Hey, I tried. I selected a bunch of horror flicks from my watchlists, mostly comedies, hoping to find at last a few that are worthy of a holiday viewing party. Did any of them bring on the fun? Let’s find out.
BIG BAD (2016)
This werewolf flick takes a while to get going, but once it does, it’s a hoot.
We first meet a bunch of teens. They party in the woods, two of them go off alone, and then it’s implied that something attacks them.
Next, we meet a trio of students. They’re doing some sort of fundraiser with their teacher…at an old, abandoned prison. When the teacher informs them that they must stay overnight in the prison cells and leaves them, a werewolf shows up. Eek!
This is a fun, wolfman style werewolf. There’s an intense scene as the trio tries to get out of the prison, and once they do, the action is carried into the woods.
They connect with a hot daddy sheriff, there’s a suspenseful but brief chase scene, and then the trio is separated from the sheriff. They end up in a warehouse for a final battle with the werewolf, where we even get a little gore.
The characters are likable, one of the main girls steals all the comedic moments, and the overall tone is playful. It does feel like the movie could have been a little longer and delivered a few more werewolf attacks and cheap thrills, but overall, this one is quite enjoyable.
There is a classic, cheesy final frame, but then we get an unnecessary segment of news reports and interviews that is goofy and doesn’t fit with the previous humorist tone. Not to mention, the one thing it needed to do—conclude the sheriff’s side of the story—is a total throwaway moment. Hot daddy sheriff deserved better. Like, two crotch shots better.
SORORITY OF THE DAMNED (2025)
Joe Davison co-writes, co-directs, and stars in this quirky little witchcraft sorority flick, which takes a while to get going before finally hitting its stride in the final act.
Davison plays a maintenance man who works at the sorority house. Felissa Rose is the witchy house mother. While dealing with plumbing issues, Davison finds a mysterious book in the basement.
It’s just what the house mother has been looking for. She draws her girls into an occult ritual, there’s some nudity, and then the girls start spitting black bile and tearing men apart. Awesome.
This is when Joe Davison steps in and has his chance to show what a naturally comedic actor he is.
Things get wild, with an awesome “She’s a Witch!” montage song (totally going in my Halloween playlist), the girls resurrecting dead ghouls from the coffins, and a big warrior statue coming to life to help Davison battle the ghouls. It’s silly fun with some cool looking ghouls.
GOTHIC SLAYERS (2025)
Going for the “over age nerds battling demons” horror comedy vibe is definitely an art, and you really have to get it just right for it to work. This movie has so many of the necessary elements, but it just doesn’t cut it. Compared to what Sorority of the Damned delivers with a similar premise, the entertainment level is just more on target with that movie. The highlight for me with this one was the awesomely faux 80s soundtrack.
The two main dudes, who also co-wrote the script, work at a miniature golf course and play a lot of video games. There are excessive scenes establishing them as the slacker nerds they are.
They are definitely likable and charismatic, and the supporting cast is also likable. There simply isn’t enough solid comedy material or plot for them to work with. How do you write your own script for characters you’re playing and not give yourself loads of great lines? They also need to fill a 101-minute runtime, and they don’t have a lot of meat with which to do that.
The plot is simple. A cult kidnaps a friend of the main dudes and intends to use him as a vessel in which to implant a demon.
Almost the entirety of the movie has the dudes trying to figure out how they are going to stop this from happening. Instead of any monster slaying, a majority of the plot has them dodging the cult and a bunch of goth girls. I don’t know why, but even things that are supposed to be funny, that I wanted to laugh at, mostly just didn’t hit right. Pretty soon you forget you were hoping for a horror comedy.
The one unique and bizarre element here is that the dudes rely on their favorite video game to give them clues as to how to stop the demon. The concept simply isn’t integrated clearly or logically enough into the story for it to make any sense. It’s used more like a novelty, right up to the anticlimactic, final battle with the demon in the last 20 minutes, which is in part presented as a 16-bit video game instead of live action. Sigh.
THE DEMON DETECTIVE (2025)
The title is perfect for this movie, because it feels like the height of the fun, supernatural SyFy original series era. It’s straightforward, it’s a little campy, it has quirky demons, and it delivers simple “magical” battle effects.
The opener sets the tone, with a hot exorcist, played by cutie Dustyn Gulledge, cleansing a chef of a wicked, horned demon man.
Our exorcist is quite powerful, has a pretty powerful sidekick, has issues with the church, and is carrying around the weight of losing his sister to a demon. He also sees dead people.
While dealing with several other demons, including one that bursts out of the floor in a school gym, the exorcist also has to contend with an aspiring, competitive demon hunter team and a woman who is being terrorized by demons as well. We also get always welcome cameos by Vivica A. Fox and Adrienne Barbeau.
The film does run a little long, and it’s not until an hour in that the main woman finally becomes possessed by the demon that has been pursuing her. It also turns out this demon is one our cute exorcist has dealt with before—and it’s none other than horror icon Doug Jones! Yay!
The final battle is over-the-top to the point of funny, just like a SyFy original, and even features demons fighting each other. Awesome. I kind of wish this would either become a television series or get a sequel.
UNDER CONTROLL (2019)
Someone in Germany decided to make a sequel to the infamous 1990 flick Troll 2, and they even got original Troll 2 star George Hardy to reprise his role a tiny bit.
While Troll 2 is known as an unintentionally bad movie, which is what gives it its charm, this sequel is intentionally made as a bad movie, so despite perfectly capturing an 80s bad movie aesthetic, it’s kind of unbearable to watch.
Most offensive is the fact that it is comprised almost entirely of those way-too-close to the camera shots that distort everyone’s faces. On top of that, all the characters are made up to look so gaudy with the seeming intention of adding to the warped style.
After a history lesson in how the troll came to be hundreds of years ago, which is both in animated form and live action form, we are brought to the present. A construction crew accidentally digs up the troll’s resting place, and it comes out to play.
How? By possessing the body of a woman to then pursue her teen daughter’s virgin boyfriend for a sacrifice that will allow the troll to open a portal to bring its troll brothers into the human world. Either this troll is actually female, or it’s the queerest Troll ever. It even comes back to life after being exhumed by charming a dude to kiss it.
This shit is just weird. The troll (in woman form) flies around on a broom. It’s hunting for a magic book it was buried with, and it is not the only one trying to get a hold of the book.
There are too many characters, there are weird fish people, the whole thing is slapstick and silly, the bad dubbing adds to the cheesy feel, and original actor George Hardy is totally underutilized. He shouldn’t have been a cameo. He should have been one of the main protagonists. That is what the Troll 2 crowd really would have wanted.
BLOOD PAGEANT (2021)
This movie feels very early 2000s, and it could have been just as hokey and fun if it weren’t almost 2 hours long.
A girl determined to win a reality show gets some extra help from her life coach. Meanwhile, another contestant, a religious good girl, is struggling with her life decisions.
As for all the other quirky girls and characters, their introductions are as boring as this script is. There’s nothing funny here, the characters are bland, and we don’t even get a pillow fight between the girls, let alone any T&A. If a gay guy is bitching about that, you know a movie is boring.
Snoop Dogg and Stephen Baldwin have minor roles, so they’re not around long enough to really spoil anything. Besides, Snoop plays a talent show judge, and Baldwin plays a priest, so they’re sticking to doing what they know.
We also get David Chokachi, who still looks Baywatch good, as a sleazy producer, and Isaac from The Love Boat. Is there anyone who doesn’t love Isaac?
The girls do begin dying off every now and then, mostly in offscreen kills, but it’s not until 65 minutes in that something significant happens—a ghoulish woman spirit starts a reign of terror. And she’s just as cheesy as all the female ghosts from early 2000s horror. In other words, wahoo!
Unfortunately, it takes until the 90-minute mark for her to go full haunting on the remaining girls, and she seems to be having a blast doing it, which means all the fun is packed into the last 25 minutes.
THE BOULET BROTHERS’ HOLIDAY OF HORRORS (2025)
This anthology is probably your best bet for closing out the holiday season and the year. It’s only 40 minutes long, and the tales are really short, but it still lands on the complete holiday horror page.
A grindhouse filter, Christmas music, and holiday home video clips set the mood as the film’s opener, and then the camera tracks into a frighteningly festive mansion (in a nod to the Tales from the Crypt intro), where the Boulet Brothers are waiting to present four tales.
1st tale – At Christmas, a mother, stepdad, and daughter move into a house they just inherited from grandma. But you can’t keep a vengeful granny down. It looks eerie as hell as her corpse prowls around, but the dramatic choral/tribal music blaring throughout the scene kills the mood.
2nd tale – There’s no mention of Christmas, but girls in very snowy woods track down a Yeti-like creature they think took their friend. This story gets right to the point…and kills…and has a total anthology tale twist.
3rd tale – It’s mentioned that it’s New Year’s Eve when Rent and Death Proof star Tracie Thoms enters the home of her recently deceased father and is terrorized by creepy messages on his answering machine.
4th tale – I assume this is a stop motion tale, and I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I think it steals the show. It’s both a funny and disturbing look at a major danger Santa must face at every single house he visits on Christmas Eve. If you want your Christmas special fucked up, this is the one to watch. I mean, Santa is wearing Christmas tassel pasties. It doesn’t get much better than that.
While there are run and sneak buttons, there isn’t a quick turn option, which is a little frustrating. Also, you use the same button to finish enemies off as you do to open doors, so if you’re standing near a door when you go to finish an enemy, half the time you’ll end up opening the door and automatically go through it instead. And the fixed camera angles and perspectives suffer the same issue as original Resident Evil games; walk into a room and the camera doesn’t allow you to see enemies that are in front of you until you walk close enough to them to change the camera angle, leaving you vulnerable to attacks. Argh!
The modern day story that ties the chapters together has a young woman in a mansion trying to uncover the truth about what happened to her father. Each time she finds a page from a magic book, we head into a new chapter. After each chapter, we temporarily return to her so she can figure out how to trigger the next chapter by searching the house, which gets scarier as the game progresses. Since you play a different character in each chapter, no inventory carries over. The magic book and spells you build up, however, do get handed off from one chapter to the other. Yay! The only catch is that it is not immediate; you have to walk through the right door to temporarily be transported to the realm where the magic book is stored to grab it for the current chapter.
This level introduces a new little bugger called a trapper. You can sneak past them, but if they catch you, you get sent to this sort of arena of platforms with different color portals and have to color match your teleporting way back to the platform with the portal that returns you to the game. However, in this dimension you can also jump from one platform to the other to refill health, sanity, and magic, so sometimes you’re going to want to run into trappers to travel here.
In this chapter, you also get little weapons you can toss at those annoying trappers to kill them from afar before they can teleport you away to the other dimension, so that’s a bonus.
Chapter 6
You also start to learn, by trial and error, about the levels of magic, which are represented by different colors. When you encounter magic barriers, you have to use whatever color magic is more powerful than that barrier color to take it down. I had a fleeting moment of clarity when I thought I was beginning to understand how to use the magic system, but I still hate it.
So after you complete all the minimal tasks and fight the usual enemies, there’s that boss at the end. Turns out the boss is fricking different depending on which color rune you chose at the beginning of the game. I don’t remember the boss looking like the version I fought, so I must have never played in red before. What sucks about this bit of news is that you’ll have no idea how to fight the boss, and if you google its name, you’ll get all different techniques to kill it because there are different fricking forms of the boss based on your color, so each technique only works for a specific form of the boss. Sigh. The bottom line is, you basically have to dodge his attacks or anything he throws at you until he changes color, then hit him with a magic spell attack in the color that is more powerful than the color of the boss. Again, this requires understanding the hierarchy of the rune colors as well as how to make the spell.
Here’s another catch. The weird thing about the soul sucker is that you seriously have to just wait in certain rooms for him to appear to fight him to eventually get all those key pieces, but you wouldn’t know this without a walkthrough. Terrible gameplay design.
In the end, pulling all nine levers opens the final doorway out of this chapter.
Also, as you backtrack to escape, you do get a cutscene, which makes you think you’ve safely escaped, but…psych! You return to control of your character after the cutscene and have to continue running until you find the right ladder to climb up to end the chapter. Ugh.
While you’re busy fighting a small boss on a platform area, there are interspersed cutscenes of two huge, cosmic horror creatures fighting out in space. Your job is simply to enchant your weapon with the dominant color over the boss, repeatedly run back and forth avoiding his attacks while hitting him when you can, which drops big sculpture things around the platform, then run up to them and smash them. Repeat this to the point of boredom, and eventually you start to take the form of each of the characters from each of the chapters and continue the same process. At some point, the boss becomes vulnerable, and you can kill him. The end. It’s all very Lovecraft once you get the cutscene of the fight in space coming to an end as well.
“Honey? Maybe a beer and a cult will make you feel better.”
