Crazy cat people, a psycho couple, and a killer board game

Posted on March 30, 2026 by Daniel

This trio of flicks offers Halloween horror, gays against psycho straights, and yet another board game of death. Let’s see if they kept me entertained.

DON’T LET THE CAT OUT (2025)



This one takes place on Halloween night, and the opener has a dude arriving for a house-sitting job in a scene so perfectly Halloween that it earns a spot on the holiday horror page.

A couple is going out for the evening, and they leave our main, cute guy with a list of instructions for taking care of the cat. There’s really not much in the way of signs that something is off at this house, and in fact, the entire movie somehow fails to deliver any sense of urgency or suspense, despite a lot of crazy stuff eventually happening.

Without any build-up, a dude in a cat mask appears suddenly, and our main guy is immediately thrust into a chase scene, which is perhaps the best scene in the movie.

He’s caught, brought back to the house, and tied up like a BDSM bitch.

It turns out he is going to be used for a ritual involving a cat, so his goal is to escape captivity. There are plenty of “action” sequences and psychotic cat situations, but for me they just didn’t hit the mark enough to make this one a thrill ride, despite the weirdness of the cat storyline and what it entails.

GATLOPP (2022)

 

This is a playful and quirky take on the killer board game movie subgenre. Four friends gather together to hang out at the house of one of the guys, who is about to sell it after a messy divorce.

They reminisce about their pasts together in flashbacks, and then they decide to play a board game. The cards ask questions that begin to get very specific and personal as the friends continue to play. Like, these cards know details about each of them that they don’t want revealed.

If they lie in their responses, inexplicable and weird things happen. The board game starts moving on its own. The cards talk back to them. When they say things, those things come true. Like literally, people they mention will magically appear in the room with them.

As crazy as it becomes, it’s all handled with humor, and the comedic timing and delivery of the cast make it quite entertaining for a while. They even get themselves into an insane jazzercise sequence once they learn that they have to play the game all the way through or they will die.

There isn’t any hardcore horror here, and much of it is about the psychological trauma each character is put through. After a while, I actually began losing interest in the plot, in part because it got a bit convoluted and silly by the final act.

HANDS OF HELL (2023)



This one is straightforward and cliché, but the gore and brutality are amplified noticeably in the final act, which definitely tickled my terror bone.

The first scene sets the tone. A murderous straight couple shows up at an isolated motel and kills off the couple that owns it. The actors playing the crazy couple are really perfect in their roles, which benefits the basic premise.

Next, we meet several couples heading to that very motel, which has now been secretly taken over by the crazies. Two of the couples are straight, and the other is gay and comprised of a Black dude and a Spanish dude.

Guess who the first victim is. Not only is it predictable, but the gay couple is not a happy one. They are arguing with each other from the very first moment they appear on screen until, well, you know. You never once see them show any affection for each other. Either way, their presence lands this one on the does the gay guy die? page.

There are a few scenes involving two detectives discussing previous murders by the crazy couple, but none of it is really necessary, and neither are the detectives, who merely show up at the end of the movie after all the killing is said and done. There’s also a big, intellectually disabled dude roaming around near the motel playing with a jack-in-the-box, but he’s also irrelevant to the plot and doesn’t add any fear factor since we know who the actual killers are. He doesn’t even get a redeeming hero moment to show that not all inbreeds are evil.

The fun doesn’t truly begin until the crazy female partner seduces one of the straight guy guests. And it is fun. This guy doesn’t show straight guys in a good light either. First, he easily decides he’s going to cheat on his girl with a stranger. Second, this strange bitch bites him immediately, drawing blood, and he continues to lust after her. And third, when she tells him to turn around, he says he’s not into “that” yet proceeds to immediately assume the position…and gets impaled through the ass. Awesome.

For a while, it appears that the Spanish gay dude might be one of the final survivors, and he even fights bravely against the crazy male partner, but in the end, after he’s called a gay slur, it’s only straights that live. However, the chase and fight scenes are definitely the grisliest parts of the movie, so at least there’s some good pay-off.

And in one of my favorite moments, the female baddie puts intercepts one of my biggest horror movie pet peeves—when she’s on top of one of her victims on the ground and the victim reaches for a nearby weapon to fight back, the baddie sees the move (like anyone hovering over you actually would) and puts a stop to it.

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Be Afraid when He Kills at Night at The Inn

Posted on March 27, 2026 by Daniel

Or should you be afraid? It’s a trio of psycho killer flicks—at a motel, at a cabin in the woods, and on the road, and two of them take place on holidays. But are they scary? Let’s find out.

THE INN (2025)



This 65-minute, indie slasher goes harder than most modern slashers in terms of brutal kills, and they were so satisfying that the hollow plot didn’t even matter to me. It also effectively captures the grindhouse filter look. However, these days that look doesn’t come across as 70s/80s horror as much as it does like the days when 00s horror was trying to look like 70s/80s horror.

This is how you start a movie. Without wasting any time, things kick off with two girls having a creepy close encounter with a dude on a dark road at night. They arrive at a motel for a party, and a fricking masked killer shows up and just starts mutilating the fuck out of everyone. The practical effects in this flick kick ass.

After the initial massacre, the film takes its time setting up a typical slasher. Turns out the killer is known for hitting up motels. Therefore, we meet a bunch of characters at another motel for the next round of kills.

I wasn’t really vested in the characters introduce or the police investigating the previous case, because none of it is developed enough in the short runtime to add much weight to the masked killer aspect. I just sat back and enjoyed the pacing taking its time this go around to deliver more evenly spaced kills as the killer tears a new bunch of characters apart.

The silly tag scene after the credits doesn’t quite fit the tone of the rest of the movie, but it does promise a sequel.

AFRAID? (Aka: What Are You Afraid Of?) (2025)



This is an odd little indie horror flick. There’s a lot going on yet not much going on. It takes place at Halloween time, yet when the main cast goes away for the weekend, the holiday is totally forgotten, so it doesn’t satisfy the criteria for a Halloween-themed horror movie. And the ending left me scratching my head.

First, we meet a white trash young woman and her white trash family. There is some violence and abuse, then she simply goes to school the next, where she has strictly all Black friends. They decide to go away for the weekend to a cabin in the woods…meaning she leaves her little sister alone with her abusive father. Weird.

There’s plenty of stuff going on to fill a literal hour before the first kill. The guys pick up liquor for the weekend. Once on the road, the group gets stopped by a white cop, and one of the Black guys has a daydream sequence imagining how this encounter could go. They then have an actual encounter with racists at a convenience store. Following that, they get a flat. A weird dude who looks like he’s wearing clown makeup appears out of nowhere and helps them change it.

They get to the cabin, and after a while, the lights go out and the group starts getting scared. The creepy clownish dude from the road shows up momentarily but there’s no clear point to his appearances. The group goes swimming in a lake the next day. They have individual conversations about their futures and their relationships.

Someone finally gets killed at the 1-hour mark. There are suddenly dogs outside. The friends are trapped inside. It’s all kind of chaotic, it doesn’t quite find a typical slasher groove, plus you can’t really see the kills because everything is filmed very dark.

Eventually the action moves to the lair of a dude wearing a welding mask. There’s not much in the way of a final battle with him, but the white girl does something so incredibly unexpected that it adds a whole new dimension to the movie…just as it’s about to end.

Nothing is explained. The killer isn’t revealed. There’s a final scene that reminds us that it’s Halloween time and also seems to imply that the film is trying to reveal something to the audience, but I had no way of substantiating my guesses, so in the end, I don’t know what any of it meant.

HE KILLS AT NIGHT (2025)



For a movie that is mostly about two people stuck in a car together, this film manages to feel totally disjointed. It also manages to deliver a lot of Christmas spirit, believe it or not, so it earns a spot on the holiday horror page.

There are reports of a killer on the loose. It’s Christmas Eve. A woman dressed in festive clothes stops on a dark, snowy road to take a piss…and gets murdered.

Then that same killer hops into the car of another woman and demands that she help him get away.

There’s a lot of talking, they listen to Christmas music on the radio, they try to steal another car, she tries to get away a few times, and seemingly random, unrelated scenes are injected into the movie, including one that takes place on Halloween.

In the end, the movie tries to tie all those intrusive scenes together with a twist, but I honestly didn’t get it.

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Kids in cabins, men in leather, zombies, crazies, and more

Posted on March 24, 2026 by Daniel

I can’t fully call this a foursome of horror comedies, because the comedic content isn’t consistent, but they are all quirky enough to work as a movie marathon.

ANKLE BITERS (aka: Cherrypicker) (2020)



Not sure why this film about four little bad seed girls was originally called Cherrypicker, but I much prefer the Ankle Biters title.

This is an odd film with black humor, sexual content, some gore, and four young sisters (played by actual sisters) that are simply evil little bitches who decide they want to kill their soon-to-be stepfather.

In his plan to propose to their mother, the main guy takes the family to a cabin by a lake for a weekend getaway. He is totally oblivious to how much the girls hate him, despite them constantly scowling at him. As a result, there’s absolutely no tension for a majority of the film.

The girls aren’t just indiscriminate killers either. They just want the main guy dead. They pull one stunt involving spider eggs that gets a freaky pay-off later in the movie, but this isn’t one of those films in which humor is derived from them constantly trying to kill him but just missing every time. They seriously don’t intensely target him until the final act.

There is one unfortunate causality along the way, and it’s a disturbing scene since it involves children, but a majority of the film has the main guy hanging out shirtless in his Speedo (not complaining), without any real sign of the girls slowly escalating their attacks on him.

The final act does deliver a few twists, and the inevitable battle between the main guy and the four little girls is a lot of fun, but there’s just not much meat in the middle of this movie.

DON’T GET EATEN (2023)

I’m shocked at how much fun I had with this one. I anticipated a silly, family gateway “scary movie” based on its premise. In essence, that’s exactly what it is, and I’m still a sucker for those types of films anyway, but it also delivers some unexpected surprises in the final act that really enhanced my enjoyment.

The plot is simple. This fun and cute dad (with great thighs) and his three young daughters make zombie survival videos for his online channel. His obsession with creating content, however, is really testing his wife’s patience.

A therapist suggests they take a family trip to a cabin in the woods. No cameras, no social media, no making videos.

Easier said than done for dad, especially when he has an encounter with an actual zombie outside while the rest of the family is inside on their very first night at the cabin. He tries to keep it a secret at first (while recording with a camera he naturally snuck up there), but eventually the number of zombies outside grows.

Before long, the whole family has to join together and put dad’s survival tips to work in fending off zombies. This is where the family fun part really kicks in, including using big, air bubble balls to keep the onslaught of zombies at a distance. This also means there’s no contact, no flesh-eating, and no zombie mutilating. This is gore-free horror.

Even so, I was unprepared for the turn the film takes in the final act. It is quite clever and breathes new life into the movie, providing a refreshing plot trajectory.

A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO SNUFF (2016)



This is mostly my kind of fun, but it doesn’t steadily deliver the level of humor I expected based on the title, and it becomes repetitive, with little forward momentum at times. It also balances a very queer vibe with a misogynistic message and throws in a hint of a political statement if you pay attention to the décor on the walls of the home of the two main characters.

We meet two cute brothers—one who spends most of the movie in his tighty-whities (yay!). They are broke and need to make money fast. They are also totally oblivious to how gay their landlord is, but viewers aren’t, so this one lands on the does the gay guy die? page.

The landlord makes them aware of a filmmaking contest with a big monetary prize. So…they decide to make a fake, found footage snuff film. This means an immediate comedy sequence of them auditioning actresses. It’s one of the most common tropes in horror comedies about hacks making a movie, so it really does nothing for me.

During the casting call, the brothers find the perfect girl and then decide they can make the movie even more realistic by actually kidnapping her so she doesn’t know she’s in the movie.

This leaves them with mounting problems as they try to figure out what they can do to her once they have her strapped down in an old warehouse. The landlord, who supplied them with the location to shoot their movie, warned them that there’s a serial killer on the loose in the area who’s cutting off the penises of his victims. You would think that could have a huge impact on the events that unfold, but it doesn’t really come up until late in the movie.

Instead, the focus is on the main girl being a strong woman who isn’t scared of her captors (they’re wearing a gimp mask and an Obama mask). Their attempts to terrorize her begin to wear thin after a while, and there are only 30 minutes left when the main girl at last turns the tables on them.

This is the highlight of the movie, with the return of the landlord, penis humor, the promise of dick sucking, one of the brothers in leather, and the main girl going batshit crazy. She’s awesome. As fun as this final act is, it just feels like the whole movie needed a little bit more excitement…and humor…and suspense.

SLEEP. WALK. KILL. (2022)



While this is listed as a horror comedy, the humor is very dry, very dark, and subtly imbedded in a sinister plot.

The opening grabs you right away. There’s a man in leather fetish gear, a napping woman, a knife, and a lot of blood.

Immediately after that, we’re introduced to the street on which the film takes place. I absolutely loved the moody vibe and atmosphere, because to me the neighborhood where the film is shot holds an incredible sense of nostalgia, as if it comes from a simpler time. There’s nothing that screams modern day.

The film itself feels like creepy horror from the 1970s, in particular, The Crazies. It begins with the neighbors hearing a weird sound outside their houses. Pretty soon, individuals start walking—and killing—in their sleep. Eek!

This film manages to be effectively eerie despite being shot in daylight. It’s more like gray light, actually, and the cloudy conditions really work to the film’s advantage.

Our main guy quickly realizes that people are becoming homicidal maniacs when they fall asleep, so the warning to everyone becomes, “Don’t fall asleep!” I see what they did there.

While there are moments that will make you chuckle, I found the film to be successfully unnerving. There are also some incredibly disturbing kill scenes, including a brilliant segment involving the connection between her mother, the fetus in her belly, and how sleep affects them both.

A group of survivors eventually gathers in the main guy’s house in hopes of staying alive (the pace slows down a bit here), but we all know nobody can stay awake forever. Shit hits the fan eventually, and the film pulls a horror subgenre switch that also gives us a clue as to what it is that’s actually causing people to go psycho in their sleep. It revitalizes the movie just when it feels like it’s beginning to lose steam. If you like the ominous feel of the type of 1970s horror that gets under your skin, I’d definitely check this one out.

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THE BIG D TIMES 3: in bed with demons

Posted on March 18, 2026 by Daniel

While none of these films might be the best that Tubi has to offer, they sure did work well together as a trilogy of the occult.

DEADLY DEALINGS (2022)



This is a very indie release, but I was drawn to it by the showy demon in the trailer, who was most definitely a highlight for me. However, my feelings towards all home-brewed indie films are the same. No matter how much energy and pride you put into creating it, you simply have to watch your own movie back and ask yourself, “If I wanted to sit down to watch a horror flick, and this was what I got, how would I honestly feel?” Better yet, ask third-party eyes to watch it and be brutally honest with you about what you might need to fix before releasing it to the public.

There are parts of this 71-minute movie I appreciated, but most of that comes at the end. With over forty minutes of mostly filler beforehand, there’s a good chance that many people won’t stick around to see the final act. In cases like this, it’s not the common low budget issues that are the problem…it’s the fact that too many filmmakers have an idea for a movie, but they simply don’t know how to structure a story or write a script. For instance, the filmmaker here co-directs, co-stars, and wrote the script. You don’t have to do it all for it to become your vision.

Whether AI or filters were used for the visual outdoor scenes, I do love the color palette chosen for them. It really captured a feeling for me, and it is on display from moment one, when our main girl is at the cemetery visiting her dead brother’s grave.

Then the film gets bogged down by poor dialogue. Her queer best friend reads her Tarot cards. They watch an occult talk show, but the audio quality on these clips is terrible, so you can barely hear what’s being said. The main girl talks to her therapist. She has dinner with her parents. She has a group therapy session. Much of this does nothing to develop a story or characters in an interesting way, and it definitely doesn’t propel the plot forward.

Finally, her queer friend suggests they use a Ouija board to contact her brother. This is where things get cheesy fun. A queertastic demon visits her bedroom in cool horror lighting and offers to bring her dead brother back in exchange for her dreams—dreams that have little impact on what’s left of the movie.

It’s like a campy horror drag show drenched in glitter and neon light as the brother returns and some odd little twists essentially shift away from the character perspective we’ve been following for the whole the film. You just have to go with it, because the final act is quite fun. I just wish the first half of the film could have met its energy, or at least ramped up to it smoothly, because it kind of feels like two different films as is.

DEMO_N (2024)



This 75-minute movie is another one of those webcam flicks in which most of the events take place on computer screens as four friends have an online reunion from the comfort of their own rooms.

This time around, one dude scores a free demo of a horror video game before he begins chatting with his friends. It’s a 2D side scroller that looks like it’s from the SNES/Sega Genesis era, and some of the most fun I had with this movie was watching the parts where he plays the game to try to save his friends.

See, for no good reason, when he plays the game the first time, he apparently unleashes a demon that then begins possessing his friends once they connect. But don’t expect to see much of them being possessed, because the movie is riddled with fast, choppy editing, scrambled video, and total blackout moments.

The ending is my favorite part. After our main guy fights a final boss in the game, suddenly the movie switches to both his POV and standard third-person view when his friends show up in demonic form and chase him around his house. Awesome. We also get one of the biggest butcher knives I’ve ever seen in a horror movie.

THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLES (2024)



IMDb doesn’t even make note of it, but it turns out this movie is a “recut” or “revised” version of a movie called Disciples that the filmmaker made in 2014. I covered it here, but I don’t remember a thing about it, so it was like watching it for the first time. However, since I couldn’t remember it, I also have no idea if this simply removes scenes, adds content, or removes some material and adds new footage, because it runs 10 minutes shorter than the original cut.

What I can say is that based on my previous post about this film, nothing has really changed in terms of it being a hot mess, and I shouldn’t have bothered to watch it a second time.

I feel like I’m repeating myself, but the cast of horror veterans is awesome: Angus Scrimm, Debbie Rochon, Tony Todd, Brinke Stevens, Linnea Quigley…

None of them helps make this a good movie. We get a chaotic plot about a variety of ghouls, humans, and Satan lovers coming together to prevent a prophecy from coming true and destroying everything. These kinds of epic concepts always seem to fall apart in a low budget environment, because there’s only so much you can do with simple sets and loads of dialogue.

There are too many characters, too many random scenes, the dialogue is dull, and there is no clear story structure. Everything that happens feels random as scenes jump all over the place right from the start.

However, a myriad of sadistic violent, bloody, and sexual scenes and visuals that use practical effects are awesome and were the one saving grace for me.

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TUBI TERROR: the creatures are coming for you!

Posted on March 16, 2026 by Daniel

This threesome has a couple of very cool monsters and one disappointing monster (although, he has a nice bod). For me, one film in particular was a total winner. Let’s find out which one.

INTO NIGHTMARES (2024)



This English language, Italian film is somber and moody with plenty of eerie atmosphere, but it’s also a fairly familiar concept. However, it tries to deliver a zinger in the end…which is also a familiar concept for horror veterans.

After the death of his daughter, an older man is sent to live in a home for seniors. The place is desolate, the head nurse is creepy, they put the man in a room with an empty bed facing his bed (eek!), and when he begins having nightmarish episodes, the in-house doctor tells him it’s just sleep paralysis.

The sequences are haunting and spooky, with a corpse-like woman lurking in the shadows in his room, the door knob jiggling, and plumes of ghostly forms floating through the room.

As creepy as it is, like most of these types of apparition flicks, it becomes repetitive since the cheap scares never lead to any actual horror. I guess that’s why a big spider inexplicably appears on the man’s bedroom ceiling at one point during one of his episodes. It makes no sense in the context of the film, but it definitely introduces something different for a moment.

The man begins to believe the nurse is keeping someone or something locked away. This sets the film up for something really freaky and substantial coming out to roam the halls at night, and if this had been a pre-1990s film, there probably would have been.

Instead, the building mystery opts for more of a psychological twist. It’s a twist in terms of this movie, but it’s not all that surprising for anyone with a long history of watching horror films.

THE COVENANT (2026)



I love movies about kids going to stay with their creepy grandparents, and this one has a really dark and sinister vibe, so it’s astounding how terribly slow and uneventful it is.

The main sisters aren’t exactly angels in this instance, especially the older of the two. She intends to loot grandma and grandpa’s place because she feels like they neglected her.

As soon as they arrive, they are met by a creepy woman who is spouting crazy stuff…and it’s not even grandma. This wacko is perhaps the scariest aspect for a majority of the runtime, specifically when she ends up crawling into the bed of the younger sister… 50 minutes into the movie!

So, what happens before that? They explore some old ruins and have a dream-like encounter in a cave. Seriously, that’s the most exciting thing that happens before the cheap thrill at the 50-minute mark.

58 minutes in, the older sister seems to get attacked by something in a river, and soon after, the younger sister apparently has her first period while taking a bath, which grandma calls a sign of her purity. There’s also talk of a creature out in the wilderness. Uh-oh.

In the final act, the “creature” comes out to play…basically a feral man with long claw fingers. There’s a creepy doll room, and the older sister whips out a chainsaw, but this is really a low-key horror flick that didn’t quite hold my interest.

THE WELL (2023)



This is like a classic gothic horror flick with fricking gruesome, brutal, hard-to-watch kill scenes, and it also reminded me of some of my favorite, unsettling survival horror video games of the last three decades, in particular, Haunting Ground.

Actress Lauren LaVera of the Terrifier movies has the perfect look for the lead role. She plays an art restorer who comes to Italy to repair a large painting in an old mansion.

The woman hosting her has that old school, welcoming yet menacing presence, she has a creepy young daughter, the restorer begins to have nightmarish dreams as she uncovers hellish looking figures in the painting…

Oh. And there’s a big bald goon in a lair somewhere keeping people imprisoned, killing them one by one, and then tossing them down a well in the middle of the room to feed them to something.

I warn you, these kills are gruesome. It’s the kind of practical effects gore that makes you squirm. There’s a lot of mutilating before the goon even throws victims down the well, and they are not even dead yet when he does. And they scream the whole time they are being tortured. It’s hard to watch and listen to all at once. Yikes!

The whole supernatural premise is highly entertaining as well, especially if you’re into traditional occult themes, and the overall atmosphere is perfect.

The final act doesn’t let up, and we do get to see what’s in the well, so the movie never falters. I seriously ordered it on 4K disc as soon as I was done streaming it.

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Horror, humor, retro fun, and practical effects

Posted on March 11, 2026 by Daniel

This was quite an enjoyable triple feature for me, and—BONUS!—each film pulled off the fun in 85 minutes or less.

THE LAST VIDEO STORE (2023)

 

This 78-minute horror comedy is a love letter to the bygone era of video stores and those that still lament the loss. More specifically, those of us who used to work at a video store. It is a total 80s nostalgia trip in style, substance, script, and score, with a touch of heart and a totally quirky, 80s sci-fi/horror vibe.

We meet the owner of one of the last video stores. In comes a lone customer returning old video tapes. Her facial expressions throughout the movie are one of its humor highlights.

The owner tries to get her to appreciate the joy of videos by popping in one of the movies she returned. Turns out it’s a cursed video tape, and it begins unleashing the horrors contained on the tape into the store, beginning with an alien creature.

The owner and customer discover they are trapped in the store—first with the alien creature and then with a backwoods killer—and must take these threats on to stay alive.

The horrors are presented with practical effects, and eventually our main characters extract a hunky b-movie hero from the video to help them survive. He’s delicious. Delic-ass, even.

There’s also a cool final boss situation, and I actually wish the movie had been a little longer and featured at least one more throwback horror monster.

Even so, it’s straight up retro fun from start to finish, and the conclusion is a nod to those who just can’t let go of the past and their longing for the video rental days.

MARK OF THE WEREWOLF (2024)



Quirky, self-aware acting and editing give this one the perfect B-movie feel, and the practical effects, colorful horror lighting, and hokey hairy werewolf costume make it 80s throwback bliss. Add an array of subplots, and it’s messy, camptastic fun from beginning to end.

Our main girl is a model who travels with a team to a cabin in the woods for a photo shoot. Turns out this cabin is built on ground that is sacred to a cult. So, the leader of the cult enlists a witch to conjure a werewolf to take care of the intruders.

No time is wasted in introducing the werewolf, which looks great drenched in red and blue light and haloed by mist. He mutilates people indiscriminately, with plenty of satisfying blood, gore, and fake body parts.

There’s also sex and nudity as the group at the cabin parties and hooks up before getting slaughtered. Awesome.

More characters are introduced to up the body count, which is where the movie begins to falter. A large group suddenly appears after a scene change, and there’s absolutely no clarification of who they are or why they are there.

The final fight between the main girl, her new man (who has a nice axe), and the werewolf and witch is funny, but instead of tying up the plot, the movie goes off the rails a bit, leading to a confusing conclusion that seemed to be trying too hard to be different Or perhaps we’ll get a sequel?

WITNESS INFECTION (2020)



It’s a mobzomcom, and it has an adorable leading man, some playful humor, and nasty, skin-stretching carnage created with practical effects.

The opening is rather bizarre. Two totally different types of guys are hunting together when a lone zombie situation occurs.

We then meet our main cutie. His dad is a mobster, and to keep the peace, he demands his son marry the daughter of another mob family.

Zombies get in the way of that. It can be deduced that eating a certain food is causing people to turn into zombies…after they suffer from a lot of gas. The reason for the infection is definitely underdeveloped, for even when it’s explained how the infection originated near the end of the film, it’s not really explained how the infection was born or why it turned people into zombies, so you just have to go with it.

This isn’t a movie with nonstop laughs, but the cast is totally charismatic, and the actors know their comic timing and delivery, which makes all the difference. The zombie scenes are fantastic, but there’s a lull in the middle of the movie before the infected action really kicks in, which does slow down the pace for a while, but it’s worth the wait.

The plot is basic. Members of each family begin turning into zombies with nasty pustules on their faces, and it’s up to the uninfected to stay alive. Our main trio of survivors eventually joins forces with a Cleopatra Jones type who drops plenty of meta lines.

Like I said, the events that unfold are nothing new. They battle zombies at the home of one mob family before doing the same at the home of the other mob family. Despite the blood, guts, and some toilet humor, this one really doesn’t push boundaries, so it’s an easy watch that feels more like horror comedy lite.

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Varying strains of zombie outbreaks and some tasty treats

Posted on March 9, 2026 by Daniel

Sure, you’ve seen it all before, but if you love zombies and man meat, you can never get enough. But…are these three enough? Let’s find out.

DECADE OF THE DEAD (2023)

This one has a really strong start. It’s ten years after an outbreak. Horror veteran Sean Patrick Thomas and his tiny team of survivors is boating to an island when a small boat of men tries to overtake them. We immediately see that the fight scenes are going to be a highlight.

On the island, the main group teams up with another group of survivors to fend off a wave of running zombies. There are some great, brief but bloody zombie battle moments in this sequence. Awesome.

But don’t get your hopes up. Much like The Walking Dead, this movie isn’t too concerned with the zombies. It’s all about the human-on-human violence.

Surprise, surprise. There’s a death-worshipping cult that wants to take over the world, and it turns out one of our main girls has a connection to someone from that cult.

This becomes more of a religious war story. Yawn. I guess I’m burnt out on zombie flicks with character development and a deeper concept, because I spent the whole movie just waiting for more zombie action, which didn’t come until the last fifteen minutes.

TRANSIT 17 (2019)



I am not going to lie. I knew ahead of time that this movie was bashed on IMDb for having very few zombies. I watched the trailer, and then the hubby and I watched the movie for a very shallow reason; it was an action movie with a muscle hunk. That’s right. We regularly devour pointless action movies if there’s a muscle hunk.

Written and directed by one of its stars, Transit 17 feels like it just meanders in between gun battles and melee fight sequences. There’s been an outbreak. There’s a group that thinks all those that have been infected need to be killed. A resistance group believes they can find a cure and save the infected.

There’s even a dude who uses Star Wars level technology to communicate.

As the resistance sets out on vaguely defined missions, they have an early zombie encounter, and it’s fricking awesome. Had there been more of them, I would have thoroughly enjoyed the movie, but it’s literally the only time there are any zombies.

We also get way too little of the muscle hunk. I thought he was going to be the star based on the trailer, but that isn’t the case.

52 minutes in, we learn that one girl was bit but not affected, and the optimistic group thinks she could be the key to a cure. If protecting her were the focus of the film, it would have been…well…focused. But it’s just not.

ZOMBIECON VOLUME 1 (2025)



This is one of those films that has so many strong individual elements to it, but as a whole it just doesn’t come together, which is made even more glaringly obvious due to a runtime of nearly 2 hours. In that time, the tone shifts (feels like a quirky comedy at times, but becomes quite intense at others), the plot refuses to focus, scenes go on too long, and each segment feels like a standalone sequence more than part of a greater whole aimed at developing a story arc.

We first meet two rival groups of cosplayers. I’m thrilled to say that each one has a hot shirtless guy. landing this movie on the stud stalking page. Each group does a weird performance at the convention, and the main group—you know, the good guys—wins a trophy.

On their way home, they run into a homeless dude in an alley, and he gets one of the girls to touch some sort of magical stone.

It’s all very intriguing so far, but despite the title of the film, this is not a movie about a zombie outbreak at a convention. Instead, the main group goes home, the girl who touched the stone apparently conjures up a zombie outbreak accidentally, and then a zombie shows up at their door.

This begins one of the major problems with the film. While the zombie fights are great, with tight makeup effects, intense action, and some gore, in every case, the group of friends screams throughout the entire fight. And none of these fights is short. It’s so irritating that it reminded me of how the main dude in Deadstream virtually ruins a great movie by screaming the whole time.

Anyway, the group then sits around just talking and trying to figure out how they’re going to survive the zombie apocalypse. Eventually they realize they have to go rescue the mom of the leader of their group. This is 57 minutes into the movie.

More zombie encounter sequences unfold as they make their way to the mom’s house. When they finally arrive, they have to take on some vengeful zombies. It’s another case of a lot of nothing going on in terms of moving any kind of plot forward. The film ends abruptly, and because it is labeled “volume 1” in the title, we know a sequel is the plan. I was definitely drawn to the characters and the performances of the likable cast, so I’ll definitely be looking out for it. I need to know how this story ends.

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Point a camera, end up out in the woods

Posted on March 5, 2026 by Daniel

If found footage is your comfort horror, then this trio of derivative flicks should do the trick. The highlight for me is that all three run between 70 and 75 minutes long.

THE LAST CABIN (2025)



This one is only 70 minutes long, and it combines The Strangers with found footage, so there are some cheap, totally cliché thrills to be had here.

The opener shows a trio—man, woman, and camera person—traipsing through the woods with a flashlight at night. They make the mistake of approaching someone in a hoodie whose back is to them. Like…have they never seen a found footage film? It doesn’t end well for them, which makes me sad, since I wanted the hot daddy to be the star.

Next…another man, woman, and camera person are traipsing through the woods at night with flashlights. Sigh. They are scouting for a shooting location for a film. They find it in an awesome “cabin” that looks bigger than my house. The interior is amazing, except for all the windows and glass doors with nothing covering them. Eek!

The group convinces the guy who lives there to let them film inside. Before leaving, he warns them to beware of the backwoods folk in the woods. Uh-oh.

There are some pretty creepy moments and some jump scares as the usual home invasion routine is unleashed, with multiple masked figures with weapons surrounding the cabin. Thankfully, it first hits—hard—when the “producer” shows up. He is such an obnoxious character and gets exactly what he deserves.

There’s a discovery of dolls in the woods (because dolls are scary), the lights go out, and running and screaming ensue. Yet the main group takes a movie-viewing break in the middle of being terrorized. They find home-made DVDs that show them that something very “sinister” happened to other people at the cabin in the past, and it’s one of a few gruesome moments in the movie.

Found footage predictability just keeps coming, right down to the main girl having a confessional breakdown for the camera. The only part that stood out to me because it didn’t make much sense was when one of the masked baddies lifts the mask to reveal that they have what looks like a demon eye. I’m not sure if it was supposed to be just a backwoods inbred thing, because other than the eye, it looked like a normal person.

OUIJA CLOWN (2023)



I’ll give the two tween girls in this 75-minute movie credit for carrying the whole thing by themselves, but it’s mostly one long stretch of filler footage carrying us to the final scene.

It’s Halloween night, and the girls have the bedroom they’re hanging out in decorated for the holiday, so this one is going on the holiday horror page.

When one girl’s dad goes out for the night, he leaves her and her friend alone in their house in the middle of nowhere. Once he’s gone, they do total tween things, which is basically nothing.

They eventually decide to watch videos on how to use a spirit board. Conveniently, they have one of their own, so they use it, and then…the screen goes black.

When the video footage finally comes back, it feels like a chapter of the movie was left out, because suddenly they’re freaking out, and the camera is bouncing all over the place. In fleeting glimpses, it appears that there’s a scary clown in the room with them. It’s kind of frightening, but it just doesn’t do much of anything.

Neither do the girls. They run around the bedroom screaming for a good chunk of the movie. Eventually they decide to go out into the woods. It’s like Blair Witch Project boredom all over again as they spend eleven minutes just filming trees and the ground. They finally see the clown, run back to the house, and lock themselves in the bedroom…to use the spirit board again.

I’m not going to lie. While this movie doesn’t try to make sense (I mean, they summoned a clown with a Ouija board), the two girls deliver on some dark content in the final few minutes. This is the one moment when the whole movie finally shines as shit takes an unexpected turn.

A COLD GRAVE (2024)



Another one that runs 75 minutes long, this is perhaps the most chaotic of this trio. It’s essentially about a guy out in the woods looking for his missing sister, but the footage jumps all over the place to various, unrelated people encountering horrors in the forest, including a hot daddy (wanted him to be the lead) and his bizarre son, a group that fights in true Blair Witch boredom style over being lost in the woods, and a ghost-hunting team that whips out a Ouija board. They better beware of clown spirits…

I think each clip is supposed to be found footage the main dude is watching on his phone as he tries to piece together what became of his sister, but I’m not sure.

He spends a lot of time doing a stream of thought monologue for the camera. He also approaches way too many people from behind. He never learns his lesson, because it never goes well, yet he just keeps doing it.

And oddly, one dude he approaches is wearing almost exactly what the first dude with his back to the camera is wearing in The Last Cabin, including the exact same mask. What the hell? I had to look on IMDb. These two films are by the same director. Dude ripped off his own scene! Awesome.

The woods are supposed to be haunted, there’s a witch (that we actually see a few times, unlike The Blair Witch Project, where what you don’t see is more boring than what you could have seen), people seem to get possessed, there are various ghouls, everyone appears to be trapped in the woods in an endless loop of nighttime…this movie seriously just keeps throwing random shit into the mix with very little in the way of a plot. One thing we do get plenty of are jump scares, mostly thanks to music zingers…you know, tone-setting music in a found footage film. As chaotic as it all is, in a weird way, I kind of like the idea that this forest is so haunted that everyone who enters encounters some sort of completely unique freakiness instead of the same old threat every time.

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Time for a trio of bizarre horror comedies

Posted on March 4, 2026 by Daniel

It’s a toilet bowl slug, new millennium mischief-making mini monsters, and a house of blood-sucking sluts

SCARED SHITLESS (2024)



Despite the title and the general theme of this film (a slug creature traveling through plumbing and popping out of toilets in an apartment building), it totally spares us any gross shit humor. In fact, the title is quite apropos, because there’s no shit. It’s just pure plumbing puns, a comedic cast of characters, practical effects, and an 80s soundtrack that includes tracks by Harlequin, Doug and the Slugs, and Loverboy. Awesome.

A plumber forces his grown, germaphobic son to tag along when he goes to unclog some toilets.

Meanwhile, a dude living in the apartment building they’re heading to has created some sort of “evolutionary” critter. That’s about all the explanation we get for this thing.

The slug he created escapes, and the antics begin. Honestly, for a movie about a toilet slug, there really isn’t much tasteless toilet humor at all. The nastiest thing that happens is a dude on the toilet gets his genitals chomped off as they are dangling inside the bowl. Toilet slug likes tea bags.

There’s slug POV, a kinky, geriatric couple, slug eggs, a shower scene, and plenty of chemistry between the father and son as they attempt to take on the slug, which keeps getting bigger and bigger as we head for the final battle. It’s just an old school comedy horror fun fest.

FRANKIE FREAKO (2024)



Remember the Astron-6 guys? Well, this one comes from them, so you’ll want to check it out if you miss their brand of filmmaking. However, I’ll say right up front that as much as I love them, this one is just a little too goofy for my tastes.

Although it takes place at Christmas time and even ends with a still of a Christmas postcard and a Christmas carol, this is generally not a holiday themed horror flick. It focuses on a dude who is being pressured to do better at the office and is not so impressive to his girlfriend in the bedroom lately either.

He sees a late-night commercial for one of those party hotlines, with a goblin as the advertising mascot, and he can’t get it out of his head. So, he eventually caves, calls…and ends up with three munchies in his house trashing the place.

This really is like the lower tier Gremlins rip-offs of the 80s, with the critters causing chaos, including trashing his house and gluing his boss to the floor in his basement. Can’t complain about seeing Astron-6 bear daddy Adam Brooks get creamed in the face with white goo…

The movie goes intro really weird territory when the main guy and the visiting “Freakos” are teleported back to the world of the Freakos. Turns out their leader, a male Freako, is hot for our main guy and wants to make him his bitch. Yeah. This turns into a sort of intergalactic gay film. Very on-brand for the Astron-6 guys.

It’s all puppet silliness until the main guy and his new ghoulie friends escape back to earth and are followed by the Freako leader, who has transformed into a hideous monster that’s like a boss out of a Resident Evil game. The Freakos pale in comparison to the great horror movie this big baddie could have been in.

Would you believe the main guy uses seduction to try to defeat the boss?

SNOW BUNNIES (2025)



63 minutes long? I was so in. That is until nothing happens for the first 32 minutes. Sigh.

The main guy in this vampire comedy deserved more time to charm us, because he and his buddies are a blast. He’s a slacker who gets kicked out of his girlfriend’s apartment and ends up at a strip club with hoochie mama cellulite asses bouncing in his face. I felt like I was watching a crunk video circa 2002, but I guess this fills the first 32 minutes nicely for the right audience.

This movie does not take place during a snowstorm, so I’m guessing the title is referencing black guys banging white chicks? The guys get invited home by a group of girls, and this is when the fun begins. At the dinner table, the girls’ dad shows up, and he isn’t looking so good.

A few minutes later a BJ for one of the guys turns into a meal for one of the girls, and the vampire camp kicks in, with the group of guys being picked off one by one as they try to escape the house. Aside from the whole second act being hard to see due to saturated blue horror lighting, it’s such a playful horror comedy scenario that is over way too fast, leaving you wanting more.

There are seriously only 20 minutes of vamp action, because the film ends abruptly with no real resolution at about the 53-minute mark, after which we get ten minutes of bloopers.

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A deadly mannequin, a bunny mask killer, and a freaky creature

Posted on March 2, 2026 by Daniel

Although their plots may falter at times, these three flicks delivered death and carnage that totally satisfied me.

TED BUNNY (2026)

I watched this one because Dee Wallace is in it, and because I thought it was going to be a basic “Bunny man” kind of slasher. I figured the title was just a play on words and didn’t realize the plot was going to stem from the actual true crimes of Ted Bundy.

And yet the few Ted Bundy kill sequences we get are the best part of the film. They are truly chilling, as is the performance by the actor playing him.

Five decades later a foursome of friends is doing a documentary on Bundy. They’ve discovered a lone survivor of his murders and go to interview her, and it’s Dee Wallace! And she’s a crazy bunny lady instead of a crazy cat lady. Awesome.

Dee recounts what happened between her and Bundy in flashbacks. Then two of the guys making the documentary begin sneaking around her house. This flick was really starting to work for me.

A big dude wearing a bunny mask sack appears, killings begin, and then…one girl gets away and calls the police. What the hell?

Dee is written out of the movie (her intriguing bunny mania goes with her), and the main girl teams up with a detective to help track down the killer, who is suddenly just out murdering random people. It turns into a generic and predictable slasher, and while it’s fun as such, it feels like a letdown after the first part seemed to establish a compelling premise that would have incorporated Dee Wallace more.

THE MANNEQUIN (2025)



This one has an early 2000s feel and a pretty interesting premise at first.

In a black and white intro, it’s the 1950s, and a female model is being sexually harassed by a pervy male photographer, who then proceeds to hack her up and use her as a model for his photo shoot after that. Yikes!

Then we meet a struggling fashion designer in contemporary times. She scores a loft apartment in an empty building at a great price. It also includes a creepy mannequin that looks so real it even has nipples.

The fashion designer’s sister ends up finding her dead and decides to move into the apartment. She butts heads with her friends, who think she’s crazy for moving there.

Yet they all decide to sleep over. They each begin waking up at night, seeing ghosts, and then falling under some sort of spell that leads them to physically harm themselves. And yet, they continue to stay there.

Inevitably, the self-harm gets gruesome, so they finally call in a dude who knows a thing or two about ghosts. This movie becomes kind of ridiculous as he proceeds to do some sort of cleansing/exorcism ritual, but that does unleash the best, most violent and gruesome part of the film, and it involves an axe. The opener and the final act are definitely the highlights for me.

MAN IN THE FIELDS (2024)

Despite running a bit too long, which causes pacing problems, this Italian-made, English language flick becomes a wild throwback to Euro horror of the 80s by the final act.

After an intriguing and ominous opener that draws you in but doesn’t have much relevance to the rest of the flick, we meet a cute guy who seems to be stuck in a rut. Yeah, there’s definitely an “I want to be stuck in his rut” joke there.

That changes when he makes a horrific discovery while walking his dog at night. Skeletal remains! Lots of them. He also finds what look like some old texts at the scene, which he takes instead of handing over to the police.

When he gets together with some friends (30 minutes into the movie), he admits what he did. He shows them the ritualistic texts, and they read them out loud.

There’s a rather trippy, surreal sequence in which the main guy is dragged out to a clearing by the “man in the fields”, after which he begins to change.

EEK! 52 minutes into the movie, he transforms into an awesome creature and goes on a murderous rampage. He begins by targeting his friends, but that eventually ends in a dark little twist that leads to a total massacre at a club. The second half of the film definitely has me leaning towards adding this one to my collection if it gets a Blu-ray release.

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