It takes a while for Hulu to get enough new horror movies for me to check out for one of my posts, but after months and months of indulging mostly in Tubi’s vast selection, I finally reached three-movies in my Hulu watchlist, making me question if Hulu is even worth it. Anyway, let’s get into this trio.
THE STRANGER (2020)
This movie was actually a series of shorts that originally aired on a now defunct streaming service. The episodes were compiled together to make one full-length movie.
Maika Monroe of It Follows stars as a rideshare driver. The film doesn’t waste any time. She picks up a dude who at first seems nice but very quickly turns very dangerous. She escapes him, but he is soon tracking her every move and making her night hell.
Initially this felt like one of the many great suspense thrillers of the 90s, but as the film goes on it gets very annoying. This psycho unrealistically knows her every single move, setting up booby traps to frame her for a series of crimes before she even knows where she’s going to end up. During the final confrontation, the film explains how he supposedly tracked her, but seriously, he continuously has trouble in place for her before she even arrives where she’s going next. It made absolutely no sense.
On top of that, there are just absurd strings of events that are way too coincidental. For instance, Maika gets off a subway in the middle of a tunnel when she’s being pursued by the stalker, gets chased by coyotes (!), finds a secret passage, slips through it, and ends up at a rave…where the stalker is there waiting for her. Eye roll.
However, if you just want to enjoy the ride of the classic girl stalked by psycho style of thriller, this one definitely delivers. Personally, I was constantly more concerned about the fate of the little dog Maika carries with her than I was about her.
LORD OF MISRULE (2023)
When you love a subgenre, you generally appreciate consuming any take on it, so I think if you are big on folk horror you’ll be satisfied with this one, even though it is a virtual rubber stamp take on better-known folk horror flicks.
Personally, despite some atmospheric moments and a cool horned beast money shot at the end, I found the film to be rather empty as it simply checked off the boxes of what needs to happen in a folk horror flick without really drawing me in to the narrative or the characters.
The plot is simple. A female minister moves into a small town where no one really goes to church. Her husband is busy writing a book. Her daughter becomes the angel mascot of the harvest season festival.
The pagan-like festival is quite creepy with people in eerie masks, so that caught my attention. But then the daughter disappears and the mother spends the rest of the movie trying to piece together what became of her as she starts to learn more and more about the weird behavior of the locals. The reference to something waiting in the fields definitely reminded me of Children of the Corn, especially the 2020 installment of the franchise.
Naturally, she ends up being all on her own as she discovers cult practices and rituals taking place, and it all leads to some sadistic actions by the cult and a fire in a ramshackle building in a field.
BIRTH/REBIRTH (2023)
This one opens with a shocking scene of a woman jerking a guy off in a very clinical way in a bathroom stall, so I was very intrigued—and wanted more of this. However this isn’t about men…or cum in a cup…at all.
The film is definitely intriguing, but it doesn’t really delve too much into actual horror. The jerk-off woman is a morgue worker who is experimenting with bringing the dead back to life. Carla of Scrubs plays a maternity nurse whose daughter dies unexpectedly.
Before long, the paths of the two women cross, they move in together, and they begin working to bring the nurse’s little daughter back to life. This requires using fetal tissue from other pregnant women.
If this were an 80s movie like Re-Animator, there would be so many nasty places for it to go. Instead, we get a more emotional drama dealing with women’s issues: pregnancy, motherhood, how women’s bodies are used for child-rearing, etc.
Yeah, it’s elevated horror with a little dose of trauma porn. Don’t expect the little girl to become a reanimated monster that goes around killing people, but considering the filmmakers knew that’s probably what viewers expected, we are thrown a bone just once to show us the little girl isn’t exactly herself anymore. However, even that moment isn’t very intense.
The closest thing we get to a traditional reanimation concept is that the two women take immoral and unethical routes in an effort to play God.
