There were definitely cool monsters in my latest triple feature, but they pretty much all deserved to be in better movies than the ones we get.
SKY MONSTER (2023)
This 75-minute creature feature doesn’t even reach early 2000s SyFy original levels. It is loaded with terrible effects, absurd plot points, awful dialogue, and actors who seem to want to come across as American but keep forgetting to stifle their British accents.
A dude puts his daughter and her friends on a private plane for her birthday. It’s just them, the captain, and the “hot” flight attendant.
I guess he’s cute, but when you try to hype a dude up by making a point of drawing attention to his non-existent butt when he bends over, it immediately knocks him down a bunch of rungs on the hot ladder for me.
Also of note is that there’s a party montage set to a contemporary song about dancing that reminds you just how horrible “dance” music is these days…this shit is like 20 beats per minute. It’s no wonder the hot dude has no ass—there’s no good music to dance to anymore to build up the buns.
Anyway, the plane flies over the Bermuda Triangle, and this huge CGI octopus creature ends up wrapping itself around a toy plane. Then overlaid tentacle footage starts infiltrating the plane.
It’s a frightening concept in theory, but the execution ruins it. The movie just gets worse and cheaper looking as it progresses, with ridiculous plot holes (for instance, the girls open the door and stand right in the doorway without getting sucked out of the plane), and rescue efforts are absolutely laughable. If you reeeeaaaalllllly miss bad SyFy films, save this one for a rainy Sunday.
THE HUSBAND (2023)
Not sure if this low budget indie started off as a short, but it feels like a short film that was expanded into a full-length feature and should have stayed a short. You will spend a majority of this movie thinking this was miscategorized as a horror movie on IMDb.
It is over an hour of low energy, verbally and emotionally abusive relationship drama between a woman and her husband. We get endless demonstrations of how he controls her, she has scenes interacting with friends who urge her to get out of the relationship, and…that’s it. It’s quite honestly insulting how much it hits you over the head with a check list of abuse warning signs.
When she at last goes to a psychic who gets spooked and kicks her out, it finally feels like this might become a horror movie.
66 minutes in, the husband has his thug friends abduct her and take her into the woods. There’s absolutely no explanation why, but a demon woman with long fingernails and a giant, toothy smile lives in a cave there and comes to help her—by killing the guys off swiftly in the course of about five minutes with really bad CGI effects. And that’s the end.
It’s a shame, because there are some eerie sequences with the demon woman, and there’s also a moment when she asks the main woman to be her husband.
It implies that there was the possibility of a great backstory for this demon woman, and the creators simply failed to realize it or just didn’t want to go for it.
THE BREACH (2022)
This one starts off promising…with a cute sheriff delving into the mystery of a gory, mutilated body floating to shore in a canoe.
He assembles a small team to investigate the home of a missing scientist on the other side of the water. Inside they find some Lovecraftian trouble brewing, including a keyhole-shaped door to the edge of reality in the attic.
If only this film had as much sleaze and blood as the Lovecraft adaptations of the late 80s (I’ve even seen it compared to From Beyond on IMDb).
We get a lot of talk and not much action. One of the guys steps into the portal and when he comes out he slowly begins to mutate. Meanwhile, the scientist’s wife, played by the mother from the TV show The Strain, shows up to add her two cents to a plot that never quite makes sense.
I’d say it’s worth watching The Breach for the hot sheriff briefly shirtless and the fricking awesome deformed beings that begin to swarm the house at the end.
The final act is definitely a treat, even if we’re left with a load of unanswered questions. But who really needs answers when there are cool monsters?
