Three out of four of these flicks really brought me some horror happiness, so let’s find out which one was the letdown.
HOME SWEET HOME: REBIRTH (2025)
The hubby and I are desperate for something entertaining to watch together these days, and this movie (based on a video game I’ve not played) was a major surprise. It’s a stunning looking flick packed with action, monsters, creatures, and two hot leading men who both get shirtless.
A cop simply enjoying time with his wife and daughter in a mall gets caught in the crossfire as things quickly turn into hell on earth thanks to his shootout with super studly demon Michele Morrone.
As humans start turning into zombies (just a brief blip in the overall array of monsters in the movie), our cop gets separated from his wife and daughter.
Mom and daughter try to make their way back to their hotel room while dad tries to find them…as he’s pursued through the city by a giant burning skeleton!
He eventually teams up with a monk who knows just how the gateway to hell opened and how the cop can close it to save his family…and the whole world, but no pressure.
More monsters come out of the woodwork, including flying demons and critters that look like the crawling creatures from Cloverfield, and the nonstop action leads to a final battle that promises a sequel—a sequel I can’t wait for.
THE MOOGAI (2025)
This is the way I like my “elevated” horror; there’s an important social message being sent while still actually delivering on atmosphere and suspense. Plus, in the end there’s a freaky creature!
The opening was so intriguing that I had to Google the historical factuality of it and learn more. It’s a horrific situation I didn’t know anything about—the Australian government’s move to “breed the colour” out of the Aborigine population in the early 1970s.
The events are frighteningly timely and are melded into the generational impacts the country’s actions have on a family in the modern day.
A woman gives birth and then begins to suffer from nightmares and visions warning of something coming for her newborn. The dream sequences feature disturbing images like the Ring video tape, and she keeps seeing a young girl with her long hair down in front of her face, so this feels like somewhat of a throwback to the era of ghost girl horror.
There’s also a heinous scene involving eggs and dead chicks.
As the woman’s experiences intensify, everyone begins to think she’s suffering a mental breakdown, including family and friends.
Just when the movie feels like it’s losing steam, the husband sees something in the baby’s room, and before long the family ends up in the woods being chased by the Moogai, which is a legendary “stealer of children”.
Naturally, it’s a fight to the finish. The mother learns what she needs to do to take down the creature, which finally comes crawling out of the woods 70 minutes into the film. It has two faces, and one is wicked creepy. The other, unfortunately, looks like someone asked AI for a demon face and it scoured the internet to find the most common design. It’s a face we’ve all seen before. I just wish they had come up with two unique faces instead of using a default face for one of them.
IN ITS WAKE (2023)
Most will probably turn their nose up at this little indie creature feature, but for me it was a simple, satisfying throwback to direct-to-video flicks from the 80s.
There’s really not much of a premise. At a diner we meet a group of four friends and a trio of businessmen. What is a little weird is that the main characters are already together, but instead of them being terrorized by a demon creature in the diner, they all head off into the snowy night…and end up stuck on the same deserted road to then get picked off by the creature.
Meanwhile, we meet a priest preparing his apprentice for a confrontation with the demonic creature.
We are provided with some good killing of irrelevant characters as foreplay to get us in the mood for some monster mutilation, and then 35 minutes in the main characters find reasons to leave their cars, only to be hunted down and killed by the demon.
There are plenty of gory kills, and the wintery setting adds to the atmosphere. Not to mention, when the group of friends hides out in a house, it’s decorated for Christmas, although this little nod to the season isn’t enough to label this as a Christmas horror movie.
Naturally, the priest arrives to battle the demon in the final act, which is where we finally get a little more nuance to the plot. And as for the creature, it is actually kind of cute when it’s not flashing its big teeth.
Definitely check this one out if you need a mindless popcorn movie or midnight viewing with some friends.
THE DOGS (2025)
Don’t let the demon dogs on the poster art fool you—they’re just ghosts and get about a minute of screen time at most.
This is a supernatural drama about a mother running with her son from her abusive husband. They find a rental house in a rural area. The son inexplicably becomes immediately wary in the house, as if he’s expecting something scary to reside there.
He quickly starts to see a ghost boy and ghost dogs. Mom gets cozy with the handsome landlord. There’s a neighbor who seems to be hiding something.
The boy, played by the main kid from Spirit Halloween, is bullied at his new school, begins seeing dead bodies, and tries to uncover the truth of what happened to the little boy.
It’s all a metaphor for fracture families, the longing for a father, and the paranoia that plagues someone being haunted by the trauma of abuse. However, initial creepy moments are all we get before the movie becomes repetitive and generic.
