In what turned out to be a sort of throwback to the horror of the early years following the turn of the millennium, my latest triple feature included ghosts, a syringe-wielding killer, and a fishman.
THE LAST INN (2021)
I’m pretty convinced all the actors in this film had to go back and dub in their dialogue for whatever reason, because even though the words match the lip movement, it looks and feels very disconnected.
That weirdness just adds to the hokey vibe of the whole thing. More than a horror movie, this comes across like a too-long episode of some sort of cheap horror anthology show you would see on television in the 80s. We have blue-faced ghosts that look almost as ridiculous as the zombies in the original Dawn of the Dead, and the most oddly 2-dimensional, cartoonish looking computer-generated effects, including visuals like a person falling to the floor and being dragged under a bed. That one made me giggle.
Anyway, our main girl has a car accident, comes to a nearly empty hotel, and immediately seems to step into a different dimension of reality where the owners and the few guests walk around as if in a fantasy land. There are ghosts everywhere, but no one seems to be all that intimidated by them. I think the bad dubbing has a lot to do with the lack of emoting.
There’s also a ghost doll terrorizing the main characters, which include the main girl, one straight couple, and one young dude, who is a sort of love interest for the main girl.
The owners of the hotel act weird, everyone thinks everything is weird, yet they just keep going around exploring the place in the dark with flashlights. There’s no sense of reality to anything that happens, so it makes the big twist ending not surprising at all, especially since it’s a twist that quickly became a cliché for ghost movies about 25 years ago. There is, however, one sub-twist within the larger picture that’s kind of clever.
NEEDLESTICK (2017)
This one gave me that nostalgic, direct-to-DVD vibe from the early 2000s, has Lance Henriksen for that direct to SyFy network feel, and features a menacing guy in a hospital murdering people with a syringe for that old school slasher feel.
It also has a lot of melodrama between hospital staff members, from relationships to ladder climbing ambitions. And then there’s the “mystery” of what kind of unethical experiments Lance is doing on dying patients, and why this killer seems to have come back to life to jab people.
The main weapon being a syringe might not be the most exciting, but it does make for one nasty eyeball scene. Eek!
There’s an interesting twist in how the killer is used to the advantage of the survivors, and there’s even a big bomb threat finale. Other than that, it’s fairly generic yet totally watchable if you’re in the mood for a throwback to the 2001 – 2007 era of B horror.
THE RED TIDE MASSACRE (2022)
This was the perfect SyFy level creature feature for me to watch with the hubby. It’s so simple and so satisfying, with a crazy body count.
A natural disaster has struck Florida, leaking contamination into the water, and for some inexplicable reason, allowing for the escape of a cop killer convict. Unfortunately, he needs to wade through water to get away, and he quite quickly begins turning into a modern day Creature from the Black Lagoon…or the fishman from my gay horror novel Rise of the Thing Down Below. He’s the perfect specimen of a man in a rubber suit.
Meanwhile, Michael Pare is the local sheriff determined to get this guy, his son works at the beach, and a female reporter is investigating the murders that start piling up.
There’s also a local dude convinced that the skunk ape is to blame. How is it that I never heard of this Floridian urban legend until the past few months when I covered a movie about him, and now he’s mentioned again?
Anyway, that is all the plot you need. The first kill comes a short 18 minutes in as the convict begins fully transforming into the creature for the first part of the movie, hacking up people left and right along the way. The final, primitive battle between our heroes and the creature on a dark road at night is awesome, and the cheesy “where are they now?” segment about each character at the end is icing on the cake of this popcorn movie.
