A foursome of flesh-eating fun…mostly

Posted on August 1, 2025 by Daniel

I almost had a totally satisfying zombie movie marathon with four flicks I chose from my Tubi watchlist, but one didn’t quit live up to the challenge. Let’s take a look.

DEATH VALLEY: THE REVENGE OF BLOODY BILL (2004)

This is 2004 direct-to-DVD goodness, and I was so here for it. I’d blind buy crap like this every new release Tuesday at Best Buy in the early 2000s and revel in the cheesiness of it all when I forced my hubby to watch my purchases with me.

After car trouble in the desert, a drug trafficking dude ends up on foot and reaches a ghost town, only to discover minutes later that it’s actually a zombie town! The undead swarm and attack him to the sounds of metal music and the sights of grindhouse filters.

That sets the tone for the rest of the movie. In fact, that pretty much is the rest of the movie. It’s one raucous, skin-stretching zombie attack after another.

A group on a road trip stops to help a guy who turns out to be in cahoots with the first drug trafficker. He holds them at gunpoint and makes them drive…right to the ghost town.

Soon, the zombie attacks begin, but there’s a little more to it. Not much, but enough to add some extra monster action. The group learns of confederate soldier Bloody Bill, who is out for revenge because he was killed during the Civil War. He cursed the town as he died, and now the dead residents are his army.

Just pop the corn and pour the cherry cola, because this is a perfect popcorn movie time waster.

DEAD GETAWAY (Infected Paradise) (2014)

It’s another one that’s all about the action and fun, with little in the way of pesky depth. If you’ve ever played the video game Dead Island, this is basically that as a movie. Friends go on an island getaway and zombie attack. That’s it.

The acting isn’t great, but it doesn’t even matter. There are loads of shots of shirtless guys before they even get to their destination, landing this one on the stud stalking page.

Once on the beach, some dude washes up on shore not looking so great. Soon after, he samples his first piece of human flesh. Not long after that, there’s a whole horde of zombies! I have no idea where they all came from so fast, but it might be something in the water.

The rest of the movie has people who are really infected, not zombies (they simply growl and have blood on their faces) chasing after and biting people with just mock munching, no actual gore effects. The movie is all about the actors play fighting on the beach, and they all throw themselves into the parts.

Eventually, they attempt to make their way to a rescue boat for the final battle. It’s simple and low budget, but it’s high energy and a lot of effort was put into creating zombie chaos.

PANDEMIC (2016)

Rachel Nichols of P2 is a doctor on a search and save mission after a zombie apocalypse. She only has three other members on her team: the bus driver, Mekhi Pfeiffer, and Missi Pyle.

As soon as they drive out of the safety of their bunker, the action begins, and it pretty much never lets up. Their reinforced bus, which is right out of the Dawn of the Dead remake, is somehow penetrated in a tunnel (which is right out of 28 Days Later), by zombies that easily get in and have to be fought off…first person shooter style! Yep. Every time there are zombie attacks, the film switches to first person POV. It’s visual chaos, with blood-splattering zombie kills right in your face. Either you love it or you hate it.

Adding to the fun as the team drives through decimated L.A., the zombie they are dealing with are fast, smart, and oddly almost human. They even feel pain when hurt and beg for mercy.

The film has some minor character development, but it’s mostly comprised of the team moving from one dark, creepy location to the next encountering zombies. There’s a great, night vision scene right out of Quarantine, and there is a character twist eventually, but this is another one you should just go into with a bowl of popcorn and a glass of cherry cola.

GONE WITH THE DEAD (2024)

 

Maybe I shouldn’t have pushed it by watching a fourth film. This one broke my streak of zombie midnight movies, which is a shame, because it seemed like it was going to unintentionally hit the mark at first.

I overlooked the poor decision to have a horror host dude introduce the movie. It served no purpose. However, that shifted to some very satisfying zombie footage and a voiceover about the outbreak during the opening credits, set to a classic, throbbing synth score.

We then meet the actors in all their stilted dialogue delivery badness. It works somehow, giving the film a campy tone, complete with unintentional laughs. There’s also early 1970s horror style with really cheap grind house static effects on the film that only kick in during zombie action. Again, it felt like part of the cheesy vibe. Meanwhile, there’s some gory gut munching, but all the blood splatter is CGI.

The plot is just a meandering cliché. A group of friends discovers there’s an apocalypse, so they try to navigate the new landscape. This leads to lots of zombie attacks, encounters with other survivors, a scientist gets in on the action to propose using a vaccine…you know the deal.

By the time we start getting hit by “missing reel” moments during zombie attacks, I had checked out. The cheap, amateur feel of the film really starts to drag it down after a while.

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Alien zombies, a corpse killer, and a mermaid musical

Posted on July 30, 2025 by Daniel

It’s subgenre insanity time as I knock a trio of random flicks off my watchlists. Let’s get right into them.

THE LURE (2015)

This Polish film is a really dark and sleazy horror musical, landing it on the screamin’ and singin’ page, and it features a variety of song styles that add some flavor while also capturing the essence of the nasty tone. It’s not a pleasant experience, and as such it kind of reminds me of Cabaret. It’s gross and icky.

A cabaret club scores two mermaid sisters and exploits them as part of the show. On top of that, both men and women at the club are sexual predators that take advantage of the mermaids and the “slot” that each has in her tail when she gets wet. We’re talking fingering scene. Ew.

The sisters have different feelings about being on land. One sister falls for a young man at the club, while the other one goes out and feasts on men. That’s the one thing the movie needed more of. There simply aren’t enough kills to show how much of a monster she is. This is more (mermaid) character study than horror.

The relationship between the sisters starts to fracture as they chose different paths in life, and they begin to take everyone in the club down with them. As a result, the people at the club turn on them and dump them back in the ocean, which leads to another disappointing, missed opportunity to deliver on the horror—the sisters return, but they really don’t get revenge on the cabaret family that betrayed them.

As it delves deep into the conflicting desires of the two sisters in a gruesome way in the final act, the film is a downer, which is the only place for it to really go.

SKINJACKER (2024)

There are plenty of other movies with the same basic premise as this one—with more scares and suspense than this offers. Not to mention, better character development.

While the isolated island setting and atmosphere are well established quite quickly, it’s the initial reaction to a strange occurrence that is the first red flag for a problematic experience. A woman and man wake up after hearing a loud sound. They quickly run over to her parents’ home to find they’re not there. Minutes later when they are back home, her father appears in a stupor with blood dripping down his face, and she literally starts asking him why he’s acting weird and to stop fooling around rather than running over to him with shock and concern. WTF?

Following that we meet several more random people who just seem to be wandering around with no clear motivation. The only one who stands out is a dude with a snarky attitude about how obviously shady he is. In fact, he’s the only one who gets some backstory later on in forced, black and white flashbacks.

Anyway, we see one guy get dragged off by something that’s growling. Then the various strangers conveniently all meet up, people continue to disappear, the rest lock themselves in a house, and several of the missing people show up outside the door acting like zombies for a brief Night of the Living Dead moment.

Eventually the group finds a glowing spot in the hills where it appears something crash landed. They go down into an opening and find themselves in some sort of alien container.


Tell me you’ve never seen Samara in action
without telling me you’ve never seen Samara in action

All we get out of the deep dive into the ground is some attacks by the zombified people before the survivors just climb out of the container, destroy the hole, and decide that they can’t tell anyone because no one would ever believe them.

Seriously, there’s not much more to it than that. It’s all just weird and underdeveloped.

ARISEN (2015)

Time for another episode of ScareBearDan’s “indie horror movie that shouldn’t have been two hours long”. Making things worse, the editing is sloppy, the music is often much louder than dialogue, sound completely cuts out at times, mostly during outdoor scenes, and dialogue spoken in outdoor settings gets drowned out by wind blowing against microphones.

The movie itself is just as messy. The opening scene takes place at Christmas time. A kid is brought into a children’s home handcuffed because he apparently killed a family. Then…a different kid kills other kids in the home. At least, I think it’s a different kid who was already in the home, unless there’s a brief flashback moment to him arriving in handcuffs and I just didn’t realize it was.

As if things aren’t confusing enough already, this opening scene has absolutely no bearing on the rest of the plot as far as I can tell.

Next, it’s Halloween. There’s a house party. They use a Ouija board with little fanfare. Then one of the guys disappears while walking home.

A year later, his sister is still grieving his disappearance. Detectives are still on the case. Apparently, Halloween now coincides with the brother’s birthday, because she’s throwing one in his honor. There are absolutely no Halloween decorations anywhere. Someone does speak the famous “one good scare” line from Halloween, and her last name happens to be Wallace. Double meta groan.

A towering man who looks like a corpse starts going after her friends. His visual appearance is the best part of the movie. I don’t know if he’s her brother. I don’t know if he’s the kid from the beginning all grown up. I don’t know if he was conjured the night they used the Ouija board the year before. I don’t know why he’s after all of them. Unless I just couldn’t hear the explanation for all this madness over the sound of the wind hitting the microphones, none of it is ever clarified, but there is a final confrontation between the sister and the killer.

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A trio of films with masked killers

Posted on July 28, 2025 by Daniel

The masks are cool, and there’s killing with sharp weapons, but only one of these three truly delivers on hardcore slasher action. Let’s find out which one…and why the others didn’t quite satisfy.

HE NEVER LEFT (2023)

I love the concept of the production company Witching Season Films—each of their horror movies takes place at Halloween time, the tone is set with classic Halloween decor and fall foliage, and there’s a filter applied that captures the look and feel of 80s VHS tapes. So naturally, this one lands on the complete holiday horror page.

The problem with He Never Left is that the Halloween season plays no part in what happens, and the masked killer hyped in the movie and on the poster art has very little relevance to a majority of the movie.

Instead, the film focuses on a guy hiding out in a hotel room after murdering someone. Virtually the whole film takes place in the hotel room, with the guy, who is perfectly portrayed as intensely paranoid, seeing visions of his victim and hearing the sounds of someone screaming in the hotel room next door.

There is a side story involving the police who are looking for him, and the legendary “Pale Face” killer that we learn terrorized the town years before does come into play, but this is no slasher film, and by the final act, the “mystery” is so convoluted and confusing, with new characters being introduced at the last second, that it’s not quite clear what the hell is going on, despite one of the newly introduce characters having to literally explain it to us.

BUTCHERS BLUFF (2023)

Argh! Why do filmmakers not review their movies and really feel the weight of runtimes that kill the stretches between the best parts? This is a backwoods slasher with a familiar, basic plot, vicious kills, quality gore effects…and a running length of 123 minutes. No, dammit. Just no. This could have been a great, simple backwoods horror flick if it had been 90 minutes long instead.

Jeremy London, who stars in Bone Face (below), actually appears in the opening kill scene of this one, which is a classic—couple gets it while parked in their car at night.

Gritty kill footage during the opening credits is almost like a mini-slasher in itself. Another plus. Then we get interviews following the murders, with locals talking about the legend of the Hog Man.

Our main characters are film students that come to town to do a documentary about Hog Man. They start asking questions. They follow leads. They learn the backstory of Hog Man, which is right out of Rob Zombie’s Halloween. They encounter horror icons like Brinke Stevens and Bill Oberst Jr.

Eventually, they head into the woods and the murders begin. There are gruesome kills, scenes in Hog Man’s lair, sex scenes, including one with girl boobs and another with hot man butt. Awesome. This meaty butt is right up in the camera, and I wanted to wash that snack down with some Cherry Cola. This one definitely lands on the stud stalking page.

Unfortunately, there’s also that 123-minute issue. The plot isn’t deep enough to support 123 minutes. I would have added this one to my movie collection if it had been a tighter script.

BONE FACE (2025)

Imagine if Friday the 13 Part V married an Agatha Christie novel, and you have Bone Face. I really couldn’t believe what I was seeing, which was mostly a lot of talking, so I won’t spend much time on this one.

Don’t get too excited about the cool masked killer on the poster art and the awesome opening massacre in which a load of camp counselors is slaughtered. That’s the most slasher you’re going to get.

Jeremy London plays a sheriff that arrives on the scene of the crime with his deputy. They quickly conclude that the killer is not the infamous Bone Face behind a legend mentioned by the camp counselors before they died, but is actually one of the numerous people inside a nearby diner. So, he locks them in the diner and spends the rest of the movie interrogating them to solve the mystery. There’s red herring, arguing, fighting, and more surprises in the mounting mystery, but no Bone Face.

That’s it. That’s the movie. Eventually the person who posed as Bone Face is revealed for a final showdown with the law in the final, slasher-free act.

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Cheap ghost scares galore

Posted on July 25, 2025 by Daniel

It’s a trio of supernatural flicks that want so badly to make us jump in terror. Did it work on me? Let’s find out.

THE DESERVING (2024)

This 75-minute movie is not really my thing. It’s one where the killer is essentially portrayed as the victim…although the title tells the real story.

We meet a mute photographer who brings women to his home for photoshoots and then kills them. He seems like a very nice guy, and the mood of the film captures his loneliness and lack of communication with other humans.

We also get flashbacks in which we see that he had an abusive father, providing insight as to why he murders women. Personally, I didn’t give a fuck about his sob story when typical corpse-faced ghost girls began terrorizing him.

The film throws all the ghost girl scares in the book at us and they are just so predictable and never succeeded in bringing me to the edge of my seat. Eventually the ghost girls swarm him, sitting around cackling like Deadites in Evil Dead.

The movie is definitely going for a psychological study of a killer’s mind, but I was so not there for it. It also ends with a twist that, while done many times before, feels a little different and more clever here than usual.

THE PAINTED (2024)

This one is very reminiscent of all the supernatural haunted house flicks of last decade, so if movies like The Conjuring unnerved you, this is a nice throwback to that style of supernatural storytelling.

A woman is made the executor of a distant cousin’s estate, so she and her family go to the cousin’s dark, shadowy house to settle things. Once there, they begin to experience strange occurrences, including physical attacks while sleeping.

Before long, they discover that painted portraits hung on the walls are fricking crawling off the canvas and roaming the house. Eek!

It’s pretty effective at first, but obviously it’s not a concept that can prolong itself, so the family eventually does what most haunted house movie families won’t; they get the fuck out. If face-eating paintings don’t convince you to leave, nothing will.

Wouldn’t you know the ghosts follow them? It becomes a very predictable scenario with them looking into the past of the family and the paintings and discovering a paranormal past in the bloodline. It’s a decent plot for a ghost movie, but overall it’s nothing new, so go into it if you’re looking for a comfort ghost movie, not if you’re hoping for something that will blow your mind. And the denouement is melodramatic, supernatural sap. Not really my thing.

CANDLEWOOD (2025)

The highlights of this movie for me were the fall foliage and the dad, who is kind of cute. I wouldn’t mind jumping in the leaves with him.

The opening of bloody dead people on a lake shore was intriguing enough. Then we meet a blended family that moves into a lake house.

They immediately begin encountering one strange neighbor after another and experiencing delusions of apparitions. They learn a legend of a mixed-race couple that died for love in the lake.

And then the delusions just keep coming, all in that cheap, fuzzy, unfocused visual style of early 2000s direct-to-DVD movies. The family starts to turn on one another, and the weirdness of the neighbors intensifies.

There’s really not much more to it than that. The film ends with a massacre by the lake, just as it began, and then we get a whole monologue from one of the neighbors about how the locals protect their past from outsiders. There’s not much here to hold the plot together.

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There’s something supernatural in the air…and the slashing

Posted on July 23, 2025 by Daniel

While not all of these films are straight up slashers, each one features a supernatural force killing people off. But only one really came together for me. Let’s take a look.

MS. KANYIN (2025)

I thought this Nigerian film was going to be more of a folk horror type of movie. The opening scene even features a spiritual tree in the woods that craves blood.

However, despite a 110-minute runtime that makes for a major slow burn, the movie ends up becoming a basic, super fun supernatural slasher in the final act.

There’s a whole lot of focus on the students and teachers at a boarding school, most notable a girl struggling in French class, the teacher trying to educate her, and the pressure both of them experience at the hands of men.

Eventually, the female student becomes desperate to pass the class, which leads her and her friends to doing something drastic…which leads to a tragic accident involving the teacher and the mystical tree in the woods. Uh-oh.

That’s when the intensive character studies, social commentary, and occult elements are tossed out the window with a sudden shift into a fast-paced, bloody revenge slasher. Awesome. I had fun with this one despite it being too long for what it actually delivered.

THE GOATMAN (2023)

There’s a great looking, horned creature in this movie…if you can manage to catch a glimpse of him when he appears on screen very briefly. This proves to be more of a supernatural flick, with the creature acting as some sort of Wendigo that appears to people in the form of someone they know.

The setup is simple. A bunch of siblings and their significant others camp out in a desert and soon begin to experience the unknown. Everyone starts acting weird, they split up, they explore the desert, and they’re terrorized by faceless people, which are the absolute highlight of the film.

Another highlight is a very creepy scene in which one girl checks her appearance in the mirror, and it’s quite noticeable that the reflection looking back at her is actually looking back at her. Freaky.

After a while, the group concludes that the main creature is making the faceless people appear as doppelgängers of the group. It’s all kinds of confusing in terms of plot, the horned creature is never referred to as the Goatman, and the tone moves into deeper, emotional territory in the final act. Personally, I just wanted more faceless terror.

#FLOAT (2022)

This 76-minute-long movie fails to create a cohesive plot or unfolding of events, rendering it kind of pointless to watch.

A wannabe influencer and her friends take the ashes of their friend, who died a year before, to the cabin and river where he died and where they do some sort of river float thing every year, which literally just consists of sitting on floats in the river.

The first night they are there, a redneck dude comes to the door and warns them to stay away from the river. They don’t listen.

The next day, they start disappearing, splitting up, and getting killed with absolutely no explanation how. And despite all the madness going on around them, those that aren’t hurt or missing just continue to go back to floating on the river. Like there’s literally a scene in which a girl gets sucked under water and a fountain of blood spurts up while everyone witnesses it, and then the next thing you know, they’re just floating on their floats again.

Meanwhile, the redneck dude keeps warning them to stay away from the river. He also claims it preys on your weaknesses, but we are never shown any actual weaknesses for it to prey on. He even abducts some of them, making us think maybe he is the one killing people rather than it being the river at all.

There’s eventually a gruesome confrontation with him, one of the remaining survivors is attacked in some sort of shadow puppet dance that implies there’s a monster, and then the influencer girl drives off and discovers she’s suddenly totally going viral. But why? It’s never implied that she’s been doing a live feed of their excursion all along, so what is attracting new followers? When there’s this many plot holes, there’s simply no solid ground for a plot to stand on.

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A monster and murderers

Posted on July 22, 2025 by Daniel

I actually had a good time with two out of these four flicks. Let’s find out which ones.

GET OFF MY LAWN (2025)

You really need to go into this one knowing that it’s intended as a campy, dark comedy thriller, otherwise the tone will really throw you off, and you might quit it before you adjust to the unexpected style.

This is a sort of satire of the psycho neighbor thrillers of the 90s. I should have realized once I saw that the psycho was a teen kid and not an old man that the title Get Off My Lawn didn’t make sense for a serious suspense film. I’m really out of it these days.

This young straight couple buys a new house, and as soon as they move in they are greeted by a young dude who says the home belonged to his grandfather. His clean cut, psycho white boy vibe is so obvious and over-the-top with not much room to intensify later on that I didn’t at first understand how the couple or the crazy kid’s two closest friends don’t see that he’s nuts.

The couple allows him to push things way too far with his exaggerated, innocent smile before they begin to push back, at which point he starts terrorizing them.

While the things he does are disturbing, the couple’s reactions to them are pretty funny at times. It gets even better when the husband starts terrorizing the psycho kid right back, although that aspect is underplayed and really could have brought the movie to another level of fun if it had been the bulk of the movie.

Instead, the weirdness continues to grow, the insanity amplifies, and the final act gets into brutality and torture! It’s definitely a satisfying climax.

MONSTER ON A PLANE (2024)

This movie is an 80s throwback blast, and just when you think it has nowhere left to go, it blows things up to a new level. The only complaint I could make about it is that it has great, gruesome face-eating scenes done with practical effects, yet all the blood splashes are CGI. If you’re making a movie, hire me and I will gladly stand off-camera with a turkey baster full of fake blood to squirt onto your actors.

Anyway, the film opens strong, with a couple canoodling in the woods and getting attacked by some sort of unseen creature.

Next, we meet a load of characters boarding a plane. Little do they know that one dude has snuck a newly discovered species onto the plane in a suitcase.

And then…turbulence hits. Out pops the creature, which is almost literally a Critter.

The fun begins with sex scenes and the Critter chomping on people while also using its secret weapon to give them hallucinations. That secret weapon, when revealed, is absolutely hilarious. It’s also nasty, so I’m glad they chose not make it the focus, because it would have ruined the perfect tone of the film and dragged it into gross-out humor.

Once the whole plane realizes the monster is on board, something very strange happens; literally most of the people on the plane just disappear and the rest of the movie sticks with one small group. Definitely a continuity issue.

I can overlook it, because things get even better when the Critter suddenly grows into a maxi-Critter, the face-eating action doubles, and the big climax totally delivers. Awesome. This is most definitely a good party flick.

31 KILLS OF HALLOWEEN (2024)

The Halloween vibes in this 73-minute movie are concentrated in unbearable horror host segments and faux commercial breaks that plague the actual movie throughout its short runtime.

Seriously, if you were to remove these segments, the movie would be shorter than the total time of the interruptions. They aren’t entertaining, they aren’t funny. I fast-forwarded through them.

The main movie was okay as a short. Two girls with a horror video channel decide to go live on Halloween night from the former home of a serial killer, which is now an Airbnb.

After a montage of them setting the place up and some backstory of the killer, they get one set of trick or treaters, then they talk to some guy they previously blocked online in hopes that he has some insight to make their live show more interesting.

They end up locked in the house, and the unblocked guy tells them they need to go into each room to witness recreations of the kills to find the key to escape the house.

The most festive Halloween light and atmosphere is experienced in each room. They are chased by zombie versions of each victim, they find the key, the zombie victims and the masked killer follow them out into the real world, and they use the key to stop the insanity. Would have been okay if this actually was a short tale in a low budget anthology. As a “full-length feature”, it just isn’t enough. And despite the title, there are not 31 kills, but it does go on the complete holiday horror page.

MY FIRST HORROR FILM (2023)

This is a familiar premise. A girl who has a horror channel wants to be in a horror movie.

She goes to the audition, where she and several other wannabes are taken to a house in the woods to work on the film.

A majority of the film is talk, mostly about horror, and with some humor sprinkled throughout, but there is also some commentary on the treatment of Black people in horror, as well as the intersection of Black and queer characters in horror, landing the film on the does the gay guy die? page.

They shoot some seasons for the movie, and then an hour in the actors begin getting killed off, but we never see anything. The killer is predictable as well.

The film switches to found footage for the denouement, with the main character running through dark woods with just a camera. But that doesn’t mean that it’s scary or suspenseful at all. There is a surprise element to this film, however. Fricking Rosario Dawson is in it!

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A trio of man monster movies from 2005

Posted on July 18, 2025 by Daniel

I needed a good dose of movies from 2005 as a throwback to better times (never thought I’d say that about the Bush era), so it was quite convenient that I found a trio of them streaming. All three happen to have the word “man” in the title…because all of them were renamed at some point! I seriously think a shit load of movies from the early 2000s have been getting retitled to trick those of us who lived on SyFy movies back then into watching movies we’ve already seen. Either way, let’s take a look at this batch.

SHARKMAN (aka: Hammerhead) (2005)

 

I imagine this was a SyFy original, and a goodie at that. The cover art on both Prime and Tubi features the art for a movie called SharkMan from 2001 (according to IMDb), but this movie is actually originally titled Hammerhead, and it is about a shark man. The SharkMan title and incorrect artwork are totally what drew me to it, so I’d say it’s a happy accident.

After the shark man attacks a couple in the water in the opening scene, we learn that Jeffrey Combs is a scientist who turned his son into a shark man while attempting to cure him of cancer.

Combs has representatives from a pharmaceutical company visit his island, but when he shows them what he’s done, they think he’s crazy. So of course he can’t let them leave.

It becomes a fight for survival as the group tries to flee the island, which isn’t easy, because the shark man can walk on land. Perfect.

It’s strictly about the shark man attacks and action sequences…and the vines that inexplicably come to life and attack one woman at one point. The shark man is a great looking creature, there’s blood and guts, and the movie’s main hero is not a Hollywood type of hunk—he’s a simple looking, out-of-shape dude in a T-shirt. Refreshing.

MOSQUITO MAN (2005)

This one is like Mimic meets The Fly 1986. It’s science backfiring in a gritty city setting, and it’s loaded with giant bug attacks and gore. Yay!

A convict escapes capture and gets goo on him in a science lab, as does a female scientist, who happens to be the love interest of the main detective dude.

The convict morphs into an awesome giant mosquito man almost instantly, while the scientist begins transforming slower.

The mosquito man makes it his mission to hunt the scientist down, sucking face of anyone who gets in his way, which mostly includes homeless men and loads of policemen as he travels through the alleys and tunnels of the city. Kind of gay considering his tongue looks like a big erection whenever he shoves it down a guy’s throat.

An hour into the film, the mosquito man sprouts wings and starts flying, adding to the creature feature fun. The detective calls him a mansquito, which was the original, much better title of the movie, and the detective and the scientist battle the mosquito man in what is essentially a giant bug zapper situation. It’s kind of hilarious. Such a 1990s sci-fi/horror direct-to-VHS vibe, and I was totally there for it.

SNAKEMAN (2005)

This one was originally titled The Snake King, which is better than SnakeMan considering it’s actually a giant snake, not a snake man.

We get to see the big bad CGI snake immediately in the opening jungle attack scene.

An archaeology team finds a sarcophagus of a human that lived for 300 years, and they believe the tribe that still lives in the jungle holds the key to immortality. So the corporation they work for sends a team there to find out if it’s so.

Stephen Baldwin pilots the helicopter that gets them there, and he joins the expedition through the jungle.

There are loads of snake attacks, battles with the natives, hilarious scenes of bodies being torn apart with bad computer effects, and eventually we find out the fricking snake has more than one head!

This is what I’m talking about. This old school SyFy original crap that’s perfect for a hot summer Sunday.

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I don’t know what possessed them, but does it even matter?

Posted on July 14, 2025 by Daniel

It’s three different takes on selling your soul to the devil, and each one has some fun, evil moments.

GATES OF FLESH (2025)

I love a good infectious possession movie, and this one definitely delivers on that. We don’t learn much about how the possession began, but in an effort to escape it, a group of friends hides out in a church.

You would think no one could get possessed in a church, but this movie seems to reflect our current society—evil keeps overpowering good!

It’s glowing eyes, veiny skin, and devilish grins galore as those that become possessed taunt and terrorize those that haven’t been infected, spilling their dirty secrets and turning the friends against each other.

One dude who has awesome Johnathon Schaech mouth goes all in on delivering a sinister possessed persona, and as a result, he ends up resembling Johnathon Schaech playing a zombie in Day of the Dead: Bloodline.

Other than that, the film delves into themes of religion, sin, redemption, and all that crap. It takes itself seriously instead of going the playful Evil Dead route, which kind of drags it down a bit. It’s simply not as exciting an experience as it could have been despite the awesome possession faces and some intense moments here and there.

THE DEVIL’S TRAP (2023)

I’m not usually a fan of religious horror, but this one focuses more on dealing with the Devil, and there are some pretty damn creepy elements to it, even if most of the freaky parts are delusions characters are experiencing.

A young, paralyzed man is brought into a hospital and gets an ailing Bruce Dern as a roommate.

Meanwhile, the staff and guests in the hospital begin to experience supernatural occurrences, and they start dying off in mysterious ways. That includes Richard Grieco, who plays one of the people on staff.

Things get really satanic when Michael Paré comes in as a priest to do some sort of exorcism on Bruce Dern, after which Dern falls into a coma.

Before long, the paralyzed dude seems to make a psychic connection with Dern, seeing the horrors Dern experienced as a child (warning: it includes killing a dog). The young guy decides he needs to team up with his sister to help Dern really exorcise his demons.

There’s not much more I can say about the film without giving it away, but it is a commentary on the evils of cancer and sickness and how illness always seems to prey on the innocent. The one major flaw is that despite a whole lot of crazy shit happening throughout the course of the film, it takes a long monologue by Dern near the end to literally spell out exactly what has been happening so that the audience will understand, because the truth does not sufficiently unfold within the events of the film.

THE DEVIL’S VOID (2022)

As derivative as this film is, it just keeps throwing little curveballs at us to try to make the final twist seem surprising. Where it does succeed is in switching from a relatively simple demonic possession vibe to a totally hokey supernatural TV show look and feel in the final act, like, out of nowhere.

There’s a lot going on here. There is a podcasting crew that debunks hauntings and is looking for a juicy story to draw in more listeners.

There’s an old lady selling her house who gets taken in by a real estate agent.

There’s the real estate agent’s medium mom, who seeks out the podcasters and invites them to the old lady’s house for a séance because a murder supposedly took place there.

There’s a detective whose wife died, and he ends up at the house for the séance.

There are a couple of campers who also end up at the house for the séance.

It’s messy, but signs of possession show up early on with some classic glowing eyes. The characters begin to act weird and seem to have dirty secrets. None of it ever makes much sense or comes together, and the characters never seem to react with even an ounce of shock when weird shit starts to happen.

In the final act, a demon woman suddenly appears, and she just starts killing people. Then a male demon appears. Then there’s a magical sword and shield, a brief battle with a demon creature, and cheesy special effects. It’s the best part of the whole movie, and so right out of a Buffy episode.

And finally, we get the big twist reveal that I totally saw coming from a mile away.

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They feed on flesh, so get out the popcorn and cherry cola

Posted on July 10, 2025 by Daniel

It’s a trio of films about infections and zombies, and two out of the three are loaded with gut-munching. The other one, not so much. Actually, not at all.

A HARD PLACE (2025)

This is such a perfectly bizarre zombie flick, with crossbreeding cannibalistic creature insanity and a host of familiar horror faces, including Sadie Katz, Lynn Lowry, Bai Ling, and Felissa Rose.

It opens with horror lighting and nasty zombie attacks galore. It’s a completely disconnected scene from the rest of the movie, but it’s still totally awesome and had me hyped.

Next, we meet a group of thieves on the run. They decide to hide out at a place in the snowy woods, and before long they’re being terrorized by plant people zombies!

They also encounter a redneck family that isn’t everything it seems. Actually, it’s more than it seems. This family can transform into flesh-eating goons! Led by matriarch Felissa Rose, who totally delivers on the over-the-top crazy act in this role, they have every intention of making the criminals their dinner.

One of the criminals is so yummy that I don’t blame them for wanting to eat him. He’s even sexual in his monster killing—death by dildo! Clearly, this movie was titled A Hard Place because of him.

The criminals try to get away, the family forces them to sit down for dinner, the plant people return for a feud, there’s an eclipse, and it becomes a smorgasbord of monstrous deformities with no real logic or reason. But it doesn’t even matter, because this one has such a great throwback feel to the weird shit that used to come out on VHS in the 80s.

PLEASE DON’T FEED THE CHILDREN (2024)

It’s an apocalyptic virus movie without a zombie in sight. Instead, our main girl explains at the beginning that the child population began carrying an infection that turned adults into cannibals. Therefore, the children were all rounded up and put in camps, but some have escaped and are attempting to flee the country.

Our main girl joins a small family of other kids with a hot older brother, and they head for freedom, but one of them gets shot, so they end up stopping at a house for help.

The woman inside lets them in to patch up the wound, but pretty soon she drugs them and holds them captive. All except our main girl, who she treats like a daughter.

As the kids try to plot a way to escape, this becomes somewhat of a Misery situation, with one difference—there’s definitely something monstrous living in the basement. Unfortunately, most of the movie focuses on the woman and her pretty predictable reason for holding the kids hostage. It would have been more compelling if the kids had begun trying to be the hero one by one, escaping their prison only to be gobbled up by the monster throughout the course of the film. Then it could have been called Please Don’t Feed the Children…to the Monster in the Basement.

It’s not until the last few minutes that the thing in the basement finally gets in on the action, and by then it just feels like a cheap thrill tossed in way too late in the game to save a rather bland flick.

BRIDGE OF THE DOOMED (2022)

This is a perfect midnight movie mess. It features vibrant colors, gnarly zombie makeup, loads of gut-munching, and corny acting. It also falls into a repetitive pattern of scenes with cheesy dialog between military members and scenes loaded with major horror action.

The plot is basic. The military is ordered to protect a bridge and keep zombies from crossing it. The whole hook of the plot is supposed to be that there’s something even worse than zombies living under the bridge, but the zombies are absolutely the highlight here.

The monster gets a fleeting attack scene in the middle of the movie and then appears in full (shadow) for a brief and anticlimactic battle with a female military officer in a cave 67 minutes into the movie. The monster is such a letdown compared to the zombies. The movie could have been titled Bridge of the Dull Monster.

Michael Pare makes a brief appearance at the beginning of the movie, and he returns at the end, this time in slow motion…I guess so the filmmakers could get more screentime out of him without having to pay him more money.

If I had to add two of these three flicks to my physical media, it would definitely be this one and A Hard Place.

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A Valentine’s slasher at a gay guy’s house, a boogeyman, and a slasher comedy

Posted on July 8, 2025 by Daniel

It’s a trio of slasher subgenres, but did they deliver on the kills?

PRETTY BOY (2021)

This is a sequel to the home invasion flick Blind, which was about a masked psycho stalking a blind actress. This is quite an odd way to extend the story, starting off as a holiday slasher, then eventually segueing into a psycho family flick. Either way, it earns a spot on the holiday horror page.

It begins on Valentine’s Day, and I assume it’s supposed to be the same night as the first movie. However, I don’t remember Blind taking place on Valentine’s Day. This one is set at an 80s themed Valentine’s Day house party being thrown by a gay guy, and while there’s plenty of VD decor and red lighting, there’s not much in the way of romance. There’s also nothing to signify that this is an 80s themed party beyond a character mentioning that it is. And while the title Pretty Boy sounds really gay, the gay host is the only gay aspect of the movie, so this one goes right to the does the gay guy die? page.

There is, however, some sexual content, including a weird scene in which a hot, straight dude is handcuffed and blindfolded and thinks his woman is licking him when it’s actually a prank—the gay guy is the one licking him. A totally unnecessary moment and kind of makes the gay guy seem predatory.

The blindfolded dude does eventually have sex with a woman, and it’s a pretty funny moment before it gets to the penetration…with a machete, that is.

Meanwhile, for no apparent reason, the killer carries the blind woman he captured in the first movie into this house. He starts hacking up party guests with a variety of weapons, but I have no idea where he’s scoring all these different weapons. Regardless, the kills are bloody and awesome and use practical effects, so I was satisfied enough with the first half of the film.

However, once the killer takes down all the party guests, we end up at the house of his parents, played by horror queen Maria Olsen and Robert Rusler of Vamp and Elm Street 2, officially making his house more 80s themed than the gay guy’s house.

Things really slow down as both parents get longwinded monologues and we finally find out why this masked dude stalked and abducted the blind actress. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before and leaves us with a very anticlimactic climax.

REVENGE OF THE BOOGEYMAN (2025)

Sounds like a sequel, but it’s not. It is, however, a basic slasher that adds nothing fresh in terms of plot but does have grisly kills, a monstrous boogeyman killer, and some understated humor.

It starts off with a strong kill and then awesome opening credit fonts that are sooooo reminiscent of the 80s.

A two-timing dude goes to a cabin in the woods and bangs a girl while waiting for a bunch of friends to arrive. They’re having a supportive gathering for a friend who is freshly out of rehab.

This is where things get questionable. At first it seems like there’s a boogeyman killer that makes creepy, throaty groaning sounds as he gruesomely kills victims, but eventually it begins to seem as if the addict guy might be hallucinating or dreaming all the kills. There’s nothing more to the plot than that, and we don’t find out until the final act what the situation really is.

Watch it for the kills, the killer, a take on the That ‘70s Show pot smoking circle shtick, and a raunchy, hetero sex scene that starts off funny but ends up going on for an oddly long time. This dude has so much control that he lasted through the commercial break of the rental on Prime, and then kept going in a different position.

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE MASSACRE? (2025)

This one is trying to be both clever and humorous in its approach to a slasher, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark in either case.

The title says it all—this is supposed to be about what happens after the slashing is done. In this case, two dudes come to a campground as the cleanup crew, but instead of getting an answer to what might actually happen after a slasher ends, we get what is basically a sequel that takes place immediately following a slasher we didn’t get to see. You know…like many slasher sequels over the decades.

It’s literally just a summer camp slasher about what happens to the next set of people that come for the second summer camp session of the season, although it looks more like winter than summer considering there are no leaves on the trees.

We do have the two main guys cleaning up some hints of the previous massacre, but this mostly features quirky characters getting killed off by “Red Face” before we have a chance to know much about them.

The killer mask is cool, there are nods to a few plot points from Friday the 13th installments, there’s killer mask eye hole POV at one point, the kills are basic with no chase scenes, the humor is lacking, and the climactic twist is short and uneventful.

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