TUBI TERROR: the creatures are coming for you!

This threesome has a couple of very cool monsters and one disappointing monster (although, he has a nice bod). For me, one film in particular was a total winner. Let’s find out which one.

INTO NIGHTMARES (2024)



This English language, Italian film is somber and moody with plenty of eerie atmosphere, but it’s also a fairly familiar concept. However, it tries to deliver a zinger in the end…which is also a familiar concept for horror veterans.

After the death of his daughter, an older man is sent to live in a home for seniors. The place is desolate, the head nurse is creepy, they put the man in a room with an empty bed facing his bed (eek!), and when he begins having nightmarish episodes, the in-house doctor tells him it’s just sleep paralysis.

The sequences are haunting and spooky, with a corpse-like woman lurking in the shadows in his room, the door knob jiggling, and plumes of ghostly forms floating through the room.

As creepy as it is, like most of these types of apparition flicks, it becomes repetitive since the cheap scares never lead to any actual horror. I guess that’s why a big spider inexplicably appears on the man’s bedroom ceiling at one point during one of his episodes. It makes no sense in the context of the film, but it definitely introduces something different for a moment.

The man begins to believe the nurse is keeping someone or something locked away. This sets the film up for something really freaky and substantial coming out to roam the halls at night, and if this had been a pre-1990s film, there probably would have been.

Instead, the building mystery opts for more of a psychological twist. It’s a twist in terms of this movie, but it’s not all that surprising for anyone with a long history of watching horror films.

THE COVENANT (2026)



I love movies about kids going to stay with their creepy grandparents, and this one has a really dark and sinister vibe, so it’s astounding how terribly slow and uneventful it is.

The main sisters aren’t exactly angels in this instance, especially the older of the two. She intends to loot grandma and grandpa’s place because she feels like they neglected her.

As soon as they arrive, they are met by a creepy woman who is spouting crazy stuff…and it’s not even grandma. This wacko is perhaps the scariest aspect for a majority of the runtime, specifically when she ends up crawling into the bed of the younger sister… 50 minutes into the movie!

So, what happens before that? They explore some old ruins and have a dream-like encounter in a cave. Seriously, that’s the most exciting thing that happens before the cheap thrill at the 50-minute mark.

58 minutes in, the older sister seems to get attacked by something in a river, and soon after, the younger sister apparently has her first period while taking a bath, which grandma calls a sign of her purity. There’s also talk of a creature out in the wilderness. Uh-oh.

In the final act, the “creature” comes out to play…basically a feral man with long claw fingers. There’s a creepy doll room, and the older sister whips out a chainsaw, but this is really a low-key horror flick that didn’t quite hold my interest.

THE WELL (2023)



This is like a classic gothic horror flick with fricking gruesome, brutal, hard-to-watch kill scenes, and it also reminded me of some of my favorite, unsettling survival horror video games of the last three decades, in particular, Haunting Ground.

Actress Lauren LaVera of the Terrifier movies has the perfect look for the lead role. She plays an art restorer who comes to Italy to repair a large painting in an old mansion.

The woman hosting her has that old school, welcoming yet menacing presence, she has a creepy young daughter, the restorer begins to have nightmarish dreams as she uncovers hellish looking figures in the painting…

Oh. And there’s a big bald goon in a lair somewhere keeping people imprisoned, killing them one by one, and then tossing them down a well in the middle of the room to feed them to something.

I warn you, these kills are gruesome. It’s the kind of practical effects gore that makes you squirm. There’s a lot of mutilating before the goon even throws victims down the well, and they are not even dead yet when he does. And they scream the whole time they are being tortured. It’s hard to watch and listen to all at once. Yikes!

The whole supernatural premise is highly entertaining as well, especially if you’re into traditional occult themes, and the overall atmosphere is perfect.

The final act doesn’t let up, and we do get to see what’s in the well, so the movie never falters. I seriously ordered it on 4K disc as soon as I was done streaming it.

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Horror, humor, retro fun, and practical effects

This was quite an enjoyable triple feature for me, and—BONUS!—each film pulled off the fun in 85 minutes or less.

THE LAST VIDEO STORE (2023)

 

This 78-minute horror comedy is a love letter to the bygone era of video stores and those that still lament the loss. More specifically, those of us who used to work at a video store. It is a total 80s nostalgia trip in style, substance, script, and score, with a touch of heart and a totally quirky, 80s sci-fi/horror vibe.

We meet the owner of one of the last video stores. In comes a lone customer returning old video tapes. Her facial expressions throughout the movie are one of its humor highlights.

The owner tries to get her to appreciate the joy of videos by popping in one of the movies she returned. Turns out it’s a cursed video tape, and it begins unleashing the horrors contained on the tape into the store, beginning with an alien creature.

The owner and customer discover they are trapped in the store—first with the alien creature and then with a backwoods killer—and must take these threats on to stay alive.

The horrors are presented with practical effects, and eventually our main characters extract a hunky b-movie hero from the video to help them survive. He’s delicious. Delic-ass, even.

There’s also a cool final boss situation, and I actually wish the movie had been a little longer and featured at least one more throwback horror monster.

Even so, it’s straight up retro fun from start to finish, and the conclusion is a nod to those who just can’t let go of the past and their longing for the video rental days.

MARK OF THE WEREWOLF (2024)



Quirky, self-aware acting and editing give this one the perfect B-movie feel, and the practical effects, colorful horror lighting, and hokey hairy werewolf costume make it 80s throwback bliss. Add an array of subplots, and it’s messy, camptastic fun from beginning to end.

Our main girl is a model who travels with a team to a cabin in the woods for a photo shoot. Turns out this cabin is built on ground that is sacred to a cult. So, the leader of the cult enlists a witch to conjure a werewolf to take care of the intruders.

No time is wasted in introducing the werewolf, which looks great drenched in red and blue light and haloed by mist. He mutilates people indiscriminately, with plenty of satisfying blood, gore, and fake body parts.

There’s also sex and nudity as the group at the cabin parties and hooks up before getting slaughtered. Awesome.

More characters are introduced to up the body count, which is where the movie begins to falter. A large group suddenly appears after a scene change, and there’s absolutely no clarification of who they are or why they are there.

The final fight between the main girl, her new man (who has a nice axe), and the werewolf and witch is funny, but instead of tying up the plot, the movie goes off the rails a bit, leading to a confusing conclusion that seemed to be trying too hard to be different Or perhaps we’ll get a sequel?

WITNESS INFECTION (2020)



It’s a mobzomcom, and it has an adorable leading man, some playful humor, and nasty, skin-stretching carnage created with practical effects.

The opening is rather bizarre. Two totally different types of guys are hunting together when a lone zombie situation occurs.

We then meet our main cutie. His dad is a mobster, and to keep the peace, he demands his son marry the daughter of another mob family.

Zombies get in the way of that. It can be deduced that eating a certain food is causing people to turn into zombies…after they suffer from a lot of gas. The reason for the infection is definitely underdeveloped, for even when it’s explained how the infection originated near the end of the film, it’s not really explained how the infection was born or why it turned people into zombies, so you just have to go with it.

This isn’t a movie with nonstop laughs, but the cast is totally charismatic, and the actors know their comic timing and delivery, which makes all the difference. The zombie scenes are fantastic, but there’s a lull in the middle of the movie before the infected action really kicks in, which does slow down the pace for a while, but it’s worth the wait.

The plot is basic. Members of each family begin turning into zombies with nasty pustules on their faces, and it’s up to the uninfected to stay alive. Our main trio of survivors eventually joins forces with a Cleopatra Jones type who drops plenty of meta lines.

Like I said, the events that unfold are nothing new. They battle zombies at the home of one mob family before doing the same at the home of the other mob family. Despite the blood, guts, and some toilet humor, this one really doesn’t push boundaries, so it’s an easy watch that feels more like horror comedy lite.

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Varying strains of zombie outbreaks and some tasty treats

Sure, you’ve seen it all before, but if you love zombies and man meat, you can never get enough. But…are these three enough? Let’s find out.

DECADE OF THE DEAD (2023)

This one has a really strong start. It’s ten years after an outbreak. Horror veteran Sean Patrick Thomas and his tiny team of survivors is boating to an island when a small boat of men tries to overtake them. We immediately see that the fight scenes are going to be a highlight.

On the island, the main group teams up with another group of survivors to fend off a wave of running zombies. There are some great, brief but bloody zombie battle moments in this sequence. Awesome.

But don’t get your hopes up. Much like The Walking Dead, this movie isn’t too concerned with the zombies. It’s all about the human-on-human violence.

Surprise, surprise. There’s a death-worshipping cult that wants to take over the world, and it turns out one of our main girls has a connection to someone from that cult.

This becomes more of a religious war story. Yawn. I guess I’m burnt out on zombie flicks with character development and a deeper concept, because I spent the whole movie just waiting for more zombie action, which didn’t come until the last fifteen minutes.

TRANSIT 17 (2019)



I am not going to lie. I knew ahead of time that this movie was bashed on IMDb for having very few zombies. I watched the trailer, and then the hubby and I watched the movie for a very shallow reason; it was an action movie with a muscle hunk. That’s right. We regularly devour pointless action movies if there’s a muscle hunk.

Written and directed by one of its stars, Transit 17 feels like it just meanders in between gun battles and melee fight sequences. There’s been an outbreak. There’s a group that thinks all those that have been infected need to be killed. A resistance group believes they can find a cure and save the infected.

There’s even a dude who uses Star Wars level technology to communicate.

As the resistance sets out on vaguely defined missions, they have an early zombie encounter, and it’s fricking awesome. Had there been more of them, I would have thoroughly enjoyed the movie, but it’s literally the only time there are any zombies.

We also get way too little of the muscle hunk. I thought he was going to be the star based on the trailer, but that isn’t the case.

52 minutes in, we learn that one girl was bit but not affected, and the optimistic group thinks she could be the key to a cure. If protecting her were the focus of the film, it would have been…well…focused. But it’s just not.

ZOMBIECON VOLUME 1 (2025)



This is one of those films that has so many strong individual elements to it, but as a whole it just doesn’t come together, which is made even more glaringly obvious due to a runtime of nearly 2 hours. In that time, the tone shifts (feels like a quirky comedy at times, but becomes quite intense at others), the plot refuses to focus, scenes go on too long, and each segment feels like a standalone sequence more than part of a greater whole aimed at developing a story arc.

We first meet two rival groups of cosplayers. I’m thrilled to say that each one has a hot shirtless guy. landing this movie on the stud stalking page. Each group does a weird performance at the convention, and the main group—you know, the good guys—wins a trophy.

On their way home, they run into a homeless dude in an alley, and he gets one of the girls to touch some sort of magical stone.

It’s all very intriguing so far, but despite the title of the film, this is not a movie about a zombie outbreak at a convention. Instead, the main group goes home, the girl who touched the stone apparently conjures up a zombie outbreak accidentally, and then a zombie shows up at their door.

This begins one of the major problems with the film. While the zombie fights are great, with tight makeup effects, intense action, and some gore, in every case, the group of friends screams throughout the entire fight. And none of these fights is short. It’s so irritating that it reminded me of how the main dude in Deadstream virtually ruins a great movie by screaming the whole time.

Anyway, the group then sits around just talking and trying to figure out how they’re going to survive the zombie apocalypse. Eventually they realize they have to go rescue the mom of the leader of their group. This is 57 minutes into the movie.

More zombie encounter sequences unfold as they make their way to the mom’s house. When they finally arrive, they have to take on some vengeful zombies. It’s another case of a lot of nothing going on in terms of moving any kind of plot forward. The film ends abruptly, and because it is labeled “volume 1” in the title, we know a sequel is the plan. I was definitely drawn to the characters and the performances of the likable cast, so I’ll definitely be looking out for it. I need to know how this story ends.

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Point a camera, end up out in the woods

If found footage is your comfort horror, then this trio of derivative flicks should do the trick. The highlight for me is that all three run between 70 and 75 minutes long.

THE LAST CABIN (2025)



This one is only 70 minutes long, and it combines The Strangers with found footage, so there are some cheap, totally cliché thrills to be had here.

The opener shows a trio—man, woman, and camera person—traipsing through the woods with a flashlight at night. They make the mistake of approaching someone in a hoodie whose back is to them. Like…have they never seen a found footage film? It doesn’t end well for them, which makes me sad, since I wanted the hot daddy to be the star.

Next…another man, woman, and camera person are traipsing through the woods at night with flashlights. Sigh. They are scouting for a shooting location for a film. They find it in an awesome “cabin” that looks bigger than my house. The interior is amazing, except for all the windows and glass doors with nothing covering them. Eek!

The group convinces the guy who lives there to let them film inside. Before leaving, he warns them to beware of the backwoods folk in the woods. Uh-oh.

There are some pretty creepy moments and some jump scares as the usual home invasion routine is unleashed, with multiple masked figures with weapons surrounding the cabin. Thankfully, it first hits—hard—when the “producer” shows up. He is such an obnoxious character and gets exactly what he deserves.

There’s a discovery of dolls in the woods (because dolls are scary), the lights go out, and running and screaming ensue. Yet the main group takes a movie-viewing break in the middle of being terrorized. They find home-made DVDs that show them that something very “sinister” happened to other people at the cabin in the past, and it’s one of a few gruesome moments in the movie.

Found footage predictability just keeps coming, right down to the main girl having a confessional breakdown for the camera. The only part that stood out to me because it didn’t make much sense was when one of the masked baddies lifts the mask to reveal that they have what looks like a demon eye. I’m not sure if it was supposed to be just a backwoods inbred thing, because other than the eye, it looked like a normal person.

OUIJA CLOWN (2023)



I’ll give the two tween girls in this 75-minute movie credit for carrying the whole thing by themselves, but it’s mostly one long stretch of filler footage carrying us to the final scene.

It’s Halloween night, and the girls have the bedroom they’re hanging out in decorated for the holiday, so this one is going on the holiday horror page.

When one girl’s dad goes out for the night, he leaves her and her friend alone in their house in the middle of nowhere. Once he’s gone, they do total tween things, which is basically nothing.

They eventually decide to watch videos on how to use a spirit board. Conveniently, they have one of their own, so they use it, and then…the screen goes black.

When the video footage finally comes back, it feels like a chapter of the movie was left out, because suddenly they’re freaking out, and the camera is bouncing all over the place. In fleeting glimpses, it appears that there’s a scary clown in the room with them. It’s kind of frightening, but it just doesn’t do much of anything.

Neither do the girls. They run around the bedroom screaming for a good chunk of the movie. Eventually they decide to go out into the woods. It’s like Blair Witch Project boredom all over again as they spend eleven minutes just filming trees and the ground. They finally see the clown, run back to the house, and lock themselves in the bedroom…to use the spirit board again.

I’m not going to lie. While this movie doesn’t try to make sense (I mean, they summoned a clown with a Ouija board), the two girls deliver on some dark content in the final few minutes. This is the one moment when the whole movie finally shines as shit takes an unexpected turn.

A COLD GRAVE (2024)



Another one that runs 75 minutes long, this is perhaps the most chaotic of this trio. It’s essentially about a guy out in the woods looking for his missing sister, but the footage jumps all over the place to various, unrelated people encountering horrors in the forest, including a hot daddy (wanted him to be the lead) and his bizarre son, a group that fights in true Blair Witch boredom style over being lost in the woods, and a ghost-hunting team that whips out a Ouija board. They better beware of clown spirits…

I think each clip is supposed to be found footage the main dude is watching on his phone as he tries to piece together what became of his sister, but I’m not sure.

He spends a lot of time doing a stream of thought monologue for the camera. He also approaches way too many people from behind. He never learns his lesson, because it never goes well, yet he just keeps doing it.

And oddly, one dude he approaches is wearing almost exactly what the first dude with his back to the camera is wearing in The Last Cabin, including the exact same mask. What the hell? I had to look on IMDb. These two films are by the same director. Dude ripped off his own scene! Awesome.

The woods are supposed to be haunted, there’s a witch (that we actually see a few times, unlike The Blair Witch Project, where what you don’t see is more boring than what you could have seen), people seem to get possessed, there are various ghouls, everyone appears to be trapped in the woods in an endless loop of nighttime…this movie seriously just keeps throwing random shit into the mix with very little in the way of a plot. One thing we do get plenty of are jump scares, mostly thanks to music zingers…you know, tone-setting music in a found footage film. As chaotic as it all is, in a weird way, I kind of like the idea that this forest is so haunted that everyone who enters encounters some sort of completely unique freakiness instead of the same old threat every time.

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Time for a trio of bizarre horror comedies

It’s a toilet bowl slug, new millennium mischief-making mini monsters, and a house of blood-sucking sluts

SCARED SHITLESS (2024)



Despite the title and the general theme of this film (a slug creature traveling through plumbing and popping out of toilets in an apartment building), it totally spares us any gross shit humor. In fact, the title is quite apropos, because there’s no shit. It’s just pure plumbing puns, a comedic cast of characters, practical effects, and an 80s soundtrack that includes tracks by Harlequin, Doug and the Slugs, and Loverboy. Awesome.

A plumber forces his grown, germaphobic son to tag along when he goes to unclog some toilets.

Meanwhile, a dude living in the apartment building they’re heading to has created some sort of “evolutionary” critter. That’s about all the explanation we get for this thing.

The slug he created escapes, and the antics begin. Honestly, for a movie about a toilet slug, there really isn’t much tasteless toilet humor at all. The nastiest thing that happens is a dude on the toilet gets his genitals chomped off as they are dangling inside the bowl. Toilet slug likes tea bags.

There’s slug POV, a kinky, geriatric couple, slug eggs, a shower scene, and plenty of chemistry between the father and son as they attempt to take on the slug, which keeps getting bigger and bigger as we head for the final battle. It’s just an old school comedy horror fun fest.

FRANKIE FREAKO (2024)



Remember the Astron-6 guys? Well, this one comes from them, so you’ll want to check it out if you miss their brand of filmmaking. However, I’ll say right up front that as much as I love them, this one is just a little too goofy for my tastes.

Although it takes place at Christmas time and even ends with a still of a Christmas postcard and a Christmas carol, this is generally not a holiday themed horror flick. It focuses on a dude who is being pressured to do better at the office and is not so impressive to his girlfriend in the bedroom lately either.

He sees a late-night commercial for one of those party hotlines, with a goblin as the advertising mascot, and he can’t get it out of his head. So, he eventually caves, calls…and ends up with three munchies in his house trashing the place.

This really is like the lower tier Gremlins rip-offs of the 80s, with the critters causing chaos, including trashing his house and gluing his boss to the floor in his basement. Can’t complain about seeing Astron-6 bear daddy Adam Brooks get creamed in the face with white goo…

The movie goes intro really weird territory when the main guy and the visiting “Freakos” are teleported back to the world of the Freakos. Turns out their leader, a male Freako, is hot for our main guy and wants to make him his bitch. Yeah. This turns into a sort of intergalactic gay film. Very on-brand for the Astron-6 guys.

It’s all puppet silliness until the main guy and his new ghoulie friends escape back to earth and are followed by the Freako leader, who has transformed into a hideous monster that’s like a boss out of a Resident Evil game. The Freakos pale in comparison to the great horror movie this big baddie could have been in.

Would you believe the main guy uses seduction to try to defeat the boss?

SNOW BUNNIES (2025)



63 minutes long? I was so in. That is until nothing happens for the first 32 minutes. Sigh.

The main guy in this vampire comedy deserved more time to charm us, because he and his buddies are a blast. He’s a slacker who gets kicked out of his girlfriend’s apartment and ends up at a strip club with hoochie mama cellulite asses bouncing in his face. I felt like I was watching a crunk video circa 2002, but I guess this fills the first 32 minutes nicely for the right audience.

This movie does not take place during a snowstorm, so I’m guessing the title is referencing black guys banging white chicks? The guys get invited home by a group of girls, and this is when the fun begins. At the dinner table, the girls’ dad shows up, and he isn’t looking so good.

A few minutes later a BJ for one of the guys turns into a meal for one of the girls, and the vampire camp kicks in, with the group of guys being picked off one by one as they try to escape the house. Aside from the whole second act being hard to see due to saturated blue horror lighting, it’s such a playful horror comedy scenario that is over way too fast, leaving you wanting more.

There are seriously only 20 minutes of vamp action, because the film ends abruptly with no real resolution at about the 53-minute mark, after which we get ten minutes of bloopers.

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A deadly mannequin, a bunny mask killer, and a freaky creature

Although their plots may falter at times, these three flicks delivered death and carnage that totally satisfied me.

TED BUNNY (2026)

I watched this one because Dee Wallace is in it, and because I thought it was going to be a basic “Bunny man” kind of slasher. I figured the title was just a play on words and didn’t realize the plot was going to stem from the actual true crimes of Ted Bundy.

And yet the few Ted Bundy kill sequences we get are the best part of the film. They are truly chilling, as is the performance by the actor playing him.

Five decades later a foursome of friends is doing a documentary on Bundy. They’ve discovered a lone survivor of his murders and go to interview her, and it’s Dee Wallace! And she’s a crazy bunny lady instead of a crazy cat lady. Awesome.

Dee recounts what happened between her and Bundy in flashbacks. Then two of the guys making the documentary begin sneaking around her house. This flick was really starting to work for me.

A big dude wearing a bunny mask sack appears, killings begin, and then…one girl gets away and calls the police. What the hell?

Dee is written out of the movie (her intriguing bunny mania goes with her), and the main girl teams up with a detective to help track down the killer, who is suddenly just out murdering random people. It turns into a generic and predictable slasher, and while it’s fun as such, it feels like a letdown after the first part seemed to establish a compelling premise that would have incorporated Dee Wallace more.

THE MANNEQUIN (2025)



This one has an early 2000s feel and a pretty interesting premise at first.

In a black and white intro, it’s the 1950s, and a female model is being sexually harassed by a pervy male photographer, who then proceeds to hack her up and use her as a model for his photo shoot after that. Yikes!

Then we meet a struggling fashion designer in contemporary times. She scores a loft apartment in an empty building at a great price. It also includes a creepy mannequin that looks so real it even has nipples.

The fashion designer’s sister ends up finding her dead and decides to move into the apartment. She butts heads with her friends, who think she’s crazy for moving there.

Yet they all decide to sleep over. They each begin waking up at night, seeing ghosts, and then falling under some sort of spell that leads them to physically harm themselves. And yet, they continue to stay there.

Inevitably, the self-harm gets gruesome, so they finally call in a dude who knows a thing or two about ghosts. This movie becomes kind of ridiculous as he proceeds to do some sort of cleansing/exorcism ritual, but that does unleash the best, most violent and gruesome part of the film, and it involves an axe. The opener and the final act are definitely the highlights for me.

MAN IN THE FIELDS (2024)

Despite running a bit too long, which causes pacing problems, this Italian-made, English language flick becomes a wild throwback to Euro horror of the 80s by the final act.

After an intriguing and ominous opener that draws you in but doesn’t have much relevance to the rest of the flick, we meet a cute guy who seems to be stuck in a rut. Yeah, there’s definitely an “I want to be stuck in his rut” joke there.

That changes when he makes a horrific discovery while walking his dog at night. Skeletal remains! Lots of them. He also finds what look like some old texts at the scene, which he takes instead of handing over to the police.

When he gets together with some friends (30 minutes into the movie), he admits what he did. He shows them the ritualistic texts, and they read them out loud.

There’s a rather trippy, surreal sequence in which the main guy is dragged out to a clearing by the “man in the fields”, after which he begins to change.

EEK! 52 minutes into the movie, he transforms into an awesome creature and goes on a murderous rampage. He begins by targeting his friends, but that eventually ends in a dark little twist that leads to a total massacre at a club. The second half of the film definitely has me leaning towards adding this one to my collection if it gets a Blu-ray release.

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Throwback thrills and bloody murder!

I needed this. It’s a trio of basic, low budget, supernatural slasher flicks with plenty of nods to the music, fashions, and satanic panic of the Gen X era.

THE BLACK QUARRY (2023)

This heavy metal horror comedy is only 49 minutes long, and I think it’s my favorite of this trio, but not because the runtime is perfect for my short attention span. Hell, the first kill doesn’t happen until 29 minutes in. In other words, don’t ask me what happened for those first 29 minutes.

Just kidding. We are welcomed by a witchy horror hostess. Not necessary, but a pretty, black metal babe dropping horror puns definitely sets the tone. The film has an old school, direct-to-video look and feel, and it takes place entirely during the day.

We then see a big, bad, bearded dude in face paint doing a satanic ritual and sacrifice.

The bulk of the movie focuses on the road trip of the members of a metal band and their manager. There’s some playful humor and banter as they travel to a quarry to shoot a music video.

The kickoff of the kills is much needed by the time we get to the 29-minute mark. The manager is singing Britney’s “Toxic” as he heads into the woods. All of a sudden, this awesome skeletal demon dude shows up.

It’s speed kill time! The massacre comes fast and furious, with victims being hacked up in very clever ways with their own musical instruments. I particularly liked the drummer’s hi-hat kill. The kills easily could have been spread out a bit more rather than crammed together in the last twenty minutes, and there’s little depth to the plot, but all that matters is that it’s a staple—playing heavy metal music leads to the horror. Insert the sign of the horns here.

ATTITUDE FOR DESTRUCTION (2008)



The play on the title alone tells you what generation of metalheads this one caters to. It even looks and feels like a shot-on-video flick from the 89-91 era, plus it begins with Ratt’s “Round and Round” during the opening logos. However, don’t expect any more licensed metal from the 80s beyond that song (which is used twice).

This is a straightforward, heavy metal/Devil worship plot. It even begins with a satanic ritual and sacrifice of a naked woman on an inverted cross. There’s blood, there’s gore, I think there’s a severed penis, and there’s even a little person thrown in for the hell of it.

Next, we meet the band. They land a record deal, but band member Drake, who thinks he calls all the shots, isn’t interested in accepting the deal. So…his band members stomp him to death and bury the body.

Drake doesn’t stay dead, and the guy playing him, despite underwhelming, living dead makeup, has a blast being sinister as he starts slicing and dicing all his former band members. What I want to know is where this dead Drake dude keeps getting all his awesome murder weapons.

There are several BJ scenes, a few full song performances by the band, and a couple of cute, shirtless guys.

Drake’s first kill isn’t until 41 minutes in, and while the kills are totally indie and sloppily executed, they deliver old school blood and campy fun. Especially the final frame.

THE DEVIL’S MUSIC (2023)



SRS Cinema released this one, and I was pleasantly surprised at its VHS throwback visuals and the totally bizarre blend of slasher and demon subgenres. I mean, yes it has a messy script, thin character development, and some hokey CGI kills, but I enjoyed the hell out of the gritty filter and dialogue that comes across as being dubbed in, making for some funny character reactions to the killers.

Yes, I said killers. This is so weirdly awesome. A group of friends gathers at a house in the woods. They bring up a tale of Steve the Miner, who was believed to have been killed in a mining tunnel explosion…only he didn’t die, according to legend.

And he didn’t. He’s still out there killing. He kills members of the group. He kills random people with no connection to the plot. Some of his kills are cutaway. Others are that bad CGI I was talking about.

Meanwhile, another complication arises. One of the friends plays a demonic record backwards and becomes possessed! He’s creepy, he’s entertaining, he loves to taunt victims, and eventually he takes on Steve the Miner.

There’s so much more that I enjoyed about this one. Everyone is wearing faux 80s fashions, hairstyles, and makeup that’s so bad that it almost looks like it is genuinely the 80s.

There’s a cop who looks like the leather man from the Village People. Sucks that he is killed off so fast, because I was living for his ridiculously fake handlebar mustache. He deserved character development…like horny leather daddy cop on the down low character development. He deserved it. He earned it.

There are a couple of campy, faux 80s music dance montages, a muscular dude boxes with Steve the Miner, and the final act is just loaded with 80s-esque horror vibes as the demon takes over the whole plot. Awesome.

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TUBI TERRORS: three creepy legends

Noticing I had three movies on my Tubi watchlist with enticing entity names, I knew it was time for a new triple feature. But did any of these flicks deliver?

BIAZ: KARA LYENIN LANETI (2024)

   

The name of the entity in this Turkish film is more frightening than the movie itself, which is a totally formulaic throwback to supernatural stalker movies of the early 2000s.

Four friends celebrating the end of exams week pull out a Ouija board at their little party. Almost immediately, things start moving around them as if they just stepped into Carol Anne’s bedroom.

And then, they each start experiencing haunting phenomena while alone. There’s plenty of horror lighting (and strobe lights), but the scare sequences are repetitive, and the entity looks like some medieval monk. Yawn.

Eventually, the kids start to get killed, but there are only four of them, so there’s no body count. After the first kill, the three survivors decide they must stick together…and then eventually split up. Sigh.

They first track down someone previously affected by the entity in a mental hospital, and she tells them how to defeat the entity. They attempt to apply her technique, more of them die, the ones that are dead seem to join the entity around those he kills, and we get a final girl and a brief chase sequence around their school (where they seem to spend a lot of time alone at night for kids that are so terrified).

Not even my nostalgia for early 2000s movies like The Boogeyman could save this one.

NAHUALLI (2025)



This 76-minute movie delves into Mexican superstition and folklore, yet it mostly comes across as a combination possession/slasher hybrid. However, the dark and atmospheric settings do the heavy lifting of capturing the spirit of the underdeveloped entity.

In the opening scene, three friends explore an old church in Mexico, and something takes possession of one of them. From what I could tell, it seems to take control of victims by inserting its hand in their mouth, which is not something you see every day.

Then we meet Mark and his two buddies. They are heading to Mexico a year later to search for Mark’s missing sister. I’m not exactly sure where anyone is staying, but the guys and a bachelorette party both end up sheltering near the church.

Mark has eerie nightmares and visions, including those of some sort of witch doctor that seems to hold the answers to everything. Mark and his friends head out into the wilderness at night, and that’s when things begin to go wrong.

The story of the bachelorette party really feels unnecessary until the guys find the church, where they encounter the demonic entity. One of them becomes possessed and heads out to start killing people, and the girls are a perfect target.

The legend doesn’t unfold organically, for in the end, a few of the characters have to find the witch doctor of Mark’s dreams, and it is he who basically explains everything. Adding to that underwhelming aspect, there’s not much in the way of a thrilling climax, although there are suddenly a few more demonic looking baddies added to the mix, and they are effectively creepy.

LECHUZA (2025)



This is a film that has a fantastic demonic/witchy creeper vibe and visuals but simply doesn’t pair its monster with a script that gives it a chance to thrive.

The story is simple. A woman, her young son and daughter, and their uncle are going on a camping trip. While on the road, they stop for a woman cloaked in black who seems to be hurt. However, as the uncle approaches her, he senses she’s a freak, so he leaves without helping her. I wouldn’t have even stopped.

Soon after, it’s like the witch is following them. During a rest stop, she terrorizes the son and seems to curse him as well. This is followed by an unneeded stretch of scenes of her roaming through the wilderness as the car drives on a deserted road.

After they set up camp, the kids go exploring and encounter the main creature. Eek! I’m telling you, this winged demon witch monster—aka: Lechuza—gets a fantastic monster design. Are the monster and the witchy woman one and the same? Not sure.

As for the family, they kind of just hang out. The kids keep getting scared, the adults tell them they’re imagining things…rinse and repeat. Even with the kids saying there’s a monster in the woods, and the adults telling them they aren’t allowed to watch horror movies anymore because they’re imaginations are running wild, the uncle goes and tells them the legend of Lechuza at the campfire! Asshole.

While this isn’t a found footage film, it sort of is. It keeps jumping between third-person camera view and a first-person perspective with no rhyme or reason. The uncle does hold a camera earlier in the movie, but I don’t think he’s actually filming during any of the first-person scenes. When the uncle explores the woods with just a flashlight, the monster suddenly goes full-face at the screen, and you hear the uncle yell, “What was that?” Like, are we supposed to be seeing through the uncle’s eyes, with that close-up being just to thrill the audience? No idea.

Like I said, the director absolutely nails the monster sequences, including a great aerial view when it’s flying over the running family and picks one of them up in a moment that brings me right back to the very first V/H/S story.

The final flight (of both the family and the monster) is fantastic and made the movie worth watching for me, but the final frame ends with the letters REC up in the top left corner of the screen. This movie wanted so badly to be a found footage film but just couldn’t commit.

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It’s never too late for holiday horrors

Yet another marathon of holiday themed horror movies landed in my lap, and they’re always in season for me. The latest smorgasbord to add to the complete holiday horror page includes Thanksgiving horror, Christmas horror, and a multi-holiday anthology of sorts.

SAY CHEESE (2026)

This 70-minute movie is like some sort of weird, art house holiday horror anthology about an old camera that infects those who get their picture taken by it. The camera seems to be possessed by some sort of demon that occasionally pops up to deliver ominous messages to those infected.

I’m assuming the whole movie takes place in the same apartment building, but I’m not sure. Colors are saturated, there are distracting flashes of light and editing, and Christmas clips, still shots, and music are inserted into tales that take place on different holidays.

Matters are made more confusing by the fact that the tales are essentially chronological by where they land during the calendar year, yet the first tale is set on New Year’s Eve, and the second one hits on Christmas Eve. My aching head.

Chapter 1, New Year’s Eve

This is the longest tale of the bunch, and an exorbitant amount of time is focused on simple dinner conversations between a straight couple stuck in their apartment during a pandemic, with the camera fixed right at the edge of their dining table. The woman scored an old camera at a sale and takes a photo of the guy eventually. Over a course of weeks (so it’s not just a New Year’s Eve tale), the man becomes sick. There’s no definitive conclusion to this tale, because we’re not done with it yet.

Chapter 2, Christmas Eve

After skipping a neighbor’s holiday party, a woman receives a mysterious package…the camera. A connection is made to the first tale (not that I understood it), and eventually the camera infects the woman.

Chapter 3, Valentine’s Day

A lonely guy is set to have a first date, but somehow the camera lands in his hands and things turn tragic for him.

Chapter 4, Labor Day

This is a holiday we don’t get every day…and it’s introduced with “Silent Night” playing. No Christmas music until after Halloween, dammit! Anyway, during a company’s staff photo shoot, the douchebag CEO demands professionalism and speed from the photographer…who now has the evil camera. Don’t expect a company-wide massacre, though. Bummer.

Chapter 5, National Podcast Day

I looked it up—it’s a real “holiday”, and it’s on September 30th. Naturally, I was disappointed that the final story doesn’t land on Halloween, but clearly the film’s creator wanted to be different. In this one, podcasters have learned about the killer camera. One team of podcasters goes to investigate, and we finally learn the fate of the guy from the first tale.

This is actually a very interesting concept movie, it just doesn’t fully come together. The script definitely needed some rewrites to strengthen the narrative.

THE PRIEST: THANKSGIVING MASSACRE (2025)

The director of St. Patrick’s Day Massacre takes on Thanksgiving, and I’ll start off by saying that I picked up the DVD of St. Patrick’s Day Massacre after seeing it, but I won’t be doing the same for this one.

The opener, which takes place way back in the days of the first settlers, is totally intriguing. A reverend who looks like the creep from Poltergeist II is trapped in a cabin with no food during the winter…with a buxom blonde. He locks eyes on her meaty mounds and decides it’s dinner time. Eek! Sadly, we don’t see him snack on the sacks. He does, however, decide he must pay for his sin, so he shoots himself.

Things take a bizarre turn in modern times. A woman who is separated from her husband brings her grown daughter and son to a house in the woods to spend Thanksgiving with the father…and his huge-breasted new girlfriend. What in the dysfunction hell?

This whole setup is just weird. There’s endless back and forth about everyone’s feelings while twangy guitar music serves as a score. The separated couple keeps arguing. The new girlfriend seems to be trying to seduce the son. They end up in a sauna together, and apparently the steam seeps into the floor and revives the priest, who is buried in the ground underneath.

I can’t even comprehend what I was watching. Seriously, the film consists of one person after another crawling under the floor of the sauna and getting killed.

It’s not until 79 minutes into this 86-minute movie that the reincarnated priest pops up through the floor. I was hoping that he would be back for more juicy tits, which seemed the only way this movie could go considering a huge-boobed woman was cast as the girlfriend, but there is absolutely no balloon popping in this silly little film. It’s a disappointment as both a slasher and a Thanksgiving horror flick.

SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT (2025)

Many argue that Silent Night with Malcolm McDowell is not a remake of Silent Night, Deadly Night, but in essence, it’s more of a remake than this remake. With this take on the 80s classic, the director of Summer School and Wrong Turn 2021 does something totally different with the main plot, and I fricking loved it.

Based off initial kills, I thought the change here was going to be that Billy, who witnesses a guy dressed as Santa kill his parents after leaving his Santa-like grandfather’s nursing home, only targets older men with white beards. That alone would have been a cool update, but that’s not where this one goes.

After an opening similar to the original, this film takes liberties. Forget the orphanage and the wicked nun. Doesn’t happen here. We go right to meeting older Billy, played by Rohan Campbell of Halloween Ends. He regularly hears a voice in his head telling him to kill like he’s got Venom living inside him or something. For most of the movie, I kind of hated this aspect and thought it unnecessary, but it all makes perfect sense by the final act.

In between answering the calls to kill and marking them with blood in an advent calendar, Billy becomes involved with a female coworker at the toy store where he gets a job, played by the roommate from Happy Death Day. Yay!

The absolute highlight of Billy’s kills is when he crashes a white supremacist Nazi holiday party and slaughters everyone in attendance.

The most amazing thing about this scene is that I’m sure the knee-jerk reaction of all the woke haters is to pounce on the political bias messaging in this movie—you know, the one that’s saying that Nazis and white supremacists are naughty and deserved to be punished. Heh heh.

It’s in the final act that the plot takes a total turn and becomes its own animal, and it totally rocks. I think it was brilliant to completely change the plot line. It’s fresh, different, and much more character focused than the original movie, offering something unique rather than a Christmas cookie cutter slasher. There’s also a fantastic sequence that takes place in a ball pit.

The way in which it’s used is actually quite chilling. And I adored the ending.

GOBBLEFOOT (2025)

I would avoid SRS Cinema movies like the plague, but they keep releasing holiday themed horror flicks, and I feel obligated to watch every holiday horror movie I know exists.

I’ll make this short. Like all SRS Cinema films, this 71-minute flick feels like a bunch of guys got together and improvised a story while they filmed in their hometown.

300 years ago, a girl was accused of being a witch after stealing turkeys. She cursed her town with a demonic presence on Thanksgiving….Gobblefoot!

We see this comical monster puppet soon after in modern times as it attacks a dude in the wilderness. A college professor investigates a series of murders believed to be the work of Gobblefoot.

A queer looking dude appears to have conjured Gobblefoot, and has the hots for the creature. He lures a few different men to a warehouse so Gobblefoot can kill them. That’s it. That’s the movie. Other than the killer turkey man, the holiday is irrelevant and never celebrated.

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All sorts of slashing, from the simple to the supernatural

It’s a smorgasbord of killers, but not all of them are up to the challenge of upping the body count. Let’s find out which ones disappointed.

AXES AND Os (2024)


While this is a fun slasher flick that takes place on Valentine’s Day weekend, everything is underdeveloped about the story, including the fact that it is Valentine’s Day weekend.

There’s a great hook for the killer—he was rejected on Valentine’s Day as a kid, so now when he kills, he rips out the heart of his victim and holds it up triumphantly. But that only occurs a few times instead of after every kill! Like, that should be his MO! It would have been even better if he’d left a facsimile of the card he handed to the girl that rejected him on every victim, but sadly, that doesn’t happen. And finally, this killer doesn’t wear a mask. He’s just a big, bearded backwoods dude.

But it’s not as simple as that. A group of girls heads to a rental house for a Galentine’s weekend at Valentine Lake after one of them is jilted by her boyfriend. Our two main girls are sisters, but only through adoption in one of the most crucial yet underdeveloped plot points of the film. The younger sister has nightmares of someone strapped to a hospital bed going crazy, and when she asks about her natural mother, her sister gives a half-assed answer. Nothing is ever clarified, yet it is absolutely essential to the final act of the film that this information be supplied. Since it’s not, the movie really makes no sense and leaves you trying to fill in the gaps.

See, this is one of those films that blends genres. I don’t know exactly why there’s a feral character…or experiment gone wrong…or vampire (?)…that comes to fight the killer at the end of the film, but that’s what we get.

We also get the usual. Cops on the case because there have been killings before. An obsessed character that is determined to take down the killer. A suspicious landlord the girls rent from who seems to be tied to the killer (another underdeveloped subplot). A bikini montage. An awkward attempt at simulating a hetero sex scene (the hubby and I both laughed, because there’s no way straight intercourse works that way).

And, of course the kills. The killer is named the Axeman, so it’s all axe, all the time. They’re not bad death scenes, and the few with heart extraction are even better, but CGI blood splashes that are used in every kill cheapen things a bit.

The highlight for me is indie horror queen Jamie Bernadette, who at one point takes a stance against the killer that’s almost like a meta moment in which she’s telegraphing that she’s an old pro at this. Her choice of fighting back makes for an unforgettable moment in an otherwise forgettable Valentine’s Day horror flick. Either way, it earns a spot on the holiday horror page.

EVIL NUN (2025)

How do you start a killer nun movie? A nun screaming her head off while giving birth by the altar in a church and then getting the axe.

Good start to a less than good movie.

Next, we meet a group of young people whose van breaks down in a Mexico desert.


Would you believe there’s no phone service out here?

As they set off on foot to look for help, they talk about a legend of a nun who had an immaculate conception in a church. Both she and the child disappeared, and now the nun haunts the church.

Sooooo…why not go take shelter in the first church they come across in a ghost town? Like…it’s a town. You could have chosen any other building.

Things get weird in the church, one good girl who is very religious starts seeing a demon nun, there’s one satisfying kill, the good girl gets possessed by the nun, and the nun demands they find her child if they want the girl back. Blah blah blah blah blah.

There’s really not a lot going on here, and that includes kills. The group finds and reads the nun’s diary and learns the truth about her delicate situation. The nun leads them to underground tunnels to find her body. No one else dies until a priest shows up and the nun is not happy about it. It’s just really bland.

THE KNOCK KNOCK MAN (2025)

A 75-minute movie from the director of Halloween at Aunt Ethel’s? I’m so in!

The Knock Knock Man is one cool and creepy killer, however he doesn’t have many victims at his disposal. I guess there are just enough to fill the short runtime, though. Dare I say I wish the movie had been perhaps fifteen minutes longer and delivered at least one more death scene?

A great little tale is told about the killer’s origins in some brief opening text. Some kind of visual narrative—perhaps eerie illustrations—would have been a fun alternative that could have enhanced the impact instead of making the backstory feel like an afterthought.

The opening kill does leave an impression though, introducing us to the creep when he appears in a girl’s peephole and then mangles her face.

Next, we meet our main group of five friends. No time is wasted in getting them to a lake house. There aren’t even any partying montages. After a quick dip in the water and a little dabbling in a game of Truth or Dare, it’s right on to someone suggesting they play the Knock Knock Man game.

This is like Bloody Mary meets Talk to Me, and it’s an effective concept. The group sits around a door on the floor and calls upon the Knock Knock Man. One person knocks on the door and momentarily goes into a brief trance. While in this other state of consciousness, they see a door. There’s a knock. They open the door. They stare into the face of the Knock Knock Man. They return to reality.

Problem is, one person is too scared to play by the rules, and before long, the Knock Knock Man has slipped into their world. Eek! He’s cool and calculated in his approach to victims, and he does some gruesome damage, which is why I wish there were more kills.

The idea of the Knock Knock Man showing up at your door gets a bit lost in the shuffle (not everyone falls victim to a knock on their door), but there are some good chases, no time is wasted in the kids coming up with a plan to conquer the killer, and the final battle isn’t drawn out or overblown. It’s neat, tidy, and left open for a sequel. Yay!

VHS SUMMER CAMP (2026)

How to make a cacophony of confusion out of a 72-minute, supposed love letter to 80s slashers. I can’t even comprehend what they were going for here. The slashing is the last thing on the mind of this sloppy script.

A group of kids comes to clean up an old campsite. One girl keeps seeing a ghost in the woods. Another dude keeps seeing prophetic clips on a videotape in his room.

The woman who owns the place is on the hunt for a witch. Supposedly, one of the girls in the group of friends is unknowingly the key to the owner becoming a powerful witch.

The owner performs a ritual in which she makes her hot daddy husband into a killer.

He does just that, and eventually he tries to make it all make sense in a piece of dialogue telling one girl in the group why she’s tied to both this place and the ghost girl in the woods.

And finally, there’s another creepy dude who appears once in a while carrying a machete without saying a word or killing anyone. He then simply pops up at the end to kill the killer.

We never do see any witches.

Here’s a note to scriptwriters. You have to choose wisely when deciding which plot elements of your story don’t need to be explained. It can’t be all of them.

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