Category Archives: Shudder Premiere

Faces of Death

Metamorphosis

by George Wolf

A deadly curse passed from house to house. A demon that can change identities at will. A young girl possessed, and desperate parents begging experts to investigate. A priest, wracked with guilt, seeking exorcism help from an older mentor. Deadly dopplegangers.

As a patchwork repackaging of several classic horror themes, South Korean Shudder original Metamorphosis (Byeonshin) works better than you might expect. Despite familiar tropes and convenient plot turns, director Hong-seon Kim scores with creepy atmospherics, sympathetic family strife and intermittent flashes of gore.

Gang-goo (Dong-il Sung) can’t believe the deal he got on the new house for his family. No other bids, imagine that! Shortly after move-in, though, the trouble starts with a very noisy neighbor and his alarming tastes in interior design.

But confronting him only brings evil closer to home, and soon Gang-goo, his wife and three daughters are facing increasing threats from each other. Or so they believe.

Turns out Gang-goo’s brother Joong-su (Sung-Woo Bae) is a priest with a tragic past, and he may be the family’s only hope to escape the demonic force that has gripped them.

Director Kim seems unfazed by the script’s lack of originality or moments of contrivance, confident in his ability to find new frights in well-traveled neighborhoods. For the most part, he does, even managing to touch a nerve that resonates beyond the horror genre itself.

Look beyond the inverted crosses, walls dripping blood and one unsurprising twist, and you’ll see Metamorphosis carrying a layer of horror-loving metaphor. We hurt each other in so many ways, and can be easily convinced that hurt is justified, or even divine.

There’s a devil in some of the details here, but the big picture is worthy.

Nutritious, Too!

Yummy

by Hope Madden

Hey, are you squeamish?

Does Shudder have the movie for you!

It’s hard to do zombies well anymore. Mainly, you have to either come up with an entirely novel concept or hope that the bloody mayhem works in your favor.

In Yummy, the concept is only marginally original, but the bloody mayhem is more than on target. Co-writer/director Lars Damoiseaux assaults your gag reflex with a viscous mess of a horror flick. Blood and entrails, of course, but expect a pretty inspired use of pus, liquid body fat, tendons and other tissues and goos.

It makes for some slick surfaces, I tell you what! Plus some unexpected little monsters keep things interesting and fun.

Set inside a cut-rate Eastern European cosmetic surgery clinic, the film follows a mother, daughter and her boyfriend into a very bad decision. Mom (Annick Christiaens) is after a series of nips and tucks; daughter Alison (Maaike Neuville) wants breast reduction; boyfriend Michael (Bart Hollanders) is just a good dude willing to drive everyone even though he’s afraid of blood.

Here is a ripe premise for horror. Mom is a Cronenberg-esque vehicle for body horror as well as vanity shaming. Alison provides comedic possibilities (no one in the clinic can begin to understand her point of view). Hemophobic Michael offers the clear hero’s arc. (Or he’ll simply die of shock by the gooey second reel.)

And no, it’s not incredibly novel—zombie movies so rarely are. But it’s smart, witty and fun. Damoiseaux accomplishes much with his budget. Practical effects are great, performances are delightful, and nothing beats a little well placed Stooges. (The band, not the knuckleheads.)

Yummy represents Damoiseaux’s feature debut as director and writer, but he’s garnered attention and awards for years with his work in shorts. Award winning co-writer Eveline Hagenbeek (Rokjesdag) channels her affinity for conversational comedy into a script that may follow a familiar structure but delivers a believable, funny edge that the game ensemble takes advantage of.

Their collaboration is no masterpiece, but it is a lot of sloppy fun.

Handle with Care

Scare Package

by Hope Madden

Has there ever been a place as glorious as the video store? The brain trust behind the horror anthology Scare Package clearly understands the secret joys of the independent VHS retailer and their beloved horror wares.

“This weekend is all about no rules, no clothes, and no cell service,” begins Emily Hagins’s surprisingly fresh meta-horror Cold Open. It sets the stage for a really funny way to spend about an hour and 40 minutes.

Chad Buckley of Rad Chad’s Horror Emporium (directed by Aaron B. Koontz) is training a new employee, covering the ins and outs of the VHS game and dodging that creepy regular customer. Periodically we get a glimpse at the store’s rentals, taking shape as the set of horror shorts that make up the anthology.

Chris McInroy’s consistently funny One Time in the Woods plays like a good natured Troma flick. So, it’s a bloody, gooey, gore-soaked, viscera-saturated mess with a bright disposition.

Noah Segan (Knives Out) makes his directorial debut with M.I.S.T.,E.R., which boasts the great casting of Noah Segan (how’d he get him?!) as well as Jocelyn DeBoer (Thunder Road, Greener Grass). You wouldn’t call it inspired, but a nice sleight of hand and one subtly creepy bartender are enough to keep you guessing and entertained.

Anthony Cousins’s The Night He Came Back IV: The Final Kill doesn’t offer much in the way of a fresh perspective and feels especially tame compared to the two other meta-horror episodes in the package. The two shorts that bridge sci fi and horror—Courtney and Hilary Andujar’s Girls’ Night Out of Body and Baron Vaughn’s So Much To Do—don’t answer nearly as much as they ask, but they do keep your attention.

The collection is weaved together with love and a lot of nerdy horror know-how. Was it destined for Shutter? Well, that Jo Bob Briggs cameo couldn’t have hurt.

Scare Package sports an excellent use of budget for a fun, campy set of horror-loving films—the kind of short movies that lovingly mock the genre. Most of the episodes offer a knowing lampooning, and each ends abruptly enough to avoid wearing out its welcome.

Scary Movie: The Movie

Warning: Do Not Play

by George Wolf

Basing a horror film around the “scariest movie ever made” premise is ambitious. Is it smart?

Well, it’s ambitious. Because at some point, you’re going to have to show at least a snippet of this deadly frightening flick your film is referencing, and your audience is already poised to dismiss the impact.

Remember the “killer” tape in the The Ring? We had to see it, and if it didn’t totally creep us out when we did, the entire movie would have crumbled. But that video WAS creepy as Hell, giving The Ring the anchor it needed to stand as one of the best PG-13 horror flicks ever made.

Shudder’s Warning: Do Not Play remembers The Ring/Ringu quite well, building a familiar mystery around some urban legendary long lost film footage.

Mi-Jung (Ye-ji Seo) is a “film festival prodigy” on a two week deadline from a big South Korean studio to come up with a great horror script or she’s out.

She needs inspiration!

Film students at the local university hip Mi-Jung to the legend of a graduation film from years earlier. They can’t remember the title, but it supposedly screened once, with repercussions so dramatic the film was rumored to be directed….by a ghost.

Mi-Jung asks for help in an online forum and is instantly met with an ominous demand to cease the inquiries, which only draws her deeper into the mystery.

Writer/director Kim Jin-won provides some nifty atmospherics in the early going, but little else to demand your attention. While Kim doesn’t rely on cheap jump scares (thank you), he pushes the unreliable narrator trope via enough “waking from a dream” sequences to quickly become tiresome.

But the blood and the body count pick up in act two, as the film adopts some Blair Witch tactics – and openly cops to it, which is nice. Mi-Jung finds herself deep inside the cursed production, and we’re left to sort out the psychological strands of her experience.

The film-within-a-film may never grasp the elusive Ring ambitions, but hang in past the setup and Warning delivers a competent mystery and some fun terror in the aisles.

Man of Your Dreams

Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street

by Hope Madden

“It was intended to play as homophobic rather than homoerotic.”

So says David Chaskin, writer of 1985’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge—a film many consider to be the gayest horror movie ever made. Chaskin has long shared the belief that it was the casting of Mark Patton in the lead role, the “final boy,” that pushed the envelope from homophobic to homoerotic.

Chaskin is right.

Thank God for casting.

The mid-Eighties hardly needed another homophobic movie, or another AIDS-terrified horror flick. Did it need the story of an adolescent boy whose homosexual nature emerges as some monstrous id, only to be cured by the love of a good woman? No, but if you just don’t watch the last ten minutes of the film, Nightmare 2 is a bizarre and glorious B-movie coming out party.

Again, thanks to Mark Patton.

Patton is the center of the Shudder documentary Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street. He also produces, which means he gives the footage his OK, leading to a film that comes off as self-congratulatory and self-indulgent more often than it should. But there is no denying Patton’s life has been fascinating.

Patton’s a charming, charismatic vehicle for the doc and the insight he offers into burgeoning stardom, closeted Hollywood and the Eighties is riveting. He’d lived quite a life before his first feature lead likely ended his career—but what he survived outside Elm Street was certainly tougher.

So much so that Patton’s particular anxiety about how this film affected him and his career sometimes feels misplaced. But watching how his perception of the “gay controversy” has evolved and what that evolution has allowed him to do within the gay community is delightful.

Of course, equally fascinating for horror fans is the debate as to who did and did not realize how profoundly gay Nightmare 2 was. Patton’s co-stars—Robert Englund (Freddy himself) comes off especially well—each add to the conversation in entertaining ways, though director Jack Sholder should maybe stop talking.

First time filmmakers Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen seem unsure of their real aim: to tell Mark’s story, to help Mark find closure, to deconstruct the film’s subtext, to explore its lasting meaning for the LGBTQ community. Because of their meandering focus, Scream, Queen feels longer than it needs to be.

Lucky for the filmmakers, every one of those topics makes for an intriguing investigation, and watching Patton triumphantly recreate his iconic (and likely career-ending) dance scene is sheer joy.  

Monster Mash

Monstrum

by Hope Madden

Very little in life brings me joy quite like a decent creature feature. Even the silly ones where a big, boil-riddled muppet winds up slathering pus leakage all over Korean mountain people in the 1500s.

Especially those.

Hun Jong-ho’s new import takes us back to 1506, a time when the king is beset by troubles: his disloyal prime minister, a plague across the land. That is a lot for one man to handle, and an even larger load once his most loyal guard, Yoon Gyeom (Kim Myong-min), abandons him to save a little girl’s life.

Fast forward a decade or so and strife still divides the nation, but that strife has a new name: Monstrum.

But is that monster really there? Or is it all just a figment of mass hysteria planted by a conniving prime minister? The sleuthing sets up a clever-enough through line and the deception creates space for plenty of gory action sequences.

Jong-ho’s story, which he penned along with Byeon Jeong-uk and Heo-dam, offers a relatively simple “the people have the power” narrative elevated by some nice set pieces and a handful of choice performances.

Myong-min cuts a properly heroic figure: quiet, savvy, handy in a fight. Kim In-kwan makes the perfect sidekick, his comedic moments (though often anachronistic) offer welcome moments of levity.

With K-pop’s Lee Hye-ri (of the band Girl Day), Jong-ho delivers a little 16th century girl power via one spunky adolescent who’s smart, capable, irreverent and fearless. (Another anachronism? Probably, but again, it’s a movie with a giant, pus-dripping puppet. You came looking for realism?)

And hey, who’s that handsome young man beguiled by Hye-ri’s badassedness? It’s Parasite’s Choi Woo-sik, charming as ever.

The film looks great, thanks in part to some exceptional costuming but mainly to cinematographer Kim Dong-Yeon’s capable maneuvering through interiors and exteriors, false backdrops and lushly wooded hills.

Monstrum is no masterpiece—go in expecting The Host and come out disappointed. But for creature feature fun and just a touch of flatulence humor, Monstrum delivers.

Imagine There’s No Heaven

Z

by Hope Madden

There is a moment that currently fascinates horror filmmakers. It is the moment when we forever lose the sweet little white boy destined to become a sociopath.

Director Brandon Christensen (writing with Colin Minnihan) examines parental involvement and even responsibility with the imaginary friend horror, Z.

Beth Parsons (Keegan Connor Tracy) and her husband Kevin (Minnihan regular Sean Rogerson) are at odds about how best to handle son Josh (Jett Klyne) and his new buddy.

This sounds familiar.

Mother is immediately creeped out. Dad is lenient. Boy begins to lash out, blaming imaginary friend. Mom wants to enlist expert help. Dad agrees within reason, but begins to pull away once Mom becomes convinced of a supernatural presence. Bodies begin to pile up.

Brightburn

The Boy

Brahms: The Boy II

Hole in the Ground

Prodigy  

That’s just in the last three years. This phenomenon means two things: filmmakers have hit upon a provocatively of-the-moment topic and it will be hard to find a unique perspective on that topic.

Though Z never seems fresh, there are moments that feel more authentic than they have any right to. Christensen’s direction lets conversations, in particular, breathe. Actors get the chance to give their characters a heartbeat. Adult family relationships have a lived-in quality that both reinforces themes and carves out layers for the story.

As is often the case in this subgenre, the film lives or dies on the role of the mother. Lucky, then, that Tracy gives such a powerful performance. Never showy, Tracy’s weary, passive, put-upon delivery creates a mysterious yet believable character. Beth’s actions feel both natural and unpredictable, which creates a lot of space for the filmmaker to build in surprises.

Too much convenience, too many unearned jump scares and too much predictability threaten to sink the effort, but a handful of narrative choices and a few truly solid performances (plus a cameo from the always welcome Stephen McHattie) elevate the film.

It’s no We Need to Talk about Kevin (the high water mark for the category), but what is? It is an unsettling way to worry about what we pass on to our kids.

Night of the Living

Blood Quantum

by Hope Madden

It’s 1981 on the Red Crow Indian reservation and white people have lost their damn minds.

Since it is 1981, no way they know it’s zombies. Sure, Romero’s Night of the Living Dead came out in ’69, but the genre doesn’t really take off until later in the Eighties. No, they have to figure this out for themselves – no meta commentary, no preconceived notions.

It wouldn’t help them anyway because Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum is a zombie movie with a twist, which he uses to his advantage to subvert your knowledge of the genre.

Traylor (Michael Greyeyes) is having a busy morning. He had to shoot his ex-wife’s dog, his sons have both been arrested, Sugar keeps calling the station because his woman’s sick, and Traylor’s dad needs him to come see something down at the store.  

It’s always nutty like that right before the zombie apocalypse, though. Although, to be honest, Blood Quantum often works a little more like 30 Days of Night and Stakeland – both vampire films that riff on zombie tropes—but the filmmaker utilizes Romero when it makes sense.

Barnaby takes common horror themes and bends them to serve the film’s purpose as an apt allegorical nightmare. It’s the combination of social commentary and intimate family drama that makes the film memorable.

Blood Quantum would have been interesting solely on the basis of “plagued up Opies” invading indigenous space—sometimes wrapped in infected blankets, even. But the film derives its real strength from a more intimate struggle. Yes, a diseased white population threatens to overwhelm and destroy the folks of the Mi’gMaq reserve, but Barnaby’s focus is internal.

Whites are a mainly nameless burden, a privileged but parasitic condition of life. Traynor and his boys need to take care of their own shit if they want to survive this.

Greyeyes offers a level performance to build around. Kiowa Gordon brings sinister charm to the bad boy Lysol role, balanced nicely as favorite son Joseph by The Revenant’s Forrest Goodluck, (“He killed my boy!”)

Better still are longtime character actor Gary Farmer (love him!) and relative newcomer Stonehorse Lone Goeman as a couple of guys who’ve lived through a lot and bring rich if not always valuable perspective.

Performances are not always exceptional, and you would not call this a feminist effort, but the underlying wry, weary wit separates the film from anything else like it.

There’s also an excellent use of resources – minimal sets maximized results: claustrophobia, tension, horror.  Barnaby’s spare but effective use of animation is another reason Blood Quantum delivers a vital new perspective for the genre.

Pop Goes the Scary

0.0 Mhz

by George Wolf

Imagine it’s 1984.

One of the members of Banarama has joined one of the members of Duran Duran in the cast of a new horror movie. That movie is assembled with the ideas and scenes from much better films, but young pop music fans probably haven’t seen any of ’em, so who cares?

Now, put on your mask and join us back in 2020. A similar mindset seems to propel 0.0 Mhz, a Shudder original that brings two stars of the South Korean K-Pop phenomenon to the screen.

Jung Eun-ji, lead singer of the band Apink, also takes the lead here as So-hee, the newbie in a teen team of ghost-chasers known as “Club 0.0 Mhz.” See, that’s the best frequency to call ghosts (don’t argue), and So-hee’s first outing with the group is to a supposedly haunted house in the woods where the kids aim to dial up a little necromancy.

But what Sang-Yeob (Lee Sung-yeol from the band Infinite) and the rest of the gang don’t know is…their new recruit comes from a long line of dead people-seers.

The local at the general store who tells them all not to go to there is just the first in a string of heavily borrowed narrative checkpoints. Pulling from The Grudge to Elm Street to The Conjuring to The Exorcist, first time director Sun-Dong Yoo adapts Jang Jak’s popular webcomic with barely a whisper of originality or visual flair.

But 0.0 Mhz is clearly aimed a notch below anyone who has seen those films. This is strictly teenage fare, content to provide good-looking idols to swoon over and warmed-over scares for kids who want to scream but not have nightmares.

It accomplishes that, and not much else.

So when get-togethers are all good again, 0.0 Mhz will be more than ready to slumber party!

Unlucky Streak

Cursed Films

by Hope Madden

The success of Shudder’s wildly informative and entertaining 2019 doc Horror Noire (still streaming – see it!) paved the way for their new 5-show doc series, Cursed Films. Each of writer/director Jay Cheel’s episodes spends 30 minutes examining one allegedly cursed horror movie production: The Exorcist, Poltergeist, The Omen, The Crow and Twilight Zone: The Movie.

Episodes 1 – 3 were made available for review, and the first thing we noticed was that each show is stronger than the last. Our hopes were highest for Ep 1: The Exorcist, but the series has a tough time finding its footing. The idea of a “cursed” production never really materializes and the episode feels padded with unrelated material.

In particular, time spent with a shyster modern day exorcist adds little to the overall theme of the program and offers limited at best entertainment value.

Poltergeist is a film more recognized for an alleged curse, so there’s a little more meat on Ep 2’s bone. Cheel opens up a handful of different, related conversations and braids them interestingly. The episode actually examines the bad luck that dogged all three films in the Poltergeist series and gets some skinny from one of the filmmakers (no, not that one).

It digs a little more at fan obsession in ways that non-Shudder audiences might mock while feeling perfectly at home with this target market. Still, the content feels light and the doc never seems to unveil much.

By Episode 3, though, Cursed Films finds its groove. The Omen offers not only more bountiful nuttiness to examine, but bigger and more interesting interview opportunities.

The big question: Why repeatedly use the single least flattering photo ever taken of Gregory Peck?

By halfway through the series, Cheel has begun to dig into the psychology of what makes a person – or the public – cling to the idea of a curse in the first place, and the psychology on display in this episode is fantastic. The random nut job guests, however, still feel like an unpleasant way to pad.

Though Episodes 4 and 5 were not available for review, the series seems to have hit its stride just as it hits two films that, while less popular than the first three in the series, suffered more profound bad luck than the first three combined.