Category Archives: Shudder Premiere

Feeling Peckish?

Little Bites

by Hope Madden

Set in the “every fabric is patterned” Seventies, Little Bites drops us into one really horrifying relationship.

Widowed mom Mindy (Krsy Fox) has sent her 10-year-old, Alice (Elizabeth Phoenix Caro), to stay with Grandma (Bonnie Aarons, The Nun franchise)—an overbearing, hypercritical shrew. That’s not the problematic relationship, though. Mindy sent Alice away because of the demon living in her basement, the one who rings a dinner bell a few times a day, then takes a couple of bites out of Mindy.

The mythology is interesting if undeveloped, but whatever the reason Agyar (Jon Sklaroff, excellent) came to live off of Mindy’s flesh, it’s a solid and troubling concept. Sklaroff’s weary superiority and dark wit create a fascinatingly nightmarish villain.

 It’s a metaphor concerning the life draining sacrifice motherhood can be—something Babadook explored so beautifully and startlingly. It’s a provocative idea executed poorly.

Writer/director Spider One (Rob Zombie’s youngest brother) strings together some memorably disturbing ideas made weirder and better with some (not all) of his dialog. And a slew of veteran actors (Aarons, Barbara Crampton, Heather Langenkamp) strengthens the effort. Chaz Bono (who Executive Produces with his mother) delivers a sweetly bruised performance.

Fox is the weak link. She lacks chemistry with the rest of the cast and struggles mightily with the filmmaker’s more overwrought sections of dialog (any conversation between Mindy and her mother, for example).  

At least as problematic is the stiff direction. There’s precious little variety in shot selection, at an hour and 45 minutes, the film is in desperate need of a good trim. Every scene goes on for an awkward length, far longer than the actors are able to maintain any sense of naturalism. Tightening scenes would certainly have made carrying the film an easier task for Fox.

There’s something here, something unseemly and a little tragic. If the filmmaker could have trimmed the fat, Little Bites might have been a pretty tasty horror.

Rizz Up

The Dead Thing

by Hope Madden

The clever, underlying theme in Shaun of the Dead is that every Londoner was already basically a zombie.

Elric Kane, co-writer and director of The Dead Thing, looks at a culture of app hook ups and sterile, fluorescent work spaces and sees something similar. A whole generation of people seems to already be dead.

They’re not exactly alive, anyway.

Beautiful Alex (Blu Hunt) fits that bill. Her job is mindless, she keeps her headphones in and avoids eye contact with her one co-worker, Mark (Joey Millin). After work and another swipe right hookup she sneaks into her apartment to avoid conversation with her longtime best friend (Katherine Hughes). Sleep. Wake up. Repeat.

Then she meets Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen), and it’s as if she wakes from a trance. It starts off the same as every other meet up, but Kyle is different. They connect. He stays all night, they laugh and draw pictures of each other and hate to say goodbye the next day when her uber for work arrives.

She decides to keep in touch, but he never responds to a text. So, she shows up where he works, and a mystery begins.

Each act in The Dead Thing tells a different story. Hunt anchors the evolving storytelling with an authentic display of ennui, of disconnectedness—partly chosen, partly inevitable. Smith-Petersen’s vacant sweetness gives each change in the narrative an underlying sinister quality that also evolves nicely from one act to the next.

By Act 3, Kane abandons the film’s original metaphor in favor of a different analogy. While this change offers more opportunity for visceral horror, the result is less satisfying than the original, insightful image of modern romance.

Though the more traditional wrap up disappoints after such a stylish and intriguing premise, The Dead Thing—including Iona Vasile’s dreamy camerawork and deceptively creepy performances throughout—keeps your attention and manages to subvert expectations and entertain.

Face Off

Grafted

by Hope Madden

Well, Sasha Rainbow knows for sure that there’s an audience for body horror enraged at the pressure to fit a certain standard of beauty. The fact that her feature debut Grafted will face constant comparisons to Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is less of a positive note. (There’s even a scene of someone gorging on shrimp, I swear to God.)

Rainbow introduces us to Wei (played in youth by Mohan Liu) and her father (Sam Wang). Both father and daughter are marked with some kind of red tissue across their faces, and while working on a cure, tragedy strikes, and Wei is left on her own.

Years later, she obtains a scholarship to a university in New Zealand and goes to live with her aunt (Xuai Hu) and cousin, Angela (Jess Hong). Try as she might, Wei (Joyena Sun) cannot fit in with Angela and her beautiful friends (Eden Hart, Sepi To’a), but she has other things on her mind—finishing her father’s research.

Rainbow, who co-wrote the script with Lee Murray and Mia Maramara, wraps social anxiety, assimilation, misogyny, sexual politics, the ludicrous nature of scientific advancement, racism, nationalism and more around Wei’s descent into madness, and it might be just too much to take on in 96 minutes.

Sun, Hong and Hart have fun, making the most of their onscreen personality swapping and Rainbow’s focus is most on target during these sequences. Jared Turner entertains as your typical vain professor, and To’a delivers enough empathy to give the film a touch of humanity.

But Grafted bites off more than it can chew. It too often feels unfocused, random, and superficial. It suffers not only in comparison to Fargeat’s film but to New Zealand’s pretty epic history of body horror.

That doesn’t mean it’s bad. There are some great ideas at work here, and every performance, large and small, brings its own weirdness to the screen. It’s certainly enough to keep me interested in seeing what Rainbow does next.

Broken Wing

Rita

by Hope Madden

In 2019, filmmaker Jayro Bustamante traced a history of state-sanctioned horrors exacted on Guatemalan women with his superb supernatural tale, La Llorona. With his follow up, he mines far more current history to uncover troublingly similar horrors.

Rita is a fairy tale told from the perspective of the titular 13-year-old (Giuliana Santa Cruz). As Rita tells us in the beginning, her story—like any fairy tale—is true, but it didn’t happen exactly this way. Remanded to a state-run institution for girls, Rita describes the palace she believed would be her sanctuary, but it was run by ogres and witches.

The girls in the shelter are divided into cliques, each with its own costume. The fairies are very young; the dogs are wild and muzzled; bunnies are pregnant. There are also princesses and star lights. Rita is an angel.

It’s one way in which Bustamante—like the world at large—defiles images of innocence linked with girlhood. But the filmmaker never veers from his protagonist’s perspective, and to her, the inmates are mystical creatures, each type with its own power, each transcendent no matter the evil.

The young cast, exclusively newcomers, impresses with every character’s unseasoned choice, every child’s brutish and childlike reaction. Their wisdom feels unforced, never the product of a screenwriter needing to provide exposition. Santa Cruz is stoic, her character interior, while Alejandra Vásquez’s Bebé is charmingly blunt, Ángela Quevedo’s Sulmy is tenderly optimistic and Isabel Aidana’s La Terca is protective and gruff.

No one’s fully dimensional, but fairy tale characters never are. Bustamante’s dialog blends childlike inexperience with tragic notes of experience in ways that feel right at home in this polluted playground.

Because Bustamante’s film never leaves the grimy physical reality of Rita’s world, Rita leans closer to Issa Lopéz’s Tigers Are Not Afraid than del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, but all three recognize the toll of systemic oppression on the most vulnerable and powerless.

Rita, though it barely qualifies as true horror, is a tough watch, especially because it is based on true events. It’s moving and debilitating at the same time, but it’s a beautiful and powerful work.

Long Way Home

Black Cab

by Hope Madden

It’s a classic ghost story, complete with a creepy old car, winding English road and a figure in white. But who could be afraid to get in this friendly cab with affable old Nick Frost behind the wheel?

Frost plays Ian, and his fare for the night is a bickering couple: Anne (Synnøve Karlsen) and Patrick (Luke Norris). Ann doesn’t really want Patrick in the cab at all. Honestly, neither does Ian.

Writer Virginia Gilbert takes a very old timey tale—the most haunted road in England, a weeping mother who hitches a ride—and gives it some teeth. This old spook isn’t here just to relive the same ancient trauma across the centuries. She wants something. And Ian aims to give it to her.

Watching Frost (Shaun of the Dead) oscillate between jovial and deranged is a bit of fun. He complicates the character, layering desperation with menace, suggesting the film could take a psychological rather than supernatural road at any moment.

Norris manages to find some depth in the cad character, but even when he’s a one-note narcissistic gaslighter, he does it well. Karlsen struggles with a character lacking in dimension. There are flashes during heated moments with Norris, as one character clings more tightly and the other sees more clearly, but those instances are fleeting. She spends most of the film in a nameless state of unhappiness, an emotion that does not evolve as her circumstances change.

Director Bruce Goodison is at his finest when his three characters are confined to the cab, moving relentlessly away from the bright lights of the city, the squeak and slap of the windshield wipers their road tunes. But a needless side trip to an abandoned motel, coupled with unimpressive CGI creature effects, keep Black Cab from ever really grabbing hold.

Parent Trap

Daddy’s Head

by George Wolf

You see the title Daddy’s Head and you might expect a bit of grind house fun, full of schlock and awe and signifying little. But this Shudder original has higher aspirations, as writer/director Benjamin Barfoot pulls off a nifty creature feature steeped in the psychology of grief.

Young Isaac (Rupert Turnbull) lives with his father James (Charles Aitken) and stepmother Laura (Julia Brown) in the English countryside. Life has already dealt the boy a terrible blow with the death of his mother, so James’s fatal car accident weighs heavy with cruel trauma.

Isaac is left with no next of kin, and officials from social services favor Laura taking over as legal guardian, if she is agreeable.

But while Laura is sorting through the legalities, days and nights begin to get bumpy.

Isaac insists that his father has returned. Something breaks through a picture window and attacks the family dog.** A kitchen knife turns up missing. And James’s divorced friend Robert (Nathaniel Martello-White) is always finding reasons to drop by.

As Isaac becomes convinced that is father is calling to him from the nearby woods, Barfoot punctures the questionable realities with some well-crafted jump scares and satisfying practical effects. The frights that come in the third act succeed because of the character dynamics that Barfoot and his talented cast build in the first two. The child-centered mystery and sleek, imposing aesthetics will likely call Goodnight Mommy to mind early on, before giving way to a Babadook-styled struggle with a monster.

But Daddy’s Head tripping is committed to upping the ante, and the escalation ultimately delivers enough to satisfy fans of both blood and metaphors.

**trigger warning: violence to animals

4th Kind’s the Charm

V/H/S/Beyond

by Hope Madden

It’s that time again. Time to blow into the cassette basket, ignore the blinking 12:00 and press play on another found footage anthology, V/H/S/Beyond.

The seventh installment in the series focuses (mainly) on left-behind evidence of alien encounters, plus one really weird but entirely unconnected doggy daycare nightmare.

This installment’s wraparound story comes not from a horror filmmaker but from award-winning documentarian Jay Cheel. He invites viewers to investigate the “evidence”—videotapes that may or may not tell of visitors—by way of the documentary “Alien Encounters: Fact or Fiction.” The primary story under the experts’ eye is of an Ontario home and a missing man.

In between talking head evaluations of that footage, we’re treated to a smattering of other “evidence.”  The most fun is Jordan Downey’s Stork. Downey enlists a first person shooter style to follow a police standoff at a home where missing babies may be stashed. Funhouse gimmicks keep it lively, but the short’s main success is its particular spin on the alien itself.

Virat Pal’s Dream Girl, an interstellar twist on Bollywood stardom, is inventive fun, although the concept of found footage (unretouched or edited footage) is most betrayed in this short.

This brings us to the three most common problems in found footage. 1) How did the found footage get edited together from multiple cameras and angles? 2) Why didn’t the camera operator put the camera down to save themselves and others? 3) How and where was the footage left to be found? To a certain degree, you need to let go of at least one of these details or you can’t enjoy the film. But it gets tough.

Life and Let Dive from Justin Martinez (longtime friend of the franchise) takes us on a 30th birthday skydiving party gone wrong. Shot GoPro style, the short is consistently entertaining, delivers carnage aplenty and one really solid jump scare, plus good-looking aliens. Also, no egregious rule breaking.

The weirdest and possibly most disturbing belongs to directors Christian and Justin Long (the actor, who does not appear). Their short, Fur Babies, has absolutely nothing to do with aliens. Instead, it tails a delightfully unhinged doggy daycare professional (Libby Letlow). There’s also zero integrity in the footage—where it came from and how it was assembled—but there is some wonderfully unseemly stuff happening in the basement.

Kate Siegel’s Stow Away delivers a one-person documentary on recent desert sightings. The segment is strangely fascinating, and Alanah Pearce offers a compelling central performance. Solid creature effects and a logical arc of horror also elevate this one, but you can’t finish it without wondering: how did the world discover this tape?

Found footage horror still manages to strike a chord for a lot of people, and the V/H/S franchise routinely collects an intriguing assortment of films and filmmakers celebrating the form. Beyond is neither the best nor the worst in the series. It does hold some impressive scares and imaginative takes on the old encounter notion.

Messy Inheritence

The Demon Disorder

by Hope Madden

A number of fine genre films have struggled through the particular horror of dealing with a parent in decline. The change in a loved one’s personality can seem horrific, and the specter of your own possible future is terrifying.

Natalie Erika James’s 2020 generational horror Relic tackled the subject with grace and dread. Fellow Aussie Steven Boyle sees something more monstrous in the family curse with is first feature as a director, The Demon Disorder.

Graham Reilly (Christian Willis) is reluctant to return to his family home, but older brother Jake (Dirk Hunter) says their youngest sibling, Phillip (Charles Cottier), needs help. The fact that Jake looks like a pirate left behind weeks ago on a desert island does not bode well for the shape of the younger brother back home.

Jake also says that Dad (John Noble) is back.

The entire film takes place in just two locations—a mechanic’s garage and a rundown family home—but Boyle gets plenty of traction out of those spots. The chemistry among the brothers feels strained but authentic, and their performances go a long way toward elevating a story that never feels fully realized.

The main event—and the biggest differentiator between The Demon Disorder­ and other films of this kind—involves some pretty impressive practical effects. Boyle’s film boasts three different globulous monsters—nasty beasties that make you want to reach for the disinfectant.

Possession film/body horror/creature feature is an enticing combination. In truth, the three don’t really fit that well together here. Eliminating the Christian symbolism might have streamlined this meandering script, but a lack of depth in the storytelling would still have shown its ugly, blobby, viscous face.

The monsters are cool, though.

But Boyle—who’s built a career on makeup design and creature FX—plays to his strengths and delivers a fun, DIY creature feature while he’s at it.

Ungovernable Emotional Excess

The Devil’s Bath

by Hope Madden

It’s been five years since Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s last horror—the remarkable The Lodge—and a full decade since their unnerving Goodnight Mommy. I had missed their particular brand of isolated, rustic horror. So it was with much excitement that I sat down to their latest, a twisted true crime fairytale, The Devil’s Bath.

Set in the 18th century mountains of Austria, young bride Agnes (Anja Plaschg) finds married life with Wolf (David Scheid) not all she’d hoped. Disappointment, confusion, isolation, fanatical religious fervor, guilt, and desperate longing—plus the suspicion that dogs any village outsider—prove too heady a combination, and soon even Agnes can’t explain her own behavior.

The film, also written by Fiala and Franz, mines historical records of the area to illustrate the natural, dire consequences of religion, patriarchy, and duty.

Both The Lodge and Goodnight Mommy were slow builds that drew as much tension from the brutal beauty of their isolated location as from the events unfolding there. The Devil’s Bath walks that same eerily remote path, but the burn is much slower and the horror less mean.

The Devil’s Bath repays close attention. Details that offer context to Agnes’s plight float in and out of the background, and without those details, the viewing experience can feel as unmoored as poor Agnes. But so much of Agnes’s trouble is recognizable—difficultly fitting in, a growing distance between herself and her husband that she doesn’t understand, and the impossible task of getting close to (or becoming independent of—either would be OK) her mother-in-law. She’s on her own and soon lonesomeness and longing are all she feels.

And what is there to do? Nothing. This is her life now, far from the mother who dotes on her and the brother who protects her.

As Agnes descends into madness, the filmmakers ensure that we feel the universality of her condition.

The Devil’s Bath opens provocatively, leaving you with a question. The ensuing two hours pointedly answers that question, and then asks: Are you sure you would do it differently?  

Graveyard Shift

Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever

by Hope Madden

Thirty years ago, Danish writer/director Ole Bornedal made a taut thriller about the night watchman in a medical facility who stumbles into a lurid crime spree. Three years later, he made Nightwatch again, this time in English. And now, fully three decades hence, he hits those of us who remember either of the earlier films with a sequel: Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever.

Back in the day, Martin (Nikolaj Coser-Waldau) took a job as overnight security to help pay for law school. Today, his daughter Emma (Fanny Leander Bornedal) does the same. Yes, she needs the money—since her mom’s suicide, her dad Martin is mainly drunk or pilled up and hasn’t worked in ages. But Emma has added reason. She just learned that her dad was involved in the famous serial killer case that ended in the building morgue.

Emma now blames the trauma for her mother’s suicide and her dad’s inability to cope, but her digging around has opened up a whole mess of new problems. Or old ones.

The filmmaker moves ably from the existential crises that fueled his original film to the ripple effects of trauma. He treads enough of the same beats to create an eerie echo of the past, but veers in mainly sensible new directions.

We do get to spend time with the majority of the original cast, though most of them appear for a scene, maybe two. Coser-Waldau anchors the sequel. Far from the wide-eyed youth who was so malleable thirty years ago, Martin is now barely functioning but earnestly interested in doing right by his daughter.

The filmmaker’s own daughter cuts a compelling contrast as Martin’s daughter. Determined and a little raw, Emma makes some rash decisions, but they never feel like dumb choices in service of a thriller’s scares. They feel like passion and impatience.

The mystery itself begins strong with an increasingly interesting perpetrator (Casper Kjær Jensen, tender and terrifying), but eventually devolves into something too pulpy and familiar. Still, Ole Bornedal has not lost his touch with the claustrophobic terror of being trapped inside a medical facility.

If you loved the original (or ‘97s solid remake with Ewan McGregor), Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever delivers bittersweet closure. But it’s an entertaining if not fantastic watch for thriller fans new to the franchise as well.