When a doll, puppets, and an AI robot come to life.

Posted on October 19, 2026 by Daniel

It’s a trio of flicks about non-human objects with murderous minds. I found only one of them fun, but which one and why? Let’s find out.

DOLLFACE: THE MOTION PICTURE (2026)


With a monumental title ending in “The Motion Picture”, either this movie didn’t know what it wanted to be or I didn’t understand what it was trying to be. IMDb lists it as a comedy/ horror. If it’s supposed to be funny, the humor is so subtle that it just feels awkwardly serious. If it’s trying to lean into the campiness of an off-screen crew member manipulating a “killer” doll and actors pretending to grapple with the doll when it attacks, it misses the mark there, too. Those scenes aren’t over-the-top enough, and again, the vibe around the scenes feels serious. It’s like no one is in on the joke.

The movie is mostly bland and meandering with dull characters and no energy. In the opener, it’s established that a dude’s fiancée has this doll that creeps him out. Then the intro credits roll, it’s 3 months later, and the fiancée is dead. Say what now? This movie clearly isn’t about what happened to her, it’s about the dude being out of sorts since she’s gone.

A straight couple the dude is friends with tries to break him out of his funk. They go to a witchy woman at a bookstore and do a ritual.

The doll comes to life. A few people die with no blood or gore.

The dude and friends hide a dead body from nosy characters. They eventually seek more help from the witch and get chased around the house by the doll as they try to vanquish her.

The most interesting part of this movie is in the last minute, when an unexpected guest shows up at the door. The end credits roll, and we’re left imagining what happens next.

THE FUZZIES (2025)



This movie felt like it was going to be such a bust, but by the end I was totally feeling the simplicity of it, mostly because it had a dark vibe and classic stop-motion special effects that modern horror audiences will most likely hate. In fact, it often felt like nods to sequences from the original Evil Dead, and that’s my horror hot spot.

A children’s entertainer dies and in her will she leaves her cabin and possessions to three childhood friends. The catch? They have to come to the cabin and find her missing puppet.

The trio of friends, a guy and two girls, enters a house that looks like a box of Crayola puked all over it. There’s a party montage. They sit around and talk. They recall a mean-spirited situation involving their dead friend when they were kids. Uh-oh.

The weirdness begins when the guy snorts coke in the bathroom. This kicks off trippy stop-motion sequences, and these puppets are as scary as they are silly.

Once it begins, the acid trip this turns into never ends. There’s a hallway of glass cases displaying puppets, there’s a nightmare sequence, there’s a bizarre scene of a tortured puppet in the woods, the puppets escape the glass cases, and there’s a fantastic, freaky under the stairs scene.

There’s also a lesson to be learned for horror amateurs; if you see the puppet you’ve been looking for sitting in a room on a chair with its back to you, stop looking for the puppet.

LOVELY A.I. – L.A.I. (2026)



The audio levels are all over the place on this indie, which really does it a disservice, as does some of the odd, choppy editing choices that seem to be attempting to create a sense of tension and cheap scares but fail to do either.

This is generally a take on the M3GAN concept with an all-Black cast. After an opening montage of various women being terrorized by a young girl calling them mommy, we meet the main family—husband, wife, son, daughter. There’s some backstory to why they are moving into a new house, but it doesn’t add much to the plot.

The dad works for an AI company, and his enthusiasm for the way it has been implemented throughout their new house is charming. His bod could charm the pants off me as well.

Soon, the daughter finds the AI girl, who is just an actual girl with no type of makeup to give her the appearance of being man-made, in her closet. The AI girl becomes the daughter’s friend.

It’s no surprise that the doll begins to turn on people. What is a little surprising is that there are no intense kills, no gore, and no suspense. The family is eventually trapped in the house with the AI doll and the pacing plummets even more. The AI doll does get a fairly interesting backstory of her own, but, overall, this just isn’t a compelling killer technology movie.

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BOUGHT ON BLU: 80s Euro horror and a gay possession flick

Posted on October 2, 2026 by Daniel

This was a triple feature of blind buys for me, so let’s find out if I should have opened my eyes before handing over my money.

THE MURDER SECRET (1988)



This Italian horror flick is a hybrid of supernatural horror, mystery, and slasher, and it reminded me of Lamberto Bava’s Macabre, just that the twisted part is withheld until the end. It is also filled with that awful, cheesy type of music that plagued Euro horror in the 80s and totally clashed with the horror vibe.

A man brings his wife and kids to visit his aunt, but when they arrive at her house, she’s not there. The caretaker says she’ll be arriving soon. So, the family settles in, and we sit around waiting for something to happen beyond some mysterious phone calls and the teen daughter hearing voices.

42 minutes in, someone is finally murdered.

We get some flashbacks to the father’s past when he was a child, including his mother’s tragic death, but the mystery here is just not very compelling.

56 minutes in we finally get some major slashing, beginning with a Psycho-esque shower scene. Soon after, heads start flying as people are decapitated. The deaths come one after another with no suspense or atmosphere. However, they deliver on the blood.

Finally, the truth of what’s going on comes out. It involves a rotting corpse, a fist fight that goes on forever, and a sudden twist that feels really out of place but would become a horror trope a few decades later.

BLOODY PSYCHO (1989)



This Italian supernatural slasher is about a corpse ghost in a wheelchair killing a bunch of sexually charged weirdos in a castle. So European.

Do the details even matter? Is it worth trying to decipher the bizarre plot twists? Of course not. It’s 80s Euro horror. You just go with it for the gore and sleazy sex.

A hands-on healer dude who also has psychic powers comes to a castle to help a woman in a wheelchair. This bitch treats her maid like a slave…who also happens to be her lover.

The woman also has a journalist friend who helps the healer investigate the castle’s haunted past, which he knows about thanks mostly to his psychic visions. He sees some pretty crazy shit, including a walking doll and a corpse in a wheelchair.

He begins poking into the past of the family that lived in the castle. He talks to a priest, a lawyer, a drunk…fun times. Especially when everyone who spills family secrets begins getting killed by the wheelchair corpse.

Macabre scenes, creepy castle atmosphere, and grisly gore aside, this is the usual hokey Euro horror trash, with a bad, jazzy 80s score, bizarre filler, like making us sit through watching a woman ride horseback before agreeing to meet with the healer, and silly edits, like the same moment of the wheelchair corpse crashing through a window presented three times in a row at different angles. In my opinion, it’s a perfect edition to my extensive collection of 80s horror.

LEVITICUS (2026)

The title tells you what you’re in for with this one that lands on the homo horror movies page—a gay horror flick based on religious abuse. In this case, despite it being gay trauma porn to some extent, I really liked the general premise. However, since the main character is experiencing a serious sense of isolation in a small town he’s just moved to, he’s pretty much the only target of the very It Follows entity that has possessed his love interest.

So, this town is very religious, to the level of cultish. The main kid becomes intimately entangled with another boy (no sex scenes though) and then witnesses that boy being exorcised of his lustful demons in church. It’s a total metaphor for conversion therapy obviously, but what’s clever is that only after the love interest is cleansed of his homosexual tendencies does he seem possessed.

Actually, it’s like a doppelgänger of the kid, and it begins to terrorize the main boy. He never really knows when it’s the real boy or the demon chasing him.

There are some creepy and suspenseful scenes of the main guy encountering the demon, but since it’s just him against the world, he has no one to drag into his problems. The movie really feels underdeveloped in that sense, or perhaps just too long due to the limitations of the story it is telling.

The finale definitely intensifies, and surprisingly, there’s a nice, neat, anticlimactic conclusion. Gays usually don’t get those types of endings, so that’s refreshing.

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I had a foursome with Bigfoot, Yeti, and a snow demon

Posted on September 22, 2026 by Daniel

It’s a movie marathon featuring hairy beasts, so let’s get right to them.

THE YETI (2026)

 

This one starts strong. It’s the mid-1900s, there’s a family in a cabin in the wintery woods, and a dude gets yanked up through the ceiling in a bloody splash. Awesome.

You’ll have to cling to that feeling, because this is a slooooow movie with a bland plot, only a few juicy kills, and not much in the way of seeing the actual Yeti.

After 2 men disappear in Alaska, a crew, including family members, goes out into the wintery wilderness to search for them.

There’s some offscreen screaming and killing, not much in the way of interesting characters, and eventually those gory kills, which are the highlight of the film.

We also get a backstory that leads to some of the characters being used as bait, but it’s just so cliché that it’s not very compelling. And as for the Yeti, we get one good look at his face closer to the end of the movie.

THE BIGFOOT EXPERIMENT (2026)



Just to get this out of the way, Bigfoot in this movie is presented in a combination of what looks like an AI King Kong design and a dude in a really bad gorilla suit.

The plot is about a bunch of content creators going to explore an abandoned facility where experiments once took place.

We get an early attack of a dude in the woods at night after his bicycle breaks down…like 20 feet from a home with its lights on. Meanwhile, he’s panicking because he can’t get good service on his phone to call for help. Either movies are reflecting how no one has any social skills anymore and don’t have the sense to just go ask someone for help…or the fact that people realize these days that if you walk up to a stranger’s house and ring the doorbell, they are likely to shoot you.

Anyway, not much happens for a good chunk of the movie. We eventually learn the guide witnessed some sort of attack on a previous tour, and finally 41 minutes in, they actually enter the facility. I’m not even kidding.

The attacks begin 47 minutes into this 83-minute movie, and along with the gorilla costume, there are plastic body parts. It’s basically something you would have watched on SyFy like 20 years ago, so if that’s the nostalgia trip you want to go on, check it out.

SAWTOOTH MOUNTAIN (2026)



This disappointing movie is really not an actual Bigfoot movie, yet it has a totally satisfying conclusion that lasts for about five seconds.

A gay and two girls go to a cabin in the woods for a Bigfoot sighting tour run by two crazy brothers, landing this one on the does the gay guy die? page.

There’s a partying dance montage with the cute gay guy getting shirtless, but he’s a gay guy of color, so inevitably…

The trio is taken on a tour of the woods by one of the brothers, and the main girl takes lots of photos during the hike. And then…this turns into a movie about the two crazy brothers trying to destroy some evidence of wrongdoing that they didn’t want caught on camera.

Any deaths all happen at the hands of the brothers, including the targeting of police that show up. I know seeing dead bodies and panicking can alter a person’s perception in the heat of the moment, but at one point I found it hard to believe that a character couldn’t tell that Bigfoot was just a guy in a costume.

However, when the main girl comes face-to-face with one of the brothers in the woods and they begin basically growling at each other, the movie concludes with a scene that could have come earlier in the story and triggered a bunch of actual Bigfoot attacks.

THE SNOW DEMON (2026)



This is a basic but fun creature feature with practical effects and some sleek and sharp visuals that give the monster moments a fantastical feel. As for the “snow demon”, it’s basically a werewolf and looks like one of those cool werewolf costumes from 80s horror.

The disconnect for me is the odd opener, which has a man sitting in a study introducing the movie like he’s reading from a storybook. It doesn’t really fit the tone of the rest of the movie.

Next, we see a girl get attacked by the snow demon in the woods. The monster generally claws at victims like a cat going at its scratcher, then bites their throats. Awesome.

Next, we meet the dead girl’s friends. Her body was never recovered, so they come to a cabin in the woods to honor her. Also in the woods is a folklorist interested in the legend that he believes got to her.

It also gets to him…first.

After that, the movie does a pretty good job of keeping up the pace, with plenty of attacks. While they are generally all the same, there are two gruesome ones, including the monster slowly tearing its claws down a victim’s back and another victim’s head being bashed against a counter edge repeatedly.

And the final girl doesn’t fuck around. She goes after this big monster with a knife! Awesome.

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The horrors of Oz and Hansel and Gretel

Posted on September 18, 2026 by Daniel

Two more children’s stories get the horror treatment, and they’ve both been done before…more than once. So, did these latest adaptations deliver? Let’s find out.

WICKED OF OZ (2026)



This take on The Wizard of Oz is campy and cheesy yet also dark and gory. It might not be for everyone due to its low-budget vibe, but for me, it’s what a wacky rewrite should be. Not to mention, if you’ve ever read the original novel, it’s pretty frightening at times.

This one takes its cue from the classic 1939 movie. Dorothy, a white girl, lives with her Aunt Gale. White Dorothy’s best friend is Toto…a Black girl. Um…yeah. Her dog is now represented by a Black girl.

The twister comes, and Dorothy and Toto are dropped into what appears to be a field or forest that could easily be in her own backyard. Just go with it. They see the glass slippers on the feet of the Wicked Witch of the East, then they meet Glinda, who is one crazy bitch.

And because Toto is not a dog but a Black person…well, you can guess what Toto’s fate is in a horror movie.

This next bit of news is a disappointment. There’s no Wicked Witch of the West! I was hoping she’d at least show up as a final boss, but it doesn’t happen. Instead, the Wizard is the one who wants Dorothy dead. And he’s this frustrated incel. His “munchkins” are just men in robes and metal masks. I guess it was hard to find a load of little people to play munchkin monsters in an indie production.

Here’s the cool part. Dorothy’s traditional storyline friends deliver the actual horror here—Scarecrow, Tinman, and the Cowardly Lion. Awesome.

To me, this is by far the best aspect of the film. They are all vicious and bloodthirsty. Not to mention, the lion is a shirtless hunk wearing a simple masquerade ball mask.

My only complaint is that this trio should have been the focus, terrorizing Dorothy for the whole film as she tries to make her way home. Instead, the final act focuses on Dorothy and Glinda working together to take down Oz and his minions. It becomes a bit too goofy at this point, especially after all the hopes I had for some serious horror upon meeting Dorothy’s “friends”.

WIZARD OF DEATH: TINMAN’S RISE (2026)



I’m back in Oz. Sort of. This one is more like Wrong Turn with the Tinman…and without the gory, suspenseful awesomeness that is Wrong Turn.

This one simply goes nowhere, and the presence of any elements of Oz are just confusing…including the Tinman. Although, by the end of the film, he does seem to have some connection to Dorothy. Yes, it’s a movie with heart.

After an unrelated opening kill scene with two victims, we meet Dorothy and her family. They go to a cabin in the woods. We then see another two random people killed.

Then it’s back to Dorothy and crew. They go hiking. They see a “yellow brick road” that’s just some random yellow bricks strewn throughout the forest. It leads them to the Tinman’s lair.

They get stuck in there for a good portion of the movie and spend most of the time trying to figure out how to distract the Tinman to escape. They finally do…and then spend a good portion of the movie trying to figure out how to distract the Tinman so they can get out of the forest. Sigh.

There just wasn’t much here to scratch my chronic horror itch.

HANSEL & GRETEL’S HALLOWEEN (2026)



This begins as a fun Halloween spin on the classic story, which makes perfect sense based on the themes of the source material, landing it on the holiday horror page. It begins with the witch being burned in her cottage and cursing the kids as they escape.

In modern times, we meet another Hansel and Gretel sibling duo (like anyone would give their kids those names these days). The siblings live in a town plagued by disappearances of kids under 16 on Halloween, so there’s a rule—only those over 16 can trick or treat. That’s the exact older, costume-free age range that crabby old folk in real life refuse to give candy to.

Anyway, H&G and their friends decide to sneak out and trick or treat, and they don’t even try to score some fake ID first. It sure does feel like Halloween is a load of fun without little kids running around. The Halloween vibe is off the charts, so I had high hopes.

Even when they unknowingly reach the witch’s house, it’s all pimped out for the holiday. Awesome.

The witch appears to be a younger woman, so the kids are lured into her house pretty easily. And then…

The movie loses its charm. It becomes a very generic, repetitive witch movie. The kids can’t find their way out of the maze-like house, they get separated, and then the witch begins tempting them with treats. But first, she spends much of the movie appearing to them, saying “you’re not ready”, and then leaving them alone. WTF? Way to pad a movie.

When she finally does reveal what it is she wants from them, it’s pretty awesome. She feeds them treats and then they turn into chocolate and melt so she can then digest them and gain youth. Although, we never really get to see her as a hideous old hag. She does cackle like a classic witch, so that’s fun.

Despite the cool concept of the chocolate mutations, the movie simply isn’t very thrilling. The pace is slow, the witch isn’t very menacing, and the final fight is anticlimactic. However, the final scene feels like a live action version of something out of Monster House, and it’s fricking awesome.

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Kicking off the 2026 holiday season

Posted on September 4, 2026 by Daniel

It’s a trio of films that takes us from Halloween to Christmas and ends with New Year’s Eve, and all three score spots on the holiday horror page. Let’s see if they capture the spirit of each season.

CURSE OF CROM 2 (2026)



I’m a big fan of the first movie, so I was stoked to come back for more. While this sequel also takes place at Halloween time, it doesn’t quite deliver on the holiday vibe. I was disappointed that the October festivities are mostly an afterthought.

Also, while much of the same cast returns to fight Crom once again, the film attempts to avoid being a cookie cutter version of the first film, but in doing so, it becomes a little messy and goes on for too long, running an hour and 42 minutes long.

The original main girl returns home from college, and before long, she gets pulled into her bedroom closet like Carol Anne in Poltergeist.

Her stepdad calls in her friends to help him go rescue her. But how did Crom even come back? Turns out there are other portals through which he can pass. There are also new critters that look like something out of an 80s movie.

And the portal the main group needs to seal? It’s in Ireland! Say what? That’s definitely where this one loses the smalltown charm that the first film delivered while also leaving its Halloween roots behind to head overseas. Bummer. At least there’s a part where they use a jack-o’-lantern to repel the monsters.

It is great to see the cast back, there’s humor, and there are some fun encounters with Crom, but he’s lost the mystique and creepiness he had in the first film.

In the end, the movie leaves room for third film.

THE GREEN MONSTER (2026)



I think this is supposed to be another horror take on the Grinch, but you’re much better off sticking with The Mean One, which does a great job of giving constant sly nods to the source material without being able to reference it directly due to rights issues.

Other than having plenty of Christmas spirit, a creature in an old school monster suit, and gory kills, The Green Monster feels cheap and low budget, and the plot is a mess.

A year after a man is killed by the monster in a house in the woods, we learn more about the monster legend, first from two true crime podcasters. They die first. Then we mostly get a series of random people entering the woods and being killed.

The movie finally settles into the house the guy at the beginning was killed in, which is now being turned into an inn by his daughter. She welcomes in some guests that need a place to stay even though she isn’t officially open yet.

We learn more about her father and the monster, which shows up to start killing off everyone at the inn, integrating Christmas staples into his arsenal.

There’s no suspense or scares, the monster is goofy, not frightening, and the surprises at the end lead to a bland climax.

Y2K (2024)



In the tradition of movies like Maximum Overdrive and Chopping Mall, it’s the Y2K paranoia re-imagined as a New Year’s Eve sci-fi horror flick, and it’s loaded with late 90s nostalgia (Tae Bo, a video store, IMs, a CD drive), plus a soundtrack that includes Fatboy Slim, Chumbawamba, Edwin McCain, Sisqo, Harvey Danger, Mandy Moore, ATB, Korn, Freak Nasty, Brian McKnight, Semisonic, and Aaliyah.

The cast includes a cameo by Alicia Silverstone, Rachel Zegler as the main girl, an appearance by The Kid Laroi, and Mason Gooding in a minor role.

The opener makes you sad that technology advanced so quickly in the years following 1999, so we didn’t get to relish any of it for long before it went extinct.

Our main guy and his buddy go to a New Year’s Eve party at a house that’s still decorated for Christmas, as houses should be in New Year’s Eve movies. When midnight strikes, all hell breaks loose and electronics start killing everyone. A toy car sets a dude on fire, an electric razor attacks a dude, there’s death by a Varsity Blues video tape, there’s a dick in a blender, planes crash, the whole town is turned to smoldering ashes quickly…

And then the vibe of the film changes. The group of friends leaves the party and tries to figure out how they’re going to survive. They are also chased by a robot with a computer monitor as a head, which feels quite silly, although it does make for a funny fight scene. Yes, this film has plenty of humor.

It’s also anticlimactic. The friends encounter Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit playing himself, they end up at another Y2K party, Fred performs “Faith”, and the main kids pretty easily conquer the computer program that plans to destroy the world. The final act of this movie simply doesn’t live up to what the first act promises.

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A trio of movies with creepy supernatural creatures

Posted on August 31, 2026 by Daniel

While the movies from my latest marathon may have issues, the creatures in all three were quite satisfying. Let’s find out where the films fell short.

THE DAEMON (2024)



I watched this one simply because the title intrigued me. The movie itself tries to be intriguing as well, but despite very few characters having plenty of time to develop, it just felt like something was missing during all the time that nothing was happening.

It does begin with a bloody opener that signals the death of a main character’s father.

The father apparently committed suicide, but his body hasn’t been found. Huh? Anyway, the main guy skips town to go to the cottage where his father was dabbling in something sinister and committed a disappearing suicide act.

The main guy’s wife decides to go after him and gets her brother and sister-in-law to come along for the ride.

The main guy isn’t thrilled to see them when they arrive, but he’s also a bit preoccupied by visions of people he loves being dragged out to sea while a cosmic creature hovers in the sky above the water. Quite eerie and totally Lovecraftian.

The others begin having have some delusions and nightmares, including a weird side story for the wife that feels like it comes out of nowhere—as does the character involved in her side story.

The horror really takes off 59 minutes in, and it includes freaky faces, salivary dripping, a cocooning substance, and characters being mind-fucked by their own fears, guilt, and shame…I think. There are definitely plot inconsistencies here, but the final act really delivers some fantastic cosmic horror visuals.

DO NOT ENTER (2026)



This movie should have been called Do Not Understand, because I’m really not sure what I was watching.

We meet a bunch of content creators, and to drive the point home, we are subjected to a pointless and bland sequence of them exploring underground tunnels in the subway system with cameras rolling.

With content like that, I can see why they’ve been struggling for views. In hopes of getting noticed, they decide to check out an abandoned hotel where a ton of money is supposed to be hidden. With cameras and night vision on, they crawl through tunnels to get inside, encounter a stream of the cleanest looking rats I’ve ever seen, and then explore the hotel.

There are a few more harrowing situations, there’s a perfectly convenient newspaper lying around that gives us backstory as to what happened at the hotel, and then a dude steps in a bear trap…in a hotel. Huh?

Eventually they encounter rival content creators who are so serious about taking out the competition that they abduct them at gunpoint. This could have been the time to turn this shit off, but soon after, at 54 minutes in, we finally get a humanoid creature attack that brought me back on board.

As absurd as the twists get, the creature suspense and gore definitely satisfy. I got back to rolling my eyes when the monster was about to get married (I’m not kidding), but I did like the scene in which the guy who plays the hero (and should absolutely be dead considering something that happens earlier) takes out the creature. Cool scene.

IT FEEDS (2025)



This is a very formulaic movie about a dark entity that uses the living as a host, so it’s kind of a possession movie, but not the girl-tied-to-a-bed-screwing-a-crucifix type of possession. It has a very PG-13 feel, as if it’s meant to make tweens squeal and giggle at a sleepover, from generic jump scares to lots of shadowy, dark atmosphere at times when frightened characters could just, you know, turn on a fucking light.

The plot is kind of original. A therapist uses her powers of clairvoyance to help patients work through their trauma. Awesome.

When a girl comes asking for help because she’s being terrorize by an evil entity, her father, played by cutie Shawn Ashmore, tries to put a stop to it because he believes there’s no help to be had.

The psychic’s daughter thinks otherwise. She’s sure her mother can help, so she pursues the girl. This totally backfires, and the entity ends up attaching itself to her. Unfortunately, Shawn is determined to kill this entity, so now he’s after the psychic’s daughter.

The freakiest part of the film for me is when the psychic’s daughter is buried alive in a casket…with the entity inside. Eek!

Things go off the rails when the film pulls an Insidious, with the psychic and her daughter battling the entity on a different plane of existence. If you’re a big fan of movies similar to that franchise, you should definitely check this one out.

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Popeye’s Revenge continues with 3 sequels

Posted on August 21, 2026 by Daniel

Yep, the slasher Popeye’s Revenge, which already sounds like the title of a sequel but isn’t, gets three sequels in one year, and what they lack in story, they make up for in death scenes.

POPEYE RETURNS (2026)

The first sequel takes place at a summer camp, and I guess the victims are all camp counselors before the place opens, for there are no children at all.

After an opening kill, we get a montage of all the kills from the first movie.

Then we learn Popeye has escaped a military facility and needs to be recaptured so he can be further studied, along with the serum that messed with him. Classic names from the cartoon are worked into the dialogue: Bluto, Olive (no Oyl), Sea Hag…

This turns into Friday the 13th with Popeye. We meet the camp counselors, a weird old dude tries to warn them away, and then they spend good chunks of the movie roaming around the woods with flashlights before getting hacked up. There’s also a character from the first movie (played by a different actor) seeking revenge on Popeye for what he did the first time around.

The practical effects are the highlight, because there’s not much of a plot. In the end, the men from the military lab recapture Popeye, leaving the movie “to be continued”.


I get it. Pop eye.

After writing this, I went back and read my post about Popeye’s Revenge to refresh my memory, and I seriously wrote so many of the same things about that film that I did about this one.

POPEYE 3: REQUIEM (2026)

The third film picks up right where the second one left off. Popeye, the team working for the military lab, the surviving camp counselors, and the dude seeking revenge all end up at the lab.

Would you believe Popeye breaks free and now they all have to try to escape the lab before he kills them?

That’s it. That’s the plot. There’s more carnage as Popeye hunts down the cast and they try to stop him. They end up in the woods again as more mist rolls in.

Popeye’s sister Olive (so much for her being his girlfriend) is mentioned as having been a mutant as well, so I’m hoping maybe there’s a killer Olive Oyl in the next movie. I guess I’m about to find out.

POPEYE 4: RESURRECTION (2026)

I found out. The movie begins with a girl getting slashed in the woods by a figure in silhouette that looks like Olive Oyl. Turns out it is her, although she’s only referred to as Olive.

The main girl from the last two movies is also back. She’s caring for a dude whose brother died in the previous movie. She has several nightmare sequences deliver some bogus slasher scenes since Popeye isn’t available to do the slashing himself.

You see, Olive is the leader of a cult that needs the main girl to resurrect Popeye. There’s gore, but there aren’t as many kills, and there’s a lot less Popeye.

This movie mostly isn’t about Popeye…except in those nightmare sequences. And in the last 15 minutes. Popeye is successfully resurrected and gets his chance to do some slashing then, but it’s the main girl who really gets her revenge this time around.

This franchise definitely doesn’t need another sequel, but that’s never stopped any franchise before.

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2 found footage flicks and a true crime mockumentary

Posted on August 18, 2026 by Daniel

For me, this was a case of two out of three weren’t bad, but which two? Let’s find out.

THE STICKMAN’S HOLLOW (2024)

This refreshing take on found footage films is broken into four separate tales based around the same mysterious force in the woods and the presence of a stick figure in each case. I found parts of it quite creepy.

Part 1

A father, mother, and their son are out camping when they encounter an evil being. We don’t see the physical form of the attacker, but there’s a very effective scene in their tent.

Part 2

A priest and his assistant arrive at a house where a child is believed to be possessed. It’s not what happens in the house that’s eerie. Imagine encountering Regan from The Exorcist on a rural road. Eek!

Part 3

This is an extremely short segment about a woman and man rowing a boat to an island that was an ancient place of worship and finding fresh, disturbing signs of occult rituals.

Part 4

This final tale runs longer than the rest, and it’s a slow build to a strong and freaky finale. A woman heads into the woods where she lost her family after reports of a feral child running around…a child she believes could be one of her relatives. Exploration of the forest leads to a crawling being in tight tunnels, and it is definitely the most effective sequence in the movie for me.

STRANGE HARVEST (2024)

This movie is structured like a true crime docudrama, and it’s damn convincing. However, it is in no way an action or scare-filled horror flick, so it might bore those who aren’t satisfied with just unsettling tone and atmosphere.

It does, however, deliver on some really gruesome crime scene imagery.

The movie is comprised entirely of interviews with detectives, witnesses, and survivors, and features some found footage style clips of detectives examining the scenes of the super disturbing murders.

Like, truly disturbing, and often described in great detail by the experts being interviewed.

Along the way, suspects are questioned, there’s an investigation into the meaning behind a symbol found at every murder scene, and eventually the killer is identified and hunted down.

There’s almost something disappointing about the movie delivering a definitive conclusion after it builds such a sinister and mysterious serial killer story.

STRAWSTALKER (2026)



This found footage flick fails to be scary, right up until the end.

A straight influencer couple films the experience of moving into a new home. The guy is cute, likes to get naked for the camera, and seems a little gay.

I especially enjoyed his appreciation of his own nipples.

We occasionally see a figure passing by the couple’s windows, they find a scarecrow in the bushes by their pool (and just leave it there on a lounge chair), and then the guy begins noticing some strange things occurring around the house.

Eventually, they have a party, and the scarecrow comes out to play, but this isn’t a found footage scarecrow slasher. It veers off into cult territory, and it is an absolutely lackluster experience. There was potential for something eerie to unfold, but unfortunately, the entire plot feels totally underdeveloped, and a found footage film with a cult conclusion is very cliché.

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Kicking off the holidays early

Posted on August 13, 2026 by Daniel

What better way to begin getting ready for Halloween early than with a couple of Halloween horror flicks to put me in the mood? And if Hallmark can do Christmas in July, I can do Christmas horror in August, so let’s get into these three seasonal horror flicks from my latest movie marathon.

4 HALLOWEEN (2023)



This little 68-minute indie is loaded with Halloween style and grisly gore, but it lacks a cohesive narrative. Hell, I don’t even know if there was a script. The IMDb blurb describing it as four characters crossing paths with different stories on Halloween night doesn’t clear things up. It felt to me like there might be more than four “stories” here, but I could be wrong. This is what I could make of it.

After a cozy opener filled with Halloween décor and what looks like a camera panning over someone’s horror collection (like I do when I film my videos in my Dan cave), the tone immediately changes. Drastically.

It’s gruesome but intriguing. Some dude starts dissecting a young, shirtless pretty boy…while wearing just a mask and an apron. WTF?

I wish his story was more developed, because all we get is him mutilating a few people and removing his mask to reveal that he’s deformed.

Next, a dude gets invited to a Halloween party, and for some reason, both his voice and that of the person on the other line sound like they were synthesized by AI. He then goes to a costume shop and befriends an old lady who reveals she’s a real witch in a cheap witch costume.

The longest story is hard to follow, but I think demonic pizza parlor workers are delivering killer pizzas to customers. Pizzas that look like they were made with Play-Doh.

Next, we get a rip-off of Trick ‘r Treat, with a woman being terrorized by a Sam clone.

Finally, we get a guy on the street at night being terrorized by a clown and then encountering a spaceship.

Like I said, I didn’t understand any of it, but I can see a lot of effort and creativity was put into producing it and capturing the holiday vibe.

THE BOY FROM BELOW (2026)



Summing this one up, I’d describe it like this: A masked killer targets a lesbian video store employee on Halloween. Unfortunately, my summary is more clear-cut and compelling than the actual movie.

The film is deeply linked in various ways to The Wicked One, another Halloween slasher by the same director, yet even though this one has a bigger budget and familiar horror faces, I actually prefer the low-budget grit of his earlier Halloween slasher.

The film begins on Halloween 1973. A young man kills his family. All but one of them. Just a little clarification before you watch this film—I initially thought the killer and the survivor were both girls of members of Hanson, but they’re both just boys with long hair.

Anyway, years later, the movie moves into nostalgia territory. Dee Wallace and her granddaughter, the main girl, run a video store. They chat about Halloween and horror movies, and in a meta movie moment, Dee references a few horror movies she’s actually starred in.


When you lend a hand in your own murder…

The main girl and her friends go to a “grave rave” where Felissa Rose is bartending and everyone is celebrating a b-movie scream queen murdered in town years before (yes, in the opening scene).

The kid who did the killing at the beginning of the movie is back. He’s mostly a basic, mean-looking redneck type, but he does wear a scarecrow-like mask to kill.

He digs up the dead scream queen, and despite her being decomposed, the wooden box in which she’s buried is in great shape. Not to mention, she looks pretty good for an almost 30-year-old corpse. Weird. And that’s the last we see of her body.

The killer goes on a killing spree, and there are some nice and bloody practical effects. But the plot doesn’t take place at the grave rave. The main characters instead leave the party and rent a bunch of horror movies, after which things just kind of meander aimlessly.

Dee gets a scene reminiscent of her encounter with Michael Myers in Rob Zombie’s Halloween, and it’s perhaps one of the best scenes in this movie.

There’s also a lesbian love scene, and the lesbians become the final girls, which is refreshing. However, overall, the plot is all over the place, and despite some good kills and good atmosphere, it falls flat in terms of the Halloween vibe, scares, and suspense.

KRAMPUS IN SPACE (2026)



If this 78-minute movie has one thing going for it, it doesn’t look as cheap as the title would have you think it’s going to be. It’s even rather atmospheric for a movie that takes place on just a few minimalistic sets. The real problem is that it’s just not all that interesting or exciting.

The cheesiest effects feature a spaceship approaching a floating structure in a scene that looks like something out of the original Battlestar Galactica TV show.

Those on the spaceship board the structure, find a big box, and decide to take it with them.

Turns out Krampus is in that box. One of the crew members, a woman who puts up a little Christmas tree and seems like the only one that cares about the holiday, believes that they have actually brought a demon onto their ship that was sent into space by the Three Wisemen. That and Krampus wearing a red coat are about as festive as this visually drab film gets.

The plot mostly consists of each crew member having nightmares or delusions of encounters with Krampus, who just stands still and makes them feel guilty about past sins. That’s pretty much the whole plot. Krampus just doesn’t seem to have the energy in this one to deliver any real horror or satisfying kills.

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Home invasion revenge, an urban horror comeback, and a Suspiria homage

Posted on August 7, 2026 by Daniel

There simply wasn’t a satisfying horror experience to be had in my latest trio of selections from my streaming watchlists. Let’s find out why.

PRANK NIGHT (2026)



I watched this one because horror queen Katharine Isabelle is in it, but there are two problems: A) it’s more a home invasion thriller than a horror film, and B) Isabelle doesn’t appear in the movie much.

So, our main girl comes home to stay with her dad and stepmom (Isabelle). The casting is weird here, because the main girl looks like she could be Isabelle’s biological daughter. Not to mention, her best friend looks like she’s cosplaying as Isabelle in Ginger Snaps.

So while the main girl goes out with her friend, home invaders break into the house and shoot her parents.

Our main girl decides to take justice into her own hands. Conveniently, she is able to track the baddies down and begins preparing with a cute trainer to go after them. Sigh.

Before she gets home invasion revenge, we get some character development. The main girl fights with her friend, and the leader of the baddies demonstrates that he is an abusive asshole. Shocker, I know.

There’s nothing scary about the main girl sneaking into the house of the baddies, and the final act isn’t very suspenseful, but there are some bloody kills. However, the final scene of the leader of the baddies coming back for more like he’s some unstoppable killer made me laugh.

PUZZLED LITERATURE (2026)



This film is about as low budget as it gets, and it seems determined to bring back the “urban horror” label while failing to deliver even one standup Black character. I wasn’t going to bother watching the whole thing, but I did, and now I will totally spoil it.

For starters, they have had no way to adjust the volume of the dialogue in post-production, because you can’t hear anything anyone is saying, so you have to either turn the volume way up or turn on the subtitles.

There are two positive aspects to the film that I’ll mention immediately. First, we at least get a shirtless guy in the opener. And second, the killer’s mask is freaky.

The story is about a dude who was just released from prison. His girl gives him a surprise birthday party. We get at least 3 hip hop partying montages in which they talk about booze, drugs, and hoes, and throw the N word around, and then the girlfriend gives the main guy a total ho dance…in front of all his friends. Doesn’t every girl do that for all her boyfriend’s friends on his birthday?

Then they go on a weekend getaway trip. They literally call it a weekend getaway trip. Does anyone actually call it that in real life? I thought it was just used in horror movie blurbs.

Anyway, there’s another hip hop montage at the house in the woods, a long game of truth or dare, and then the main guy has a meltdown, so it comes as no surprise who’s behind the mask when the kills begin 35 minutes in, with the weapon of choice predominantly being an arsenal of guns. Yawn. The killer also leaves poorly written poetry as a calling card, so at least the writing doesn’t try to outshine the script.

After killing a few people, the killer eventually ties up all his friends and we are bombarded by flashbacks and a monologue that reveal why he targeted these awful people. After that, the movie ends on a cliffhanger and a promise of “to be continued”. If it is continued, I won’t be watching.

SATURNALIA (2025)

This movie is basically a love letter to Suspiria, but that’s all it has going for it. It includes plenty of echoes of that film and its style, but it simply fails to grab you by the throat or deliver the icy cold sequences that made the Dario Argento film a classic.

The opener is so promising. A teen girl tries to sneak out of her boarding school at night. The setting looks just like Argento, and once she makes it outside, a masked figure wearing a white mask hangs her with a wire, which seems like a nod to Argento’s Trauma.

Next, our main girl is dropped off at school by a creepy taxi driver who offers her a cryptic warning. She then meets all the mean girls at the school and the evil head mistress, as well as a teen boy who is there because, well, I don’t know why. I must have missed a line of dialogue that explains it.

Anyway, the main girl has trippy nightmares, is tormented by the mean girls, and is terrorized by the head mistress. So much of this movie takes place around the dinner table and lingers on the idea of eating and body size.

The main girl also plays Nancy Drew, to unfold a mystery about her parents that simply isn’t all that compelling.

It’s 51 minutes before the first victim is murdered, and once again, the film doesn’t live up to the kind of horror Argento delivers. The few kills we get are very basic and disappointing.

The reveal at the end is not much of a surprise, and it makes this feel like it’s just a simple rehash of Suspiria. If you’re going to pay homage to the Italian horror master, you simply have to give it your own spin in the process and not make a film that pales in comparison to the movie you want to celebrate.

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