I had varying degrees of fun with the latest foursome of flicks from my watchlist, one of which lands on the holiday horror page (kind of for the second time), another of which scores a spot on the does the gay guy die? page, so let’s get into them.
BRUTE 1976 (2025)
The director of Pretty Boy gives us an homage to grisly 1970s horror movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes that also seems to celebrate the onset of diversity in the 1970s. However, if you ask me, the film actually seems to be turning the usual social message on its head and serving as a warning to the “woke” crowd to rethink its approach to progress. Not that it’s right wing propaganda, but it isn’t exactly pushing the equality movement. I’d love to hear what others think after watching the movie.
The opening scene is a goodie. A lesbian couple gets stuck in the desert, explores an old mining cave, and then gets terrorized by freaks in masks. Keep track here. Lesbians are the first victims.
Next, we meet their friends, who are traveling in a classic Texas Chainsaw van, and the characters even have a conversation about that movie.
This is a pretty fun, likable group (especially the Randy type character who knows his horror movies), and they are heading into the desert to do a bicentennial photo shoot—a forward-thinking, interracial photo shoot featuring a white woman and a Black woman.
There’s also a sexy white male model with a pornstache wearing Daisy Dukes and not much else.
The male photographer seems to have the hots for him, so, when the group reaches a ghost town and everyone goes to explore, the two guys go off on their own.
Are you with me here? There’s homoerotic sexual tension between the two men. But then…it seems to get cock-blocked by an admission of heterosexuality and some self-inflicted closeting. But then, it seems like both men were lying about their lack of homosexual attraction. And then…it goes straight to a shit situation in a restroom to totally kill the mood and diffuse any homoeroticism. That, however, doesn’t stop a glory hole scene from unfolding next. Here’s the weird thing about this scene. It is gruesome and explicit, but there’s a little rectangular blur covering the full Monty!
I have no idea if the movie was made this way or if Amazon Prime chose to block it, but either way, when that wiener gets mutilated behind the little rectangular blur, even what you don’t see will make you feel the agony. I was in a room with three other guys, and we were all crying out in pain. While I would love to see a cut of the film without the little rectangular blur, what concerns me most is that it’s a little rectangular blur, so it doesn’t seem like it is censoring much of anything.
Meanwhile, take note that the second set of targeted victims in the flick were seemingly gay. Yep. All the queers die first.
Well, not quite all the queers. Here’s where the DEI comes into play, and ironically, it comes mostly from the psycho family that is doing all the killing. This turns out to be a mixed-race family with a gender-bending queer dude leading the pack. And he isn’t even proudly queer, for he gets defensive about his genitals. Yeah. This movie totally indulges in the trope of the era in which it takes place—psycho killer with gender identity issues.
As for the rest of the movie, there are creepy masks, violent kills, nasty gore moments, and plenty of scenes of everyone splitting up and getting chased, but the pacing does begin to drag. The film is 105 minutes long but probably would have benefited from about 15 minutes of edits. There’s also a point to the family’s madness, where the usual right wing extremist hillbilly psycho family trope is turned on its head. It’s actually pretty clever to break from tradition, even if it’s a message leftists won’t love. The real issue I have with the denouement is that it just isn’t very exciting or intense. It’s definitely no Texas Chainsaw family dinner.
One final thing you can learn from this movie if you never realized it before; if you’re ever in a horror movie, blocking a door with a piece of wood furniture when the guy hunting you down has a chainsaw isn’t going to do shit.
MATCH (2025)
This is my kind of nasty little horror flick. Everything about it is predictable for horror veterans, but the ride is so simple and smooth that I found it totally satisfying. It has a great deformed human, good gore, suspense, and a sense of humor.
Our main girl is trying to find a man online, but she’s connecting with one jerk after another. Personally, I would have swiped right on the guy who chose to send a dick pic.
She instead waits it out and finally strikes up a convo with a hottie, who she agrees to meet up with…at his house.
When she gets there, his mother welcomes her in, and it all goes horribly bad fast. This mother bitch is crazy. She is luring women over on dating apps to find one that her son can impregnate.
Would you believe her son isn’t the guy our main girl saw online? Let’s just say if you’ve ever played the GameCube remake of Resident Evil, he’s like the male version of Lisa Trevor. Eek!
There are plenty of gross-out situations involving the son’s deformed penis as he hunts our main girl down in the house to knock her up. Once she saw that thing, she must have kicked herself for passing up the guy with the pretty dick pic.
In the meantime, behind every door is a new horror for her to discover. For me, the deformed dick is definitely the most traumatizing.
The film builds to a great climax in which several other characters arrive at the house and have to work together to escape the insanity. The gore goes hard in the final act, as does the general wackiness, making this one a great midnight movie to watch with friends. My only real complaint is that there’s one dream sequence somewhere in the middle to add some shock value, and it’s just a cheap detour the movie didn’t need to take because the pacing was fine without it.
MAULER (2025)
This film flounders for most of its runtime, finally finding its footing in the last 25 minutes, when it actually gets more of a sense of humor.
It opens with a little boy beating his abusive father to death with a sledgehammer. You know a film is going to be a mess when the effect used to depict such brutality actually makes you and the hubby laugh out loud. Cheap CGI blood doesn’t help either.
The opening credits feature The Omen level demonic choral music. The film is still taking itself way too seriously.
20 years later, we meet a group of friends that decides to take part in a contest to win 25,000 dollars—they have to document themselves staying at a haunted location overnight. As they discuss the plan in their car, brace yourself for them to burst into an annoying chant song that goes on way too long.
What also goes on way too long is them standing outside the location they choose—the house where the little boy killed his dad. Turns out the boy still lives there and is now seven feet tall. He’s not very ominous at all because he’s kind of soft-spoken and spouts religious extremist nonsense whenever he informs victims that they are sinners before torturing them with his sledgehammer.
So, the friends spend a whole lot of time outside trying to figure out how to get in rather than just, you know, finding a haunted house that doesn’t have a live killer in it.
Eventually, one of them makes it inside and is terrorized by the Mauler while the rest of the group continues to stand outside trying to figure out how they are going to get in. This goes on for about an hour of the movie.
Eventually they all get in, and when one of the girls is bashed in the forehead with the sledgehammer and simply says, “I’m just a little woozy”, the movie seems to finally get into a groove and lean into a sillier vibe.
The camp escalates when a wannabe hero security guard comes on the scene and initiates a funny confrontation with the Mauler as if they are in a boxing match. The laughs continue when the final girl has to evade the Mauler until the end. The final act definitely saves this mostly disappointing film a little.
DIE’CED RELOADED (2025)
This is an expanded version of an original 50-minute Halloween horror film I cover here, which has been re-edited with new footage to run 80 minutes long.
I don’t remember the original enough to recall how much has changed, but I almost feel like the additions consist mostly of a higher body count and super gory kills with great practical effects. The opener alone in a mental institution has our killer absolutely mutilating a few people before escaping. I’m pretty sure it didn’t start this way the last time around.
As for the rest of the movie, there’s still a great 80s vibe, and the clown killer has quite a presence, but the tone with which he carries himself is all over the place. At times he wants to have a larger-than-life personality with a sense of humor, but at other times he’s going for totally sinister and silent.
I also don’t feel like the extra 30 minutes have added anything to the plot, because it’s still super thin and cliché. Killer escapes mental institution, tracks down main girl while killing some random people along the way, and eventually abducts main girl from a Halloween party and takes her to his lair, where a fight to the finish ensues.
I welcome all the great new gore, but a longer running time should have been utilized to not only add more of a Halloween vibe, but also to draw us deeper into the story and characters. Somehow, we still don’t get to know anyone, so we’re left with no connection to the main characters. It feels like most of the characters get about five minutes of screen time at most. Even the main girl fades into the background of a virtually nonexistent plot. There’s nothing to really absorb here beyond the cool new kills, which is probably why I can barely remember watching the original cut, which I blogged about less than two years ago.
