It’s all kinds of body takeovers in this trio of flicks, but did any of them hit all my horror buttons?
BLOAT (2025)
This movie is all over the place in both narrative arc and story presentation, which is comprised of online videos, texts, home videos, video calls, and online research pages, with the screen constantly jumping from one format to the next. Not to mention, the level of digital product placement and brand advertising is insane. Prepare to be possessed by the need to own an Apple product after watching this one.
A couple lost their child during birth, so they plan a trip to Japan with their two young sons to get past it. However, dad is a military man and can’t go. He does, however, basically pull a Paranormal Activity with his family and monitors every weird thing that starts to happen while they’re on vacation.
So what happens? The younger son almost drowns in a lake and then begins acting psycho. He bites his brother. He eats cucumbers like crazy. There are cucumbers and bugs under his bed. He spits up green bile.
At first the father suspects his son got an infection from the water, but soon he determines the kid is possessed by something supernatural. The mother, who is actually with the son and not an ocean away, thinks he’s fine.
We watch the dad view videos his older son sends him, research infections, research the supernatural, and research why spirits and entities might show themselves to people digitally over the internet.
This movie is a mess. The dad enlists a friend who is in Japan to help him, introducing one of the most annoying, unserious characters ever in a serious movie. Happily, the dude goes into the woods and is attacked by a monster. So, is this a water demon or a woods demon? The movie can’t decide.
Granted, there are some genuinely creepy visual moments in the film, but it is absolutely incohesive and has a bland climax.
WHISPERS OF THE WITCHING HOUR (2025)
This 79-minute movie would have worked better if it clocked in at about 30-minutes long.
The opener is seriously the best part…and totally irrelevant to the rest of the movie. A dude in the olden days encounters a witch coming out of the water. She’s a freaky witch, and she pulls a Stephen King’s It and sends a little sailboat floating his way.
50 years later, it’s still the old days, and a dude is in love with his brother’s wife. He goes to a young witch in the woods, and she keeps upping the ante of things he has to bring her to work magic that will make the sister-in-law his.
That’s when this movie turns into a soap opera love triangle for the majority of its runtime. With 20 minutes left, the sister-in-law starts terrorizing her brother-in-law in a demon possession form for a brief time.
It doesn’t bring much in the way of chills and thrills, but the little twist in the final moment makes this perfect for use as a short in an anthology if it were trimmed down…by 50 minutes.
THE CRUCIFIX: BLOOD OF THE EXORCIST (2025)
Imagine a movie that starts with a medieval battle with Vikings, moves to the present for 50 minutes of talk, and then turns into an Exorcist rip-off for all but the last 5 minutes, which reverts back to another Viking sword fight, and you have this possession film.
After a dude is cursed during the opening medieval war and has a knife driven through his skull, we meet a modern straight couple that moves into a new home. When I tell you a bunch of little details are presented that are never cleared up, I’m not exaggerating. They lost a child the wife has flashbacks about, but it doesn’t have any significant impact on the story. They come to live in a new home, but their neighbor apparently cared for the husband’s father. Was he sick? Is the home his and they inherited it? Did the husband even care about his father? No idea.
The husband starts to immediately use a detector to dig up a skull with a knife embedded in it on his property. Why? Did he know it was there? Is he an archaeologist or historian or something? You’d think with 50 minutes of talk we’d get some answers, but nope.
Even so, there are some great setup shots, like these two around the skull as the couple argues.
The wife decides to pull the knife from the skull (why would she do so if it’s some sort of ancient artifact that shouldn’t be tampered with?), and she eventually becomes possessed. 56 minutes in she turns demon and demands they get the fucking priest, which made me laugh.
He arrives and she does the usual taunting. She says, “what a great night for an exorcism”. She levitates. The priest screams prayers at her. She pukes.
“Honey? Maybe a beer and a cult will make you feel better.”
It was eye roll time in the final scene when the husband finds himself fighting the original Viking with a sword and shield to save his wife.
