It’s a trio of films about infections and zombies, and two out of the three are loaded with gut-munching. The other one, not so much. Actually, not at all.
A HARD PLACE (2025)
This is such a perfectly bizarre zombie flick, with crossbreeding cannibalistic creature insanity and a host of familiar horror faces, including Sadie Katz, Lynn Lowry, Bai Ling, and Felissa Rose.
It opens with horror lighting and nasty zombie attacks galore. It’s a completely disconnected scene from the rest of the movie, but it’s still totally awesome and had me hyped.
Next, we meet a group of thieves on the run. They decide to hide out at a place in the snowy woods, and before long they’re being terrorized by plant people zombies!
They also encounter a redneck family that isn’t everything it seems. Actually, it’s more than it seems. This family can transform into flesh-eating goons! Led by matriarch Felissa Rose, who totally delivers on the over-the-top crazy act in this role, they have every intention of making the criminals their dinner.
One of the criminals is so yummy that I don’t blame them for wanting to eat him. He’s even sexual in his monster killing—death by dildo! Clearly, this movie was titled A Hard Place because of him.
The criminals try to get away, the family forces them to sit down for dinner, the plant people return for a feud, there’s an eclipse, and it becomes a smorgasbord of monstrous deformities with no real logic or reason. But it doesn’t even matter, because this one has such a great throwback feel to the weird shit that used to come out on VHS in the 80s.
PLEASE DON’T FEED THE CHILDREN (2024)
It’s an apocalyptic virus movie without a zombie in sight. Instead, our main girl explains at the beginning that the child population began carrying an infection that turned adults into cannibals. Therefore, the children were all rounded up and put in camps, but some have escaped and are attempting to flee the country.
Our main girl joins a small family of other kids with a hot older brother, and they head for freedom, but one of them gets shot, so they end up stopping at a house for help.
The woman inside lets them in to patch up the wound, but pretty soon she drugs them and holds them captive. All except our main girl, who she treats like a daughter.
As the kids try to plot a way to escape, this becomes somewhat of a Misery situation, with one difference—there’s definitely something monstrous living in the basement. Unfortunately, most of the movie focuses on the woman and her pretty predictable reason for holding the kids hostage. It would have been more compelling if the kids had begun trying to be the hero one by one, escaping their prison only to be gobbled up by the monster throughout the course of the film. Then it could have been called Please Don’t Feed the Children…to the Monster in the Basement.
It’s not until the last few minutes that the thing in the basement finally gets in on the action, and by then it just feels like a cheap thrill tossed in way too late in the game to save a rather bland flick.
BRIDGE OF THE DOOMED (2022)
This is a perfect midnight movie mess. It features vibrant colors, gnarly zombie makeup, loads of gut-munching, and corny acting. It also falls into a repetitive pattern of scenes with cheesy dialog between military members and scenes loaded with major horror action.
The plot is basic. The military is ordered to protect a bridge and keep zombies from crossing it. The whole hook of the plot is supposed to be that there’s something even worse than zombies living under the bridge, but the zombies are absolutely the highlight here.
The monster gets a fleeting attack scene in the middle of the movie and then appears in full (shadow) for a brief and anticlimactic battle with a female military officer in a cave 67 minutes into the movie. The monster is such a letdown compared to the zombies. The movie could have been titled Bridge of the Dull Monster.
Michael Pare makes a brief appearance at the beginning of the movie, and he returns at the end, this time in slow motion…I guess so the filmmakers could get more screentime out of him without having to pay him more money.
If I had to add two of these three flicks to my physical media, it would definitely be this one and A Hard Place.
