It’s a mish-mosh of subgenres in my latest movie marathon, so let’s get right into them.
CREEPY CRAWLY (aka: The One Hundred) (2022)
This Asian film is a squirmy wormy nightmare in a good way, with an odd legend about a centipede that possesses people intertwined with a story of a bunch of people quarantined in a hotel during COVID. Ugh.
That’s the only part I wasn’t feeling. I’m back in COVID hell right now between this movie and the fact that I’m reading the Stephen King book Holly, which takes place at the height of the COVID epidemic. If there was ever a time for a “too soon”, that would be now.
Anyway, you can look past the COVID part easily if you focus on the unsettling vibes in this hotel, where the owner seems to be up to no good, people are getting possessed, and centipedes start falling out of vents.
The slow burning suspense during the first part of the film reminded me of the movie Infection, one of my favorite Asian horror flicks, as those in the hotel roam the empty halls with something sinister always just around the corner.
Midway through the film it goes for the all-out creepy crawly segment, with centipedes galore. And it all leads up to someone mutating into what is essentially a boss from a horror video game.
Totally awesome. This is definitely a fun one and a good one to watch with friends.
BENEATH US ALL (2023)
This is a vampire light horror flick that borrows from various well-known vampire movies, but I appreciated the atmosphere and tone, as well as two horror veterans in the leading roles: Maria Olsen and Sean Whalen.
The film is rather slow paced, but that just amplifies the moody energy of the plot. A couple living in a rural area are the parents of several foster children. It’s not exactly the most pleasant family environment, particularly for the oldest teen girl, who is on the verge of aging out of foster care and not treated all that kindly by her foster father in particular.
It takes a while, but eventually she finds a box in the woods at night from which a man emerges.
She takes him home and hides him, and pretty soon we get into Let The Right One In territory as he begins to ask her to bring him fresh sustenance to regain his strength. On top of that, there’s plenty of fog and eerie lighting reminiscent of the Subspecies movies.
Inevitably, the teen girl becomes the vampire’s minion, which is a perfect way for her to get back at the foster parents she hates.
Most of the horror action takes place in the last fifteen minutes or so, and when the vampire finally shows its true form, it’s kept mostly in shadow. Despite being derivative (or perhaps because of it), I enjoyed this one.
DEVIL MAY CARE (2023)
I’m going to get right to the point with this one. It is a very low budget production and feels like the creators decided halfway through that there was no way this would be taken seriously, so they shifted tone to go for cheesy camp.
Six friends sneak into an old theater. One tells a story of the theater’s history—it was built on the devil’s ground!
The group sees what they think is a dog but turns out to be a werewolf. One of the guys seems to get possessed and leads everyone down into tunnels underground.
The movie is 70 minutes long, and the werewolf in its silly makeup begins to emerge like 50 minutes in. It also has a fight with the devil, who is a guy with goth makeup and horns.
And just for the hell of it, some zombies are thrown into the mix. This felt to me like one of those cheap direct-to-DVD releases that flooded the market when the format was first becoming hot in the early 2000s.
