Category Archives: Shudder Premiere

Shudder Premiere

More Trick than Treat

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Hallowarrior

by Hope Madden

It’s hard not to root for Milly Shapiro to survive a horror movie. In writer/director Ben Sottak’s Hallowarrior, we see Shapiro as desperately lonely teen Pumpkin. Pumpkin’s been alone—truly alone—for four Halloweens now, since some kind of plague swept through and claimed everybody else, as far as she can tell.

So, this Halloween was going to be her last. She put out decorations, lit candles, watched the old home movie where she carved pumpkins with her family, and prepared. But then, a noise on the front porch. And suddenly, Pumpkin’s wish for a family comes true.

It’s a Halloween miracle!

Pumpkin may not have seen as many post-apocalyptic movies as some of us, which would explain a lot. Royce (AJ Bowen) only contains his hostility when he notices the piece Milly’s packing. Thalia (Shannyn Sossamon) seems more nurturing and understanding but angry young Wendy (Ajani Russell) wants to shake some sense into Pumpkin.

And these three are the nice ones.

Sossamon is particularly effective, languidly menacing and just convincing enough as a maternal figure to convince a lonely kid.

Shapiro succeeds as that lonesome, naïve Pumpkin. Her innocence is frustrating but never forced. Pumpkin’s awkward, needy chemistry with Wendy likewise carries an authenticity that helps the film overcome some of its shortcomings in pacing.

Once “Wax and the boys” come calling, Hallowarrior should be hitting its groove, but we get so little in the way of character or story development, the film doesn’t develop the kind of dread it could. Though the stakes are as high as they could be, you don’t feel it.

Still, each of the new guests is creepy in their own way and there are a couple of impressive (and one incomprehensible) kills.

We’ve seen the end of the world from a lot of perspectives. Pumpkin’s is different, and thanks in large part to Shapiro’s performance, Hallowarrior is a fine addition to the end of times canon.

Shudder Premiere

What’s All the Racquet?

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Bloody Tennis

by Hope Madden

German filmmaker Nikias Chryssos does not hide his influences. After witnessing the brutal slaying of a beautiful girl, we watch a young American student being driven to an exotic if spooky European academy where she will be trained among the elite in her field.

Bloody Tennis is Suspiria for athletes. Sophie (Sandra Guldberg Kampp) is the athlete newly arrived at the Mary Tyrone Tennis Academy. She’s welcomed, in a way, by Ms. Tyrone (Elina Löwensohn, Nadja) herself. It isn’t a warm welcome.

“I’m your daddy now.”

The class is small: six players (minutes the girl we watched die in the opening moments, whose absence makes room for Sophie). Aside from Ms. Tyrone, head mistress and team doctor, there’s one coach (Zlatko Buric) and one handyman/chauffeur/cook/weirdo (Vincent Romeo).

Though the title suggests a campy comedy, the dark, creepy humor that runs through Bloody Tennis is anything but camp. And while his underlying structure is reminiscent of Suspiria, Chryssos leans just as heavily toward slasher. (Also an Italian genre, owing to Mario Bava’s 1971 originator, A Bay of Blood).  

That’s not to suggest the film is somehow untrue to its title. There’s a lot of blood (some of it pretty inspired) and a lot of tennis.

Though Guldberg Kampp is not entirely convincing as an American (she’s Danish), her performance otherwise compellingly anchors the film. Sophie is curious and observant, her personality mainly interior. Guldberg Kampp navigates Sophie’s arc with a quietly animalistic nature that suits the film and the character.

The rest of the athletes are offered little opportunity to really craft characters, but each is solid. Löwensohn’s gleefully committed and Romeo is unsettlingly odd.

The film’s themes are as unhidden as its influences. Training to be an elite athlete is a soul and body ruining exercise, as punishing as it is bloodthirsty. There is perhaps less depth and less mystery to Bloody Tennis than it needed to be genuinely memorable, but it’s an intriguing, gory reminder that women’s sports is where it’s at.

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Pregnant Pause

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Goody Goody

by Hope Madden

Filmmaker Raymond Creamer made the most of what he had for his feature debut, Goody Goody. What did he have? Four talented actors, two locations, and a knack for atmosphere.

Samantha Robinson (who was utter perfection in 2023’s The Love Witch) is Goody. Goody is pregnant, and she’s creating the beautiful childbirth her baby deserves. She knows that he’ll feel it. He’ll know. It has to be perfect.

Colleen Foy is Sarah, the grownup in the room. Sarah is Goody’s midwife, the one who warned Goody not to give birth in a remote cabin deep in the woods during winter. The only reason Sarah agrees to the job is the fear that Goody, her husband Jayson (Colby Hollman), and his sister Candace (Zoe Renee) will go through with the home birth on their own.

Pregnancy/childbirth horror is so common because it is custom made for the genre. A beast is attempting to burst out of a human body. That human is swollen to a ludicrous degree and is, therefore, wildly handicapped when it comes to things like running or lasting more than ten minutes without having to pee. It is easy to generate dread because, even in real life, it’s terrifying and vulnerable and bloody and it really hurts.

Because it is so common, it can also feel tired. But Creamer develops dread differently. Our point of view is Sarah, the competent one. Watching her grow anxious generates a different kind of dread. When the one who knows what she’s doing is worried, everybody needs to worry.

Foy is remarkable in this role. The way Sarah’s patience and care are soothing but authoritative is a comfort to Goody and family, but also the viewer. As her nerves begin to show wear and tear, we feel more realistically trapped in this nightmare with her.

Robinson’s also wonderful, treading a line between entitled and defenseless, reckless and idealistic. She’s almost hypnotic, almost seductive, and that level of ecstasy helps the film find its tone.

It’s a gorgeous movie. Creamer creates striking moments in a dreamily rustic environment, slowly and quietly introducing the supernatural before pivoting to a full-blown creature feature. The tonal shift wouldn’t work were it not for Robinson’s spellbinding work bumping against Foy’s urgent realism.

For some, it still may not work. The film’s waning moments are mesmerizing, beautiful, and unsatisfying. But for most of Creamer’s 110 minutes, he counted his blessings and made them count.

Shudder Premiere

In Summer, Meanwhile Back

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Penny Lane Is Dead

by Hope Madden

It’s 1986 in Australia. Three brand new high school graduates plan to spend the night at Penny Lane’s (Bailey Spalding) grandparents’ empty lake house. Their moms drop them off, and the girls sneak a cigarette and pop down to the liquor store. Those crazies!

But Penny’s disturbed cousin Kat (Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn) arrives uninvited with cupcakes so loaded with drugs that Penny passes out. So, Penny’s besties Toni (Tahlee Fereday) and Amy (Alexandra Jensen) throw Kat out.

This seems a fine plan until Kat calls her 40-year-old ex-con boyfriend to pick her up and he shows up with two other felonious pals, all of them with bad intentions.

Writer/director Mia Kate Russell’s feature debut is a weird mix of gritty Ozploitation horror and 80s comedy. The film is at its best when she exhibits her keen instincts for practical gore. Those feet!

But long before things get bloody, the anxiety Russell and her ensemble generate inside the humble little beach house is impressive.

Home invasion horror often delivers a particularly uncomfortable tension, and Russell comes close to Last House on the Left vibes. Ben O’Toole is particularly effective as Angus, a vainglorious low-rent thug delighted to partake in bloody debauchery.  

And Penny Lane Is Dead definitely gets bloody. But the violence is of a type that doesn’t fit well with the film’s more broadly brushed humor. The tonal issues are anchored in Wright-Mendelsohn’s character.

The performance itself is very impressive, almost Fairuza Balk a la The Craft at times. Kat, in horror movies actualy made in the 80s, would have been the tragic but cool outsider—Angela from Night of the Demons, Trash from Return of the Living Dead. Sure, she’s chaos walking and her poor decisions bring destruction, but you don’t hate her.

Russell sidesteps that cliché in favor of the unspeakable: the popular girl who looks like a Barbie really is the hero and the messed-up Goth chick really is evil. And for a time, Wright-Mendelsohn (Ben’s daughter) carves out a madness that is deeply unsettling and very impressive.

But Act 3 becomes “pile on the mean girl” and Kat becomes a near-supernatural villain when, honestly, it’s the three men who deserved this level of comeuppance. The vitriol seems misdirected, and paired with a poorly handled sexual assault storyline, Penny Lane Is Dead can’t get out of its own way.

It’s too bad, because there was something  here, something unnerving and unwholesome.

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All You Care to Eat

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Buffet Infinity

by Hope Madden

At about the 5-minute mark, I’d begun to worry about Buffet Infinity, co-writer/director Simon Glassman’s very Canadian sci-fi/horror/comedy hybrid. So far, we’d done nothing but flip through various low-fi, low-budget, very local Canadian TV ads. For five minutes.

That seemed like a long time for a prelude to a narrative. By 10 minutes, panic settled in as I realized the flipping from a few seconds of this law office ad to a few seconds of that used car commercial to a few seconds of this buffet advert would compose the entire film.

About one minute later I’d submitted to the mind-jangling force of Buffet Infinity. Which almost certainly means I would not have survived whatever it is that happened in Westridge County, Canada the day the sink hole appeared behind that mall.

Glassman’s premise, built from a script co-written with Allison Bench and Elisia Snyder, is clever, but its execution is bananas and perhaps brilliant.

The film mimics the experience of channel surfing in the Nineties with all the regional news and commercials. Did your small town have a car salesman who took on a superhero alter ego? Or a badly dressed ambulance chaser promising you a big payout for your negligence lawsuit? These are joined by a delightful pawn shop, an untested diet pill, a hilariously lip-synched series of insurance commercials, one low-rent L. Ron Hubbard (every ad is hilarious), and a nasty grudge match between neighboring restaurants.

Edited masterfully and performed atrociously (intentionally and enjoyably), and aided by a handful of quick news bits, the clips tell the tale of a town fighting to survive some cosmic capitalistic catastrophe.

Glassman’s instincts for presentation are on point. Whether it’s the crawl on the screen, the news channel jingles, the insane verbal descriptions attached to the buffet commercials, or just the relentless and twisted familiarity of each ad, Buffet Infinity nails its style.

I wouldn’t call it style over substance because that feels like a knock against the narrative being unveiled with each changing commercial. Still, certainly the presentation and its unlikely durability (93 minutes!) make style the more impressive of the two.

Buffet Infinity is a wild watch, and though—given its channel hopping style—it seems ideal for Shudder, don’t let the home viewing let you get distracted. Glassman repays you for your attention.

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The Passenger

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Hellcat

by Hope Madden

Writer/director Brock Bodell’s Hellcat keeps you guessing and intrigued with a tight premise, two locations, and a cast you can count on one hand.

Dakota Gorman is Lena, and she’s not having a good time. She’s awake, her head is spinning, her stomach is not right, and she’s moving. Unsure of how she got here, Lena’s in an Airstream, rolling down a highway to God-knows-where.

For the majority of Hellcat’s 91-minute runtime, Gorman is alone to throw fits, connive, sleuth, convulse, and rebel inside that camper. Physically alone, anyway. Over a sound system rigged to the pick-up hauling the thing is the voice of Clive (Todd Terry). Clive wants Lena to stay calm and stop busting up his home until he can get her to a doctor. She’s been infected, he says.

It’s a clever but simple premise, and the tensions and questions are mined well. Lena is quite sure she’s been drugged and kidnapped. Bodell drops well-timed hints and clues to keep you leaning one direction and then the other. Evidence suggests that Clive is not what he says he is, although there’s still some proof that maybe he’s not a villainous liar. It’s tough to know.

Gorman’s physical performance is impressive and grueling. She gives Lena a savvy, angry edge that makes you believe she’ll find or fight her way out of this.

Likewise, Terry makes you want to believe Clive.

The long, lonesome highway allows for some clever attempts at escape, and given your conflicting loyalties throughout, Bodell is not afraid to twist the knife.

As we head into the third act, things get a little contrived but weirdly, entertainingly so. The full backstory/mythology is never entirely articulated, which is a bit convenient given the direction things take. And the practical FX are slightly hokey.

But on the whole, Hellcat is lean, mean, and effective.  

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Dead of Winter

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The Yeti

by Hope Madden

The year is 1947. The location? The Alaska Territory.  A little expedition led by oil tycoon Merriell Sunday (Corbin Bernsen) has gone missing. Sunday’s son (Eric Nelson) mounts a search party, but it wasn’t oil his old man was after. It was something hairier.

The Yeti boasts a cast full of talent, Nelson, Bernsen, Brittany Allen, Jim Cummings, and William Sadler among them. And it’s a period, practical FX creature feature! I didn’t expect Godzilla Minus One, but I was hoping maybe for something as fun and interesting as last year’s Monster Island.

It actually reminded me a little bit more of Roseanne Liang’s 2020 creature feature Shadow in the Cloud for its retro vibe and girl power attitude.

Writers/directors Gene Gallerano and William Pisciotta buoy a soft script with their casting, and they hit a fun, hokey tone by mining the era for a newsreel vibe. The stagey sets, hard-boiled dialog, and practical FX are endearingly compelling.  The filmmakers are clearly going after a 40s B-movie feel without leaning parody, and it mainly works.

A couple of shots are beautifully lit, and every actor pulls their weight and then some.

As Sunday Jr.’s expedition hits some bloody snags and the horror of the story begins to gel, the script’s weaknesses start to really draw attention to themselves: forced backstory sharing, burdensome daddy issues, and plot holes that don’t get filled.

Naturally, like a werewolf movie, a yeti film lives and dies on creature design. Wayne Anderson’s design is solid. On occasion, the filmmakers seem unable to shoot, light, and edit the scenes for maximum impact/minimum “that’s a mask and a suit” disbelief. But the physical presence of the beast gives dimension to scenes. Plus, thank you for going practical instead of ruining the film and its throwback vibe with AI.  

In the end, a script that needed a couple more drafts keeps The Yeti from truly satisfying. It has its moments, though.

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Night, Mommy

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Nightborn

by Hope Madden

Finnish filmmaker Hanna Bergholm (Hatching) once again explores horrific maternal themes with Nightborn. Don’t confuse it with Neil Blomkamp’s soulless AI short film. This is not that.

Bergholm’s film stumbles into a classic Finnish folktale. Saga (Seidi Haarla) and her husband Jon (Rupert Grint) move to her grandmother’s old, long vacant home deep in the forest. Gran was a bit of an eccentric. She kept old junk—tractors, machinery, wire—around the property because the creatures in the woods hated cold iron.

What a nut!

Saga and Jon settle in to reclaim the cabin from the encroaching woods and to start their family. Jon is immediately besotted with little Christian regardless of how hairy he is. Saga can’t seem to bond with him, although she does try to find her place as a mother, first by asserting that his name is Kuura.

Bergholm’s film, co-written with Hatching writing partner Ilja Rautsi, takes us deep into a post-partum nightmare. While the film is far less original than Hatching, examining maternal horror from the mother’s perspective gives the film dimension.

Haarla looks and acts the part perfectly. Bergholm and Haarla work together to bend your expectations and sympathies. There is something wrong with this child and we’re as frustrated as Saga with the way she’s dismissed as being depressed and exhausted. The next minute, we see Saga as a narcissist whose personality disorder is now on display because she can’t find love in her heart for her baby. Then, clearly Saga is just delirious and exhausted and suffering from post-partum, all issues exacerbated by society’s demand that motherhood is precious and perfect.

Nightborn weaves these likelihoods without asking us to turn against anyone. The film empathizes with Saga, even when her behavior does seem too prickly. Likewise, we’re never asked to hate Jon—a good thing because Grint is endlessly sympathetic as a man who wants desperately to be a good dad and husband.

Though Nightborn is not perfect—the creature and baby effects leave a bit to be desired—its exploration is fascinating. Never tidy, never patronizing, but not quickly forgiving, the film embraces what’s monstrous in us. It’s not the complete success of Hatching, but it’s a vivid nightmare worth your time.

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Comfortably Numb

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by Hope Madden

Touch Me

About a decade ago, filmmaker Amat Escalante made a movie about sexual frustration, bad decisions and tentacle sex. The Untamed grounded the fantasy in a profoundly ordinary and relatable human drama, limiting the absurdity and amplifying the horror.

Addison Heimann leans far more absurd with his tentacle sex horror Touch Me, a potent drug metaphor that speaks to a modern malaise.

In a lengthy and surprisingly effective opening monologue, Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley, exceptional) explains her situation to her psychiatrist. A weirdly good-looking alien in a tracksuit (Lou Taylor Pucci) came to save the planet from climate change and convinced Joey to have cross-species intercourse. His touch made her mind go quiet for the first time in her life, but she fled because she nearly died.

Still the lure of a quiet mind proves too much and soon Joey and her best friend Craig (Jordan Gavaris) cave into temptation and find themselves hooked.

Which doesn’t sound funny, but Heimann’s delightfully accepting glimpse at modern slackerism paired with Pucci’s wide-eyed narcissism and hip hop moves keep things light despite a lot of truly dark turns. At its core, Touch Me is about deeply damaged people struggling to face a reality that cannot make them happy and the incessant temptation of hard drugs to silence that anxiety.

For that reason, the silliness sometimes seems tone deaf. That, or the dramatic turns seem maudlin. But only briefly, mainly because of the commitment of Heimann’s small but talented cast.

Dudley and Gavaris affect a believable co-dependence, their banter a familiar and humorous cadence of self-loathing and support. Dudley is particularly impressive in a role that holds the metaphor, horror and silliness together. And Pucci hits a perfect tone for oblivious track-suited narcissist.

The writing does not always serve the actors as well as they serve it. There are holes in logic that Touch Me laughs off by pointing them out—a fun tactic, but not a solution. And the whole feels slight given the deeper ideas sewn throughout. But the film is an enjoyable, sloppy, relatable mess with insight and fun to spare.

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Running to Stand Still

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Find Your Friends

by Hope Madden

I love Shudder. Truth is, Shudder is the only station I know how to find on our TV. I mean it. How I look forward to each new Shudder original! Happily, most of them live up to the excitement.

But every once in a while, you get a Find Your Friends.

Five unreasonably attractive and clearly alcoholic twentysomething besties wreak havoc on their livers and look good doing it. And screw the a’holes at this yacht party because these party bitches are headed to Joshua Tree to a better party followed by some desert tripping. Hell yeah!

I rarely stop watching a movie once I start it because it’s my job to finish the movie. I had to remind myself of this during Find Your Friends no fewer than four times before we even got to Joshua Tree.

We spend time with Amber (Helena Howard), Lavinia (Bella Thorne), Zosia (Zión Moreno), Lola (Chloe Cherry), and Maddy (Sophia Ali) twerking, doing shots, slapping each other’s asses, taking Molly, smoking joints, taking ‘shrooms, more shots, making out with strangers, driving wasted, saying “pussy” hundreds of times, talking incessantly about dick, and living as if we don’t exist in a country where you get away with rape but go to prison for defending yourself.

But that’s sort of writer/director Izabel Pakzad’s point, I suppose. That humans aggressively oblivious to their own safety still deserve safety, which is true. And that young women are often so frequently coerced and misused that they bond over it, joke about it, numb themselves to it. Also valid.

And that no women live in Joshua Tree at all. Only pick-up truck driving rapists and rifle carrying misogynists. This seems less accurate.

The heavy handedness of the film’s story and the one-dimensionality of its characters make it hard for Pakzad to build any momentum. There really is a story of female rage swimming beneath the sea of alcohol, but the story is so slight and the film so long and the climax so abrupt and the final shot so unearned that the message is tough to get behind.