In this trio, handsome leading men face off against various horror threats, and I actually enjoyed all three of them. The movies, I mean. Okay, the men as well.
THE BEAST WITHIN (2024)
This is a more sophisticated, story-driven approach to the werewolf genre…and yet my adolescent appetite still found it engaging.
The opener sells us on the horror, with a woman being attacked by a werewolf under a red moon, complete with some graphic munching. However, it’s almost like a false start, because this film is in no way packed with gory werewolf attack action.
The focus is solely on a father, mother, and daughter living in a house in the woods. The young girl is having nightmares and beginning to recognize that the mother (played by Ashley Cummings of NOS4A2) and father (hottie Kit Harington of Game of Thrones) sneak out of the house at night, load a pig into their truck, and drive off into the woods. So…she follows them.
The young girl now has to come to terms with what she witnesses. Her mom chains her dad up in a structure in the woods and leaves him there until morning. He transforms. He devours the pig. Eek! He’s also naked. Yum.
The family dynamic unfolds slowly, and the grandfather even gets in on the drama, but eventually it leads to an exciting and suspenseful final act, with the family caught up in a cat and mouse game with the werewolf in their house. This was an engrossing, understated werewolf flick.
THE SEEDING (2023)
This slow burn deep dives into folk horror, exploring themes of fertility, motherhood, fatherhood, gender roles, gender norms, and suppressed sexuality. It’s an odd film that doesn’t try to make total sense, but it definitely delivers on the “out there” vibes.
A photographer hiking in the middle of a seeming desert right out of The Hills Have Eyes encounters a young boy who runs off before the man can help him. However, the boy does manage to steer him towards a cabin down in a cavern.
The man ends up descending a rope ladder into the cavern, where he meets a woman living alone in the cabin. She lets him stay the night, and when they wake up the next morning, the ladder is gone and there’s no way back up the rock walls surrounding the area. There also happens to be a band of creepy, feral boys up on the cliff, looking down on them and taunting them. One is even dressed in drag.
And yet the woman seems to just accept it for what it is, making for a whole lot of conflict for the main man. He wants to get out of the cavern. He feels compelled to protect the woman. He even tries to be a paternal figure to one of the boys up on the cliff.
All the horror comes from the psychotic boys, from the way they look to the vile things they do…like one of them whipping out his dick and pissing over the cliff to drench the man.
Despite all the weirdness that unfolds, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll know what is going on, but the film does what folk horror needs to do; it indulges in themes of bizarre sacrificial rituals and the darker side of procreation. Despite this not exactly being my kind of horror subgenre, I was definitely entertained.
APOCALYPSE Z (2024)
It’s a Spanish zombie flick about a man and his beloved cat navigating the country after an infection breaks out, turning people into cannibalistic crazies.
Is there anything new here? Not much. It’s the usual—leading man on a mission to get to a safe location after quarantine and mandatory evacuation makes plenty of friends and enemies along the way. In this case, the hero uses a harpoon gun as his weapon of choice.
These frantic zombies sort of squeal like pigs, and they’re pretty terrifying when they’re chasing and chowing down in hordes. Eek! The film is a little too long and slow in spots due to the 2-hour runtime, but the fight and flight sequences make up for it, because they are fantastic.
An intense chase that starts on motorcycle and ends on foot and a makeshift mobile cage scene are two of the highlights, and some of the characters the main man teams up with along the way to a helicopter getaway are kick ass, so despite this being yet another formulaic zombie film, it’s a goodie for those who just can’t get enough of this subgenre. Not to mention, you will definitely be most concerned about the cat surviving through the whole movie.
