This was a fairly fun triple feature I selected from my Tubi watchlist, with movies in a variety of subgenres.
THE RITUAL (2024)
The Ritual is like Flatliners with occult, body horror, and slasher aspects. There are some really good horror elements, but the pacing has issues, the film runs too long, and the plot gets too complex for its own good as it continues to unfold.
The super strong opener shows a shirtless dude in a creepy mask doing some human sacrificing. Delicious.
Then we meet our main girl, who is suffering from PTSD following the death of her father…yet she decides to take the same college class he taught in the same lecture hall in which he died.
She has a teacher who is enthralled by something her father was researching—a drug that is supposed to open users to a gateway to hell.
Somehow, he convinces her to join him and several students in a series of experiments with the drug, despite her being a recovering addict. She also has a hot husband who is a religious fanatic.
They start their secret meetings to try out the drugs. While tripping, the first human Guinea pig that takes the drug sees the main girl’s dead father, who looks like he’s wearing the fakest beard ever. Not sure if it is real, but it just looks so weird…which makes me wonder if mine looks fake, since I currently have like the same style beard.
Naturally, the main girl now wants to try the drug to see her dad once again.
Each student has nightmarish experiences with a creepy masked killer (best sequences in the film). Meanwhile, the main girl begins getting weird breakouts on her face.
Complicating matters, 70 minutes in, the main girl’s mommy issues are introduced, and her husband, who seemed to be just an out-of-touch religious fanatic who was unsupportive of her, steps up to basically become her hero.
A cheesy ghost girl with bad face paint enters the picture, which is a shame, because the creepy mask dude is a much more ominous threat. It all culminates in a confusing denouement complete with another sacrificial ritual scene. Definitely an inconsistent script that couldn’t really decide what it wanted to be.
THE CANDY STORE (2025)
It’s back to basics with this low budget flick, but there are some surprisingly nasty bits. What I really like about this indie is that it’s reminiscent of direct-to-DVD Black horror flicks of the early 2000s like Killjoy and Leprechaun in the Hood.
Kids have been disappearing in a Black suburban community for years, and it’s no secret to viewers who is responsible—a crazy woman and her big goon of a son.
However, the town apparently doesn’t realize how weird that little family is. In fact, it doesn’t even seem like the locals are aware this crazy lady has a son. Instead, her house is considered a candy store, where kids stop regularly to get treats.
They also get eviscerated and eaten in some nasty scenes. This movie pulls no punches when it comes to mutilating kids on screen. Yikes!
The plot is kind of weird. The crazy mother appears to actually be possessed by a demon. There’s a campy scene in which she asks a kid to come in and help her get something off a high shelf, and every time he turns away from her, she gets white demon eyes and begins approaching him menacingly. Pretty funny moment.
As kids keep getting abducted, gutted, and eaten, a detective is on the case, and there’s a confounding moment when the mother of one of the missing boys is finally like, “There’s this crazy candy store bitch I used to live next to as a kid, and the last time I saw my friend years ago, she was going to the candy store and was never seen again, and I know this crazy lady has a psychotic son nobody knows about, and I’m sure they have my son.” Why the hell did she wait this long to point out something that has been so obvious to her since she was a kid?
The final act is the highlight, when basically everyone still alive ends up sneaking into the house of the crazy mother and son. The film suddenly taps into a more atmospheric vibe than it managed to bring for most of its runtime. However, when the movie concluded, I still didn’t understand what was up with the mom and her demon eyes, which was the most compelling part of the movie for me.
SEVEN CEMETERIES (2024)
The director of the whacky and wild Feast movies gives us a film with Danny Trejo in the leading role instead of relegated to a mere horror cameo as he often is these days. The surprising thing here is that for someone responsible for a crass, nasty, gory, action-packed splatterest franchise, the director has toned his style down a lot in recent years.
A drug lord plans to take a ranch from a husband and wife, and part of that plan includes killing the husband immediately. However, it turns out the husband has set it up so Danny Trejo, who is just getting out of prison, will come looking for work at their ranch, so the wife can hire him as her protector.
Danny immediately gets shot up by the local authorities when he arrives at the ranch, but he is whisked away by a witch who has supernatural plans for him. She has him shed blood at cemetery plots to resurrect a dead mini-army to get revenge on the baddies.
The sequence of him gathering up his army is loaded with campy, dark humor, and the first battle with authorities is a blast. However, there are noticeable CGI special effects.
After being set up for over-the-top humor and gore, the film ends up becoming surprisingly low-key and loses focus, turning into what feels like more of a series of vignettes about each undead member having individual encounters with the enemies rather than a team effort to stop the baddies.
Eventually it all leads to another pretty big battle, which basically saves the final act by bringing it back up to the level of the earlier part of the film. Danny Trejo gets the final frame scene, and it’s so perfectly a Danny Trejo moment.
