RESIDENT EVIL 3: Nemesis is forever my nemesis

Posted on January 22, 2026 by Daniel

Resident Evil 3 is still my absolute favorite RE video game. It is the first RE game I played on my first PC, right after the first RE movie came out, and it put me in a panic the whole time…except for that whole chunk of time I spent running in circles when I couldn’t figure out what I was missing that was keeping me from progressing. That was when I first learned about online walkthroughs.

While I really liked the remake from a few years ago because it was a new gaming experience with familiar elements, I still wish we had gotten a faithful update like the Resident Evil 2 remake. I would love to see the original Nemesis game refreshed on modern systems.

Revisiting the original game now on my GameCube, I can’t even imagine how many times I replayed it. My last “game completed” save was on hard mode, which means…I had infinite ammo for every weapon. Awesome.


That didn’t help much at the very start, when Jill Valentine is left surrounded by zombies after the opening movie. I had only an infinite handgun on me, and I was so not equipped to handle a throwback to the old tank controls. Holy crap did survival horror games play differently back then. At least this game introduced quick turn…which I ended up not using even once during the replay. You also get dodge functions, but I didn’t use those either. At least, not on purpose. At times when I was button mashing, they were triggered accidentally, and shockingly, it always worked out in my favor.


Once I made it to the first save room (RE3 still has the best save room music ever), I grabbed the infinite rocket launcher from the storage chest, and I was good to go. I just wish that you’d also get infinite printer ribbons. Ugh. I hate feeling nervous to save too often. As for supplies, this game is kind of tricky, because a lot of items don’t glimmer, so they’re not easy to spot. For instance, at one point I randomly decided to click on a pile of rubbish in the corner of a room and found another ink ribbon! That’s 3 save slots I could have missed out on, and apparently the person who wrote the walkthrough did, because it wasn’t mentioned at all. You best believe I immediately Googled all ink ribbon locations for the game and wrote them all into the walkthrough.

I love that RE3 lets you run through the narrow, claustrophobic alleys in Raccoon City. You can actually hear how evacuated the city is. So creepy. The distant moans of zombies carry on the wind, and occasionally you’ll run past windows that have zombies banging on the other side of them. Eek! The streets are extra unnerving in hard mode because there are a lot more zombies around, but they were no match for my infinite rocket launcher. And once you find the first map, you realize how helpful the RE maps were compared to the useless maps some other horror games offered back then.

The challenge for me was trying to keep inventory slots open. With only 8 of them and no telling which items you can leave in storage for a while, I often found myself leaving behind minor items that are major to me—like health! Argh! Thanks to my infinite ammo, what I didn’t need to worry about was the whole aspect of picking up and mixing gun powder to make ammo, which was first introduced in this installment of the series. The upside is that when you use an item and it isn’t needed again, the game prompts you to discard it, which is a weight off your shoulders.

The fun for those who played RE3 after originally playing RE2 first is when you arrive at the Raccoon City Police Department. There’s not much time to rejoice, however, because you immediately encounter that big bully Nemesis. EEK! This is the first time in the game where you get a “choose your own adventure” selection on screen. Following a walkthrough will help you make informed decisions as to how your game will differ based on the choices you make in these moments, and this is perhaps the reason I played the game so many times. I’m sure I meticulously made notes as to which paths I took each playthrough so that I could select different ones every time in order to experience all the game had to offer. Not to mention, I first played it on PC…then got the PS1 version for my PS2 to play on a larger screen…then upgraded to the Dreamcast version for tighter graphics…then did the same when I bought the GameCube. Holy shit, I’ve wasted so much money buying the same things over and over again.


Anyway, for this first encounter with Nemesis, there’s an option to completely avoid him, but with my infinite rocket launcher equipped, I opted to blow him away instead. That drops him temporarily, and you get to pick up a bonus treasure that he leaves behind. I’d forgotten just how many “choose your own adventure” moments add replay value to this game. The walkthrough I used was extra thorough and broke down the path choices and which one was “recommended”. In most cases the recommended one ensures you avoid a battle with Nemesis. However, those rules don’t totally seem to apply in hard mode. At one point, I chose the recommended option, in which Nemesis is supposed to get blasted through a window by an explosion so you don’t have to fight him. I thought I was in the clear after the cutscene and began nonchalantly exploring the room for supplies while Nemesis was draped dead over a windowsill…but then the monster music began and the bitch got back up and I had to shoot him with my handy infinite ammo rocket launcher. Man, this game is fun once you score that weapon.

When you enter the police station, the extra thrill of being back in your old stomping ground is that you get to enter a few different areas that were closed off to characters in RE2. Awesome. You do some basic exploring, item gathering, and zombie killing, and then Nemesis shows up again. Without a walkthrough, you wouldn’t know that you are actually finished in the police station at that point and should just leave instead of wasting ammo on him (if you don’t have an infinite rocket launcher).


Back on the streets, you now have to contend with zombie dogs as well as continue running around in circles not really knowing exactly what the hell you’re trying to accomplish. These games really did make you feel like you were absolutely without motivation most of the time, didn’t they?

Zombies become more prevalent, Nemesis shows up more, and you have some random puzzles here and there. You also have to pick up a lot more items, and even after you score an added satchel that gives you two bonus item slots in your inventory, you should read ahead in a walkthrough to see what you can leave in storage for later to free up some room.

As desolate as the city is, you don’t feel totally alone, because you meet several military guys along the way. Human contact. It matters. However, as you get deeper and deeper into the city, it becomes more maze-like, and more zombies, killer dogs, and bigger creatures start appearing, so the loneliness comes flooding back. The game also delivers some great jump scares just when you think everything is calm and quiet.


The moment you’ll know you’re near the end of the first part of the game is when Jill has to get a cable car running. Before you can even get to the cable car, you end up falling into a hole and land in a little corridor with a giant worm popping out of holes in the wall. The goal is to turn on three switches in various corridor offshoots to lower a ladder to get out of the hole. Problem is, the worm always fricking knows where you are. As soon as you enter a nook to hit a button, the worm hits you and knocks you out of the nook. It also takes a load of your health. Fuck. And the fixed camera angles make it almost impossible to see the worm when you really need to. Fuck. This little side section wasted so much of my damn health, and there was none to be found on the way to the cable car. I even tried blasting he bitch with my infinite rocket launcher, but I got the sense he’s indestructible in this segment. Not to mention, the only way to avoid being hit by him before I could lift my launcher was to stand outside the nook, at which point the camera angle would change and I couldn’t see if he was even in the nook anymore. I have a feeling he wasn’t.


Once you get the cable car running, holy crap does shit get hard. You end up at a clock tower, and there are more zombie swarms, killer crows, and those damn giant spiders.

Whenever you kill them, they release little baby spiders that swarm you and poison you. There’s one central foyer in the Clock Tower that has some blue herbs to heal the poison immediately without having to put it in your inventory first, but there is really nothing in the way of regular health. I’m not going to lie. By the end of this section, I was clutching my side and dragging my leg, with my health status in total danger mode, and it was at that point that I had to fight a Nemesis battle. Oh fuck.


I don’t know how I pulled this off, because in this boss battle he was shooting at me with a rocket launcher. The idea is to shoot back when he isn’t holding up the launcher. That also happens to be when he’s charging you. Somehow, I managed to zombie shuffle my wounded ass out of the rocket’s way a few times and shoot my own infinite rocket launcher at him as he charged me. Shot him twice and he was done.


Right then, you switch over to playing Carlos. Jill has been infected, and it is up to him to find a cure…without access to her inventory. The difficulty increases with Carlos. In infinite ammo mode, he doesn’t have the rocket launcher, just an assault rifle and a handgun. Obviously, I went with the assault rifle, because the enemies are insane during his mission. The only other thing you get for him is a set of 3 ink ribbons. Yay, because you find 3 more for him in another save room. Sadly, you can’t leave them behind for Jill once you switch back to her, but on the bright side, you should absolutely use them all.

You have one mission here. Go to the hospital and find a few ingredients for a vaccine. Unfortunately, there are lots of zombies, and lots of fricking hunters. I also noticed that if you have to load a save because you die, or in my case, because my aging GameCube kept freezing up, items like herbs are in different places, and you get different enemies despite retracing the same path you walked the first time.


This isn’t a long segment—you only have to go to two floors and just a few rooms—but the number of enemies makes this one a chore. However, as you leave the hospital, there’s suddenly a bomb on a 7-second timer. The door to leave is literally about ten steps adjacent to where you are standing before the timer cutscene, but you know how fricking disorienting those returns to playing after cutscenes can be. Worst of all, just as you are about to return to Jill, Nemesis appears in a bigger, badder, mutant form, and he chases you through doorways! The idea is not to fight him but to just run right back to the room where you left Jill, since it’s a save room and he can’t follow you in.


Once you are back to being Jill (video games have been woke and gender fluid for decades), you are in the final stretch of the game. The good news is that if you research where ink ribbons are in the game, you can score like 12 in total in this final section. I was saving left and right. It was awesome, and I still had like 10 ribbons left when I finished the game.

By the way, even if you were deathly ill as Jill before you became Carlos (as I was), you are all fresh and healed when you are back to playing her. Good thing, because you immediately encounter mutated Nemesis. You can dodge him, but he does follow you. With the infinite rocket launcher, I just blasted his ass, and he dropped one of those 3-pack health sprays. Holy shit, I forgot all about them. Three health sprays taking up only one inventory slot. Crucial here, because the enemies are brutal in this final section. I also noticed that the rocket launcher, even infinite, has two disadvantages. First, it takes time to lift the heavy fucker every time you shoot, so if fast enemies are right on you, you get caught in a loop of them hitting you while you’re lifting the launcher, at which point you start the movement all over again and get hit again until eventually you die without having shot one rocket. Second, you can’t aim up or down with the rocket launcher, so if anything is crawling on the floor or ceiling, you shoot right past the enemy. I decided to also carry my infinite assault rifle for this last part for shooting speed and flexibility for the crawling enemies.

We even meet some new enemies, including snakes that drop from above in a park section, as well as the return of the giant worm, which you do get to fight this time. You also go through a graveyard where fricking zombies come up from the ground. Awesome from a horror perspective, but in reality, Resident Evil has always been about infection, not the rising of the dead, right?

The park area is dark, spooky, and loaded with enemies, at least in hard mode. Decades ago, when I first played on easy, there was an amazing moment where I entered this really tranquil boardwalk path over the water and through the forest, and there was just one lone zombie standing at a turn in the boardwalk, swaying back and forth, not even looking at me. It was terrifying. This time, hunters kept jumping out of the water left and right and beating the shit out of me. Fuckers.

Most of this section is about finding keys just to open paths to get to other keys. You also have a few very short runs through the sewer (hate the sewer), and some of the puzzles are damn annoying, even with a walkthrough. Plus, there are quite a few choices to make to choose your own adventure and change the ending of the game.

There are plenty of save rooms, which are the perfect complement to all the ink ribbons you find. There’s also lots of health around, so I would advise grabbing it all and running back to the save rooms to store it for use during the final boss battle.

Before the final boss, you have a run-in with mutant Nemesis. You are required to kill him to get the last necessary key card, so health and ammo are crucial to have on hand. This battle is also followed by a timer, and I was panicking, because a cutscene shows the card key following the defeat of Nemesis, but as soon as I regained control of Jill, I was spinning in circles around the room trying to locate that spot. Argh.

The final battle is tricky. Nemesis has now morphed into a big slug thing with tentacles. In the tight room you’re in, which has several offshoots, the goal is to fend him off while you run around pushing three huge batteries into their designated spots. You know how slow those pushing animations can be. Argh. The smart thing to do is to go check the batteries and their locations before you press the button that triggers the battle, because they are numbered 1,2, and 3, and you have to push them in order. Also, once you get the machine running, you have to lead the monster in front of a giant laser gun thingy so he will be shot by it, and you have to get him to stay in front of it more than once.

As soon as he’s dead, it’s time to jump in a helicopter and watch a city explode below you…just like in most Resident Evil games.

Still think this is one of my favorite RE games, with Code Veronica as a close second. I will find out soon enough, because that one is next on my replay list.

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FOUND FOOTAGE: in the woods, at a church, in an asylum

Posted on January 21, 2026 by Daniel

Time to point those cameras and run screaming again. As derivative as they are, I did have a favorite of this trio of found footage flicks.

SHE WALKS THE WOODS (2019)

While this one uses the basic found footage flick template, with not much happening for a majority of its 81 minutes, the payoff in the last 20 minutes is so worth it.

We get a taste of what’s in store for the main cast when the film opens with footage of some hunters getting attacked by something in the woods. Good thing they had cameras, too.

Our main group consists of three guys and one girl going to a cabin in the woods to film their survivalist show.

They do some show footage, they talk around a campfire, one guy hooks up with the girl, they hear noises at night, they hike into the woods…

And then the she-creature strikes. Holy shit is the first attack so perfectly orchestrated.

Things move fast after that. The survivors try to make a run for the cabin, they make stupid decisions (like wondering if they should really go back to the cabin), they argue, and they get viciously killed off one by one. And that fucking cabin is all windows, which had my nerves on end.

Okay, maybe they shouldn’t have gone back to the cabin, but they’re still dumb enough not to barricade the damn door once they get back inside.

The she-creature is scary as hell and looks great in the few clips in which we get to see her in action. Totally worth the watch.

THE HEM (2024)

This 78-minute movie tries to use the standard found footage template, but it fails in every individual aspect. There is absolutely no suspense, mystery, or sense of foreboding here, despite the potential of the premise.

A crew doing a documentary on a church that burned down in a small town is met by tight lips and people walking away when they try to interview them. So much for getting any insight into what occurred there.

They then go to the derelict church to do some filming.

I am telling you, they walk around exploring until 38 minutes into the movie, and the creepiest part is the discovery of a sewing room with wedding dress forms.

There’s little in the way of discovery to build a lore behind the initial tragedy at the church and what the bridezilla’s whole issue is.

At the halfway mark, they get separated. There is no dread or urgency as each individual eventually comes across a fleeting glimpse of a bride. This movie is so stale.

With fifteen minutes left, cops show up, and one of them is George Hardy of Troll 2 fame. Their segment, which looks like a first-person shooter video game, is better than the rest of the movie, and we finally see the vicious bride up close. The denouement is flat and fast, and then the church burns down…again.

There’s a silly final frame scene, but it is even weaker than the rest of the film. Unlike She Walks the Woods, this climax doesn’t make the movie worth watching.

DEVON (2024)

This is it. The “biggie” in the bunch because it’s directed by JWoww of Jersey Shore. The one in which you can tell JWoww just watched the most basic found footage films and said, “I can do that…exactly like that.”

Be warned. The audio is terrible (I turned on subtitles), and the editing is totally spastic, so I wasn’t able to get any clear still shots of any of the ghosts. Actually, I was barely able to see any of the ghosts in the movie at all.

It opens with a sobbing woman being interviewed in a police station. These interrogation clips are interspersed throughout the film as she recounts what happened….

Next, we meet a variety of people that have signed up to investigate an old asylum where a young girl disappeared twenty years before. This one lands on the does the gay guy die? page, because one of the guys is gay. He also ticks every gay affectation check box in the book, as if he’s auditioning to be on RuPaul’s Drag Race. Quite the caricature compared to the other characters.

Anyway, the participants arrive at the derelict asylum with cameras attached to their bodies. They get locked in, are bombarded by bogus jump scares, see creepy things like toys, dolls, and the little girl’s name written in blood on a wall, and eventually split up.

It’s 72 minutes of bouncing flashlights, blurry footage, darkness, screaming, running…you know the drill.

A few times we see figures flit in front of the cameras, but there’s just nothing visible enough to be scared of beyond a figure standing in a corner or a ghost crawling frenetically across the floor.

The actors were the highlight for me, because each one seems absolutely batshit terrified when they are about to die.

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Stay alive or it’s game over…for good!

Posted on January 20, 2026 by Daniel

It’s an immersive video game horror experience for the groups of friends in my latest weekend movie marathon. Two out of three flicks were fun, and I had a fave out of those two. Let’s find out which one.

KILLSTREAK (2025)

This 75-minute movie has a simple storyline, so if you love survival horror video game movies and the classic Stay Alive, just sit back and enjoy the cheap thrill ride.

It’s a familiar premise—online players discover a new video game and quickly learn that if you die in the game, you die in real life.

It begins with six players, each in their own room, immersing themselves in a survival horror game online. They are curious as to how the video game characters they are playing could possibly look and sound exactly like them, but naturally they totally explain away the red flag.

If you’re a horror gamer, you will feel the tension as you watch them exploring a creepy old video game house. Lone zombies roam the halls, and they don’t have much in the way of weapons while searching for keys to escape each level.

They have to run away as it becomes apparent that getting caught in the game causes a flickering version of the enemy to appear in your room to kill you in reality. Quit the game, and you also die. Eek!

It’s basic and straightforward, so just grab the popcorn and watch each character get caught and killed violently in their bedrooms by pixilated holograms. There are fun, in-game jump scares, some violent deaths scenes, and a devious little final battle.

LIVESCREAMERS (2023)

This sequel to Livescream is the total winner in this trio, and returning director Michelle Iannantuono probably had a bigger budget to work with, because this film is everything the first film failed to be.

Just like in Killstreak, there is a group of gamers live-streaming a survival horror video game. However, they are all playing locally in the same room on different monitors. The awesome aspect of this movie is that it flips the finger at the anti-woke crowd. These gamers are doing a livestream that celebrates diversity, so the selection of players is filled with people of color and queer people. Notably, a gay plot line plays a crucial part in the game they’re playing, securing this film a spot on the does the gay guy die? page.

There’s a reference to the events of the first movie, which the gamers believe is nothing more than an urban legend, and then they step into a video game mansion right out of Resident Evil.

They immediately notice the characters in the game look and sound just like them. Another red flag ignored…and this group already knows a story about a video game killing people! Sigh.

Soon after, they learn that if you die in the game, you die in real life. Well, one of them actually learns the hard way. In this case, it’s in the very same room as all the other players since they are playing locally. Now that’s a bloody good time.

The game cuts the livestream and informs them they must continue playing or die. While Killstreak seems to have borrowed a lot from this movie, it forgot to borrow blood, because this one has plenty of it.

On top of that, gamers who watch this film will relish the all-too familiar aspects of playing a survival horror game—finding weapons, using health kits, solving timed puzzles to survive, a relentless boss, and worst of all, quick time events. Fuck quick time events, even if I’m not the one actually playing the game.

The game even manages to mess with the players’ minds along the way, revealing their dirty secrets in order to turn them against each other so they won’t work cooperatively. This includes exposing cheating, disloyalty to their influencer team business, gay baiting, and more.

The arguing spills onto the screen, and you can’t help but wonder who would give a fuck about a partner influencer secretly starting their own separate channel when you’re in the middle of a game that can kill you.

The in-game atmosphere and tension are great, the kills are a blast, and the final decision the survivors have to make to survive is just like, well…something out of a video game. Awesome.

BACKLASH (2025)

This is a different take on the video game kills you in real life concept. In this one, a group of gamers ends up playing a live action version of a game at the location after which it was modeled.

Problem is that everything essential to the plot feels rushed and underdeveloped. We first see a teenage girl discovering a firework has been thrown through a window—a firework that explodes and blinds her.

Next, we meet her older sister’s group of friends. The older sister is tired of watching after her younger, blind sister, who gets bullied a bit at school.

Meanwhile, a nerd asks the sister’s friends if he can play video games with them. They don’t seem like major gamers, but apparently, they are. They finally agree to let the nerd join them for a round, but once they go online to play, they quickly kill his character and upload video of it online.

That’s it. That’s all the development we get concerning their love of video games and their “cyber bullying” of the nerd.

And yet they all wake up chained together at the real location off of which the game is based. They are wearing shock cuffs that zap them if they try to quit playing, and the idea is to fight it out with the enemies and find their way to the exit. Sadly, it wasn’t even a horror video game they were playing, which could have made this experience a lot more fun.

The fact that one friend is instantly psycho and willing to kill all his friends rather than work with them to survive just makes this whole movie feel absurd. And even though he’s the biggest douche in the bunch, most of the characters are not particularly likable.

There’s some suspense and action as the friends battle it out with guns and melee weapons while trying to escape the “game” and each other, but there’s nothing substantial to cling to. The possibilities of who could be orchestrating the game and the motivation behind it are limited, so in the end there’s no surprise.

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Nature strikes back! Snakes, mosquitos, and koalas!

Posted on January 19, 2026 by Daniel

It’s a trio of playful flicks in which wildlife goes even wilder. Let’s see how much fun I had with this triple feature.

ONE BIG SNAKE (2025)

My indie fave director Charlie Steeds brings back the campy, hissing snake from Snake Creek! But dammit if the snake isn’t outfanged by the threat of a voodoo man who wants to become one with the snake.

A hot daddy, his wife, and his son head to a house in the woods they just inherited. They immediately find a man squatting inside, which is where the trouble begins.

The squatter has sinister, ritualistic snake plans. There are snake eggs on the property. An exterminator and a couple of redneck handymen come to the house to up the body count.

But hot dad and mom don’t immediately believe their son when he says he saw a giant snake in the woods.

However, the squatter’s evil plot starts to become clear, making him the problem for a majority of the film. The snake just doesn’t get as much attention as it did in Snake Creek. Although, it does eventually multiply.

The final act is when things pick up and we get funny snake attacks and battles, and it’s totally worth the wait.

DROP BEARS (2025)

  

I expected a lot of silliness from this one, but it went from pretty bad to even worse as it progressed. However, it has great fashion sense.

Believe it or not, apparently there is a real scam tour guides use in Australia concerning the legend of “drop bears”–killer koalas that drop down onto their victims from the trees. That is the basic premise of this one.

The opening kill sets the stage for a fun creature feature.

Then we meet our American tourists, one of whom looks like a Temu Justin Timberlake circa the NSYNC years.

There is way too much time spent on the group setting up camp and sitting around a campfire before the two tour guides that take them into the outback try to pull a drop bear prank on them. However, real drop bears show up! We’re talking 2007 level SyFy CGI killer animal effects. The drop bears’ feet never even touch the ground. Awesome.

This is when I thought the film would take off with loads of campy killer koala action. Instead, the group ends up in some sort of lab bunker and encounter a giant, talking koala/human hybrid in a bad costume.

He explains what human scientists have done to his kind and how they’ve fed off humans ever since. His soliloquy is cheesy and accompanied by flashbacks to how the whole scientific experiment thing went down.

The movie totally falls apart, and for a change, the only good part is when the military shows up, because they have a sizzling hot leader. I mean…because their arrival triggers a stampede of small drop bears. Don’t all small bears want a daddy bear?

The group eventually has to take on the talking koala human, but once the boss battle dust settles, the movie goes on for another ten pointless minutes, and there’s even an unnecessary scene after the credits.

KILLER MOSQUITOS (2018)

This one, which has been retitled Insect on Tubi, is mostly a load of fun. It’s an Italian film, but most of it is in English, with just some occasional Italian speaking characters with no subtitles, so you have to turn them on if you watch it on Tubi. Also, while the film was originally titled Killer Mosquitos, a caretaker refers to them as horseflies. Therefore, I’ll just call them bugs.

The movie opens with maintenance men getting attacked by the bugs, which to me look like mosquitos with an awesome ability to split their faces open to reveal big mouths full of teeth.

Next, we meet a group of friends staying at a villa in the woods. One of the main couples is gay, and the pair doesn’t shy away from hanging all over each other, landing this one on the does the gay guy die? page.

As the group gets settled into the house, they become concerned because of news reports about a serial killer that has escaped from prison. The killer does indeed make his way to their house, which is when the swarm arrives, making his plot line obsolete mighty fast….

There are entertaining kills along the way, as well as some minor battles with the bugs, but there is a noticeable slowdown in pace halfway through the film as the group tries to figure out how they’re going to safely leave the house.

The highlights for me include the group learning that pot smoke kills the bugs dead, and that there’s a giant queen bug hiding in the house somewhere. However, that’s where the movie kind of blows it. This giant bug should have had its moment to wreak havoc, but we never get that!

Instead, the movie takes some unexpected turns and leaves us on a sort of cliffhanger with the old “to be continued…” as the final frame. Yet it doesn’t appear a sequel ever happened. Argh!

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I just can’t let the holiday season go

Posted on January 16, 2026 by Daniel

I dug up one more Halloween horror flick and two more Christmas horror flicks for the holiday horror page. Should I have left them buried?

TRICK AND TREATS (2025)

Didn’t expect to get a new Halloween movie for the holiday horror page in January, so I was psyched when this one popped up on Tubi.

Talk about a movie that shifts tones drastically. I was so into this one at the beginning. It all starts in colonial times when a dude wheels in a huge jack-o’-lantern, flogs a woman until she reveals she’s a demon, and then hacks her up and stuffs her in the pumpkin. It feels like good old cheesy fun is about to transpire for the remainder of the film.

Next, the outdoor Halloween visuals and score that accompany the opening credits deliver Halloween IV level atmosphere. I was so ready for an awesome autumnal horror flick.

That’s not what I got.

Instead, in the modern day we meet four friends dressed for Halloween and heading for some festive fun. Their car breaks down, so they walk to a nearby bar for help. They are immediately harassed by a biker gang, which quickly morphs this movie into a torture porn. WTF?

One character in particular has something horrible done to her face with a power tool, and it’s just such a disturbing scene even though we never actually see the result of what was done to her. I felt like I was watching a Hostel movie.

What’s unfortunate is that there’s a campy, playful horror flick just waiting to emerge from this cruel mess. There’s a jack-o’-lantern on display in the bar—same one from colonial days—and the demon inside, voiced by Malcolm McDowell, speaks to one of the main girls throughout the film and tries to coach her on how to get out of the predicament. This could have been a blast if demon McDowell had geared her towards breaking free earlier, but she only escapes and gets revenge close to the end.

At that point, the film jumps back into the holiday spirit for a few final sequences involving what demon McDowell wants in return for helping the main girl get away. Such an opportunity for a fun, original Halloween horror flick wasted on over an hour of misogynistic torment and torture.

CURTAINS FOR CHRISTMAS (2024)

This 68-minute Christmas slasher comedy comes from Steve Rudzinski, who directed Red Christmas and Amityville Christmas Vacation, so he’s no stranger to holiday horror. This is definitely my favorite of the three films.

You really have to be into Steve’s whacky sense of humor to appreciate his over-the-top style.

Despite the beautifully festive, snowy outdoor shots (is it real or AI? Not sure), the indoor scenes are straight up low budget sets.

Our main girl is a psycho. She wants a man for Christmas and every man she meets is the perfect guy…until she kills him. She also has a giant Christmas rat subconscious that talks to her and sounds like Paul Lynde.

She eventually settles on a married guy, played by Steve, and she’s determined to make him hers. It’s funny and ridiculous when she kills his wife and wears her face as a horrific mask…and Steve believes it’s actually his wife breaking up with him. The main girl looks like the wife, so I’m not even sure she needed the wife face mask to fool him.

The final act is my favorite part. The main girl invites Steve to spend Christmas with her, so she busts into a cabin owned by a gay couple and makes them play her two dads for her Christmas gathering with her “new man”, landing this one on the does the gay guy die? page.

This absurd comedy becomes enjoyably vicious as she starts doing some gory killing. Even children aren’t safe from it. Awesome. There’s also a great nod to Silent Night, Deadly Night.

I SLAY ON CHRISTMAS (2023)

This is as lowbrow and sloppy as an indie anthology gets, but I did actually appreciate one of the “tales”, if you could call it that. However, overall, this is a mess.

It begins with a guy running through the woods and finding a pinecone. But the wraparound isn’t about him.

Then we see a sick guy sitting by his tree. Wraparound not about him either. Everyone working on every part of this movie probably needed to put down the bong.

Finally, a dude in the woods has hallucinations of a babe playing with her tits and then biting off his dick. Then comes the first story.

1st story – a white trash dude drinks, screams at his wife, taunts his baby, tries to rape a woman, axes her when she runs, then kills a dude with Mr. Bill voice. The end. Oh…the white trash dude does mention Christmas and Santa a few times and the Mr. Bill guy is dressed as an elf.

Wraparound – Now a different dude is in the woods telling the stories to the dude who thought he got his dick bitten off.

2nd story – It’s in Spanish with no subtitles, so you have to turn them on manually. There’s a long news report about the discovery of body parts, then a dude invites a girl to his place for a date. His place is decorated for Christmas. He appears to have every plan to kill her, but this one gets a little twist.

3rd story – A woman goes on a date with a guy, he gives her lingerie as a Christmas gift, then kills her when she won’t wear it. The end.

4th story – This was the only one I liked. A dude saw mommy kissing Santa Claus as a child, so he abducts Santa to torture him. Very clever. This one even has a few fun twists.

Wraparound – We learn why the guy is in the woods hearing these stories as punishment, and then he explodes. Not the end.

Another guy walks into the woods and finds 4 pinecones then gets dragged away. Still not the end.

Another guy strangles a kid to death. Nope. Not over yet.

A radio show guy spouts conspiracies about the government and Christmas. The end.

 

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BEWARE boys, bears, and all you other beasts. They’re coming to get you!

Posted on January 14, 2026 by Daniel

It’s a trio of queer themed flicks in different horror subgenres, including a glory hole killer, a gay ghost, and lesbian-hating home invaders, giving me a few more titles to add to the complete homo horror movies page. Let’s see how this triple feature worked out for me.

ANAPIDAE (CALL ME) (2024)

This 45-minute short French film is actually too short to make much sense. It needed more time to indulge in the morbid, messed up, and tragic themes it is exploring.

It’s about grief, loneliness, deception, secrets, living a lie, and living in the closet.

That’s why the whole aspect of a giant spider as a metaphor, which gives the movie its name, is the one element that totally distracted me from everything else going on. See, there’s this dude that works as a caretaker at a cemetery, and the opening scene really captures the look and music of a late 1960s/early 1970s horror movie, which grabbed me immediately.

But that spider. That damn silly looking, giant spider that hangs around the cemetery. The movie does its best to have the caretaker explain how its life parallels his, but for me it wasn’t essential to the story at all. There are numerous clips of bugs interspersed in the film, and the way the imagery is edited into scenes reminded me of the creepy Samara/Sadako video, which adds to the sense that something quite freaky is going to happen at some point.

A widow shows up regularly at the cemetery to visit her husband’s grave. She bonds with the caretaker, who knew her husband. She says the husband told her the caretaker might be gay, but it doesn’t matter to her, and she keeps pushing him to either meet a woman or a man so he’s not alone.

He is alone. He’s totally alone. He lost his love. He cries in pain for his lover at night. In a very cheesy, very Euro horror moment, he digs up the corpse of his lover and makes love to it. But here’s the thing—the lover is a total skeleton (talk about getting boned). This caretaker looks like he’s maybe 21 at the most. How long has his lover been dead? I think in reality the caretaker is supposed to be around the age of the widow, but I’m not sure.

This macabre plot point was the hook for me, but it doesn’t even really have any impact on the rest of the story…because of that damn spider. Is the spider real? I wish. The widow and her two creepy daughters who are right out of The Shining, even see it. However, if the arachnid is a metaphor, that must mean it’s reflective of their grief as well, so naturally they can see it…right?

Don’t hold your breath if you’re hoping for the spider to do something gruesome in the final frame, because it doesn’t. There is some sort of horrific reveal the widow stumbles upon at the end, and it does involve the spider, however, I think what she is seeing is actually…metaphorical. And for viewers, it’s not very horrific at all. Argh. Made me wish they had just stuck to the skeleton fucker fun. Or, perhaps, in a full-length feature, made the bereft caretaker crazy enough to enlist his metaphorical grief spider to kill anyone who discovered his dirty—or dirt covered—little sex secret. Oh, how I wanted the metaphorical spider to literally devour the creepy girls.

I really loved the horror atmosphere and the gay angle of the movie. I also got a chuckle whenever this cheesy love song—a staple of Euro horror—played, because the subtitles literally say “cheesy music” every time. I just wish the movie had delivered more on the emotional aspects and the character development. Well, all that and, you know, the skeleton fucker fun.

THE MORNING AFTER (2023)

This is a queer movie with an agenda. For real. The dialogue is overloaded with unapologetic commentary on the state of woke culture, queerphobia, racism, feminism, gay rights, politics, conservatism, incels, law enforcement, and so on and so on. I’m not sure anyone really wants to experience it on screen as entertainment since it’s a war being waged in reality, yet as you are drawn into a sort of home invasion flick, you have nothing else to focus on other than the social statements.

Two girls wake up the morning after they have a big party and a sexual interaction. They find the cute ex-boyfriend of one of the girls in the bathroom. They learn he announced the party on social media. And now…

There are three strangers in masks standing outside the house. One of them calls himself the big gay bunny and says he is there to teach them that men will not be replaced. He also intends to drill it into the head of the ex-boyfriend that he has been completely emasculated by being an ally to the poison of liberalism.

As the trio inside tries to figure out who is behind the masks, what the strangers want, how to get away, and why the police won’t help them, they are constantly taunted. There are also signs each of them might be hiding something, because they are a sketchy group of victims.

The social messages predominantly overshadow any horror or suspense, but be warned—the big gay bunny cuts off a dog’s ear before killing it, and there is a gory eye removal scene, but it’s a of a human, so no big deal.

Eventually, there appears to be a prank at play, but also…not actually a prank at play. Loads of motive exposition is presented, there’s forced sexual intercourse, some people die, and the big gay bunny removes the mask to reveal his face, but only to the main characters. That’s right. We don’t get to see the identity of the instigator, and the main trio apparently knows who it is. We can’t share in their shock, making everything that happens in the film feel somewhat pointless to us since there’s not much of a chance of piecing together anything that happened either through the course of the movie or the night before.

SCISSORS (2025)

You know how the tagline of my site is “if you’re looking for a safe space, you’ve come to the wrong place”? Well, the same applies to this gay serial killer flick. It doesn’t give a fuck about your feelings. Gay men are absolutely tortured, and all of them are painted as only caring about one thing—anonymous sex.

That’s right. There is no balance here. There are no fully realized gay characters to connect with, only sex fiends that are blamed for their own demise.

The two main characters are the detectives on the case, and one of them has a straight sex scene in which he’s sporting nipple rings, so that gave me a chuckle. He also happens to be a co-writer and co-director of the movie.

The whole point of the film is that a serial killer is targeting men at glory holes and then either doing gruesome things to them through the hole or taking them back to his lair, so the intent isn’t to portray all sides of the gay spectrum. Think the preamble to Cruising.

This is balls-to-the-wall torture porn right from the start…literally.

The Leatherface-sized killer is freaky awesome, with a part gimp/part blowup doll mask, and the kills are fricking brutal. I’m warning you, the torture scenes go on for quite some time, and the guys playing the victims are more convincing in their screaming agony than any of the female bimbos in any 80s slasher I’ve ever seen.

Eric Roberts has a minor role as the mayor, who is concerned the open case will negatively impact his reelection campaign, so that is part of the motivation for the two main cops to solve the case. What we get is part sleazy sex torture and part police procedural. What we don’t get is any characters we really care about. The detectives seem somewhat sympathetic to the situation, but they still use gay slurs.

The ending for me was a highlight. Nothing is tied up neatly, but there’s a dark reveal of the killer that gives this movie more depth than it ever hints at during the entire course of events leading up to the finale.

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Silly slashing, but did it make my sides hurt?

Posted on January 13, 2026 by Daniel

I selected three that sounded like horror comedies from my watchlists, but did any of them deliver the kind of fun I was hoping for? Let’s find out.

MOVIE THEATER MASSACRE (2023)

I love when slashers take place in a movie theater. I love when movies only run 72 minutes long. I love horror comedies. So…what went wrong here?

There is just no energy. We spend a majority of the movie at a theater (filmed in an actual, fantastic movie theater), watching the staff toss around movie trivia and complain that nobody goes to theaters anymore as they count down the days until the theater closes for good. The actors all seem bored in their attempts to act natural, and I guess the most obvious hint of humor is when one of the ushers notices someone jerking off in one of the bathroom stalls.

About once every 30 minutes, someone is murdered in the back parking lot, with no suspense, jump scares, or intense violence to liven things up. So that’s about 3 victims throughout the course of most of the movie.

Linnea Quigley is called in as a psychic to do a séance that goes nowhere, the girl working the ticket booth gets held up at gunpoint, and the crew kills time by making their own little movie at one point.

That’s all that’s really going on here until suddenly there’s a rush of people coming to the theater in the final act.

This leads to a sudden jolt of action, with the masked killer stabbing and shooting theatergoers as they stampede out of the theater Then…I think some supernatural force drags the killer out of the theater and up into the sky to put an end to the killings.

What the hell did I just watch?

GIRL IN THE REFRIGERATOR (2025)

This is like the Cougar Town of dark horror comedies, with a bunch of friends just hanging around drinking and talking the whole time. Difference is, most of these friends don’t know there is a dead body stashed in the main guy’s fridge.

I guess the goal was to make the beefy main guy seem geeky and unassuming, but his sleazeball haircut and exaggerated glasses make him look more like a creepy pedo, so it’s kind of hard to believe that he has a girlfriend and that a pretty neighbor is interested in him.

See, the main guy wants to break up with his girlfriend, but he decides to at least bang her one more time. Unfortunately, he kind of drills her right into a deadly power tool.

Rather than face the consequences of what he’s done, he decides to store the body for later disposal. He researches the best way to do it, and I guess we finally learn what the purpose is of AI, because it suggests that the smartest thing to do is keep the body in a refrigerator.

He does just that then goes on with his day. The tone is quite quirky and humorous, with plenty to give you a giggle as different characters pop in and out to chill and have some beers in the apartment complex.

The problem is, the movie kind of forgets there’s a body in the fridge and that this is a horror comedy. We get flashbacks of how annoying the girlfriend was and why the main guy might have wanted to dump her (and her body), his daydreams about how things will unfold with the law if he’s busted. Meanwhile, people that drop by keep getting close to discovering the body, which means they must die. Unfortunately, we never get to see him kill them!

Instead, the focus is on his budding relationship with his pretty neighbor, which shifts this into romance mode. So far into romance mode that the romance even starts getting the black and white, silent film treatment.

Eh. Really just not my thing. Plus, you kind of sense right from the start where the relationship between him and his new love interest is going to end up.

MASSACRE AT FEMUR CREEK (2024)

Of these three “horror comedies”, this one worked the most for me simply because it has the worn out look of a VHS tape of a backwoods horror flick. In terms of what the film was going for, the script is not disciplined enough to grab you with any clear concise plot.

While most of this is played for laughs, there’s an aspect that seems completely overlooked and underutilized that could have made the film effectively creepy. For the first few kills, the killer, who is wearing one of those transparent masks, simply limps slowly up behind a person standing on the side of an isolated road at night and kills them.

It virtually rubber stamps the killer’s trademark approach, but that is never really explored again. At least the kills after that are gory with practical effects.

Our main group is a bunch of guys camping in the woods for a bachelor party. Rather than kill them off, for an entire hour the killer just comes upon random people that are in the woods for a variety of reasons. The cleverest moment has a small group of indie filmmakers shooting a backwoods horror movie and not realizing that the killer has unintentionally stepped into the role of their killer.

We also get a female stripper who is hired to come to their camp for a performance and gets more character development than most of the main guys.

Just before the one-hour mark, the killer wanders up to their campfire and starts killing them. Like, these guys had no idea there was a killer in the woods for most of the movie, which affected their own importance to the plot if you ask me.

The whole final act, between the kills and the main characters fighting back, is anticlimactic, but a dick does get blown off with a gun, which is always fun.

After that, there’s a very boring final scene focusing on the day of the wedding, but it does end with a cheesy, old school final frame.

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3 more from director Chad Ferrin

Posted on January 9, 2026 by Daniel

Having just added a few more of director Chad Ferrin’s horror flicks to my collection, I checked to see what I’ve still missed from him, and I found three more to watch. But are they worth buying on disc?

SCALPER (2023)

This one, which is actually a sequel to the giallo-inspired Night Caller, takes me back to Someone’s Knocking at the Door, which I believe was the first nasty little Chad Ferrin flick I watched.

Scalper gets right to that same kind of nastiness—a masked killer sodomizing a dude with a knife. Although no blood pours out of the victim, there is a gross blood and poop-covered knife blade moment before the killer scalps the dude.

Next, the psychic medium character from the first movie is being interviewed about those events by a conservative radio show host who loves guns, hates California, and thinks trans people are evil. Not sure what the purpose even was of making this dude an insufferable douche, because it just makes you wonder why the psychic would go on that kind of person’s show and doesn’t add anything to the story. You don’t even get any satisfying end to his existence to make his douchery worth witnessing.

While on the show, the psychic sees visions of a returning character, played by Bai Ling, being murdered. Bai Ling is a really good sport, because for the rest of the movie, the killer wears her face.

The psychic teams up with two detectives, one of them being Jake Busey, to try to find out who the killer is.

The movie is tied very strongly to the first film in terms of returning characters, but the tone is entirely different. There’s dark humor in this one, to the point that it sometimes feels goofy compared to the original. It also bombards us with other plane of existence sequences as the medium is taunted by various ghosts of the present and her past.

There’s plenty of gore, but much of it is in those ghostly realms, which reminded me of something right out of The Frighteners at times. This sequel is completely missing the thrills and suspense that made me a fan of Night Caller, so the close connection to its plot and characters just felt odd and I feel no need to own this one. Of course, in the back of my head I’m thinking that the next time I score a gift card, I’ll buy it to complete the series and then convince myself that I basically got it for free.

PIG KILLER (2022)

This one is “inspired by” a real-life Canadian serial killer named Robert Pickton. As with most true crime serial killer stories adapted into horror movies, do not go into this movie expecting any kind of accuracy. This is a total Chad-style production. It’s nasty, gnarly, has a splash of twisted humor, and stars most of his usual roster of actors. It also features loads of 80s music from artist Gerard McMahon, who was also credited under the name Gerard McMann when he recorded the classic “Cry Little Sister” for The Lost Boys soundtrack. He also appears in a live performance of one of his songs in this film. Awesome.

Jake Busey is the killer, and he very quickly takes a prostitute, played by Bai Ling, to his trailer home. They have a really weird sex scene together, and it gets even weirder when one of his pet pigs comes in to spectate. As gross and disturbing as the scene is, it’s incredibly silly (especially the fake pig head popping in from the sides of the screen).

In fact, the handful of kills spread out through this 2-hour movie are all handled with a gross, over-the-top sense of dark humor, making it undeniably entertaining if you can stomach that sort of thing. Jake hacks up victims after killing them, and usually the whole death and disposal scene is treated as a montage instead of a full kill scene.

Wanna know what made me the most disgusted? A scene of a guy who had his dick mutilated by a hog getting a blow job. Blech.

You know which scene disturbed me the most? Busey stabs a needle into a woman’s eye and then rapes her while the needle is going deeper and deeper into her eye as her face is pressed into a pillow.

Meanwhile, there are a few side stories involving other characters, including Michael Pare as a detective, but there really are no stories here to be told. It’s odd to make such a long movie that essentially goes nowhere.

Even the dive into the serial killer’s psyche is underwhelming. It’s basically just a few scenes letting us know of his incestuous issues with his mother. Hell, by the final act, it feels like the movie has forgotten it was supposed to be about Pickton and makes someone else the bad guy instead. This movie definitely felt pretty aimless.

UNSPEAKABLE: BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP (2024)

This is Chad doing what he does best—raunchy, sleazy cosmic sex horror based on Lovecraft that pushes the envelope more than Stuart Gordon did in the 80s.

On a side note, there are some Christmas decorations around, so this does take place during the season, but the holiday is totally irrelevant to the plot.

We begin in 1998…in black and white! Kill me now if the 90s are being represented by black and white film. Anyway, a dude thrown in jail for pedophilia is sexually harassed by his cellmate, so he bites the dude’s dick off. I won’t be able to see how exactly that all went down until the movie is released on physical media, because The Roku Channel blocked out the going down action!

The rest of the move focuses on Edward Furlong, a dream specialist working with psych patient with a split personality. This patient is creepy, and he soon turns into a monster and starts noshing on the heads of other people in the mental institution, infecting them with, well, something.

Meanwhile, Furlong begins having horrific visions, most of which involve his wife, played by 80s adult film queen Ginger Lynn.

This is a perfectly fucked up and chaotic, surreal nightmare of nonsense, which includes Furlong entering a realm in which he watches two men with monster penises battle it out.

Eventually, there’s a segment that unfolds briefly like a zombie outbreak in the hospital, there’s a great hand-in-trash-disposal scene shown from the inside (eek!), and the main patient dude ends up in a church fucking a nun with his own monster penis.

This is so my kind of throwback trash, and it’s the only one from this trio of Chad Ferrin flicks that I want to add to my collection.

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Freaky food, a masked murderer messing up, and killing chaos

Posted on January 7, 2026 by Daniel

Nothing is really as it seems in any of the movies from my latest movie marathon, making for one interesting triple feature.

1998 (2025)

This slasher comedy is only 77 minutes long but pads quite a bit of its runtime with montages, a music video, and 9 minutes of closing credits, so there isn’t much room for it to deliver the best of what it has to offer.

In a very bizarre opener that takes place in 1988, a singer decides to become a 1990s serial killer after he has his voice stolen from him.

For most of the first 29 minutes, we watch the killer do basic everyday tasks—making a protein shake, taking a bubble bath, jerking off, trying on different outfits in a fashion montage—in between failed attempts at being a masked killer, because in each case he gets his ass kicked by the would-be victim. A funny concept, but not quite the full intention of the plot.

A month later, a group of goths heads to a cabin in the woods. The guys have that sexy, queer goth vibe going on, which is a plus.

After a dance montage, they play truth or dare while the killer chases an unrelated couple in the woods.

Despite the campy tone of the film, the slashing scenes are crafted quite seriously. However, most of them are negated when a fun subgenre shift is presented, albeit way too late in the film to exploit it, which is a real bummer, because it really could have delivered something fresh and playful.

Meanwhile, the soundtrack kind of kicks ass, with a blend of songs that sound right out of the 80s and 90s.

HAUNTED HOUSE OF PANCAKES (2025)

It’s one for the holiday horror page! This horror comedy takes place at a fully decorated diner filled with customers in costume on Halloween.

Two brothers, one of them a total hunk, work at the diner. I can see why his brother can’t resist touching his pecs.

Their boss scores a new waffle iron, one of the brothers gets cut in the kitchen and bleeds into it, and then the waffle iron begins generating killer diner food and killer waffle balls.

Don’t ask me why the movie was titled Haunted House of Pancakes. Although, there was a moment when the movie served up some tasty cakes.

There are classic 80s style synth music cues, campy humor, silliness, killer food with teeth and eyes, gore, some impressive special effects, a nasty sex comedy scene, and the customers basically turning into a horde of possessed zombies.

It’s a pretty damn good entry in the killer food subgenre. The hubby and I both laughed out loud quite a bit. We also got a major craving for diner food.

THE ONLY ONES (2024)

This little indie really snuck up on me. The poster art isn’t very compelling, so the most I was hoping for was a generic slasher.

In the first few minutes, I thought I was going to be in for a pleasant surprise, with a backwoods killer wearing a skin mask hacking up quite a few people as we get narration of his backstory—born of incest, deformed, discarded in the woods, raised by a witch, now guarding the forest, and known as…Boneface! Awesome.

This movie did not go where I expected it to, in a good way.

A group of friends, including the beefy cutie in the blue shirt, travels to a house in the woods to party. They immediately discover a couple of squatters in the house and kick them out. One of the squatters seems kind of psycho….

Then we get character development. I feared this might end up being all dialogue driven filler, but it was just a campfire chat and a good amount of focus on the past trauma of two girls in a lesbian relationship. Yes! The star roles in this film belong to two lesbians. You don’t see that every day.

I don’t want to give it away, but things take an unexpected turn when one of the friends encounters the squatters again. Shit spirals out of control, and there ends up being one kill after another, some of them quite brutal, with a heavy dose of dark humor in the mix.

Even my hubby was getting a kick out of this one as it just carried us along on a rollercoaster ride right to the end. This is a perfect example of how you can deliver loads of thrills without a big budget.

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Back to the late 1900s: possession and aliens

Posted on January 4, 2026 by Daniel

Spanning three decades, my latest movie marathon is a retro-tastic dive into lower tier flicks from the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

THE POSSESSED (1977)

Four years after the release of The Exorcist, movies were still trying to chase its fame, even on television. This made-for-TV movie has nothing going for it beyond a cool cast of familiar faces, including Harrison Ford, Ann Dusenberry (the girl who cried, “Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-shark!” in Jaws 2), PJ Soles of Halloween, Diana Scarwid of Strange Invaders and Psycho III, and Dinah Manoff of Grease. Awesome.

There’s this girls’ school, and for some unknown reason, shit starts going on fire: a typewriter, a dorm room, a fricking girl. Seriously, this demon is actually just a firestarter. So silly.

A detective comes to investigate the fires, but one of the teachers decides something supernatural is going on, so she calls in a priest, at which point the movie plays out mostly like a drama.

Suddenly at the end, another staff member reveals she is possessed while standing by an indoor pool. The priest comes in, the demon tries to firestart him, the power of Christ is compelled to put the fire out, the demon spits tacks out of her mouth at him, and finally he jumps in the pool to exorcise her.

All of this while they’re just standing there staring at each other. WTF with this movie? I don’t even think I saw this one back when it was released, and I saw like every made-for-TV movie in those days.

ALIENATOR (1988)

This is a totally goofy play on The Terminator concept…with a bodybuilder woman as a metal-bikini-wearing alien with a laser gun attached to her arm that sounds exactly like a lightsaber.

Jan Michael Vincent runs a space prison where PJ Soles and Joseph Pilato (the douche from Day of the Dead) also work. However, all there have minor roles.

A prisoner pulls a C-3PO and R2-D2 and escape pods his way to Earth, is struck by an RV full of young people, and then tries to warn them that someone will be coming for him and they will be in danger, too.

There’s a local sheriff, two silly rednecks (silly rednecks always found alien happenings in the woods in 80s movies), and our Alienator with her big body and punk rock wig running around the woods a lot. Of note is that there is a kill that reminds us that filmmakers used to actually light people on fire to get it to look like someone was lit on fire….

Thing is, not much happens. She incinerates someone now and then, but it’s not until the last 20 minutes that she closes in on the group of friends, who have holed up in a cabin and must fight back.

Fred Olen Ray directs and definitely captures the cheesiness of late 80s, direct-to-video sci-fi, he just doesn’t deliver something worth remembering. The most memorable part is some space leeches the prisoner uses as weapons during his initial escape.

OUT THERE (1995)

This is a charming yet slow-moving nod to sci-fi flicks of the 50s and 60s, and it even begins in 1969, with two men having a close encounter. But of what kind?

In the modern day, cutie Billy Campbell scores a camera that has old film in it…with photos of that 1969 encounter. He meets the daughter of one of the men in those photos, and she is determined to find out what happened to her dad, since those photos are the last he was ever seen.
The pair begins to do some detecting, and they interact with the likes of Julie Brown, Rod Steiger, Billy Bob Thornton, Jill St. John, Bobcat Goldthwait, and PJ Soles. This almost could have been a PJ Soles movie marathon, but she isn’t in any of these films long enough to warrant that label. This one only gives her approximately ten seconds of screen time!

There is a lot of talk, so despite the great retro vibe, not much beyond conversations actually goes on for a majority of the movie. There’s humor, but the material is played straight, so there’s no over-the-top comedy.

The highlight really is the final act. The truth about the aliens is uncovered, there are some twists, we get some classic aliens, and there’s a chase scene. There’s even a mean shot taken at Michael Jackson and the possibility that he’s an alien!

 

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