This trio of flicks offers Halloween horror, gays against psycho straights, and yet another board game of death. Let’s see if they kept me entertained.
DON’T LET THE CAT OUT (2025)
This one takes place on Halloween night, and the opener has a dude arriving for a house-sitting job in a scene so perfectly Halloween that it earns a spot on the holiday horror page.
A couple is going out for the evening, and they leave our main, cute guy with a list of instructions for taking care of the cat. There’s really not much in the way of signs that something is off at this house, and in fact, the entire movie somehow fails to deliver any sense of urgency or suspense, despite a lot of crazy stuff eventually happening.
Without any build-up, a dude in a cat mask appears suddenly, and our main guy is immediately thrust into a chase scene, which is perhaps the best scene in the movie.
He’s caught, brought back to the house, and tied up like a BDSM bitch.
It turns out he is going to be used for a ritual involving a cat, so his goal is to escape captivity. There are plenty of “action” sequences and psychotic cat situations, but for me they just didn’t hit the mark enough to make this one a thrill ride, despite the weirdness of the cat storyline and what it entails.
GATLOPP (2022)
This is a playful and quirky take on the killer board game movie subgenre. Four friends gather together to hang out at the house of one of the guys, who is about to sell it after a messy divorce.
They reminisce about their pasts together in flashbacks, and then they decide to play a board game. The cards ask questions that begin to get very specific and personal as the friends continue to play. Like, these cards know details about each of them that they don’t want revealed.
If they lie in their responses, inexplicable and weird things happen. The board game starts moving on its own. The cards talk back to them. When they say things, those things come true. Like literally, people they mention will magically appear in the room with them.
As crazy as it becomes, it’s all handled with humor, and the comedic timing and delivery of the cast make it quite entertaining for a while. They even get themselves into an insane jazzercise sequence once they learn that they have to play the game all the way through or they will die.
There isn’t any hardcore horror here, and much of it is about the psychological trauma each character is put through. After a while, I actually began losing interest in the plot, in part because it got a bit convoluted and silly by the final act.
HANDS OF HELL (2023)
This one is straightforward and cliché, but the gore and brutality are amplified noticeably in the final act, which definitely tickled my terror bone.
The first scene sets the tone. A murderous straight couple shows up at an isolated motel and kills off the couple that owns it. The actors playing the crazy couple are really perfect in their roles, which benefits the basic premise.
Next, we meet several couples heading to that very motel, which has now been secretly taken over by the crazies. Two of the couples are straight, and the other is gay and comprised of a Black dude and a Spanish dude.
Guess who the first victim is. Not only is it predictable, but the gay couple is not a happy one. They are arguing with each other from the very first moment they appear on screen until, well, you know. You never once see them show any affection for each other. Either way, their presence lands this one on the does the gay guy die? page.
There are a few scenes involving two detectives discussing previous murders by the crazy couple, but none of it is really necessary, and neither are the detectives, who merely show up at the end of the movie after all the killing is said and done. There’s also a big, intellectually disabled dude roaming around near the motel playing with a jack-in-the-box, but he’s also irrelevant to the plot and doesn’t add any fear factor since we know who the actual killers are. He doesn’t even get a redeeming hero moment to show that not all inbreeds are evil.
The fun doesn’t truly begin until the crazy female partner seduces one of the straight guy guests. And it is fun. This guy doesn’t show straight guys in a good light either. First, he easily decides he’s going to cheat on his girl with a stranger. Second, this strange bitch bites him immediately, drawing blood, and he continues to lust after her. And third, when she tells him to turn around, he says he’s not into “that” yet proceeds to immediately assume the position…and gets impaled through the ass. Awesome.
For a while, it appears that the Spanish gay dude might be one of the final survivors, and he even fights bravely against the crazy male partner, but in the end, after he’s called a gay slur, it’s only straights that live. However, the chase and fight scenes are definitely the grisliest parts of the movie, so at least there’s some good pay-off.
And in one of my favorite moments, the female baddie puts intercepts one of my biggest horror movie pet peeves—when she’s on top of one of her victims on the ground and the victim reaches for a nearby weapon to fight back, the baddie sees the move (like anyone hovering over you actually would) and puts a stop to it.
