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 Dangerous Animals (2025, Sean Byrne)

After Alone, why not watch another girl get kidnapped by a serial killer and try to escape her fate. This time things are more complicated – we see other victims, there’s an attempted rescue, and the maniac is a boater who feeds captured surfers to sharks while filming them on VHS.

Surfer Zephyr (of Southbound) has a lovely time with new friend Moses, then she drives to the beach, gets kidnapped by a maniac and locked on his boat with fellow victim Heather. Really Good Guy Moses keeps searching for her, connects the clues, and arrives only to be kidnapped himself, then Z chews off her own thumb to escape from the cuffs Saw-style. Byrne is two for two, now I’ve gotta catch The Loved Ones. Everyone else who watches this already knows who villain Jai Courtney is – I’ve only seen him in Edward Furlong cosplay as a lead-in to Yoga Hosers.