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.
