Reanimating the Re-Animator legacy with The Resonator series

Posted on September 29, 2025 by Daniel

Veteran horror actor and director William Butler returns to his Full Moon roots with a “movie” trilogy that I, as far as I can understand, is actually just a bunch of short episodes of a show that have been combined to create three different film installments, none of which runs more than an hour. That’s perfect for me, because it’s just enough to give us a throwback to Stuart Gordon’s Lovecraft adaptations of the 80s, most notably Re-Animator.

Visually, the films are neon color eye candy more in keeping with From Beyond. They’re also loaded with cosmic creatures, most of which are created using practical effects. And what would a Stuart Gordon homage be without some sexy scary sleaze thrown into the mix?

THE RESONATOR: MISKATONIC U (2021)

The first feature is 63 minutes long. The plot involves a handsome young college student who tries to carry on his late father’s experiments, which involve connections to higher dimensions. In doing so, he drags a group of classmates into the insanity as he unleashes the cosmic creatures into the earthly plain of existence.

This also spawns a bunch of erotic dreams and visions featuring a seductive demon.

Elm Street alum Amanda Wyss makes a brief appearance as a teacher, as does Michael Pare, who plays a crucial role by the end of the first installment as he becomes immersed in the unleashing of the cosmic creatures.

The film ends with the arrival of a new student at the school: Herbert West. Awesome.

BEYOND THE RESONATOR (2022)

Classic Re-Animator character Herbert West moves to the forefront for the 48-minute sequel, in which he quickly begins to experiment with reanimating little animals.

Meanwhile, our main guy from the first movie is grappling with the horror he and his friends experienced first time around. He also has to deal with the fact that one of his friends has now blown out his own brains.

What luck for Herbert West. A human head with a huge bullet hole in it that he can experiment on.

The monstrosities and gore in this one are better than in the first as the friends tackle the cosmic creatures and Herbert West’s scientific mess-ups, plus, Michael Pare returns just in time with a sinister smile that sets us up for the final film.

This is definitely my favorite of the three films.

CURSE OF THE REANIMATOR (2023)

The remake truth is out as the final film drops the Resonator mask and uses Reanimator in the title.

This 49-minute movie easily could have been combined with the second film to make one full-length sequel to the first film, but then we couldn’t call this a trilogy, and that’s no fun.

But seriously, the first half is essentially repetitive filler of West’s experiments and the main guy’s manipulation of his father’s dimensional machine. The only bright side is that we finally see the main guy shirtless.

All the fun is packed into the last few minutes, when the students and West manage to resurrect a bunch of their dead friends, who turn into classic, shuffling zombies that turn on the seductive demon to end the madness once and for all.

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Follow along as I take on the Tag-Along movies

Posted on September 26, 2025 by Daniel

My limitless love for Asian ghost girl movies brought me here, but does this franchise live up to the best that Asian ghost girl movies have to offer? Let’s find out.

THE TAG-ALONG (2015)

I really liked this movie’s little ghost girl creature in a red dress. She’s super creepy, but she’s also heavily CGI when she moves, so the ghost feels a lot more disconnected from reality than those in classics like Ringu and Ju-on (that is…you know…if you believe in ghosts as part of reality). Not to mention, the film simply doesn’t build the kind of feelings of dread you get from those classics.

It also fails to build a good backstory for the ghost, and it just felt to me like the whole plot falls apart by the end, with too many confusing elements coming into play and an unclear finale.

We meet a young man and his grandmother. He leaves for work, and she is terrorized by something with little hands. He returns from work, she’s acting weird and leaves, and then his face is attacked by those little hands in what is possibly the best moment in the movie.

Meanwhile, he’s been pressuring his girlfriend to get married and have a family. She is totally resistant.

After some disturbing behavior, the boyfriend disappears, and the girlfriend delves into the supernatural possibilities of his absence.

She has nightmares of the girl in red, she has an uncle do a sort of cleansing of the boyfriend’s apartment (which is a kind of funny scene), and all roads of her very weakly unfolding investigation lead to a search and rescue team heading for a haunted mountain.

The plot is seriously lacking, the legend of the girl in red is poorly explained, some more ghostly creatures are thrown into the mix, and it’s suggested that the girlfriend has a secret past in which she either lost a daughter or had an abortion. I really could not figure out what was being implied.

THE TAG-ALONG 2 (2017)

Like most of these supernatural tales of ghostly girls, the sequel expands on the complexity of the back story, which is very welcome here—and the only real notable part of this overly long sequel. All the horror elements are just rehashes of the scares from the first movie, including the opening, which features the little girl in red’s hands infiltrating a guy’s face. Okay. That part never gets old.

What isn’t needed is the weird side story involving some sort of spiritual rituals in the mountains and a dude who fancies himself a tiger that sniffs out demons. It complicates the heart of the matter, which is the expansion on the themes of motherhood and guilt over giving up your child in one way or another.

We are introduced to several new female characters. First, there’s a mother who has been keeping her daughter hidden away in order to protect her from the threat of the girl in red and demon in the mountain using some sort of rituals.

There’s also a female social worker who gets drawn into the legend of the girl in red after she brings her teen daughter for an abortion, which is followed by the teen disappearing. This leads to a search team heading up the mountain to look for her. Now we learn there’s an abandoned hospital on the mountain (anything to expand that story), where they discover the main girl from the first movie acting grossly feral.

Inevitably, the three different women—original main girl, social worker, and ritual mom—join forces and head to the mountain together in hopes of finding all the missing people in their lives, getting closure on their failures as mothers, and fighting the demon and evil little baby creatures from the first movie. That’s the point where things start to feel like the Asian horror version of a melodramatic Lifetime movie.

Definitely go into this one for the enriched story details more than for a good charge of horror. You might also go into it for this pretty face. Damn.

THE TAG-ALONG: DEVIL FISH (2018)

Each new movie gets progressively longer than the movie before it, making it harder for me to remain focused and interested. Not to mention, more complex legends are introduced each time. And somehow, this installment simultaneously introduces more horror while moving farther away from the genre.

Would you believe demonic possession is unleashed by a fish this time around? Sigh. You have to know your franchise has gone off the rails when you have little kids bringing a goldfish in a clear plastic bag to get it exorcised. Right?

On top of that, the tiger legend from the previous film is more prominent, and it becomes the key to vanquishing the main demon in the mountain.

At the forefront once again is the theme of parent/child bond and separation. This time we have a sick mother and her son and a father raising his son after his wife’s death. The father also happens to be some sort of exorcist with ties to the “Master Tiger”. Ugh.

Having said that, there are several possession scenes that are quite creepy, plus a few jump scares. The girl in red makes more of a cameo this time around as other demons take center stage.

For the final act, it’s back to the mountain for more demon action, at which point the exorcist dad guy channels the Master Tiger, and this starts to feel more like a superhero movie. A fiery tiger ghost entity literally battles the bad demon for the final fight. I truly hope this is where the series dies.

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Demons, creatures, monsters, and ghosts

Posted on September 20, 2025 by Daniel

Three out of four of these flicks really brought me some horror happiness, so let’s find out which one was the letdown.

HOME SWEET HOME: REBIRTH (2025)

The hubby and I are desperate for something entertaining to watch together these days, and this movie (based on a video game I’ve not played) was a major surprise. It’s a stunning looking flick packed with action, monsters, creatures, and two hot leading men who both get shirtless.

A cop simply enjoying time with his wife and daughter in a mall gets caught in the crossfire as things quickly turn into hell on earth thanks to his shootout with super studly demon Michele Morrone.

As humans start turning into zombies (just a brief blip in the overall array of monsters in the movie), our cop gets separated from his wife and daughter.

Mom and daughter try to make their way back to their hotel room while dad tries to find them…as he’s pursued through the city by a giant burning skeleton!

He eventually teams up with a monk who knows just how the gateway to hell opened and how the cop can close it to save his family…and the whole world, but no pressure.

More monsters come out of the woodwork, including flying demons and critters that look like the crawling creatures from Cloverfield, and the nonstop action leads to a final battle that promises a sequel—a sequel I can’t wait for.

THE MOOGAI (2025)

This is the way I like my “elevated” horror; there’s an important social message being sent while still actually delivering on atmosphere and suspense. Plus, in the end there’s a freaky creature!

The opening was so intriguing that I had to Google the historical factuality of it and learn more. It’s a horrific situation I didn’t know anything about—the Australian government’s move to “breed the colour” out of the Aborigine population in the early 1970s.

The events are frighteningly timely and are melded into the generational impacts the country’s actions have on a family in the modern day.

A woman gives birth and then begins to suffer from nightmares and visions warning of something coming for her newborn. The dream sequences feature disturbing images like the Ring video tape, and she keeps seeing a young girl with her long hair down in front of her face, so this feels like somewhat of a throwback to the era of ghost girl horror.

There’s also a heinous scene involving eggs and dead chicks.

As the woman’s experiences intensify, everyone begins to think she’s suffering a mental breakdown, including family and friends.

Just when the movie feels like it’s losing steam, the husband sees something in the baby’s room, and before long the family ends up in the woods being chased by the Moogai, which is a legendary “stealer of children”.

Naturally, it’s a fight to the finish. The mother learns what she needs to do to take down the creature, which finally comes crawling out of the woods 70 minutes into the film. It has two faces, and one is wicked creepy. The other, unfortunately, looks like someone asked AI for a demon face and it scoured the internet to find the most common design. It’s a face we’ve all seen before. I just wish they had come up with two unique faces instead of using a default face for one of them.

IN ITS WAKE (2023)

Most will probably turn their nose up at this little indie creature feature, but for me it was a simple, satisfying throwback to direct-to-video flicks from the 80s.

There’s really not much of a premise. At a diner we meet a group of four friends and a trio of businessmen. What is a little weird is that the main characters are already together, but instead of them being terrorized by a demon creature in the diner, they all head off into the snowy night…and end up stuck on the same deserted road to then get picked off by the creature.

Meanwhile, we meet a priest preparing his apprentice for a confrontation with the demonic creature.

We are provided with some good killing of irrelevant characters as foreplay to get us in the mood for some monster mutilation, and then 35 minutes in the main characters find reasons to leave their cars, only to be hunted down and killed by the demon.

There are plenty of gory kills, and the wintery setting adds to the atmosphere. Not to mention, when the group of friends hides out in a house, it’s decorated for Christmas, although this little nod to the season isn’t enough to label this as a Christmas horror movie.

Naturally, the priest arrives to battle the demon in the final act, which is where we finally get a little more nuance to the plot. And as for the creature, it is actually kind of cute when it’s not flashing its big teeth.

Definitely check this one out if you need a mindless popcorn movie or midnight viewing with some friends.

THE DOGS (2025)

Don’t let the demon dogs on the poster art fool you—they’re just ghosts and get about a minute of screen time at most.

This is a supernatural drama about a mother running with her son from her abusive husband. They find a rental house in a rural area. The son inexplicably becomes immediately wary in the house, as if he’s expecting something scary to reside there.

He quickly starts to see a ghost boy and ghost dogs. Mom gets cozy with the handsome landlord. There’s a neighbor who seems to be hiding something.

The boy, played by the main kid from Spirit Halloween, is bullied at his new school, begins seeing dead bodies, and tries to uncover the truth of what happened to the little boy.

It’s all a metaphor for fracture families, the longing for a father, and the paranoia that plagues someone being haunted by the trauma of abuse. However, initial creepy moments are all we get before the movie becomes repetitive and generic.

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Cabin possession, a witch curse, and another killer Popeye

Posted on September 13, 2025 by Daniel

I love demonic possession, I love wicked witches, and I love sailor men, but I had a favorite in this trio of subgenre horrors. Let’s find out which one.

SPIRIT SPRINGS (2025)

This homage to Evil Dead takes almost an hour to kick into high gear, and then it’s all over in a flash.

A struggling band hits a series of snags when they travel to a possible gig, so they are put up in a mansion by a lake, where we get several music montages, as well as a whole band performance clip, which is your chance to speed up the viewing experience, if you know what I mean.

Finally, a girl and guy go swimming in the lake at night. The next morning (apparently, they were in the lake all night), they are walking back to the house and come upon a spring…while a nod to Evil Dead shaky cam that looks more like drunken cam comes stumbling through the woods.

The water whore decides to take a dip in the spring while the dude reads a sign that says the spring is filled with spirits that will possess you if they don’t like you.

56 minutes into the movie, the spring decides it doesn’t like the water whore. She becomes possessed, enters a weird delusional plain momentarily, and then attacks and chomps on a band mate. After the gang sees their friend get bit, the possessed water whore messes with their minds to lure them in, and you have to wonder…did they not see Evil Dead…or her eating their friend?

Here’s the biggest disappointment. While possessed water whore resembles the Deadite mom from Evil Dead Rise, she disposes of all her friends quickly, and they all open their eyes to show they’ve become possessed…right as the movie ends! WTF? You gotta spread the horror love through your movie, not concentrate it into the last few minutes! I can only assume the intention here is to make a sequel that is an actual homage to Evil Dead.

UNHOLY SONG (2025)

This “witch” movie feels very much like a local, home-brewed production. At one point there are three different timelines being juggled, so it’s not exactly the smoothest narrative. It’s also not very eventful.

Basically, there’s this dude who rents out some rooms in his house. He tells the new tenants not to go into a shed in the yard. They do. They play a tape they find in there. It unleashes a witch.

Next, we’re presented with flashbacks to a back story of how the landlord acquired the tape, and how his wife became possessed by a witch when he played it.

Finally, we’re presented with flashbacks to a back back story of a brother whose witch sister was terrorizing him, so he shot her just as she was singing an incantation into the tape, which led to her cursing the tape.

It’s an entertaining, no-nonsense plot, it’s just not handled with any energy. The most fun is had when a priest gets involved. Fun isn’t really the word for it though. His battle with a dude who gets possessed is actually funny. Not sure if it’s intentional humor, but it made me laugh, especially when the priest whips out…a spray bottle of holy water?

When a priest realizes he has limp wrist…

The possessed dude does appear as a demon eventually, and that’s about the most exciting visual horror we get, because the witch only appears for about ten seconds at the very end of the movie.

POPEYE THE SLAYER MAN (2025)

This is the third Popeye slasher I’m covering, and although the killer Popeyes all look so much alike that this could have been a franchise of sequels instead of three movies independent of each other, this one is the most fun and could serve as an origins story.

Here’s the awesome back story—a spinach canning company that was cutting corners ended up poisoning the food supply, leading to a man morphing into the psycho sailor man. Awesome.

Everything else is just gravy. Various groups of people end up at the now abandoned factory—film school students, a gang of thugs, a few business people—and get violently mutilated by Popeye. The kills are king here. They’re loaded with gory practical effects, and that’s all I really need from my sailor man slashers. Well, that and the fact that behind the mask, this particular Popeye looks like this…

As an added bonus, the movie introduced me to a new song for my Future Flashbacks show: “Believe, Rewind” by Icarus. Plus, the movie is totally left open for a sequel, and of the three Popeye flicks I’ve seen so far, this one is my choice to get one.

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An Asian ghost horror excursion

Posted on September 9, 2025 by Daniel

It’s been a while since I indulged in some supernatural Asian films, so I decided it was time to get a fix after several titles were suggested on my streaming services. This is just the first 3 of about 9 that I’ve added to my watchlists, so expect to see me covering more as we move closer to Halloween. For now, let’s see if this trio worked for me.

DELETED (2023)

If you need a quick Asian ghost girl throwback film, this 63-minute movie feels like a love letter to Ju-on and Ringu.

This time, the ghost girl is captured in a piece of footage during the filming of a horror movie. A young editor is tasked with trimming the running time of the film, but she likes the footage that includes the mysterious figure in the background. However, the producers keep ordering her to cut it out.

Each time she does, whichever person demanded it be removed is visited by the ghost girl and dies. The kills are as paint-by-number as ghost girl movie kills gets, with the best moment being a dude stumbling upon a victim that is still alive but has had his face peeled off.

That’s the one aspect that could have been played up with each death, because the peeled face directly relates to the ghost girl, whose goal in life was to be in a movie.

For the final confrontation, the filmmakers barely resisted having the ghost girl crawl out of the editing monitor—she crawls over it instead. She also takes it upon herself to part the long black hair hanging in front of her face for full exposure. This bitch really wanted to be on screen, but once we see her face it’s obvious why she didn’t make the cut…although, she could have been cast in the horror movie as, you know…a ghost girl.

The oddest aspect of this movie is that we learn what led up to her deaths, but we never find out how she died. Even one of the characters says it’s not clear if it was suicide, an accident, or murder. Weird.

THE GHOST STATION (2022)

This 80-minute Korean horror film is another nod to turn of the millennium Asian ghost girl horror, basically transferring the plots of both Ju-on and Ringu into one movie with a horde of ghost children at a train station. This one is derivative with a messy mystery, so I actually liked Deleted better.

A journalist becomes obsessed with doing a story on a series of mysterious deaths at a train station, and with the help of a male colleague she begins to investigate the incidents. She’s already in hot water with her boss for what appears to be an incident of outing a trans woman in one of her reports, which has led to a lawsuit. It’s an odd side story that doesn’t go very far.

My new favorite kill scene position.

There are various deaths, sightings of little ghost children that look like zombies, and a bizarre detail that involves an orphanage, children in a well (sigh), the train station being used as a grave for a mass murder that has led to these ghost children holding a grudge (they literally call it a grudge), and those who learn the truth needing to pass the curse on in order to save themselves.

Unfortunately, despite being a total rip-off, the film simply lacks the tension, atmosphere, and scares of the two iconic movies it’s trying to mimic.

GONJIAM: HAUNTED ASYLUM (2018)

This is just an Asian horror version of an overplayed plot of numerous U.S. found footage films; a group of ghost hunters enters an abandoned asylum that’s reputedly haunted.

As usual, there’s backstory: mass deaths of inmates, a crazy asylum director that simply disappeared, a particular room that is cursed. And, also as usual, there a whole bunch of trekking through the woods with cameras, setting up monitors in the asylum, exploring a location sprinkled with creepy items like dolls and wheelchairs, and screaming in terror at things the audience doesn’t get to see.

However, the tedium shifts into terror late into the film after the ghost hunters decide to do some sort of ritual with candles.

As the specters come out of the woodwork, there’s a lot of chaos and it’s often dark and hard to see anything, but there’s also Silent Hill level ghouls, paranoia, suspense, isolation, and claustrophobia as the ghost hunters experience an onslaught of intense attacks. The final act definitely redeemed this one for me.

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Three degrees of slashing

Posted on September 4, 2025 by Daniel

This is definitely an uneven selection of slashers I picked from my streaming watchlist, but are any of them worth a watch? Let’s find out.

AMERICAN SCARECROW (2020)

If only this film had recognized the opportunity embedded in its unintentional comedic moments, it could have gone a totally different route.

As far as killer scarecrow movies go, this is not a supernatural flick…it’s a guy in a scarecrow mask. So, it’s nothing more than a slasher.

After an opening “kill” scene in which a dude simply falls in a well from freight, we meet a group of friends that comes to an abandoned farmhouse to assess it for rehab and renovation. They explore the vacant house’s creepy nooks and crannies, one girl finds a diary that adds no significance to the plot, a little, scared girl shows up and also adds no value to the plot, and there’s a brief discussion of Native Americans having the land stolen from them…which…has no bearing on the plot.

What I’m saying is, there’s not much of a plot.

To pad the time, we see a random redneck enter a cornfield about 30 minutes in for a nicely crafted, claustrophobic chase scene in the rows, but there’s no screaming or blood when the scarecrow strikes. Sigh.

52 minutes in, one of the main dudes is killed by the scarecrow, at which point the slashing action takes off, and this becomes fairly watchable. It’s also where the humorous potential shines. The kills come across as funny, and one dude who gets his hand hacked off suddenly becomes hilarious as he keeps begging someone to rescue his severed extremity. I’m almost positive that this whole segment is intentionally funny, which makes me wonder why this tone wasn’t established earlier and carried through the movie.

The final chase and fight definitely deliver, so the film ends on a high note, even if there’s no clear explanation for the unclear unfolding of events.

THE OMICRON KILLER (2024)

Making the odd choice to cash in on a pandemic four years after it changed the world, this film is about a copycat killer following in the footsteps of a previous killer known as the New York “COVID killer” (because he wears a surgical mask). How is that for a weird setup? The original COVID killer is dead, so we never even get to see him in action. You’d think this was actually a sequel to another movie.

Adding to this bizarre setup, there’s a satanic cult, led by Felissa Rose, that hangs out in the cemetery throughout the movie trying to do a ritual to resurrect the original COVID killer.

Horror queen Lynn Lowry has a minor role as the head of police, but the detecting is done mostly by two recovering alcoholic dudes, which is when you realize this movie appears to be trying to come across at least in part as a horror comedy. Very confusing.

The copycat killer ends up in a hospital after his first three kills in an alley because the police think he was just defending himself against a trio of thugs…that he brutally killed. There are some weird characters at the hospital, including a nurse and a doctor, but the focus on them goes nowhere once the copycat killer escapes the hospital, killing everyone on his way out the door.

There’s virtually no plot to follow beyond the copycat killer being incensed that he is considered irrelevant because he’s just a pale imitation of the original COVID killer. Even news reporters are calling him a “weaker variant” (wink wink), which is when he goes out and buys a cooler mask to replace his plain old N95 mask.

The kill scenes, which just consist of taking out random people rather than relevant characters, are at least pretty intense, but the final battle between police and the copycat killer is a letdown.

There is, however, an epilogue scene that ties up one of the dangling subplots and promises a sequel with a much cooler looking killer.

TORTURE THE FLESH (2024)

The movie poster of a sexy neon glow killer mask says sleek, contemporary slasher, but the title tells the real story. There’s nothing sleek or sexy about the way the flesh is tortured in this throwback to serious video nasties, complete with grisly, old school practical effects.

Those gross death scenes are definitely the reason to watch this one, because the “mystery” is weak and the events that unfold between the kills are painfully repetitive as the movie tries to drive home the profiles of the minimal number of main characters so that they all seem like suspects. The overkill could have been paired down by editing out much of the repetition and trimming the movie down from a whopping 110 minutes to a leaner 90 minutes.

This is a purely misogynistic massacre movie with kills reminiscent of the gnarliest over-the-top deaths in late 70s/early 80s Euro horror. There’s plenty of female nudity as a nipple is cut off, faces are cut in half with buzz saws, fingers are chopped off, heads are bashed with a hammer, and not once, but twice, vaginas are stabbed repeatedly in explicit closeups.

While fucked up, the mutilations are definitely a way to balance out the plodding plot. One guy is dealing with his wife and daughter being victims of the killer, and he does a lot of moping around while grieving. There’s also an alcoholic, abusive detective on the case, along with his insecure, rookie partner. And just for good measure, we get Lynn Lowry again, this time as the ex-wife of the abusive detective.

Near the end of the film, we get a long strip club scene, because every sleazy horror flick needs one, and the film concludes in a warehouse with the main characters standing in a circle accusing each other of being the killer. It’s a bland finale that includes a shootout (yawn), and you’ll most likely guess who the killer is before the reveal.

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When ghosts, demons, and zombies get the last laugh

Posted on September 2, 2025 by Daniel

It’s a trio of indie horror comedies in various subgenres, but do they all deliver on the humor? Let’s find out.

FOREVER HOME (2023)

This film is going for the playful haunted house vibe, but its charm is hindered by one thing—the whopping 115-minute run time. Argh!

It starts off strong with a few kids sneaking into a reportedly haunted house and discovering it is indeed haunted.

Then we meet our main straight couple, and wouldn’t you know they’re headed to the same house because they just bought it. The wife’s quirky brother shows up, and that’s when the ghosts really start to show themselves.

For most of the movie, the ghosts consist of an adult woman with a knife in the back of her head, which never gets old, two mischievous kids, and a woman playing a violin.

The couple and the brother learn that anyone who dies in the house is doomed to be trapped there forever, so they try to sell quickly. Naturally, the ghosts use their powers of spooking to scare away prospective buyers. A psychic medium is brought in, and there’s a séance.

An aggressive male ghost comes forward way into the movie and becomes the main enemy they have to contend with, leading to a possession.

There are cute, funny moments, but there’s really nothing new to the plot, and the film is way too long, so the pacing struggles. It’s also padded with too many montage sequences, like them driving to the house, them cleaning the house, and the ghosts playing silly scare games with them.

The final act also shifts tone and goes the heartfelt, melodramatic route, which feels a little out of place in an otherwise silly film, but the final scene does take place on Halloween. Yay!

THE HOUSE ON ADAM’S DRIVE (2024)

In the tradition of Black horror comedies like A Haunted House and Meet the Blacks, this possession flick comes from writer/director/star LaRonn Marzett. He’s a total cutie who has a clearly defined comedy style that he exploits here.

It’s perhaps a bit too self-indulgent at times, with some sequences going on too long, making this a 110-minute movie, but in a major meta moment near the end of the film, one of his fellow characters calls him out on milking his act and making the movie too long! Makes for a good in-joke, but if he had heeded his own script’s warning and cut some of the excessive fluff showcasing his talent from the first part of the film, the pacing would have greatly benefitted. Luckily, LaRonn is charismatic and funny, plus he has a good supporting cast to work with, so the film is a blast as he indulges in classic, satirical white/Black issues and in-your-face sex humor. Just be warned; the n word gets dropped incessantly.

The opening scene shows how brazen, confident, and comfortable LaRonn is. He and his woman are at a restaurant, he can’t pay the bill, and he hopes to secretly work off the bill quickly washing dishes or something like that. Instead, the waiter makes him a proposition he can’t refuse, resulting in unapologetically sexual gay banter, landing this one on the does the gay guy die? page.

A series of scenes follows featuring LaRonn interacting with other characters, which is where his overindulgent shtick stretches out the runtime, but 45 minutes in we get to the point—desperate to make money to appease his woman, he dresses as an 80s adult film star, complete with Jheri curls and short shorts, and goes to a house where he thinks there’s a porno being shot.

He discovers he has accidentally committed himself to working an exorcism…of a white girl that has been turned into a Black girl by a demon.

You can imagine the racial comedy that ensues. The white priest he is assisting plays a great straight character against his over-the-top performance, making them a perfect comedy duo. When the priest eventually gets shirtless to fight the demon, I was kind of hoping that whole porn job was going to come back into play, because they would be sizzling hot together.

The film is a hoot despite the long length, and there are fun pop culture references, including nods to Mariah Carey, Michael Jackson, and Ghostbusters, plus the final exorcism battle rises to Evil Dead 2 levels. I hope LaRonn makes more horror comedies in this style, because I’m so there for it.

ALL YOU NEED IS BLOOD (2023)

Although it’s not really the same and nowhere near as good, the structure of this minimalistic zomcom reminded me of One Cut of the Dead.

The opening scene, which is set 30,000 years ago with cave people establishes that there’s a meteor that turns you into a zombie if you touch it. There’s absolutely no need for this scene beyond starting things off with zombie action.

Next, we meet our main teen kid. He’s an aspiring filmmaker, lives with his unsupportive dad, and speaks to the urn that holds his dead mother’s ashes and speaks back to him…a plot point that seems like it’s going to be of some significance but instead is completely forgotten.

The main kid’s best friend is a mute kid, and they want to enter a film festival to win some money, but the festival is only for horror movies, and he doesn’t want to make horror movies.

However, just as two girls arrive at his house to audition, including Mena Suvari, a meteor lands in his yard, and his dad touches it and turns into a zombie.

Before you know it, they realize they can use his zombie dad to make a horror movie. It’s a cute concept with plenty of opportunity for some humor, with things spiraling out of control as more and more people are bitten and the “cast” of zombies grows, but despite a lot of heart clearly being put into the film, it tends to get slow in the middle and isn’t quite as funny as it could be.

Things pick up in the final act, mostly because there’s a sudden burst of zombie action as we see the results of all the incidents they’ve been filming. There’s even some good gore. However, things get really weird when one dude turns into a sort of final boss with a turtle head.

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Evil children, psycho seniors, and a deformed killer

Posted on August 29, 2025 by Daniel

It’s a trio of indie horror flicks, and each one had at least a little something to keep me entertained, but there was definitely a winner for me.

MY FIRST YEAR OFF CAMPUS (2024)

The IMDb description of this is way off. It sounds like two girls move into an apartment and discover their landlord is obsessed with Hitchcock. Instead, this turns into It Follows combined with a psycho senior citizens flick.

There are definitely some nods to 80s aesthetics in the beginning of the film as we meet the girls and the young male landlord. We learn people died in the house they’re renting, we learn he’s gay. He even mentions that he’s a different kind of gay than Norman Bates was, because he has a healthy relationship with his mother, so this one earns a spot on the does the gay guy die? page.

Then we meet the crazy elderly parents. They seem to be supernatural. No matter where the two main girls go, the parents find them. The parents keep abducting them, they keep escaping, and the parents keep recapturing them. The parents are definitely creepy, but the repetitive structure chips away at the effectiveness of their presence.

The family is involved in the black arts, but the son begins to show resistance to hurting anyone else. It’s all mysterious and weird with some fun, spooky atmosphere, but there’s never any sense of urgency in the events taking place, so it loses steam after a while. However, there is some satanic ritual action in the last few minutes, and the results promise something that could have been at the forefront of the frights if it had taken place earlier in the film.

BEWARE THE CHILDREN (2018)

This is probably too low budget for most viewers, with a weak script, and it doesn’t exactly feature professional actors, but I have to admit there are some deliciously mean-spirited killer kid moments, and the plot idea is pretty unique.

However, there’s a lot of noise around the main storyline, and there are really no clearly defined characters to latch onto to carry us through the film, so it can become a little confusing. Generally, young, troubled kids suffering from nightmares or sleep paralysis end up in group therapy at an institute where something nefarious is going on.

Eventually, the kids disappear, their parents panic, people begin dying, and police investigate. Like I said, it’s all really messy, and the finale is disappointingly anticlimactic, but when the kids begin murdering adults they are convinced are monsters, the death scenes add a nice touch of low budget gore. Plus, the reason the kids begin killing is clever. With a bigger budget and a better script, this little film could have brought something special to the killer kid subgenre.

Note that there are some conservative-leaning elements to the film (a military family, talk of God over evil as the answer to everything) that might jump out at left-leaning viewers—not to mention the filmmakers chose to have a Black kid in a hoodie as the one who wields a gun as his choice of weapon (palm, meet forehead), but the main message has to do with revenge for bullying, particularly of a kid with a disability, so the movie does seem to mean well…

CAMP TERROR (2024)

Camp Terror is a sleekly produced indie slasher with one major flaw—it runs 110 minutes long. Argh! It’s a basic slasher setup, so it simply did not need so much padding. I assure you, if you overlook the slow start, you will be well-rewarded in the second half.

It opens strong with chasing and killing, complete with practical effects gore and an awesome deformed killer that’s a blend of Jason Voorhees and Victor Crowley. If there’s one minor flaw to the film, it’s the excessive, booming stinger sounds used to up the jump factor.

The intro credits feature a piece of pop rock circa 2003 direct-to-DVD horror movie soundtrack, so I felt all giddy with nostalgia.

Next, we meet our main characters. There is a group of friends (they’re a little bit too old to call “kids” this time). Theres a redneck creeper at a convenience store who warns them away from the camp they’re heading to. There’s a female sheriff. Brinke Stevens is the shunned local whose brother was a bullied boy that went on a killing spree years before, and everyone believes she is keeping him hidden away somewhere.

The plot may not be original, but it’s the kind of paint-by-numbers slasher that does what it needs to do, but not until 49 minutes in, when the first kill happens. Wouldn’t you know the victim is the Black guy of the group?

The death scenes are hardcore, the lighting is horror perfection, and the final act focusing on the final girl’s chase and battle with the killer totally rocks. We even get a hokey, old school final frame, plus a post-credits tag that is a must-see for both its cameo and its nod to a summer camp slasher classic.

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Mothers and others

Posted on August 26, 2025 by Daniel

This trio of films about mothers and monsters offers a variety of familiar subgenres, including evil children, backwoods slashing, and possession. But do they also deliver on scares?

THE OTHER (2025)

The director of the gay slasher classic Hellbent takes us on a white hetero couple’s crazy ride with their newly adopted Black daughter. It’s so crazy that despite being intriguing and having some compelling horror elements, it’s absolute chaos and completely loses focus. There’s just way too much going on here.

The couple adopts the girl, who is mute. Things immediately start getting weird around the house—everything in the fridge goes bad, pink stuff shows up in the pool, the kitchen knives end up in the little girl’s bed.

There’s also a psychotic neighbor girl with Down syndrome who befriends the adopted girl and encourages her to indulge in macabre behavior, like mutilating dolls. The neighbor girl’s mother is also pretty weird and played by horror queen Shawnee Smith.

There’s a disturbing backstory, the concept of “other” is explored in various ways, bugs play a prominent role in the nasty moments, the wife seems to become possessed and turns on her new daughter, and the husband is determined to protect the seemingly evil daughter. Literally everyone appears to be psycho, so it’s hard to figure out what is going on, which is part of what makes this so intriguing and watchable.

The horror really delivers in the final act as things get clearer and move into Stephen King’s The Dark Half territory.

WOMB (2025)

Violent, macabre, dark, and suspenseful, this backwoods horror flick has a killer opener, with perfect camera angles and use of sound (or lack of it) to create a super tense chase. A camouflaged killer carrying a baby carrier and a knife chases a very pregnant woman through the woods. Eek!

Next, we meet a young woman being driven to a cabin in the woods by her hot fiancé so she can spend some time alone with her future sister-in-law.

Here’s where things get infuriating fast. A cop stops them for a chat, and the main girl says, “Shouldn’t you be out looking for that fetus snatcher?”

WHAT? You know there’s a fetus snatcher on the loose and you’re going to go stay in a cabin in the woods? WTF? This is an immediate suspension of disbelief cock blocker. Oh, but it gets better. She arrives at the cabin, and there’s a padlocked door inside with a cryptic message on it, and she just accepts that the owner has said it’s off limits. Also, the windows are boarded up, yet that’s explained away, too. Am I supposed to feel sorry for her pregnant ass?

I have to admit, the first appearance of the fetus snatcher is perfectly smooth and fresh and thrusts us right into the action, but then the pregnant girl cries out to the killer, “What do you want?!?!”

No. Seriously. You don’t know what he wants?

The film really is intense and thrilling as more people find their way to the cabin for various reasons, the most important one being to get killed off, but even though there are some red herring along the way, I knew where this was all heading right from the start, and I imagine most horror veterans will as well.

Despite the flaws of the film, the final few moments get into Jeepers Creepers territory, and the ending is nasty, mean, grisly, fatalistic, and comes complete with a graphic visual baby delivery moment. Nope. Birth is not beautiful, real or fake.

THE BEAST INSIDE (2024)

I love scream queen Sadie Katz, and while she usually does great horror comedy roles, she is notably good in this more dramatic role. I was really liking the fresh take on the possession theme at first, but the movie ends up going nowhere and concludes with a very typical and bland exorcism scene.

A divorced mother, all Sadie wants to do is see her son, but she is fighting her demons, literally. She believes her mom died of possession and that her family passes possession on and now it’s her turn. While it’s not the focus of the film, the Christmas season is on full display, so this one goes on the holiday horror page.

Sadie definitely experiences signs of possession, and she goes to her family’s priest for help, but he tells her the church doesn’t believe in possession anymore and passes on helping her…for now.

Therefore, Sadie decides to self-exorcise. Cool change in plot, right? Unfortunately, it just drags on and goes nowhere. The most that happens is that she has some demonic encounters in the hotel room in which she’s staying, and her ex-husband’s girlfriend seems to be lightly terrorized by the demon.

And in the end? The priest comes back to help exorcise her, making for a routine possession bedroom scene with a lot less excitement than the best of them.

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PRIME TIME: flesh and blood

Posted on August 24, 2025 by Daniel

For a change, I picked three from a streaming service that all delivered on the horror elements I crave, even if one of them had a more substantial plot and was going for an elevated story. Let’s get into them.

CONSUMED (2024)

 

This is a monster flick, but it’s also a metaphorical movie about how cancer attacks the very core of who we are and devours our existence, making us just a shell of who we used to be.

A straight couple goes on a hiking trip to celebrate the woman’s remission from cancer. Even so, she’s still struggling emotionally and having nightmarish, symbolic horror dreams about some sort of creature tearing her body apart.

Turns out there’s also a creature in the woods, and soon the couple is on the run from it and trying to find a place to hide.

They encounter horror king Devon Sawa, who is out in the woods hunting what he believes is a Wendigo that takes over people’s bodies by stealing their skin. This makes for some nasty epidermal effects.

There are plenty of close encounters with the creature and some good suspense, but this is a slow burn with lots of exposition and exploration as well. Not to mention, there’s quite a bit of symbolic imagery that starts to feel like overkill after a while in its effort to sprinkle visual horror throughout the movie.

Things really pick up in the final act when it’s time to come face to face with the creature. Great monster, great fight to the death. More than just a cheap thrills flick, this one is a nice balance of smart and scary.

MOUSEBOAT MASSACRE (2025)

It’s another killer Mickey Mouse movie, and what it lacks in storyline it makes up for in some fricking gnarly kills. By the time the mouse pulled out a cheese grater, my hubby bailed on our movie night and left me alone in the living room to the sounds of a victim shrieking in agony.

The plot is pretty silly. There’s this old cartoon video, and if you watch it, the cartoon mouse comes to life and goes on a killing spree.

Our main girl is a druggy. Her family and friends bring her to a secluded house for an intervention. They lock her in a room with the video, which was a favorite of hers when she was a child. So…she watches it. Let the mouseboat massacre begin.

There’s sex, boobs, tons of blood, and the mouse executing some excruciating kills that most often involve very slowly sawing off body parts with a sharp object.

The backstory of the tape is goofy (not that Goofy), and the final moment between the main girl and the mouse is not all that surprising if you’re a horror veteran. It’s also anticlimactic, but you should really just go into this one for the grisly kills.

WEREWOLF IN A WOMEN’S PRISON (2006)

Campy, sleazy sexploitation with a classic creature costume, tons of blood and an 80s VHS flick filter complete with tracking lines at the bottom? Sign me up for this trashy werewolf flick.

It opens strong with a couple having sex in a tent, and the dude getting mutilated by a werewolf. The woman gets attacked…

…and wakes up naked in a women’s prison having her snatch examined by a dominatrix. Oh yeah. This goes right for the 80s female prison movie vibe right from the start. I welcome all the sex and nudity, but I am bummed that none of the men get naked, especially the head warden, played by hottie Domiziano Arcangeli of the gay vampire flick The Brides of Sodom. He looks sexy as hell when submitting to the dominatrix, but he does it with his pants on. What the hell?

Anyway, there’s tons of misogynistic female exploitation, lesbian sex, and cat fights, but the movie doesn’t skimp on the werewolf action and practical effects gore either.

Our main girl is visited by her decaying boyfriend’s ghost, in true An American Werewolf in London fashion, and he informs her she’s cursed, will be turning into a werewolf, and needs to kill herself.

Instead, she falls for her pretty prison mate and ends up becoming her werewolf protector every time some nasty dude tries to abuse her.

There’s a whole lot of involuntary sex work going on in the prison, which leads to the warden throwing a big sex party that turns into a werewolf massacre for the final act.

It’s (im)pure sex and violence fun if you’re into that kind of blast from the VHS and cable past.

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