TUBI TERRORS: a horror triple feature with gays!

Posted on January 16, 2024 by Daniel

This was a treat. Not only was it a triple feature of flicks in various subgenres, but each one also included gay male characters…including one that was a total gay horror romance, landing these films on the does the gay guy die? page and the homo horror movies page.

CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT (2023)

Despite this being a period piece, I really hope this hidden gay horror romance gets a physical media release, because it’s something different and has some cool vampire monsters.

I’ll just note that in this negative and nasty age we live in, I noticed keyboard warriors on IMDb criticizing the film because the characters are wearing modern T-shirts. Seriously, this is where we are at as a horror viewing community. And who knows? As someone who mostly loathes period pieces, maybe I liked this film because the dudes were wearing modern T-shirts…

But seriously, I don’t give a crap if dudes are wearing contemporary T-shirts when there’s a much bigger picture here…partially because I’m just waiting for them to take the shirts off, but more importantly because this film dares to create a totally gay love story set during World War II with a good vampire vibe moving the story forward. Sure, the movie has its moments of feeling like there were budget constraints, but overall I felt it did a fine job of creating its universe, capturing the essence of the time period and offering up some impressive sets.

The story is simple and straightforward. After a mysterious encounter with a red-robed figure on the battlefield, two soldiers get away from the explosions and encounter a pretty boy who offers to bring them to his father’s home for shelter.

Once at the house, we quickly learn it’s the son’s job to bring home “food” for him and the dad. Problem is he falls in love with one of the two young soldiers.

The film touches upon the effects of religion on young gay men and brings forth the parallels between vampires and gays both being considered monsters in society. Personally, I was drawn to the look and style of the film. It’s sexy, it’s romantic, it has some ominous atmosphere, and there’s a satisfying vampire battle in the final act.

There was only one scene that didn’t work for me and made me giggle, and it involved two German soldiers shooting at the main characters, with one guy behind the other and shooting a machine gun willy-nilly, which definitely would have hit the guy in front.

RAGE (2020)

It’s not often that one of the movies I watch proves to be more interesting than all the fun to be had on my iPad, but this drug trippy film starts strong and kept me fixated for a while. It feels sort of like backwoods horror sprinkled with a dash of folk horror.

A group of friends of varying gender identities and orientations vacations in a beachside house to party and have sex. After attending a rave, they begin to experience some very odd situations. An old lady at a shop they stop in appears to be pregnant (very freaky scene).

A weird plumber dude fishes things out of their toilet with his hands.

And then, while the group is doing drugs on the beach, one of them sees some sort of fireside occult ritual.

An intense buildup, a warped sense of reality thanks to the recreational drug use (or have they been roofied?), and sexual indulgences all establish the onset of something frightening and intriguing, but somehow the film fails to take advantage of the very elements it introduces. There’s so much that could have been explored, but the plot simply doesn’t commit to fully realizing the horrors at its disposal.

For instance, there’s a sort of backwoods vibe, in large part due to the fact that after the rave there seems to be no one else in the town but the old pregnant lady and the plumber. Where did everyone go? A cult aspect comes into play, but the few cult members only show up as needed to satisfy suspense scenes—the old lady and the plumber are the predominant threats. What the hell happened to the rest of the cult?

Even as the friends get abducted and gruesomely prodded in a secret lair for an extraction of sorts, the details of what is going on are fuzzy—the “cult” (of two) is only in need of one virgin for some sort of fertility ritual. And it’s not even a thrilling ritual, making for a very anticlimactic finale.

THE SLAUGHTER (2022)

In the wake of Scream back in 1996, we were inundated with loads of copycat slashers, and it was awesome! Even Euro horror took the sleek modern slasher route. Italian film The Slaughter, which is actually an English language movie, very much feels like a throwback to that era.

Imagine my surprise when the movie begins with an interracial gay male couple. They even share a quick kiss. I had high hopes for them.

Well, those homo hopes were dashed pretty fast. The white dude has no interest in hanging with the Black guy’s friends, so he’s immediately written out of the film. And once the slasher action starts, the gay Black guy, who is a hardcore horror fan and should recognize all the slasher signals in his reality as soon as they appear, somehow manages to be the first one to die. Sigh. Meanwhile, a lesbian couple gets a nude sex scene. No fair.

Anyway, the friends sneak into an abandoned movie studio and are welcomed by a creepy caretaker dude. As in Rage, this group offers a range of sexualities, and they’re looking to have sex, which is amplified after they each pop a pill.

The eerie, empty building set is great, and the slasher elements are classic if not cliché. It’s very American in style, with only one death scene that felt like an homage to old school Italian death scenes.

The killer wears a baby face mask reminiscent of masks from movies like Valentine and Happy Death Day. There are several good chase scenes, and the killer uses a variety of murder techniques—electrocution, acid bath, stabbing, etc.

While it’s mostly straightforward, the film seems to allude to other elements that are simply never expanded upon. The group finds and watches what appears to be a snuff film, but there’s never any concrete explanation as to its relevance to the current kills. There is some security camera POV that seems to imply there are supernatural elements. At one point, one characters flashes demon eyes and I seriously thought we were heading into Demons territory rather than slasher mode (that would have been awesome). And brace yourself. Near the end of the film the killer suddenly begins to make a Grudge sound! WTF? Did the filmmakers just assume everyone who watches the movie would know what that signifies so we could draw our own conclusions as to why the kills were happening? But if it’s a supernatural situation, why was the killer wearing a mask? Sigh.

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TUBI TERRORS: found footage, a lake zombie, and a creature in a bar

Posted on January 12, 2024 by Daniel

Even if I didn’t love all the films in this trio, each one had some scary elements that satisfied my horror appetite. Let’s take a look.

MISTER CREEP (2022)

Running only a little over an hour, this one brings nothing new to the found footage subgenre, and it’s fairly disjointed, but if you are a diehard fan of found footage films, you’ll probably feel right at home.

A small group of college students plans to make a film about a family that disappeared from their house without a trace. They get sidetracked by a bigger story…a serial killer in a clown mask who would bring people to his farmhouse and film their murders while broadcasting them.

We get footage of the clown being interrogated, the kids taking a trip to the abandoned police station where he was held, and visiting a woman with some knowledge of the events. Eventually they somehow end up just running around screaming in the woods, because isn’t that how every found footage film has to end?

Despite the messy presentation, there are several creepy sequences, along with a freaky looking doll, as well as a few jump scares. But overall, I would really only recommend this one to found footage lovers. Then again, it’s only like an hour long, so you don’t have much to lose for some cheap thrills in return.

NIX (2022)

The director of all the Sharknado movies and numerous other cheesy fun SyFy originals makes an attempt at elevated horror, which (like most elevated horror) is essentially trauma porn. On top of that, the script tries so hard to be complex and deep that it ends up turning in on itself.

On the bright side, an awesome zombie monster rises from a lake to terrorize a family. It’s definitely the highlight of this heavy-handed family drama. Sadly, we spend the whole movie wondering if it’s real or just a metaphorical monster.

The opening scene shows us how the family tragedy began, and because the monster is questionably real, the sequence plays out quite oddly. Basically, a husband, wife, and their young daughter and sons go camping in the woods, the daughter vanishes in the water, and the father fails to save her. We see the zombie monster come out of the water and have to assume it killed the father because…

…flash to the future, and the mother (played by Dee Walllace) and her grown sons are still struggling with the inexplicable absence of the daughter and father years before.

There’s plenty of creepy and sometimes odd stuff going on, the zombie monster lurks in shadows, and people die. The family starts to unravel, and it doesn’t help that Dee is so lost in her grief that she decides they need to go back to the location where she last had her family together. Sigh.

It sucks that this movie just gets so damn confusing. I don’t know what they were going for, because there are so many unanswered questions that pile up as the plot continues to derail and go in circles. I honestly couldn’t determine whether the monster was real or metaphorical when all was said and done. Perhaps the point was to leave the decision up to viewers, but it fricking pissed me off.

CRAVING (2023)

 

An awesome monster mouth on the poster art made me put this one in my watchlist. Plus, Felissa Rose was at the top of the cast list.

Well, Felissa doesn’t even last twenty minutes, and the monster doesn’t come in until the last twenty minutes. Argh.

You’d think a movie with a plot similar to that of Feast (patrons in a bar terrorized by a creature) would go all out with the monster madness. Instead, this film goes all out with the irrelevant backstories of all the characters, who are all junkies. So many characters to care about I didn’t know what to do with myself. Okay, yes I did. I just focused on the bearded hottie…

Anyway. There is a group in the bar. Then another group crashes and holds them at gunpoint. In the meantime, a third group keeps all those in the bar trapped inside and warns that one of them is a monster, and they will be trapped inside until they let the monster out to be dealt with.

What can I say? It could have been cool. Instead, there’s lots of talk, fights, flashbacks, lesbians, and red horror lighting while we wait impatiently for a monster reveal.

I can’t believe they could deliver such an awesome practical effects monster and then choose to only feature it for about fifteen minutes. But dang, it sure does kick ass for those fifteen minutes, with plenty of gore. Is it worth sitting through the rest of the film to get to this part? In this case I’d say yes.

As if to make up for an hour of no action, there’s another monster massacre sequence during the closing credits, and it’s even better than the monster attacks during the final act. However, it’s a totally different vibe than the serious tone of the rest of the movie, with a grindhouse filter as whimsical hillbilly music plays and the monster goes on an exploitative killing spree. Awesome.

 

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PRIME TIME: hotel ghosts, a summer camp slasher, and a mad mommy demon

Posted on January 11, 2024 by Daniel

All three of these flicks brought to mind movies of past decades, so I did get some retro satisfaction out of at least two of them. Let’s take a look.

THE OVERNIGHT (2022)

I guess it doesn’t matter to newer generations of horror fans, but for me, if you’re going to make a movie along the lines of The Shining, you have to rise to the occasion, and this film just didn’t for me.

A straight couple on a road trip has to make an emergency stop at a creepy hotel. The manager and owner are odd, so it’s no surprise the couple begins seeing ghosts everywhere.

There are plenty of great hack n slash murders here, but they are all simply residual hauntings giving us flashbacks to the hotel’s history.

The dudes running the place know about the ghosts eternally trapped in the building, so they clearly have a plan for our main couple.

Unfortunately, the scariest thing that happens besides the couple spotting the ghosts is black gunk splattering all over the guy while he’s showering. I wasn’t exactly mesmerized by this one. Ghost movies just don’t give me the willies like they used to back in the Poltergeist era…when I was 13.

FINAL SUMMER (2023)

If you are in the mood for a totally derivative summer camp slasher, this one definitely checks off all the right boxes. There’s a paper thin, predictable storyline, but it doesn’t really matter, because it’s all about the masked killer with an axe chasing counselors through the woods.

It begins with a faux scare campfire story, then we meet forgettable counselors—including the final girl, which is the downside here. It’s not the actress’s fault. She simply doesn’t have any material to work with to make her a sympathetic character or hero we’re rooting for.

Along with really great, blue-hued moon lighting, what worked for me is the fact that instead of victims being picked off one by one because they’re unaware of the threat, the whole camp of counselors almost immediately learns of the killer’s presence during a chaotic massacre.

The survivors spend the rest of the movie either huddled in a cabin while the killer lurks outside, or being chased through the woods by the killer.

That is about it. There’s not much more to it. There are standard levels of violence and blood (PG-13 level, I’d say), and you will most likely guess who the killer is, but if you love those summer camp slashers from the eighties, I’d say Final Summer is an okay time killer. My favorite part is when the killer runs full speed after one victim. Eek!

THE NAMELESS DAYS (2022)

Maybe I’m just in a nostalgic mood, because the old school feel of these flicks is bringing me comfort compared to the more mainstream modern horror coming out these days.

This one reminds me of the vengeful female specter PG-13 movies of the 00s. The timely take here is that the film focuses on a teenage girl and her father whose property is on the edge of the Mexican border, where migrants are trying to get into the U.S.


Let him in!

When a new mother and her brother try to sneak through a tunnel to cross the border, one of their travel companions is attacked.

What’s refreshing is that this isn’t a heavy-handed commentary on illegal immigrants. Instead, our main girl tries to help the migrants when a vengeful demon begins pursuing them to get its gnarly hands on the baby.

The creature is awesome, and even if this is a fairly average horror flick, there are several really effective moments when the demon is chasing the main characters. On top of that, the main girl is very likable, and her dad’s friend is a cutie.

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PRIME TIME: demons, cults, and home invaders

Posted on January 8, 2024 by Daniel

Time to look at an odd triple feature I selected from my Prime watchlist. One of the movies even has a queer aspect…briefly.

SAVING GRACE (2023)

Argh! This movie has its moments and some clever aspects, but it all gets negated by the execution. It feels like the writing throws all these loose ends our way just to make the narrative twist a success.

We meet Sarah, who cares for invalids for a living. She heads to a secluded home by a lake to care for Grace, a woman who became an unresponsive mute after her twin sister dived into the water and just disappeared.

This is a slow burn that has Sarah struggling to keep her cool when it feels like someone else is in the house with them. Is it the ghost of Grace’s sister? Is the sister actually still alive? Is Grace just sleepwalking around the property? Is the caretaker who lives on the grounds really a nice a guy, or is there something he’s not telling Sarah? Has Sarah been brought to the property for a bigger, more sinister reason?

It’s hard to tell, mostly because this is yet another film made by creators convinced that the only way to deliver scares is to make every scene so dark we can’t see anything, and to ensure the main character, no matter how terrified she is, never turns on a fucking light. It’s infuriating.

The film is vaguely suspenseful, but it does recognize that it needs to keep things interesting, so it throws in a scary sequence that is actually a nightmare sequence (sigh).

On top of that, while the final twist is a goodie, there is no effort to explain all the other shady situations that made Sarah’s spidey senses tingle—what became of Grace’s sister’s body; what was up with the Lucifer book in the office of the woman who hired her; the suggestion that the caretaker had a secret hobby; the passing reference to a childhood trauma Sarah experienced; Sarah choking up a hairball…. none of it matters enough to be addressed by the script.

THE DEVIL COMES AT NIGHT (2023)

Not only does the title sound cliché, but the movie itself builds on familiar concepts in other occult-oriented home invasion flicks. Despite that, the Devil is in the details, and there are some unique details here. Unfortunately, the film fails to tap into what makes the best home invasion horror work.

So what’s unique here? A Black man comes to the home of his recently deceased, estranged father looking for his inheritance. This soon leads to a Black man vs. white supremacists angle.

We slowly learn of the Black man’s family history and how it relates directly with the motivation of the white cult that is surrounding his father’s house but unable to come in. And best of all…the specific goal of this cult is for their leader to eat the Black dude.

Setting the scene is intense, but only briefly, for with several odd characters dropping by too quickly to build momentum, the plot gets right to the point—bad cult wants in. We’re left with way too much time that needs to sustain suspense, and it just doesn’t happen. On top of that, so many extremely dark scenes cloak the action. Argh! The only thing worse than sitting through one film that is too darkly lit is to sit through two in a row!

PARABLE (2023)

The constantly changing plots and tonal shifts in this South African film will have your head spinning faster than Regan’s in The Exorcist. I say that because, well, this is partially a possession film.

That’s not how it starts. It begins with a teenage girl getting caught kissing another girl. Her father sends her to a reverend for “conversion therapy”.

But is this a film about the horrors of conversion therapy? I’m not sure. The reverend concludes that lesbianism isn’t the main problem here. He believes the girl is possessed! So he straps her down to a bed and calls in some other dude to help him cleanse her.

Meanwhile, there’s this group of friends. One dude smokes pot, and all his friends are afraid he may have done something awful to his ex-girlfriend, which he denies.

And yet, the possessed lesbian begins visiting him in his nightmares. She also likes to bite people. At this point, I was like the only one who cared that she’s a lesbian.

When the group of friends eventually has a party, the possessed lesbian summons all the guests to come to her, and they basically turn into zombies that prey on the reverend, his sidekick, and the main group of friends.

Whiplash, I tell you.

Perhaps the film is trying to imply that sinful homosexuality is a plague that will take everyone down with it? I don’t know. I usually like these weird films that jump subgenres from one scene to the next with no rhyme or reason, but I found this one to be too mild and horror lite to pull off the bizarre vibe it was going for.

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BOUGHT ON BLU and UHD: five purchases from the past few months

Posted on January 3, 2024 by Daniel

It’s a lost 80s horror bonanza, with five flicks that never came my way in the days of cable and video rentals, but have found a home in my media library four decades later. I’m absolutely giddy over it…but that doesn’t mean they’re all good movies…

THE BLACK ROOM (1982)

This feels more like a sleazy acid trip flick from 1972 than it does a horror movie from 1982. Honestly, if I had seen it back in the day I wouldn’t have added it to my extensive collection of 80s horror flicks. Oh, who am I kidding? I probably would have bought it purely out of nostalgia anyway.

It starts off with nudity, a kill, and a burial, so it did grab my attention. Next we meet a sexually active couple that is going through a dry spell because having kids ruins lives (in this case one of the kids is played by young Linnea Quigley).

The husband rents a sex room from a weird brother and sister and starts bringing random women there for sex.

Little does he know that the siblings abduct these women and “feed” off them through blood transfusions.

Are they unconventional vampires or just crazy? We’ll never know. But considering they’re filling themselves with the blood of sexually promiscuous people in 1982, they are seriously at risk of contracting HIV before anyone even knows what it is.

This movie is sexually weird (yay!), but don’t expect a body count. There is, however, one scene ripped right out of the true story of Jeffrey Dahmer, when a victim got away but ignorant witnesses just let the killer take the victim back inside.

Goose from Grease 2 even gets involved in all the sexual shenanigans, but it’s eventually just the husband and wife vs. the “vampires”, and it’s a pretty underwhelming final fight.

FATAL GAMES (1984)

A lost indie slasher of the eighties is always a treat, and while this is generally a cheap, lower tier offering, it deserves a controversial place in queer horror history as it seems to get inspiration from movies like De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and Sleepaway Camp.

In terms of 80s slash trash, this one delivers, starting off with an awesome attempt at progressive rock music during the gym montage opener. Athletes are representing their school at a nationals competition. Keep an eye out for Glen’s dad from Elm Street as the principal.

We are soon being treated to what made 80s horror great—lots of gratuitous T&A, in this case both male and female as we move from one locker room to another.

There’s also an interesting angle here—the star athletes are apparently being fed some sort of “medication”, and there’s reference to the coaches wanting to tame one girl’s hormones for fear her development will affect her performance. Considering where this film is headed, this is an unexpectedly timely element of an otherwise thin plot.

Our killer wears a hoodie jumpsuit and uses a very phallic javelin as a weapon. As a result, most of the kills are the same, but they’re all dark and shadowy, drenched in 80s horror blue, and accompanied by ridiculously melodramatic horror music that is such overkill it starts to wear thin.

However, there are plenty of chase scenes and some fantastic moments to be had. The first appearance of the killer is epic and makes for a perfect movie poster. There’s an underwater kill in a pool that brings to mind Jaws POV.

The body reveal scene near the end is original and absolutely priceless. The identity of the killer is sort of predictable, but the scandalous killer motivation will have queer horror groups battling it out for years to come.

Also of note is that there’s a lesbian couple and what amounts to one of the best pieces of IMDb trivia ever.

Apparently when everyone went away for Christmas break during shooting, one of the girls playing a lesbian became Born Again and refused to kiss another girl on the lips when she returned, so it became a forehead kiss instead. Leave it to a Christian to not only ruin a horror movie, but not just drop out completely and instead only draw the line at a lesbian kiss in a movie loaded with nudity, sex, violent kills, a predatory massage scene, and a twist that paints queers in a bad light.

OFF BALANCE (aka: Phantom of Death) (1987)

The director of Cannibal Holocaust brings us a bizarre movie about a pianist who is suffering from an accelerated aging disease that also makes him a psycho killer—who reminded me of Mr. Hyde.

I had never seen this one before I bought the Blu-ray, but I’ve noticed it being compared to giallos online quite a bit.

It has 80s Euro horror sensibilities for sure, but it’s essentially one of those portrait of a serial killer movies.

There’s no mystery here for the audience; we know who the killer is. The only one trying to uncover the killer’s identity is Donald Pleasence, who plays the detective on the case.

Overall, the film is kind of boring despite some classic gory Euro horror kills.

Most intriguing is that due to the killer rapidly aging, Pleasence keeps getting conflicting clues, from eye witness accounts of the killer’s appearance and age to voice analysis of calls the killer makes to Pleasence. What a great way for a killer to foil an investigation, even if he has no choice in the matter.

RAT MAN (1988)

Rat Man is about a lab-made rat/monkey hybrid that gets loose and starts terrorizing models on an island.

For starters, expect plenty of photo shoot montages and several sets of titties, because this was the 80s, and that’s how horror rolled back then.

Pretty quickly, the photographer and models shooting on a beach find bodies. That’s right. Not once, but twice they find bodies stuck in the rocks along the shore.

Doesn’t stop them from delivering more photo shoot montages.

In a very Argento-esque moment, one model walking alone at night is chased by a stalker, sneaks into a random house, and ends up turning a game of cat and mouse into a game of mouse and rat.

The film does go the investigative route after that, with one woman who comes to identify the body playing detective to learn the truth of what happened to the model. The photographer ends up doing the same exact thing.

Although the film is slow for a while, it picks up and pays off when the rat man comes out to play in the final act, saving the film. There’s even an ending that could have led to a sequel called Rat Man on a Plane.

SPIDER LABYRINTH (1988)

In Spider Labyrinth, a sexy American researcher goes to Budapest to meet with a professor who was working on a secret project.

The professor turns out to be really bizarre and paranoid, and before long it appears he had reason to be, because he’s found hanging from a spider web in his home.

Is this a giant killer spider movie? No, but spiders do play a part with really bad, stop motion effects that look even worse in 4k. The spider theme is mostly a metaphor for a mystery surrounding meshing religions that worship the same divine figure. It’s an intriguing and confusing concept…another sign of 80s Italian horror.

The hot researcher spends a lot of time running around town trying to investigate the case he’s been ensnared in, locals stare at him in a creepy fashion, cat, spider, and black ball themes keep coming up, and there’s a freaky, drooling witchy woman running around killing people.

It’s a rather slow experience for a while, the highlight of which is a classic Italian horror sequence—a woman is chased and killed while running through a maze of white sheets. Very Argento.

The final act is the money shot. I didn’t totally understand what the hell was going on, but the visual horror rocks. There’s an actual underground labyrinth and a freaky and gory sacrifice scene involving a baby and a giant spider that is so incredibly 80s Euro horror. It made me glad I blind bought this release. As if there was ever a question that I would pass up on buying a horror flick released in the 80s.

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HULU HORRORS: hosts, immigrants, and ghosts

Posted on December 28, 2023 by Daniel

Each of these three had satisfying horror moments, but none of them fully wowed me. Let’s take a look.

APPENDAGE (2023)

If you’re looking for a more serious version of Bad Milo, this might fit the bill. Whereas Bad Milo was a monster born of a man’s angst that lived in his ass, this one is a little critter that grows from the side of a young female fashion designer’s abdomen.

She has a tense relationship with her parents. She feels like she’s not good enough to succeed at her job. She fears her best friend and her boyfriend are having an affair.

As a result, a hideous little growth comes along, she cuts it off, and it lives separate from her, feeding her fears with taunts about her worthlessness (yes, it talks).

She locks it in the basement, researches it online, and finds a secret support group of people dealing with the same issue.

Rather than a movie in which the parasite created by the host’s mind goes on a killing spree to get revenge for her, which is what we’ve come to expect, this is instead a slow burn about our main girl coming to terms with everything that irks her in life.

The final act is when things go yucky body horror, but this still isn’t a body count flick. Instead it offers a refreshing twist on this subgenre and takes us to some surprising places. I was really feeling the second half of this film.

AMERICAN CARNAGE (2022)

Not for the anti-woke crowd, this is a political satire right out of the gate, beginning with real clips demonstrating hatred towards immigrants and how they are painted as enemies to scare gullible people for the sole purpose of winning elections. We even get a spot-on presentation of douchey racist white boys at a fast food drive-thru.

As part of his political aspiration, a governor signs an executive order to have the homes of all suspected immigrants raided and everyone inside arrested.

Our main kid ends up in a program working at a senior facility that is supposed to expunge his record and set him free.

There he makes a group of friends, including Jenna Ortega, and they quickly begin to notice something isn’t right and that all the elderly people are virtually comatose.

I was wondering if this was even going to be horror, but then a freaky sort of contortion/possession moment happens and I felt more at home.

Oddly, as the kids figure out the truth of what horrible things are happening at the facility, the contortion thing only happens one more time. Bummer, because there’s a better movie just waiting to be made that focuses strictly on that aspect, which was more or less an afterthought in terms of how this film unfolds.

Even so, the final act is a wild ride as the kids learn why they and the elderly people are really there and have to figure out a way to escape.

HAUNTING OF THE QUEEN MARY (2023)

I probably should have appeased my lack of attention span by not watching a 2-hour movie, but here we are. Haunting of the Queen Mary feels like The Shining meets Death On the Nile. The problem is that it constantly jumps from 1938 to the present with no clean transitions or logical reason why these two stories are being told yet never converge. The attempt at a mystery becomes a huge blur of situations that makes it impossible to cling to any narrative thread or to allow us to connect with any characters in either time period.

In 1938, a lower class couples sneaks on a cruise ship with their kid and tries to pass for an upper class couple.

In the present day, a couple and their child visit the same cruise ship, now a permanently docked tourist attraction, in hopes of creating a documentary or book about the boat’s past.

We are presented with a drawn-out, trippy narrative—leading up to a bloody axe massacre in the past and a ghostly haunting in the present.

I gave up on trying to understand any of it about halfway through. I was never frightened, and any sense of dread or suspense was always interrupted by a time jump.

However, this is often a visually arresting film…at least it is when the scenes aren’t hampered by agonizing darkness that ruins any chance of seeing what’s happening. That’s especially unfortunate, because the horror elements are the only thing you can really appreciate if you simply take them on their own without trying to comprehend what they mean.

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STREAM QUEEN: zombies!

Posted on December 20, 2023 by Daniel

As burned out as I am on zombies, I still keep going back for more. Was it worth going back for four? Let’s find out.

DAY ZERO (2022)

This Filipino language film combines the heart of Train to Busan with the action of a martial arts film to deliver a nonstop thrill ride of manic zombie horror.

A hunky baldy in prison has yet to meet the daughter he’s never known face to face. A former U.S. Special Forces military man, he is trying to get out on good behavior, but he keeps getting into trouble trying to defend his little boy toy.

Look, I’m not saying it’s blatantly stated in the film, but it is pretty obvious they have an “arrangement” and that he is the protector of his gentle buddy.

The film wastes no time in introducing the screeching, running, fast and furious zombies. They get into the prison, so the lead and his boy toy escape and head for the tenement apartment where his daughter and the mother of his child live.

We quickly learn the zombies are like the Silent Hill nurses—they remain eerily still unless you make noise. This offers loads of intense, suspenseful situations as the survivors in the apartment building try to stay alive…and eventually get the help of our fighting machine main guy.

A mission to save his daughter delivers plenty of character development, relationship building, tension, gore, atmosphere, fantastic camera work, and in the end, a total action sequence with our hero turning into a zombie killing machine. Awesome. And keep an eye out for the crazy head-turning zombie moment.

THE DRIVER (2019)

With all the heart-tugging zombie flicks about a father trying to protect his child after the zombie apocalypse (such as Day Zero, above), this film is generally derivative, but one aspect kept me watching to see how things turned out.

Our main guy lives in a survivor community with his family. He is one of the few people with a set of wheels, and he’s more concerned with the threat from other humans than he is with the zombies, which are triggered by noise (as in Day Zero).

After an action-packed sequence of humans and zombies busting into their camp, our main guy ends up on the road with his daughter. He’s heard of a safe zone up north, and he’s determined to get his daughter there before it’s too late, because he’s keeping a tragic secret from her.

It’s not as emotionally impactful as films such as Train to Busan, and there aren’t hordes of zombies, although there are spurts of them to balance the drama with the zombie attacks (sort of like an episode of The Walking Dead). The big issue here is that too much time is spent on scenes of the dad training the daughter to be a survivalist. These could have been trimmed down to a simple montage, which would have shaved about ten minutes off the film and helped the pacing.

The cool thing about the ending is that the father and daughter team up with two bad ass young women, and those characters are the focus of an unrelated sequel…

DEAD EARTH (aka: Paradise Z) (2020)

I’ll say it right up front—this zombie flick does nothing new for the genre, has a limited number of zombies, no scares, no gore, only two characters, and the zombies don’t truly attack until the 53-minute mark of the 80-minute runtime.

The non-story is that two young women are surviving at a resort after the apocalypse (no idea how they ended up here after the conclusion of the previous film). They lounge by the pool, carry baseball bats around, read, make art, have sex, and give us a dance montage.

There’s a nightmare sequence with one zombie 35 minutes in.

Things do get fleetingly interesting when the girls go scavenging and encounter two dudes. We finally get a glimpse at some personality and character traits of each girl, but it almost feels like an afterthought, as if the creators felt obligated to give them some sort of backstory and just tossed it in quickly.

Soon after that the zombies infiltrate the resort. They’re nice and gnarly looking and fast running, but the action is limited as the girls try to escape.

For me, the highlight is that the girls wear wrist protection during their escape so they can fight off zombies without getting bit on the arms.

A NIGHT OF THE UNDEAD (2022)

Considering horror franchises are getting multiple branching timelines these days, it should come as no surprise that public domain classic Night of the Living Dead would get resurrected in just that way.

This is as low budget indie and amateurish as a film can get. Is the premise of a direct sequel that ignores all the official sequels intriguing? I guess it depends on how much you can suspend disbelief.

The notion is that the events at the farmhouse in 1968 have become folklore. Some believe it really happened, others think it’s a hoax, and still others believe there was a government cover-up.

Oh boy.

Anyway, four podcasters decide to travel to the farm where it all happened for their show. Don’t expect a house that looks anything like the house from the original…this house looks more like a trailer home. Sigh.

Conveniently, despite it being about 45 years since the original incident, there’s like one zombie roaming around the area.

We see it a few times, but most of this film has the podcasters just chatting in the house. None of the concepts presented in this endeavor are explained.

Eventually the zombie breaks into the house, inevitably the podcasters begin getting bit, and as a result, shooting and killing them becomes a necessity. Really, there’s just nothing to cling to here.

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Christmas Horror Round-Up 2023

Posted on December 19, 2023 by Daniel

It’s that time of year again, and I think between this and a previous Christmas horror post, I’ve checked out all the Christmas horror for 2023. I’ve added them all to the complete holiday horror page, so let’s find out which ones were my faves.

THERE’S SOMETHING IN THE BARN (2023)

This is an enjoyable, semi-comedy horror flick that is visually stunning, has plenty of Christmas atmosphere, and delivers violence and blood. It’s also notably reminiscent of Gremlins, from aspects of the concept to the PG-13 family vibe.

An American family—father, son, daughter, stepmother—inherits a house in Norway.

Before long, the son discovers an elf in the barn and learns that there are rules to keep it from turning on you.

The family breaks the bright light and noise rules as soon as they set up their massive Christmas display.

There is somewhat of a slow burn here, but instead of enhancing the suspense, it causes the film to drag for a while. It’s not until 42 minutes in that the elf first gets into the house and we finally get a kill scene.

However, that’s when the film takes off. After a fight with the family, the elf calls in its village of elves. Eek!

Talk about change of pace. The film goes into overdrive, with loads of battles, chases, and Christmas red blood splatters. The family is likable, the elves are likable in an evil way, there’s a funny zombie reference, pokes at American gun culture, and a hokey, heartfelt ending. There’s Something in the Barn will definitely get you in the Christmas horror spirit.

THE SACRIFICE GAME (2023)

Despite doing something a little different with the home invasion premise and delivering plenty of Christmas décor, this film just didn’t give me any sense of tension or suspense. It did, however, deliver plenty of torture and gore.

Two girls are left behind at a boarding school during Christmas break and learn of a series of Christmas home invasions and murders (beautifully presented in the opening scene).

Wouldn’t you know, the home invaders invade the school.

We’ve seen the first part of this film many times before, with victims being terrorized while tied up at a table. However, since these serial invaders have been leaving signs of Satanism behind at the sites of their crimes, the film does eventually get that twist…and a few twists on top of that. I really liked the general idea, but I simply didn’t get enough thrills from how it all unfolds.

A CREATURE WAS STIRRING (2023)

This is one trippy Christmas horror movie that will have you questioning whether you’re watching a creature feature, a parable, a fairy tale, a comic book adaptation…or a little bit of each.

Christmas visuals perfectly mesh with horror lighting as we meet Kate from This Is Us, who gets to play a very different character in this film.

She lives with her daughter, they have a volatile relationship, and right from the start you begin to question who the real monster is—or if there’s even a monster at all.

Suddenly their home is “invaded” by Scout Taylor-Compton and her brother, who are actually just looking for refuge from the storm.

You’ll soon start feeling like you’re high on something as no one in the film seems to really comprehend their own circumstances, cryptic conversations fly, tensions over faith arise, and the horrors the mother and daughter are hiding begin to come to light.

Whether real or imaginary, the monster is definitely fricking awesome and provides satisfying horror even if we never quite understand what’s going on. There’s a snow tunnel scene that is the horrific highlight of the whole damn movie, as well as a delicious monster transformation scene.

The only catch is that because the movie is so surreal and trying way too hard to be complex and psychological, it’s not one I could turn to when I just want to watch some comfort holiday horror. The film does its best to explain everything with one final sequence, but when the writing requires an addendum to all make sense, it sort of takes the fun out of watching everything that came before it.

ADULT SWIM YULE LOG (2022)

To think an excruciating movie like Skinamarink was getting so much positive attention while an awesome, out-of-the-box flick like Adult Swim Yule Log is going unnoticed.

This movie is batshit crazy and I couldn’t stop watching. It just doesn’t give a fuck, which is what makes it so entertaining. Is it a Christmas movie? Not specifically, but we do tend to think of Christmas when we hear Yule log.

The fact is, a couple is staying at a cabin in the woods, and the dude makes money filming Yule logs for the internet. So he sets up a camera facing the fireplace…and burns the wrong log.

At first, much of the film is shot from that fixed POV (very Paranormal Activity), but that changes to standard 3rd person POV…as well as the POV of the Yule log. Not even kidding.

There’s a hillbilly woman and her masked son on the loose killing people. A group of friends shows up claiming to have rented the cabin for the weekend, but they can’t get in touch with the landlord to see if it was a double booking (a very Barbarian moment).

Then shit gets crazy.

This movie has trippy scenes due to edibles being eaten by the characters, the Yule log comes to life and starts flying around bashing people’s heads in, a character simply changes to another character with no logical explanation beyond supernatural fuckery, the hillbillies show up to cause more chaos, there’s an alien angle, and there are moments of split screen showing the history of what has happened in the cabin, from slavery, to queer people, and more. None of it makes sense but it is impossible to look away, and the horror elements rock.

NIGHTMARE ON 34TH STREET (2023)

It is inexcusable to make an anthology with three stories and a wraparound 2 hours and ten minutes long. That could have been avoided if the writing had focused on the basic premise of each story instead of going for some sort of art house vibe.

These stories fall apart because they are all over the place. I’ll try to narrow down the narrative of each story as best as I can—just know that none of them is this straightforward.

The opener is enticing enough. Three creeps in Christmas costumes break into a house and kill most of the family and some cops. One child is left alive and a dude dressed as Santa starts telling him stories.

1st story – a puppeteer fails to land a job at an audition, has flashbacks of a traumatic past, and begins killing people while wearing a reindeer a mask and carrying around his snowman puppet.

2nd story – dealing with an absent father at Christmas, a kid soon has to contend with Krampus sneaking into his house. Krampus is more human than creature, and he’s oddly campy.

3rd story – a former holy man endangers his whole family as a sort of vengeance cult targets everyone he knows before coming for him.

The film has cool horror elements and plenty of Christmas spirit, but that alone wasn’t enough to keep me mesmerized. I was really never sure of what I was witnessing, and I was trying so hard to make sense of it all that I couldn’t enjoy it—I was even convinced at one point that the stories were actually all interweaving. Were they? I don’t know.

YULE LOG (2023)

Running only 71 minutes long, this is a Mark Polonia movie, and I’m guessing he was giving his own no budget twist to a similar concept as Adult Swim Yule Log.

Three middle-aged men go to a cabin in the woods, cut a log off a tree used to kill a witch once, and then start to experience terror at the cabin as tree branches encroach on it, complete with a sloppy attempt at Evil Dead camera POV.

But there’s more to it than that—however, not a killer Yule log. The witch is lurking in the woods, and she’s pretty cool in a haunted attraction witch costume sort of way. The only thing that spoils the battle to the death with her at the end is the appearance of a demon that looks like a CGI Ghidorah, the three-headed monster.

If you bother to watch this one, keep an ear out for an in-movie radio plug for another Polonia Christmas movie, Sister Krampus.

WEREWOLF SANTA (2023)

This is a 71-minute long movie with a campy concept and dry British humor, but going into it, you have to accept that there’s no budget, so the werewolf Santa is just a guy in a Santa suit and a cheap werewolf mask. Even so, I found it to be entertaining.

The film begins with Joe Bob Briggs in comic book form narrating the entire “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” poem, which is totally unnecessary beyond landing his name on the film.

We then meet Lucy, who has an online monster hunting show. When she and her cameraman are visiting her family for Christmas, they go out into the park to hunt for werewolves and end up seeing Santa get attacked by one.

Santa goes all lycanthrope, and now it’s up to Lucy and her family to save Christmas by killing him.

As silly as it is, there’s holiday atmosphere, humor, and even some good suspense, most notably in a haunted attraction they stumble into (on Christmas Eve?). There’s even a good twist at the end.

SANTA ISN’T REAL (2023)

Running 75 minutes long, this is another one of the better flicks in this year’s choices, so I’m glad I finished off with it. It has a lot going for it. It’s sleek and beautifully shot, there’s loads of Christmas atmosphere, the setup is really intriguing and tense, and there is some good gore (eventually).

The opener has a young woman alone on Christmas when someone in a Santa suit and mask comes down the chimney and attacks her. She’s in a coma for a year, and it was believed she attempted suicide.

Once she’s awake and back in business, she decides to go to a cabin in the woods with her boyfriend and her two best girlfriends. There she tells them what really happened to her…and then strange things begin to occur in the cabin.

The first part of the film totally sucks you in, but the turning point causes two problems—it basically makes it easy to guess who the killer is, and it also slows the pace drastically. There’s even a plot point about religion, God, and faith that kind of killed it for me. Discussions about God in a Christmas horror movie? Sinful.

The other thing to note is that with only four characters, there is barely a body count, and the killing only starts in the last fifteen minutes.

It almost seems like the filmmakers were concerned about that fact, because there’s a totally random scene after the credits that bears no connection to the rest of the film and has a completely different, cheesy tone. And in the end, I still have no idea if Santa was real or not.

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Stream and slash

Posted on December 15, 2023 by Daniel

I was due for a good fix of simple slashers, but with the three recent ones I watched, only one satisfied—and it even lands on the does the gay guy die? page.

CRUEL SUMMER (2021)

I’ve been a fan of Scream Team Releasing movies because they usually capture the spirit of 80s slashers, but lately it feels like they’re just distributing any indie release that is 80s related and has a synth score.

There were a few immediate bad signs for this movie. First, after a hit-and-run, a dude just sits in his car laughing for way too long before the opening credits role. Next, we meet girls in shorts talking about school being over, but in this movie called Cruel Summer, the sky is gray, there are no flowers anywhere, grass is brown…it looks like it is early spring at most.

A group of amateur actors–I mean—friends heads off to a cabin in the woods for an 80s slasher murder mystery weekend.

There’s a nice old groundskeeper.

There’s a neighbor that comes complaining about the noise.

And there’s a guy without a mask knocking off random people that are walking around in the dark at night. Once we see him, it seems kind of pointless, but he does eventually don a mask.

There’s nothing scary here, but at least there’s an effort to deliver some bloody kills. It’s mostly just messy chaos, and the kids in the cabin eventually uncover a killer backstory—a long-winded, complicated one with too many layers. There are so many indie slashers out there, so I don’t really see the point on settling on this one. The highlight for me was this girl, who totally sold her kill.

CRUEL SUMMER PART II (2022)

Yes, I went back for more. The upside to the sequel is that the film quality looks more cinematic. Downside is that the rest of it is just as messy as the first film.

Although it takes a while, the survivors from the previous film decide to participate in a theater production of their experience as trauma therapy. They also determine the killer is probably still out there.

We get more people being murdered by the masked killer with plenty of references to popular slasher movies—a clear reminder that these types of low budget slashers are more often made by fans mimicking their favorite horror movies than the product of creative filmmakers.

I was impressed that a character dropped a Lords of Acid reference, I liked that a victim blinded in the previous film is targeted in the eyes again by the killer (mean!), and there are once again several killer related twists, but I saw the most “shocking” one coming from the beginning.

THAT’S A WRAP (2023)

The director of the Blood Feast remake and Blind saves my slasher triple feature selection with a film that has the more mature styling of adult-oriented Euro slashers of the 80s, complete with classic setup shots and incessant neon lighting. Awesome.

Perhaps running a little long, the film basically vacillates between great kills and heavy-handed dialogue. Sure it gives us plenty of character development and a bevy of suspects, but it’s not all that necessary in a hack n slash flick. Even the killer’s monologue at the end drags and just sucks the life out of the final scene. However, it did give me Scream 4 final dialogue flashbacks.

Having said that, not only does the film deliver brutal death scenes, it also has hints of underlying dark humor and meta references hardcore horror fans will appreciate.


This shot alone is reason enough for me to add it to my collection if it’s released on physical media.

The premise is simple—cast and crew at a wrap party for a horror film begin getting stalked and slasher by a killer in a red leather coat and a blonde wig. The look totally gives off gender-bending killer vibes, and I’m pretty sure that’s reflected in what appear to be homages and nods to films like Psycho, Dressed to Kill, and Sleepaway Camp (beware that hot curling iron!).

Best of all, there’s a gay subplot that involves one of the best exchanges of dialogue in the bunch, as well as a gay kiss and a blow job. Yay!

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Getting into the 2023 Christmas spirit

Posted on December 4, 2023 by Daniel

It’s a trio of holiday horror flicks that have already hit the streaming services for this seaosn, and I’ll be adding them all to the holiday horror pageholiday horror page, so let’s get right into them.

IT’S A WONDERFUL KNIFE (2023)

The director of Tragedy Girls and Good Boy tackles the trendy subgenre of time travel slashers framed as a play on It’s a Wonderful Life. This festive flick delivers Christmas atmosphere and violent kills by a cool killer all in white, plus it’s all wrapped up in a charming lesbian love story.

Justin Long plays the greedy mogul trying to basically take over an entire little town. Joel McHale plays a fellow real estate agent, and he has a daughter (the main girl), and a gay son (who scores a gay kiss, landing this one on the does the gay guy die? pagedoes the gay guy die? page).

A highlight of the film is Katharine Isabelle in a very different role as the cool lesbian aunt, and her girlfriend is the psycho girl from Influencer.

Within the first fifteen minutes of the film there are multiple kills, mostly at a Christmas party, and our main girl saves the day. But a year later she is still suffering from PTSD and wishes she was never born.

Bring on the It’s a Wonderful Life angle. Our main girl ends up in an alternate version of her town a year later, when she didn’t exist to stop the killer. The murders have continued, and now it’s up to her to unmask the killer and figure out how to get back to her original reality.

Things get a little wonky in the final act—it almost feels like a new concept is introduced at the last second, but overall it’s a fun ride with a lot of heart…and a lot of kills. Yay!

THE MEAN ONE (2022)

This film barely started and I knew it was an instant buy on Blu-ray for me. A gory slasher with violent kills, loads of Christmas spirit, and humor, it so perfectly pays homage to How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

The narrator speaks in rhyme, occasionally incorporating lines from the source material, and the film has plenty of Grinch references imbedded in both dialogue and the surroundings.

When our main girl Cindy was a child, she witnessed a horrorific murder on Christmas Eve. 20 years later she’s returning home with her dad to sell the house in Newville, a town that has completely stopped celebrating the season.

Cindy has a reputation for having claimed a green monster killed her mother, and even spent time in a mental institution. It’s no surprise that as soon as she returns home, people start dying and she begins claiming the green monster has returned.

And he has. The dude who plays Terrifier plays The Mean One with a perfect balance of sinister and silly.

He shines most during a major massacre at a bar.

And of course there’s the final fight to the death, which delivers a horror twist on the conclusion to the original classic Grinch story. This is an instant annual watch for me.

BLACK SANTA (2023)

This indie flick is touted as a horror movie on IMDb because it involves a guy in a Santa suit keeping all the people who made his childhood miserable tied to chairs with an array of torture weapons on a tray nearby, but the first major kill doesn’t happen until 75 minutes into this 83-minute movie.

More a commentary on the struggles of Black men in society, this is basically a no budget portrait of a Black kid who had it hard as a child and has finally snapped as a result. He lost his father, was abandoned by his druggy mother, was bullied, went into the foster system, saw his brother die at the hands of a doctor…all of which is revealed in endless flashbacks.

The scenes with the tied up victims are all the same, with Black Santa threatening to kill them violently and them all begging for their lives.

Honestly, the highlight for me was when our hunky killer gets shirtless at around the 23-minute mark.

I’m glad we have him to look at for 83 minutes, because there’s just not enough substance here to sink your teeth into, and not enough killing to satisfy your holiday horror itch.

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