It’s thrilling to have a series focusing on queer horror produced for a major horror streaming service, and I even discovered a few movies and books that I simply had to add to my collection after watching Queer for Fear on Shudder. Yet in an odd way, the 4-episode series feels somewhat hesitant to fully bring horror out of the closet while arguing that horror has always been queer.
Just a very brief background about this project from what little I know. The creative team behind it changed hands after interview videos had already been gathered from dozens of queer horror creators, including myself. All of our footage was scrapped and the documentary went in a different direction. There’s a whole community of queer horror influencers that know each other and have helped bring together a large queer horror fan base through social media and various in-person events, so it’s kind of sad that instead of using interviews with all of these people who are in the trenches every day exploring, discussing, discovering, and creating queer horror, the production team behind this series opted to drag out many of the same old generic queer faces like Lea DeLaria, Bruce Vilanch, and Michael Feinstein (really?), as well as queer “scholars” most people will not recognize but who throw around all the right collegiate vocabulary and just repeat the textbook queer horror theory arguments that have been made a million times before.
Add to that directors with no background in horror (and in some cases, no background in directing at all), and it at times feels that this is more of a pandering project made by Shudder to cash in on a movement that’s actually happening despite no input from the people involved in putting this project together.
Even so, hang in there, because it gets better after the first episode, with more notable horror names chiming in later on, as I’ll outline in my breakdown of what you can expect from each episode.
Episode 1
Episode 1 covers the coding of queerness in classic gay fiction by authors such as Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and Oscar Wilde, and explores the monster as the symbol for the queer. Naturally it delves into the real or imagined queer identity of these authors in order to fit the narrative of queers being the founders of horrors. Sigh. It’s okay to just be honest and identify that there were actual queer contributors to the horror genre alongside the likes of Poe and Lovecraft just as there are queer contributors to society in general instead of making a claim that queers created horror.
Cassandra Peterson proves to be the most famous horror face in the first episode, and she gets much less screen time than anyone else. There is also a drag queen injected into the mix for some camp value, but because everyone else is so damn sterile and stiff, her shtick feels jarring and out of place.
Episode 2
If episode 1 and episode 2 had been streamlined and edited down into one episode, it would have been a really strong start for the series. Episode 2 is a much better installment, but only covers two directors in an hour’s time. First there’s a look at how director James Whale (The Invisible Man, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Old Dark House) embeds queer camp into his films and how queer viewer’s identify and sympathize with his ostracized monsters.
Then the focus turns to Alfred Hitchcock having worked with lots of queer talent and brazenly yet subtly presented queer characters in his films. He is also considered for portraying queer men as loathing women, which naturally pivots the conversation to his ultimate queer identity issue film—Psycho. Most interesting is Anthony Perkins’ son discussing how that role as Norman Bates affected his father’s career and life, how that extended into his resurgence as Norman Bates in the 80s sequels, and his eventual death of AIDS.
Episode 2 is notable for going a little more high profile horror with some of its speakers, including Don Mancini (creator of Child’s Play) and Heather Matarazzo (Scream 3, Hostel 2).
Episode 3
This episode is one of my faves. It’s all about transformation horror and how being terrified of something inside of us we can’t control, usually sexuality we can’t suppress, simply has to be read as queer horror. Thing is, this could be applied to the sexual awakening in everyone, regardless of gender identity or orientation. When our hormones begin to rage, we change, we transform, we perhaps no longer recognize ourselves, and we are even made by society to feel shame about our desires, no matter where we land on the sexuality scale.
Even so, this episode beautifully explores the parallels between queer identity and monster transformation. There’s a segment on the Cat People franchise being totally lesbian (I couldn’t believe no one made a comment about cats being pussies). The string of “I Was a Teenage…” films is looked at as grooming films in which the older scientists convert kids into monsters. Invasion of the Body Snatchers films are wonderfully dissected as fear of conformity. And this episode notably covers plenty of the great 80s transformation creature features. Awesome.
Episode 4
The final episode focuses on women owning their sexuality becoming the monster simply because femininity as power is frightening to the mainstream.
It begins with a discussion of the real Elizabeth Bathory and movies and novels based on her…and the possibility that she desired women and therefore consumed them. One interviewee even finally uses the cheap cat as pussy joke. Yay!
The episode explores lesbian desires in films like Rebecca and The Haunting, quickly covers all the softcore lesbian vampire flicks of the 1970s that were meant for the male gaze, and then moves into the lesbianism and bisexuality of 80s horror females in films like The Hunger, The Lair of the White Worm, and Vamp.
What’s refreshing here is that there are more interviews with women of color, including Rachel True (The Craft), Rutina Wesley (True Blood), and Tawny Cypress (Yellowjackets).
While I really like the approach to films from the 90s and beyond focusing on queer female characters wanting to take over the bodies and lives of straight characters in this final episode, it does exactly what I feared the series would do…strays from queer fear. In an effort to fit its narrative while relying on well-known film titles, it walks the line by dipping into suspense thrillers and then strays even farther away from the horror genre, making the second half of the final episode come across more as a show about the portrayal of lesbians on film at the turn of the millennium rather than a queer horror documentary.
Fortunately for me, that makes for a perfect segue into my final thoughts. While this was a “history” of queer horror, what the world could use is a “we’re here and we’re queer for fear now” series that celebrates the genuine representation of queers in horror in the past 50 years, both in mainstream and indie horror, and not in coded form. Just browsing the homo horror movies page and does the gay guy die? page on my site, both of which focus solely on films with gay male content, it’s staggering to me how many films with blatant gay content went unmentioned in this series. How about a series focusing on how queer characters are represented in more contemporary horror films, whether as the monsters, the victims, or the heroes? The movies are out there—this series just wasn’t ready to tackle the task of amplifying the prominent queer voices in horror now.
And since all the questions I answered for the original vision for this documentary were left on the cutting room floor, I decided to upload my video responses to YouTube just for fun and so everyone might get a sense of the other direction this documentary could have gone—although there’s also the possibility my answers would have been rejected for clashing with the angle that documentary was going for as well. Heh heh. I would encourage other queer horror contributors who participated in that original plan to do the same. If you do, shoot me a link to your video or channel on YouTube and I’ll share them on my Boys, Bears & Scares social media. Here are my clips, broken into two parts.
Sure the big deal this year was Hocus Pocus 2, but what other family and family-unfriendly treats did the season have in store? I’m covering everything I’ve seen so far this October, with a few more are yet to be released, so I’ll add them to this list as they hit on the way to Halloween. And don’t forget to check out my complete list of Halloween horror movies on the holiday horror page.
CURSE OF CROM: THE LEGEND OF HALLOWEEN (2022)
If you just want to revel in the holiday spirit while watching a group of kids being terrorized by a demonic creature created with practical effects, this charmer is the movie for you. I really hope it gets a physical disc release so I can add it to my Halloween movie collection.
The opening street shots make it clear that the filmmakers wanted autumnal authenticity and waited until the actual season to film these crucial setup moments.
Our main girl works food delivery and has a very strange old man customer. Little does she know that his “family” issues are going to become her problem.
When a freaky creature begins appearing outside the windows of her and her friends at night (shrouded by plenty of eerie Halloween color lighting and fog machines), they must uncover the truth behind a curse placed on the old man’s family that is now going to terrorize their whole town unless they can put a stop to it.
And it involves doing a ritual on Halloween night to send the demon back to where it came from…
An instant Halloween fave for me. Doesn’t hurt that this cutie looks like a younger version of The Rock.
THEY SEE YOU (2022)
This one comes from the director of the gritty Halloween slasher The Wicked One. I almost did a blind buy of They See You on DVD, but I’m glad I rented it instead, because it’s really not a Halloween winner for me.
It attempts to capture the spirit of 80s horror flicks and Halloween horror flicks, but it’s incredibly dull for a majority of its running time. A major problem is that the main characters are simply not charismatic–they seem like a bunch of uninterested, bored kids living in a small town (which is what they are). As a result, every scene, every word of dialogue, and most interactions and reactions are just flat.
Three brothers are left alone on Halloween, and in a classic 80s moment, hop on their bicycles to the sounds of a synthesized score. They run into their bullies, and then decide to steal a mysterious magic board from a shop owned by two monster hunters. These two monster hunters are the highlight of the film and bring all the personality, but sadly they’re underutilized.
As you’d imagine, the brothers and their friends use the board. This unleashes some ghouls from another dimension…who are just guys in masks. Neon Maniacs this isn’t.
That brings us up to this problematic timeline, with little going on in between:
40 minutes in the ghouls show up at their house
57 minutes in the ghouls remove their masks and aren’t all that ghoulish underneath, so they’re even less frightening once they put the masks back on for the rest of the movie
77 minutes in there’s a gory kill–the first gory kill
With only about twenty minutes left, the only real highlight of this film proves to be a brief but awesome massacre when the ghouls crash a Halloween party. Bummer.
CURSED FRIENDS (2022)
If there’s one thing this movie does right, it’s tap into the nostalgia for crass comedies of the early 2000s. References to the era abound, fart and male genitalia jokes offer hit and miss funny moments, and the soundtrack offers up songs like “I Want You Back” by *NSYNC and “I Wanna Be Bad” by Willa Ford.
The film is also ripe with problems. The first is that so much of the humor doesn’t land. There is some funny stuff here, but not enough to keep up the pace and energy. As a result, the cast tries to overcompensate by being even more colorful and charismatic with their performances, which just comes across as loud and obnoxious at times because the material they’re delivering doesn’t back it up.
But the bigger issue is the inability of the film to stick with a plot. Our main girl comes home to try to land a job and reconnect with her friends. In a flashback we see that 20 years ago they scored a weird book that predicts the future from none other than Kathy Griffin as a witchy woman whose doorbell they rang while trick or treating .
In the present day, they find the book and suddenly things start going wrong for each of them. They begin to realize they are cursed and have to figure out a way to break the curse.
Sounds pretty straightforward, but the movie is all over the place. Scenes most often feel like a string of skits rather than a cohesive storyline with a trajectory. The cast moves from one location to another merely to give us nods to a variety of horror subgenres (slasher, possession, cult, etc.) with no real relevance.
It’s quite tedious, and not even the Halloween theme, some campy moments with special guest star Joey Fatone as himself (who reminds us every time he’s in a comedy that he should be cast in more comedies), and a few horror comedy elements can bring it together.
This is a Comedy Central original, and it most definitely feels like a messy TV movie. The diverse cast will most likely annoy the woke-whiners (Black girl, gay guy, etc.), but the fact is this type of casting has been a thing for at least two decades and has only become an issue since conservatives made woke a dirty word. If anything, the woke-whiners should be cheering on the fact that the minorities are presented with the traditional, tired stereotypes conservatives can appreciate.
I just find it tragic that the film sets up this whole scenario where the gay dude ends up in an occult ritual surrounded by naked men–and then seems to demonstrate that the scene was not written by a gay guy, because the raunchy comedy places it could have gone if it had been. However, it still lands this film on the does the gay guy die? page.
SPIRIT HALLOWEEN: THE MOVIE (2022)
Going into Spirit Halloween: The Movie, you need to realize that this isn’t an adult horror movie. This is a Disney/RL Stine style Halloween spook flick with a family friendly vibe, and as such it definitely succeeds. It could easily become an annual viewing selection along with the likes of When Good Ghouls Go Bad, Hocus Pocus, And Ernest Scared Stupid.
And of course, it’s also a treat for Spirit Store fandom. Surprisingly, it’s not much of an advertisement for the store’s products, mostly because the store has become heavily focused on movie licensed products in the past few years (It, Halloween, Hocus Pocus, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Trick ‘r Treat, etc.). It would be promoting everything but its own brand if it fully stocked the store in the movie with its current inventory.
The premise is basic and perfect for this kind of flick. Christopher Lloyd was a greedy developer who intended to kick a woman off her land, so she worked some magic on him.
The film then does just what these throwbacks to the vibe of 80s kids movies do–shows a trio of boys riding their bicycles through a town drenched in fall foliage. Awesome. The boys are on the verge of relinquishing their grip on childhood, and trick or treating is for kids, so they decide to sneak into a Spirit Halloween store that pops up in a creepy lot and spend the night on October 31st.
The fun begins when they unleash Christopher Lloyd’s spirit and he begins to terrorize them by possessing one store display monster after another.
It’s definitely a blast watching Lloyd voice a bunch of animatronic ghouls, and the kids are all capable of carrying the film. Not to mention, the film delivers just the right amount of Halloween scares and suspense the whole family can appreciate.
Adding to the fun is Marla Gibbs as a creepy grandmother, and Rachel Leigh Cook, who doesn’t look like she’s all that much older than 20 years ago yet is playing the mother of a teenager. Weird.
THE CURSE OF BRIDGE HOLLOW (2022)
It’s like Netflix heard Spirit Halloween was going to make a movie in which all the figures in their store come to life and decided they would do one better by making a movie in which all the figures on people’s lawns came to life for Halloween.
The Curse of Bridge Hollow is the absolute best Halloween movie of 2022 for me. It does Spirit Halloween one better. It has all the holiday magic Hocus Pocus 2 lacks. It stars Marlon Wayans, who tones down his A Haunted House style of comedy just enough to not steal the show from everyone else, particularly the girl playing his daughter, who totally kicks monster butt.
Halloween spirit abounds as the family moves into a new house in a small town where everyone loves Halloween. The daughter soon learns of an urban legend that haunts the town…and accidentally unleashes it, which causes the decor on neighbors’ lawns to start coming to life.
Loads of humor, chase scenes, Halloween spirit, and monster battles keep the pace racing as father and daughter try to track down a spell that will put the curse they’ve unleashed to rest.
The variety of ghouls and creeps is fantastic, the soundtrack includes 80s tracks like “Somebody’s Watching Me”, “Freaks Come Out at Night”, and “Highway to Hell”, there are plenty of familiar comedy faces in supporting roles, Kelly Rowland gets a chase scene, there’s an awesome haunted maze chase scene, and there’s a perfect reminder that the zombie cry of “Brains!” never gets old.
I want this movie released on Blu-ray immediately. And I was also reminded that Marlon Wayans has become such a DILF I need to pull out my A Haunted House Blu-rays and watch his sweet ass bang Annabelle again.
TERROR TRAIN (2022)
Any remake these days has a conundrum. If it strays too far from the original plot, fans revolt. If it is a basic scene-for-scene remake, people say, “Why did they even bother?”
Terror Train essentially goes for a rubber stamp remake that just mixes things up a bit during the denouement so fans of the original won’t guess the killer.
The major changes? This is a Halloween party on a train instead of a New Year’s Eve party, landing this film in a different section of my holiday horror page. There are more people of color as compared to the mostly white cast of the original, and there’s a fleeting gay kiss just to piss off the anti-woke crowd…which also earns this film a spot on the does the gay guy die? page.
And instead of a Groucho Marx mask, which would mean nothing to a young modern audience, the killer opts for a menacing clown costume. Eh. They really couldn’t come up with something a bit more original?
Speaking of costumes, most of the standout costumes from the original film are represented in the remake.
Every major memorable scene from the original is recreated. And even the car in which Jamie Lee Curtis battles with the killer at the end of the original is replicated for the remake.
The suspense scenes and kills are pretty good, but if you’ve seen the original film they don’t quite have a major impact because you’ve get that “been there, done that” feeling. It’s the final chase and battle—the only time the film somewhat changes things up—that stood out to me, in large part because the killer gave a campy good psycho performance.
I even discovered a new now wave song for my Future Flashbacks show: “Neon Affair” by Splize.
10/31 PART III (2022)
I was a big fan of the first 10/31 anthology, and Part 2 had its moments, but there’s a noticeable downgrading in quality with each new installment. This third entry has little in the way of unique or intriguing tales, there are no quality scares or suspense, and there’s not much in the way of atmosphere or even Halloween fun.
The movie runs 85 minutes long, and the first 8 minutes are comprised of some fun faux horror movie trailers. Then the horror hostess form the previous two films introduces four new tails.
1st story – a guy setting up a Halloween haunted attraction in his house buys a mummy figure from a thrift shop, and it comes to life and goes on a murderous rampage.
2nd story – every time people move into a particular house, they are killed by a figure all in black.
3rd story – adult friends in costume decide to sneak into the home of a mean old man and terrorize him. Instead, they are killed off one by one by someone in a mask.
4th story – this is the only story that doesn’t simply line up a bunch of victims to be killed by a threatening figure. Okay, it does do that, but at least the plot is slightly more interesting than the others. A group of female friends gathers to kill something they’ve captured that we can’t see. It escapes. It’s the shortest tale, but it’s nice and gory.
Overall, the tales feel more cheaply produced than the previous films with little effort made to write anything that would stick with you.
HALLOWEEN ENDS (2022)
I don’t usually cover blockbuster horror flicks and franchise titles, but considering this controversial installment literally made me laugh out loud a few times despite taking itself very seriously, I figured I’d jump into the fray.
For starters, there will most assuredly be true lovers of this bizarre latest final chapter of the never-ending saga, there will be diehard Halloween and Michael Myers fans who will adore anything with those names attached to it, and there will be Jamie Lee Curtis fans who believe she can do no wrong so therefore Halloween Ends will be a perfect film by default. But there are also sure to be a bunch of outspoken, online voices with oh so edgy opinions that will be contrary just for the hell of it or to gain attention and hits on their social media platforms by praising this installment to high heaven, claiming it’s daring and innovative and not just another recycled Michael Myers plot.
It’s not innovative whatsoever. It essentially dumps Jamie Lee Curtis into a Rob Zombie white trash Halloween installment (there are even loads of inbred kids that look like the offspring of Rob and Sheri Moon Zombie running around Haddonfield) then mashes it up with Satan’s Little Helper. Indeed, Michael Myers, indiscriminate killer of anyone who gets in his path, takes pause this time around and decides, “This one who has invaded my lair is different. This one shall be my apprentice!” Meanwhile, when Freddy Krueger made a body/brain agreement with Jesse almost forty years ago, people shit all over it. Really, what hope is left for the world of horror when Michael Myers is like, “I’m getting too old for this shit. You do it”?
Halloween Ends also seems to give a lot of nods to Halloween 4, which has been escalated to the level of masterpiece thanks to this newest trilogy showing us how to really ruin a franchise. The house Laurie now lives in with her granddaughter Allyson is reminiscent of the house from Halloween 4. And considering Michael has been MIA for four years, perhaps the old blind man who snagged him from the river at the beginning of Halloween 5 is the one who tucked him away in a sewer pipe for all that time…yet no one is the wiser to his presence in Haddonfield…except for an old homeless man that reminded me of the old blind man from Halloween 5.
Anyway, Laurie is determined to let go of the past and not feed the evil–she’s so zen, even if everyone in town is like, “Bitch, this is all your fault!” Laurie seems to be really coping with all her Halloween tragedies of the past and not even concerned that Michael is still out there somewhere (neither is anyone else). Laurie is all smiles, totally in the Halloween spirit, has not a single booby trap in her Halloween 4 house, and even welcomes Lindsey Wallace into her home to carve pumpkins like it’s 1978 all over again. Sadly, the script was written before the creators discovered that Kyle Richards rox, so they gave her about five lines total in this whole movie, most of which are delivered while she’s at work in a loud bar.
A majority of the film is about a dude Allyson is dating who has a messed up past just like her (which serves as the opener and one of the only thrilling parts of the whole movie). We kind of get the message the residents of Haddonfield make people into monsters by clinging to anger, grief, and violence and passing it on. The filmmakers seriously decided to jump on the elevated horror bandwagon for the newest final installment of this long-running franchise (I guess being horror trendy has become a trend when you consider H20 followed in the footsteps of Scream back in 98). There’s a load of character study here as we see that no one can keep their shit together in this once quaint, quiet suburban town–the same exact chaos that plagued Rob Zombie’s Halloween 2. And believe me, as much as I thought the Zombie films were crap 15 years ago, I just rewatched them in both theatrical and director’s cuts back-to-back to give them yet another chance (twice the chance, actually), and none of that helped. They’re still mostly a disaster, so I can guarantee I will feel the same about this installment in another 15 years, despite the insistence online that this is going to be worshipped as a cult classic in years to come.
Perhaps Halloween Ends should have been called Haddonfield, not only because the town is once again the star, but also because the film has strayed so far from celebrating the holiday season while delivering its horror experience that it has completely lost its identity. There’s also a clear effort here to fully separate the franchise from Laurie Strode at last in hopes of making the horrors go on without her for years to come. It’s reminiscent of the way they tried to hand the responsibility off to Jamie Lloyd in Halloween 4, first making her the final girl then having her re-enact Michael’s childhood clown costume kill so she could be groomed to grow up to be Miss Myers, an idea they scrapped when it was time to write the script for Halloween 5.
But back to this trailer trash in a town tragedy. All the trauma porn eventually leads to a few kills that I rolled my eyes through because Michael had his apprentice trailing behind him. And when Laurie finally confronts Michael, you once again have to marvel at how many fucking stupid mistakes she makes for a final girl who has been planning for this moment for forty years.
Even so, their final battle really does kick ass. However, I lose all respect for Laurie’s sense of judgement when she makes some speech about Michael being just a mortal man, not the boogeyman. Bitch, this dude was left in a burning basement in 2018 and climbed out to slaughter a calendar worth of hunky firemen, got sliced and diced by the whole damn town in the middle of the street later that evening, got back up, killed them all, killed your daughter, and became a sewer rat for four years.
Remember when the creators of this trilogy insisted Myers wasn’t going to be some supernatural powerhouse in their franchise then barely made it through the first half hour of Halloween 2018 before proving that idea was an impossibility?
The finale bringing together the whole town once again (except Lindsey. WTF?) to finish Michael off for good is as logical as it is laughable, but I’m disappointed the creators didn’t just flip us one last bird and have the whole town chanting “Evil dies tonight!” as the screen faded to black for the final frame.
When it comes to horror movies, I inevitably judge them on whether or not I can go back for them again and again like the sweet saltiness of chocolate covered potato chips. Yummy. I’m talking about the kind of movie that sucks me in every time as scene after scene keeps me looking forward to what’s coming up next as the film progresses. Does Halloween Ends do that? Hell no! I waited over a damn hour for even a hint of horror thrills as I was forced to wade through the emotions of a bunch of miserable people who refused to just let it go like Laurie Strode.
You know what moment still sticks with me and packed more of a punch than anything that took place in this latest trilogy? That instant in H2O when Laurie comes face-to-face with Michael for the first time in 20 years with just a thin pane of glass between them. Still gives me chills every time. Not once did a scene in this trilogy grab me like that.
Picture it. Octobers future. I want to get in the holiday mood with a Michael Myers film. One thing I know for sure…it ain’t ever gonna be Halloween Ends.
And now…on to the bonus. A look at the novelization of the movie!
HALLOWEEN ENDS NOVELIZATION
When I was a tween in the early 80s, I adored the novelizations of Halloween and Halloween II because they added more scenes, more characterization, and more background story that you didn’t get from the movies.
The novelizations of Halloween 2018 and Halloween Kills had hints of that, but both felt mostly like simple prose adaptations of the film scripts.
Now we come to Halloween Ends. Even though I wasn’t a fan of this trilogy at all, and especially this final film (to be honest—I’d be fine if they never made another Halloween film again, yet I’ll totally keep watching if they do!), I couldn’t wait to read this novelization. I was really hoping it would fill in so many of the gaps I felt made Halloween Ends an absolute mess. I am thrilled to say it totally delivered. It also offers more focus on Michael and more kills by him than the movie does. Whether you loved the movie or hated it, I’d highly recommend reading this book. However, if you aren’t a reader and just want to know what you’re missing, I’m going to give you a basic breakdown of the additions to the plot. In other words, you need to have seen the movie to read on, because there are assumptions that you’ll understand the references I’m making in terms of how they apply to the film. Not to mention, they’re loaded with spoilers for the movie. So let’s get into it.
-the book begins at the end of Halloween Kills with a little more coverage of how Allyson’s night ended, and includes Michael murdering two sanitation workers the next morning so he can take their garbage truck to escape.
-there’s a bit more of Corey’s backstory to further demonstrate that he has a dysfunctional family and lives on the wrong side of the tracks compared to the couple for which he was babysitting. His mother also has more influence on him throughout the main plot.
-there’s more transitional information as to how Laurie went from mad Michael hunter to totally at peace.
-there are Michael Myers conspiracy theories spread by the DJ who later dies in the movie, and they are a total nod to the story of Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers.
-there’s a flashback to a mental patient that was used by crazy Dr. Sartain from Halloween 2018 to awaken Michael in Smith’s Grove…and how that mental patient escaped when Michael did on the night the bus crashed in 2018. That mental patient then becomes the man who discovers Michael in the sewer and cares for him. When Corey falls off the bridge, this mental patient (who just appears to be a homeless man in the movie) takes him to the sewer to sacrifice to Michael (we’ll get to that later).
-in her writings, Laurie recounts communications with Dr. Loomis, who worked with another young male patient inspired to kill by the film Roadgames (a Jamie Lee Curtis film from the tail end of her early slasher days—wink wink). He ended up in Smith’s Grove and Michael’s evil spread to him.
-in a flashback to the manhunt for Michael in 2018, he escapes to the woods and encounters a little girl being held captive by her abusive father. She is then inspired to kill her father using Michael’s knife. Michael then goes and hides in a meatpacking plant.
-flashback to Halloween 2019. The girl who tried to steal Allyson’s boyfriend on Halloween night 2018 at the party goes to the meatpacking plant with her new boyfriend to park and have sex in his Plymouth Fury. Believers in the conspiracy theory that Halloween Ends is a remake of Christine rejoice. And by the way, those people are so wrong. Halloween Ends is clearly a remake of Grease 2. Think about it. Anyway, the couple discovers a decaying body of one of the sanitation workers then Michael Myers appears and chases them into the meatpacking plant…a chase that ends in his sewer pipe lair. It is there that the escaped mental patient reconnects with him and begins feeding him victims like Seymour satisfying Audrey II’s needs. Obviously this is a remake of Little Shop of Horrors.
-the passing of the evil from Michael to Corey when they meet in the sewer is more descriptive and better defined so the idea that Corey has taken on a new “Shape” is more believable. The idea of “The Shape” and taking on a new “shape” is stressed repeatedly throughout the novel. However, this is the point where the idea that Michael wasn’t supposed to be supernatural in this trilogy’s story arc is proven to be bullshit. If Michael Myers feeds on the energy of his kills to stay alive and can pass his evil on to others…He’s. Fucking. Supernatural.
-Michael thinks of the first night he killed in 1963, and Laurie thinks of Ben Tramer fleetingly. We also learn one of the bully punks is related to Ben Tramer (remember, in this timeline Halloween II never happened, so Ben Tramer didn’t die).
-Lindsey has a few more interactions with both Laurie and Allyson, plus she gets a brief suspense scene, which she totally deserved in the movie after delivering one of the best scenes in Halloween Kills. Most importantly, she’s present for the grinder ending, whereas she was missing from it in the movie.
-flashback to 1982 when Frank, the cop Laurie likes, was in a competition with another cop to win her affections. The other guy took her home, but she only went along with him so she could ask him to kill Michael Myers at Smith’s Grove. He refused.
-there’s an unnecessary brief scene of kids holding a séance to resurrect Michael Myers at the site of his old house, but it does play into the idea that evil is attractive and infectious.
-it’s spelled out that Michael kills Corey in order to take back all the evil he gave him so that he’ll be better equipped to fight Laurie.
-Since it didn’t happen in the movie, I was hoping the book ending would change to have Laurie dive into the grinder. Instead, the book implies at the end that the evil transfers to Laurie and she will be the new Michael. Do they really think Jamie Lee Curtis would come back for another trilogy as the killer? Do we? Should we start a GoFundMe now?
And yet despite all the wonderful embellishments, added plot elements, and inner thoughts of characters that enrich this story, I still couldn’t buy it when that first kill came with Corey and Michael working as a team. Even more amplified in novel format is the fact that after they start killing together they just totally split up and go off and do their own things. It’s rather sad how quickly their relationship gets to the point where they don’t need each other anymore!
Better question, why do people keep going to houses and cabins in rural locations? So we have more horror movies to watch, of course! So let’s get into these three.
DEADSTREAM (2022)
This is essentially a horror comedy found footage one man show, co-written and co-directed by the star. The first half is all fun and goofy humor, but at the 40-minute mark the comedy tone blends with traditional found footage horror elements and plenty of jump scares and freaky creeps. This is definitely not just a tour of forest leaves like The Blair Witch Project.
How much you enjoy the comedy depends on how much you like the leading man. Some might find him a bit shrill…especially when he screams. And he screams a lot. Throughout the entire movie. The first few times I thought it was funny, but when it turned out it was part of his shtick for the full 90 minutes it became tedious, and it’s really the biggest complaint I have about this film, which is a blast otherwise.
So this dude is an online celebrity who fell out of favor after making some bad mistakes with his live stream. For his comeback he decides to spend the night in a derelict, haunted house in the woods.
The first forty minutes has him killing time trying to entertain the audience with a tour of the creepy house and stories of those that have died there. He also responds to viewers as their comments scroll up the side of the screen.
When the ghouls in the house suddenly begin terrorizing him, it’s no joke. It is scary fun straight through, and the main ghost girl eventually becomes reminiscent of Deadites in Evil Dead. Her frightening companions are freaky enough to give the monsters from Silent Hill a run for their money as well. Fun fun fun.
MONSTROUS (2022)
Monstrous comes to us from the director of All Cheerleaders Die, and while this works visually as a frightening supernatural specter film reminiscent of PG-13 horror of the early 00s, it’s the writing that just completely falls apart. The hubby and I tried to piece it together after it was over with no success, and even consulting some of those “ending explained” sites online, I discovered they made ridiculous errors in trying to make it all make sense.
The worst part of it is that there’s a turning point in the film when I saw a great and different twist being set up perfectly. Unfortunately, somehow the writer completely overlooked the opportunity and instead went for something we’ve seen before, tried to complicate it so it wouldn’t seem like it was so obvious, then just made a mess of the twist in the process.
Anyway, it’s the 1950s, and Christina Ricci and her little boy run away from their life to live in a rental house in a rural area. It becomes clear she is trying to escape her husband.
Then the son begins to see some sort of monster coming out of the pond by their house on a nightly basis. He begins to beg Christina to just take him home, but she insists at first that he’s just imagining it.
That all changes when there are a few freaky encounters with the ghoul. Awesome.
That’s when the film falls apart. Bummer. You’ll most likely figure out the ending, yet still have so many questions after you do.
3 DEMONS (2022)
I really don’t know how to feel about 3 Demons. It has that classic setup of one man dealing with a demonic presence at a cabin in the woods, but it’s also a film that deals entirely with abstractions, so you’re never sure if the man is really experiencing any of the horrors or if they’re all symbolic of his own deeper issues. And for me, that just always equals a lack of fear. I just can’t feel frightened for a character when I am convinced they’re not actually dealing with tangible horror.
The whole premise is built around a wraparound of our main man telling his story to a psychiatrist. Clips of this session are interspersed throughout the film and add nothing to the overarching story.
And that story is…this deputy is assigned to “protect” the body of a dead woman under a sheet in the woods by a cabin.
Left alone with his thoughts about a personal loss, he spends the movie in a sort of multidimensional reality being haunted by shadowy specters in the woods, along with the sheeted body, which tends to move around a lot.
There is definitely plenty of eerie visual stimulation to go around here, so I enjoyed that aspect of it, but don’t expect any concrete explanation to why any of this is happening to him (or not actually happening to him).
The soundtrack sets the tone for sure, with tracks by a-ha, Tiffany, Rockwell, and Culture Club, and the main girls make plenty of precise 80s pop culture references.
As for the film, it ends up feeling like a tween cross between the new Evil Dead and The Craft…without any of the edge of either.
A bunch of friends goes to a cabin by a lake to party. While exploring the woods at night, the two main girls come upon a creepy tree-like thing in a cabin, and something happens to one of them. When the others find her, she’s…different.
Conveniently, they all go to a religious high school, so her odd behavior is exacerbated by her surroundings. Her best friend begins to believe she’s possessed, so she hires a musclehead evangelical dude to help perform an exorcism.
There’s just not enough funny stuff going on here to really grab your attention, and the horror elements are also kept to a minimum. It’s kind of a yawn fest.
GOODNIGHT MOMMY (2022)
Naomi Watts stars in this remake of the Austrian film, which I covered here. This is in no way an exact remake, and in the end it feels much more like a tragic drama about grief and mental illness than the original, although that one covered those issues as well. This remake just doesn’t quite capture the unnerving tension and sense of dread that builds throughout the original.
The story is about twin brothers dropped off by their father to live with their mother. When they arrive at her house her face is totally bandaged up like a mummy and she just tells them she had a procedure.
But they begin to notice that she is acting totally different and unloving. They become convinced she is not their mother at all, but an imposter who has replaced her.
There’s lots of creeping around in dark shadows at night spying on her and suspense sequences of her suspecting she’s being watched. She starts to come across as abusive. Some dream sequences are also injected to create some horror moments.
However, the mere fact that I know Naomi Watts is under the face wrap makes the mom much less mysterious and ominous than she was in the original. Hell, every time she spoke, I expected one of her sons to call her Rachel and start ranting about the girl in the well.
Eventually, this moves into Misery territory for a short time. That is when the plot makes some drastic changes from the original final act, quickly watering down the more terrifying aspects of the storyline to focus on the tragedy. There’s even a change in one crucial aspect of the plot line that will just totally drive right wingers up a wall because they will take it as a personal attack on their constitutional rights…
TERROR TRIPS (2021)
The initial setup of this film makes it seem like it’s going to be a meta lover’s dream. A guy plans to start a terror tour business in which he brings people to famous horror movie locations for screenings of the films. So he asks a group of friends, each of them a diehard fan of a specific horror subgenre, to do a test run.
The first surprise for me is that this isn’t a found footage film, because it really feels like its establishing itself for the format. The second surprise is that this great premise is just completely wasted on what becomes nothing more than an astonishingly generic. low budget organ harvesting plot.
The group goes to hike into the woods for their chosen location, they get abducted one by one, they escape one by one, they get abducted again one by one…all by a ring of Russian organ thieves. Eye roll.
There’s simply no worthy horror here, which is dumbfounding considering the whole point of the movie is that this whole group consists of horror experts. However, the catch, and it would be clever if the film were fun, is that as many horror movies as these dipshits have seen, they fall victim to every obvious trope.
The only highlight for me was having the main girl played by Hannah Fierman, best known as the creepy-eyed girl from the original V/H/S. She’s so refreshingly different here as the paranoid, panicked, cautious character in the bunch.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
Foreshadowing in the shadows…
