Evil Dead and the remake and is loaded with the kind of trippy, surreal, freaky setups and sequences of nasty, low budget, direct-to-video era horror that gave genXers nightmares in the early 80s. It’s also the staple style of the creators, the Crum brothers. I’m a fan of their movies, but I have noticed their films have been getting more and more nonsensical, leaving me to just revel in the horrific elements the craft while putting up with the painful deficit in plot and cohesion. I was also disappointed that the cutie Crum brothers, who usually star in their films, stayed behind the camera this time.

The opening scene absolutely sets the tone and draws you in. An adult man in a rundown house is talking to his mother, who we never see…until he opens her bedroom door to see her on fire. Total horror chaos ensues, and for no logical reason, the sequence keeps cutting to clips from the classic Carnival of Souls. I can only assume it’s supposed to be playing on a television somewhere in the house, but we never actually see the TV, so the clips are jarring, distracting, and pointless.

Next, two girls come to the same house, apparently a family house, to meet contractors to fix it up. How they don’t know about the mother and son that were living there is never explained. The contractors show up, tour the house to see what work needs to be done, and find a body. Insanity immediately breaks out.

There’s a demonic female presence just beyond a dark doorway, and characters scatter, coming in and out of the cabin with no rhyme or reason. They also react in the oddest, most unfazed ways to horrific situations—like a demon woman riddled with razors blades giving one girl a gruesome lap dance (awesome) while a guy who could very well help her just sits and watches.

In true Evil Dead fashion, individuals begin getting possessed and going after others, and that horror was all I had to cling to as any other hint of a storyline went out the window. Unfortunately, just when I was willing to let go of all but the visual horror aspects, a talking goldfish puppet came on the scene and absolutely destroyed any credibility Malice had as a horror film. Sigh.

Highlight of the film for me? A fricking blender scene. Eek!

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A horror and humor foursome

Posted on May 9, 2025 by Daniel

An invisible dinosaur, a weredog, zombie bug spray, and Lovecraftian lunacy. Do these four flicks live up to the horror comedy label?

THE INVISIBLE RAPTOR (2023)

With a title like The Invisible Raptor, I kind of assumed the hubby and I were in store for a throwback to SyFy crap like Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus or Piranhaconda. Instead, this is a creature comedy camp fest loaded with gore, guts, and crass, tasteless humor. Its only flaw is that it’s 114 minutes long. Not even something this much fun can support a nearly 2-hour runtime.

We immediately meet the invisible raptor in its cage in a secret lab. You know those raptors. They are smart. And this one outsmarts Sean Astin and escapes.

Next we meet our main characters at a dinosaur park—a paleontologist, his ex-girlfriend, and an insecure security guard with a small dick.

Pretty soon, the invisible raptor is terrorizing the town, breaking into suburban homes and chomping the heads off children, dogs, cats, old ladies, and the disabled. It’s old school offensive fun, with the biggest piece of evidence being a huge pile of invisible raptor shit.

There are loads of references to classic sci-fi and horror flicks, like Predator, Gremlins, Jaws, and of course, Jurassic Park. Action scenes are bloody and funny. There are crazy massacres at a stoner party and a house party. There’s a cameo by Jeff Goldblum’s daughter from Jurassic Park 2. Mr. Heckles from Friends has a cameo and totally delivers a line that is a nod to his sitcom character.

And in the end, sex humor abounds as the heroes decide to use sexual desire to lure the invisible raptor into a trap.

This one is definitely a party movie for those who like flicks like Cocaine Bear.

THE YORKIE WEREWOLF (2024)

I’m not even going to spend much time on this one. You’d think with a title like The Yorkie Werewolf this would be a totally watchable, silly, hot mess. It runs only about 73 minutes long, but it felt like forever because it’s virtually all talk…and no humor.

The plot is about a teenage girl pitted against her mob boss dad after he kills her witch mom. This is only after the mom’s coven does a sacrificial ritual that results in the main girl being cursed as a Yorkie werewolf that looks exactly like an Ewok.

The main girl teams up with a young vampire dude to take on the mob boss dad, who is known for killing creatures of the night and was responsible for killing the vampire’s parents.

Lots of nonsensical goodness going on, right? Wrong. Like I said, it’s mostly all talk with no humor that works, there’s barely any fighting, and there’s barely any Ewok action. I mean…Yorkie werewolf action.

ZOMBIE REPELLANT (2025)

This 73-minute indie has several clever plot aspects—a straight couple heading to Vegas gets stuck in a small town where the locals happen to know that zombies occasionally appear. The problem is that it’s so occasional that the movie ends up being dialogue heavy with few zombies.

The dialogue is where the humor is forced to reside, but it is very dry, flat humor with no energy, and it remains at that level. It’s as if the slow drawl of the locals of the town is reflected in the humor, so you won’t find any laugh-out-loud moments here.

If only there had been more zombie action, this one really could have taken off. The couple arrives in the town, finds lodging in the home of a creepy woman, there’s a cowgirl who likes to kiss girls, a backstory about a mining disaster, a creepy fisherman portrait that is highlighted yet never develops into anything, and a simple solution for contending with the occasional undead—cans of zombie repellent spray! Awesome.

However, we only see zombies mostly in groups of…um…one at a time: 30 minutes in, 45 minutes in, and 57 minutes in. Yikes.

It’s a bummer, because the twist at the end of the film is such a goodie and perfect for a horror comedy.

HOW TO KILL MONSTERS (2023)

Stewart Sparke, the director of The Creature Below and Book of Monsters, is becoming the king of pseudo-Lovecraftian cosmic horror, and How to Kill Monsters lives up to the genre most of all.

It begins at the end, with a monster massacre at a cabin in the woods on Halloween night and only one girl surviving. As a sort of meta in-joke, the final credits begin rolling. In fact, the film has a load of fun with its meta awareness.

After the credits, we jump right back into the movie. It’s still Halloween night, landing this one on the holiday horror page, and our main girl is tossed in jail with a bunch of other girls in costumes. As she tries to explain that she and her friends accidentally summoned a monster with a sacrificial dagger, the dagger is being examined as evidence, and the monster is released again!

We are treated to nonstop practical effects as a monster reminiscent of Audrey II and some Critter-like minions terrorize the police and prisoners in the police station…which ends up getting lifted up into the air in another dimension like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz.

It’s action and humor-packed energy as the group works together to try to send this monster back to hell, and the film takes an awesome detour in the final act, refreshing the whole premise somewhat without cutting back on the thrills and fun.

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An occult drug experiment, a kid-killing mother and son duo, and undead Danny Trejo

Posted on May 5, 2025 by Daniel

This was a fairly fun triple feature I selected from my Tubi watchlist, with movies in a variety of subgenres.

THE RITUAL (2024)

The Ritual is like Flatliners with occult, body horror, and slasher aspects. There are some really good horror elements, but the pacing has issues, the film runs too long, and the plot gets too complex for its own good as it continues to unfold.

The super strong opener shows a shirtless dude in a creepy mask doing some human sacrificing. Delicious.

Then we meet our main girl, who is suffering from PTSD following the death of her father…yet she decides to take the same college class he taught in the same lecture hall in which he died.

She has a teacher who is enthralled by something her father was researching—a drug that is supposed to open users to a gateway to hell.

Somehow, he convinces her to join him and several students in a series of experiments with the drug, despite her being a recovering addict. She also has a hot husband who is a religious fanatic.

They start their secret meetings to try out the drugs. While tripping, the first human Guinea pig that takes the drug sees the main girl’s dead father, who looks like he’s wearing the fakest beard ever. Not sure if it is real, but it just looks so weird…which makes me wonder if mine looks fake, since I currently have like the same style beard.

Naturally, the main girl now wants to try the drug to see her dad once again.

Each student has nightmarish experiences with a creepy masked killer (best sequences in the film). Meanwhile, the main girl begins getting weird breakouts on her face.

Complicating matters, 70 minutes in, the main girl’s mommy issues are introduced, and her husband, who seemed to be just an out-of-touch religious fanatic who was unsupportive of her, steps up to basically become her hero.

A cheesy ghost girl with bad face paint enters the picture, which is a shame, because the creepy mask dude is a much more ominous threat. It all culminates in a confusing denouement complete with another sacrificial ritual scene. Definitely an inconsistent script that couldn’t really decide what it wanted to be.

THE CANDY STORE (2025)

It’s back to basics with this low budget flick, but there are some surprisingly nasty bits. What I really like about this indie is that it’s reminiscent of direct-to-DVD Black horror flicks of the early 2000s like Killjoy and Leprechaun in the Hood.

Kids have been disappearing in a Black suburban community for years, and it’s no secret to viewers who is responsible—a crazy woman and her big goon of a son.

However, the town apparently doesn’t realize how weird that little family is. In fact, it doesn’t even seem like the locals are aware this crazy lady has a son. Instead, her house is considered a candy store, where kids stop regularly to get treats.

They also get eviscerated and eaten in some nasty scenes. This movie pulls no punches when it comes to mutilating kids on screen. Yikes!

The plot is kind of weird. The crazy mother appears to actually be possessed by a demon. There’s a campy scene in which she asks a kid to come in and help her get something off a high shelf, and every time he turns away from her, she gets white demon eyes and begins approaching him menacingly. Pretty funny moment.

As kids keep getting abducted, gutted, and eaten, a detective is on the case, and there’s a confounding moment when the mother of one of the missing boys is finally like, “There’s this crazy candy store bitch I used to live next to as a kid, and the last time I saw my friend years ago, she was going to the candy store and was never seen again, and I know this crazy lady has a psychotic son nobody knows about, and I’m sure they have my son.” Why the hell did she wait this long to point out something that has been so obvious to her since she was a kid?

The final act is the highlight, when basically everyone still alive ends up sneaking into the house of the crazy mother and son. The film suddenly taps into a more atmospheric vibe than it managed to bring for most of its runtime. However, when the movie concluded, I still didn’t understand what was up with the mom and her demon eyes, which was the most compelling part of the movie for me.

SEVEN CEMETERIES (2024)

The director of the whacky and wild Feast movies gives us a film with Danny Trejo in the leading role instead of relegated to a mere horror cameo as he often is these days. The surprising thing here is that for someone responsible for a crass, nasty, gory, action-packed splatterest franchise, the director has toned his style down a lot in recent years.

A drug lord plans to take a ranch from a husband and wife, and part of that plan includes killing the husband immediately. However, it turns out the husband has set it up so Danny Trejo, who is just getting out of prison, will come looking for work at their ranch, so the wife can hire him as her protector.

Danny immediately gets shot up by the local authorities when he arrives at the ranch, but he is whisked away by a witch who has supernatural plans for him. She has him shed blood at cemetery plots to resurrect a dead mini-army to get revenge on the baddies.

The sequence of him gathering up his army is loaded with campy, dark humor, and the first battle with authorities is a blast. However, there are noticeable CGI special effects.

After being set up for over-the-top humor and gore, the film ends up becoming surprisingly low-key and loses focus, turning into what feels like more of a series of vignettes about each undead member having individual encounters with the enemies rather than a team effort to stop the baddies.

Eventually it all leads to another pretty big battle, which basically saves the final act by bringing it back up to the level of the earlier part of the film. Danny Trejo gets the final frame scene, and it’s so perfectly a Danny Trejo moment.

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A hunky killer, a haunted lesbian couple, and hillbilly horror

Posted on May 2, 2025 by Daniel

As a triple feature plucked from my Tubi watchlist, these three indie films actually worked well together in terms of look and feel. As for the level of horror they delivered, it’s a mixed bag.

DEATH’S SONATA (2024)

Landing this one on the stud stalking page, hunky hot director/co-writer Douglas Downing III also plays the hunky hot psycho killer Charles in this low budget slasher that tries to go deeper with its portrait of a serial killer and a commentary on mental illness. However, in the end, it really feels like an unfocused, direct-to-video indie that runs way too long at 103 minutes.

This is the basic premise. Psycho Charles has the grim reaper sitting on his shoulder–actually standing by his side–coaxing him to kill people.

So he does. Lots of people. Nameless, irrelevant people. He just keeps going around killing locals in a rural town while dramatic organ music plays. There’s some nasty gore, but occasionally you see his rubber axe bounce during kills. And although there’s a gritty vibe, there’s no suspense, tension, or scares, especially since the mask doesn’t hide any surprises, because Charles takes it off whenever he’s done killing. But dang does Charles have nice arms to go with that face.

Anyway, the therapist who worked with Charles wants to catch him and help him more since he did such a bang-up job the first time. So…the therapist asks his young male bipolar patient with a drug problem to help him track down Charles. Huh?

It is a bizarre plot idea that takes quite a while to unfold. Meanwhile, there’s a detective that suspects the therapist of being involved in the murders, but like all of the characters here, the detective isn’t well developed. However, Charles’s arms are.

There are a few odd twists in the final act that paint mentally ill people as seriously sick in the head, and then Charles gives us a heavy, philosophical monologue at the end.

Did I mention that Charles the killer is a really hot hunk?

BACK ROAD (2021)

No new ground is broken here, but if nasty, sleazy, gory, low budget backwoods family horror is your comfort fear, this one might just work for you.

It wastes no time in showing you what you’re in for…a dude gets his dick bit off. For reference, this is what it would look like if you followed through when someone told you to eat a dick.

Next, we meet a group of friends heading to a cabin in the woods on 4th of July weekend, which lands this one on the holiday horror page. Although they never get around to celebrating, if I’m not mistaken, one of the members of the hillbilly psycho family they encounter actually has an American flag hat on (that totally tracks these days).

Anyway, the group stops at a gas station, and the muscle goon of the bunch quickly shows himself to be a fucking douchebag (also tracks). He is abusive to a pregnant woman, uses racial and anti-gay slurs excessively, and pretty quickly allows his temper to get the group into an I Know What You Did Last Summer situation.

As soon as they cover up their mess and get to the cabin, the hillbillies come crawling out of the woods to terrorize them. It’s kind of horrible what the group of friends is put through, but they also aren’t painted in the best light, so it’s hard to feel bad for them.

The proceedings are familiar and predictable with no scares or suspense, but a fetus is torn out of a woman and eaten, there’s running and screaming through the woods, there’s a severed head and rape (literally at the same time), a dinner table scene, vomiting, a bear trap, heads blown off by shotguns…you know, the usual.

The dialogue audio volume is very uneven, the blood and gore use practical effects, and the look and tone are very grindhouse, so I do think fans of the subgenre will find something to like about this one.

COMING BACK FOR YOU (2022)

Seriously, this is a lesbian love story with only psychological horror elements, and our main lesbian couple makes for the worst representation for lesbian love ever.

It opens with the couple arguing. One is having a mental breakdown, wielding a knife, and accusing the other of cheating. She leaves the house, and I assume based on the sound effects during the opening credits that she gets into a car accident.

Flash forward two years, and the alleged cheater picks her accuser up from jail! What? I guess it was a really bad car accident.

The couple decides to stay at a summer home to escape it all. Their conversations and bickering are so whiny it makes me glad to be a gay man. Yeesh. Are female-female couples really like this?

We get lesbian strip tease and lesbian romance montages, and the couple gets themselves–would you believe this–into an I Know What You Did Last Summer situation!

Soon, the guilt is eating away at them and haunting them. There’s pill-popping, nightmares of a dead body drenched in red horror light and lurking around the house, and a nosy detective. But mostly, there’s more lesbian whining and bickering.

However, there are some interesting twists from a non-horror perspective because, well, this is mostly not a horror movie at all.

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Killer creatures in the woods

Posted on April 28, 2025 by Daniel

I managed to make it a mostly good movie marathon with the hubby this past weekend when I perused my streaming watchlists for three creature features. Let’s find out where things went slightly wrong.

DARK NATURE (2022)

This is a slow burner, and I was concerned it was going to end up being one of those metaphorical monster movies, but the creature does prove to be real when it’s finally revealed.

After escaping an abusive relationship, a woman goes on a women’s therapy retreat in the wilderness. Oh yeah. This is one of those female empowerment films the woke haters would fume over for being “anti-male”.

Each woman in the group is suffering from past trauma, but there are only hints of what each one experienced in quick flashbacks.

Meanwhile, our main girl begins to have nightmares and visions and becomes convinced her ex has found her and is following them through the wilderness.

There are a few red herring to keep us wondering if there is really a monster, but then the group starts getting peeled away, and eventually, 59 minutes in, we see the creature, and it’s pretty damn gnarly. Is it just me, or does it look like it is female?

The final act delivers monster action and suspense, and there’s even a pretty unexpected twist in the plot that has me second guessing if this actually is a metaphorical monster.

MORTAL GAME (2024)

This one was the highlight of this triple feature for me. The premise is simple, so it goes right for the creature horror and rarely lets up.

A title card explains that there is an island of monsters where hunters go for sport…and never come back.

Next, we meet the latest group of hunters. Upon arriving on the island, they are immediately greeted by skeletons pinned to trees. We learn very little about each character as they set up shop in a house accessible to hunters. Why is this island so accommodating to hunters if it’s known that they never come back? Weird.

19 minutes in, there are flashes of blood and beast as the first hunter to go off on his own gets taken out. Soon after, there’s a wicked good fight with the creature right outside the cabin. The action doesn’t let up after that.

This is one intelligent and sadistic creature. It uses traps to capture victims. It uses a severed head to freak them out by putting it up against windows. It even seems to understand how walkie talkies work and uses them to hunt down victims.

The monster is awesome, there’s blood and nasty gore, there tension and suspense, the film is shot very dark even in daylight scenes to create atmosphere, and the final girl kicks ass.

SCREATURE OF THE LAGOON (2021)

70 minutes long with a title like this? Screature of the lagoon is my nickname whenever I have sex near a body of water, so I had high hopes for creature feature fun, but other than a cheesy good rubber mask and hands, this is an absolute mess and shot so dark you can barely see what’s going on (I brightened my screenshots so you can see what you don’t see when you watch the film).

This creature feature wants really hard to be moody and meaningful, but the plot is impossible to follow and loaded with holes. For instance, we are introduced to a sheriff calling a “tracker” to find a girl missing in the woods. Does he find her? No idea, because we immediately cut to the tracker in his house in a montage set tow mellow, twangy guitar music. He’s cute in a sort of Backstreet Boys way.

Next, the sheriff brings a military man to the home of this tracker to ask him to help them hunt down a creature that escaped a secret military lab after a failed experiment. What? We don’t even know if Roswell really happened and we’re supposed to believe the government would reveal this scandal to a redneck in rural America?

The tracker is teamed up with a handful of other nobodies who would never be told government secrets, and they are all sent to the wilderness location on a submarine. What? And why does everyone actually sound like they’re talking underwater while conversing on this submarine? I give this low budget film credit for attempting to pull off a submarine scene, though.

It’s all downhill from there. These dudes roam the woods, keep splitting up, seem to die at the hands of this creature and then suddenly reappear. At one point, “two months later” flashes across the screen—a time jump that offers no significance to the fact that this whole team is still just walking through the woods hunting this creature that I already thought killed all but the tracker.

Well, at least you get to watch them die all over again.

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A slasher, an alien beehive, and a killer clock

Posted on April 25, 2025 by Daniel

Even if they are not the greatest films, this is another trio of indies that offered some standout moments for me.

THE CLOCK (2024)

If you just need an old school, low budget style movie about a family that buys a haunted object from a tag sale, this is your kind of movie.

It begins by showing us what we’re in for later. Men are carrying a grandfather clock out of a house and onto a priest’s truck. The men suddenly get glowing demon eyes and chase the priest as he drives away and back to his church.

A few years later, a straight couple buys the clock from a church sale. Once they place it in their home, they notice what looks like blood on the face, and we get red clock POV. Awesome.

Strange occurrences begin in the house, but the real star of this movie becomes the self-proclaimed, pervy, straight couple that lives nearby, who even gets a couple of montages of them living their pervy lifestyle, notably dancing at a strip club and taking erotic photographs. Why can’t I have neighbors like that?

Anyway, it seems possession is being passed around to all their neighbors to build an army to get to the clock. Simple, creepy effects and camerawork give this one a particular nostalgic charm as more and more people connected to the main couple get drawn into the possession chaos.

There’s a séance, a Ouija board, a psychic medium, a backstory about the main woman’s mother being into black magic, and eventually some chaotic old school ghostly special effects for the final battle in the couple’s living room. There’s a brief, creepy clip of what I can only assume is the devil, and then suddenly the dust settles and everything seems okay again, and the family has been saved from the evil clock.

The hubby and I were convinced the filmmakers like…left out a scene that actually showed how they defeat the evil. Weird. Even the psychic medium’s reaction when she comes out of her trance is campy.

BE OUR GUESTS (2019)

The trivia section for this movie on IMDb says it all:

“The movie was made as a front for a collection of Z grade musicians associated with the production company. As a result the movie awkwardly cuts between a generic slasher film and a series of poorly made music videos.”

It’s a shame, because aside from a weak script loaded with plot holes, the co-writer/director of this film did a great job of creating solid slasher elements that, unfortunately, get very little screen time due to the endless montages of that music mentioned above.

For over an hour of this 110-minute movie, we watch a bevy of young, undefined characters in montages—boxing, working hospitality, recording music, ballet dancing, getting tattoos, sunbathing, and attending a concert. You can watch the first part of the movie for preliminary storyline until the music montages start, then jump to the 56-minute mark and you’ll get a tightly paced slasher about kids getting knocked off at a bed and breakfast.

Despite two cool killers worn creepy masks and perfectly executed kill scenes, plus some suspenseful chase scenes, the plot is a mess. We first meet parents called to school because not one, but both of their sons have violent tendencies.

15 years later we meet several characters that aren’t really characters. They’re just extras that get knocked off to set the stage for a slasher.


Then we meet a bunch more college kids. Then we get all those music montages. In between, it is established that the two violent kids from the beginning are grown up, wear masks, and kill off people that come to their family’s B&B.

Once we hit that 56-minute mark, the killers start terrorizing the characters we never had a chance to know, so just watch it for the kills, because you won’t care about any of the characters. Too bad the filmmaker wasn’t given a chance to actually make a full-fledged horror film.

Adding to the weirdness of this production, if you watch past the credits, there’s this bizarre scene of a campy drag queen talking directly to the camera about the movie, briefly summarizing the plot and then claiming she didn’t understand it. It’s almost like they plucked an audience member from a screening of the film and said, “Just tell us what you really think about the movie.”

THE BEEHIVE (2023)

The final 20 minutes of this alien movie serve as a sign of what a suspenseful sci-fi/horror movie it could have been if it had delivered on more of that level of suspense—and more of the monster, which we only get about three glimpses of.

So much of what happens here that fills the first hour of the film feels like incomplete thoughts. A young girl lives with her father and her older brother in their rural house. She is interested in bees. She finds what she thinks is a beehive attached to a tree in the woods.

Their mother died, but we never find out how—or why it seems like it’s taboo for anyone in the family to speak about it.

The father discovers the city is trying to take over part of his property. We don’t know why, but in the end, it seems like it’s just an excuse to have a city worker’s body part turn up.

There’s a very weird scene of a friend putting his arm around the brother, and the brother looks at him like it doesn’t feel right, but there’s no explanation for or exploration of this incident. So why was it made so obvious?

Bees keep turning up everywhere, and it’s almost like they hold some significance. Only…they don’t.

The aunt of the kids believes aliens are coming after reports of weird lights in the sky, yet despite seeming to know more than she’s letting on, she doesn’t play any major role in the end.

There is a nasty scene of people eating lobster at a picnic. The sights, the sounds…I could almost smell it, and I wanted to hurl. I only mention it because it was so gross.

When anyone touches the hive, it oozes slimy goo and appears to do something to them. At first I thought maybe it was going to turn them into creatures, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Finally, we get the could-have-been part of the movie, a short sequence of intense monster thrills that deserved to play a larger part in the film. It’s not exactly a giant bee, but it does look like some sort of bug larva.

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Attack of the killer Bs

Posted on April 22, 2025 by Daniel

In what turned out to be a sort of throwback to the horror of the early years following the turn of the millennium, my latest triple feature included ghosts, a syringe-wielding killer, and a fishman.

THE LAST INN (2021)

I’m pretty convinced all the actors in this film had to go back and dub in their dialogue for whatever reason, because even though the words match the lip movement, it looks and feels very disconnected.

That weirdness just adds to the hokey vibe of the whole thing. More than a horror movie, this comes across like a too-long episode of some sort of cheap horror anthology show you would see on television in the 80s. We have blue-faced ghosts that look almost as ridiculous as the zombies in the original Dawn of the Dead, and the most oddly 2-dimensional, cartoonish looking computer-generated effects, including visuals like a person falling to the floor and being dragged under a bed. That one made me giggle.

Anyway, our main girl has a car accident, comes to a nearly empty hotel, and immediately seems to step into a different dimension of reality where the owners and the few guests walk around as if in a fantasy land. There are ghosts everywhere, but no one seems to be all that intimidated by them. I think the bad dubbing has a lot to do with the lack of emoting.

There’s also a ghost doll terrorizing the main characters, which include the main girl, one straight couple, and one young dude, who is a sort of love interest for the main girl.

The owners of the hotel act weird, everyone thinks everything is weird, yet they just keep going around exploring the place in the dark with flashlights. There’s no sense of reality to anything that happens, so it makes the big twist ending not surprising at all, especially since it’s a twist that quickly became a cliché for ghost movies about 25 years ago. There is, however, one sub-twist within the larger picture that’s kind of clever.

NEEDLESTICK (2017)

This one gave me that nostalgic, direct-to-DVD vibe from the early 2000s, has Lance Henriksen for that direct to SyFy network feel, and features a menacing guy in a hospital murdering people with a syringe for that old school slasher feel.

It also has a lot of melodrama between hospital staff members, from relationships to ladder climbing ambitions. And then there’s the “mystery” of what kind of unethical experiments Lance is doing on dying patients, and why this killer seems to have come back to life to jab people.

The main weapon being a syringe might not be the most exciting, but it does make for one nasty eyeball scene. Eek!

There’s an interesting twist in how the killer is used to the advantage of the survivors, and there’s even a big bomb threat finale. Other than that, it’s fairly generic yet totally watchable if you’re in the mood for a throwback to the 2001 – 2007 era of B horror.

THE RED TIDE MASSACRE (2022)

This was the perfect SyFy level creature feature for me to watch with the hubby. It’s so simple and so satisfying, with a crazy body count.

A natural disaster has struck Florida, leaking contamination into the water, and for some inexplicable reason, allowing for the escape of a cop killer convict. Unfortunately, he needs to wade through water to get away, and he quite quickly begins turning into a modern day Creature from the Black Lagoon…or the fishman from my gay horror novel Rise of the Thing Down Below. He’s the perfect specimen of a man in a rubber suit.

Meanwhile, Michael Pare is the local sheriff determined to get this guy, his son works at the beach, and a female reporter is investigating the murders that start piling up.

There’s also a local dude convinced that the skunk ape is to blame. How is it that I never heard of this Floridian urban legend until the past few months when I covered a movie about him, and now he’s mentioned again?

Anyway, that is all the plot you need. The first kill comes a short 18 minutes in as the convict begins fully transforming into the creature for the first part of the movie, hacking up people left and right along the way. The final, primitive battle between our heroes and the creature on a dark road at night is awesome, and the cheesy “where are they now?” segment about each character at the end is icing on the cake of this popcorn movie.

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Celebrating Halloween, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day the horror way

Posted on April 21, 2025 by Daniel

It’s a smorgasbord of four flicks to add to the complete holiday horror page, so let’s get right into them.

PUMPKINHOLE (2022)

When I told my hubby I was watching Pumpkinhole, he said, “You already did that on your book cover”. Okay, maybe he didn’t remember the name of my book is Wet Screams, but the cover art has definitely made a lasting impression on him…due to awe or embarrassment. I’m not sure which.

Anyway, there is no literal “pumpkinhole” in the movie, although the main character does mention going into the pumpkinhole once. No, I didn’t understand what it meant, but it was hot hearing him say it.

This is more trauma porn than horror, but there are definitely some haunting visuals and sequences, and even flashes of gore. Also, Halloween is crucial to the plot and adds to the very moody, gloomy tone and atmosphere of the film.

It’s actually a tragic story about a broken man suffering from the trauma of having run over a trick or treater a year ago while drunk and then choosing not to report it. But I felt like the film goes deeper than that and is more like an allegory about failing to achieve what you wanted in life, even if it was just the simple yearning for a wife and child.

Our main man’s existence is sad and lonely. He kind of stalks the grieving mother of the child he killed out of guilt, which gets very uncomfortable and awkward. He is plagued by visions and nightmares. He sees a lone pumpkin floating around wherever he goes, he is haunted by the dead trick or treater, and even Halloween candy infiltrates his delusions.

He tries in various ways to face his demons as Halloween draws near once again, including confession at church, a tarot reading, and attempts at supporting the grieving mother.

There’s a flashback to the night of the accident, and it sort of doesn’t make sense. He struck the little trick or treater with his vehicle in a desolate tunnel. Why was a little boy in costume in a tunnel at night on Halloween? Or did that incident even really happen, or is it part of an alternate reality that mirrors the longing for and loss of something our main man never had?

Regardless, the tunnel scene is quite disturbing and comes full circle in a dark twist at the end of the movie. Like I said, it’s not totally horror. However, it’s conclusion is totally horrific.

ELF IN THE HOOD (2024)

This 75-minute killer doll flick gives off a major Full Moon films vibe circa the turn of the millennium. It’s Christmas Eve, and there are plenty of holiday lights at the house in which the events take place, but the killer elf doll is not a dedicated Christmas elf. Blah. It’s just a foul-mouthed, possessed doll from the ghetto that likes to drop the n word. Leprechaun had more fun in the hood than this little twerp.

The highlight here is really the super nasty, practical effects gore during kill scenes. The story is kind of abysmal.

A couple struggling to make ends meet scores a doll that is apparently worth some money. When they bring it to the home of a woman who wants to buy it, they are all targeted by the doll after it comes to life.

The buyer tells a backstory about the demon in the doll, which is called Ju-Ju. The actress playing the buyer seems to stumble over almost every single line of dialogue, often pausing as if trying to remember the next word. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m still not sure if it was accidental or an acting choice.

Plenty of other people pass through the plot just so the doll can drop some one-liners and deliver some dastardly death scenes, but the doll itself is totally uninspired and forgettable. It also appears to be CGIed into shots, so it looks like it’s just floating there. Not exactly a standout (or stand up) killer doll.

The film really starts to drag when the main characters make a plan to stop the doll and then begin hunting it through the house, and the final scene is accompanied by goofy, whimsical music—very Full Moon.

ADVENT (2024)

The director of Werewolf Santa is back with more Christmas horror. This time he takes on Krampus…sort of.

I really like the premise of this movie and the folklore backstory that goes with it, which is told mostly through interspersed clips of an “expert” on the subject who is sitting in atmospheric horror lighting as he’s interviewed.

The main story is about a young woman who lost her mother, is living with her alcoholic father, and has a YouTube channel on which she and a friend tackle urban legends and paranormal phenomenon—Bloody Mary, Ouija boards, etc.

She becomes obsessed with a Krampus advent calendar. She purchases one, and she and her friend begin filming their experience as they open one door on the tree-shaped calendar each day leading up to Christmas.

Behind each door is a challenge, and the goal is to do the challenge each day to eventually summon Krampus on Christmas Day. At first, the challenges are fairly simple, such as circling the Christmas tree backwards or mailing a bunch of envelopes to Krampus. Much of the running time is filled with these challenges, which the friends film around the house.

Halfway through this 75-minute movie, the challenges turn dark, which is when things get creepy. You would think when the main girl reaches a challenge in which she has to kill an animal she’d call it quits. For the sake of the movie, she doesn’t—she’s probably kind of possessed by the paranormal experience at this point. For our sake, we don’t see animal murder. It’s a blocked shot of her injecting a hamster.

The movie has some eerie moments, like one where there’s a woman’s head just poking around a corner while drunken dad is in Blair Witch position, and another involving an under the bed scare. Also, the escalation of the challenges adds some good tension, but in the end, do not expect to see Krampus. This is essentially a low budget found footage film with a rather tidy, offscreen climax.

HEART EYES (2025)

This is the biggie in the bunch—made it to theaters, stars horror hunks Mason Gooding and Devon Sawa, plus Olivia Holt of Totally Killer, and features a soundtrack of familiar pop hits, including Lonestar’s “Amazed”, “Please Don’t Go” by KC & the Sunshine Band, and The Supremes’ classic “You Can’t Hurry Love”.

She’s all of us right now…

It also happens to be the perfect balance of horror comedy, horror romance, and slasher, with some really fresh takes on the genre. Plus, Heart Eyes has an awesome mask and is a vicious killer.

After a gruesome opening sequence at a vineyard that starts things strong with four kills, we meet our main characters.

Olivia works at a jewelry business that is suffering losses because of the Valentine’s killer Heart Eyes, who appears to be targeting loving couples. Mason’s character is brought in to help do damage control. When he and Olivia join up for a work dinner, things quickly spiral out of control.

The pair is interrupted by Heart Eyes. They end up spending the rest of the movie being chased by the killer in various locations—drive-in theater, police station, a church—leaving a whole trail of dead bodies along the way.

The humor is perfectly understated, the chemistry between the leads is fire, Mason Gooding is more adorable than ever, Heart Eyes knows how to execute a kill, and the drive-in massacre sequence rocks. The big denouement even makes a statement about what constitutes a romantic relationship. Heart Eyes is a welcome addition to the yearly marathon of Valentine’s Day horror movies.

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Low-tech scares…going back to basics by dabbling in the occult

Posted on April 17, 2025 by Daniel

Cults, the occult, and a witch? Sign me up! But…did I get what I signed up for with this trio of selections from Tubi that rely on simple incantations, rituals, and sacrifices? Let’s find out.

EVERWINTER NIGHT (2023)

With a 105-minute runtime, this one could be considered a “slow burn”, but the burn isn’t hot. There’s no sense of dread or suspense as we move towards the sudden amplification of action in the final act.

As if to remind us this will eventually be a horror movie, there’s a brief opening in which a couple on a road trip stops at a lodge for directions, and it’s implied that something sinister happens. It’s really not a necessary scene other than the promise it establishes of terror at this lodge.

That was 30 years ago, which would have been the 1990s. I’ll never get over the act that there we were in 1978 thinking that it was the olden days when Michael Myers killed his sister in 1963. Sigh.

Next, our modern day main girl meets up with her friend to hang for the weekend. However, her friend invites two other girls, and those two girls have met some guys who invited them to a winter lodge, and so on, and so on, and so on…. Anyway, our main girl, who just wanted a weekend with her one friend, is dragged into a big party.

Turns out this party is some sort of mystery celebration being thrown by a bunch of young men. There are masks, partying, drinking, and lots of talk and character interactions. Following that, very slowly, all the girls at the lodge begin acting…different.

Eventually, like way, way into the movie, our main girl starts to notice there’s something very Stepford Wives about these girls all of a sudden. There’s some sort of man cult, there’s a sacrifice ritual, there’s an entity that you barely see because it’s obscured by strobe light effects, and then there’s some possession for a battle to the death. It’s an entertaining enough climax, it just takes a long time to get there.

When he’s so big it feels like it goes right through you

THE BOOK OF THE WITCH (2024)

 

Eureka! It’s a short, simple, atmospheric witch movie with a classic scary witch, pointed hat and all. So simple yet so effective.

The opening alone sets the tone. Much like the trick or treaters silhouette in Halloween III, we see a witch grunting and struggling to drag a body along the ground with a fiery sun set as a backdrop. We get to see what she does with the body, and then we jump to our main characters.

There are two security guards, a man and a woman, working the night shift in a building, patrolling the creepiest areas drenched in red light. There’s something very Last Shift about this segment of the movie, with the bonus of some fantastic witch action.

For reasons that aren’t clarified initially, the female security guard is tracking the witch like a detective investigating a serial killer. When she pinpoints the witch’s home, she heads into the California desert to break into it, and then we discover what her plan is.

She is afraid of her own mortality due to the death of her mother, and she believes the witch uses a book of spells to cheat death. So…she steals the witch’s book!

It’s like Hocus Pocus goes full-on horror. Pretty soon, the female security guard is being terrorized by the witch and the ghost of her own mother. I’m telling you, this is straightforward, witchy fun with a dark twist.

THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT (2022)

Folk horror usually bores me to tears, and even much of this film ran a little long and slow for my tastes, but at about 45 minutes in the folk horror aspects merge with home invasion and revenge flick elements loaded with blood and action, giving me the jolt of excitement I need to keep my attention.

After a man’s wife dies in a car accident, his sister comes to stay with him at his rural home. While out hunting, he finds a hole in the ground, complete with Blair Witch sticks and all.

His neighbor tells him natives used to discard of criminals and evildoers down there before settlers turned it into a holy grail of some sort.

Pretty soon, the main guy and his sister are experiencing strange occurrences in the house, including figures lurking around corners.

Once the sister witnesses a cult sacrificial ritual in the woods, things finally take off. There’s home invasion, abduction, rape, and a surprisingly underwhelming drop down into the hole, which I would have expected to be the big shocker reveal of the film instead.

From there, it becomes a revenge hunt by the brother and sister, where things get super violent and gory, with male nudity and eventually demon eyes.

That pretty much checks off all my boxes, so I was totally invested in the second half of what is otherwise pretty familiar horror territory.

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