STREAM QUEEN: there are boys and bears, but are these horror comedies funny?

They all have some man meat and at least a couple of laughs, but three of these horror comedies dragged on with plodding dialogue, while the fourth one was nonstop action and humor. Let’s take a look.

CORPSE (2019)

Based on clips on the internet, I thought this black and white, 70-minute movie might be a campy queer film about a gathering of gays that gets drunk and wakes up to find a dead body on the floor.

Now that would have been a movie. Unfortunately, these guys gather after one of them breaks up with his girlfriend. Ugh! They’re straight. If they hadn’t referenced girls I would not really have known.

Sooooo…this is not a horror comedy. These guys sit around and talk about relationships for about half the film, then wake up, find a dead body on the floor…and talk about that for the second half of the film.

The guys are cute and some of their reactions are funny at times, but mostly nothing happens and there’s not enough humor. And while the music is reminiscent of sixties horror movie scores, It always seems to be poorly implemented both in timing and intensity.

SUBFERATU (2020)

If you’re going to make a horror comedy that is virtually all dialogue (which you shouldn’t), it has to be funny dialogue. Sitting through one lackluster script was bad enough, but Subferatu was like watching Corpse all over again.

A group of boaters not unlike the cast of Gilligan’s Island ends up on a Nazi ship from the past when their boat sinks, and eventually discovers there’s a vampire on board. Again—sounds like a plot ripe for comedy.

Instead, the two captains have a verbal standoff…and then everyone talks and talks and talks.

One guy discovers the vampire on the ship and is apparently bitten, because in between all the talking he pops up as a vamp for a split second (53 minutes into the movie) but is immediately taken down by the crew.

There’s another scene that’s visually thrilling of a guy being approached by the vampire, and eventually everyone stops talking long enough to splash holy water on a vampire.

That’s it. That’s all the vampire action you get in this one. The cast does what it can with the material to make us laugh, but the material doesn’t support them back.

PSYCHO-THERAPY (2020)

Only the final 20 minutes save this 70-minute movie from being another all talk, no action or laughs horror comedy.

I can’t imagine why the last twenty minutes wasn’t used as the plot for the entire movie. Hey, I get character development, but for 50 minutes we listen to a variety of patients speaking with their therapist: a wife beater, a throuple, a guy afraid of a clown, a lesbian and her sexually confused girlfriend, etc.

Finally, the therapist takes the patients on a group therapy retreat. Within minutes all hell breaks loose. Yay! And this crazy bitch totally steals the show.

She reminds me of funny actress Edie McClurg, who was in Elvira: Mistress of the Dark and played Nurse DeFarge on an episode of The Golden Girls.

There’s an absolute bloodbath as the patients start hacking each other to pieces. I really can’t imagine how the writer overlooked the potential of weaving their mental backstories into the group therapy sessions at the retreat house—which would have created interpersonal tensions to serve as a catalyst to a full-length slasher.

There are also some beefy boys, and yes, the clown does show up, but his minuscule appearance doesn’t support his use on the poster art.

GIRLS WITH BALLS (2018)

I’ve saved the best for last. If you’re looking for a bloody good backwoods time with plenty of humor, Girls With Balls is a the perfect choice, and it’s available on Netflix both in French and very well dubbed in English.

This campy girl power film isn’t, however, much of a “horror” film. A female volleyball team and its beary coach stop at a lodge for the night and immediately have a bad encounter with the skeevy dude running it.

They leave and park in their RV for the night, but when they wake up, the lodge dude and his group of masked rednecks is waiting to chase them down through the woods…using guns.

Yes, a majority of the gore revolves around people getting body parts shot off. The very funny interactions of the girls and the macabre humor rock, however, the girls do eventually have to resort to melee weapons to do damage.

The film is fast-paced, there’s a “Greek chorus” cowboy dude singing ditties about the action taking place, a hilarious scene in which “YMCA” ignites gay passion (landing this one on my does the gay guy die? page), and a slapstick dog vs. man fight that shouldn’t even bother the most sensitive dog lovers because it’s so goofy and over the top.

The film doesn’t even try to explain the motivations of the baddies, although they do appear to be some sort of religious cult, but it doesn’t even matter, because it’s more about the girls as they step up their game to kick ass…with the help of their beary coach, who totally rox.

To put these four films into perspective, this film is actually the longest of the bunch, yet it felt like it flew by.