This was one underwhelming trio of films for me, but at least one of them had gay guys and hot bods, which lands it on the does the gay guy die? page. Let’s get right into them.
DARK DISTORTION (2026)
It was nice to feel like I was catapulted back to the early 2000s, direct-to-DVD, supernatural slasher era watching this one, but aside from plenty of eye candy for the gay male’s gaze, as well as a gay couple, this simply isn’t a very cohesive movie.
There’s this group of models/actors that makes money by meeting up with creepy online fans and then robbing them.
There’s also the ghost of some woman’s dead son inside a camera. And there’s a sexy sleazy dude who films pretty people having sex in order to summon the ghost inside the camera to come out and kill them. This sexy sleazy dude is this like this ghost dude’s bitch.
The plot is all over the place, there are no likable characters to connect with, the kills are underwhelming, and we never actually see the killer ghost. I repeat—we never see the damn ghost. Basically, every opportunity to make this a halfway decent flick was missed.
THE DAMNED LANDS (2024)
Take the hillbillies in animal masks backwoods horror concept and suck all the unsettling suspense out of it, and you’ve got this movie.
It opens with a redneck and his female “escort” checking out some property he bought in the middle of the woods…in the middle of the night. What better time to see your purchase, right? Anyway, the baddies kill them, so we at least know right away that the death scenes are kind of violent.
Then we meet our main group of young friends. They’re heading to that exact location to camp despite warnings they receive from locals along the way.
Soon after, we are presented with the masked baddies…talking to each other! The fear factor gone in an instant.
What follows is pretty typical stuff—a few random kills, the friends setting up camp, sitting by a fire, doing a lot of talking, etc. The only things missing are some good old fashioned, gratuitous nudity and sex.
That would have at least kept us entertained until the group is finally targeted…53 minutes into the movie! Even then, it’s just not very exciting, and when the baddies finally abduct someone, they immediately remove their masks and have a chat with their prisoner about why they are killing people.
A letdown from start to finish.
TRUCKER (2024)
We all love a psycho driver terrifying people on the road movie. Well, that isn’t this, despite the title. This is basically a backwoods, trailer home revenge slasher movie. The hillbilly banjo music used at various times throughout definitely sets the corny tone, so it’s hard to find anything frightful about this one.
We begin with a fresh take on I Know What You Did Last Summer. Dirtbags driving a car at night run a truck off the road. Some old hillbilly dude with only one good eye shows up on the scene of the crash and knocks out one of the dirtbags, and his friends all run for it. They also decide never to admit they were with the friend they left behind that night.
A year later, this dude is still missing, so the friends decide to go back to the vicinity of the accident to find him. This place is like a junkyard/trailer park. The old dude lives there, and so does the trucker they made crash. He hangs out in his trailer skinning animals to cook. Not people. Just animals. Primitive but not…you know…cannibalistic as you might expect from this type of setup.
The kids start poking around the trailer park junkyard, and the trucker, who wears an ominous mask but still fails to frighten, eventually comes out to play. And by eventually, I mean about 20 minutes before the film ends.
There is approximately one good, violent and bloody kill, but there are no suspenseful chase scenes, there are no likable characters, the old dude with one good eye is goofy, and there’s that annoying banjo music. This just isn’t much of a slasher at all.
