3 more from director Chad Ferrin

Posted on January 9, 2026 by Daniel

Having just added a few more of director Chad Ferrin’s horror flicks to my collection, I checked to see what I’ve still missed from him, and I found three more to watch. But are they worth buying on disc?

SCALPER (2023)

This one, which is actually a sequel to the giallo-inspired Night Caller, takes me back to Someone’s Knocking at the Door, which I believe was the first nasty little Chad Ferrin flick I watched.

Scalper gets right to that same kind of nastiness—a masked killer sodomizing a dude with a knife. Although no blood pours out of the victim, there is a gross blood and poop-covered knife blade moment before the killer scalps the dude.

Next, the psychic medium character from the first movie is being interviewed about those events by a conservative radio show host who loves guns, hates California, and thinks trans people are evil. Not sure what the purpose even was of making this dude an insufferable douche, because it just makes you wonder why the psychic would go on that kind of person’s show and doesn’t add anything to the story. You don’t even get any satisfying end to his existence to make his douchery worth witnessing.

While on the show, the psychic sees visions of a returning character, played by Bai Ling, being murdered. Bai Ling is a really good sport, because for the rest of the movie, the killer wears her face.

The psychic teams up with two detectives, one of them being Jake Busey, to try to find out who the killer is.

The movie is tied very strongly to the first film in terms of returning characters, but the tone is entirely different. There’s dark humor in this one, to the point that it sometimes feels goofy compared to the original. It also bombards us with other plane of existence sequences as the medium is taunted by various ghosts of the present and her past.

There’s plenty of gore, but much of it is in those ghostly realms, which reminded me of something right out of The Frighteners at times. This sequel is completely missing the thrills and suspense that made me a fan of Night Caller, so the close connection to its plot and characters just felt odd and I feel no need to own this one. Of course, in the back of my head I’m thinking that the next time I score a gift card, I’ll buy it to complete the series and then convince myself that I basically got it for free.

PIG KILLER (2022)

This one is “inspired by” a real-life Canadian serial killer named Robert Pickton. As with most true crime serial killer stories adapted into horror movies, do not go into this movie expecting any kind of accuracy. This is a total Chad-style production. It’s nasty, gnarly, has a splash of twisted humor, and stars most of his usual roster of actors. It also features loads of 80s music from artist Gerard McMahon, who was also credited under the name Gerard McMann when he recorded the classic “Cry Little Sister” for The Lost Boys soundtrack. He also appears in a live performance of one of his songs in this film. Awesome.

Jake Busey is the killer, and he very quickly takes a prostitute, played by Bai Ling, to his trailer home. They have a really weird sex scene together, and it gets even weirder when one of his pet pigs comes in to spectate. As gross and disturbing as the scene is, it’s incredibly silly (especially the fake pig head popping in from the sides of the screen).

In fact, the handful of kills spread out through this 2-hour movie are all handled with a gross, over-the-top sense of dark humor, making it undeniably entertaining if you can stomach that sort of thing. Jake hacks up victims after killing them, and usually the whole death and disposal scene is treated as a montage instead of a full kill scene.

Wanna know what made me the most disgusted? A scene of a guy who had his dick mutilated by a hog getting a blow job. Blech.

You know which scene disturbed me the most? Busey stabs a needle into a woman’s eye and then rapes her while the needle is going deeper and deeper into her eye as her face is pressed into a pillow.

Meanwhile, there are a few side stories involving other characters, including Michael Pare as a detective, but there really are no stories here to be told. It’s odd to make such a long movie that essentially goes nowhere.

Even the dive into the serial killer’s psyche is underwhelming. It’s basically just a few scenes letting us know of his incestuous issues with his mother. Hell, by the final act, it feels like the movie has forgotten it was supposed to be about Pickton and makes someone else the bad guy instead. This movie definitely felt pretty aimless.

UNSPEAKABLE: BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP (2024)

This is Chad doing what he does best—raunchy, sleazy cosmic sex horror based on Lovecraft that pushes the envelope more than Stuart Gordon did in the 80s.

On a side note, there are some Christmas decorations around, so this does take place during the season, but the holiday is totally irrelevant to the plot.

We begin in 1998…in black and white! Kill me now if the 90s are being represented by black and white film. Anyway, a dude thrown in jail for pedophilia is sexually harassed by his cellmate, so he bites the dude’s dick off. I won’t be able to see how exactly that all went down until the movie is released on physical media, because The Roku Channel blocked out the going down action!

The rest of the move focuses on Edward Furlong, a dream specialist working with psych patient with a split personality. This patient is creepy, and he soon turns into a monster and starts noshing on the heads of other people in the mental institution, infecting them with, well, something.

Meanwhile, Furlong begins having horrific visions, most of which involve his wife, played by 80s adult film queen Ginger Lynn.

This is a perfectly fucked up and chaotic, surreal nightmare of nonsense, which includes Furlong entering a realm in which he watches two men with monster penises battle it out.

Eventually, there’s a segment that unfolds briefly like a zombie outbreak in the hospital, there’s a great hand-in-trash-disposal scene shown from the inside (eek!), and the main patient dude ends up in a church fucking a nun with his own monster penis.

This is so my kind of throwback trash, and it’s the only one from this trio of Chad Ferrin flicks that I want to add to my collection.

Posted in Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on 3 more from director Chad Ferrin

Freaky food, a masked murderer messing up, and killing chaos

Posted on January 7, 2026 by Daniel

Nothing is really as it seems in any of the movies from my latest movie marathon, making for one interesting triple feature.

1998 (2025)

This slasher comedy is only 77 minutes long but pads quite a bit of its runtime with montages, a music video, and 9 minutes of closing credits, so there isn’t much room for it to deliver the best of what it has to offer.

In a very bizarre opener that takes place in 1988, a singer decides to become a 1990s serial killer after he has his voice stolen from him.

For most of the first 29 minutes, we watch the killer do basic everyday tasks—making a protein shake, taking a bubble bath, jerking off, trying on different outfits in a fashion montage—in between failed attempts at being a masked killer, because in each case he gets his ass kicked by the would-be victim. A funny concept, but not quite the full intention of the plot.

A month later, a group of goths heads to a cabin in the woods. The guys have that sexy, queer goth vibe going on, which is a plus.

After a dance montage, they play truth or dare while the killer chases an unrelated couple in the woods.

Despite the campy tone of the film, the slashing scenes are crafted quite seriously. However, most of them are negated when a fun subgenre shift is presented, albeit way too late in the film to exploit it, which is a real bummer, because it really could have delivered something fresh and playful.

Meanwhile, the soundtrack kind of kicks ass, with a blend of songs that sound right out of the 80s and 90s.

HAUNTED HOUSE OF PANCAKES (2025)

It’s one for the holiday horror page! This horror comedy takes place at a fully decorated diner filled with customers in costume on Halloween.

Two brothers, one of them a total hunk, work at the diner. I can see why his brother can’t resist touching his pecs.

Their boss scores a new waffle iron, one of the brothers gets cut in the kitchen and bleeds into it, and then the waffle iron begins generating killer diner food and killer waffle balls.

Don’t ask me why the movie was titled Haunted House of Pancakes. Although, there was a moment when the movie served up some tasty cakes.

There are classic 80s style synth music cues, campy humor, silliness, killer food with teeth and eyes, gore, some impressive special effects, a nasty sex comedy scene, and the customers basically turning into a horde of possessed zombies.

It’s a pretty damn good entry in the killer food subgenre. The hubby and I both laughed out loud quite a bit. We also got a major craving for diner food.

THE ONLY ONES (2024)

This little indie really snuck up on me. The poster art isn’t very compelling, so the most I was hoping for was a generic slasher.

In the first few minutes, I thought I was going to be in for a pleasant surprise, with a backwoods killer wearing a skin mask hacking up quite a few people as we get narration of his backstory—born of incest, deformed, discarded in the woods, raised by a witch, now guarding the forest, and known as…Boneface! Awesome.

This movie did not go where I expected it to, in a good way.

A group of friends, including the beefy cutie in the blue shirt, travels to a house in the woods to party. They immediately discover a couple of squatters in the house and kick them out. One of the squatters seems kind of psycho….

Then we get character development. I feared this might end up being all dialogue driven filler, but it was just a campfire chat and a good amount of focus on the past trauma of two girls in a lesbian relationship. Yes! The star roles in this film belong to two lesbians. You don’t see that every day.

I don’t want to give it away, but things take an unexpected turn when one of the friends encounters the squatters again. Shit spirals out of control, and there ends up being one kill after another, some of them quite brutal, with a heavy dose of dark humor in the mix.

Even my hubby was getting a kick out of this one as it just carried us along on a rollercoaster ride right to the end. This is a perfect example of how you can deliver loads of thrills without a big budget.

Posted in Johnny You ARE Queer - Gay Thoughts, Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, Scared Silly - Horror Comedy, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Comments Off on Freaky food, a masked murderer messing up, and killing chaos

Back to the late 1900s: possession and aliens

Posted on January 4, 2026 by Daniel

Spanning three decades, my latest movie marathon is a retro-tastic dive into lower tier flicks from the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

THE POSSESSED (1977)

Four years after the release of The Exorcist, movies were still trying to chase its fame, even on television. This made-for-TV movie has nothing going for it beyond a cool cast of familiar faces, including Harrison Ford, Ann Dusenberry (the girl who cried, “Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-shark!” in Jaws 2), PJ Soles of Halloween, Diana Scarwid of Strange Invaders and Psycho III, and Dinah Manoff of Grease. Awesome.

There’s this girls’ school, and for some unknown reason, shit starts going on fire: a typewriter, a dorm room, a fricking girl. Seriously, this demon is actually just a firestarter. So silly.

A detective comes to investigate the fires, but one of the teachers decides something supernatural is going on, so she calls in a priest, at which point the movie plays out mostly like a drama.

Suddenly at the end, another staff member reveals she is possessed while standing by an indoor pool. The priest comes in, the demon tries to firestart him, the power of Christ is compelled to put the fire out, the demon spits tacks out of her mouth at him, and finally he jumps in the pool to exorcise her.

All of this while they’re just standing there staring at each other. WTF with this movie? I don’t even think I saw this one back when it was released, and I saw like every made-for-TV movie in those days.

ALIENATOR (1988)

This is a totally goofy play on The Terminator concept…with a bodybuilder woman as a metal-bikini-wearing alien with a laser gun attached to her arm that sounds exactly like a lightsaber.

Jan Michael Vincent runs a space prison where PJ Soles and Joseph Pilato (the douche from Day of the Dead) also work. However, all there have minor roles.

A prisoner pulls a C-3PO and R2-D2 and escape pods his way to Earth, is struck by an RV full of young people, and then tries to warn them that someone will be coming for him and they will be in danger, too.

There’s a local sheriff, two silly rednecks (silly rednecks always found alien happenings in the woods in 80s movies), and our Alienator with her big body and punk rock wig running around the woods a lot. Of note is that there is a kill that reminds us that filmmakers used to actually light people on fire to get it to look like someone was lit on fire….

Thing is, not much happens. She incinerates someone now and then, but it’s not until the last 20 minutes that she closes in on the group of friends, who have holed up in a cabin and must fight back.

Fred Olen Ray directs and definitely captures the cheesiness of late 80s, direct-to-video sci-fi, he just doesn’t deliver something worth remembering. The most memorable part is some space leeches the prisoner uses as weapons during his initial escape.

OUT THERE (1995)

This is a charming yet slow-moving nod to sci-fi flicks of the 50s and 60s, and it even begins in 1969, with two men having a close encounter. But of what kind?

In the modern day, cutie Billy Campbell scores a camera that has old film in it…with photos of that 1969 encounter. He meets the daughter of one of the men in those photos, and she is determined to find out what happened to her dad, since those photos are the last he was ever seen.
The pair begins to do some detecting, and they interact with the likes of Julie Brown, Rod Steiger, Billy Bob Thornton, Jill St. John, Bobcat Goldthwait, and PJ Soles. This almost could have been a PJ Soles movie marathon, but she isn’t in any of these films long enough to warrant that label. This one only gives her approximately ten seconds of screen time!

There is a lot of talk, so despite the great retro vibe, not much beyond conversations actually goes on for a majority of the movie. There’s humor, but the material is played straight, so there’s no over-the-top comedy.

The highlight really is the final act. The truth about the aliens is uncovered, there are some twists, we get some classic aliens, and there’s a chase scene. There’s even a mean shot taken at Michael Jackson and the possibility that he’s an alien!

 

Posted in Living in the 80s - forever, Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, Scared Silly - Horror Comedy, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Back to the late 1900s: possession and aliens

A gay ghost story, a New Year’s slasher, and cannibal killers

Posted on January 2, 2026 by Daniel

It’s one for the homo horror movies page, one for the holiday horror page, and one that belongs on a list of the many derivative psycho backwoods family movies out there.

LADYBUG (2024)

This gay flick begins as one of the slowest burn suspense films yet fails to drop the necessary hints for the audience to make any sense out of the full-on supernatural horror movie it becomes in the final act. The hubby and I were saying “WTF?” for the entire half hour, and we then had to talk through it to make sense of it, which included rewinding the film and watching certain scenes again to try to piece it all together.

The other problem is that the supernatural aspect is so absurd and full of logic holes that it’s hard to be forgiving.

A gay artist getting over a breakup heads to his family’s cabin in the woods to focus on producing new work to appease his agent, played by horror queen Scout Taylor-Compton.

He soon begins to notice someone watching him from the woods. For a city boy, he is way too chill about it if you ask me, but I guess he’s too distracted by the cute handyman that comes calling and flirting with him to care. Once the handyman offers to be his nude model, I totally understood why he forgot about the lurker.

This thriller setup has few thrills but is loaded with suspicious scenarios to confuse us, which is so unnecessary when the actual plot is already so damn hard to follow.

Eventually there’s a major supernatural revelation that involves the ghosts of a killer’s victims, paranormal hookups, and possession, with very few attempts to connect the dots along the way. It got to the point that we didn’t know who was dead, who was alive, and who was possessed.

Watch it and pay super close attention, because aside from the sexy scenes and intense horror elements at the end, you must contend with the fun of having your head completely scrambled. Also, keep an eye out for a cameo by Marion, the nurse from the Halloween movies.

NEW FEARS EVE (2025)

This wacky slasher comedy is totally schizo, which makes it both chaotic and highly entertaining.

The opener is absolute perfection. We get someone dressed as a plague doctor killing several victims in a series of quick, gory death scenes interspersed with news stories.

Seemingly oblivious to all this serial killer stuff stealing headlines is the staff at a company run by horror king Dave Sheridan, whose assistant is none other than Felissa Rose.

There is some adolescent sexual comedy that made me chuckle out loud as we are introduced to the workers, one of whom is Final Destination creator Jeffrey Reddick.

There are quite a few more random kill scenes thrown in the days leading up to New Year’s Eve, including Felissa getting one of the nastiest kills of all. I can’t stress enough how gnarly and gory the kills are for a horror comedy.

Meanwhile, the characters are just doing their thing. There isn’t much weight to their stories, so their interactions begin feeling like simple, humorous filler in between the kills.

I think the main issue is that despite the title of the movie, most of the action takes place before the New Year’s Eve party. When the party finally hits in the final act, rather than a festive focus on a big holiday celebration or a countdown to midnight, the party is mostly just background noise as the plague doctor goes on a murder spree in the office.

The final battle between all the main characters is a blast (including a dildo fight), but of note is that one of the most torturous deaths in the film is inflicted on a gay character right before he’s about to hook up with another guy. I believe there could be a major correlation between the fact that there is talk about ass-eating right before his tongue is targeted by the killer, and I feel personally attacked. Obviously, this one lands on the does the gay guy die? page.

We never do learn the identity of the killer, because the film blatantly sets us up for a sequel that should pick up right where this one ends. Can’t wait, and I hope this one gets a physical media release.

CANNIBAL CABIN (2022)

I’m always up for a Louisa Warren indie, but I prefer her fun creature killers to a cliché, backwoods cannibal family horror flick. And this one is as cliché as it gets.

The opener has a few friends, including a pregnant woman, entering the wrong place at the wrong time. We are immediately introduced to the crazed family, most of them wearing skin masks like a cheap Texas Chainsaw knockoff.

It’s also clear that things aren’t going to go well for the pregnant woman and her unborn child. But for an opening scene, it’s so long that by the time the killing began, I was like, wait, they’re not the main group?

Next, we are introduced to a group of friends on a road trip. Would you believe they have van trouble?

Much of the middle of the movie features a majority of the group going to look for help, so there’s a bunch of exploring with no suspense.

Eventually, they also enter the wrong place at the wrong time, and we get a scene right out of Wrong Turn. From there it’s the usual. Anyone they turn to for help is part of the family. There’s torture porn. There’s a need for more babies in the family.

The gore is grisly enough, but the movie just doesn’t hit you in the nerves, and the survivors put up a pretty pathetic fight. The most annoying part of this whole predicament? Early on, one of the main dudes literally points out that they are getting themselves right into a horror movie. Seriously, I’m not trying to victim blame, but anyone could have seen that was the case, so it’s absurd that someone says it out loud yet they don’t all immediately rethink what they’re doing.

Posted in Johnny You ARE Queer - Gay Thoughts, Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, Scared Silly - Horror Comedy, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A gay ghost story, a New Year’s slasher, and cannibal killers

Fight for the right to bite!

Posted on January 1, 2026 by Daniel

It’s a foursome of vampire flicks. The fangs are fab, but are the movies a mess? Let’s find out.

BOGIEVILLE (2024)

The opener of this film—a woman terrorized by a vampire in a restroom stall—sets us up for thrills that the rest of the film rarely delivers.

The vampires have that awesome, modern multi-teeth and black eyes look, but instead of leaning hard on the horror of them running rampant in a trailer park, the movie tries to delve into a moody, Let the Right One In vibe that fails to propel the plot forward at an engrossing pace, especially considering the movie is 108 minutes long.

A small town couple runs off together and ends up at a trailer park. Almost immediately, the redneck dude that welcomes them introduces them to vampires he has hidden away. He tells them that now that the vamps know their scent, they can never escape them, so they must stay. Of course, he has an ulterior motive for entrapping the couple.

The vampires occasionally come out to attack random people, but there’s not enough intensity or suspense in the sequences. The movie just crawls along, jumping back and forth between scenes of characters who don’t have much to do and becoming very repetitive. Even vampire in-fighting fails to bring much excitement.

The best part is a sudden hi-energy battle between the authorities and the vampires in the final act, which even throws in a splash of humor. Compared to the somber tone of everything that comes before it, it feels like we’ve suddenly started watching a different movie.

The final “twist” ties up the Let the Right One In element perfectly, but it almost feels like it was conceived first with less effort given to making the unfolding of events beforehand a true slice of entertainment.

OUT FOR BLOOD (2004)

Now this is the escape the hubby and I needed—a SyFy original vampire flick from 2004 with Kevin Dillon and Lance Henriksen. Even Melissa Rivers gets a cameo.

Dillon is a troubled cop who won’t stop bothering his soon-to-be ex-wife. Lance is his boss, who assigns him to a missing persons case that started at a rave.

So Dillon heads to the club, witnesses some sexy stuff, gets seduced by a female vamp, is swarmed by pretty male vamps right out of Buffy, and is then attacked by an awesome master vampire.

It just so happens that Dillon’s ex is an author of vampire books, so he goes to her for help with his new vamp problem. So they come up with a plan to take out the master to save Dillon from a life of blood-sucking.

It is definitely as fun as an episode of Buffy, so just sit back and enjoy the campy vibes, a handful of notably funny vampire sequences, and familiar vampire makeup effects.

THE NIGHT BOYZ (2023)

This Black vampire flick has lofty goals, including the nearly 2-hour runtime, but it plods along with way too many individual components that never seem to come together.

There’s an opener in colonial times with race hate, the n word, a lynching, and I think a white dude putting some sort of curse on Black people.

In contemporary times, we meet two cousins (one of them the director of the film). They are at odds with a gang in the hood.

The leader of the gang is turned into a vampire by the “head vampire”. The cousin (not the director…the other one), is turned into a vampire by a young woman who seems to be in cahoots with his aunt, who I think is pregnant with the baby of the head vampire.

Yes, this film is very confusing.

The cops are trying to crack down on the gang problems on the streets, so they get caught up in the vampire issue as well. The sheriff is quite the daddy.

The cousin teams up with the girl who bit him in hopes of killing the head vampire so they can be human again. Naturally, the head vampire has some nefarious plan linked to the past.

Problem is, there isn’t much action, which is not good news for a movie that is almost 2 hours long. Everyone ends up in the head vampire’s lair for the last ten minutes of the movie, and we suddenly get some werewolf action (aka: bad werewolf mask). No idea why, and it whimpers out as fast as it howled in. I really just couldn’t with this movie, despite the cool vampire fangs and glowing eyes.

THE STRANGER (2014)

This is the serious, story-driven vampire flick of this bunch, and color me shocked, because it totally sucked me in despite not having any kind of cheap vampire thrills. It’s a totally complex, character-centric flick.

Somber and tragic, it has a man vamp seeking the vamp wife that ran away from him years before. He has finally tracked her to a small town, where he immediately finds himself infiltrating the life of a kid who rescues him from a violent attack by a local gang.

The leader of this gang is as douchey and relentless as they get, and his protective father is the fricking corrupt sheriff. Meanwhile, the vamp man is so intent on being good and not using his powers for self-preservation that he sort of allows the bad mortals to spiral out of control in their desire to destroy him.

We watch as these lives become intertwined in the messiest of ways, when all the man vamp wanted to do was make sure his vampire bloodline can’t infect anyone else.

I won’t say more, because you really have to watch this one when you are in an attentive mood and want a really compelling and emotional vampire story.

Posted in Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Fight for the right to bite!

Are any of these seven flicks the perfect party movies for your New Year’s Eve?

Posted on December 31, 2025 by Daniel

Hey, I tried. I selected a bunch of horror flicks from my watchlists, mostly comedies, hoping to find at last a few that are worthy of a holiday viewing party. Did any of them bring on the fun? Let’s find out.

BIG BAD (2016)

This werewolf flick takes a while to get going, but once it does, it’s a hoot.

We first meet a bunch of teens. They party in the woods, two of them go off alone, and then it’s implied that something attacks them.

Next, we meet a trio of students. They’re doing some sort of fundraiser with their teacher…at an old, abandoned prison. When the teacher informs them that they must stay overnight in the prison cells and leaves them, a werewolf shows up. Eek!

This is a fun, wolfman style werewolf. There’s an intense scene as the trio tries to get out of the prison, and once they do, the action is carried into the woods.

They connect with a hot daddy sheriff, there’s a suspenseful but brief chase scene, and then the trio is separated from the sheriff. They end up in a warehouse for a final battle with the werewolf, where we even get a little gore.

The characters are likable, one of the main girls steals all the comedic moments, and the overall tone is playful. It does feel like the movie could have been a little longer and delivered a few more werewolf attacks and cheap thrills, but overall, this one is quite enjoyable.

There is a classic, cheesy final frame, but then we get an unnecessary segment of news reports and interviews that is goofy and doesn’t fit with the previous humorist tone. Not to mention, the one thing it needed to do—conclude the sheriff’s side of the story—is a total throwaway moment. Hot daddy sheriff deserved better. Like, two crotch shots better.

SORORITY OF THE DAMNED (2025)

Joe Davison co-writes, co-directs, and stars in this quirky little witchcraft sorority flick, which takes a while to get going before finally hitting its stride in the final act.

Davison plays a maintenance man who works at the sorority house. Felissa Rose is the witchy house mother. While dealing with plumbing issues, Davison finds a mysterious book in the basement.

It’s just what the house mother has been looking for. She draws her girls into an occult ritual, there’s some nudity, and then the girls start spitting black bile and tearing men apart. Awesome.

This is when Joe Davison steps in and has his chance to show what a naturally comedic actor he is.

 

Things get wild, with an awesome “She’s a Witch!” montage song (totally going in my Halloween playlist), the girls resurrecting dead ghouls from the coffins, and a big warrior statue coming to life to help Davison battle the ghouls. It’s silly fun with some cool looking ghouls.

GOTHIC SLAYERS (2025)

Going for the “over age nerds battling demons” horror comedy vibe is definitely an art, and you really have to get it just right for it to work. This movie has so many of the necessary elements, but it just doesn’t cut it. Compared to what Sorority of the Damned delivers with a similar premise, the entertainment level is just more on target with that movie. The highlight for me with this one was the awesomely faux 80s soundtrack.

 

The two main dudes, who also co-wrote the script, work at a miniature golf course and play a lot of video games. There are excessive scenes establishing them as the slacker nerds they are.

They are definitely likable and charismatic, and the supporting cast is also likable. There simply isn’t enough solid comedy material or plot for them to work with. How do you write your own script for characters you’re playing and not give yourself loads of great lines? They also need to fill a 101-minute runtime, and they don’t have a lot of meat with which to do that.

The plot is simple. A cult kidnaps a friend of the main dudes and intends to use him as a vessel in which to implant a demon.

Almost the entirety of the movie has the dudes trying to figure out how they are going to stop this from happening. Instead of any monster slaying, a majority of the plot has them dodging the cult and a bunch of goth girls. I don’t know why, but even things that are supposed to be funny, that I wanted to laugh at, mostly just didn’t hit right. Pretty soon you forget you were hoping for a horror comedy.

The one unique and bizarre element here is that the dudes rely on their favorite video game to give them clues as to how to stop the demon. The concept simply isn’t integrated clearly or logically enough into the story for it to make any sense. It’s used more like a novelty, right up to the anticlimactic, final battle with the demon in the last 20 minutes, which is in part presented as a 16-bit video game instead of live action. Sigh.

THE DEMON DETECTIVE (2025)

The title is perfect for this movie, because it feels like the height of the fun, supernatural SyFy original series era. It’s straightforward, it’s a little campy, it has quirky demons, and it delivers simple “magical” battle effects.

The opener sets the tone, with a hot exorcist, played by cutie Dustyn Gulledge, cleansing a chef of a wicked, horned demon man.

Our exorcist is quite powerful, has a pretty powerful sidekick, has issues with the church, and is carrying around the weight of losing his sister to a demon. He also sees dead people.

While dealing with several other demons, including one that bursts out of the floor in a school gym, the exorcist also has to contend with an aspiring, competitive demon hunter team and a woman who is being terrorized by demons as well. We also get always welcome cameos by Vivica A. Fox and Adrienne Barbeau.

The film does run a little long, and it’s not until an hour in that the main woman finally becomes possessed by the demon that has been pursuing her. It also turns out this demon is one our cute exorcist has dealt with before—and it’s none other than horror icon Doug Jones! Yay!

The final battle is over-the-top to the point of funny, just like a SyFy original, and even features demons fighting each other. Awesome. I kind of wish this would either become a television series or get a sequel.

UNDER CONTROLL (2019)

Someone in Germany decided to make a sequel to the infamous 1990 flick Troll 2, and they even got original Troll 2 star George Hardy to reprise his role a tiny bit.

While Troll 2 is known as an unintentionally bad movie, which is what gives it its charm, this sequel is intentionally made as a bad movie, so despite perfectly capturing an 80s bad movie aesthetic, it’s kind of unbearable to watch.

Most offensive is the fact that it is comprised almost entirely of those way-too-close to the camera shots that distort everyone’s faces. On top of that, all the characters are made up to look so gaudy with the seeming intention of adding to the warped style.

After a history lesson in how the troll came to be hundreds of years ago, which is both in animated form and live action form, we are brought to the present. A construction crew accidentally digs up the troll’s resting place, and it comes out to play.

How? By possessing the body of a woman to then pursue her teen daughter’s virgin boyfriend for a sacrifice that will allow the troll to open a portal to bring its troll brothers into the human world. Either this troll is actually female, or it’s the queerest Troll ever. It even comes back to life after being exhumed by charming a dude to kiss it.

This shit is just weird. The troll (in woman form) flies around on a broom. It’s hunting for a magic book it was buried with, and it is not the only one trying to get a hold of the book.

There are too many characters, there are weird fish people, the whole thing is slapstick and silly, the bad dubbing adds to the cheesy feel, and original actor George Hardy is totally underutilized. He shouldn’t have been a cameo. He should have been one of the main protagonists. That is what the Troll 2 crowd really would have wanted.

BLOOD PAGEANT (2021)

This movie feels very early 2000s, and it could have been just as hokey and fun if it weren’t almost 2 hours long.

A girl determined to win a reality show gets some extra help from her life coach. Meanwhile, another contestant, a religious good girl, is struggling with her life decisions.

As for all the other quirky girls and characters, their introductions are as boring as this script is. There’s nothing funny here, the characters are bland, and we don’t even get a pillow fight between the girls, let alone any T&A. If a gay guy is bitching about that, you know a movie is boring.

Snoop Dogg and Stephen Baldwin have minor roles, so they’re not around long enough to really spoil anything. Besides, Snoop plays a talent show judge, and Baldwin plays a priest, so they’re sticking to doing what they know.

We also get David Chokachi, who still looks Baywatch good, as a sleazy producer, and Isaac from The Love Boat. Is there anyone who doesn’t love Isaac?

The girls do begin dying off every now and then, mostly in offscreen kills, but it’s not until 65 minutes in that something significant happens—a ghoulish woman spirit starts a reign of terror. And she’s just as cheesy as all the female ghosts from early 2000s horror. In other words, wahoo!

Unfortunately, it takes until the 90-minute mark for her to go full haunting on the remaining girls, and she seems to be having a blast doing it, which means all the fun is packed into the last 25 minutes.

THE BOULET BROTHERS’ HOLIDAY OF HORRORS (2025)

This anthology is probably your best bet for closing out the holiday season and the year. It’s only 40 minutes long, and the tales are really short, but it still lands on the complete holiday horror page.

A grindhouse filter, Christmas music, and holiday home video clips set the mood as the film’s opener, and then the camera tracks into a frighteningly festive mansion (in a nod to the Tales from the Crypt intro), where the Boulet Brothers are waiting to present four tales.

1st tale – At Christmas, a mother, stepdad, and daughter move into a house they just inherited from grandma. But you can’t keep a vengeful granny down. It looks eerie as hell as her corpse prowls around, but the dramatic choral/tribal music blaring throughout the scene kills the mood.

2nd tale – There’s no mention of Christmas, but girls in very snowy woods track down a Yeti-like creature they think took their friend. This story gets right to the point…and kills…and has a total anthology tale twist.

3rd tale – It’s mentioned that it’s New Year’s Eve when Rent and Death Proof star Tracie Thoms enters the home of her recently deceased father and is terrorized by creepy messages on his answering machine.

4th tale – I assume this is a stop motion tale, and I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I think it steals the show. It’s both a funny and disturbing look at a major danger Santa must face at every single house he visits on Christmas Eve. If you want your Christmas special fucked up, this is the one to watch. I mean, Santa is wearing Christmas tassel pasties. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Posted in Johnny You ARE Queer - Gay Thoughts, Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, Scared Silly - Horror Comedy, Sound Check - The Songs Stuck in My Head, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Are any of these seven flicks the perfect party movies for your New Year’s Eve?

Christmas killing, Halloween horror, and a good dose of demon

Posted on December 29, 2025 by Daniel

This trio of flicks delivers on body count during the Christmas and Halloween seasons, but only two out of the three earn a spot on the holiday horror page. Let’s find out why.

BLACK KRAMPUS (2025)


I was so thrilled to find a new Christmas horror to watch with the hubby on Christmas Eve. That is until we watched it.

I guess they called this British horror flick Black Krampus because the title I Know What You Did Last Christmas was already taken. The whole “we’re reuniting after doing something a year ago that we dare not speak about” plot is much more of the focus than Black Krampus actually is.

Krampus kills a couple at the beginning, complete with a beheading, so that gave me hope.

Then we meet the group of friends reuniting for Christmas. The creepy old groundskeeper who warns them about Black Krampus has a rockin’ narrator’s voice. In fact, he does the old school narration for the movie’s trailer. They so need to bring back trailer narrators.

In between the group spending most of the time talking, there are occasional flashbacks hinting that something happened a year ago, but they are the most unrevealing flashbacks ever.

There’s one low-key kill, and Black Krampus himself is just as chill. That’s because Black Krampus spends most of the time making his supernatural power do his dirty work for him by turning the friends against each other.

The kills are few and far between, the Christmas atmosphere is minimal, and we don’t get enough of the ominous presence of Black Krampus. And the ending? Whoosh. The two survivors apologize to thin air for what they did last Christmas and then just walk out of the house without ever confronting Black Krampus.

TRAUMATIKA (2024)

I’m a huge fan of Two Witches by the same director, so I’m psyched that I blind bought this one despite all the “wah wah wah, so much missed potential” shit I’ve seen floating around the internet about it. For me, this is like if all the boring trauma porn shit that hits Shudder was actually good and filled with intense scenes. It’s also only 82 minutes long, so it gets right to the horror.

Perhaps I’m a bit biased because the concept is similar to Oozy Bruisy, an abusive creature that first appeared in one of my short stories before becoming the main antagonist in my latest book Halloween Specials & Torcher Porn.

This film is about trauma (title kind of gives it away…), but it’s a literal trauma demon that passes the pattern of abuse from one person to another. Seriously, this concept is ridiculously similar to Oozy Bruisy.

There’s a bizarre opening scene that isn’t quite necessary but establishes that this demon dates back to at least 1910. Then we jump right into several edge-of-your-seat scenes of a boy and a cop (played by AJ Bowen) being chased through a dark house by a possessed girl. This is a perfect example of how to create a heart-pounding cat and mouse sequence.

The movie manages to jump timeline a bit without being overwhelming as we see how things led to the moment of the boy being terrorized by the possessed girl. In case the block of text that opens the film didn’t clue you in as a trigger warning, this is a movie about abuse, particularly sexual abuse. Interestingly, the daughter abused by her father is played by an adult woman…who happened to star in Two Witches.

There are some fantastic horror visuals as the film progresses, as well as disturbing bodily autonomy moments, and then the demon’s intentions begin to unfold. Just when everything appears to come to a head, the movie totally switches gears, and this is the part people seem to be bitching about the most.

Personally, I found it a satisfying switch-up. The movie essentially becomes a slasher for the last 20 minutes or so, and it takes place on Halloween! Not long enough to consider this a holiday horror movie, but it does add to the shift in tone and delivers seasonal atmosphere.

The theme of the infectious abuse is totally still at the forefront, it simply takes on a different form this time—a killer instead of a child abuser. Awesome and logical, since the need to hurt others as you’ve been hurt doesn’t always materialize in the exact same way. And if you’re going to morph from possession to slasher, the goal is to deliver on both subgenres, and Traumatika nails both.

THE JESTER 2 (2025)

This sequel to The Jester remains fully immersed in the Halloween night theme, and the plot also reminded me of Satan’s Little Helper. However, by having the Jester enlist a little helper, it waters down his creepy mystique. But, if you can accept that Michael Myers hired an apprentice after almost 45 years of working alone, then you shouldn’t really gripe about this turn of events in the second movie in what is apparently becoming a franchise.

We jump right into the holiday celebration with an outdoor Halloween party. In his magical fashion, the Jester climbs out of a trunk in the middle of the woods and starts right in with his terror tricks.

Then we meet our main teenage girl, an aspiring magician dressed as a magician for Halloween. She has no friends, so she is totally bummed to be going out by herself on Halloween night.

She has an encounter with the Jester, who is impressed by her magic knowledge, so after he kills off a few more people, he circles back to her and way too easily convinces her to tag along for some trick or treating. I get that she’s lonely and vulnerable, but did no one ever teach this teenager not to take candy with a stranger…?

The Jester soon makes it clear to her that he wants her to participate in using magic to mesmerize victims before murdering them. So begins her on-again/off-again relationship with him as she goes from trying to dip out of this one-night stand to joining in on his murder spree.

It’s all very odd, with the main girl’s wishy-washy feelings about the Jester killing any sense of suspense or horror. Adding to the lack of tension is the fact that the movie is focused on making the Jester an iconic quirky killer character—the same move that quickly made Freddy, Jason, Chucky, and Art the Clown into cultural caricatures rather than terrifying personas.

The kills are clever and get gorier and more fun along the way, but the movie waits until the very last second to clue us in to exactly what the Jester’s motivation is and why he will definitely be back next Halloween. The main girl’s final words tell us that his goal is four tricks for four souls every year, which is at odds with the fact that he totally killed more than four people in this installment.

Posted in Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Christmas killing, Halloween horror, and a good dose of demon

Traveling back in time with Eternal Darkness on GameCube

Posted on December 28, 2025 by Daniel

I finally found time to get back to my replays of all my old survival horror games as I move on from the PS2 to the GameCube. First up was Eternal Darkness.

While this game plays smoothly for the most part and has plenty of zombies, it’s actually set up as a series of chapters that are all period pieces, with you playing a different character each time. We’re talking ancient history, sand, swords, and even blowguns. Blech. And it’s not so much horror survival as it is stand and fight, hack n slash stuff.

You get a variety of weapons depending on the chapter, beginning with a sword. There’s a targeting system that lets you hits specific spots on enemies—head, arms, torso. Hack away until an enemy drops and then you can hit a button to finish him off, which replenishes your “sanity” meter so you don’t hallucinate. If you don’t finish the baddie off fast enough, the body just disintegrates. It is a little challenging trying to target specific enemies when several of them are swarming you, so it’s good to try to run past them to make some room and hopefully get them to fall more into a line formation rather than a cluster so you can deal with them one by one.

There are some positives to the gameplay. For starters, the game pauses while you are in your inventory. There’s a reload button for guns, but you can also just go into your inventory to reload if you need a breather. In inventory, you can also access game settings, a map, and the save system. Best news of all? You can save anywhere! Yes! However, you can’t save when there are enemies in a room. Drats!

While there are run and sneak buttons, there isn’t a quick turn option, which is a little frustrating. Also, you use the same button to finish enemies off as you do to open doors, so if you’re standing near a door when you go to finish an enemy, half the time you’ll end up opening the door and automatically go through it instead. And the fixed camera angles and perspectives suffer the same issue as original Resident Evil games; walk into a room and the camera doesn’t allow you to see enemies that are in front of you until you walk close enough to them to change the camera angle, leaving you vulnerable to attacks. Argh!

The modern day story that ties the chapters together has a young woman in a mansion trying to uncover the truth about what happened to her father. Each time she finds a page from a magic book, we head into a new chapter. After each chapter, we temporarily return to her so she can figure out how to trigger the next chapter by searching the house, which gets scarier as the game progresses. Since you play a different character in each chapter, no inventory carries over. The magic book and spells you build up, however, do get handed off from one chapter to the other. Yay! The only catch is that it is not immediate; you have to walk through the right door to temporarily be transported to the realm where the magic book is stored to grab it for the current chapter.

Most importantly, when you begin the game, you have to choose which color rune to play through (red, blue, or green). You’ll have no idea what any of it means, so just roll the dice and pick whichever one you want. You will need to learn the hierarchy of these three colors (blue tops red, green tops blue, etc.), and the game plays somewhat differently depending on the color you pick for replay value.

Chapter 1

Very straightforward. Guy with sword runs around an ancient structure, fighting a few zombies and picking up stones that he then needs to put in the right spots in a main room to exit the chapter.

Chapter 2

A female character runs around an ancient structure. However, we are introduced to the sanity meter now. This is on top of a health meter. Whenever you encounter enemies, your sanity meter goes down a little, and when it runs out, your health takes a hit. I hate that shit. As your sanity lowers, you also start to panic and move slower. Eventually, your coordination gets fucked up, as does your vision, and you hallucinate. Ugh. I think the point of the sanity meter was just to offer an opportunity to throw in jump scares (the hallucinations), because without it, this game is really not frightening at all.

This chapter has bigger zombies, more of them, hallways with slice n dice traps and little darts shooting from the walls on either side of you if you step on the wrong color floor panels, and a part when your sword breaks and you get a fucking blow gun with limited ammo that takes forever to kill just one enemy.

Here’s the shitty part. You can have a human who happens to be nearby fix your sword when it breaks…but only if you kill two zombies first with the blow gun before they kill the human. Good luck with that. The human dies within seconds, and the zombies don’t. I had to play the rest of the chapter without my sword. You can just use your fists to try to fight, but getting too close to zombies is asking for trouble. Luckily, I was able to dodge the zombies for the rest of the chapter in my quest to find the lever that opens an escape route.

Chapter 3

This is when the game starts to get more complex and confusing. While you’re still doing pretty straightforward fetching and collecting missions, there are new elements introduced. First is the magic ability, which is really confusing and includes combining different enchantments, codexes, and runes. Ugh. You can assign some spells to five quick buttons on your controller if you can figure out which ones are most useful for the particular chapter you are playing, or you can go into the menu to make them when it’s time to use them as needed. The good news is that there are spells to heal yourself and to fix your sanity. You’ll really need to grab a magic mixing chart from the internet to juggle the magic concoctions.

This level introduces a new little bugger called a trapper. You can sneak past them, but if they catch you, you get sent to this sort of arena of platforms with different color portals and have to color match your teleporting way back to the platform with the portal that returns you to the game. However, in this dimension you can also jump from one platform to the other to refill health, sanity, and magic, so sometimes you’re going to want to run into trappers to travel here.

You wouldn’t know this without a walkthrough, but there is a kind of boss at the end of the level, and you can enchant your sword with magic to defeat him faster.

Chapter 4

The game is already getting repetitive at this point. To mix things up, after a few hits, a zombie will sometimes morph into some sort of aggressive, screeching monkey creature before you defeat it.

You begin collecting more magic for mixing, and by the end of the chapter you actually have to enchant your sword with a specific rune to use it as a key to open the final door. The magic menu is complex, so you’ll most likely want to limit magic use to just the most effective spells. Be aware that a) you can’t use spells repeatedly, because you have a magic meter that needs to replenish, and b) when you cast a spell, you get circled by a triangle of power that takes time to generate. If you move or an enemy strikes you in the middle of that process, the fricking spell is cancelled and you have to cast it again. In other words, only cast a spell when you’re totally in the clear.

In this chapter, you also get little weapons you can toss at those annoying trappers to kill them from afar before they can teleport you away to the other dimension, so that’s a bonus.

The downside of this level is that there are two different sections that lock you into a certain space and force you to take on several waves of enemies before you can leave. Ugh. That’s a lot of forced combat for a “survival horror” game.

Chapter 5

You’re in the mansion from the wraparound story, with a pistol, and there are servants cleaning up all over the place. You wouldn’t know it without a walkthrough, but there’s one servant you can shoot in the head to turn her into the monkey creature, then shoot it to the floor and perform an autopsy on it so it won’t come back. Kind of pointless.

Actually, as short as this chapter is, you really won’t know what to do for most of it if you don’t follow a walkthrough. Eventually, you’ll fight a big bug, and the goal is to shoot it as it’s casting a spell and then watching it whenever it teleports to get a good fix on it again. Argh.

Chapter 6

This chapter is much more involved than previous chapters. It introduces a new enemy that you face a soon as you start! It’s this winged creep, and the goal is to shoot him repeatedly until he opens his wings, at which point he’s vulnerable and can be killed. There are also zombies that seem to cast some magic of their own. It can hurt you, but they also take each other out. Yay!

This is heavy on rooms that all look alike, and maze-like hallways that introduce some new traps, including faster blades dropping, walls that slam together to crush you, and gas that fills the halls. And you’ll be running through these halls repeatedly, especially if you read the walkthrough, which tells you right before you finish the level that you should backtrack a super amount to do some extra stuff to score the most crucial rune in the whole game for your magic. You would never know to do this without a walkthrough. WTF?

You also start to learn, by trial and error, about the levels of magic, which are represented by different colors. When you encounter magic barriers, you have to use whatever color magic is more powerful than that barrier color to take it down. I had a fleeting moment of clarity when I thought I was beginning to understand how to use the magic system, but I still hate it.

Chapter 7

This is where the backtracking really picks up and gets super annoying. It’s also where you discover you have to know how to create new spells, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to do that unless you google the “recipes”. Argh. They might be embedded in the menu system somewhere, but I didn’t feel like clicking on a dozen different items to figure it out.

You also learn that all these tight quarters can make certain weapons a hassle to use, because they seriously get fricking stuck on shit when you’re in mid-swing, stopping your strike and allowing enemies to get a cheap shot on you.

Enemies become more prevalent, and of course because there’s so much backtracking, they game designers decided to pull the old respawn crap on you. Sigh.

Chapter 8

This odd chapter has you running around “surveying” a bunch of rooms in a crumbling structure. The usual enemies are in the way, and the most annoying one is the return of the winged creep, who now conjures the little trappers that transport you to the other dimension. So, you have to try to take him out with your sword, but if he conjures them before you do, you have to quickly switch to a bow and arrow to shoot them, then you have to switch back to your sword and take him out before he can conjure more of them. Argh.

The only new enemy comes right near the end, and it’s two big worm things that pop out of a hole, but they’re really easy to kill with just one slash of your sword.

The suckiest part of the chapter is that your character runs slow and has no stamina, and once you finally run through the maze-like structure to survey every room, you have to figure out how to get all the way back to where you started to end the chapter.

Chapter 9

Everything changes in this chapter because…there’s finally a boss battle. Dammit.

As usual, there’s a lot of running back and forth and solving simple puzzles just to get through the chapter, but you are in a location you’ve already been in a previous chapter. There are a lot of those damn screeching monkey zombies this time, as well as loads of trappers. However, you also discover that you need to use a summon spell to control one trapper to crawl it through a hole in a wall to then teleport a dead body away from blocking a door so you can get through it. How do you know this? You read a walkthrough. Otherwise, you’ll have no idea what to do, as usual.

So after you complete all the minimal tasks and fight the usual enemies, there’s that boss at the end. Turns out the boss is fricking different depending on which color rune you chose at the beginning of the game. I don’t remember the boss looking like the version I fought, so I must have never played in red before. What sucks about this bit of news is that you’ll have no idea how to fight the boss, and if you google its name, you’ll get all different techniques to kill it because there are different fricking forms of the boss based on your color, so each technique only works for a specific form of the boss. Sigh. The bottom line is, you basically have to dodge his attacks or anything he throws at you until he changes color, then hit him with a magic spell attack in the color that is more powerful than the color of the boss. Again, this requires understanding the hierarchy of the rune colors as well as how to make the spell.

Chapter 10

The chapters from the past really start to blend with the present at this point. You spend a good portion of the time trying to save servants around the mansion from a soul sucking creature that teleports to the basement to rejuvenate every time you beat it off someone. The bad news is that even when you’re not in the same room with this soul sucker as you run around, you can’t save at all until you finally get to the part where you can kill him. In other words, if you die, you have to do a huge segment of this chapter over.

The goal is to eventually find the piece of a key to fix with magic, then use the key to get into the basement to destroy the rune so the soul sucker can’t revive itself, and then kill the soul sucker.

Here’s the catch. Each time you beat the soul sucker away from a servant, the thing stays right near the servant, and if you accidentally hit servants, you can fricking kill them! Problem with this is that if they survive, they give you things…like a key to a gun cabinet with an elephant gun in it. Kill that particular servant, you don’t get the key and don’t get the gun. Argh.

Speaking of the guns, in this chapter you can get several of them, and you can mod them into double barrel guns. More powerful for sure, but they also use more bullets. However, there are loads of bullets to collect, and you’ll need them.

Here’s another catch. The weird thing about the soul sucker is that you seriously have to just wait in certain rooms for him to appear to fight him to eventually get all those key pieces, but you wouldn’t know this without a walkthrough. Terrible gameplay design.

Anyway, eventually you head down a ladder and into the interesting part of the game. You end up in a room with 9 points, and the goal is to turn them on one at a time in order to teleport to platforms to choose a rune on a panel. Yep, you’ll need a walkthrough to know which one. Anyway, picking the right rune turns on another teleporting circle which takes you to another room where you have to fight various enemies to pull a lever that drops a magic field that is blocking your exit to get back to the original room with nine points. Sound confusing? It is. This whole section really feels like a way to just extend the length of the game. It becomes tedious fighting so many enemies, including that big boss from before quite often, but it’s always good to kill all enemies rather than just pulling the lever and escaping the room, because the rooms are interconnected and you end up running through the same rooms over and over to get back to the 9-point room. Ugh.

In the end, pulling all nine levers opens the final doorway out of this chapter.

Chapter 11

You need to use several spells to get through this chapter, so you’ll need a magic recipe book and your walkthrough with you. There are lots of enemies you’ve fought before, and they’re only really a pain in the ass at the end of the level.

See, this level generally has very little backtracking, so you don’t actually get to see the sights several times to remember the various paths. This becomes a problem when you eventually plant a bomb…and then get a 3-minute timer to get the fuck out of there. Fuck me. You really don’t have any idea where you’re actually supposed to get to in order to escape, so a walkthrough helps. However, there are suddenly enemies everywhere. You can run past them, but at times they swarm you and you really have to take some time to fuck them up in order to keep running. The good news is that at the beginning of this level you get a rifle that can be moded to shoot three grenades at a time. It’s virtually a one-hit kill bonanza if you use them sparingly and save them for the end of the level.

Also, as you backtrack to escape, you do get a cutscene, which makes you think you’ve safely escaped, but…psych! You return to control of your character after the cutscene and have to continue running until you find the right ladder to climb up to end the chapter. Ugh.

Chapter 12

At last, you get to fully play as the main girl from the wraparound. Actually, the wraparound segment right before this chapter kicked off her involvement big time, feeling very much like a creepy, modern survival horror game in a mansion. The most notable, unique aspect to this game at the time of its release was the “insanity” effects that cause your character to experience weird shit, see things, make your screen go wonky, and most cruel of all, give you bogus error messages suggesting that your GameCube has malfunctioned.

But honestly? What a disappointing way to end the game. You have to revisit the room with 9 points and just do mini tasks with each point again to simply return to the main room to just then go to the next point. This section is much easier than the first time around, particularly since it uses mostly magic this time and has less enemies. You’ll need a walkthrough to know how to wield the right magic, but after you’ve cleared all 9 points, you get sent to the final boss.

While you’re busy fighting a small boss on a platform area, there are interspersed cutscenes of two huge, cosmic horror creatures fighting out in space. Your job is simply to enchant your weapon with the dominant color over the boss, repeatedly run back and forth avoiding his attacks while hitting him when you can, which drops big sculpture things around the platform, then run up to them and smash them. Repeat this to the point of boredom, and eventually you start to take the form of each of the characters from each of the chapters and continue the same process. At some point, the boss becomes vulnerable, and you can kill him. The end. It’s all very Lovecraft once you get the cutscene of the fight in space coming to an end as well.

Posted in The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror, What I'm Doing With My Joystick | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Traveling back in time with Eternal Darkness on GameCube

A Viking demon, a water spirit, and a witch

Posted on December 23, 2025 by Daniel

It’s all kinds of body takeovers in this trio of flicks, but did any of them hit all my horror buttons?

BLOAT (2025)

This movie is all over the place in both narrative arc and story presentation, which is comprised of online videos, texts, home videos, video calls, and online research pages, with the screen constantly jumping from one format to the next. Not to mention, the level of digital product placement and brand advertising is insane. Prepare to be possessed by the need to own an Apple product after watching this one.

A couple lost their child during birth, so they plan a trip to Japan with their two young sons to get past it. However, dad is a military man and can’t go. He does, however, basically pull a Paranormal Activity with his family and monitors every weird thing that starts to happen while they’re on vacation.

So what happens? The younger son almost drowns in a lake and then begins acting psycho. He bites his brother. He eats cucumbers like crazy. There are cucumbers and bugs under his bed. He spits up green bile.

At first the father suspects his son got an infection from the water, but soon he determines the kid is possessed by something supernatural. The mother, who is actually with the son and not an ocean away, thinks he’s fine.

We watch the dad view videos his older son sends him, research infections, research the supernatural, and research why spirits and entities might show themselves to people digitally over the internet.

This movie is a mess. The dad enlists a friend who is in Japan to help him, introducing one of the most annoying, unserious characters ever in a serious movie. Happily, the dude goes into the woods and is attacked by a monster. So, is this a water demon or a woods demon? The movie can’t decide.

Granted, there are some genuinely creepy visual moments in the film, but it is absolutely incohesive and has a bland climax.

WHISPERS OF THE WITCHING HOUR (2025)


This 79-minute movie would have worked better if it clocked in at about 30-minutes long.

The opener is seriously the best part…and totally irrelevant to the rest of the movie. A dude in the olden days encounters a witch coming out of the water. She’s a freaky witch, and she pulls a Stephen King’s It and sends a little sailboat floating his way.

50 years later, it’s still the old days, and a dude is in love with his brother’s wife. He goes to a young witch in the woods, and she keeps upping the ante of things he has to bring her to work magic that will make the sister-in-law his.

That’s when this movie turns into a soap opera love triangle for the majority of its runtime. With 20 minutes left, the sister-in-law starts terrorizing her brother-in-law in a demon possession form for a brief time.

It doesn’t bring much in the way of chills and thrills, but the little twist in the final moment makes this perfect for use as a short in an anthology if it were trimmed down…by 50 minutes.

THE CRUCIFIX: BLOOD OF THE EXORCIST (2025)

Imagine a movie that starts with a medieval battle with Vikings, moves to the present for 50 minutes of talk, and then turns into an Exorcist rip-off for all but the last 5 minutes, which reverts back to another Viking sword fight, and you have this possession film.

After a dude is cursed during the opening medieval war and has a knife driven through his skull, we meet a modern straight couple that moves into a new home. When I tell you a bunch of little details are presented that are never cleared up, I’m not exaggerating. They lost a child the wife has flashbacks about, but it doesn’t have any significant impact on the story. They come to live in a new home, but their neighbor apparently cared for the husband’s father. Was he sick? Is the home his and they inherited it? Did the husband even care about his father? No idea.

The husband starts to immediately use a detector to dig up a skull with a knife embedded in it on his property. Why? Did he know it was there? Is he an archaeologist or historian or something? You’d think with 50 minutes of talk we’d get some answers, but nope.

Even so, there are some great setup shots, like these two around the skull as the couple argues.

The wife decides to pull the knife from the skull (why would she do so if it’s some sort of ancient artifact that shouldn’t be tampered with?), and she eventually becomes possessed. 56 minutes in she turns demon and demands they get the fucking priest, which made me laugh.

He arrives and she does the usual taunting. She says, “what a great night for an exorcism”. She levitates. The priest screams prayers at her. She pukes.

“Honey? Maybe a beer and a cult will make you feel better.”

It was eye roll time in the final scene when the husband finds himself fighting the original Viking with a sword and shield to save his wife.

Posted in Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on A Viking demon, a water spirit, and a witch

Zombies, from silly to serious

Posted on December 19, 2025 by Daniel

It’s a six-film marathon of zombie and infected flicks that are a mixture of intense, dramatic, somber, comedic, and action-packed. Let’s find out which ones worked for me.

ZOMBIE APACHE (2025)

This 76-minute indie takes a fun approach to the zombie genre, with some charming performances by the cast. The one thing it’s missing is bulk. It feels like the movie just moves along with little moments rather than any meaty components to carry the weight of any action. It’s like horror comedy lite.

The new sheriff in a small town is adorable, and he’s faced with a major dilemma when a rich family’s plans to build big on a Viking burial ground unleashes a trio of zombie Vikings!

I was reminded of the 80s fave Neon Maniacs as these armored baddies start to go around town hacking off heads here and there. Problem is, they just don’t do it enough, and before long, their ominous presence turns goofy.

See, the leader of their pack plays a primitive woodwind instrument that temporarily possesses living humans. At first it seems like the plot is going to be that the possessed humans become killer zombies, but that doesn’t pan out.

Before long, the possessed people are just doing silly things like dancing wildly. And this is where the bottom falls out of this movie. There’s no fear of the baddies. Not enough kills, panic, chases, or confrontations. The humor is quaint and subtle, but the overall tone lacks excitement, and the final fight is as lackluster and goofy as the rest of the movie.

URBAN FLESH EATERS (2025)

Holy crap, this movie is produced by Rob Base of “It Takes Two” fame. And it’s a blast as far as indie zombie flicks with a splash of comedy go.

In fact, the cast is pretty damn great, with very distinct characters that each have their own special style of humor. Not to mention, the main guy is a hunk who even delivers a nip slip.

The plot is simple and satisfying—residents of an apartment building discover that something in the water is turning people into zombies.

Trying to survive the outbreak that is unleashed inside the building are a mother and her teen son and daughter, the mother’s neighbor/friend, the hot hunk, a religious nut, a gay dude, a funny white super who kind of thinks he’s Black, and several others.

The bland apartment building setting creates an unsettling tone, the zombies look pretty savage, and there are some tense scenes, especially since the survivors discover the zombies can only hear, not see, so you can quietly sneak past them. Eek! Reminded me of the nurses from Silent Hill.

Some highlights include a pussy-eating zombie moment, the gay guy hiding behind the hunk for protection, and the banter and bickering between neighbors once they realize they are dealing with zombies.

In the end, the goal of those that don’t die is simple…get to the roof to be rescued. There’s only one problem. The stairs are filled with zombies. Awesome.

ZOMBIOLOGY: ENJOY YOURSELF TONIGHT (2017)

This Cantonese film is both as odd as an Asian horror flick can be and pretty damn boring at the same time. Maybe it’s a better movie for fans of anime, because it seems to be indulging in that fandom.

The very first scene shows a security guard encountering the live costume version of an anime character in an alley. It shoots some sort of bubble from its mouth that enters the guard and turns him into a zombie.

Then we meet our main characters, a dude and his best friend, total anime nerds who dream of saving the world one day. The dude lives with his aunt when his estranged father, who was just released from prison, shows up, and pretty soon they’re all on the run and hiding from a zombie outbreak.

Problem is, they spend most of their time in hiding rather than actually fighting zombies. The best moment is their first zombie confrontation—a child zombie at a birthday party that they kick across the room. It’s also the funniest moment in what I think is supposed to be a horror comedy but which is way too low energy to be very humorous.

There’s way too much downtime as the characters deal with their feelings. There’s also some underdeveloped plot element about these big eggs that make people’s heads explode, leaving behind just a skull. I have no idea what it all meant, and the film doesn’t explain it.

It’s not until an hour and 26 minutes in that the wannabe heroes finally have an entertaining splatter battle with a bunch of zombies.

It’s short-lived, however, and right after that, the main guy encounters the anime character. There’s a “deep” conversation between them, and then…the final boss battle is an animated sequence. Ugh. I did not get what this movie was going for at all.

GANGNAM ZOMBIE (2023)

Running only 81 minutes long, this Korean zombie film has a simple premise but delivers big time on the nonstop action. My only real complaint is that it pulls the annoying stunt of opening with a hi-nrg sequence that doesn’t happen until much later in the movie before bringing us back to “24 hours ago”, which means we know right away which characters aren’t in any fatal danger for most of the movie.

An interesting way to start a zombie superspreader plot, the movie begins with a thief getting attacked by a cat and then turning into a zombie. He becomes the “main zombie” chasing our leads for the rest of the film.

The leads are a really cute guy and a young woman who work in an office building. After some introductions to the main characters, the cat zombie guy shows up at the office, and before long there’s a whole load of zombies terrorizing everyone in the building. The zombies have black eyes and lots of blood around their mouths, and eventually some of them grow some major fangs.

These are fast, smart zombies. They fight back and dodge bats swung at them and shit like that, so there are plenty of melee battle scenes. There is also a good sense of humor sprinkled throughout the film, so it runs at a satisfying, fast clip, making it a nice quickie if you just need an infected fix.

Also of note is that the film takes place during both COVID and Christmas, although neither aspect plays into the events that unfold.

UNCONTAINED (2025)

The first thing I must say about this movie is that the isolated, rural, snowy setting is stunning, perfectly captures the cold atmosphere, and will chill you to the bone just from watching it, making this a good winter watch.

The writer/director is also the star of the movie, but this in no way feels like a vanity project. Instead, it’s a pretty damn engrossing and intriguing take on an outbreak of infected people, with some great and emotional character development that gives it somewhat of a slow burn until the major unique aspect of the plot kicks in.

We meet a young boy and girl all by themselves in a cozy country house in the middle of the woods. There are creepy hints of infected people roaming around outside to let us know what’s going on here.

The children eventually allow a drifter into their home, which leads to a nice bond growing between them.

Eventually, other characters begin arriving at the house to cause trouble and complicate matters more than any infected people ever do in this film.

One character in particular is significant to revealing what’s really going on in the world that has landed them in this predicament, and this is where the story shows its strength and rises above the usual plot of being trapped inside while zombies roam around outside.

The mood becomes quite melancholy and rather tragic, and we become very invested in the characters, including the dog, who is essential to surviving the outbreak. This is not a cheap thrills kind of infected flick at all, and yet my usually non-existent attention span was present and undivided.

FORGIVE US ALL (2025)

This one has the same kind of tone as Uncontained. This time, there’s a woman and an older man surviving in a cabin in the woods after there has been some sort of unexplained, hostile takeover by the government…I think. Nothing is ever really explained, and there’s the usual “artistic” time jumping narrative (sigh), but the main plot is that people have turned into cannibalistic crazies.

Don’t expect much in the way of these cannibals until the final act of the film. Most of the movie focuses on the woman coping with what happened to her husband and daughter—specifically in two flashback scenes that are horror goodness and show us the infected in action.

The woman ends up rescuing a wounded man from the woods. Her older male roommate isn’t happy about it, because he fears it will lead “agents” to them. These agents look like cowboys, and they do eventually come looking for the wounded man.

The film really doesn’t clear up much of the story, but in the final act, the woman and the wounded man head into the woods to escape the agents. This is when we discover that the cannibals only seem to come out at night.

Their coming out is intense and the highlight of the whole movie. I wish there had been more of these freaky encounters creating challenges for the main characters throughout the course of the film, because the cowboy agents were not all that intimidating.

Posted in Johnny You ARE Queer - Gay Thoughts, Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, Scared Silly - Horror Comedy, Sound Check - The Songs Stuck in My Head, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Zombies, from silly to serious