There’s nothing like an unhappy demon to get the horror party started. But did these pissed off creeps make it an unforgettable party? Let’s find out.
HEADLESS HORSEMAN (2022)
Ghost Rider gets a Halloween horror makeover. This b-movie silliness so deserves airtime on SyFy at Halloween time, and earns a spot on the holiday horror page.
After a trick or treating montage and some other setup scenes, a guy and his girl are hunted down by her drug dealer ex and his cronies (including Roach from People Under the Stairs). They abduct her and leave the boyfriend for dead.
Conveniently, the Devil, played by Michael Pare, hears his cries for help and offers to give him powers to seek revenge in exchange for his soul.
The powers include a flaming jack-o-lantern head and a Freddy Krueger razor hand from which he can shoot 80s-style green laser special effects to blow baddies to dust. There’s also a catch…to stay alive, he needs to suck blood.
You’ll get a chuckle as he uses his finger lasers to make enemies explode, but the big disappointment is that he only tosses his pumpkin head at a guy to kill him one time. The razor fingers and lasers weren’t even needed. When you call your movie Headless Horseman, the dude should kill everyone with his pumpkin head! Not to mention…he should be riding a horse, not a motorcycle…
That tells you everything you need to know about this one. The final act battling the boss baddie is as cheesy as it gets, with some funny lines. And the ex even brings a priest to a pumpkin head fight.
DON’T SAY ITS NAME (2021)
If you’re a fan of Native American folklore horror, you should find this atmospheric film that takes place in a rural, snowy town entertaining and creepy.
In a nice twist on the usual backwoods creature movie, this creature seems to attack people that are out in the forest in pairs, yet only kills one of them…the one that can smell and see it. Eek!
A female sheriff teams up with a female park ranger (another fresh twist on the usual male-centric cast), and they investigate who or what could be doing the killing, which eventually leads them into mythical territory due to the town having a high concentration of Native American residents that care about their land.
The odd thing is that the “creature” attacks are presented as aerial POV of something swooping down at its victims, making this seem like it’s going to be a supernatural creature tale.
However, when we finally see the threat in the final act, it looks like a mortal witch that runs around on two legs.
Even so, there are some suspenseful moments once the witch is revealed, especially an intense scene of her chasing a kid on a bicycle.
MARRY FUCK KILL (2023)
I know it’s a Tubi original, but if you’re going to title your horror movie Marry Fuck Kill, you have to deliver something a little more intense than the sloppy supernatural occult demon plot we get here. This definitely feels like a throwback to all the direct-to-DVD ghostly apparition movies that came out in the wake of bigger budget, PG-13 horror flicks in the early 2000s.
After a young woman commits suicide as part of a ritual, the friends she was estranged from, including her ex-boyfriend, come to stay at her house for the funeral and discover she left everything to them in her will.
While drinking, they play a game of Marry Fuck Kill. It doesn’t even really matter that they play. The fact is the reason she didn’t talk to them anymore is because they all had an orgy together and didn’t invite her.
Hey, at least they got the fuck part right in this film, for there are numerous flashbacks to the big bang. Guy-girl, girl-girl, guy-guy. Hot.
In fact, one of the guys is gay, scoring this film a hot spot on the does the gay guy die? page.
Anyway, there are a few kills by an unseen specter, the ex has some ghostly dreams about the dead girl, and a convoluted occult plot unfolds.
It’s all just so bland and silly, but there’s a witchy looking demon in a pentagram at the end. Yay.
