Time to take on a foursome of flicks to add to the holiday horror page. Consider this a post about three for the halfway to Halloween season with a short Christmas flick as a bonus.
SUPER HAPPY FUN CLOWN (2025)
I couldn’t look away from this odd and quirky portrait of a crazy girl, which also has plenty of autumn and Halloween atmosphere.
We meet a young girl obsessed with clowns and horror. Her mother despises her interests and punishes her for indulging in them. Naturally, the trauma of being denied what she desires means she carries her fandom into adulthood.
Now she’s all grown up and still dresses like a clown, entertaining people in the park in “whimsical” clips that make it clear she’s not right in the head.
She first snaps and kills someone at the 25-minute mark, so the film doesn’t waste time in bringing her over to the psycho side. Yay!
She then gets invited to a Halloween party, which triggers a gleeful need to kill. There’s even a nasty scene of her masturbating with the blood of a very relevant victim.
Come Halloween night, this turns into a long, fun, devious montage of her going on a killing spree, beginning at the Halloween party. Once she’s done there, she continues to live her best Halloween, heading over to a haunted cinema event and haunted attraction, where she starts taking out all the haunting actors before having a standoff with law enforcement.
If you’re going to make yet another movie about a killer clown on Halloween, this is how you do it. It’s a unique, indie treat that is a perfect watch for the Halloween season.
THE SPACE RODENT (2025)
When you make a horror comedy called The Space Rodent about giant alien rodents with glowing eyes invading earth, and you even have a campy cool rodent design, you need to exploit your creative creature. Unfortunately, this film instead leans heavily on banter between its main characters to fill the time, leading to an 80-minute movie that will give you a chuckle now and then but starts to feel more like a 150-minute movie.
It begins with rodent aliens speaking in their own language (with subtitles) about having no resources left and having to escape their planet. This sets up the humorous tone perfectly, even if the rodents themselves are never funny again.
We next meet two main dude bros and their girlfriends. The girls are getting dressed in costumes for Halloween, but the guys aren’t into it and don’t even want to answer the door for trick or treaters.
The girls hit the road, the guys stay home, and this movie makes the huge mistake of having the two pairs spend most of the movie apart contending with the space rodents every now and then…in between all the talking.
The few alien rodents we get are introduced early on, but the guys and girls don’t actually begin battling them—at separate locations—until about 54 minutes into the movie. The girls eventually end up back home to team up with the guys to escape the alien invasion, which amounts to a mini alien home invasion.
The comedy has its moment, like a space rodent jerking off and cumming all over one guy’s face, and the cast is spot on with their comedic timing, but the material they have to work with just isn’t strong enough fill the gaps in between the space rodent action. And the space rodent action isn’t strong enough to make this one a good time. If the guys had been the focus, the film could have gone harder with a buddy comedy routine, especially since there is an underlying sexual tension to their friendship that could have been explored for laughs.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN (2024)
It may be a fairly typical holiday slasher, but this one is loaded with fantastic Halloween atmosphere and décor, has a likable cast, and delivers some tightly executed kill scenes. Its weakness comes from the fact that the story, back story, and character interactions are too complex for their own good and just aren’t interesting enough to propel the movie forward. It often feels like aimless filler to pad the runtime, which isn’t even that long yet feels like it should have been shortened because of the filler!
The opener totally grabs you, with a dude in a corn maze being targeted by a masked killer who gets a thrill out of carving victims into holiday displays. Awesome.
The Halloween season also marks the 300-year anniversary of the town in which the movie takes place. There’s supposed to be a big celebration, but I seriously never got the sense that there was one going on considering the only characters in the film were all the main characters. You never really see any background extras to demonstrate that there are other people in this town.
Our main girl is suffering PTSD from an attack by her ex-boyfriend a year ago. He’s in prison, and she’s trying to move on with her life. Her plan is to just party with her friends on Halloween. Why do these movies always have a final girl who has already suffered trauma on Halloween agreeing to celebrate the season again?
To fill the time in between the cool kills, the main girl and her friends are investigated as suspects in the string of murders, the details of what transpired a year before come out, the main girl’s friends have some conflicts with another group of kids from school, and there’s focus on a local election that has no bearing on the plot. The most enjoyable part to me was the main girl’s budding relationship with a big boy high school quarterback.
Finally, the friends head to a haunted corn maze attraction, where most of the killing takes place. The setting is great, but again, there’s no one else around! Where are all the townsfolk??? I guess it’s that pesky curfew.
The final sequence provides plenty of chaos, but it’s just that—chaos. The unfolding of the action is not well-executed, so the killer’s main rampage fails to much in the way of dread or tension.
MIND LEECH (2023)
This one takes place at Christmastime, and there is some Christmas décor around, but the holiday is not the focus of the film. However, there is plenty of snow, since most of the movie takes place outside.
This had so much potential to be a cozy little b-movie about a parasite turning people into crazies in a small, isolated town, and what we get totally works in a creepy way, but the film runs only an hour, so the horror moments just aren’t plentiful enough! I wanted more!
Two dudes dump a container of chemicals in the water in the woods, which results in a monster leech. This large leech first leaps out of an ice fishing hole and attaches itself to a dude’s head, making him into a mindless murderer. Awesome.
That’s it. That’s the plot, and it’s all we need. The leeched victim goes around killing people, and if the host dies, the leech latches on to someone else. The film has a great low budget late 70s/early 80s vibe, with an exaggerated leech model and some modest gore, but there just isn’t time to deliver enough kills or leech transfers. I’m talking only once does the leech transfer from one person to another. But it does look hella freaky when a victim is walking around like a zombie with a leech attached to its head—an old school, practical effects leech.
The face every bottom has made at some point in his life.
The story is straightforward, with a sheriff and his deputy following the trail of bodies in an effort to track down a killer, and it all leads to a simple shootout once they encounter the leech. It really is a tight production that was perhaps kept to only an hour long due to budget constraints. Whatever the reason, I’d love to see this one expanded into a full-length, more intense feature.
