I found a hint of satisfaction from each of these flicks, but I’ve also been down all these roads before.
NO SUCH THING AS MONSTERS (2019)
The title No Such Thing As Monsters is deceptive—makes it sound like it’s going to be about a kid with night terrors or something like that. Instead, this is actually one for fans of psycho backwoods family horror movies. It checks all the right boxes.
It definitely had me on the edge of my seat at first, as it did a fantastic job setting up the tension. Inevitably, however, it did fall back on all the usual tropes, so it began to lose steam halfway through.
What’s notable is that the female member of the main straight couple is missing an arm and wears a mechanical arm most of the time. She’s also reticent about going camping with her man to a spot in the woods where his family would go when he was young. As with much of what goes on here, we never get clarification or reason behind why she’s so paranoid.
Soon after they arrive, a van full of people shows up, one of them a grown woman in a dress and wearing a mask. I don’t care how friendly the other members of the group seem to be at first, when you’re camping in the woods, the arrival of a “mask girl” is all you need to know to get the fuck out of there.
Instead, the couple starts to hang out with them. That leaves us just waiting for that moment when the group turns on them. This is the good stuff that keeps me twitching.
Like I said, it’s kind of typical after that. The virile young couple is separated, kept in chains, used for the purpose of expanding the family…you know the backwoods drill. It’s not gory or particularly violent or disturbing, but even so, if you need a fix of this kind of horror, I think this one is worth a watch.
THE DARKNESS OF THE ROAD (2021)
This particular type of twist ending film was becoming common about ten years ago to the point that every new one thrown our way was obvious from the start, but I realized when this one started that I suddenly hadn’t seen one in a while. Yet they’re still as obvious as they always were if you’ve seen a bunch of them before.
I guess you could consider this a surreal, slow burn, psychological horror flick. I’d describe it as Silent Hill in a car.
A woman wakes on a desolate road after having a nightmare that she blew her brains out with a gun. She’s in her car with her young daughter. We know nothing about their backstory.
When she arrives at a gas station and experiences some odd and creepy occurrences, we immediately start wondering if she stepped (or drove) into the Twilight Zone. She picks up a female hitchhiker she meets there. Is she inviting the hitchhiker into her nightmare, or vice versa?
Once on the road, they get into a car accident and fall unconscious after almost hitting something that darts across the road. When they awake, the main woman’s daughter is missing and some sort of neon blue humanoid being seems to be pursuing them as they look for her.
The film traps us in a disjointed loop of odd things happening to the two women as they repeatedly get in and out of the car. The rare appearances of their supernatural stalker are creepy cool, and the inside of the car even goes through Silent Hill-esque transformations, but if you pretty much guess what’s going on all along as I did, it essentially waters down much of the dread you feel for the characters.
CHICAGO ROT (2016)
This supernatural revenge exploitation flick doesn’t have much in the way of plot, but it definitely delivers on the grind house sleaze, violence, and gore.
A not quite human guy known as The Ghoul, a vigilante seeking revenge for the death of his mother, goes on a brutal rampage while being pursued by a detective. That’s about it. So what kind of debauchery do we get as The Ghoul takes a journey through a seedy city to wreak havoc?
–Weird music video segments that set the tone in the heat of the action.
–a visit to a gay sex party bring thrown by The Ghouls sleazy, psychotic buddy (scoring this film a spot on the does the gay guy die? page)
–a consultation with a drag queen psychic.
–a nasty, internal viewpoint of a guy being stabbed with a knife…and then the guy’s knife wound being fucked with a dildo.
–a vicious fight with a guy wearing an elephant mask…or is that a woolly mammoth?
And finally, by the end of this bizarre flick, which totally reminds me of the splatterfest Adam Chaplin, it started to feel like a Mad Max/Tron mashup.
