I actually had a good time with two out of these four flicks. Let’s find out which ones.
GET OFF MY LAWN (2025)
You really need to go into this one knowing that it’s intended as a campy, dark comedy thriller, otherwise the tone will really throw you off, and you might quit it before you adjust to the unexpected style.
This is a sort of satire of the psycho neighbor thrillers of the 90s. I should have realized once I saw that the psycho was a teen kid and not an old man that the title Get Off My Lawn didn’t make sense for a serious suspense film. I’m really out of it these days.
This young straight couple buys a new house, and as soon as they move in they are greeted by a young dude who says the home belonged to his grandfather. His clean cut, psycho white boy vibe is so obvious and over-the-top with not much room to intensify later on that I didn’t at first understand how the couple or the crazy kid’s two closest friends don’t see that he’s nuts.
The couple allows him to push things way too far with his exaggerated, innocent smile before they begin to push back, at which point he starts terrorizing them.
While the things he does are disturbing, the couple’s reactions to them are pretty funny at times. It gets even better when the husband starts terrorizing the psycho kid right back, although that aspect is underplayed and really could have brought the movie to another level of fun if it had been the bulk of the movie.
Instead, the weirdness continues to grow, the insanity amplifies, and the final act gets into brutality and torture! It’s definitely a satisfying climax.
MONSTER ON A PLANE (2024)
This movie is an 80s throwback blast, and just when you think it has nowhere left to go, it blows things up to a new level. The only complaint I could make about it is that it has great, gruesome face-eating scenes done with practical effects, yet all the blood splashes are CGI. If you’re making a movie, hire me and I will gladly stand off-camera with a turkey baster full of fake blood to squirt onto your actors.
Anyway, the film opens strong, with a couple canoodling in the woods and getting attacked by some sort of unseen creature.
Next, we meet a load of characters boarding a plane. Little do they know that one dude has snuck a newly discovered species onto the plane in a suitcase.
And then…turbulence hits. Out pops the creature, which is almost literally a Critter.
The fun begins with sex scenes and the Critter chomping on people while also using its secret weapon to give them hallucinations. That secret weapon, when revealed, is absolutely hilarious. It’s also nasty, so I’m glad they chose not make it the focus, because it would have ruined the perfect tone of the film and dragged it into gross-out humor.
Once the whole plane realizes the monster is on board, something very strange happens; literally most of the people on the plane just disappear and the rest of the movie sticks with one small group. Definitely a continuity issue.
I can overlook it, because things get even better when the Critter suddenly grows into a maxi-Critter, the face-eating action doubles, and the big climax totally delivers. Awesome. This is most definitely a good party flick.
31 KILLS OF HALLOWEEN (2024)
The Halloween vibes in this 73-minute movie are concentrated in unbearable horror host segments and faux commercial breaks that plague the actual movie throughout its short runtime.
Seriously, if you were to remove these segments, the movie would be shorter than the total time of the interruptions. They aren’t entertaining, they aren’t funny. I fast-forwarded through them.
The main movie was okay as a short. Two girls with a horror video channel decide to go live on Halloween night from the former home of a serial killer, which is now an Airbnb.
After a montage of them setting the place up and some backstory of the killer, they get one set of trick or treaters, then they talk to some guy they previously blocked online in hopes that he has some insight to make their live show more interesting.
They end up locked in the house, and the unblocked guy tells them they need to go into each room to witness recreations of the kills to find the key to escape the house.
The most festive Halloween light and atmosphere is experienced in each room. They are chased by zombie versions of each victim, they find the key, the zombie victims and the masked killer follow them out into the real world, and they use the key to stop the insanity. Would have been okay if this actually was a short tale in a low budget anthology. As a “full-length feature”, it just isn’t enough. And despite the title, there are not 31 kills, but it does go on the complete holiday horror page.
MY FIRST HORROR FILM (2023)
This is a familiar premise. A girl who has a horror channel wants to be in a horror movie.
She goes to the audition, where she and several other wannabes are taken to a house in the woods to work on the film.
A majority of the film is talk, mostly about horror, and with some humor sprinkled throughout, but there is also some commentary on the treatment of Black people in horror, as well as the intersection of Black and queer characters in horror, landing the film on the does the gay guy die? page.
They shoot some seasons for the movie, and then an hour in the actors begin getting killed off, but we never see anything. The killer is predictable as well.
The film switches to found footage for the denouement, with the main character running through dark woods with just a camera. But that doesn’t mean that it’s scary or suspenseful at all. There is a surprise element to this film, however. Fricking Rosario Dawson is in it!
