HULU HORRORS: body horror, witchcraft, and a dark apartment

Posted on October 4, 2022 by Daniel

I checked out three horror flicks on Hulu dealing with women in peril, and although I expected nothing from any of them, one was a satisfying surprise.

THE ACCURSED (2021)

This bewitched family film ends up feeling like it would have the most impact on the tween market except for one factor…it’s kind of boring despite the cheap, weak scares.

Two sisters are cursed by another woman at the beginning of the film, so they kill her and get rid of the body using a ritual that’s supposed to bury the body and the curse.

22 years later, the son of one of the sisters is getting married, and the curse claws its way back from the dead to destroy the family.

Ugh. Other than a bunch of attack vines in the garden, a lot of talking, and family members glaring at each other suspiciously, not much happens here.

There are some cutaway kills that make this feel like a pre-slasher horror flick from the early 1970s, and when there are about fifteen minutes left, the buried bitch from the beginning finally returns from the dead to offer some tame terror. There’s even a hokey final frame scare.

It’s not the worst witchcraft movie, but it probably would have been better if it were a movie in like 1972…

HATCHING (2022)

This Finnish film is an odd little blend of a variety of subgenres, so it very often feels like you’ve seen it all before…yet, you’ve simultaneously seen nothing like it. The basic premise is familiar, but the presentation is kind of out there and rather brilliant.

A tween girl is being pressured to be a successful gymnast by her mother, a vlogger who has created this illusion that she has the perfect family.

The girl finds an egg out in the woods, brings it home, and secretly nurtures it in her bedroom. It begins to grow…very big. And then it hatches. Let me just say that there are a lot of metaphors about becoming a woman, having control of your own body, being a mother, and being a controlling mother in this film. The good news is that all the messaging doesn’t get in the way of the fact that this is a horror movie. See? You can elevate horror without letting the doors close before the horror can get on board.

Anyway, out of the egg pops a surprisingly large, nasty looking bird that needs to learn to fly. And our young girl is going to help push it out of its nest. This is where we get the good old concept of a child whose secret monster friend begins to kill off anyone it feels is a threat to the child. Wahoo!

And yet there is so much smart exploration of the life trajectory of being a female weaved throughout fast-paced chills and thrills.

And then the film morphs…just like the bird. Would you believe it turns into a body horror flick? And it’s pretty damn fun and freaky…without leaving the elevation down in the lobby.

ROOM 203 (2022)

This movie was a dud.

It’s about two female friends that move into a creepy apartment together, and one feels very protective of the other because she already helped her get over a drug problem.

There’s loads of walking around in the dark and stinger sounds to make the movie “scary”, because all you get otherwise is an intriguing stained glass window and a dark hole in the wall with a mysterious necklace in it.

The former druggy starts acting weird and sleepwalking, the other girl begins investigating the history of the apartment, this starts to feel like The Toolbox Murders remake for a while, and then it starts to feel like just another possession film for a while, only without any suspense or scares.

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A vampire comedy, a sitcom classic remade, and killer fish women

Posted on October 1, 2022 by Daniel

I kept things interesting with a mix of oddities when I chose my latest triple feature, so let’s see how that worked for me.

HOLLYBLOOD (2022)

This Spanish teen romance horror comedy is cute and charming, but you definitely have to hang in there a little too long before it finally kicks into high gear. It starts off strong with some sort of creature attacking teen boys by the school pool.

Then we meet our main boy, new to the school and attracted to a girl obsessed with a Twilight-esque franchise. To get closer to her, our main boy goes to a premiere of the latest movie (clips of which are deliciously homoerotic).

Through a series of unplanned circumstances, he convinces the girl that he is a vampire. Little does he know that a) there’s a geeky vampire hunter kid determined to prove he’s a fraud, and b) there’s an actual vampire that has no intention of allowing a fraud to overshadow him.

The characters are charming and funny, and there are plenty of gay humor jokes, but the actual vampire action doesn’t kick in until 61 minutes into the film, with only 26 minutes remaining.

With lots of time to make up for, the cast of characters combines forces quickly to go on an action-packed and quite funny vampire hunt.

So much great horror comedy energy is crammed into the last twenty minutes it leaves you wanting more.

THE MUNSTERS (2022)

It’s easy for me to be more lenient on this Rob Zombie film than many others because I had absolutely no expectations and was more than willing to give him a chance at trying his hand at something new…a silly, colorful, family-esque remake of a classic black and white monster comedy series.

Visually this take on the beloved show was total eye candy, from the sets to the setup shots. I couldn’t get enough of what I was seeing. Zombie truly captures the look of cheesy, campy horror-themed children’s comedies of the 90s and early 2000s for sure.

However, if you’re expecting the TV show translated into a full-length feature, forget about it. This is a prequel story in which Lily falls for Herman despite Grandpa’s objections.

Therefore, there’s no Eddie, no Marilyn, no Spot. The family doesn’t even get to the house on Mockingbird Lane until the last half hour of an overblown 110 minutes, the first of many problems that plague the movie.

The other major problem is that this has an absolutely hollow plot. I just kept waiting for some significant storyline to take hold, but nothing ever did. Lily falls for Herman, a semi-famous rocker with a very alternative look, they date, Grandpa objects, and eventually they move to the house on Mockingbird Lane.

There’s very little more to it than that…and it’s stretched out to nearly two hours. And I can’t help but wonder if this new backstory is somehow a bit of a biographical look at the relationship between Rob and his wife Sheri Moon.

In general, all three main actors (including Sheri Moon as Lily, of course) pull off their roles well, without doing mere impersonations of the original characters. However, as vibrant and cartoonish as they are, they simply lack the charm of the original characters. They’re just not lovable. They feel flat and stiff, due in large part to an absolutely dull script that offers very little in the way of laughs. My guess is that there’s not even enough silly humor or situations here to mesmerize children.

Having said all that, there were a few highlight for me beyond the visual presentation. The love between Herman and Lily grows during a montage of them singing “I Got You Babe”. Some other classic movie monsters make guest appearances. The final act takes place on Halloween. And Cassandra Peterson plays their real estate agent. Yet even that perfect casting is wasted. She tells Lily over the phone that when they meet she’s going to be in costume so they shouldn’t be shocked by her appearance. You’re probably thinking what I was—the jokes would practically write themselves with her dressed as Elvira and looking like a Lily clone in the process. Well forget it. It doesn’t happen. She’s dressed as a witch instead. It’s a huge missed opportunity for Cassandra Peterson to save this whole damn movie.

PIRANHA WOMEN (2022)

If you come to a film directed by Fred Olen Ray called Piranha Women with this poster art looking for anything other than those teeth tits coming to life, then I have no interest in your opinion about Piranha Women.

I came for the teeth tits and I got them.

Piranha Women runs less than an hour long and gets right to the points. A really gorgeous guy meets a chick at a bar, she takes him home, and she takes him for a dip and a dick in her pool. Ouch.

Next we meet our main girl. She has a fatal disease so she goes to a scientist doing experimental work with fish DNA. Uh-oh.

Meanwhile, her man becomes the main suspect when his boss turns up dead. He also has to become his own detective to figure out who killed his boss and where his woman has disappeared to.

The teeth tits are the best, but if I have one complaint it’s that they don’t get enough action. The body count is disappointingly low, but the final battle with the piranha women is low budget fun.

 

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A supernatural sequel, a teen fave goes horror, and a slasher at a cabin in the woods

Posted on September 30, 2022 by Daniel

Ghost hunting brothers are back for more, cheerleaders must die, and victims go out on a high note in this trio of flicks. Were any of them worth a watch?

ANNA 2 (2019)

The Crum brothers, who collectively write, direct, and star in their movies, are back for this sequel to their film Anna, in which ghost hunters stole a haunted doll with dire consequences. It’s referenced very briefly at the beginning of this film, which, despite hanging onto the same title, doesn’t focus on the doll at all.

This time around the boys join forces with another team of paranormal investigators to start their ghost hunting business up again. At first they are totally setting up a scam scenario, but the possession case they encounter seems frighteningly real. This early segment of the film features the Crum brothers dabbling more in the humorous side of their horror.

They then move on to their main goal…an abandoned amusement park. This is where the film takes us into darker Crum territory—totally nightmarish surrealism with no clear plot line but oodles of horrific visual stimulation as each member of the group is almost immediately drawn away to have his or her own hellish, trippy experience.

Essentially that’s the plot, if you can call it that. The Crums truly are masters at low budget, horrific eye candy, and knowing that’s what I should expect from them, I don’t go in with any hopes of a meaty narrative.

As I’ve said before, their films tend to feel like you’re trapped in Silent Hill, which is always enough for me. Although it would have been nice if there had been some bare Crum buns again as there were in the first Anna.

BRING IT ON: CHEER OR DIE (2022)

Not only is this a slasher installment of the long-running cheerleader franchise, it also manages to squeeze its way onto the Halloween horror movie page…barely.

In classic slasher movie tradition, there’s an opening bullying and death scene revolving around a cheer squad in 2002.

20 years later, the high school cheer squad wants to practice on Halloween weekend, but the principal won’t let them do it on school grounds.

Sooooo…they decide to break into an abandoned school to have a slumber party and practice.

Foreshadowing in the shadows…

But someone dressed as the school mascot has other ideas for them.

As far as the teen vibe and teen humor go in the first half of the film, I was left wishing the writers of the original Bring It On had been hired for this first horror installment, because it totally misses the mark—very flat with a cheap tween TV show tone.

On the bright side, the kills kick in promptly once the kids split up, and they come rapid fire. They’re also never simple. For instance, the first death is by noose…oh wait…by pom-pom…or is it by falling lamp? This killer never settles on just one weapon per victim.

And yet despite the complex kills, there’s a low energy feel to much of this movie. It’s also disappointing that a movie that takes place on Halloween weekend barely taps into the holiday. There are pumpkins scattered around the background of scenes before the kids get to the abandoned school, one brief scene of trick or treaters, and two kids show up at the abandoned school in costume, but that’s it. Considering this is premiering on SyFy as an original for October, I imagine tying Halloween into the plot was a requirement so they just did the bare minimum to accomplish that.

The film does finally become a load of silly fun in the final act when all the surviving kids begin running around the school screaming and using cheerleading moves to dodge killer attacks and eventually to fight the killer. It’s a shame the campy tone was all jam-packed into the finale instead of sprinkled throughout the runtime. Even the obligatory gay cheerleader kid saved his most fabulously funny behavior for the final act, landing this one on the does the gay gay die? page as well.

At least we got a slasher version of Bring It On at last, but how amazing would it have been if instead we got Gabrielle Union as the killer, finally back for her ultimate revenge, hacking up the little white bitch daughters of Kirsten Dunst and Eliza Dushku?

REQUIEM FOR A SCREAM (2022)

I’m all in for kids getting hacked and slashed at a cabin in the woods, and this Tubi original delivers on that. Requiem for a Scream isn’t the scariest flick you’re going to see, but if you ate up all the direct-to-DVD slashers that were pumped out in the early 2000s following the Scream craze, it delivers the basic elements needed to keep you entertained.

After an opening scene with some torture, some murder, and a masked killer making a girl sing for her life, we meet our main girl and her friends, who sneak away to party at her family house in the woods.

The main girl is essentially running away from her problems…she is in the midst of a conflict with her father, who is suffering from grief over the death of her sister and is pushing her to become a singer as her sister was going to be.

There’s definitely a bit too much filler—including a game of “Never Have I Ever” used as a vehicle to paint a picture of each character. Since there aren’t a lot of kids at the house and the kills take a while to kick in, this ends up feeling more like a home invasion film than a slasher. Plus, the singing aspect of the killer’s motivation is a little underplayed considering the movie description makes it sound like it’s the focus of the kills. Even so, the killer action does deliver.

However, there is one thing that’s quite frustrating about the film, and it involves gay stuff and spoilers concerning gay characters, so don’t read ahead if you don’t want to know…

**SPOILERS** – the film has a diverse cast, but here’s the problem. The 2 gay guys, one Black and one white, the only guys at the cabin, admit they’re gay for each other with a kiss. Awesome, right? Well, minutes later the Black gay guy gets killed, of course. Worse? When there are only ten minutes left in the film, the white gay guy steps up to fight the killer, and does a damn good job of appearing like he’s going to be one of the heroes and one of the survivors…but how often does a mainstream slasher let that happen?

This is why I write gay horror books with no straight characters in them. Sure, gay guys die in my books, but there’s still a whole city full of gays left over when they do…

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NETFLIX AND CHILLS: a trio of Asian horror flicks

Posted on September 28, 2022 by Daniel

Creepy women and evil curses. What more could you ask for from your Asian horror?

UMMA (2022)

I only have myself to blame for watching this knowing it was going to be exactly what I expected it to be, but at least it was only 82 minutes long and it starred Sandra Oh and Dermot Mulroney.

Umma feels like one of the many supernatural tween scare movies that came in the wake of The Grudge and The Ring back in the early 2000s. In particular it reminds me in some ways of Mama.

In other words, it’s a movie loaded with scenes that are way too dark as Sandra constantly walks around her farmhouse at night experiencing quick edit shocks that we can’t even really see and that just stop short as if they were only illusions.

Ugh.

Sandra learns her mother died. She acquires something of her mothers. She begins to experience supernatural occurrences. The backstory of what transpired between her and her mother unfolds.

She eventually tries to rid herself of her mother once and for all for closure, but of course the dead mother has other plans that involve Sandra’s teen daughter, too.

It’s just sooooooo generic.

INCANTATION (2022)

Another film about a mother trying to save her daughter from a curse, this one is a hybrid of Asian horror and found footage that features familiar, satisfying elements of both subgenres. Problem is the decision to present a nonlinear story, as is almost always the case, adds nothing to the film beyond making it a confusing mess.

I’ll just give a brief chronological overview. A young woman did a ghostbusting show with her boyfriend and classmates in which they filmed themselves proving various myths and superstitions false. They went to a village and broke the rules of a ritual that is important to the locals and things went horribly wrong (the found footage segments were the best part for me in terms of delivering scares).

She then goes for some mental rehab for a while, during which she places her daughter in foster care. When she comes out and gets her daughter back, strange occurrences around her home and her daughter speaking about seeing “baddies” lead her to believe that her daughter is now cursed. So she asks her viewers online to participate in prayers with her that will help her break the curse.

It’s a fairly basic plot for a movie that runs almost 2 hours long, but it definitely has some creepy moments. And while the curse plot is reminiscent of the old Sadako/Samara curse from the Ringu/Ring movies, there are elements of the details of this curse that give the rehashed concept a bit of a fresh angle. And speaking of fresh angles, props to this film for giving us this angle after a car crash scene…

THE BRIDGE CURSE (2020)

It’s back to that throwback Ring/Grudge vibe, but this one totally goes for it without any meaningful mom shit to get in the way. It’s a pure girl ghost coming back for revenge flick. Wahoo!

The Bridge Curse is the one to watch if you truly miss early 2000s Asian horror. It’s about a girl at a college who was wronged by a boy and then jumped off a campus bridge into a lake. Now there’s an urban legend about crossing the bridge—if you dare to look back while doing so, the ghost will get you.

Naturally, kids feel the need to test the legend by doing “bravery initiations”.

Much like The Grudge movies, this one jumps between stories of kids who have died after doing the initiation in the past as a young woman in the present day investigates the deaths of more students.

It’s everything you could want in this kind of Asian horror flick, with a creepy-crawly ghost girl pursuing them around campus and delivering some eerie atmosphere. As derivative as it is, there are some fun surprise twists concerning the curse during the denouement. I’m also convinced one scene is inspired by that true story about the young Asian woman who was found dead in a hotel water tower after acting very strange on elevator security camera footage.

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PRIME TIME: werewolves, a shadowman, and a humorous anthology

Posted on September 20, 2022 by Daniel

I was satisfied with two out of three with this selection from my Prime watchlist, so let’s find out which ones.

WEREWOLF CASTLE (2021)

I’m always there when director Charlie Steeds makes a new horror flick, and considering I purchased his last flick, A Werewolf in England, on DVD, I was psyched to discover his latest is another werewolf film.

Werewolf Castle is more of a medieval action horror flick, with a young man becoming the unlikely hero when his village is attacked by a pack of werewolves.

No CGI here—these are awesome, old school werewolf costumes and bloody effects. And there’s no cloaking these werewolves in shadows or dark; many of the action scenes take place in broad daylight.

After a village massacre, a team is sent on a journey to the castle of the king to ask for help in taking down the beasts. The cute leading boy, who was busy having sex in a barn during the attack (and showing off his booty), offers to be the navigator.

His worth is questioned by his peers, but as their adventure continues, he proves to be a major asset and steps up to take on the vicious werewolves each time they attack.

It all leads to a final battle that is not only bloody and violent…it’s darkly sexy.

AWAKEN THE SHADOWMAN (2017)

Eh. I don’t even know why I bother to watch these supernatural specter movies. They’re all the same—countless moments of the apparition appearing in the background with a stinger sound to deliver a jump scare that is followed up with absolutely no action. I’ve said it before and I’ll continue to say it…by about the fourth time this happens in these movies, the supernatural entity has lost all its potency and you no longer feel a hint of fear.

Anyway, a dude is called to his mother’s home by the brother he’s been estranged from because the brother sort of stole his ex.

He now has his own woman and a baby, but the tension is still there.

The mom (played by Jean Smart) has gone missing, and the brothers slowly begin to work together to figure out what became of her by talking to various weird members of the community.

The dark demon silhouette is creepy the first time, then it just gets thrown in now and then to keep reminding us this is a horror movie since nothing really intense happens for a majority of the film.

In the end this kind of gives off hints of Rosemary’s Baby.

A COMEDY OF HORRORS, VOLUME 1 (2021)

Boldly labeling itself as volume one, A Comedy of Horrors proves to be an anthology I would totally welcome a sequel to. It might be a little uneven, but overall it really captures the dark, semi-humorous tone of classic anthology flicks of the 80s.

The wraparound alone is a blast, with a wicked teacher sitting down to read her students some scary stories…

1st – a clown party turns into a massacre in 1988. That’s cool, but this story is just a little too silly for my tastes. In the present day, the town in which history begins to repeat itself is fully inhabited by clowns, including the two cops on the case. There are some funny moments and some slashing, but this is just bizarre overall.

2nd – this one reminded me of the movie Benny Loves You. A dude with a puppet has a date, and she’s obsessed with his puppet…which he tries to warn her is actually a monster. You can imagine where this is going.

3rd story – a campy bachelorette massacre tale, this one turns into a battle to the death as a group of girls gathers in a house to celebrate one girlfriend’s big day.

4th – this is my absolute favorite of the bunch. A movie actor finally scores a role as a superhero and goes to get fit for his costume. The special effects dude turns out to be a bit of a psycho who uses the molds he casts as voodoo dolls.

And finally, it’s back to the wraparound for the teacher to give her students a lesson they’ll never forget.

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BOUGHT ON BLU AND DVD: the 70s, 80s, and 90s

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Daniel

Made for television in the 70s, lost in the 80s, and the sixties sequelized in the 90s. Let’s take a look at three more I just added to my collection.

TERROR OUT OF THE SKY (1978)

This is actually a sequel to the 1976 made-for-TV movie The Savage Bees, which I probably saw on television when I was kid. I purchased Terror Out of the Sky for an anal, obsessive reason—it was the only horror movie in which Grizzly Adams starred that I didn’t yet have in my collection. Ah, Dan Haggerty, with that delicious beard and feathered 70s hair.

Anyway, now that I own and have watched this one, I feel no need to buy the first film. This isn’t even a direct continuation, features none of the same characters or actors, and is just total dullsville.

Scientists engineer evil queen bees and accidentally send a bunch of them out to beekeepers to add to their hives.

It’s up to Dan Haggerty, who plays a pilot, to fly the heroes of the film to various locations to retrieve the queens before it’s too late. There are a couple of bee attacks along the way, and a surprisingly gnarly shot of a post-attack victim’s face, but it is all just totally mundane.

The big climax has killer bees wreaking havoc on an outdoor family event, entrapping a bunch of kids in a school bus, and a mission that requires a beekeeper to be lowered down onto the bus from a helicopter to attract all the bees onto him so he can then transport them to an enclosed environment.

It’s all about as 1970s made-for-TV as it gets…except for that post-attack face. EEK.

THE KISS (1988)

I’ve waited so long for this one to get a Blu-ray release, but it just isn’t happening, so I finally picked up a Spanish DVD release…which means one of the boutique labels will probably announce a Blu-ray release any day.

The Kiss is one of a long line of movies about a distant relative or stranger that comes to live with a family and proves to be a witchy woman.

In this case, two sisters are separated as children. Years later, one sister gets a call from the other sister. Soon after she dies in an awesomely gruesome car accident, her sister shows for the funeral, and the husband invites her to stay with him and his teen daughter.

It’s a pretty basic plot. The mother’s sister seduces the husband. People close to the family start dying mysterious deaths. The daughter begins to figure out that her mother’s sister is some sort of witch.

But what sets this film apart is the hilariously cheesy and freaky stray cat minion that attacks the family any chance it gets.

It totally steals the show, along with the slug thing that slithers out of the witch’s mouth during the final battle to chase the daughter around the pool in the backyard.

The most laughable moment of all is when the family friend tries desperately but keeps failing to drag the daughter out of the pool as the slug gets closer and closer…when there’s literally a ladder the daughter could use to just climb out of the pool right next to her.

THE BIRDS II: LAND’S END (1994)

It’s astounding to see people still shitting all over this movie. I get that it’s a sequel to a Hitchcock classic, but let’s put things into perspective here. It came out over thirty years later, and it was made for TV, so why would you even watch this at all if you were expecting some sort of high-quality sequel? Then consider that it took only a little over a decade for us to get from the masterpiece Jaws to Jaws: The Revenge, which is the equivalent of The Birds 2. Then take into account that Jaws existing inevitably led us to six Sharknado movies, and people watched the fuck out of those.

In other words, The Birds 2 is exactly what you should expect. It comes to us from Rick Rosenthal, the director of Halloween II and Halloween: Resurrection, and it does just what it’s supposed to do—rehashes the original, throws in the crucial cameo, ups the gore, and leaves things open-ended for another bad sequel.

So a guy comes with his wife, daughters, and dog to an island for the summer. They’re still grieving the loss of their son. The wife starts getting too chummy with a photographer played by James Naughton. Tippi Hedren, the original queen of The Birds, has a small role as a woman who works at a general store.

And of course, the birds start acting weird. They land on swings and jungle gyms a lot. They seem determined to attack the main guy as much as possible. I can see why.

And they even seem to be smart enough to get revenge on anyone who knows too much about them and smart enough to cut phone lines when people try to call for help.

Yes, it’s all that bad.

Even worse? The family dog gets attacked and dies.

There’s none of the tension and mesmerizing camerawork from Hitchcock’s original, but the situations from 30 years before are mentioned, and the final act is a blast. Everyone on the island flocks to the docks to get away, and it becomes total chaos as the birds make a meal out of all of them. Plus, some dumb ass shoots a bird with a flare gun and causes a chain reaction of explosions in the process. Most unforgettable is when the family hides under a flipped boat; the screaming daughters are more irritating than the screeching birds pecking at it.

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BOUGHT ON BLU: killers and creatures of the 60s and 70s

Posted on September 14, 2022 by Daniel

This trio of flicks I added to my collection comes from 1969, 1976, and 1977, and includes a psycho killer, Bigfoot, and a melting man!

HORROR HOUSE (aka: The Haunted House of Horror) (1969)

I had to pick this one up because people online say it’s an early slasher, and, more importantly, it now ensures I have every horror movie in which Frankie Avalon stars (that would be this one and Blood Song).

The late sixties party vibe is groovy, and a bunch of kids take off to check out an old spooky house William Castle would envy, but I was a little disappointed in the lack of a body count.

These kids go on this excursion. Awesome. A creepy old dude is basically stalking one girl and follows her there. Cool. The kids split up using candles for light to explore the place. Yay. They decide to have a séance. Excellent.

Then, one guy gets slashed in a seriously stylized kill scene vibrant with bright red blood. Nice.

When the friends decide to get rid of the body for fear they’ll be accused of the murder and it will ruin their lives, I was so thinking I Know What You Did Last Summer.

But then they go on with their life and no one comes to kill them. WTF? One person gets murdered because they go back to the house, but everyone else is just paranoid since detectives start asking questions about their missing friend.

Eventually the final act saves the film. Three of the kids decide to return to the house to try to figure out who the killer is, the killer is revealed, the killer’s motivation is explained, and someone gets stabbed in the crotch!

But a crotch kill isn’t enough. I still wish there had been more bodies.

CREATURE FROM BLACK LAKE (1976)

While all the other Bigfoot movies were taking themselves so seriously during the Sasquatch panic of the 1970s, Creature from Black Lake captured the same backwoods atmosphere while having fun with the concept instead.

It wouldn’t be a Bigfoot movie if it didn’t begin with a professor giving a lecture on the creature. After class, two college students decide to head off into the woods to research the creature.

There’s subtle humor along the way as they go on their adventure, which makes them all the more likable.

They spend much of the film meeting up with various rednecks, who give them eyewitness accounts of Bigfoot, which we see in flashbacks.

The cool thing about this movie is that there are plenty of teasing shots of Bigfoot, and most of them are during the day. However, there is never really any full Monty facial shot, so I did the best I could to grab a still from a fleeting moment…

The climactic hunt and battle with Bigfoot takes place in the final chapter, and that’s at night. It’s also a pretty exciting sequence for a low budget indie.

THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN (1977)

I’ve never seen a man melt so fast. Seriously, The Incredible Melting Man wastes little time in pushing its creep to skeletal levels of goo.

An astronaut returns from a space trip gone wrong, ends up in a hospital, wakes up, and then flips out and tears off all his bandages to reveal his melting condition.

This leads to a totally trippy, so 1970s horror scene of a nurse running and screaming in slow motion down a hall that looks like…a kennel?

Anyway, a scientist is assigned to find the missing melting man, who leaves a trail of drippings and dead bodies as he continues to ooze and kill random people until finally staking out the scientist’s house.

This is just icky, eerie fun as our melting man gets grosser and grosser while on the run. There’s simply not much more to this movie. It’s basically just a slasher with killer POV, stalking, gore, home invasions, and a melting killer. I couldn’t ask for more.

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I took a trip to the Fear Pharm…

Posted on September 13, 2022 by Daniel

…and then went back for more! After numerous marathons of “smart horror” in my Shudder watchlist, I seriously needed to actually get back to enjoying horror again with simple fun, and this double feature did the job. I’m definitely going to be adding these two films to my personal collection.

FEAR PHARM (2020)

Yay! A humorous indie throwback to early 2000s slashers that takes a basic premise (kids visit a haunted maze), gives us what we expect, and yet also throws in a few silly surprises to deliver pure fun. If I have one complaint it would be that despite the IMDb description describing Fear PHarm as a Halloween film, the holiday is never referenced in any way. Pumpkin and hay bale displays at the entrance to the corn maze are the most you get, so I’d say it’s a good fall season horror flick more than Halloween specific.

Things start off perfect, with a naked woman being chased by a bunch of masked killers and getting gruesomely hacked up.

15 years later, we jump right into some sexy times between two of our four attractive main kids.

Not only are they all likable, they decide quickly to head off to the haunted maze.

Next we meet the crazy family that owns and runs the place. Unlike the usual backwoods nuts, these are smart entrepreneurs.

While some of the family members always wear their haunter costumes (including a muscle hunk in a mask), the patriarch is a sexy daddy, and the “slutty” daughter is the “scientist” in the family.

After introductions are done, our four main kids learn they’ve earned a chance to win money if they get through one of several secret mazes. They decide they can quadruple their chances of winning…by splitting up!

As the sun starts to set, the cast is treated to some cheap scares before shit gets real. The bummer here is that there are only four kids and you really like them all and don’t get enough time with them, so you hate to see them die. But die they must.

Good chases, good gore, some tame but still nasty torture, plenty of understated humor,  a great assortment of psycho killers, an awesome final girl, and a campy, unique killer motivation make this one a blast, so naturally I had to check out the sequel.

FEAR PHARM 2 (2021)

Considering both films are less than 80 minutes long and this continues the story of the main girl from the first movie, it makes sense to just watch the first film and the sequel as one long movie.

As is often the case with sequels, this one gives us some backstory and more over-the-top plot points, offers a higher body count, brings different psycho members of the family to the forefront, amplifies the characteristics of each killer, and pumps up our main girl with even more fight.

There are some story elements involving the family’s business, but they’re not all that important.

The film is well aware of that and therefore doesn’t take long to just line up a whole new bunch of kids for the slaughter.

This time it’s a gaggle of girls running through the maze, and they ensure that there are plenty of chase scenes, fights scenes, death scenes, and gore.

Basically this sequel makes up for the shortcomings of the first film by giving us more of everything we couldn’t get enough of with only four main characters the first time around.

Fear Pharm 2 is fast-paced slasher action from start to finish, and the main girl rox once again.

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SHUDDER AND SHRIEK: wiping out the watchlist

Posted on September 12, 2022 by Daniel

It’s the final purge for now, with the last three films I had in my Shudder watchlist at the moment, so let’s get right into them.

NIGHT’S END (2022)

Night’s End is one of those films with a story told predominantly through video chat. It also has a fantastically cheesy horror denouement that takes me back to horror of the 80s and 90s. Unfortunately, you have to sit through 70 minutes of video chats to get to those awesome final ten minutes.

A reclusive dude who lives in a building that only has one other apartment, which is vacant, is trying to become an internet sensation in any way he can. I immediately became disconnected from this character because his hobby is collecting dead birds that he keeps in plastic bags in his freezer and displays all over his apartment. WTF?

And then…he starts freaking out when the dead birds start falling off the wall and appearing around his apartment. Insert palm to forehead emoji here…

His viewers begin to suggest maybe his apartment is haunted. There are knocks on the door, he hears the door opening and closing, and he sees weird stuff in the camera on his videos.

He turns to friends and strangers online as he researches the paranormal. He learns of an axe murderer that lived in his apartment. And eventually, a handful of the people he chats with throughout the film sign on all at once to talk him through a ritual to rid himself of his ghost, which is when all hell breaks loose.

If you’re in the mood for some cheap last minute thrills, there is some footage of the leading man shirtless in the middle of the movie to help kill the time it takes to get there.

ON THE 3RD DAY (2021)

It was only after skimming through this movie again as I grabbed screenshots for this post that I realized that while it’s such a disjointed mess the first time around, it can be appreciated a little more once you know what it was going for.

A woman has a car accident while driving with her young son at night, eventually wakes up in a hospital, and can’t remember what happened or where her son is. The film then takes us on an out of order journey revealing what happened.

Unfortunately, it tosses in scenes of the guy who was driving the car that hit her holding another woman hostage in a box.

To confuse matters more, it also throws in scenes of him having nightmares. Plus, there are what feel like fever dreams the main woman is having as she is hypnotized and recalls incidents leading up to her getting in the car with her son. Argh!

In the final chapter, the truth is revealed, and it involves a creepy cool version of a classic monster.

There’s also a twist that only has an impact if you go back and watch the movie again, because it’s simply lost in all the chaos of the way the narrative is handled here, which is a damn shame.

MOLOCH (2022)

Moloch is a bit too slow and low energy for my tastes, however, it has some tense moments and an unnerving tone and will most likely get under your skin if you’re into movies about local legends and curses.

A woman lives with her young daughter, her ill mother, and her father, who believes that something is inevitably coming to get them due to a family curse.

Following the death of a homeless man near their home, the family experiences a terrifying home invasion that triggers a series of mysterious situations.

The mystery of the curse plaguing them unfolds very slowly, so an intense escalation of cultish events in the final act when the truth comes out feels a bit jarring. It’s also the most thrilling part of the film other than that earlier home invasion.

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SHUDDER AND SHRIEK: a haunted house, vampire urges, and an eerie island

Posted on September 2, 2022 by Daniel

I guess the upside is that this wasn’t another marathon of grief porn like the last three Shudder horror flicks I posted about the other day. The films in this trio are at least distinctly different, so let’s get into them.

HOME WITH A VIEW OF THE MONSTER (2019)

This film is broken into chapters, but they shouldn’t have been labeled chronologically considering there’s a damn jumping timeline and you’re almost sure to not understand what’s going on if you’re not warned ahead of time. Even if you are warned going into it…well…good luck trying to figure everything out.

I’ll try to describe it as best as I can. A young straight couple buys a house really cheap because it’s haunted. The house starts to have a negative effect on their relationship. They decide to go on a vacation and rent the place out.

They rent it to a guy and girl who have just met and are kind of having a spur of the moment fling. It so happens that one of them is looking to commit murder, and the other is looking to commit suicide.

The two plots eventually come together when the couple that owns the house comes home early and meets one of the renters, who is wielding an axe and says there’s a dangerous force in their house.

It’s all mysterious and moody, but it’s also quite convoluted, so how much you enjoy it depends on your level of patience for this kind of attempt to break the storytelling mold.

DEAD & BEAUTIFUL (2021)

Another Shudder movie, another selection pushing me closer to cancelling the service. It seems like any movie Shudder has that’s actually horror was made before the year 2000, and I own every single one of them on disc. All their new stuff is either bland elevated horror or artsy films that barely resemble horror.

What can I say about Dead & Beautiful? I don’t intend to say much, so let’s start with this—it’s basically the Nicholas Cage film Vampire’s Kiss with a bunch of pretty rich kids thinking they’ve become vampires.

We get plenty of neon lights and stylish visuals, plus a sensual montage of shirtless guys dancing in slow motion.

Other than that it’s all talk for over 90 minutes as these richies try to embrace being vampires, which mostly consists of them not even having the actual desire to suck someone’s blood (which should tip them off that maybe they aren’t even vampires).

OFFSEASON (2021)

As I was watching Offseason, several movies kept coming to mind—Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, Messiah of Evil, and Silent Hill. Actually, the Silent Hill movies and video games came to mind. This could easily have been marketed as Silent Hill 3.

A woman and her man are called to a small island by a cemetery caretaker who says her mother’s grave has been desecrated. Once they arrive, they find the cemetery, but not the caretaker.

The goal is to get off the island before a drawbridge goes up, but they miss their opportunity. They somehow get split up and she spends much of the movie alone, running through isolated, foggy locations and encountering creepy people.

The atmosphere is fantastic and there are some tense scenes, but it really is just a total clone of Silent Hill. The empty streets are ominously foggy. All the stores and building are vacant. The horn that blares through town is the warning that the drawbridge is going up, and the drawbridge replaces the fractured streets that keep you trapped in Silent Hill. The main girl even has to find a specific item to help her operate the panel that raises the drawbridge. Ah. Survival horror.

However, there’s one crucial aspect of Silent Hill missing—no freaky creatures. There are finally some suspenseful run-ins with supernatural beings, but they’re mostly crammed into the last half hour.

The highlight for me was the most intense, Silent Hill-esque moment of all; she’s trapped in a dark room with just a flashlight as something begins to morph into a monster in the corner. Eek!

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