Two siblings and three of their friends en route to visit their grandfather’s grave in Texas end up falling victim to a family of cannibalistic psychopaths and must survive the terrors of Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) and his family. This is one of those cornerstones of horror that you’re always aware of even if you’ve never […]
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
It may be tempting to write “#Alive” off as just another zombie movie. In a way that’s what it is. This South Korean survival thriller from director and co-writer Cho Il-hyung doesn’t bring anything particularly new and it certainly doesn’t reinvent the horror sub-genre. At the same time, it’s hard not to enjoy its nimble […]
REVIEW: “#Alive” (2020)
A young woman (Lene Kqiku) awakes drugged and restrained in a strange house, but her captor may be more than he appears. I encountered this short film on Amazon Prime. The premise sounded interesting and with a runtime of only 7.5 I was intrigued. It does a good job of giving the film an undercurrent […]
Carcera (2018)
Gruesome violence and grisly backwoods “surgery,” blood and stitches and axes and arrows, sharp stone shards left as booby-traps for the unwary dominate “In the Earth.” Kind of what you’d expect from a thriller built around mycorrhizal research deep in the forests of Britain, eh? The pandemic picture from the director of “Free Fire,” “High […]
Movie Review: In a Pandemic, Maybe Nature Won’t Share what’s “In the Earth”
Psycho Goreman (2020) Little Girl. Big Psycho. If you imagine a riff on E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) but with the kindly alien botanist swapped out for a bloodthirsty intergalactic warlord who’d look right at home in a GWAR music video, you’re on the right track here. Written and directed by Steven Kostanski, The Void (2016), […]
Psycho Goreman (2020)
Underwater (2020), Kristen Stewart, 20th Century Fox It’s the promise of thrilling action sequences that take place at the bottom of the ocean that drew me to Underwater; an action/thriller about a group of researchers trying to survive after an earthquake devastates their subterranean laboratory. The good news is that I got the well-executed and thrilling […]
UNDERWATER (2020): The Thing I Liked…
The Dark and the Wicked (2020) ★★★ / ★★★★ Here is a horror story that thrives in delivering terror in the intimate quiet. Although its plot is not original—adult siblings returning to their parents’ home because their father’s health has turned for the worse—it is confident in what type of tale it wishes to tell: […]
The Dark and the Wicked
In the upcoming horror thriller “The Devil Below” from director Brad Parker an abandoned Appalachian mining town holds a dark and deadly secret. Back in the 1970s the tight community of Shookum Hills was decimated by what was ruled an “environmental disaster”. As a result the town burned to the ground and as many as […]
REVIEW: “The Devil Below” (2021)
In the upcoming indie chiller “The Vigil” a troubled young man encounters a malevolent spirit while watching over the body of deceased man from his Jewish community in Brooklyn. It’s a religious ritual where the person watching (called a shomer if male, a shomeret if female) both protects and comforts the deceased’s soul until time […]
REVIEW: “The Vigil” (2021)
Shawn Linden’s “Hunter Hunter” wasn’t at all what I expected. Its crafty advertising sells a deep woods thriller about a wolf terrorizing a wilderness family. To be fair that is a big part of the movie. But as the film sets your eyes in one direction it then broadsides you with a story full of […]
REVIEW: “Hunter Hunter” (2020)
I realise this might be slightly controversial view, based on what I have read about this movie right after seeing it, but… I need to say what I feel. The ending didn’t work for me the way it (apparently) worked for most of the people on the Internet. Which slightly hinders my enjoyment of the […]
Ready or Not (2019) Review – All About That Ending
“Yeah, I’ll do your little movie,” the pitch meeting ended, probably a short one, probably handled by phone. But the Oscar winning actor had one rider he insisted on in his contract. “I’ll do it so long as I don’t have to talk.” Say this for the quixotic career of Nicolas Cage, Academy Award winner, […]
Movie Review: Let’s turn Nic Cage loose in “Willy’s Wonderland”
A part of me would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when the crazy idea for “Spontaneous” was pitched to the studio heads. “It’s an adaptation of a book about high school students who inexplicably begin exploding in class. And I mean literally blowing up, spraying blood all over their classmates […]
REVIEW: “Spontaneous” (2020)
Prisoners of the Ghostland is a collaboration between America’s most bonkers actor, Nicolas Cage, and Japanese auteur Sion Sono, known for grotesque violence, extreme eroticism, and surreal imagery. I’m not the biggest fan of Nic Cage’s recent reincarnation as a b-movie cartoon, but I thought this combination was made in movie heaven and couldn’t wait to […]
Sundance 2021: Prisoners of the Ghostland
Really bad decisions and horror movies go together like peanut butter and jelly. There are countless examples: reading the blood-inked Necronomicon, attempting to tame a zombie, reaching down to pull the mask off a downed serial killer, saying Candyman’s name five times to a mirror. In the upcoming “The Devil Below” a group of amateur […]
First Glance: “The Devil Below”
Iranian-American director Kourosh Ahari delivers a striking feature film debut with “The Night”, a cerebral slice of psychological horror that impresses as much with its style as it does with its ability to get under your skin. Set within the creepy confines of an old history-rich hotel, “The Night” does what so many other good […]
REVIEW: “The Night” (2021)
One of the biggest surprises coming out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival has been “Eight for Silver”, a gory old-fashioned horror movie that offers a fresh spin on the age-old werewolf story. The film comes from British writer-director Sean Ellis who is no stranger to debuting his films at Sundance. His latest film looks […]
SUNDANCE REVIEW: “Eight for Silver” (2021)
By the time it reached streaming screens in 2021, The Empty Man was so buried that it might as well have never existed. Although filming wrapped in 2017, 21st Century Fox didn’t release it before they were acquired by the Walt Disney Company in early 2019. Realising that this type of horror didn’t really sit […]
Prior: The Empty Man (2020)
Her name is Enid, and she’s a film censor, the person who negotiates the bad language, graphic violence, drug use, and nudity of a film, deciding just how much can be kept in and retain an R rating, and which films will either need to be edited, or bumped up to NC-17 and so on. […]
Sundance 2021: Censor
Whatever you do don’t confuse Jayro Bustamante’s “La Llorona” with 2019’s promising but ultimately disappointing “The Curse of La Llorona”. The two couldn’t be more different, their only real connection being the ubiquitous Latin American folk tale of “The Weeping Woman”. Bustamante has a much more sobering ambition, using the ghostly legend as a means […]
REVIEW: “La Llorona” (2020)
