A queer horror smorgasbord…sort of

Posted on December 13, 2025 by Daniel

Comedy, camp, Christmas, killers, the undead, single white straight cis stalkers, all kinds of gender identities and sexual orientations…this marathon of horror seems to have everything. But let’s find out what’s missing.

THE LAST HOUSE OF HORROR (2023)

This is a shocking case of bait and switch, so I can’t justify adding it to the homo horror movies page. However, it gets a well-earned spot on the stud stalking page. It also lands on the holiday horror page because it takes place during the days leading up to a college Halloween party.

There are some highlights here for nostalgia buffs. The score is a totally 80s, synth-driven throwback. There’s an instrumental knockoff of the A Flock of Seagulls new wave classic “I Ran”. At one point, the disco song from Prom Night can be heard in the background, sped up to chipmunk speed. There’s a play on the first Scream phone call, as well as more than one killer. Plus, the film captures the look of shot-on-video movies from the VHS days.

Most importantly, there are endless scenes of college hunks in tight underwear for most of the movie, with significant closeups of their asses, and even some bare man booty. In fact, this footage is so significant that there’s little in the way of a plot, nor is there any central character to cling to.

It’s mostly hot men lounging around their dorm rooms, with a few other characters doing their own thing in between. There are shadows of individual plot lines, but none of it ever feels like it comes together to create a story beyond masked killers popping in every once in a while to slaughter someone.

The kill scenes use cheesy practical effects and CGI blood, which totally services the indie filmmaking style. Visually, the establishing shots for the kill sequences are classic, delivering all the right camera angles, horror lighting, and ominous shadows. On top of that, while there isn’t much in the way of Halloween décor for a majority of the film, when we finally get to the Halloween party, the autumn party lights and jack-o-lanterns are lit!

The biggest “twist” is the sudden shift to total heterosexual content in the final act. While all the male nudity never crosses into man-on-man action, in the end, heteronormativity prevails. A girl finds out she might be pregnant, a dude eats pussy (I’m almost convinced he was really chowing down), and there’s doggy style straight sex. We even get a final girl instead of a final guy, as a female character is instantly thrust into the spotlight for a climactic chase scene.

This brazenly erotic movie isn’t going to satisfy either end of the male sexuality spectrum. Straight guys won’t sit through the parade of exploited hunks in the first half, and gay dudes will be let down by the final act. However, bi and pan crowds may find it to be a tasty buffet.

Be warned. The film intentionally leaves us with a cliffhanger, no resolution, and the announcement of part 2. The sequel has already been made, so as soon as I find a way to watch it, you’ll be able to read all about it here.

I DON’T UNDERSTAND YOU (2024)

Imagine if you will a movie that is highly entertaining but also an absolutely horrible movie in terms of content and you’ll understand I Don’t Understand You.

More a dark comedy than a horror comedy, although it does get bloody later on, the film begins with a gay couple trying to adopt a child. In the meantime, they head to Italy for a vacation, where they accept an offer to visit the restaurant of a renowned chef.

This is when things get creepy for them. Their car breaks down on a desolate country road in a rainstorm at night. A man who doesn’t speak English offers them a ride, but then drops them off at a house in the middle of nowhere and drives off. An old lady who doesn’t speak English invites them in for food and shelter. The lights go out. The phones don’t work. And then…

This movie goes totally Tucker and Dale on us, only with an educated gay couple instead of dumb and dumber. Through a series of accidents, people begin dying and the bodies pile up. But that’s not exactly true. After the first accident, this privileged white gay couple about to welcome a newborn into their lives does everything in their power to cover their tracks for fear their perfect life will be ruined.

This really is a nasty portrayal of a gay couple, because they know very well that everything they are doing is wrong, yet they just keep digging themselves deeper to protect themselves, with no regard for those who are most impacted by the situation. And yet…

…it’s so damn funny and wrong that you can’t stop watching. The hubby and I had a great time with it, laughing all the way, and all the while, I kept repeating, “This is an awful movie”.

The film stars the likes of Andrew Rannells and Amanda Seyfried, adding to its evil charm. And the 80s Starship hit “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” is used perfectly. Make sure to continue watching for some tag scenes between and after the closing credits.

CHRISTMAS BLOODBATH (2024)

The director of Easter Holocaust takes on Christmas with a heavy dose of John Waters weirdness and crass camp. I found this way-too-long shlockfest absolutely unbearable.

It’s sleazy, skanky, absurd, messy, confusing, filled with queer content, and an absolute bore.

A dude and his non-binary sister are heading to a museum run by a psychotic woman to get her to sell the place to a devious corporation that is selling beauty products that mutate people.

We get: drag queens playing female characters, a puppet as the head of the company, a trio of goth punks participating in a daisy chain fuck (girl in front, bi guy center, gay guy in back), abortion, murder, conjoined twins, killer dolls, killer ornaments, raunchy sex humor, tits with teeth, and eventually a killer animatronic Santa. And it all adds up to a movie that drags on for 103 minutes.

QUEENS OF THE DEAD (2025)

There was so much hype around the fact that the daughter of George Romero was making a queer zombie film, but now that I’ve seen it, I have to say that she probably shouldn’t have allowed it to be promoted via the nepotism route. I’m so let down by how weak this movie turned out. There are several indie queer zombie flicks out there that accomplish what this one fails to. It misses the mark in almost every way.

I felt like I was watching two different movies—a zombie comedy snoozer and a poorly written, no budget, queer camp comedy—that finally come together momentarily near the end to give us a hint of what could have been.

After a promising opener featuring a drag queen encountering a zombie, we are dragged into a queer bar for an exorbitant amount of tired queer banter. On the bright side, the film celebrates the queerest characters possible, with no signs of the usual cute gay white guy cast in sight. There’s a variety of colors and gender identities. Problem is most of these characters turn out to be a bunch of incessantly screaming queens instead of bad ass queer zombie fighters. Sigh.

It gets tedious and shrill fast, which is perhaps the only upside to there being barely any zombie action for them to scream through. Every character is too much of a caricature vying for attention as the queerest one of all, so there are no highs and lows or comic rhythm in the unfolding of events. You know something went horribly wrong in your diverse, queer horror movie when the funniest, most charismatic character is the one white, seemingly straight cis guy.

The characters simply don’t have much to do here for a majority of the run time beyond delivering pointless lines that don’t move the plot forward. Eventually, in the final act, a horde of zombies gathers outside, and the queers make a plan to let the living dead in for a confrontation in their safe space.

While the final fight is fun, it’s another missed opportunity. It begins as a drag performance of Ke$ha’s “Blow”, but just as the queens get up the nerve to go to war as the beat kicks in, they drop the act and simply start fighting the undead old school style. This was the golden opportunity to exploit the attempt at a campy queer horror flick by having a choreographed battle incorporated into the drag dance performance.

We do get some cameos by familiar faces, including Cheyenne Jackson, Margaret Cho, and Tom Savini, but their presence is as bland as everything else. Honestly, as much as I pride myself on my gay horror movie collection, I’m really going to have to convince myself to add this one to my library if it gets a Blu-ray release, which bums me out. I guess there’s no excuse not to buy it, considering what I did next…

THE FINAL BOY (2025)

I blind bought this one on Blu-ray because it doesn’t seem to be streaming anywhere.

A twink and a somewhat beefier young guy featured in the first scene are cute together as they watch a horror movie, although their meta convo is typical and tired. However, they do reference the gayness of Elm Street 2. Once the killer comes on the scene, it gets fairly suspenseful, and the beefier boy is no slouch. He fights back, but that doesn’t matter in the end.

Next, we meet the main cast of friends at the funeral—a very long funeral with way too much establishing dialogue as they decide to honor their dead friend (the beefier guy) by going to a cabin in the woods. Due to an overwritten script, the excessive talking becomes an issue all the way through to the killer motivation speech at the end, which causes this film to run a whopping 2 hours and 6 minutes long—the scariest part.

Without a focus on eye candy, there’s a good mix of everyday queers, including one couple made up of a pansexual guy and a trans guy. There’s even an open-minded moment where a straight character asks them exactly how that works.

We get lots of exploration of the interpersonal relationships, which again means loads of talk, a few flirty sex scenes with no explicit content at all, and a brief partying montage moment.

The simple, serviceable kills don’t kick in until almost halfway through, and the killer wears a basic robe and a mask. The major body count doesn’t pile up until 90 minutes in, and half of the death scenes are shown as flashbacks as the killer reminisces in the way too long denouement dialogue.

There’s not much suspense, no body reveals, no chase scenes. I know queer indie filmmakers are determined to give us more representation in horror, but it’s crucial to also deliver on the horror, which this doesn’t. Not to mention that you will most likely figure out right from the start who the killer is and what their motivation is, so the whodunit aspect isn’t compelling either.

There’s a big Christmas dinner scene after the final credits begin to role, and once again, there’s too much talking that goes on way too long considering the big twist it is leading up to is totally obvious.

Meanwhile, the faux horror film the gay couple is watching at the beginning of the movie is included as a short film in the extras on the Blu-ray, and its old school VHS horror movie vibe is better than the actual movie.

BIG EASY QUEENS (2025)

Even at only 76 minutes long, this film cannot find its footing or decide what it wants to be. I’m only covering it because it’s labeled on IMDb as a horror movie, and I have to warn you that it is in no way a horror movie, although it attempts to shoehorn in a few bloody elements that make it look like it’s trying to be horror.

Hell, it barely passes as a comedy, mostly failing to be the campy experience it’s aiming for. It tries to appeal to a queer audience without committing to being fully queer. There are also numerous musical “numbers” that are mostly comprised of just one drag queen singing slow songs.

So why isn’t it horror? It’s about three women living and running businesses in New Orleans. There’s cheating, backstabbing, and bounties on heads, giving this more of a mob movie angle. There’s one bizarre sequence near the end of the movie that appears to be two of the women performing voodoo rituals that spawn zombies (you know, because it’s New Orleans), but I honestly have no idea if any of that was supposed to be real, because none of it ever pans out and we just go back to the mob story.

So what about the gay stuff? At first, this seems to be about three drag queens, but it turns out that two of the drag characters are playing actual female characters, and the third female character is a woman dressed like a drag queen. I don’t understand why they didn’t just have drag queens playing all three roles.

The only thing that gives this a queer element is that we are eventually treated to some hot gay male throuple action—a reveal that would have made more sense if the three female characters had been portraying drag queen characters and all been played by drag queens. The truth of the matter is that the threesome scene between the guys is the highlight of the whole movie, and it lands this one on the does the gay guy die? page.

HAG (2025)

I’m so thrilled that filmmaker Sam Wineman finally got his chance to make a full-length feature, and he pretty much knocked this queer nod to 90s erotic thrillers out of the park.

For starters, the soundtrack of electronic dance music is a banger, and you have to hear the kitschy theme song for main character Rowan during the closing credits to appreciate how obnoxiously infectious it is.

So our main guy Rowan works at a coffee shop but is also a wannabe musician who is determined to get his demo into the hands of a hot but sleazy daddy bear record executive.

In walks Mag, a cis, straight, single white female. Not only is she a new coworker, she also dated Rowan way back in middle school. She is aggressively forward in rekindling their friendship, but somehow Rowan is as oblivious to that as he is to the fact that he’s going to have to spread his cheeks for the sleazy hot daddy bear record exec if he wants a record deal. Personally, I would have chosen the record deal over the creepy girl stalker as a roommate option, but Rowan chooses otherwise.

And that’s the most uncomfortable part of this movie for me. I’ve never been a fan of the fag hag concept, and the immediate bond between Rowan and a desperate straight girl is just icky. He literally strips down in front of her practically the minute he brings her home to take a dip in the pool. What gay dude would do this?

And she refers to them as Will and Grace, but they are even twice as fucking annoying as Will and Grace.

Mag is, however, a fantastically campy psycho, and all Rowan’s friend from the coffee shop are extremely likable. Among the cast is an American Idol alum who is now known as Adore Delano of Drag Race fame.

Mag is crazy right from the start, and the distinct addition to this formulaic film is that when she has her “episodes”, she mutilates her own fingernails. Eek! That shit always freaks me out. Bitch, can’t you just cut yourself like a normal person? Mag also delivers one of the most original psycho acts I’ve ever seen in an erotic thriller, and it involves a toothbrush. Nothing grosser and greater than a germ-ridden toothbrush scene trying to be a sexy scene.

Mag starts manipulating everyone and everything to have Rowan to herself, including leading him into a threesome with a bi guy he likes.

Meanwhile, we just wait anxiously for her to totally snap and start killing people, which is saved for the final act after some carefully paced tension is built up.

You have to love when Rowan and his best friend lay a very Nancy on Elm Street style trap for the final showdown. The predicament Mag gets Rowan in during the big battle is hard to believe and kind of silly, but it totally fits the vibe of the movie. Not to mention, it’s quite clear that Mag is totally going to come back for more.

I can definitely say that this was my favorite film of this bunch, and I sure hope Tubi starts allowing their originals to be rereleased on physical media someday so I can add this one to my collection (along with the damn Terror Train remakes).

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BOUGHT ON BLU and DVD: a new slasher and 2 from 1967

Posted on December 12, 2025 by Daniel

I blind bought the new flick because I’m a sucker for throwback slashers, I bought one of the 67 flicks for Roddy McDowall, and the other one from 67 was on the same disc, so…bonus! But was the bonus worth it? Were any of them worth it? Let’s find out.

HELL OF A SUMMER (2023)

So a dude from Stranger Things and a dude from Ghostbusters: Afterlife decided to get together to co-write, co-direct, and co-star in a summer camp comedy slasher with a retro vibe to it. There’s plenty of potential here, but not much hits the mark beyond the dark, shadowy, old school look of the summer camp setting.

The opening scene is pretty damn good, with a classic first kill. There’s even some funny humor with a tennis racket bug zapper. Adam Pally of Happy Endings is sitting by a campfire with his woman. He gets killed offscreen, but she gets a satisfying kill. This sequence set my expectations high. Too high, apparently.

Next, we meet our summer camp counselors. The main guy is painted as too old for the job. He’s also painted as if he’s going to be the funny man, but he’s just not funny. And neither is most of the humor here. The cast didn’t have much in the way of good material to work with. Personally, I think if Adam Pally had played the older counselor role, he could have elevated the comedy.

The older guy’s ex-girlfriend works at the camp, there’s an influencer, there’s a gay theater geek, there’s a goth girl, there are our two filmmakers/stars, and there are a few more characters. Thing is, no one really comes across as a main character, and we simply don’t feel connected to any of them.

There’s a lot of talk for a while and not much else. The first kill is 27 minutes in, but all we see is blood splatter on a mirror. In fact, most of the kills are cutaway.

When the first dead body is found, everyone runs and screams…a lot. Instead of funny, it quickly becomes just shrill and annoying as it is overused. Eventually everyone turns on the older counselor, thinking he’s the killer because he’s too old to still be a counselor. This plot point doesn’t add much excitement or intrigue, nor does it help the pacing.

There’s a familiar “twist”, and the gay guy gets the only onscreen, graphic and gory kill. The final battle between one of the main guys and the killer is perhaps the funniest sequence in the movie, and it made me wish the whole movie had captured the same tone.

IT! (1967)

A few weeks ago, I thought I bought and posted about the last Roddy McDowall horror movie I didn’t have in my collection and then realized I’d ordered two movies and this one hadn’t arrived yet. Now my Roddy McDowall collection is officially complete.

It! has never gotten an upgrade from DVD, and it’s only available on a double feature disc with The Shuttered Room with Oliver Reed…which makes me want to see if I have every horror movie in which Oliver Reed appeared in my collection. Wait. Hold on…

Okay. I’m back. I do have every Oliver Reed horror movie in my collection.

Anyway, after a museum storehouse fire, Roddy, who works at the museum, discovers that one ancient statue survived unscathed. He also realizes it seems to be a supernatural killer. So why not bring it back to the museum?

The really weird aspect of the plot is that Roddy keeps his mother’s corpse in his house and regularly steals precious jewels from the museum for her to wear. There’s no explanation for this macabre element, but obviously it was a way to ride the coattails of Psycho. Her dead presence is a very minor part of the story with no real resolution.

It does, however, give Roddy motivation to have the statue do his dirty work for him. He learns how to make the statue his bitch, so he orders it to smash display cases for free jewelry and kill people who get in his way.

The highlight of this movie is that there are plenty of pretty boys in the cast. Roddy must have had a field day working with them….

There’s a Jewish myth background to the statue, which is cool, and the death scenes are plentiful but also fairly safe for the period. Overall, it all feels goofy, especially an absurd scene in which Roddy has the statue, which is only slightly taller than an average human, knock down a massive bridge, and the finale, when the military tries to destroy the statue with a nuclear warhead. Did the military back then not know the kind of damage nuclear weapons could do to, like, everyone?

THE SHUTTERED ROOM (1967)

Awesome killer POV and the general plot are the absolute highlights here, because they feel like the inspiration for so much horror that has come since.

The opener sets us up for a dark and sinister experience as we see through the eyes of something that comes down from the attic in a house and terrifies a little girl in her bed.

Carol Lynley, a staple in television and movies in the 60s and 70s, plays that little girl all grown up. Having been sent to foster care as a child, she returns to the home with her husband after she inherits the house from her parents. Her family backstory is so weak, and we don’t really know why she doesn’t remember much of anything…like the thing that was hovering over her bed and should have scarred her for life based on her reaction back then.

Anyway, several locals warn the couple not to stay at the house, including Carol’s aunt, who still lives in town. While there’s some killer POV when they arrive at the house, the biggest threat to the couple for most of the movie is the local gang of bad boys, led by Oliver Reed. I don’t know if everyone in this backwoods place is related, but apparently Carol and Oliver share the same aunt, so they are cousins, and he wants to sexually assault Carol. Pretty skanky storyline for 1967.

While there’s great atmosphere in the house and some good tension since we know something hides in the shadows, nothing much actually happens. Late in the movie, a slutty woman enters the house and gets viciously attacked and killed, but that’s about it until the final sequence, which involves Reed, Carol, her husband, and the aunt all ending up in the attic.

It is the biggest letdown ever for a movie about something unknown and unseen hiding in a house. Major spoiler here…it’s literally just a feral woman that we can only assume was perhaps Carol’s sister that the parents were keeping hidden away? No idea, because it’s never clearly explained beyond the aunt being left to care for the feral female, but Carol does seem to suddenly have some sort of telepathic connection with her at the last second. Holy underdeveloped script.

Not to mention, there’s a dude in town with no eye who is more frightening than the bitch in the attic.

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Aliens, ass slugs, and melon heads

Posted on December 11, 2025 by Daniel

It’s a trio of creature features, but are the movies as good as their monsters? Let’s find out.

THE AREA 51 INCIDENT (2021)

You could say this is derivative of many alien movies, but that’s just admitting that many alien movies are derivative. The goal is to find derivative movies that are fun to watch, and the hubby and I had a good time with this one.

The opening scene, which introduces us to the aliens on their home planet, assures us we’re in for a visual treat. This is how you do computer-generated scenes right.

Next, we go down into a bunker, where a scientist has decided to take his adult son and the son’s girlfriend for a first-time tour. Don’t ask me why he also decides to let them witness a close encounter of the third kind when a portal opens in a tunnel in the bunker. Bad for them, good for us, because it’s another great looking scene.

A giant alien infiltrates the bunker, as do hundreds of mini aliens. All hell breaks loose at first with some thrilling chase scenes, but the movie does slow down for some character development in the middle, which makes you wonder if the aliens decided to take a break, because they disappear for a while.

Once things pick back up, there’s a new alien aspect–an onslaught of mouth-to-mouth transmission of alien eels that infect people and make them crazies. Back to awesome.

The giant alien finale looks straight out of Cloverfield, but I don’t understand why it is taken down without a fight. Such an epic presentation of the final boss deserved an epic boss battle.

URANUS ATTACKS (2024)

When this one popped up in my Prime recommends, I clicked on “add to list” so fast you’d think I was clicking “buy it now” on a dildo with the same name.

Uranus Attacks is just what you’d expect it to be. The opening trigger warning informs viewers that Uranus and fudge packing references will abound. Did I mention that the movie takes place in a fudge factory called Uranus? Sure there’s crass, adolescent humor, but it’s surprisingly all trash talk with little in the way of visual trash.

Our main young man heads off to work at the fudge factory, leaving his mom home alone with a hot daddy that lives in an RV in their yard. The hot daddy thinks an alien egg is one of his golf balls…until it hatchets a purple slug that penetrates his anus.

This is the prettiest, gayest looking purple slug ever, so it’s no surprise it enters daddy’s ass.

Oh, how I wish the film were more graphic and explicit for that scene. We don’t see him spread his cheeks, but the hot daddy does spread the slug love to others. However, following that first host takeover, all remaining slug entries are through the mouth. Uranilingus? There were quite a few guys I wanted to see hot daddy lock lips with, but instead he just spits the slugs onto their shoulders. Blah.

If you wanted more anal, you get it later. When the main guy and his coworker friend finally discover how to eject the slugs from those who have been infected, that shit shoots out the ass. I was quite relieved to see that the expulsions are purple as well…especially since there’s a lot of face splatting.

The Uranus and fudge packaging jokes do come rapid fire, and while some are excessive, many of the different approaches to them will make you giggle like a thirteen-year-old boy. The cast is totally dedicated to the goal of delivering on the humor, so the comedic performances are right on target.

The only real issue is that the movie starts to drag a bit in the middle and would have benefitted if it had been trimmed down from its 105-minute runtime.

Once a small, infected army is finally assembled, it’s an ass blast as the main boys take them on at the fudge factory. This sequence of trying to outwit and destroy the aliens should have been a good chunk of the movie, but instead, it’s over in a flash, and the final takedown of the main alien (the hot daddy spitting the slug plug out of his ass) didn’t quite give me the big climax I was hoping for….

THE MELON HEADS: HOUSE OF CROW (2024)

I always check out the indie films of Eddie Lengyel, and although the creatures are creepy in this one and it has a great. 1970s horror look whenever they’re on screen, it’s not one of his better films. The script is weak and the story drags.

The intriguing part is that the movie is based on a real local Ohio legend. We meet a group of college students assigned to projects based on urban legends, and two girls get the melon heads. Supposedly a psycho scientist named Dr. Crow kidnapped and experimented on children years ago, making their heads grow in the process. Now, those “melon heads” roam the woods at night.

We get occasional attack scenes of random characters, but our main characters take their sweet ass time finally getting to the woods to search for the melon heads.

There are two main male classmates who decide they are going to find out the truth about the melon heads before the girls can in hope of getting a better grade, and yet they decide to spend way too much time at a strip club before getting their head start into the woods. It’s seriously 40 minutes before they finally find Dr. Crow’s lair and get abducted and tortured.

Meanwhile, the girls get loads of unnecessary backstory about their family drama. They don’t arrive in the woods until 76 minutes into the movie, at which point they are in Dr. Crow’s lair just long enough to find the guys and try to escape.

The most excitement we get is a head explosion and an unintentionally funny scene of the main girl running away from the lair with one of the guys…in a wheelchair!

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Holiday horror season 2025 continues

Posted on December 9, 2025 by Daniel

My latest marathon includes two that take place on Halloween, one that takes place on Thanksgiving weekend, and two Christmas flicks. But did they all manage to deliver on the holidays and the horror and earn places on the holiday horror page? Let’s find out.

RATCHET (2025)

File under movies I didn’t understand. File under movies that have cool kills and a creepy killer but not much else. File under movies that have Halloween in the plot description but only mention the holiday a few times with no actual sign of the holiday in sight. File under the many movies that shouldn’t be 2-hours long.

The opening credits are classic, with eerie shots of the killer assembling a mannequin. The first kill is also great, with a throat slash edited in such a way that it totally caught me off guard.

The story, unfortunately, drags on and on. Our main woman is witness to thugs shoot a dude carrying a bouquet of flowers and wearing what looks like a scarecrow mask. She also watches as the seemingly dead man comes back to life before he goes on a killing spree.

In between people occasionally being murdered, the main woman works with both a detective and psychics to try to solve the case. The investigating elements really weigh the movie down, taking away from the impact of some great kills, suspense, and chase scenes. A crotch split on a sex worker with an axe is especially memorable.

The random victims get no character development, but they are usually painted as lowlifes. Hell, there’s even a small group of sketchy queers at one point, and one of them is a female who uses a fake penis to piss like a man. Now that’s what I call diverse representation.

Kills aside, the final scene between the main girl and the killer comes and goes and I was still clueless as to what anything in this movie meant.

HALLOWEEN NIGHT (2024)

This Halloween slasher makes the smart move of not wearing out its welcome, running only 73 minutes long and getting right to the point. It’s also totally derivative, but that’s okay since it feels fun and familiar.

Would you believe a killer escapes a mental institution at Halloween time and comes home to kill some more? The difference here is that this dude is schizo, so he talks to himself a lot before donning a clown costume.

There are several “main kids”, and that’s the one problem: their stories never seem to converge beyond them going to the same school. The first girl lost her mother to the killer, and she has a very Michael Myers moment outside her classroom window.

Another girl is babysitting, and she has a very When a Stranger Calls Back moment outside her front door.

Another girl gives off final girl vibes as she becomes romantically involved with the guy she works with.

There’s some Halloween décor around, but the movie is not heavy on the holiday, because the plot makes it known that ever since the first round of murders no one trick or treats anymore. However, the final scene, which takes place a year later, goes full Halloween celebration.

The guy playing the psycho clown nails the insanity, and there are a few satisfactory, brutal kill scenes, as well as some great setup shots.

My favorite moment was when three of the main girls surround the killer clown at the end and there’s a glorious fall prism behind them. At the same time, it’s also by far the biggest letdown, because just when the girls are finally going to team up to beat the crap out of him, cops swarm them and tell them to get out of the way and use guns instead. So much for a major climax.

THE LIZZIE BORDEN GAME (2025)

This is my kind of simple, supernatural slasher movie in the tradition of basic Bloody Mary plots.

It opens with two young sisters playing “The Lizzie Borden Game”. The rules are simple; you need to have the guts to recite the infamous Lizzie rhyme in front of a mirror…because she then comes out of the mirror and hacks up your guts.

Next, our main group of friends gets together for a Friendsgiving. This movie isn’t very Thanskgivingy, but while they don’t have any turkey, Lizzie Borden definitely carves up a lot of white meat.

It’s the usual situation. Talk gets around to different stories about what happens to people who play the game, and then they decide to play. While they’re playing, the main girl even sees visions of the original Lizzie Borden murder spree. I mean…alleged murder spree.

For a while, we just get cheap faux scares, like a hand reaching really slowly for a shoulder and then the person attached to the hand saying, “I didn’t mean to scare you.” Bitch, that slow, calculated reach was totally intentional.

Anyway, Lizzie eventually enters the real world and starts hacking the fuck out of her victims. Like, super gory and great. Hell, she splits her first victim—a male—in half, starting at his crotch with manual axe swings. Ouch.

This is a good reminder that sometimes brutal and gnarly kills are enough. Adding a bit of interest to the proceeding, the movie offers a totally different take on Lizzie Borden’s case.

KILLER RACCOONS! 2! (2020)

 

Okay, so this is a sequel to a 2005 movie called Coons! from the same director. Smart of them not to title this one Killer Coons…. Not sure if I saw the original back in the SyFy days, but I think I would remember it if I had. Either way, based on some references to it in this follow-up, that film was about a summer camp being terrorized by killer raccoons.

The sequel is actually a Christmas movie! It isn’t, however, a comedy creature feature, which I assume the first film was. This is a totally goofy farce, with intentionally adolescent humor, bad green screen, cheesy acting, and raccoon puppets. You either have the patience for this type of silliness or you don’t.

Quite honestly, the raccoon puppets and the little sounds they make are funnier than 95 percent of the human roles in the movie.

Some of the main characters from the first film are back, but played by different actors, which I only know because they purposely poke fun at how none of them looks the same. The main guy who survived first time around gets on a train ride to DC, and finds himself pitted against a bunch of terrorists…and government trained raccoons.

It’s pure absurdity as everyone fights gun-toting raccoons, but the train is loaded with Christmas décor, there are plenty of sexual jokes, and Ron Jeremy makes an appearance, apparently right before he was arrested for sexual assault in real life, never to be seen again.

Scenes of fighting and killing raccoons are hilarious, and the only time humans outshine the puppets in the comedy department is when the main good guy fights the main bad guy at the end in a slapstick scene that even had my hubby laughing.

A CREATURE WAS STIRRING (2024)

I really have no idea what this film was trying to accomplish, because it goes nowhere and nothing happens. However, if you love Pontypool, you might like this, because it’s basically Pontypool with Santa.

The story of what happened before the “plot” begins is presented as comic book panels during the opening credits. There was a zombie apocalypse, and the elves, reindeer, and Mrs. Claus were all infected, so Santa moved to Texas with his pet polar bear, where he lives alone transmitting a radio show to any survivors that are still out there and need some uplifting.

So as not to feel lonely, Santa strikes up a friendship with an AI girl in an app. He tells stories to listeners when on air. He has a sort of domesticated zombie friend who hangs around outside. He does a song and dance number (with his polar bear). He goes scavenging for supplies. He cooks. He practices fighting for a zombie battle that never happens.

This is literally just a movie about Santa killing time after the apocalypse. The only thread of motivation is a late plot introduced that has Santa concerned when he learns that a young girl left her safe house to go find him. The big climax? No rescue mission. No zombie fighting. Just Santa worrying until the girl shows up safely at his door. The end. We don’t even get any fantasy footage for Santa fetishists—not even when he takes a shower and is just shown from the neck up.

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Are cool monsters enough to make a movie worth a watch?

Posted on December 2, 2025 by Daniel

That is the question I asked myself as I checked out three horror flicks featuring deformed and grotesque humanoid beings.

THE PRICE WE PAY (2022)

The one thing this cliché movie has going for it is that the absolutely ludicrous final fight between the main characters and the “monster” is super gory and violent.

Stephen Dorff and two other dudes rob a business and force a young woman who witnessed the crime to be their getaway driver. The clever little wrench thrown into their plan is that her car sucks. It breaks down, so they walk to a nearby farm to crash for the night.

Somehow, the film fails to deliver any sense of suspense, tension, or build-up as the group settles in and explores the property, but eventually they get knocked out and strapped down to operating tables by a crazy dude and a huge, deformed woman for organ harvesting. That’s it. That’s pretty much the whole movie.

There’s some nasty mutilation during surgery without anesthesia, and the main girl becomes the hero, but first, Dorff gets cut open, gets stapled back together by the main girl, and then has a fight with the deformed woman while wearing a diaper.

It’s so bad, and it just gets even more laughable as the main girl takes on the deformed woman. However, the final fight is deliciously gnarly.

BLOODY EYES (2025)

I had cheesy horror hopes when this film opened in a neon lit lab with scientists injecting something into a dude wearing a sack over his head.

My hopes were crushed for a majority of the film, with the exception of one of the main cops being a cutie.

The script somehow manages to have a group of cops knee-deep in solving a crime that they talk about in circles for the whole movie without ever giving the audience any details as to what case they’re cracking wide open. I’ve never seen anything like this before.

Their secretive investigation quickly leads them to the underground lab, where they spend a majority of the movie walking around with flashlights in search of something. What exactly that is I don’t know, but it ends up having something to do with lab samples, the most obvious aspect of the plot.

42 minutes in the cute cop finally spots the sack head guy from the beginning, sans sack and showing off his deformed face while he’s eating someone. Awesome.

64 minutes in someone else finally gets attacked. Within only about 20 minutes left, most of the remaining characters face off against the monster all at once. The “action” is entirely low energy, with almost every scene involving the monster presented in slow motion with the audio levels turned down low and muffled. What the hell? I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a monster movie loaded with guys waving guns sabotage itself this badly.

NEVER BLINK (2025)

If Flatliners had a great creature and sloppy storytelling, it would be Never Blink. The film needed to streamline its scientific angle, simplify the experimentation elements, and trim down the runtime by about 20 minutes.

The title does fit, and there are fun moments when the camera view seals up to darkness like closing eyelids, but for a movie not called Bloody Eyes, this one actually has a lot of bloody eyes, unlike Bloody Eyes.

The general premise is a goodie. A professor at a medical school presents his students with the notion that blinking makes up to 48 minutes of our day during which we’re not actually seeing anything, so what if there’s something there in those “blind” minutes? Eek!

Of course there is something there for the sake of this movie, and the students begin to see it materializing and coming for them in the non-blinking world. That is the problem, however. It’s never quite clear exactly how this other dimension is being triggered. The students aren’t experimenting on themselves, so why are they all having encounters with this creature? Is just one of the affected patients they are working with bringing it into reality? Is it the experimental drug they are using? No idea, but the only thing to remember is…never blink!

The characters definitely give off a nostalgic, early 2000s horror movie vibe, and there are attempts at character building, but none of the traits have any impact on the movie. One guy is selling drugs from the lab. Doesn’t matter. Another guy states that he is gay, Black, and has visions. Doesn’t matter. The main girl is having nightmares. Why? Not explained.

We never really get any answers to anything. There are occasional sightings of the creature that is preying on them, and it’s fricking awesome. The horror visuals only get better in the final act when the surviving students decide to meet the monster on its own plane of existence. The horror action gets creepy and gory, plus we get a hot guy shirtless along with an odd number of closeups of his crotch. That and the final freaky fight, which has a 90s techno battle throwback feel to it, are definitely the horror highlights here.

Well, not exactly. In the opening bloody dream sequence, the main girl squishes a mutilated body’s intestine underfoot, and I blurted out, “If you think about it, it’s kind of like stepping in poo”, which gave my hubby a giggle. That was the highlight for him.

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Six degrees of holiday horror?

Posted on December 1, 2025 by Daniel

My latest marathon covers several holidays, some more than others. Let’s find out if they all make my holiday horror page.

THE VICTORVILLE MASSACRE (2011)

At last, I found a horror movie that takes place on Labor Day weekend. In this case, a group of friends uses the holiday weekend to party at a house in a small town.

This is a really likable group of friends, which is rare in slashers these days. I actually enjoyed their banter as they took their road trip, soaked in a hot tub, and played Truth or Dare. Not surprisingly, two girls make out during the game.

Even the kills are sleek and violent, and the killer wears a hooded robe and a mask, providing a cool presence. The slashing even begins strong, with a couple going off to have sex….

Unfortunately, the film gets a little messy as it tries to create a backstory and killer motivation through distracting flashbacks that start to infiltrate right when the slasher pacing finally picks up. Not to mention, the “twist” reveal of the killer isn’t very surprising, because it’s made obvious right from the start which character has a conflict that might push them to murder.

SLAY RIDE (2024)

Olivia Dunkley directs, cowrote, and stars in this flick, which borrows familiar 80s slasher themes but ends up being more of a holiday home invasion horror flick.

The score is awesome, making Christmas music sound sinister, which sets the tone. As does some great initial outdoor footage of snowy houses decorated for the season. However, after that, it visually shifts into what is clearly a low budget endeavor.

Newspaper clips during the intro credits reveal that a little boy witnessed his dad kill his mom on Christmas when he was a child. That boy was locked up in a mental institution years ago. Uh-oh.

You guessed it. He escapes on Christmas and comes home. After an initial kill in a random house, he shows up in the back seat of the main woman, who is on her way home to see her son and husband. A rather hilarious fight breaks out between the psycho Santa and the woman as she continues to drive, and she literally kicks him out of her car.

Leo from Charmed makes a brief appearance as a detective, and he gives the main woman and her family some police protection outside their home in a squad car. If you don’t know how that’s going to work out for the cops, you need to watch more horror movies.

Thing is, there’s a very low body count, and most of the movie ends up being about this very animated and kooky, talkative, psycho Santa keeping the family tied up in their house. I was really underwhelmed by the unfolding of events in this fairly generic flick.

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST CHRISTMAS (2025)

Obviously, this has nothing to do with the famous franchise, and obviously it follows the same exact basic plot, but you know what’s not so obvious? Why do people who accidentally killed someone a year ago, or ten years ago, or even twenty years ago still continue to go to a reunion with all guilty participants invited when dozens of movies have made it clear what the outcome of such reunions is?

The film introduces us to a killer Santa in a black mask…in the main girl’s fricking nightmare sequence! Does that mean our main girl has psychic powers? No, so it’s kind of ridiculous.

She does get a note inviting her to regroup with her friends a year after a prank gone wrong.

The house they gather at has Christmas lights, but don’t expect a wintery vibe. There’s no snow, and the trees are all green. Blah. Also, after the first dead friend is discovered, the group spends a lot of time just sitting there talking about how they can’t just sit there and do nothing.

The movie is only an hour and 8 minutes long, there are a few fun Santa kills and good body reveals, but there are no scares or suspense, although the final girl’s dumb decision to “hide” under a pool table is perhaps the best bad scene ever. There’s even a little lesbian element to the plot eventually. Bottom line is cool Santa, cool kills, but not much else.

HEADLESS: A SLEEPY HOLLOW STORY (2022)

This delightful occult comedy was originally a webseries, but the individual episodes have been linked together as a movie on Tubi. It’s a fun and unique, modern twist on the classic Washington Irving story, manages to include Irving’s other famous character Rip Van Winkle in the mix, and even indulges in some meta horror moments.

The writers/directors star in the film as three of the leads, but everyone in the cast puts their all into it, making for a great production. The guy playing Brom Bones especially shines as a comedic actor.

A banjo player/singer serves as the Greek chorus, carrying us through the story with his musical narrative, which sets the whimsical tone of the show.

Ichabod Crane comes to work as a teacher, rents a room, and ends up with the Headless Horseman as his roommate! In a fun take on the story, Ichabod, Brom Bones (cleverly cast as a gym teacher), and a goth witch who works at an occult shop band together to try to find the Headless Horseman’s head.

It turns into a mystery of witchcraft and the supernatural as their hunt becomes an investigation of the sinister history of the town of Sleepy Hollow. The hook of the show is that the witch is able to use sorcery to give the Headless Horseman temporary heads…of dead people. Teehee. Each time she does, the Headless Horseman takes on the persona of the deceased, making for some funny situations.

The show moves at a good pace, but there are a few unnecessary side stories that throw the plot off track once in a while and simply aren’t funny enough to warrant their inclusion.

The last episode makes for a great finale, with plenty of surprises, as well as appearances by two supernatural show alum: Tom Lenk, who played Andrew on Buffy, and Felicia Day, who played Charlie on Supernatural. Awesome.

If I have one complaint, it’s that the show absolutely should have taken place entirely at Halloween time and indulged in fall foliage and holiday decor. There’s a…um…nod to the Headless Horseman’s pumpkin head, and only one scene referencing Halloween, with some Halloween decor splashed on a wall in the backdrop. That’s all we get. Halloween is never celebrated at all.

ZOMBIES: CHRISTMAS APOCALYPSE (2024)

This one won’t be getting a spot on the holiday horror page, because it’s actually just a previously released, non-Christmas horror movie called Zombies that has been expanded by 30 minutes with a side story focusing on one of the original film’s minor characters.

This added side story does take place at Christmas time, and it simply bookends the original Zombies movie. This guy proposes to his woman in a bar, and as they’re leaving, they are attacked by zombies. He fights back, which lands him in jail, where the original Zombies begins, with this guy’s cellmate being the main character of that movie, which I cover here.

After the original movie ends, we circle back to the guy from the beginning. He’s free from prison and walking out in the snow as Christmas music plays, to further justify renaming this as a Christmas zombie movie. His newly added story arc with his fiancée from the beginning gets some closure. Taken on its own without a whole separate movie dropped in the middle of it, it’s actually a fun little zombie short. It’s definitely odd that a whole movie about another guy concludes with this, but props to the filmmaker for extracting a minor role from his original movie and creating a complete, unrelated story in the same universe.

BAD BUNNY (2025)

After opening with a big hillbilly bear with great tits banging his bunny rabbit, this movie becomes a surprisingly serious backwoods creature feature slasher.

A woman comes to live in a house in the woods after the death of her man and is soon being terrorized by what is obviously the human/hybrid offspring of the banged bunny from the beginning. The movie doesn’t need to get into the details, because everyone knows that when you fuck a bunny, it gives birth to a bunny man.

The bunny man looks freaky fantastic and makes nasty noises, and he gets to kill an assortment of random characters throughout the course of the film. Plus, the kills are nice and vicious with some complementary, chaotic camerawork. The part that I didn’t like was that the bunny man also gets the main girl’s dog. WTF? The dog’s part in the film is so irrelevant that they didn’t even need to include it just to kill it.

Most of the movie has the main girl just trying to evade and escape the bunny man as he chases her, and it simply starts to get repetitive. Even so, the final fight to the death is fricking brutal, and the final girl’s emotional breakdown at the end is pretty heartbreaking for an indie slasher. And you simply have to love the final frame.

As is usually the case, this is not an Easter horror film, but what better time to watch a killer bunny movie than on Easter weekend? Therefore, it’s going on the holiday horror page.

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Three from 1973

Posted on November 25, 2025 by Daniel

It’s always hard to wrap my head around the fact that movies like these were coming out at the same time as game changers like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Exorcist. And yet I keep watching them when I come across them, mainly because they star familiar faces. So did any of these give me even a hint of a scare?

ARNOLD (1973)

I added this one to my movie collection to ensure I had every horror movie in which Roddy McDowall stars only to find he barely makes it past the halfway mark.

This quirky gothic horror comedy is loaded with famous faces, including Stella Stevens as a new bride who makes her entrance to a lively song about her fiancé. The catch? The man she’s marrying is dead. And in a coffin. And his will says she must spend every minute of her life with him by her side if she wants to collect his inheritance.

At the reading of the will, the family learns that the deceased left a secret stash of money hidden somewhere in the house.

And then, people begin to die gruesome deaths. As in all these whodunit murder mystery mansion movies, there’s backstabbing, jealousy, revenge, scandalous affairs, someone spying through a hole in the eyes of a portrait, and a bumbling detective on the case.

Along with the silliness, there are some macabre moments, spooky nightmare sequence, and Jamie Farr in black face as a Middle Eastern servant. WTF?

Highlights for me included a cat playing with a severed foot, and a decapitation by guillotine that is perhaps the funniest moment in the movie once it’s discovered, but overall, this isn’t one I’d find myself revisiting…even though I now own it.

THE HOUSE OF SEVEN CORPSES (1973)

This flick starts strong by using echoing sound effects that were so prevalent in early 1970s horror movies to give them a trippy vibe. Plus, the opener is a montage of people being murdered in a mansion.

Then we get to the dull part, which is most of the movie. A film crew is making a movie in that mansion. The deaths that took place in the mansion are merely mentioned, and we never get any substantial discovery of what actually happened at the location in the past. WTF? A little deep diving would have given the characters something to do.

Instead, we watch one sequence after another of the crew filming scenes for their horror movie, which look like they’re from a better movie than the one we’re watching. We also get John Carradine in a minor role as the caretaker, and there’s a mutilated cat moment that’s shockingly gruesome for the time at which this was released.

It’s not until one hour in that they decide to use a black magic book they find in the mansion for a scene in their movie. The book is actually The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which isn’t even a black magic book, but a religious text, so what the hell?

Anyway, without explanation beyond the reading of the book, a few dead bodies rise from a graveyard that’s conveniently located right outside the mansion, so we have to assume that messing with the book is what triggered the zombies. These are gnarly looking corpses, and it’s pretty creepy as they roam around in the shadows, but even the horror fun fails to bring anything cohesive to the plot. You really only turn to this one if you’re a fan of horror flicks of this era and have seen most of the others.

TERROR IN THE WAX MUSEUM (1973)

This period piece set in the late 1800s comes from the same director as Arnold and features much of the same cast because they were filmed simultaneously. Thing is, while this film flirts with the idea of being a horror film, when it comes down to it, it’s really a mystery.

John Carradine owns a wax museum, and the film opens with him and his deformed assistant dumping a pretty woman into the wax to make a new display piece for the museum. Like the array of “wax museum” films that came before and after it, you would think that would be the whole horror plot and that the deformed assistant would be a killer.

Nope. Carradine is killed, and those that want to get their hands on his business come to stay in the museum. Does that mean sinister, devious plots to take each other out and people being killed left and right? Nope. Even the deformed dude is a sympathetic character and not actually a monster.

There’s a detective investigating Carradine’s death, and there are plenty of delusions and nightmares of the famous murderers from the macabre museum displays coming to life, but that’s about it. This movie is super boring.

As you’d expect, there’s a final fight around Carradine’s all but forgotten wax vat, and a killer is at last unmasked, but it’s incredibly anticlimactic. No matter how much you love the wax museum horror movie concept, this is a bottom of the barrel option.

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When my streaming slasher selections go wrong

Posted on November 19, 2025 by Daniel

It’s a variety of different types of slashers, each of them with (sometimes oddly) erotic elements, but that didn’t make my latest triple feature any better. Let’s find out what went wrong.

SPIN THE BOTTLE (2024)

A teen supernatural slasher that runs over 2 hours long. WHY? There is no excuse for this.

In the 1970s, a group of friends is hanging out at one girl’s house, and they decide to play spin the bottle…in the basement…which turns out to be an occult lair…with a pentagram on the floor…which they sit around to play the game…with a bottle the girl warns is her father’s prized possession…

In modern times, we meet our main teen guy, who is going on ahead to the house he will be moving into with his mother, played by Ali Larter. Right here is one of those moments when the film could have been edited down. Their situation is established in a conversation before he leaves, and then we get another conversation between them when he arrives at the house, which adds absolutely nothing new of value.

He quickly makes a group of friends at school and invites them to the house. The kids know of the house’s history, so naturally they decide they should play spin the bottle in the basement…with the same bottle. On a side note, I don’t understand this recent trend of filming movies in the super long and narrow 2:35:1 aspect ratio. Perfect opportunities to capture the bottle sitting in the middle of the full pentagram are hampered by the squished height of the picture size.

In a typical moment of catering to a straight, male audience, while playing, two guys laugh off the idea of kissing when the bottle signals that they are supposed to, but when it’s two girls, they don’t hesitate in going for it and getting into it. Yawn.

Anyway, the kids release a ghost of the girl who lived in the house in the 1970s, and she begins terrorizing them, and very occasionally killing them. Justin Long appears as the sheriff who investigates the mounting deaths.

Once again, there’s a repetitive segment, this time at a funeral for one of the kids, which simply needed to get to the point but takes way too long to do so, with scenes both at the grave and in the church. We really didn’t need to attend the entire funeral of a dead character in a slasher movie.

Finally, the remaining kids decide to delve into the backstory of the house. They talk to a reverend and learn they must get the demon back in the bottle. It’s only briefly in the final act that the movie gets to the point—all the kids in the house together being hunted by the ghost girl, who sucks their souls out through their mouths. If only the film had been 30 minutes shorter and this section about 20 minutes longer, this could have been an okay teen supernatural slasher.

I HEART WILLIE (2025)

It’s another killer Mickey Mouse movie, and it begins with some homoerotic torture porn. Yay!

Then we meet a small group of goth kids that likes to go to macabre locations. They head to the infamous lair of the famous “Steamboat Willie” character, who one of the girls loves.

They spend a lot of time roaming around the property in the dark, both inside and out, with some of them going off to have sex. This is 43 minutes in and when things finally pick up. Our shirtless Mickey begins hunting, abducting, and absolutely torturing everyone in his lair.

The big surprise is when we discover just how much the main girl really loves Steamboat Willie, but even that is not enough to save this poorly paced slasher. At least it’s gritty and grisly.

KARMA (2025)

The only thing that kept me watching this one was one hot guy who spends most of the time shirtless.

Otherwise, it’s a dialogue-heavy bore.

Four years ago, a group of friends accidentally killed a girl during a prank gone wrong. Now they start getting “I know what you did” type notes. But first, there’s a bunch of banter between them that feels unscripted, pointless, and just an excuse for them to all call each other the n word repeatedly for nearly 25 minutes.

It’s 50 minutes before we get the first major kill, and it’s a 2fer. The killer wears a robe and mask, but don’t expect any suspense, chases, or death scenes. The best part of the few kills we do get is the reaction by a white guy as he’s dying.

65 minutes in there’s an anticlimactic reveal of the killer, who has everyone tied up on a stage and just tortures and kills them for the remainder of the film…after talking for like 20 minutes. Yawn.

Would you believe the movie ends with a maniacal laugh outburst?

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A three-ring circus of crazed clowns

Posted on November 18, 2025 by Daniel

I’m always up for a scary clown movie, but was this just a run-of-the-mill triple feature? Let’s find out.

THE CURSE OF THE CLOWN MOTEL (2023)

Some well-known names somehow made it into this mess of a movie that never decides if it wants to be about a vengeful Native American entity or creepy clowns. One thing is for sure – it’s definitely a clown show.

In the Old West saloon opener, hottie Randy Couture scores a brief role as a cowboy who gets killed by a magical Native American man, whose face paint I presume is supposed to resemble that of a clown. Randy’s last words are something to the effect of “You haven’t seen the last of me”. Yet…we never see Randy again.

In modern times, Tobin Bell owns a clown-themed motel in the desert. Don’t ask me why anyone would come to a clown motel in the middle of nowhere, but a group of business people does.

Also present is a young Native American woman who wants to reclaim the sacred land of her people from Tobin, who has been exploiting it by…running a clown motel business on it?

Meanwhile, Richard Grieco is moping around, and I think he’s supposed to be another Native American working with the main girl’s grandmother to unleash that magical Native American man from the beginning. I don’t know why Grieco is even in the movie, and I don’t think he does either.

At one point it appears that a life size clown in the gift shop (?) is alive, but there’s no payoff to that moment, so the whole clown aspect is basically dropped. The Native American man is brought back somehow, kills a few of the guests, shoots electric magic from his mouth, and lurks inside mirrors and paintings on walls. It’s never clear who he’s mad at or trying to get revenge on, because he just kills random guests.

The first of the few major kills comes at about an hour in, and while the death scenes are nice and gory, there aren’t enough of them, and the nastiest part of one of them is blocked by…get this…CGI fricking blood on the camera lens. What? Despite that, it’s still the best scene in the movie.

I won’t even try to explain the main girl’s final battle with the Native American man, because, well, I can’t explain it.

VAMPIRE CLOWN (2025)

Hunky Tyhr Trubiak of Tempus Tormentum is the lead here, and he could charm the pants off me. He carries the quirky tone of Vampire Clown perfectly with his humorous himbo performance. The desolate country town setting also adds to the overall weird vibe, and the film felt to me like a throwback to 1960s horror in which residents of a little town are taken over by the unknown.

In this case, the unknown is a vampire clown. Tyrh, a man who is questioning his worthiness, learns his neighbors are being found dead in their homes.

He begins to suspect something strange is going on, especially when locals start appearing during the day in surgical masks while behaving all distant and comatose. It’s quite creepy, and the eerie feel is only hindered by the whimsical tone whenever the actual vampire clown comes around.

Tyrh rides around on his bicycle trying to figure out what’s happening to his town, which benefits his little guy as hero persona as he uncovers the truth. Eventually, he and his girlfriend have to team up with her ex to stop the vampires once and for all, which is when the movie really hits its dry comedy stride.

It’s small in scope and low in budget, but it’s filled with heart, and I enjoyed the heck out of it.

DO YOU SEE ME? (2017)

The question should be, do you want to see Do You See Me?? I was so drawn in by the establishing minutes of this clown movie. The opener is a gruesomely atmospheric “skin mask” kill, and then we learn it’s right before Halloween, which lands this one on the holiday horror page. Yay!

We meet our main girl, recently divorced and bickering with her incredibly cute husband over ownership of their home.

She also has tension with her mother during phone conversations, has a sister with strong opinions about what she’s doing wrong in her life, and is regularly bothered by a dude at the gym who can’t take the hint that she’s not interested in him. Was the goal here to create a list of suspects who might have it out for the main girl? Not sure.

The possibility of attending Halloween parties hovers in the background, but that’s about as far as Halloween gets. There’s one trip to a store for some costume shopping, but there’s absolutely no Halloween atmosphere here—no pumpkins, no decor, no fall leaves. Bummer.

Anyway, our main girl keeps spotting a clown lurking around wherever she goes, and those sightings are often accompanied by her receiving a simple text message: Do you see me?

There’s such an intriguing and suspenseful feel to the film…at first. However, pretty soon it just keeps making promises it doesn’t keep. It becomes repetitive, and you begin to wonder if the clown is all in the main girl’s imagination. He doesn’t target anyone else. He doesn’t kill anyone. He never actually chases the main girl. Yawn.

And then, in the final moments, there are suddenly several clowns outside her house terrorizing her. Why introduce a bunch of clowns at the last second? Even with the addition of more threats, the movie doesn’t movie into terrifying territory, and the conclusion is a letdown, with no explanation for anything that happened, no Halloween party, and the clown seemingly moving on to harass someone else. It seems that films inspired by those real sightings of creepy clowns that were talked about on the news several years ago are becoming a bit of a trend.

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Killer canines, infected teachers, and an alien spouse

Posted on November 17, 2025 by Daniel

It’s a trio of Asian horror flicks without the usual supernatural style, which is my fave. Let’s so how these other subgenres worked out for me.

PROJECT SILENCE (2023)

The Mist meets Cujo on a bridge? Project Silence is repetitive and lacks intensity and suspense, with CGI dogs so bad they just kill any sense of realism.

We meet a variety of characters that are all inevitably headed for that bridge. A heavy fog leads to a massive car pile-up that also blocks off any exit from the bridge.

Then a military truck that was carrying laboratory dogs is found busted open. Pretty soon, the dogs are attacking people left and right, and their runs and leaps look less realistic than a modern video game. It just totally took me out of the movie, and I became bored fast.

There’s a cool helicopter crash scene, a plan is eventually hatched to lure the dogs off the bridge, and the bridge does collapse, so there’s all that to look forward to.

Even the motivation of the leader of the dog pack is pretty good, and it has to do with her love for her puppies, but by that point I was so dissatisfied with the special effects that I felt no sympathy for her and blurted out, “How sad. They killed all her CGI puppies.”

ZOMBIE SCHOOL (2014)

This infection movie is not listed as a comedy on IMDb, but it totally feels like a comedy due to the dubbing, and it seems pretty intentional, so I’m not sure what the intended tone was. Either way, it works as a comedy, because both the hubby and I were laughing throughout.

It especially needs to be a comedy on account of there being no likable characters. A group of troubled kids is sent to a school on an isolated island, and the teachers are basically bad kids that grew up to become teachers of bad kids. We’re talking like major physical abuse scenes.

Speaking of abuse, be warned that when the backstory of how people are becoming zombies comes out, it involves a flashback scene that looks like real footage of pigs being buried alive in a pit. I’d suggest either fast-forwarding through it or just looking away while listening to the dialogue for the explanation.

Basically, as kids and teachers are fighting nonstop, the principal’s dog is attacked by an infected pig. The principal goes out to get revenge on the killer pig, gets bit, turns into a zombie, and then infects the rest of the school staff.

This rampant spread doesn’t happen until 45 minutes into the movie. But the last half hour or so brings on the hyper zombie action, with fast zombies, power tools, and a dose of gore as the kids fight back against the infected.

It’s all pretty typical, except for one thing—at the last minute, there seems to be the presentation of a way to calm the infected! There could have been a whole new angle to the usual infected plot line if they had made this revelation an integral part of the plot earlier on.

NIGHT OF THE UNDEAD (2020)

Pixelated penis! This is the second time in about a month that I’ve watched a horror movie on Prime in which a scene with penis is blurred out! In this case, it’s two scenes! Double the dick opportunity totally denied! What is going on? I have no idea in either case if this is the way these films presented the penis or if Prime is censoring content.

At least we get to see the rest of the bod…

We are immediately cock-blocked for the first time in the opener before we meet a newlywed straight couple. For a sci-fi comedy that ends up running a little too long, the plot pacing is ironically fast. Within the first twenty minutes, the wife becomes convinced her husband is cheating, she goes to a private detective, he uncovers the husband’s philandering ways, and he drops a conspiracy bomb—he thinks her husband is an alien.

That leaves her to contend with the explosive suggestion for the bulk of the movie. Not to mention the gang of secret alien men that knows she’s uncovering their alien plot and therefore must be destroyed!

With the help of her female friends and the detective, she plots to kill her alien husband, which turns into an absolute comedy of errors, complete with seemingly dead people coming back to life. However, this is not in any way a zombie film, despite the English translation of the title. I have no idea if it’s the correct translation.

Night of the Undead is indeed comedic, with plenty of humorous scenarios, and it turns into an across town chase as the alien men hunt down the women, but despite the thrilling pursuit, the film somehow feels slow. If there had been a way to just trim about 15 minutes off the 105-minute runtime, it would have been a total blast. As is, it’s only like two-thirds a blast, and there’s no actual alien reveal scene in the end other than some red eye action.

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