Even if I didn’t love all the films in this trio, each one had some scary elements that satisfied my horror appetite. Let’s take a look.
MISTER CREEP (2022)
Running only a little over an hour, this one brings nothing new to the found footage subgenre, and it’s fairly disjointed, but if you are a diehard fan of found footage films, you’ll probably feel right at home.
A small group of college students plans to make a film about a family that disappeared from their house without a trace. They get sidetracked by a bigger story…a serial killer in a clown mask who would bring people to his farmhouse and film their murders while broadcasting them.
We get footage of the clown being interrogated, the kids taking a trip to the abandoned police station where he was held, and visiting a woman with some knowledge of the events. Eventually they somehow end up just running around screaming in the woods, because isn’t that how every found footage film has to end?
Despite the messy presentation, there are several creepy sequences, along with a freaky looking doll, as well as a few jump scares. But overall, I would really only recommend this one to found footage lovers. Then again, it’s only like an hour long, so you don’t have much to lose for some cheap thrills in return.
NIX (2022)
The director of all the Sharknado movies and numerous other cheesy fun SyFy originals makes an attempt at elevated horror, which (like most elevated horror) is essentially trauma porn. On top of that, the script tries so hard to be complex and deep that it ends up turning in on itself.
On the bright side, an awesome zombie monster rises from a lake to terrorize a family. It’s definitely the highlight of this heavy-handed family drama. Sadly, we spend the whole movie wondering if it’s real or just a metaphorical monster.
The opening scene shows us how the family tragedy began, and because the monster is questionably real, the sequence plays out quite oddly. Basically, a husband, wife, and their young daughter and sons go camping in the woods, the daughter vanishes in the water, and the father fails to save her. We see the zombie monster come out of the water and have to assume it killed the father because…
…flash to the future, and the mother (played by Dee Walllace) and her grown sons are still struggling with the inexplicable absence of the daughter and father years before.
There’s plenty of creepy and sometimes odd stuff going on, the zombie monster lurks in shadows, and people die. The family starts to unravel, and it doesn’t help that Dee is so lost in her grief that she decides they need to go back to the location where she last had her family together. Sigh.
It sucks that this movie just gets so damn confusing. I don’t know what they were going for, because there are so many unanswered questions that pile up as the plot continues to derail and go in circles. I honestly couldn’t determine whether the monster was real or metaphorical when all was said and done. Perhaps the point was to leave the decision up to viewers, but it fricking pissed me off.
CRAVING (2023)
An awesome monster mouth on the poster art made me put this one in my watchlist. Plus, Felissa Rose was at the top of the cast list.
Well, Felissa doesn’t even last twenty minutes, and the monster doesn’t come in until the last twenty minutes. Argh.
You’d think a movie with a plot similar to that of Feast (patrons in a bar terrorized by a creature) would go all out with the monster madness. Instead, this film goes all out with the irrelevant backstories of all the characters, who are all junkies. So many characters to care about I didn’t know what to do with myself. Okay, yes I did. I just focused on the bearded hottie…
Anyway. There is a group in the bar. Then another group crashes and holds them at gunpoint. In the meantime, a third group keeps all those in the bar trapped inside and warns that one of them is a monster, and they will be trapped inside until they let the monster out to be dealt with.
What can I say? It could have been cool. Instead, there’s lots of talk, fights, flashbacks, lesbians, and red horror lighting while we wait impatiently for a monster reveal.
I can’t believe they could deliver such an awesome practical effects monster and then choose to only feature it for about fifteen minutes. But dang, it sure does kick ass for those fifteen minutes, with plenty of gore. Is it worth sitting through the rest of the film to get to this part? In this case I’d say yes.
As if to make up for an hour of no action, there’s another monster massacre sequence during the closing credits, and it’s even better than the monster attacks during the final act. However, it’s a totally different vibe than the serious tone of the rest of the movie, with a grindhouse filter as whimsical hillbilly music plays and the monster goes on an exploitative killing spree. Awesome.
