It’s a trio of flicks in which creepy women…well…creep around. Let’s get right into them.
PANDORA (2024)
Much of this movie feels like a drug dream, allowing viewers to connect with the confusion and chaos the protagonist is going through…without ever getting any sense that any of it is actually real or frightening.
The main man is a has-been, recovering addict musician with insomnia. His wife died from an overdose with drugs he gave her, landing him in jail for a while and creating distance between him and his daughter. His neighbor dude wants him to reboot his music career and wants to be part of it. His ex-manager is totally an enabler in every bad thing he does.
Our main man scores a drug that is supposed to help him sleep. After he takes it, he wakes up to discover slaughtered women in his home. He has no idea how they got there. His ex-manager helps him cover up the crime with no questions.
And then our main man is haunted by corpse-like girl ghosts in his home—but I’m not sure if he actually sees them or of it’s just us, the audience. He basically starts mentally falling apart and moving closer to using drugs while drenched in horror lighting for a majority of the film. More people die, but this doesn’t feel much like a horror movie after a while.
It’s only the final segment that brings things into focus, but it’s one fuzzy lens. It’s gruesome and twisted, but it comes out of left field. I guess you could say that at least makes it fresh and unpredictable…not to mention even more incomprehensible.
DEMON SLAYER (2004)
It’s one of my favorite setups—a group of kids goes to an abandoned building and unleashes an evil force that begins to possess them one by one. Problem is, the evil force doesn’t possess enough of them in this movie and the meat of the possession doesn’t begin until an hour in!
After a vicious opener in which an unfortunate dude enters the abandoned building and gets hacked up by robed women, we meet a group of delinquents being tasked with renovating an old mental institution.
The guys are cute, including horror hottie Adam Huss, who plays the obnoxious dude and balances out the good with the bad—he drops a reference to The Monster Club, but he also calls a priest a fag.
One of the main girls is open to visions, which are what make up the bulk of the “spooky” moments for the first hour. She also finds a diary that details various atrocities that took place in the hospital. It’s all low energy filler as we wait for the fun to hit the fan at the 61-minute mark.
The first serious possession hits hard, and it’s just weird to me that the film didn’t bother to bring this level of cheap thrills earlier. The whole tone shifts suddenly.
There are demon women, the two main guys come alive with humorous reactions to the situation, a campy priest with an eye patch shows up to save the day, and the demon action kicks into high gear. I seriously would have wanted to add this one to my physical media collection if only it had delivered sooner on the scares.
MERMAID’S CURSE 2 (2025)
Indie filmmaker Louisa Warren directed the first movie, but she only produces the sequel.
This film isn’t much different than the first film in terms of plot, but while the first film was strictly about “witches of the water” (its original title), this one incorporates elements of mermaid visuals into the story.
The story is that men are vanishing from the beach, and the viewers know the culprit is a siren—possibly mermaid—that comes ashore to viciously attack them. She even rips one dude’s dick off. Delectable.
Anyway, there are two brothers who run some sort of news business and need a good story to make money. They decide to focus on the missing men, because their own father vanished mysteriously, and their mother seems to be hiding the truth of what happened. The daddy is shown in flashbacks, and he is also delectable.
Meanwhile, one brother starts dating a pretty young woman, and the other brother suspects that she’s up to no good and begins following her around the beach at night. That’s about the extent of the plot. There are some twists as the truth about the dad and the girlfriend unfold, but honestly, the dick detachment is definitely the highlight for me.
