Hate spreads misery throughout the holiday season

Posted on July 19, 2022 by Daniel

One masked killer scores spots on both the Halloween and Christmas sections of the holiday horror page with this double feature.

HAUNTED HAY RIDE: THE MOVIE (2008)

This New Jersey film definitely has its cheap homemade movie charm.

The plot is nearly non-existent beyond a group of friends getting ready for Halloween night while the killer is busy hacking up tons of random people at Halloween stores, pumpkin patches, and haunted attractions. Considering the main characters don’t arrive at the scene of the crimes until there are only about 20 minutes left, their biggest dilemma for a majority of the film is that they flushed some good drugs down the toilet.

The killer calls himself Hate, screws a metal skull mask to his face, and tells his first victim, a cop, that he hates all people and feels they should all die. The description of the film references him as a “supernatural killer”, but good luck finding any explanation of that notion in the movie itself. There’s no legend built behind Hate by any of the characters—he’s sort of just there from the beginning killing anyone and everyone.

And that’s about it. There are several montages, mostly set to metal music (always a clear sign a film is made locally), and the montages include shots of the hay ride tour, a girl doing her best Britney Spears impersonation dance, and Hate chasing victims through the woods.

The lack of a cohesive plot or standout characters to carry a story makes the movie drag, even though there are plenty of cheesy death scenes. These are by far the highlight, but they’re not scary. They’re actually kind of funny and it never gets old, because most deaths feature Hate whacking a victim in the head with a machete to what sounds like the snap of a clap board. This is how you give your film a memorable element.

But as entertaining as the repetitive kills are, there’s definitely a money shot—Hate going for a total massacre on the hay ride. Awesome.

HATE’S HAUNTED SLAY RIDE (2010)

It’s a great follow-up title, but there’s no literal sleigh ride in this one—it’s all slay ride.

Picking up during the same holiday season when the first film left off, this sequel has some fun concepts and indie horror moments buried in an unnecessary two-hour running time.

A main girl and main old man that survived the first film are in the hospital. The girl’s mother is running around with a gun looking for justice for what happened to her daughter. The old man is desperate to break free of the hospital to get revenge for what happened to everyone at his Halloween attraction.

Meanwhile, a rabbi is visited by Hate (making this a semi-Chanukah horror flick as well), and he then spends the movie trying to convince the cops that they are dealing with a supernatural killer. They think the killer is the son of the cop murdered in the opening scene of the first film.

Like the first film, this one drags with not much memorable meat in terms of story. It’s unfortunate, because there’s a clever, underdeveloped plot here—Hate is pissed that Halloween is over and everyone is busy getting ready for Christmas. Awesome.

As a result, he spends the final act (aka: not enough of the film) hacking up sidewalk Santas and shoppers rushing home with their treasures. The kills are much gorier this time, but I do miss the constant clap sound of the machete striking victims, which has been replaced with a more natural, mushy sound in this sequel.

Sadly, only the string of kills at the end entertained me, and Hate even makes a flamer joke when lighting one victim on fire. He really is a hater…but at least he has a sense of camp.

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Time for another Amityville marathon…sort of…

Posted on July 18, 2022 by Daniel

The bogus Amityville movies are being pumped out fast these days, and I found four of them on Tubi, so naturally I had to subject myself to the torture.

AMITYVILLE IN THE HOOD (2021)

I’m hoping perhaps indie director Dustin Ferguson is concluding an Amityville trilogy with this third go at a movie focusing on the infamous house.

Look. I liked Ferguson’s first film Amityville Toybox, which even featured gay characters. I actually purchased it on DVD. The next film, Amityville Clownhouse, was a curious tie-in/departure that included some extra footage not used in the first film. This 70-minute third film is…I don’t even know where to start.

Drug dealers steal pot from the Amityville house.

It is implied that those who buy and smoke the pot become possessed, but we only see this once, and that possession is clearly generated using a face morphing app.

A detective is put on the case and at some point talks about the dangers of the house—the perfect excuse to pad the film with clips from Ferguson’s first two Amityville movies.

There’s barely a plot to cling to and no horror action, but the detective does decide to end the Amityville curse once and for all by destroying the house.

We can only hope that means Ferguson is giving up the Amityville game.

AMITYVILLE COP (2021)

Quite honestly, as far as I can remember (and I just watched this movie), Amityville isn’t mentioned once in this film. But that in no way works against it, because for me it stands on its own and has a lot going for it.

So what did I like about it? For starters, it’s only 68 minutes long. And this is one of those rare cases when I would have taken a longer runtime if it meant more action and a bigger body count.

Simply put, this is a Maniac Cop rip-off in which the super fun zombie cop was Black before he was killed and resurrected during a satanic ritual.

The main cop brings a comedic edge to the role. Actor Jason Toler is cute and funny, so I definitely want to seek out his other horror films (I’m talking to you, Crack House of the Dead).

Because the film is short, the zombie cop’s killing spree on the streets doesn’t last long before he sets his sights on a very specific event: the New Year’s Eve party at the police precinct. Awesome!

It’s a New Year’s Eve horror flick, landing it on my complete holiday horror page.

The action at the party is the meat of the movie and I had a good time with it. It definitely has that late 80s/early 90s horror flick vibe.

AMITYVILLE CULT (2021)

Well, the good news is that this film at least takes place in Amityville and even throws in an Easter egg…the main guy’s last name is DeFeo. Unfortunately, Amityville is in New York, but the film was shot in Texas, and at one point you see the name of the state etched into the door of a diner. Oops.

As for the movie, it’s a mostly dialogue driven plot.

DeFeo learns he’s been left his grandmother’s house in her will. He goes to the house, finds a diary, and then we learn how she dumped her husband after moving into the house, hooked up with a cult leader with a freaky smile, and had his child…DeFeo’s mother.

In current times, DeFeo meets the man his grandmother dumped, who is determined to get revenge on the cult that stole her from him, He gives DeFeo more of the backstory—in a long-winded monologue.

Eventually the cult shows up at the house, the grandmother magically reappears, and a “demon” that is just a guy in Halloween makeup and ram horns makes an appearance. It’s pure low budget silliness.

AN AMITYVILLE POLTERGEIST (2020)

It’s another basic indie slapped with an Amityville title for distribution, so there’s no mention of the town or the house at all.

This is the story of a college kid who takes a job house sitting for a woman who warns him there’s something bad in the house. The confusing part for me is that I assumed no one was going to be home, hence the need for a house sitter, yet as far as I can tell, she’s living in the house while he’s there.

He has two friends visit him frequently—a female and a Justin Timberlake clone. And he has numerous encounters with…The Grudge girl. That’s the meat of what this movie is…a rip-off of The Grudge.

There’s even a blend of The Ring thrown in, including a crawl from the television, which is odd considering TVs of the 2020s don’t ever present us with a screen full of snow…

The film is loaded with annoying, cheap and cheesy jump scares created with in-your-face ghost encounters accompanied by loud orchestral stings. The atmosphere is created by lighting the house in red and blue, and every encounter fails to reach a conclusion. The ghost will be coming for the main guy, the scene will cut away, and we’ll have no closure as to how he escaped the predicament.

Just watch The Grudge…or if you were in it for Amityville, watch an Amityville movie made before the year 2000.

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STREAM QUEEN: time for a zombie triple feature

Posted on July 14, 2022 by Daniel

I dipped into my Prime, Netflix, and Tubi lists for this trio of zombie flicks. Did any of them satisfy my hunger for some fresh zombie horror?

ZOMBIES (2017)

Tony Todd opens this flick as a detective who releases some prisoners from a cell during a zombie outbreak. The immediate action is pretty cool as they make their way out of the building fighting off the undead.

Then the movie focuses on one of the guys Tony Todd released, who has made it his goal to scavenge for survivors to bring back to their fortress.

There’s not much of a story here, just a bunch of missions. The zombies and corpses are gnarly good and the lighting is dreary and effective during indoor scenes, plus we get some gut munching, but the repetitive scenarios wear thin fast.

The highlight for me is an early scene in which the main guy has to save a woman who has been chased into a cornfield by zombies.

I really like the way the sequence is shot—the action and thrills almost feel like being immersed in a video game.

I guess the only other point to make is that one of the main plot points is that the main guy ends up reconnecting with an old flame. Even so, that detail doesn’t help give either of their characters any dimension. Note that Romero’s son gets slammed for having produced it.

VALLEY OF THE DEAD (2020)

Despite this Spanish movie being about war, despite it being a period piece, and despite it being about the military, I still gave it a chance because it’s about zombies.

Even overlooking all that, I simply could not get into this. Everything about it is derivative. If you’re going to make a cliché zombie movie, which most are these days anyway, it has to be a thrill ride, and this just isn’t at all.

A military dude and a young driver are forced to take on a dangerous mission and end up in enemy hands. I didn’t care about any of that, but at least people started turning into zombies almost immediately. Naturally the two men are forced to work with their enemies to take on this mysterious threat.

The humans quickly figure out you need to shoot the new enemies in the head, which goes to show we’ve known since the Spanish Civil War how to kill a zombie.

That doesn’t make this any more exciting. It’s just so typical. Sure the zombies look cool, but it’s all run and gun as the team of soldiers travels from one location to another. Worst of all, the big hunky bald hottie in the group seems like he’s going to be a main character, but instead his heroism gets the best of him—meaning, the zombies get the best of the movie. Blah.

BRAIN FREEZE (2021)

Brain Freeze is just what you’ve been looking for if you are going through a zombie dry spell. Checking all the right boxes for zombie flicks, it’s familiar while offering a little something new.

The social commentary set forth as we meet the main players in a pretentious, wealthy community is that they are all faux rich liberal snobs.

So how does the zombie outbreak start? A chemical company has created a fertilizer that keeps the grass lush and green at the community golf club even in the winter.

That chemical leaks into the water supply, and before long both people and pets are turning zombie.

Once the fast-running zombies bust loose, it’s nonstop action and suspense with a good dose of light humor. And what’s really cool is that the main character is a teen kid who has to navigate the zombie hordes with his baby sibling strapped to his chest.

The zombies are intense and get more and more gnarly as the film progresses…because it turns out they begin growing grass on their bodies. Ew!

To complicate matters even more for the main kid, he has to contend with twin women that work for the chemical company and are causing even more havoc as the community is quarantined. But don’t try to make too much sense of the evil corporation subplot, because it doesn’t totally add up, so just get on board for the fun zombie roller coaster ride.

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The hunt for Halloween horror for 2022 begins

Posted on July 12, 2022 by Daniel

I’m already on a mad hunt for Halloween horror flicks I hadn’t yet seen to add to the complete Halloween horror page, because sometimes they’re really hard to track down. For instance, with this trio I had to buy two on used DVD and rent the other one on Prime. Let’s see how much Halloween spirit they delivered.

THE FANGLYS (2004)

Although it pains me to give Texas props for anything, I have to give this low budget film made in Texas major props. Wannabe indie directors should look to films like this for an example of how to do it as right as you possibly can on a low budget. This is a movie that gets to the point, delivers the horror and Halloween atmosphere, keeps the pace going without any excessive, extraneous scenes of dialogue, and demonstrates a director actually planning out setup shots rather than just sticking actors in front of a camera.

Notably, The Fanglys gives me the warm and fuzzy feels because it’s a reminder of the direct-to-DVD days of the early 2000s. I miss movies like this from that era.

The opener sets the Halloween tone with a scary voice-over reciting a creepy limerick, as well as a Wolfman Jack vocal clone DJ dude hyping the spirit of the season while we are treated to festive shots of a town all ready for the holiday.

And of course there’s a first kill scene. A couple driving on a deserted road stops when they hear something scraping along their pickup truck. This scene just teases us with a glimpse of a witch’s hands and a warped witch POV.

Then we meet our main guy, who is totally preparing for Halloween night and planning a trip to a cemetery with his friends. I felt so noticed when he jokes on the phone about a friend’s taste in mail-order horror sequels. Yay!

There are plenty of classic cheap scares to get us in the mood, as well as a heavy metal strip tease dance in a second witch attack before our main group arrives at the cemetery. Then we learn the legend of the killer witch, known as the Fang Lady, and her intellectually disabled son, who skins and eats her victims. This is accompanied by some nasty visuals of him actually doing it.

The hillbilly son also keeps some sort of creature in a cage, but we only ever see that from the POV inside the cage. That might perhaps be the biggest letdown. The second letdown is that the witch herself is not as effective as she could be. The majority of her presence is simply her sitting in a chair and barking orders to her son. She kind of sounds like Norman Bates’ mother.

The hillbilly son is the horror star. He gives a great, icky performance as he runs around the woods in blue lighting and fog machine mist killing and collecting the cast to bring back to his and the witch’s isolated house in the forest. It’s during the final battle that the filmmaker does something I was kind of waiting for all along considering this film was made in the redneck of the woods—tosses in a derogatory slur. The shocker? It’s one of the main characters calling the hillbilly son a “tard”.

Interesting to note is that the deleted scenes on the DVD virtually all contain some sort of fart or shit humor. It was definitely a smart move to cut these scenes from the film, because they would have felt ridiculously out of place and cheapened the serious tone of the film.

DEATH ON DEMAND (2008)

This camera POV supernatural slasher starts on Thanksgiving and ends on Halloween! The first scene shows a man carving up his whole family on Thanksgiving instead of the turkey, and then 20 years later a reality web show contest takes place in that house on Halloween.

Essentially, this is a low budget indie take on the Halloween Resurrection concept, complete with inserts of a group of kids at a Halloween party reacting as they watch it. This would be a good time for me to reveal that I don’t hate Halloween Resurrection. I don’t hate it at all. I actually think it’s a blast.

I also thought Death On Demand was kind of fun, too, in a post-Scream era low budget slasher way.

For the setup, pretty people prepare to go on the show while the guys behind the scenes plot their production. We get the usual adolescent behavior meant to appeal mostly to straight male viewers—tits, sex, lipstick lesbians, fat jokes, guys farting. You know, the stuff that appeals to the people running this world and trying to control the moral fiber of the masses. And we wonder why we’re in such a mess.

The show starts, the kids, all in Halloween costumes, use a Ouija board to summon the dead murderer, they all go off to have sex, and pretty soon the murderer is back and hacking them up—no mask, just a psychotic looking dude.

The rundown house is a classic setting and works well here with the help of traditional horror lighting, plus, the kills are nice and gory and rely solely on practical effects. Awesome.

The kills start piling up in the final act, and we are whittled down to a final girl (yay!) that holds her own.

It’s definitely comfort food for fans of simple slashers from the 2000s, plus it takes place on Halloween, so I had a good time with it. The only bizarre aspect is that the killer’s backstory features this sudden, out of left field reveal about him snapping and killing his family because of the Abominable Snowman. Huh?

IN SEARCH OF LOVECRAFT (2008)

This curious combination of subgenres mixes Lovecraft with found footage and Halloween horror, resulting in a film that feels more like something from the late 90s than 2008.

All the Halloween aspects are focused on the first scene…and the song during the closing credits. A reporter is on the street for Halloween, interviewing people dressed in costume for a Halloween story about HP Lovecraft. It sets us up nicely for the holiday. Unfortunately, after that the only other real indulgence in the holiday is during the end credits, which roll to the sounds of a rockin’ track called “Halloween in Hollywood”.

As for our reporter, she and her crew, including a hot cameraman and an assistant who dresses like a Catholic schoolgirl, expand their research into Lovecraft. They talk to a college professor, join forces with an expert on the occult, and eventually add a practicing witch to their entourage.

The film is way too long at 97 minutes, so much of the movie is uninspired exposition about them trying to determine if there’s a cult that is trying to bring the creatures of Lovecraft’s writing into the real world. In an odd twist to the found footage concept, the lost film they discover that holds some of the answers is worn out black and white footage from a mid-1900s camera!

It’s not until there are only about 30 minutes left that the film finally settles down and finds its groove, which should have happened much sooner. The team stays in a house where a cult was believed to perform their rituals. They then begin to encounter cheesy, CGI, otherworldly creatures, which leads to my favorite part—the survivors entering a pentagram to fend off the various supernatural threats crawling their way. It’s cheap looking, but it’s still a fun finale shrouded in loads of fog machine mist.

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Five from Christopher Lee—the scary, the silly, and the sexual

Posted on July 8, 2022 by Daniel

The Eurocrypt of Christopher Lee Volume 2 just hit Blu-ray and virtually filled in the remaining gaps in my collection. With the purchase of one other film that I also didn’t have before, there’s now only one Christopher Lee horror movie that isn’t yet on a legit DVD or Blu-ray. However I checked that one out online so I can wrap up my Christopher Lee horror film viewing experience at last with this post.

UNCLE WAS A VAMPIRE (1959)

Hot on the heels of his role as Dracula for Hammer studios, Christopher Lee perfectly plays the straight man vampire in this charming little Italian vampire comedy.

Renato Rascel is the real star here, and the pairing of him and Lee made me think of none other than the shenanigans of Abbott and Costello.

Rascel is a baron forced to sell off his family castle, which is turned into a hotel. However, he stays on as a bellboy and soon learns a distant uncle is coming to stay with him.

That uncle proves to be Christopher Lee, delivered in a coffin and absolutely dying of thirst.

The interactions between the pair are quite funny, and once Rascel realizes his uncle is a vampire, his reactions and plans to take care of his familial problem give him the chance to shine. In fact, Lee is written out of the film for a majority of the running time, and despite it being a bummer that the pair doesn’t share more back and forth comedy shtick, Rascel absolutely holds his own.

If you loved The Munsters, The Addams Family, and the movies in which Abbott & Costello met famous movie monsters, you’ll definitely appreciate this one.

THE HANDS OF ORLAC (1960)

A tale as old as horror time and one that has resurfaced again and again, The Hands of Orlac (the only film not on disc yet) stars Mel Ferrer as a master pianist who needs his hands transplanted after a plane crash. Conveniently this happens at the same time that a strangler is about to be executed.

Needless to say, once the pianist is back on his feet (hands?) and his girlfriend’s cat is found strangled to death, he begins to suspect he has become a monster unable to control his new murderous hands.

Disappointingly, he doesn’t go on a killing spree. Instead, Christopher Lee plays an evil magician who hatches a blackmail plan involving Ferrer’s hand issue.

It’s a rather slow film that lacks any suspense, but Lee is fun, and there is (finally) one now common kill scene right at the end. But not even a death scene can serve as a Band-Aid for the disappointing truth behind the mystery of the killer hands. What a letdown.

THE WHIP AND THE BODY (1963)

Mario Bava proves with this film that he truly was a ground-breaker back in the day, pushing the envelope by reimagining horror as distasteful, sexual, misogynistic exploitation!

Herschell Gordon Lewis still gets plenty of credit for making nasty gore the star of horror in the 60s, but that’s not what this film is about. This is a fricking sadomasochistic incubus romance that totally objectifies women and paints them as sexual whores that love to be abused. And it does it all under the guise of a gothic ghost story, with plenty of visually arresting settings and without any nudity.

The family in a coastal castle is in total turmoil, all due to evil Christopher Lee. One of the servants worships a bloody dagger she keeps in a protective glass case…because it’s the knife her daughter committed suicide with after an affair with Lee ended in him dumping her. That’s because he was engaged to the woman who has now become his brother’s wife. This all led to Lee being banished by his father.

It’s clear upon Lee’s return that he has a psychological hold on his whole family. He intimidates them with his words and they quickly agree to let him stay.

Along with the beautiful scenery and romantic score, we are suddenly treated to an encounter on the beach between Lee and his ex while she is out horseback riding. They kiss and then…he uses her horsewhip to viciously beat her, degrading her by telling her she hasn’t changed and still loves violence. All the while, she cries out and whimpers lustfully. Wow.

The film then takes a turn you don’t expect. Lee hears ghostly voices in his bedroom at night, appears to be attacked by the window curtain, and ends up dead!

He’s gone but he’s not forgotten. For the remainder of the film, his ex sees visions of him, hears the sounds of a whip in every tree branch, and is visited by him at night for more beatings. Again…wow.

Is Lee really dead? Is he a ghost? Or is his ex just losing her mind? It all plays out as an elegant gothic horror complete with creepy corridors, dark rooms lit only by lightning outside, muddy footprints, a crypt, a corpse…it’s absolutely delicious. And so is the guy who plays Lee’s brother.

DARK PLACES (1974)

This odd little movie of deception and thievery infuses some haunted house elements and ends with a bang in a series of murders (the best part).

A man inherits an old mansion from another man who happens to have looked just liked him…which makes the unclear time jumps super confusing.

Christopher Lee and Joan Collins play a brother and sister team that wants to find money hidden inside the mansion. So not only does Joan start a romantic relationship with the new owner, but the pair decides they are going to scare him out of the house by convincing him it’s haunted.

Little do they know that the dude was recently released from an asylum and has some serious mental issues.

As he begins to hear laughter and voices in the house, he seems to also experience flashbacks to the life of the man he inherited the mansion from…a life that led to a murderous tragedy. And that tragedy has dire effects on the new owner’s fragile mental stability, which isn’t good news for Lee or Collins.

It really isn’t a compelling movie until the final act, and Lee and Collins are woefully underutilized, appearing only at the beginning and end.

DRACULA AND SON (1976)

Christopher Lee got the last laugh after playing Dracula for decades. Not only did he do a comedy version of the character right at the beginning of his run with Uncle is a Vampire, he did it once again at the end of his run with Dracula and Son.

I preferred the humor and pacing of Uncle is a Vampire over this film in its original French version, which is slow and spotty in its humor. However, Lee gets the funnier moments here—about the only moments that shine—and it’s a treat to see a smile on his vampire face every once in a while.

A lot is packed into this plot. First, the vampire impregnates a woman. After she has the baby, she turns into a vampire and accidentally fries herself in the sun. Now the vamp is a single dad. We watch as his little terror grows up, and then father and son are run out of town by the angry villagers.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the vampire ends up in London and his son ends up in Paris.

The vampire decides to take advantage of his dark allure and becomes a horror movie star. Teehee. Lee is most definitely used to good effect in this sense.

His son’s story, on the other hand, is rather lame. It’s mostly about him trying to survive as a vampire in the real world as he looks for work and…food.

The film finally takes a bit of a more interesting turn when father and son reunite. But their joy is short-lived. Before long, they fall for the same woman…who looks just like the son’s deceased mother.

You would think that plotline would make for some great comedy. It just doesn’t. It’s astonishing to me that a) this movie is even considered a comedy in its original 100-minute French version, and b) that people hate the U.S. cut. See, here’s what happened. For its U.S. release, the film was edited down to 80 minutes (yay!) and redubbed with an entirely different script that makes it a true horror spoof in the style of the Leslie Nielsen comedies of the 1980s with cheap gags, pop culture references, dirty sex jokes, and a narrator. There’s even some queer humor. 

Watching it right after watching the original cut, I think it is a bloody brilliant revamp. So glad both versions are included in the Eurocrypt of Christopher Lee Volume 2 Blu-ray release.

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Witch possession, an evil neighbor, and a Halloween haunt slasher

Posted on July 6, 2022 by Daniel

This trio of low budget indies in varying subgenres covers a lot of familiar territory, but does that outweigh the fun to be had?

REAWAKENED (2020)

This hokey little witch/possession/teen slasher feels like a cheap film you might see on SyFy around Halloween time, so don’t expect any suspense or even any cheap jump scares.

A young woman wakes up in a hospital bed and a detective is there waiting to interrogate her as to why all her friends are dead. That kind of setup always kills a majority of the suspense instantly because once the flashbacks start, there are no surprises—we know exactly who’s going to die and who’s going to be the final girl.

Anyway, we flash back.

The main girl and her friends go hiking. They come across an empty house. They find witchcraft paraphernalia inside.

One friend puts on a necklace she finds. She has flashbacks to a witch being tried and persecuted in the past and then becomes possessed by her. That possession comes in the form of white face paint, color contacts, and a hoodie.

This all drags on for almost an hour before she begins killing all her friends, occasionally using 1980s era computer generated supernatural magic effects.

Once they’re all dead and we get back to the final girl telling her story in the hospital, the witch has somehow followed her there and the killing continues for a few more minutes.

DAY 13 (2020)

This film started off feeling like Rear Window meets Disturbia meets Fright Night, and I was okay with all those derivative comparisons meshed together.

Left alone to watch his younger sister when their single mother goes away on vacation, a teen boy immediately begins to spy on a house across the street as a man and his daughter move in.

Then the teen boy gets ridiculously obsessed with the new girl’s business even though she’s standoffish to him at first. He’s persistent and tries to warn her that a) her dad is doing weird things at night, and b) her house is suspicious because it’s the oldest house on the block.

Various elements of this movie seriously cause plot holes. Plus, despite the teen boy realizing the dad is delving into satanic ritual shit and keeping his daughter prisoner, which leads to the teen boy and his buddy sneaking into the house numerous times, it’s just not as suspenseful as it should be…perhaps because it’s so predictable.

That is until the final scene. Let me clarify. The twist at the end is predictable also, but the final scene is something that has to be seen to be believed. I’ll give the filmmakers credit—if you’re going to try to make your derivative film as different as can be at the last possible second, this is the way to do it.

HURT (2018)

This is such an odd approach to a slasher/Halloween haunted attraction flick. It also sprinkles in a dash of backwoods horror and incorporates a commentary on military PTSD. There are moments that work, but just know that you are not getting into a heart-pounding joy ride of horror here. This is a moody slow burn that only really ramps up the thrills in the last twenty minutes or so.

A crucial point to make first is that if low budget movies that are shot so dark you can barely see anything drive you nuts, you will not be happy with this one. I was really frustrated by it because I so wanted to be able to better immerse myself in what was being offered here, especially considering that Halloween themed horror flicks make me giddy. Naturally, this one earns a spot on the holiday horror page.

I was immediately confused by the opening and how it’s supposed to relate to the remainder of the film—a general disconnect that plagues this movie right through to the final scene.

We meet a straight couple living in a sleepy town. He has just returned from serving active duty, she’s trying to embrace his return and support him while getting into the holiday spirit. But her love for Halloween at first makes her out to be somewhat of a psycho due to the dark approach she has to celebrating the season. This is one of those disconnects I was talking about, although in the end I feel like this film is passing judgement on those who live for the horrors of Halloween!

Anyway, after way too much time is spent demonstrating to us just how low-key the couple’s life is, they decide to go to their favorite Halloween haunted hayride event. She is much more enthralled with the morbid entertainment than he is, and it clearly has a negative effect on him.

This is when the film gets even weirder. The couple gets separated due to them having a fight, and the female eventually returns home…which is where all the horror truly begins as she is eventually chased for the final act by someone in a mask. Despite the minimal number of characters, we do at least get several bodies to count, but while this final sequence saves the movie by at last delivering some suspense and intense situations, it’s still a challenge to add all the pieces together—and the excessive darkness only amplifies that challenge. Good news is that the final sequence actually takes place the next morning during daylight hours….

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TUBI TERRORS: car creeps, backwoods freaks, and urban exploitation

Posted on June 30, 2022 by Daniel

I found a hint of satisfaction from each of these flicks, but I’ve also been down all these roads before.

NO SUCH THING AS MONSTERS (2019)

The title No Such Thing As Monsters is deceptive—makes it sound like it’s going to be about a kid with night terrors or something like that. Instead, this is actually one for fans of psycho backwoods family horror movies. It checks all the right boxes.

It definitely had me on the edge of my seat at first, as it did a fantastic job setting up the tension. Inevitably, however, it did fall back on all the usual tropes, so it began to lose steam halfway through.

What’s notable is that the female member of the main straight couple is missing an arm and wears a mechanical arm most of the time. She’s also reticent about going camping with her man to a spot in the woods where his family would go when he was young. As with much of what goes on here, we never get clarification or reason behind why she’s so paranoid.

Soon after they arrive, a van full of people shows up, one of them a grown woman in a dress and wearing a mask. I don’t care how friendly the other members of the group seem to be at first, when you’re camping in the woods, the arrival of a “mask girl” is all you need to know to get the fuck out of there.

Instead, the couple starts to hang out with them. That leaves us just waiting for that moment when the group turns on them. This is the good stuff that keeps me twitching.

Like I said, it’s kind of typical after that. The virile young couple is separated, kept in chains, used for the purpose of expanding the family…you know the backwoods drill. It’s not gory or particularly violent or disturbing, but even so, if you need a fix of this kind of horror, I think this one is worth a watch.

THE DARKNESS OF THE ROAD (2021)

This particular type of twist ending film was becoming common about ten years ago to the point that every new one thrown our way was obvious from the start, but I realized when this one started that I suddenly hadn’t seen one in a while. Yet they’re still as obvious as they always were if you’ve seen a bunch of them before.

I guess you could consider this a surreal, slow burn, psychological horror flick. I’d describe it as Silent Hill in a car.

A woman wakes on a desolate road after having a nightmare that she blew her brains out with a gun. She’s in her car with her young daughter. We know nothing about their backstory.

When she arrives at a gas station and experiences some odd and creepy occurrences, we immediately start wondering if she stepped (or drove) into the Twilight Zone. She picks up a female hitchhiker she meets there. Is she inviting the hitchhiker into her nightmare, or vice versa?

Once on the road, they get into a car accident and fall unconscious after almost hitting something that darts across the road. When they awake, the main woman’s daughter is missing and some sort of neon blue humanoid being seems to be pursuing them as they look for her.

The film traps us in a disjointed loop of odd things happening to the two women as they repeatedly get in and out of the car. The rare appearances of their supernatural stalker are creepy cool, and the inside of the car even goes through Silent Hill-esque transformations, but if you pretty much guess what’s going on all along as I did, it essentially waters down much of the dread you feel for the characters.

CHICAGO ROT (2016)

This supernatural revenge exploitation flick doesn’t have much in the way of plot, but it definitely delivers on the grind house sleaze, violence, and gore.

A not quite human guy known as The Ghoul, a vigilante seeking revenge for the death of his mother, goes on a brutal rampage while being pursued by a detective. That’s about it. So what kind of debauchery do we get as The Ghoul takes a journey through a seedy city to wreak havoc?

–Weird music video segments that set the tone in the heat of the action.

–a visit to a gay sex party bring thrown by The Ghouls sleazy, psychotic buddy (scoring this film a spot on the does the gay guy die? page)

–a consultation with a drag queen psychic.

–a nasty, internal viewpoint of a guy being stabbed with a knife…and then the guy’s knife wound being fucked with a dildo.

–a vicious fight with a guy wearing an elephant mask…or is that a woolly mammoth?

And finally, by the end of this bizarre flick, which totally reminds me of the splatterfest Adam Chaplin, it started to feel like a Mad Max/Tron mashup.

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TUBI TERRORS: torture porn, a throwback slasher, and a rape/revenge sequel

Posted on June 27, 2022 by Daniel

I’m continuing to conquer my watchlist on Tubi, and it was a mixture of subgenres with this weekend triple feature.

DON’T CLICK (2020)

The whole moral message of Saw totally pinpoints one naughty behavior in this film—watching porn.

Some dude jerks off to an online pay-per-view video channel of bound women being tortured by a masked man.

When his roommate comes home, he finds the computer on the fritz, gets sucked into a cyber lair where his friend is tied up, and is then telepathically controlled by a deformed dude in a suit and tie who speaks like a woman.

What follows is bouncing around between the main guy being forced to slowly mutilate his tied up friend, scenes of how they became hooked on the online porn thing, and clips of the sexual torture videos. This movie is literally torture porn. It’s very much like a Saw film, right down to the confusing timeline. But if it was trying to guilt me into never watching porn again, it totally failed.

The situations the guys go through and the baddies that administer the torture were just such low energy that the horror simply didn’t come through. Not to mention…Don’t Click is clearly a warning to misogynistic hetero male behavior.

DEATH RINK (2019)

I was so drawn into Death Rink, which is only 75 minutes long, because the vibes it gives off immediately reminded me of the 1989 classic Intruder, only instead of a grocery store, this film takes place in a roller rink after hours.

We meet the staff as they clean up for the night, smoke pot, play around on the rink and in the arcade, and talk about a kid who died in the rink years before. Uh-oh.

The confusing thing is that the death is referenced as having taken place in the eighties, but the film itself feels like it is taking place in the eighties. There are no signs of modern conveniences, and the staff keeps getting prank calls on a landline.

The problem here is that once we get to know the cast, we just keep getting to know them. Seriously, the first kill doesn’t come until 45 minutes in. The film is entertaining enough when the basic death scenes kick in, the killer wears a mask and a hoodie, and the atmosphere is eighties awesome, but overall the horror elements don’t pack a punch, and the denouement goes for confusing twist upon twist reveals in late 90s slasher revival style.

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE: DEJA VU (2019)

Normally I wouldn’t cover an installment of this franchise because they’re just not my thing, but I wanted to touch upon this one for several reasons. First of all, it’s a direct sequel to the original cult flick by the original director, and brings back the original actress, Camille Keaton. Second, it also stars two of my favorite horror queens—Maria Olsen as a backwoods matriarch, and Jamie Bernadette as the original heroine’s daughter.

While I don’t like rape/revenge flicks, I actually think this is a worthy continuation/sequel story. I also think director Meir Zarchi played it smart in a) not trying to recapture the exact feel of the original film, instead making this a very contemporary horror film, and b) not trying to top the violence and brutality of all the sequels that have been made in recent years.

The biggest issue I have with the movie is that I can’t comprehend what Meir was thinking in making it two hours and 30 minutes long. The fluidity of this decent plot could have had more of an impact if the runtime had been slimmed down to even an hour and forty-five minutes (which would still be too long for me). It is tough sitting through this for 150 minutes, not because of disturbing content, but because it drags.

Even so, the plot really worked for me. The original heroine has made a career as an author by writing the story of her experience. While Camille Keaton appears in the first portion of the film, this is really about her daughter, and I’d say it’s the best performance I’ve seen yet by scream queen Jamie Bernadette.

Turns out the rapists from the original film had family, and Jamie ends up in their neck of the woods. Uh-oh. It takes quite a while to get to the fucked up rape scenes, and while they are not as horrific as some of the scenes in the more recent sequels, Jamie’s performance definitely makes you feel them. The fact that I watched this the day after Roe was overturned made the sequences weigh even heavier on me—my mind kept thinking that there are women who will now have to go through what this woman is going through in this movie and then be forced to carry the result of the vicious, relentless attack.

On the flip side, there’s an aspect of this sequel you might guess right from the start that is an understated message from a whole different side of the Roe vs. Wade debate.

I even like that the film has several stages that keep Jamie’s fight going (I just wish the journey was shorter), and best of all, for the first time ever, the title finally gets literal props in the movie…more than once!

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DIRECT TO STREAMING: circling back around to some favorite indie directors

Posted on June 24, 2022 by Daniel

Every once in a while I discover a movie in my watchlists is from an indie director whose films I’ve covered in the past. Turns out there were four movies this time from three different directors.

TOOTH FAIRY: THE LAST EXTRACTION (2021)

Director Louisa Warren is back with the third installment of her killer toothy fairy franchise.

As always, Louisa knows how to deliver on the kill scenes, and the gnarly looking tooth fairy is in top form, but there’s nothing much new being introduced here beyond some extra backstory of the tooth fairy legend that doesn’t add much considering we’re really just in this for the slasher action (at least, I am).

After a fun multiple-kill opening scene, we meet the guy who was a kid in the first film, a young man in the second film, and is now an adult with a grown daughter. He still suffers major tooth fairy PTSD.

He takes his daughter and her friends on a trip into the countryside, they get their hands on a book with a ritual involving the tooth fairy, they read the damn thing out loud like idiots, and then the killing begins…55 minutes into this 90-minute movie.

Sure it’s low budget and it’s repetitive if you’ve seen the other installments, but I’m a fan of Warren’s film-making style, so I was entertained as usual.

DOCTOR CARVER (aka: Conjuring the Plastic Surgeon) (2021)

Bonus! There were two from Louisa Warren on my watchlist. This one was originally titled Conjuring the Plastic Surgeon. It’s a clunky title, so I prefer Doctor Carver. While this is a low budget indie and therefore may not appeal to everyone, it’s important to note that just below the fun, cheesy, icky slasher surface is a whole lot of commentary on the predatory practices of the modeling industry, how naïve young women fall victim to it, and how even other women play a part in participating in the damage being done to young females.

After a young model is told by a photographer that surgery will help her career—as will the casting couch—her self-esteem hits rock bottom. She sees an opportunity for free cosmetic procedures and goes for it.

She becomes one of a handful of girls brought together at a house for a spiritual approach to surgery—more like satanic approach. While participating in a “prayer ritual”, they conjure “Doctor Carver”.

As the girls struggle with their body images, the deformed doctor consults with them one at a time, and there’s plenty of Argento lighting to set the tone. In classic indie horror form (and in my opinion), the special effects are much more disgusting than in Hollywood horror. If you’re squeamish, the procedure scenes will make you turn away, because they don’t hold back in magnifying in graphic detail just how horrific plastic surgery can be. Blech.

The pace does tend to be slow at times, and as is often the case with Warren’s films, much of the best horror action with the baddie is packed into the final act.

THE JACK IN THE BOX: AWAKENING (2022)

The Jack in the Box was a fun throwback to early 2000s supernatural slashers, so I was excited to see a sequel has been released. Director Lawrence Fowler delivers once again, nailing the style, tone, look, and atmosphere of that era with a film that not only delivers on slasher action but also, as with many sequels of that time period, delves more into the legend and backstory of the killer.

An elderly, wealthy woman is dying, and her one wish is that her son hunt down the jack in the box that was linked to a series of murders a few years before. Why? Because she knows she can have a wish granted by the box—she wants her health back so she won’t die.

But there’s a catch. In order to get her wish, she has to deliver six victims to Jack. She’s much too frail to get out of bed and do the dirty work herself, so she convinces her son to do it.

The cool part of this sequel is that we see the son struggling with throwing people under the bus…or into the box in this instance. And we watch as his attitude morphs and he becomes evil as well. However, I have to wonder why he even agrees to do what his mom wants. If this old rich bitch dies, wouldn’t that just benefit him?

The slasher elements are fun once again, and the jack-in-the-box is still a fantastically freaky baddie. The director reminds us that he has definitely studied films that make great use of light, shadow, camera angles, and timing. As is often the case with these backstory sequels, the exposition is okay but doesn’t add much to the point of the movie, which of course is kill, kill, kill!

Either way, once I watched this and it reminded me that I’d seen the first film a few years back, I decided to order both films on Blu-ray to add to my collection.

SPIDER IN THE ATTIC (2021)

Scott Jeffrey is the director of The Curse of Humpty Dumpty and a bunch of other indie horror flicks I’ve covered on my site, so I didn’t hesitate in checking out his latest about a killer spider.

This is an interesting blend of subplots. A reporter about to lose her TV show needs a fresh, gripping story. She and her team follow a lead about a Nazi researcher studying generic engineering which leads them to a house with…you guessed it. A mutant spider.

Approximately the size of a cat, this creepy crawler is cool looking and will definitely give you the willies if bugs bug you, but the CGI factor is there. In order to mask the issue of the CGI looking overlaid onto the footage, the film tends to be very dark (therefore, I lightened this still shot so you could get a good look at the little bugger).

The film plays out like a typical creature feature of this sort, with the cast roaming around a dark house while the spider lurks in corners and occasionally snares victims in its web of evil. I’d like to snare this guy in my web of evil…

There’s more than enough drama revealed about the characters through dialogue that doesn’t really add much to the story (and not surprisingly slows down the pace), and I’d say there are too few victims, which also hurts the pacing.

But when it comes down to it, the movie is all about the interesting twist as to the creature’s origins and the pay-off in the final frame. We’re talking hokey 80s horror level zinger ending, and I was so there for it.

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Who’s afraid of an alien abduction?

Posted on June 22, 2022 by Daniel

It’s a trio of alien encounter films that gave me the creeps when I first saw them. Do they still hold up?

COMMUNION (1989)

Author Whitley Strieber (Wolfen, The Hunger), went the nonfiction route when he became convinced he was abducted by aliens and wrote the book on which this movie is based. Communion comes from the director of delicious 80s horror trash like The Beast Within and Howling 2 and Howling 3, and while it starts out much more eerie and unsettling, it becomes another 80s disaster.

Christopher Walken plays Strieber, who takes his family to their house in the woods. A strange occurrence involving a lot of light saturating the house spooks the family overnight, but there’s little recollection of what transpired.

For the rest of the film, Walken and his wife go to various doctors, therapists, and group meetings to determine what may have actually happened, because Walken begins to lose his shit, from getting pissed at a little girl for playing a prank at a Halloween party to envisioning everyone on a bus with big bug heads.

The more flashbacks we get inside Walken’s mind (through hypnotism), the more the movie spirals out of control, with scenes featuring classic big-eyed aliens and blue dudes that look like a mix between Jawas and the critters from Phantasm.

Every alien sequence begins to feel like a drug trip, almost as if the filmmakers decided they had to make the footage live up to Walken’s natural weirdness. Let’s face it—only Walken could make an anal probe scene feel like a campy alien/human gang bang.

By the time he started dancing with aliens in the final act, I realized I must have repressed my memories of this movie even deeper than people who’ve actually been abducted repress their memories.

One interesting thing of note is that in this story, Strieber mentions seeing an owl before the abduction, an element that plays a bigger role in The Fourth Kind below.

THE FOURTH KIND (2009)

I recalled being kind of freaked out by this movie when I caught it on cable over a decade ago, so with Communion and Fire in the Sky hitting Blu-ray, I figured I should round out my collection of films with disturbing alien abductions themes. This film isn’t “boo” terrifying, but it sure is a psychological freak out.

I really like the way it’s structured. Milla Jovovich introduces the film as herself being in a documentary of re-enactments focusing on people in Alaska who all experienced alien encounters in their homes.

Events are often presented with a split screen—on the left is the “real” footage of the “real” person (it’s fake) experiencing what the re-enactment is portraying on the right. It sort of gives the film this hybrid found footage feel at times.

The Milla character’s story is intriguing. She had a horrifying experience in which her husband was stabbed to death by a mysterious figure while she was in bed with him, but she can’t remember any details. It adds a frightening dimension to the usual alien abduction concept.

The whole movie involves several deaths, making thing even more unnerving considering alien abduction stories don’t usually come with murder as a side effect.

Milla sets out to figure out what could possibly have happened, in part by interviewing other people in her area who experienced similar occurrences. Rather than abduction situations, most of the time the footage makes these experiences come across more like possession.

It’s all creepy in its own rights, but absolutely nothing is clarified by the time the film concludes, and everything is left open-ended.

We never do see an alien, but the focus on everyone who is abducted thinking that an owl has been visiting them repeatedly is chilling. As you start to realize that the owl face eerily resembles the face of a classic depiction of an alien as described by those who’ve encountered them, you begin to feel like you have seen an alien in the movie even though we never do.

FIRE IN THE SKY (1993)

Loosely based on a man’s claims of alien abduction, Fire in the Sky really freaked me out when I saw it way back in the 90s. Revisiting it, I was surprised to find that a majority of the run time (the first 70 minutes) focuses not on the man abducted, but the small group of friends that saw him abducted and how they were treated by a public that didn’t believe their story of his disappearance.

The great cast includes the likes of Robert Patrick, Henry Thomas, Craig Sheffer, and Henry Thomas, with James Garner as the man who interrogates them.

Various flashbacks reveal what led up to the abduction, and that scene is a spectacle in itself, drenched in red in the forest at night as the men encounter a spaceship while in their truck and their friend, played by DB Sweeney, gets out for a closer look.

All the melodrama about how they’re treated by the locals and how it affects their lives is okay, but the money shot is the phenomenal sequence that comes after they find Sweeney five days after he goes missing. Following his reemergence, he is suffering severe PTSD, which eventually leads to the payoff—what is still one of the most detailed and frightening alien abduction scenes ever.

There is no gentility in how the aliens treat Sweeney. He is put through a nightmarish conveyor belt of alien spaceship horror before the aliens, totally indifferent to his shrieks of terror, subject him to gruesomely invasive procedures.

It’s still a hard scene to watch and it is reason enough for me to consider this the most traumatic viewing experience of these three films.

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