by ·Comments Off on Terrifier 3 (2024, Damien Leone)

“a Phil Falcone production” – not the disgraced hedge fund billionaire, but the auteur of a PTSD army drama with Tom Sizemore, and defendant of finance disputes over the first movie in this series. Home-invader Santa carrying an axe is nothing new. “Five years prior” cop finds a decapitated clown in abandoned building, it kills him and takes his head, so the backstory is… Art in various forms of headlessness and disrepair tears some people apart to repair himself?

Teen Vic Secret Angel Sienna is still alive from part two, and continuity is a drag. Her uncle Greg (a Goldthwait regular) takes her home to Aunt Jess (Crazy Joe’s wife in The Irishman) and admiring younger cousin Gabby (who has only ever been in Christmas movies, incl this one). Nerd boy Jonathan is also still alive, growing into a not-great actor. But it barely matters – the dialogue is Hallmark-caliber and the production is at “casting Clint Howard” sequel level, following in the footsteps of The Dentist 2, Silent Night Deadly Night 4, Leprechaun 2, and 3 From Hell.

I don’t like that the girl-clown-demon talks, or that the final scene reveals Sienna’s Wolverine healing ability. Not sure how I feel about Art killing a podcaster with a chainsaw while a novelty “Terrifier Christmas” song plays. I’m fine with the cute niece falling into hell despite a really terrible plan to save her.

by ·Comments Off on The Loved Ones (2009, Sean Byrne)

Another rock & roll movie from the Devil’s Candy guy. Traumatic backstory comes back around in the end in a different way than expected. Lola likes a boy Brent, but the boy likes Holly. So Lola has her dad kidnap the boy and bring him home to enact their own little prom. The boy is resistant to this idea, so they nail his foot to the floor, then drill a hole in his skull and threaten to “boil his brains.” He escapes and kills the dad, so she throws him into the boyfriend pit… but he’s got a hammer, and now has to kill all the boyfriends.

The boy must’ve been a coworker in Send Help, his Cooper Hoffman-like friend was in The Proposition, and Cooper’s goth prom date is now Sonya Blade in the Mortal Kombat movies.

by ·Comments Off on Night Visions, part 1 (2001-02)

Discovered a whole anthology horror series I’d never heard of before, from a couple of Goosebumps producers, hosted (succinctly) by Henry Rollins. What joy!

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Quiet Please (Joe Dante)

Nervous city boy Cary Elwes goes camping to relax, only to spend the whole trip trying to get away from noisy, arrogant camper Brian Dennehy. But it turns out Cary is the serial killer the city news had been reporting on, bad luck for Brian.

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The Occupant (Joe Dante)

Someone is intruding in divorcee Bridget Fonda’s house and moving stuff around, only enough so she’ll notice, not to tip off the police. She thinks someone is living hidden in her house – tries telling her ex, tries telling a random guy who buys her dinner when her card is declined, tries praying to god. Turns out Bridget is the person living hidden in the house – it hasn’t belonged to her since the divorce. That’s the second episode in a row where our tormented protagonist turns out to be the dangerous crazy person (and this was better than the camping story).

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The Bokor (Start Gordon)

Real clunky writing, as the cadaver assigned to a team of medical students turns out to be a bokor, “an evil voodoo priest.” But this was a fakeout by one student (the princess in Super Mario Bros.) to scare the others (a Bride of Chucky cop and a Lucky Louie regular), so her doctor boyfriend (Jason London of Carrie 2) can bury them alive for witnessing him stealing morphine. Twist: he double-crosses his girl and buries them all then goes home to his sweet morphine. Twist: Princess knew about bokors because she is one, and returns from the grave to dissect him alive.

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Patterns (Start Gordon)

Nicely apocalyptic, the best of this batch with the classiest cast. In interview with psychologist Miguel Ferrer (deep in between Twin Peaks seasons), arrestee Malcolm McDowell (in a slack period before replacing Donald Pleasence in the Halloween remakes) nervously explains that he has a contract with god and needs to do his OCD rituals or else people die. Ferrer is not convinced, so they drug and isolate the patient, then reality starts collapsing in a manner more random-cartoony than apocalyptic-horror, now Ferrer needs to take over doing the OCD patterns in order to keep the planes in the sky.

by ·Comments Off on Village of the Damned (1995, John Carpenter)

Pretty good remake of the pretty good 1960 movie, which is to say it’s a terribly disappointing followup to In the Mouth of Madness. At 10:00AM during the harvest festival everyone in town passes out, and a few hours later the women wake up pregnant. This movie’s major update is that in the 1990s you can say the word pregnant.

Carpenter couldn’t help himself:

Killer Jedi Priest:

Kirstie in her evil boardroom:

Epidemiologist Kirstie Alley arrives from the government and offers to pay all the townspeople to have their alien demon babies, so they all go along with it. As the kids grow up they have a tendency to mind-control-murder any parents who get in their way. They take out twisted priest Luke Skywalker, but killing Superman’s beloved is going too far, and he manages to suppress their mind-reading powers long enough to blow everyone up with a suitcase bomb. The Damned Kids: one would play a Toulon descendent in Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys… one starred in Shrooms… one was in an Elm Street reboot.

Linda Kozlowski of Crocodile Dundee fame just drops in to rescue her alien demon son from the impending inferno:

by ·Comments Off on Cult of Chucky (2017, Don Mancini)

Good sequel, tying together all previous plots, while also allowing Chucky to multiply, while also being an Elm Street 3-style psych-ward-set serial killer thriller.

Andy is back, torturing his own personal Chucky head after a cute girl from the latest Final Destination breaks up with him. Wheelchair Nika is still alive too, so is her niece (now Mike Flanagan’s Carrie) and Jennifer Tilly-as-herself and the doll version of Jennifer Tilly, and hey, why not bring back the girl from part two, it’s a party.

Andy gets himself committed by attacking a guard. They charles-lee-ray Nika. Evil wins, kills everyone and gets away with it. I would’ve been happy to watch a couple more movies like this, but apparently the followup was a three-season TV series, and I simply don’t have that many hours to devote to Chucky.

Claire, getting Very-Long-Engagemented:

In the asylum is:
Schizophrenic Multiple-Malcolm (a cop in The Long Walk)
Confrontational Claire of Cube 2: Hypercube
Mom-wannabe Madeline of House of the Dead
Angela who thinks she is a ghost (of both Violent Night and Silent Night Deadly Night Remake)
Nurse Ashley of Malcolm McDowell Silent Night
Nurse Carlos of Jessica Alba The Eye Remake
McDreamy-lookin’ Dr. Foley of The Viewing

by ·Comments Off on The Black Phone (2021, Scott Derrickson)

Set in 1978 Denver, this is one of those movies where the bulk of the effort was put not into scares or the story making sense, but in lovingly recreating 1978 Denver. Young “Albert” Finney is a bullied baseballer schoolkid with a typically drunk/abusive dad (Jeremy Davies of Spanking the Monkey), when all the kids in town start getting abducted by Ethan Hawke, who then grabs Finney. Now the kid has to escape from the basement before he gets murdered.

Best part of the movie is Grabber’s mask, which has a different expression every time we see it. Worst part is the titular phone, through which the kid’s dead classmates call and offer clues that help him escape, while the police are being as useless as they were in Weapons. Why did Grabber even install that ghost phone down there? Glad to see Ziggy as Grabber’s brother, a conspiracy nut who lives above the child-dungeon and gets killed for discovering it (?). I was only half paying attention, playing with my new glasses. Derrickson initiated the direct-to-DVD era of the Hellraiser franchise, and this is at least his second Ethan Hawke missing-children serial-killer movie after Sinister.

by ·Comments Off on Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026, Jane Schoenbrun)

Self-analyzing cinema, Scream without the thrills. Kids in the Hall sense of humor with stunt-cast harbinger Kevin McDonald. “There is a hole at the bottom of the lake where the movies come from.” Sleepaway Camp and Friday the 13th both exist within this movie, they’re both mentioned, but they’re also ripped off (Friday sequel titles, Sleepaway closing shot) by the fake Miasma franchise. The middle quarter of this is just Camp Miasma Part 1, featuring a long-take massacre to Counting Crows’ A Long December, which has never felt longer: digital kills combined with film texture and VHS love (return of the Videodrome flesh slot from TV Glow). I liked it, of course – the fantasy of going inside your favorite horror franchise to make out with Gillian Anderson.

by ·Comments Off on Obsession (2025, Curry Barker)

First the Spielberg and now this: the summer movies love to reference The Rehearsal. It’s never subtle either – our guy is delivering his romantic confession to a stranger, practicing to unleash the real thing on his bar trivia friend. The point is to set up how hopelessly awkward he is, so terribly bad at verbal communication (and decisions in general) that he can barely make a phone call or talk to his actual friends, so when things get uncomfortably supernaturally murdery, he’s even worse. The movie gets in a couple of good jokes about this, but unfortunately it’s a pretty dialogue-heavy story and we’re stuck with him for the endurance. Hopefully the kids will get over their love of terrible awkwardness and we can swing back to coherence.

Should Obsession 2 be Stick-and-Stacks or ChromaScope?

Great performance by Inde Navarrette, the bar trivia friend who becomes a horrifyingly clingy girlfriend after Bar Trivia Bear makes a wish that she’d love him. Apparently the real Inde is locked away in some hell dimension, replaced by the singlemindedly obsessed Girlfriend Inde until one of them dies. I noted the early setup of “I’ve got pills that’ll kill you” and “I know where dad keeps his gun” sidelined for 80 minutes, until they become Bear’s prime suicide options. The wishing thing is great, folding the supernatural into the everyday as smoothly as Weapons did. Best friends/casualties include the cute smart girl who actually likes him, and his doofy bestie Cooper – fortunately only young people get butchered, so Andy Richter is left alone.

Apparently there was much discourse, and most people (Sicinski, Marsh) disliked it, but my most trustworthy horror guy Adam Nayman said it was pretty good, so I watched it on the exercise bike, and it was pretty good.

by ·Comments Off on Backrooms (2026, Kane Parsons)

Chiwetel is divorced and depressed, living in his discount furniture shop, until he discovers a world beneath the world, with layers and layers of increasingly corrupted copies of the ground floor, like Us squared. Text is reversed or mutated, everything’s clipping into the walls, people have the wrong number of eyes, like a discount AI office park. Chiwetel gets his employees involved in documenting and mapping (leading to too much period-accurate VHS footage), then they disappear in there.

Every horror movie needs a couple of dummies to kill off. These two are TV stars from Shrinking (also about a therapist) and the Jodie Foster season of True Detective:

Anyone who has played dungeon games on Apple II knows how to deal with the backrooms:

Cut to the perspective of his therapist Renate, who makes a solo wellness check and manages to find Chiwetel, who is thriving in the backrooms. But she should’ve realized from the crayon wall drawings that her patient had gone ’round the bend, and he should’ve realized that the movie’s gonna become a therapy-backstory drama for a while. He tries to escape this by kidnapping her and showing her around to his new (edible) friends.

Finally we get back to proper horror when Carl is eaten by Giant Pirate Carl, who chases the therapist through ever more messed-up environments, until her apparent rescue by some white guys. We’ve seen these guys before, running their own backrooms explorations, setting up A/V equipment and apparently alarm-activated canisters of gas-that-does-nothing. Movie ends with her being interrogated by Phil, who does not imply that she’ll be safe or released, reminding me of the “rescue” at the end of 28 Years Later.