HOLIDAY HORROR: Halloween, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day with a side of gay

Posted on May 5, 2023 by Daniel

This foursome offers up a nice mix of holidays and subgenres. They are all getting added to the holiday horror page, and one of them earns a spot on the homo horror movies page as well. But will you want them to be part of your annual holiday horror traditions? Let’s find out.

KIDS VS. ALIENS (2023)

An alien tale from V/H/S 2 gets extended into a full-length feature running a tight 75-minutes long. This is essentially like an 80s Steven Spielberg film with gore. Or…Stephen King’s Silver Bullet with aliens.

A group of nerdy tweens is regularly harassed by the town’s teen bad boy and his friends.

On Halloween night, all the kids end up at a house party without any parental guidance.

It isn’t long before aliens bust in and start dragging them away. Eek!

Our main kids get drawn into a pretty freaky underwater alien lair where they are subjected to some cruel practices…like being dissolved with acid. Frightful fun for adults, this film would be considered a full-fledged horror movie to kids.

There are plenty of atmospheric and suspenseful chase scenes, and our main geek girl gets to squash her hero envy with a sword.

But be warned, this film does not have a tidy ending and begs for a sequel. Also note that there’s tag scene after the closing credits.

AUTUMN ROAD (2021)

This isn’t your ordinary haunted attraction film. It’s a slow, brooding story that focuses more on those affected by the disappearance of a little girl on Halloween in a small town than it does on concrete horror.

Ten years later, the missing girl’s sister is going through a dark period and has an awkward relationship with her mother, played by Friday the 13th Part 7 star Lar Park-Lincoln.

Twin brothers, one sweet and one weird, were the last two people to see the little girl alive, and they are now running a popular haunted attraction.

The main girl befriends the sweet twin, and as they slowly grow close, she extracts information out of him about his last minutes with her sister on that tragic Halloween night.

Meanwhile, someone in a mask is doing some seemingly random terrorizing and killing. However, this film is not a slasher. “Masked killer” moments are few and far between, but one of them, which is a sort of stalking/home invasion sequence, is fantastic and fresh.

As intriguing as it all is with sinister October atmosphere, it’s also very bizarre and doesn’t quite come together—a lot of open-ended details leave it up to viewers to decipher what exactly transpired.

TWO WITCHES (2021)

Like a mashup of a Sam Raimi movie and 80s Euro horror, Two Witches delivers all the hocus pocus you could hope for. But don’t expect Halloween witches. They’re more like winter witches considering the events take place at Christmas time.

Broken into a few “chapters”, the film is essentially two different stories that come together at the end of the second part…sort of. Just like 80s Euro horror, there’s a lot going on here, it’s all really spooky, none of it quite makes sense, and there’s no resolution to clarify things beyond a promise that the story is “to be continued”. I’ll gladly take a sequel since the ride is so much fun.

The first part is about a pregnant woman who becomes convinced a witchy woman is stalking her.

She is friends with a couple that is into the occult, so they gather together one night to dabble in the magical arts to find out if she is hexed. Tension building edits and a slow burn atmosphere lead up to some freaky witch action.

The second chapter stars horror queen Kristina Klebe (Linda in Rob Zombie’s Halloween).

She is renting a room to an eerily weird young woman, played to witchy perfection by Rebekah Kennedy.

Kristina tries to be friendly and supportive, but Rebekah’s craziness moves into Single White Female territory. This is when the witchy goodness spins out of control…and into total chaos. But it’s so satisfying I didn’t even care. I’d especially like to learn how Rebekah pulls off this levitation trick…

Make sure to stick around for the after-credits scenes and the old school final frame moment.

LOVE HURTS (aka: Most Horrible Things) (2022)

Although I am not a fan of movies that piggyback on the Saw concept of throwing a group of less than pure people in a room to either physically or psychologically torture them, I watched this one because it’s a holiday flick with queer characters.

6 people accept an invite to a mansion for Valentine’s Day with the promise of winning money. They are greeted by a butler, played by the psycho Santa bear from Once Upon a Time at Christmas. He looks particularly hot when framed by penis head lighting.

He makes them sign waivers and takes their phones. Uh-oh.

The guests bicker and mock each other’s credentials to give us some character development, and then their host arrives and drags even more character details out of these unlikable people. The host is referred to as “they” by one character and doesn’t even give a straight answer when asked if they should be called “sir”, so we can only assume they are a they/them. They happen to be deliciously dark, bitchy, and condescending with no sense of personal space. I felt like I was watching an interview on the Drew Barrymore Show when they spoke with each guest.

While the host slowly draws dirty secrets out of each guest in what seems like an effort to get them to make romantic connections, the bulk of this film focuses on two gay guys—a hot Black gay and a snooty white gay. This is the highlight of this otherwise typical flick, because it dives into interracial dating, white tribalism, and bigotry within the gay community.

It all leads to the gays cat fighting, at which point I began wondering, “Why don’t the other guests just bow out of the offer of money?” And this is perhaps the most unique aspect of the film. They suddenly do all decide to pass on continuing to join in the Valentine’s Day festivities!

Of course, leaving isn’t as simple as it seems, so it’s a major letdown that there’s only one moment of violence and gore in the whole damn movie. Also, so many plot points feel like they’re left dangling, but there is an attempt to make the ending unique and unexpected. Unfortunately, the takeaway for me was that a) even when a majority of the focus is on queer characters, they are still going to be at the mercy of straight characters, and b) the whole point of the movie seemed to be to present an absurdly complicated way of going about getting a date.

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Bad things always happen in the middle of nowhere

Posted on April 27, 2023 by Daniel

Whether it’s a motel, a country house, or a forest campsite, people just never learn. So which of these three isolated locations worked best for me in my latest triple feature? Let’s find out.

MYSTERY SPOT (2021)

If you come up with a cool premise for a horror movie but don’t have the budget to offer anything but 110 minutes of mostly dialogue-driven plot, I’d suggest waiting to raise more money to give us an experience we won’t forget…and would gladly sit and watch for 110 minutes.

There is intriguing stuff going on here. There’s a motel in the middle of nowhere run by a nice old gay guy with a bit of a flirty, lecherous side to him. Oh how I miss the days of being admired by guys like that. Shit. I guess I’m supposed to start behaving like one of those guys now. Anyway, this dude lands Mystery Spot on the does the gay guy die? page.

There’s a “mystery spot” near the motel—an abandoned roadside attraction with metaphysical powers that defy the laws of gravity, according to the old gay guy. And that’s exactly why it’s such a shame that there is no exploration of the damn inside of the attraction. WTF?

Instead, this is a character study of the people staying at the motel, including Lisa Wilcox of Elm Street 4 and 5, a beary dude holding auditions for his movie in his hotel room, and a Black guy who just sits in his car outside and warns Lisa away from the mystery spot. Naturally he’s hiding an ulterior motive, but that unfolds very slowly. As does the whole movie.

Most of the mysterious aspects revolve around the bear, and it seems to involve either making porn movies, occult practices, or pedophilia. It’s all quite creepy for a while, but then it just loses steam as the lives of the characters come together in what is mostly a drama about people being haunted by their pasts. What a letdown.

DEMONS AT DAWN (2022)

Demons at Dawn is book-ended by a plot point about a prisoner, which didn’t add anything but confusion for me. However, the prisoner was a hot daddy, so I’ll let it slide.

The focus is on a hit man who takes one more job to pay his debt. When he arrives at the countryside house where he is to do the job, he sees a man dead in a field. I’m almost convinced the shot of a tree used in this movie is the same one from The Ring.

Before long the hit man is dealing with various “visitors” who seem to know something about a cult situation in the vicinity.

Soon after that, they’re all dealing with cheesy good, dime store demons like something right out of a direct-to-video 1980s horror movie.

It’s not a particularly innovative or scary film, but I really liked the throwback vibe during the eventual demon cult siege of the house.

Unfortunately, the home invasion is not exactly a substantial part of this 80-minute movie.

FREAK (2020)

This indie runs only 51 minutes long. Thankfully director/writer Lucky Cerruti makes use of every second. There’s no fat to trim here. This is a tight little backwoods creature feature demonstrating that Lucky has paid attention to the horror movies he’s watched and also didn’t let a limited budget restrain him.

Freak is simple, straightforward fun. The practical gore effects are icky great, and the mutant monster is fantastic, despite moments when his rubbery construction is quite obvious.

This is the kind of horror I grew up on, so it’s totally satisfying to me. Those that think CGI effects are the way to go might not appreciate what’s going on here.

So a kid tells his mom and his pretty dad that he’s taking his sister with him on a camping trip with friends.

During the ride to the site, an urban legend of a deformed man in the woods is discussed. That doesn’t stop the kids from setting up camp.

We get old school monster POV and grunting, plus a subtle yet genuinely effective music score. And before long, the monster wreaks havoc. Funny thing is, due to the short runtime, the kills basically happen all at once. With more money and a little more character interaction (for instance, an obligatory partying montage, skinny-dipping, some sexy times in the tents, etc.), the kills could have been spread apart, and we could have gotten some suspenseful chase scenes as well.

Despite the absence of the extra fluff, what’s here is a blast, and there’s even a nasty castration moment.

And the details on the monster, including close-ups of its drooling mouth, are nice and gooey. We even briefly see the monster running, and perhaps due to budget limitations, there’s something “freaky” about its grotesque movements.

The film ends abruptly and left me wanting more. Maybe a sequel is in the works?

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The only way to survive the horror is to run and scream

Posted on April 25, 2023 by Daniel

When the survival horror genre was going strong in the early 2000s, game companies wanted to find ways to make the experience different. One way was to make “run and scream” games as I like to call them. In an effort to be known for something other than Resident Evil, Capcom did just that with Clock Tower 3. The main game mechanic is that you can’t fight back with weapons when you encounter enemies. Instead, you have to run while inevitably screaming as you search for a hiding spot where the enemy won’t find you. Think Nemesis in Resident Evil 3 without so much as a knife in your inventory. Sigh.

This was the first Clock Tower sequel on PS2. The first two games on the PlayStation One used an archaic system called “point-and-click”. It was basically a side-scrolling game with a little wiggle room and the ability to travel both left and right. However, moving required positioning a cursor on screen to where you wanted to travel before pressing a button that would get you to head there—called point-and-click because the games are usually played with a mouse. How fucking primitive.

The first installment on PS2 plays out like a horror movie…and controls mostly like a survival horror game. It’s visually atmospheric, and you spend the whole time searching for items and solving puzzles while fearing that an enemy will pop out of nowhere and chase you relentlessly until you find a hiding spot. The only time you use a weapon is for the boss battles at the end of each chapter.

You play as a teenage girl. You’ve come home from school, your mom is gone, and a creepy man is lurking around your house. You explore for a while, pick up some items and notes that are well lit so you can easily see them in the environments, and gather holy water, which you’ll need to open marked doors to teleport to new locations and also to sprinkle on enemies to very temporarily slow them down when they chase you. You can fill your holy water bottle at fountains you’ll find around the locations you explore, which is also where you can save at any time.

Unlike Resident Evil at the time, Clock Tower 3 does not feature tank controls. You move in the direction you push the thumb stick. However, because the game uses fixed survival horror camera angles instead of an over the shoulder POV, when the perspective changes suddenly, you are still pushing the stick in the direction you were originally moving, yet your character is actually heading in a different direction. Initially a smooth transition, it quickly falls apart when you need to change direction. You essentially have to release the stick and let it reset so you can once again push in the direction you want to go. Not convenient when a murderous enemy is on your tail. And speaking of, while the default character pace is running speed, there are times you need to press a button to walk slowly for more controlled movement. That’s because kicking items like cans on the street, which can happen easily if you’re running, will cause enemies to hear you and come hunting. Eek!

Instead of health, you have a panic meter, which can be calmed by taking lavender that you find during exploration. If you do hit full panic mode, your character comes to a standstill, shakes uncontrollably, and begins to get dizzy spells…all while being chased. Fun.

Instead of trying to complete a chapter while being pursued by an enemy, the goal is to find designated hiding places. When you slip into them, as long as the killer didn’t see you hide, they will lurk nearby for a while looking for you and then finally give up. However, sometimes if they stand right outside your hiding spot for too long, your panic meter will go up and you will exit the hiding spot in a panic! These types of hiding spots can be used over and over again. There are other escape mechanisms that are one time use—essentially glowing booby traps you can use once to take down the enemy temporarily, leaving you in peace for a while.

And finally, during your travels you will occasionally be bothered by ghosts. Just what we needed. The ghost will follow you and choke you, but you can shake them off. You can also free their souls. They are always near a dead body waiting to get back an item they lost in death. The idea is to find the item—which is usually nearby—and return it to the dead body while avoiding the angry ghost. Here you are trying to help the damn ghosts, and they’re still attacking you.

Those are the basics of the game, so now let’s look briefly at each chapter.

FIRST CHAPTER

This is one of my faves. You get teleported to London and run around deserted streets and some shops at night. After an initial cut scene that gives you a backstory about the killer of the chapter, the chase is on!

The killer is a hulking deformed dude with a giant hammer who grumbles, “Alyssa, where are you?” whenever he chases you. Terrifying.

Learn where the hiding places are, but don’t fully depend on them. Sometimes they’re too far away to be of help. The killer will also throw you completely off course when you’re in the middle of trying to accomplish something. Good luck finding your way back after you’ve been totally turned around.

The most infuriating part of this chapter has you crossing a plank over a stage and then crossing back again. Fall and you die. This segment totally defies the original rules of the controls. For instance, you are moving left across the screen, so you don’t push forward on the stick, you push left. When you start to lose your balance, the idea is to gently push the stick in the opposite direction than you’re falling. But if you fall towards your character’s left (which is falling towards the bottom of the screen because you’re facing the left side of the screen), you have to push right on the stick to balance yourself, not up, which is actually the character’s right! WTF?

When you finally get to fight hammer man, you’re equipped with a bow and arrow during a magical cutscene, and then the battle is on. No aiming is necessary. You just run around a fountain, wait for hammer man to swing at you, which temporarily gives him pause, and then you hold down triangle to power up as much as possible and release to shoot (the only time you’re given an over the shoulder POV). There’s lots of running and aiming in the battle, and you can’t adjust your aim once it’s locked in, so the boss can just step out of the target range. It takes quite a while to beat him.

Note that you will find special red or green arrows throughout the game, but it’s best to save these for the final battle of the game, because there aren’t many of them, and your regular arrows are good enough for all the other battles even if they do make the battles last longer than they should.

SECOND CHAPTER

Before you even get to meet the second enemy, you do a lot more running around your mansion, and then tackle a lot of ghosts once you’re teleported to the area where this chapter takes place. As with all these older survival horror games, there’s no way you’d know where to go or what to do without a walkthrough.

Once you do meet the enemy, he is another bad ass right out of a horror movie. It’s a dude wearing an oxygen mask and protective smock and carrying a canister of acid he shoots all over you when he gets near you. There’s plenty of running around and another ridiculous plank crossing scene that is presented at an awful camera angle, plus this dude is on you even more than hammer man. And the one hiding space this chapter provides is a one-time use spot. Ugh. Again, you need to use a walkthrough. Without one, you’ll run in circles being chased constantly by the baddie without a hiding spot to temporarily rid yourself of him.

As freaky as acid man is, he’s also sort of campy. He even pounces on you by doing a butt bounce. Weird. The boss battle consists of running around a power plant room trying to aim your arrows at him without getting hit by his acid…or butt bounced.

THIRD CHAPTER

This one is infuriating and also sucks all the horror out of the game. Your enemy “The Chopper” feels more like a weasel of a superhero villain than a horror enemy, even if he does carry a sharp weapon in each hand. He hops and spins around you and taunts you jovially, which is annoying enough as it is. On top of that, in the first part of this chapter he chases you incessantly in a very minimal amount of underground sewer space. And this is while you’re trying to run around gathering items to help you escape the area.

And then you fight him the first time. That’s right. First time. You have two boss battles with him, and this is the easy one, even though it’s hard. It’s in a tight fighting arena, and he bounces around so much it’s hard to line up shots with him. Argh!

After you conquer him, you end up in a graveyard and have to teleport through several portals to reach different parts of the graveyard…where you have to collect items to solve puzzles while The Chopper haunts you along with glowing butterflies that leave you disoriented when they get near you.

And just when you’re feeling you’re in any easy part, you have to cross a cavern bridge that begins to crumble beneath you as the camera angle and dust clouds fuck you up. Argh. My suggestion is stay to the right and you should make it. Once you do get safely to the other side, you don’t get to save, because it’s right into a boss fight. Fuckers.

Fighting The Chopper in the graveyard is infuriating, will take you forever, and is only slightly more doable if you use a Codebreaker. Just saying. The Chopper is even more aggressive. He chases you relentlessly so it’s rarely possible to get distance enough from him to line up a shot. You get stuck on tombstones. You get stuck in a loop of getting knocked on your ass. And he flings blue boomerangs at you.

And that is the key to this battle. The ONLY time your arrows hurt him is after you’ve successfully shot one of his boomerangs with your arrow and boomeranged it right back at him. Then you get several opportunities to power-up your arrow and do damage to his health bar. Then it’s just running in circles waiting for certain verbal cues he gives that let you know he’s about to throw a boomerang again. The worst is when you miss the boomerang and have to start the process of waiting for him to throw another one all over again.

FOURTH CHAPTER PART 1

Here you have your friend with you, and he looks like Weasley from Harry Potter. In the first part of the chapter he gets captured by one of the enemies and you have to find him in a hospital. There are several ghosts to contend with immediately, and as you search the hospital you find the objects needed to set them free.

The enemies this time–that’s right, plural—are a nod to the original game. The original point-and-click game enemy was called Scissorman, and he chased you around with huge shears. Now there are brother and sister twins with big scissors, but once again, they come across as superhero villains. Imagine if the Wonder Twins decided to go on a cutting spree. Despite them not being scary, dammit if the game seems to realize they aren’t scary, so it offers up the biggest damn jump scare in the whole game.

You never encounter both twins at once—it’s always one twin or another. However, they do appear frequently like The Chopper. Worst of all, this is a two-floor hospital, and only one floor has a hiding spot.

Even so, this is a fairly short segment requiring a lot of back and forth running. There’s no boss battle, and eventually you end up at a castle.

FOURTH CHAPTER PART 2

This is a fairly small castle. It’s almost pointless to explore the small west wing unless you want to save the ghost in there. However, that requires finding the necessary item in the east wing and going right back to give it to the ghost’s corpse. Otherwise, you actually never go back to the west wing, and if you’re a completist you won’t successfully save all ghosts in the game.

The problem is that the scissor twins come at you constantly here, and there’s no hiding place! There’s one trap that you can use to get them once in the useless west wing, and another trap usable just once in the east wing.

There are also limited saves and holy water refill stations, so you will be doing a lot of backtracking to save and replenish. Problem with that is it often requires running through a hallway of knight statues that hack at you in a sporadic pattern. Tedious.

There’s some fetching to find items to insert in statues to open new doors, and then there’s a whole section you would never have a clue about conquering properly unless you use a walkthrough. It requires going down elevators hidden in iron maidens in each corner of the knight room (argh) to unlock doors down below in a prison. Once you do, you then have to pull a lever and run perfectly in a straight line to a door that unlocks on the other side of the prison. If you run even slightly off track (and you will), walls come down and block your path. Guess what. You then have to go back up in the elevator to the knight room, get to the iron maiden that takes you back down to the switch, and try again.

Meanwhile, you’re going to want to return to the last save room several times, because when you least expect it, you are thrust into two boss battles in a row without a save in sight. That save point? Through the hall with the knights. Argh!

FIRST FINAL BOSS

It’s the scissor sister, and she’s really annoying…mostly because for whatever reason they’ve decided that for this boss battle only, you don’t get auto aim on your arrows. And by that I mean you don’t get auto aim plus you can’t adjust your aim. WTF? You have to run in circles then try to get her in front of you as she teleports around the room, then press the arrow powering button and hope she’s in your sights when it switches to the over-the-shoulder view. If not, you need to let go of the arrow button fast or she’ll whack you good.

Other than her regular attacks, she occasionally sends a wind around the room that you can try to dodge until it goes way.

SECOND BOSS BATTLE

It’s the scissor brother. He’s actually easier than his twin simply because your auto aim is back. He does, however, have a few more attacks than her.

After you defeat both of them, you get to save. Then you climb winding stairs, pull some levers, crawl your way through a bunch of gears in the clock tower, and finally reach one more save room before the final battle.

FINAL BOSS

Not even the Codebreaker can save you from this horror show, because the code for the powerful arrows, of which you only have four at most, does not work. The only way to seriously beat this boss would be to have infinite powerful arrows.

You’re on a round arena platform with two open holes in the floor. Can you fall into them? I don’t know, because somehow I managed to avoid them. It was everything else I couldn’t stay away from.

The boss has a double life-bar. He relentlessly throws purple orbs at you. When they hit you they hold you mostly in place. This gives him the time to hit you with another orb…and then a third. Once he hits you three times he can one hit kill you.

If you manage to get past taking down his first life-bar, he adds blood puddles to the ground, which also catch you and hold you in place. This gives him the opportunity to walk right up to you, pick you up, and suck life out of you to replenish his life-bars. Yep. Not only does his second life-bar replenish, his first one does, too. This is the part of the game when a smart person gives up, because your lame normal arrows will never take him down.

If you are some sort of video game pro, once you defeat him it’s not over. You have to run around the holes in the floor to get to a specific spot to hit X in order to trigger a cutscene. The boss is still able to attack you, and if you die before getting to the hot spot, you have to fight the whole boss battle over again.

I can’t believe I thought this was one of my favorite horror games at one point.

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British monster invasion

Posted on April 24, 2023 by Daniel

There’s a lively indie horror scene coming from the UK, and it’s somewhat of an incestuous situation, with a circle of writers, directors, and actors working together regularly. For my latest triple feature, I checked out cheesy monster movies that all happen to feature indie horror vets Chrissie Wunna and Stephen Staley (whose hotness I recently covered in another post).

CROC! (2022)

It really bums me out that SyFy no longer snatches up all these hokey, low budget flicks featuring nature’s animals striking back. Croc! is a perfect selection for a SyFy Saturday marathon of CGI killer animal movies. Those were the days.

A shirtless mega hunk and his girl get eaten by the awesome, big-mouthed croc for starters, and then guests arrive at a mansion for a wedding.

Stephen plays a friend of the groom and Chrissie a friend of the bride.

In the best plot device ever, the groom needs to keep the eating of the first guest secret, which totally backfires when the croc shows up at the wedding to start chomping on people.

This is everything you want from a CGI croc movie. The croc’s mouth is mesmerizing, and its movements and attacks are laugh-out-loud funny.

And just as important, the characters make dumb and hilarious decisions left and right, like running around outside when there’s a perfectly good mansion to hide in.

That is until the croc gets inside. Oh, SyFy, you don’t know what you’re missing.

MONSTERS OF WAR (2022)

The director of Easter Bunny Massacre delivers a monster movie that isn’t even good enough for SyFy.

Chrissie plays a woman traveling on a country road with her two kids. They are terrorized by a weird creature, they meet two other guys, and they all run into a cave.

Within minutes, terrible CGI monsters, including 2 T-rexes, kill a couple of the people, and the rest end up at a church. Stephen is there, but he plays a fairly minor role in the film.

The movie gets weighed down by endless dialogue and character development we couldn’t care less about. We just want bad CGI monsters and laughable kill scenes. We get too few of them. The monsters aren’t even varied enough to entertain.

Worst of all, there isn’t a major battle with the monsters in the end. The survivors basically just hop in a car and escape.

DINOSAUR HOTEL (2021)

Dinosaur Hotel is about desperate contestants (all women) that participate in an underground game to win money. Little do they realize that the goal is to survive the night in a hotel filled with raptors, Pterodactyls, and a T-Rex.

Chrissie lands a spot in the game after a brief talk with Stephen, which is the last time we see him.

This is very much the same general plot structure as Monsters Of War. However, there are a lot more laughable kills, thankfully.

There’s also a silly floating eye host.

Once again, Chrissie has two kids with her, and they break off and sneak into a cave they find outside the hotel, so she has to go find them.

The best thing I can say about this one is that it’s more worthy of airing on SyFy than Monsters Of War. Now if this had been a film with a cast of all women in the 1980s, we would have gotten pillow fights, shower scenes, cat fights, and more. How far the monster movie genre has fallen…

 

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Conjuring up some revenge

Posted on April 14, 2023 by Daniel

There’s nothing like an unhappy demon to get the horror party started. But did these pissed off creeps make it an unforgettable party? Let’s find out.

HEADLESS HORSEMAN (2022)

Ghost Rider gets a Halloween horror makeover. This b-movie silliness so deserves airtime on SyFy at Halloween time, and earns a spot on the holiday horror page.

After a trick or treating montage and some other setup scenes, a guy and his girl are hunted down by her drug dealer ex and his cronies (including Roach from People Under the Stairs). They abduct her and leave the boyfriend for dead.

Conveniently, the Devil, played by Michael Pare, hears his cries for help and offers to give him powers to seek revenge in exchange for his soul.

The powers include a flaming jack-o-lantern head and a Freddy Krueger razor hand from which he can shoot 80s-style green laser special effects to blow baddies to dust. There’s also a catch…to stay alive, he needs to suck blood.

You’ll get a chuckle as he uses his finger lasers to make enemies explode, but the big disappointment is that he only tosses his pumpkin head at a guy to kill him one time. The razor fingers and lasers weren’t even needed. When you call your movie Headless Horseman, the dude should kill everyone with his pumpkin head! Not to mention…he should be riding a horse, not a motorcycle…

That tells you everything you need to know about this one. The final act battling the boss baddie is as cheesy as it gets, with some funny lines. And the ex even brings a priest to a pumpkin head fight.

DON’T SAY ITS NAME (2021)

If you’re a fan of Native American folklore horror, you should find this atmospheric film that takes place in a rural, snowy town entertaining and creepy.

In a nice twist on the usual backwoods creature movie, this creature seems to attack people that are out in the forest in pairs, yet only kills one of them…the one that can smell and see it. Eek!

A female sheriff teams up with a female park ranger (another fresh twist on the usual male-centric cast), and they investigate who or what could be doing the killing, which eventually leads them into mythical territory due to the town having a high concentration of Native American residents that care about their land.

The odd thing is that the “creature” attacks are presented as aerial POV of something swooping down at its victims, making this seem like it’s going to be a supernatural creature tale.

However, when we finally see the threat in the final act, it looks like a mortal witch that runs around on two legs.

Even so, there are some suspenseful moments once the witch is revealed, especially an intense scene of her chasing a kid on a bicycle.

MARRY FUCK KILL (2023)

I know it’s a Tubi original, but if you’re going to title your horror movie Marry Fuck Kill, you have to deliver something a little more intense than the sloppy supernatural occult demon plot we get here. This definitely feels like a throwback to all the direct-to-DVD ghostly apparition movies that came out in the wake of bigger budget, PG-13 horror flicks in the early 2000s.

After a young woman commits suicide as part of a ritual, the friends she was estranged from, including her ex-boyfriend, come to stay at her house for the funeral and discover she left everything to them in her will.

While drinking, they play a game of Marry Fuck Kill. It doesn’t even really matter that they play. The fact is the reason she didn’t talk to them anymore is because they all had an orgy together and didn’t invite her.

Hey, at least they got the fuck part right in this film, for there are numerous flashbacks to the big bang. Guy-girl, girl-girl, guy-guy. Hot.

In fact, one of the guys is gay, scoring this film a hot spot on the does the gay guy die? page.

Anyway, there are a few kills by an unseen specter, the ex has some ghostly dreams about the dead girl, and a convoluted occult plot unfolds.

It’s all just so bland and silly, but there’s a witchy looking demon in a pentagram at the end. Yay.

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Some of my indie slasher faves get sequels

Posted on April 11, 2023 by Daniel

I’m a fan of the directors and their movies, and now there are sequels, so naturally I had to check them out. Of note is that hottie Stephen Staley, who is racking up a horror resume in the UK, appears in three of these four films. Unfortunately, he doesn’t do any shirtless scenes this time around. Therefore, I’ve supplied a picture.

TOOTH FAIRY: DRILL TO KILL (2022)

I recently covered the fourth film in this franchise from director Louisa Warren and was happy that it was given a fresh start. This fifth installment is a direct sequel to that film, and as is common with sequels, it just takes everything that made its predecessor good and exploits it to numbing levels.

It also does something we’ve seen plenty of times before. It pushes the horror problem onto someone else. The survivor from film 4 works at a school with her sister, who ends up inheriting the haunting by the tooth fairy.

While the tooth fairy’s penchant for standing outside people’s doors knocking was super effective in the previous film, here she does it so much that it loses its impact.

Other than that, she does what she does best—bashes people with a hammer and chisels out their teeth. It’s more of the same, just in a school this time. The series is definitely starting to wear thin at this point.

DEMONIC PLASTIC SURGEON, MD (2022)

Louisa Warren brings us a sequel to her film Doctor Carver—no matter what names the distributor gives these movies, they’ll always be Doctor Carver movies to me. This sequel even features some returning characters. Clever little twist—the main girl is played by a different actress, who blames looking different on plastic surgery.

While the first film was a commentary on predatory modeling agencies, this sequel is more about aging and plastic surgery addiction.

Would you believe characters that were wannabe models in the first film all somehow end up coming to work at the same old ladies home? That includes the survivors of the first film and the evil nurse that assisted Doctor Carver.

As in the first film, any time the doctor and nurse torture a new victim with plastic surgery, the whole screen is lit in red. Scenes start to feel very reminiscent of The Dentist, especially since one sequence features an old lady getting (what remains of) her teeth extracted.

The film also goes for a sleazier, trashy edge, including a resident who shits her pants constantly, a dude who gets a blow job from an old lady, and a sex scene in which “plastic surgery” begins to melt off the woman onto the guy.

Note that there are a few kills along the way, however most of the horror chaos happens at the end of the film in a long sequence in which everyone is tortured all at once.

CONJURING THE GENIE 2 (2022)

I really liked the first Conjuring the Genie, which came from one of my fave indie directors, Scott Jeffrey. This time he simply, produces, doesn’t direct.

Just like the latest Tooth Fairy film I cover above, this sequel is a been-there-done-that situation. However, the genie looks creepier this time, and is almost always drenched in haunting blue light.

The film does what it needs to do to gather a new set of victims. After learning about what happened in the first movie, an author looking for something new to write about gets her writing group to participate in another conjuring.

As the genie visits each group member to grant them their wish—which involves incorrectly interpreting the wish on purpose to bring them pain and suffering—it also terrorizes our main author girl, who made a wish for her comatose mother to wake up. Uh-oh.

Despite a more streamlined plot than some of the weirdness that went on in the first film, this is a fairly generic supernatural specter slasher.

CULT OF HUMPTY DUMPTY (Curse of Humpty Dumpty 2) (2022)

The first film was an entertaining and fun killer doll movie from Scott Jeffrey, who once again doesn’t direct, unless he’s releasing these sequels under a pseudonym. The second film goes the Halloween 6 Thorn cult route. Humpty Dumpty gets help from cult members when he kills his victims! Blah.

A bunch of school girls gets sent to an ecological garden preserve to do some character building work. It’s clearly a nutty place from the start—for instance, the people that run it revel in the fact that their vegetables are grown by simply funneling their sewer line into the garden for fertilizer. I guess that’s where the dumpty part comes in…

Featuring a group of pretty girls at a country camp, this could have been a fun slasher romp, but Humpty Dumpty is really overshadowed by the plot line about the cult. The first film was much better—although it is enjoyable watching the cult feed live victims to Humpty Dumpty, which is definitely a new aspect to the Humpty legacy.

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Bodies, brains, and a fan base

Posted on April 6, 2023 by Daniel

Let’s just get this over with.

BODIES BODIES BODIES (2022)

This film sort of reminded me of Sissy without a substantial slasher feel.

A rich lesbian takes her new girlfriend to a party weekend at the home of one of her wealthy friends, played by Pete Davidson. She almost immediately begins ignoring the new girlfriend, who feels like a total outsider.

Then they start playing a murder mystery game called Bodies Bodies Bodies. They also seem to simultaneously play a drinking game in which they slap the shit out of each other. I’m not sure if it’s part of the same game or they’re two different games, but the Bodies x3 game is the perfect springboard for a slasher. One person gets secretly anointed the killer, they turn out the lights, and then they run around in the dark in a sort of game of hide and seek.

Unfortunately, after only one round the game is totally forgotten. The lights actually go out, one person is found dead, and then everyone spends the rest of the movie roaming around in the dark looking for the person they think is the killer.

There is no slasher scenario, and this ends up feeling more like a Tucker and Dale situation with rich people in a mansion. Even though this is considered a black comedy horror, only one person gets any funny screen time.

Actress Rachel Sennott absolutely steals the show as they all turn on each other in the end, arguing about their relationships while throwing around trendy psychology buzz words. It’s ultimately a letdown, but worth watching for Rachel.

BRAINHUNTER: NEW BREED 1987 (2023)

A perpetual victim to advertising, I watched this one because they slapped “1987” onto the title. The date is irrelevant.

Even so, I could have appreciated this little gory indie if it had focused on the meat of the horror it had to offer rather than trying to give us a detective story as well.

With gnarly creature makeup and practical gore effects, the film should have delved into the basic plot—kids break into an abandoned building for the night and get terrorized and killed by a demon-zombie sort of brain eating humanoid.

Instead, the bulk of the film follows two detectives that team up to solve a murder case.

While the low budget is apparent in the horror sequences, it works perfectly in a direct-to-video way.

It doesn’t work when you just have a bunch of inexperienced actors trying to carry a detective story entirely with dialogue.

FAN BASE (2021)

This triple feature post had me a) wishing I hadn’t wasted my time on any of these movies, and b) writing about them just to remind myself later that I watched them.

Fan Base feels like the numerous meta fan films that are all over YouTube these days. This low budget movie in a nutshell—a big hillbilly gets angry when he doesn’t get the response he wants after meeting one of his favorite actors, and then goes on a killing spree on a horror movie set.

He spends a good amount of the movie killing people without any mask. 40 minutes in he dons a white jumpsuit and white mask. Are we supposed to suddenly be scared?

All the kill scenes are clumsy and amateurish and come across as a bunch of horror-loving kids playing pretend. The onset shenanigans just aren’t funny and serve mostly as filler…in a 63-minute movie. In an effort to keep us entertained, there are also references to famous horror movies.

You’ve seen it all before, done better. It’s just another movie about fan obsession. That’s right. I said fan, not stan. The word is fan, short for fanatic, not some dumb ass social media word fans have started to use to feel trendy—especially considering its inspired by an Eminem song from twenty years ago. Like, get with the times. Even Stan called himself a fan, not a stan….

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With a special appearance by Danny Trejo…

Posted on March 31, 2023 by Daniel

Inevitably, horror king Danny Trejo will occasionally pop up in movies in my watchlist. He might have top billing, he might be featured front and center in the poster art. And yet…he will barely be in the movie. So, why not look at four such films in one post?

THE PREY: LEGEND OF KARNOCTUS (2022)

Danny Trejo is in this little creature feature for about five minutes total.

It begins with full Monty monster attacking some men in a cave. That leads to a comic book style intro set to hip hop music, making this feel like something on the SyFy network in 2003. And I was so there for that vibe.

Next, U.S. troops get into a gun battle in Afghanistan and are forced to retreat into a cave. Typical egos come into play as the group splits up to explore the tunnels. They stumble upon gas canisters, some of the soldiers begin having hallucinations, there are large spiders, bodies of decaying past victims are found…

…but no more monster until 58 minutes in. Even so, the monster delivers on the creature feature fun.

It looks a bit different than your usual underground creature and sees humans with some sort of X-ray vision. Cool.

The final battle is also a good time. My only complaint is that it turns out there are more than one of the monsters, which makes it kind of inexcusable that it takes almost an hour for them to start attacking invaders in their home.

CYBORG X (2016)

This is one of those movies you stumble upon on a streaming service that makes you long for the days when SyFy was pumping out cheap action/sci-fi/horror flicks that are campy and cheesy thanks to low budgets and bad CGI effects, and also endearing thanks to recognizable faces in the cast.

Cyborg X concerns a military group that has to fight back against cyborgs gone wild after a weapons supplier is taken over by a virus.

These cyborgs happen to look like muscular, shirtless knock-offs of comic book villain Bane.

The leading man is a very pretty hunk who delivers on the shirtless action (for lady lovers there’s also a hot babe as the female lead).

Danny Trejo plays a crazy team member who gets more screen time than expected, considering I figured he was going to be cast in a cameo just for name recognition. And funny man Adam Johnson of Vamp U plays a different role as a cigar-smoking, bearish military man. Hot.

Despite the CGI effects, there are practical gore effects during gun battles, which are mostly contained to the first act, smack dab in the center, and final act. The bulk of the film does get a little too talkie as the team makes battle plans.

L.A. SLASHER (2015)

This is a trendy, artsy “slasher” in which the whole is simply not as good as the sum of its parts. It’s an attempted commentary on people that are famous just for being famous (reality stars, socialites, influencers, etc.). They are being targeted by a killer that wants to expose them for the talentless hacks they are and make them pay the price for gaining success by doing nothing—and in the process becomes a sort of celebrity himself. Problem is there isn’t any aspect of the film that is truly developed, including the killing.

I will start by saying I was loving the 80s vibe. The film begins with “The Look of Love” by ABC, has plenty of neon-drenched party and club scenes set to faux 80s dance music, closes with the 1990 hit “The King of Wishful Thinking” by Go West, and uses Divine’s “I’m So Beautiful” as a theme song for the killer.

It’s everything else that has issues. There is essentially no lead character here to carry a story arc, leaving the audience flailing in the wind as irrelevant characters go through various scenes with no purpose.

Mischa Barton is the closest we get to a final girl, but she’s barely in the film. Other familiar faces that appear fleetingly include Brooke Hogan, David Bautista, Eric Roberts, and of course Danny Trejo.

The most cringey casting is Andy Dick as the voice of the killer. His irritating tone destroys what is otherwise a freaky killer in a white tuxedo, blank white mask, and long wig. I think the point of the killer’s appearance is to show that only beautiful people get noticed in L.A., because everyone in the city knows there’s a killer on the loose, yet the killer goes out on the town and parties in crowds and never gets a second glance.

The film is filled with flashy editing, trippy sequences, lots of drugs and parties, online social media commentaries on screen, and a sleek, stylized, all-white lair where the killer brings his victims to terrorize them. Unfortunately, while there’s plenty of blood splatters as aftermath, all the kills are cutaway, so this film offers nothing in the way of death scenes. It’s a bummer, because the visual presentation leading up to the kills is hot.

VAMPFATHER (2022)

This low budget indie has a very direct-to-DVD circa 2001 look and feel. It’s not so much a vampire horror film as it is a romanticized vampire legend film—it’s about a female vamp who has longed to become human since she was a child. Huh? Vampires don’t grow or age, so how was she once a vampire child? I guess that tells you everything you need to know about lack of attention to details with this one.

Anyway, Danny Trejo gets about fifteen minutes of screen time in total, playing the vamp father—who has no vampire teeth while all his children do. Again, it’s all about the lack of attention to details. He informs his kids that their time on earth has come to an end due to lack of blood to drink—mortals have become to pure. Say what? I really struggled to get through this one.

Accepting that their time has come to an end, the family commits suicide together, but the daughter who wanted to become human shows up late and didn’t get the memo. So she sets out on a journey to figure out who and what she really is now.

She visits her therapist (played by Tom Sizemore). She visits her doctor, who seems to have ulterior motives while treating her and also sleeps with a blow-up doll. She goes to a Halloween party with the best friend she has lesbian feelings for. She becomes close to a cute young male detective who is investigating a series of murders for which she is one of the suspects.

If you’re okay with low budget films and like stories that feature a vampire as the protagonist, I guess you might like this one. It was all just a little too silly for me—although it did have some intentionally funny moments that gave me a chuckle.

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All the single supernatural ladies

Posted on March 28, 2023 by Daniel

It’s a trio of films that took me back two decades to the days of vengeful girl ghosts skulking around claiming victims. They may not be groundbreaking, but I was glad to indulge in a comfort marathon of familiar horror territory.

LULLABY (2022)

This is the kind of early 2000s throwback film I needed right now: sleek production, dark lighting and shadows, cheap scares, an evil entity preying on a newborn, and a mythological backstory.

A woman who just had a baby receives a “care” package including baby items that belonged to her sister, who has been locked away after the death of her husband and disappearance of her baby. I don’t know—I personally wouldn’t think it a good idea to then use those items for my newborn, but this woman apparently never saw any baby horror movies. Among the items she receives is an old book, and she fricking sings a lullaby she finds within its pages to her baby.

From that point on, the baby never stops crying.

Slowly but surely, an evil presence in the house starts to reveal itself. The beautiful thing here is that the hot husband doesn’t think the wife is crazy, because they’re both being terrorized.

Just like all the supernatural specter films of the early 2000s, the couple has to delve into the mythology behind this entity, and it turns out it involves Jewish lore and the story of Lilith, a woman believed to have been Adam’s first wife, who was booted from the Garden of Eden for not being subservient. My kind of evil bitch.

Things get retro cheesy as the couple is forced to confront Lilith in a mirror dimension to save their baby. So satisfying.

THE INHABITANT (2022)

This fun twist on the true Lizzy Borden story with a supernatural slasher edge stars Odessa A’zion of the Hellraiser remake as a teenager who begins to think she’s losing her mind because she’s a distant relative of the famous, alleged axe murderer. I can’t imagine why they chose a title that doesn’t reference Lizzie’s name at all.

The parents are played by familiar faces: Leslie Bibb and Dermot Mulroney. They don’t get to do much for most of the movie, which focuses on Odessa having visions and nightmares about murdering people with an axe.

Good news is there are also people actually being murdered by someone with an axe, and although this isn’t a Halloween-heavy film, it does take place during the season, so we get a hint of seasonal atmosphere.

The body count is a bit low, and Odessa’s dream sequences feel like a desperate way to populate the film with (faux) horror, but the final act delivers good battle against “Lizzy Borden”.

There are some tight performances, enjoyable violence, and a good old silly passing of the torch—um, axe—in the final frame.

MARA (2018)

Several years old now, Mara would have been released around the time that sleep paralysis films were hot. Considering I can’t remember any of the ones I watched and covered at the time, I’m going to say this is the best of the bunch just because Mara is so awesomely creepy.

A police psychologist is investigating a series of deaths in which victims are found in bed, twisted like a pretzel.

Very quickly, she begins to experience sleep paralysis, and each time she does she sees a tall, lanky, decrepit woman from the corner of her eye.

Through group therapy sessions she oversees, the psychologist connects with a dude who seems crazy as he warns all the patients that Mara is coming for them.

The creepy-crawlie cracking joints ghost woman horror is reminiscent of movies like Lights Out and The Ring, and the paranormal research plot has been done to death, but that doesn’t matter. This is all about the Mara attack sequences. They are spooky good. There’s even a double whammy sleep clinic scene that rocks.

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Catching up with some indie horror creators

Posted on March 24, 2023 by Daniel

Filling in my viewing gaps of films featuring horror actor Nick Damici and movies by indie director Charlie Steeds, I ended up doing a marathon of four films, so let’s get into them.

WE ARE WHAT WE ARE (2013)

Director Jim Mickle and Nick Damici had an awesome indie horror streak going on a decade ago, with Mulberry St., Stake Land, and this final film. Not sure why they opted to break the streak, but I can say We Are What We Are is my least favorite of the three films. It’s a slow burn that also focuses on religion. Even so, it’s moody, atmospheric, and has a satisfying payoff in the end.

After the unexpected death of his wife, a man in a small town pushes his two teen daughters into the matriarchal role of helping raise his young son, keep house…and keep their dark, religious rituals alive.

Meanwhile, Nick Damici plays the local sheriff, who is on the case when people go missing.

His younger deputy becomes close to one of the daughters while the investigation is underway, and clues soon begin to lead to the home of the recently widowed father.

The film doesn’t delve too much into the horror aspects of what the family is up to, so this plays out more like a drama/mystery for a majority of its runtime.

However, it’s the final act that gets vicious, delivering a juicy horror denouement.

BLOOD CONSCIOUS (2021)

By taking the familiar “demons at a cabin in the woods” premise and making a Black family the focus, this film embeds a commentary on race relations into an otherwise fairly straightforward and mundane horror movie. The film’s biggest fault is that it fails to visually deliver on any demonic aspects, leaving us with a plot in which everyone just starts accusing each other of being a demon. It’s sort of like watching The Crucible in hopes that someone, anyone, will start flying around on a broom. Heh heh.

Despite the lack of blatant horror, I liked the subtle exploration of being Black in a white world.

Arriving late to meet their family members at a cabin in the woods for a get together, our three main characters quickly run into Nick Damici, who is wielding a gun at them and demanding to know if they are demons.

Fearing for their lives, the trio finds a way to subdue Damici. In the meantime, one of the guys starts buying into Damici’s rants about demons that are hiding in human form.

Next thing you know, a white woman appears on the scene, claiming her husband was murdered and begging for help. But if you’ve been paying attention to reality, you’ll know this bitch’s behavior screams KAREN!

The trio struggles with what to do with the woman and if they should wait for the police to arrive. They start turning on each other…all over a white woman. Even the idea of Black women longing for their men to vow loyalty and marriage to them is addressed through the lens of the demon theme.

Even when the Black characters fear a group of white people pointing weapons at them might be demons, the white people look equally terrified of them and ask, “What are you?” Clever. It’s definitely an “us vs. them” metaphor movie.

FREEZE (2022)

As a fan of director Charlie Steeds, I was excited that he was delving into a fishmen theme, but The Pirates of Penzance period piece style came across as very cartoonish to me, so I just wasn’t feeling the horror aspects. Not to mention there’s a lot more dialogue than monster action.

Anyway, a captain and his crew go on a rescue mission to save his missing friend, who set out on some sort of expedition and never returned. Pretty soon the captain’s ship gets stuck in ice, a fishman creature gets on board, and those who aren’t eaten by it bail and find a cave to hide out in.

Wouldn’t you know the cave is the lair of the fishmen? Actually you won’t know it for quite some time, because this film is rather slow and has a lot of character side stories going on before the creatures finally come into play.

There’s some gore and the creature costumes are cool, but there simply isn’t much in the way of horror atmosphere here.

THE HAUNTING OF THE TOWER OF LONDON (2022)

This feels like Steeds’ ode to the historical witch hunting films of the late 60s and early 70s starring the likes of Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, and Paul Naschy. The difference is that those films were about the real-life horror and exploitation of women, while Steeds’ film has actually paranormal themes and the sexual torture of men instead. Eek!

The plot of this period piece focuses on the discovery that two young princes have been abducted and murdered.

After their bodies are found, a man confesses to the murders and is thrown in the dungeon, where he is terrorized by the ghosts of the princes.

As supernatural occurrences persist around the castle, a young priest turns against his own faith to work with a psychic medium who has also been arrested. In doing so, the priest is haunted by his own guilt.

And what’s fascinating is that much of his guilt stems from homosexual desires. Steeds cleverly keeps the gay issue somewhat masked—just as gay men would have needed to do during this time period.

There are a few fantastically creepy horror scenes throughout the course of this slow burn featuring otherworldly specters, but things get absolutely disturbing when the priest and his male “friend” are stripped and sexually tortured in the final act for their sins. There was never a scene this gruesome in any Hammer films, that’s for sure.

If you can make it past that heinous scene, the film delves back into supernatural horror in the last few minutes. Despite this not being a favorite subgenre of horror for me, I feel Steeds nailed the retro vibe here and brought elements into the mix that none of those classic witch hunt movies touched upon. This one definitely lands a place on the does the gay guy die? page.

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