Nothing is really as it seems in any of the movies from my latest movie marathon, making for one interesting triple feature.
1998 (2025)
This slasher comedy is only 77 minutes long but pads quite a bit of its runtime with montages, a music video, and 9 minutes of closing credits, so there isn’t much room for it to deliver the best of what it has to offer.
In a very bizarre opener that takes place in 1988, a singer decides to become a 1990s serial killer after he has his voice stolen from him.
For most of the first 29 minutes, we watch the killer do basic everyday tasks—making a protein shake, taking a bubble bath, jerking off, trying on different outfits in a fashion montage—in between failed attempts at being a masked killer, because in each case he gets his ass kicked by the would-be victim. A funny concept, but not quite the full intention of the plot.
A month later, a group of goths heads to a cabin in the woods. The guys have that sexy, queer goth vibe going on, which is a plus.
After a dance montage, they play truth or dare while the killer chases an unrelated couple in the woods.
Despite the campy tone of the film, the slashing scenes are crafted quite seriously. However, most of them are negated when a fun subgenre shift is presented, albeit way too late in the film to exploit it, which is a real bummer, because it really could have delivered something fresh and playful.
Meanwhile, the soundtrack kind of kicks ass, with a blend of songs that sound right out of the 80s and 90s.
HAUNTED HOUSE OF PANCAKES (2025)
It’s one for the holiday horror page! This horror comedy takes place at a fully decorated diner filled with customers in costume on Halloween.
Two brothers, one of them a total hunk, work at the diner. I can see why his brother can’t resist touching his pecs.
Their boss scores a new waffle iron, one of the brothers gets cut in the kitchen and bleeds into it, and then the waffle iron begins generating killer diner food and killer waffle balls.
Don’t ask me why the movie was titled Haunted House of Pancakes. Although, there was a moment when the movie served up some tasty cakes.
There are classic 80s style synth music cues, campy humor, silliness, killer food with teeth and eyes, gore, some impressive special effects, a nasty sex comedy scene, and the customers basically turning into a horde of possessed zombies.
It’s a pretty damn good entry in the killer food subgenre. The hubby and I both laughed out loud quite a bit. We also got a major craving for diner food.
THE ONLY ONES (2024)
This little indie really snuck up on me. The poster art isn’t very compelling, so the most I was hoping for was a generic slasher.
In the first few minutes, I thought I was going to be in for a pleasant surprise, with a backwoods killer wearing a skin mask hacking up quite a few people as we get narration of his backstory—born of incest, deformed, discarded in the woods, raised by a witch, now guarding the forest, and known as…Boneface! Awesome.
This movie did not go where I expected it to, in a good way.
A group of friends, including the beefy cutie in the blue shirt, travels to a house in the woods to party. They immediately discover a couple of squatters in the house and kick them out. One of the squatters seems kind of psycho….
Then we get character development. I feared this might end up being all dialogue driven filler, but it was just a campfire chat and a good amount of focus on the past trauma of two girls in a lesbian relationship. Yes! The star roles in this film belong to two lesbians. You don’t see that every day.
I don’t want to give it away, but things take an unexpected turn when one of the friends encounters the squatters again. Shit spirals out of control, and there ends up being one kill after another, some of them quite brutal, with a heavy dose of dark humor in the mix.
Even my hubby was getting a kick out of this one as it just carried us along on a rollercoaster ride right to the end. This is a perfect example of how you can deliver loads of thrills without a big budget.
