I caught one on cable and two were streaming. Cable is the biggest loser this time around, so let’s get into them.
INCARNATION (2022)
This film is visually problematic right from the start because it uses both that distracting shaky cam effect and in and out zoom style we see in sitcoms where there’s supposedly a cameraman filming everything, like The Office and Modern Family.
Taye Diggs and his wife move into a new rental home, with Michael Madsen as their really weird landlord. Basically this film shows its hand right from the start, but I continued watching in hopes there would be some surprises.
There weren’t.
The couple is trying to open a new business. She wants to have a baby. They fight over money. She finds some oddities in a room upstairs, including a satanic book and a handful of gold coins. Where is Leprechaun when you need him to make things interesting?
Taye reads a ritual out loud from the book and starts to act weird. He has dark flashbacks, including his father killing a dog he brought home when he was a child.
Eventually things go really bad between him and his wife and him and the landlord. They’re all awful people and there’s little in the way of actual horror elements until the last minute. It’s messy, it drags, and it disappoints.
SLASH/BACK (2022)
This may be a movie about teenage girls battling aliens, but it doesn’t lack on horrific visuals and gore.
It goes harder than any of those tween haunted house movies that make so much money at the box office. It even opens with a vicious face sucking scene.
So these girls live in a rundown Arctic settlement in the mountains.
When they’re out hanging in nature one afternoon, they see a bear that isn’t acting anything like a bear. That’s because it’s been invaded like the dog from Carpenter’s The Thing!
As the kids figure out something is using the local wildlife as hosts, the alien species begins to infiltrate grownups as well.
These people look like contorting zombies wearing Leatherface masks. Eek.
Not to mention, tentacle appendages pop out of their faces to attach to other life forms.
The likable kids band together to fight the alien life forms using any weapons they can, and the film is loaded with suspenseful sequences and freaky encounters with the transformed adults. It’s fun from start to finish with fantastic outdoor scenery.
TROLL (2022)
This Norwegian film (dubbed in English on Netflix) takes the best of King Kong, Godzilla, Cloverfield, and Troll Hunter to bring us a giant monster movie with a dash of fantasy mixed in.
Turns out trolls are these huge mountain monsters and not those little things with the bushy hair that you’d stick on the end of your pencil in the 1980s.
A paleontologist is called in by the government to help the military take down the creature after it attacks people in the mountains, and her military leader is a cutie.
The first encounter with the monster is fantastic. Actually, every encounter is if you’re a fan of big monster movies like the ones I mentioned above.
The backstory that is eventually presented caused me to sympathize with the troll. I wanted him to kill all those damn military men (except the hottie). I was also psyched to learn that trolls hate Christians and throw stones at their churches. We seriously need a troll in every state in the U.S. to put an end to religious fanaticism in this country once and for all.
Troll is a blast, and the final battle is as entertaining and thrilling as some of the big Hollywood monster movies.
