Each of these films features a curious combination of subgenres that makes them all rather unique when taken as a whole, yet simultaneously cliché in how the individual subgenres are presented and play out in each movie.
FOG CITY (2023)
Indie filmmaker Steve Wolsh has made three full-length horror flicks—this one, Kill Her Goats, and Muck. Muck was a St. Paddy’s Day horror that was supposed to be part of a trilogy that never came to fruition, but I still wish it had. I have all three of his films on disc, but Muck is by far the only standout among them. Like Kill Her Goats, Fog City had potential, but ultimately it was not a movie that gave me the warm and fuzzy horror feels.
I’d describe it sort of like The Fog meets Cabin Fever meets The Crazies.
A girl whose father owns the local factory, which has a bad track record, is invited to party at a house near the factory.
After a quick sex scene (yay! I love that Wolsh has brought gratuitous sex and nudity back to horror—and I also love the setup shot for the scene), sirens begin to wail and a smoky mist starts to rush in.
Here’s the interesting part. The group becomes convinced that something toxic has leaked from the factory. They decide to hibernate in the house and close off all air holes so they won’t, you know, turn into zombies or anything.
The question for the audience is whether there actually is something poisonous in the fog, or if the friends have just watched way too many horror movies and are suffering from some sort of mass paranoia. Don’t expect to ever find out for sure.
Either way, the group becomes convinced they can catch something and pass it on to each other. They begin forcing those they believe are infected into isolation. They turn on each other. Some of them begin to become crazy and homicidal. Others feel like the crazies are using up their precious air supply and would be better off dead than as a living threat to the rest of them.
It’s an entertaining concept, and Wolsh definitely manages to make the fog feel like a character in the movie much like John Carpenter did in The Fog, but the initial sense of foreboding and establishment of suspense he creates when those sirens first sound quickly get watered down, and we are left with a bunch of kids just yelling at each other, fighting with each other, and eventually acting out and killing each other. There are some worthy scenes of violence, but too many of them involve use of a gun (yawn), so overall this is a really lackluster flick. I think what could have helped this movie is if this guy had been in it more. There’s something very enticing about the “not an exit” sign behind him…
CONTROL FREAK (2025)
There’s a whole lot going on in this movie, which blurs the lines between elevated horror, body horror, and good old monstrous demon horror (the part that kept me watching).
The movie is very much about the female psyche and female identity. Our main character is a successful self-help speaker who feels her career beginning to slip away from her. At the same time, she is plagued by a chronic itch at the back of her head. The incessant scratching definitely starts to go right through you after a while.
She is also dealing with her husband, with whom she’s been trying to have a baby, even though she doesn’t totally want one. Indeed, the movie is about bodily autonomy. The husband soon finds out that respecting your wife’s bodily autonomy requires you to take care of your own bodily autonomy…
It’s also about mommy issues, which we learn as the story unfolds and the main character explores the volatile relationship she had with her deceased mother.
To add to the itch, the appearance of ants plays a significant part in the body horror, but we also get a few teases of a demon hand that seems to be initiating her scratching. Several of these horror sequences are nothing more than nightmares or delusions, and that always gets stale after the first few times.
It generally unfolds with a typical body horror slow burn, so I wasn’t all that engrossed in it for a large chunk of the run time. The payoff for me came when the menacing demon finally comes out to play. Yay! The shift away from the usual body horror flesh rotting scenario to a simple demon battle definitely drew me back in for the final act.
COMPANION (2021)
This is an odd mashup of zombie and ghost genres that kind of folds in on itself due to a self-inflicted, full-circle plot. I’m talking Control Freak level head scratcher.
We are thrown into the middle of a weird kind of apocalypse. The dead are basically returning as ghostly entities, but they can physically make contact with you when they feel like it, so they’re basically zombies. But not. They’re transparent, so they’re ghosts. They look rotted, so they’re kind of zombies. It’s all very confusing, but it has an interesting catch—they can’t travel far from where they were originally killed.
The movie focuses on a small group of people. First, we meet a straight couple trying to survive this ghost zombie apocalypse. A radio broadcast makes reference to a safe place, so they’re trying to head there.
The couple gets attacked by a crazy preacher and his minions.
A cowboy who has been chasing the preacher saves the couple from being killed. The preacher runs off. The main guy, who has been hurt, asks the cowboy take his wife and get her to the safe place.
They leave, the preacher returns, and the main guy teams up with him! After lots of fighting with ghost zombies for most of the movie and loads of character development, the cowboy and the woman come back, and now the husband considers the cowboy to be his enemy for taking his wife. What?
The trajectory of the plot really falls apart, but the ghost zombies are an interesting break from the usual outbreak movie. They are predominantly computer generated and do that flickering head thing that was so common in ghost movies in the early 2000s, so you might find it somewhat nostalgic if you miss that era of ghost horror.
