Category Archives: Shudder Premiere

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Funeral for a Friend

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The Mortuary Collection

by Hope Madden

“Have you any experience in the mortuary arts?”

So begins a conversation between Raven’s End’s mysterious mortician and a young woman who’s come to answer the help wanted sign out front in writer/director Ryan Spindell’s fun and stylish horror anthology, The Mortuary Collection.

Mortician Montgomery Dark (Clancy Brown) has tales to tell of the lives and deaths in Raven’s End. His new assistant Sam (Caitlin Custer) is an eager listener, but also tough to please.

Such is the framing device for the anthology of short horrors, much like the one from Rusty Cundieff’s 1995 collection, Tales from the Hood (and just a bit like Jeff Burr’s 1987 anthology with Vincent Price, From a Whisper to a Scream).

The framing device is so often the best part.

Brown conjures a bit of Angus Scrimm (Phantasm’s Tall Man), channeling a little Tom Noonan as well, to create a spooky but somehow vulnerable master of ceremonies. Custer’s is an intriguing character, challenging her host, never squeamish or spooked. It makes for an interesting dynamic that turns more into a conversation on storytelling than you might expect.

The tales themselves are all set in and around a town where newspaper headlines speak of beasts, asylums, and missing persons. Raven’s End and its stories possess an unidentifiably vintage quality, something fictional and fanciful, modern and yet of an indeterminate past.

Characters sometimes pop up in multiple tales, each story boasting that patented twist ending you’d expect from a Tales from the Crypt episode. Some of the shorts are stronger than others (as Sam likes to point out to Mr. Dark), but the performances are all very solid, and Spindell peppers every story with fun bits of dialog.

“They won’t let me near a scalpel, and for good reason.”

There isn’t a weak short in the bunch, and though certainly some of the twists are not surprising, the execution is slick, the shorts are gorgeous and moody, and Clancy Brown is an absolute treat.

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Squeaky Clean

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The Cleansing Hour

by Hope Madden

Almost a decade ago, Colin Minihan and Stuart Ortiz locked a couple of fraudulent online “ghost hunters” inside an abandoned hospital in the entertaining flick Grave Encounters. It wasn’t the best “supernatural huckster faces honest demonic peril” film of that year—that award goes to Daniel Stamm’s impeccably cast The Last Exorcism.

So, fast forward about a decade and writer/director Damien LeVeck (that is a horror name, my friends) gives us a mash up of both of those movies.

The Cleansing Hour is actually a full-length version of his 2016 short of the same name. In the feature, boyhood friends Max (Ryan Guzman) and Drew (Kyle Gallner) use what they remember of their Catholic school days to fake weekly online exorcisms.

Star of the show Max is a hottie and a bit of a d-bag. Dressed like a priest, he’s in it for the fame and groupies, or as he likes to call them, disciples. Drew is the brains behind the operation. But they’ve hit a plateau. Their viewership isn’t growing as fast as they’d like. Maybe Max is looking at other opportunities. Maybe Drew should just marry longtime girlfriend Lane (Alix Angelis) and get an honest job.

Or maybe a real demon will show up for their next episode.

LeVeck and crew mine that oh-so-Catholic nightmare of shame and confession well. Performances are fine, Guzman’s pretty, but there’s so little new being said here that the film grows tedious long before its 95 minute run is up.

The Cleansing Hour plays too much like a film made by someone who’s seen a lot of horror movies but lacks an original voice. Storylines fall back, not on primal scares or universal areas of dread, but on ideas from other movies.

LeVeck’s film offers a few speeches concerning the evils of the Catholic church (nothing inspired or vital, mainly obvious and hollow), points to our unholy dependence on technology, and shows anxiety about how tech both connects us and brings out the worst in us. Also, an ugly voice comes out of a pretty face.

Familiar stuff, that.

Most problematic (but least surprising) is the twist ending that’s so tired by this point, the idea was just mocked in another horror movie that opened last week.

There’s nothing awful about The Cleansing Hour. It is perfectly serviceable low budget horror. You could watch it. Or you could find any one of the movies it steals from instead.

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Do the Work

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Scare Me

by Hope Madden

Writer’s block—it is a common theme in all writing, especially horror. Think about The Shining, for example. Fred (writer/director/star Josh Ruben) certainly is. And at first, writer’s block is what the writer/director in Ruben leads you to believe Scare Me is all about.

Fred takes a cab to a wintry cabin. He tries to dodge questions from his driver, who, like Fred, fancies herself a bit of a writer. A short time later, Fred stares at a laptop screen. He’s not typing.

A power outage and a chance encounter with “real writer” Fanny (Aya Cash) lead to an evening of telling scary stories. And just like that stormy night so long ago when Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley out-storied her companions Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, the male ego is more easily wounded than any fictional character.

At its best, Scare Me offers an intriguing look inside the mind of privilege. What is it like to be a decent-looking white guy who has to resolve himself to the fact that he actually has no claim to that top spot on the totem pole that he’s always been told is his?

At its worst, it’s an overlong bit of self-indulgence.

As Fred’s nemesis/love interest(?)/frenemy Fanny, Cash is straightforward, merciless, funny and full of insight—as is Ruben’s script. Scare Me has no time for entitled, lazy writers.

For any of the real tensions of the film to work, we have to recognize and, to a degree, empathize with—even root for—Fred. Thanks to a smart script and an eerily recognizable performance, we do.

Ruben does an excellent job of wading those familiar waters, sort of likable and loathsome, sympathetic and toxic. Fred is kind of a good guy, or he sees himself as a good guy. Of course, he also sees himself as a writer.

The film hits its high (pun intended) when pizza guy Carlo  (SNL’s Chris Redd) joins the storytelling. It’s not quite enough to save a second act that simply goes on for too long. But a bloated midriff doesn’t spoil Scare Me entirely, a savvy piece of storytelling in itself.

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Bold Patterns

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Spiral

by Hope Madden

How many films, horror or otherwise, open as a moving van leaves a fresh faced family unpacking in their new dream home? Kurtis David Harder and his new Shudder thriller Spiral welcome you to the neighborhood.

What feels like your typical suburban paranoia film, this time given a fresh coat of paint with the introduction of a same-sex couple at its center, turns out to be something else entirely.

Even as Malik (Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman) and Aaron (Ari Cohen) try to convince Aaron’s teenaged daughter Kayla (Jennifer Laporte) that she really won’t miss the big city, Malik is seeing some things around the cul-de-sac that worry him.

But Aaron isn’t ready to believe the neighbors are homophobes (or racists, for that matter, even if Tiffany across the street assumed Malik was the gardener).

Spiral quickly falls into a very familiar pattern. Malik, who works at home as a writer, begins to let his research get the better of him. Writer’s block has him paranoid—or maybe there’s a trauma in his past that’s to blame? Is he really seeing something strange in his neighbors’ windows? Is Aaron right, did he go overboard with that new home security system?

It sounds familiar—so much so that the film sometimes just figures your brain will fill in blanks left open.  And while Spiral’s internal logic is never air tight, screenwriters Colin Minihan (It Stains the Sands Red, What Keeps You Alive) and John Poliquin are more interested in bigger patterns. Their social allegory doesn’t achieve the breathless thrills of Get Out, but Spiral swims similar waters.

The filmmakers see patterns in political hatred and the continuing reaffirmation of the status quo, and those patterns are horrifying. While horror has always been an opportunity for the collective unconscious to deal with social anxiety in a safely distant way, Spiral is less interested in creating that comforting fictional buffer. It’s as if the filmmakers want you to see the holes in their plot so you’re more able to see the nonfiction it’s based on.

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Shed’s Dead, Baby

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The Shed

by Hope Madden

The 2008 film Deadgirl tested me. Boasting solid performances across the board, it told of a bullied teen who pined for the bully’s girlfriend. He and his even more damaged best friend find a monster, which one sees as a curse and the other sees as a gift. The resulting 95 minutes took me three tries to complete, not because it was scary or gross or troubling, but because it was unwatchably hateful.

Co-writer/director Frank Sabatella builds The Shed on similar terrain.

Stan (Jay Jay Warren), still stuck on his middle school crush Roxy (Sofia Happonen), is in trouble at school, with the sheriff’s department, and with his abusive grandfather, not to mention the local bullies—who have a real field day with his best friend Dommer (Cody Kostro).

So far so familiar, but Sabatella zigs when you think he’ll zag in a couple of important ways. The monster in question—that thing stuck in the shed, at least until sundown—used to be his neighbor, Mr. Bane (Frank “Big Brain on Brad” Whaley, nice to see you).

What Sabatella mines with just a handful of excellent, tense, gory scenes is a certain isolated, rural anxiety. He mixes childhood terrors with adolescent angst with smalltown rebellion with something aching and lonely. All of it, in these few scenes, speaks to something authentic in terms of wrong-side-of-the-tracks coming of age.

Everything else is borrowed, from the Night of the Living Dead and Fright Night, that old Michael Fassbender Nazi zombie thing Cold Creek and, of course, the morally bankrupt Deadgirl. Maybe just a touch of Stakeland.

Still, it’s fun.

Kostro is particularly effective as the best friend who’s far more f’ed up than Stan realizes and Warren offers a strong emotional center to the film. There are about a dozen too many nightmare sequences and the end is simply nonsense, but for horror fans, it’s not a bad time.

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So Random

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Random Acts of Violence

by Hope Madden

The last time I saw Jesse Williams get into a car on a road trip to horror, the journey delivered one of the most fun flicks of 2011, Cabin in the Woods.

He’s back on the road in co-writer/director/co-star Jay Baruchel’s graphic novel adaptation, Random Acts of Violence. Williams plays Todd, creator of the adult comic series Slasherman.

Though writer’s block is keeping him from finishing the final installment, Todd hits the road with his publisher Ezra (Baruchel), assistant Aurora (Niahm Wilson), and girlfriend Kathy, played by Jordana Brewster. (Brewster also starred in a road trip to hell—for character and viewer—with the 2006’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning.)

Their goal is to visit the landmarks associated with the comic’s inspiration, the gruesome serial killer dubbed the I-90 killer who terrorized a stretch of highway from 1987 – 1991. Todd and Ezra hope to drum up some publicity for their comic con appearances. Kathy is researching her own related project, a nonfiction and victim-centric book about the same killer.

The film lands on ground fertile for horror examination. Most interesting and timely is the conversation around perspective. Are we beyond the point as a society where we make the serial killer our protagonist when we can instead take the point of view of the victim? (The popularity of the book and series I’ll Be Gone in the Dark suggests that we may be.)

Too bad the film relegates this conversation to a single argument: men create horror and women hate that; meanwhile, women create something more wholesome. (Counterpoint: much of the best horror of the last decade was made by women, and if it’s gruesome you want, please see Julia Ducournau’s fantastic 2016 rumination on adolescence and meat, Raw.)

The film does boast moments of provocative carnage, plus flashes of intriguing content. Rather than the traditional creepiness inspired by the Midwest rural route gas station—the isolated community somehow suggesting incest and cannibalism without every directly saying so—Baruchel conjures the far more realistic and modern blight of meth to achieve the same unhealthy atmosphere.

Never a particularly compelling presence, Williams lacks the gravitas to shoulder the suffering artist schtick and Brewster’s presence doesn’t elevate the tensions. Both Baruchel (an outstanding purveyor of nerdy support in any cast) and the tenderly engaging Wilson offset this lack of chemistry in their brief screen time, but it’s not enough.

Random Acts of Violence could have been an interesting indictment of the true crime phenomenon. It might have been an intriguing entry into the Writer’s Block Turns Horrific family (of which The Shining is patriarch). Instead, it’s a mainly competent but frequently lazy flick with gore to spare and some fun animations, but it could have been a lot more.

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Cry Little Sister

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La Llorona

by Hope Madden

Another timely Shudder original plays upon the madness that can creep into a period of lockdown. The righteous anger of a population, the chanting and signs, corruption in the government—that all seems pretty of-the-moment, too, but this isn’t Portland. This is Guatemala, and if you think the context seems familiar, you should hear the title: La Llorona.

But co-writer/director Jayro Bustamante’s indigenous horror bears little resemblance to Michael Chaves’s middling 2019 effort (which was partly salvaged by a solid-as-always turn from Linda Cardellini). Instead, Bustamante retools the Latin American ghost story of the weeping woman to spin a yarn of righteous vengeance.

La Llorona takes us inside the home of a war criminal (Julio Diaz). El General’s home is on lockdown since his conviction was overturned. Angry Guatemalan citizens, and especially members of the Kaqchikel people most terrorized by his bloodlust, protest outside the door all hours of the day and night.

Inside, the General, his bitter wife (Margarita Kenéfic), their doctor daughter (Sabrina De La Hoz), her daughter (Ayla-Elea Hurtado), and two female servants (María Mercedes Coroy and María Telón) begin to crumble under the tensions.

Bustamante’s film is a slow boil as interested in those who’ve tacitly accepted evil as it is in those who’ve committed it. What goes unsaid weighs as heavily as what happens in front of us. Impressively, this is also the first horror film in decades to make truly effective use of a dream sequence.

The fact that justice, however slowly, comes in the form of generations of women is understated perfection.

Justice springs from compassion, which requires empathy—which sometimes depends upon courage and selflessness. No tears necessary.

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Zoom and Gloom

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Host

by Hope Madden

It was bound to happen, and no doubt the inanely titled Host is the first in a succession of films to tap into quarantine and pandemic frustrations to fuel horror. The fact that co-writer/director Rob Savage employs found footage for his of-the-moment horror show seems even more obvious.

Sometimes, though, it’s the most obvious choices that work out. Savage taps into the real emotional gap between face-to-face and virtual relationships as a handful of mates jump on a Zoom meeting for a bit if fun.

Separated because of lockdown, the buddies decide to create an event: an online séance. Haley (Haley Bishop) is hoping her friends will be respectful of the medium Seylan (Seylan Baxter), but those hopes are dashed when Teddy (Edward Linard) convinces the group to do a shot every time Seylan says “astro plane.”

“It’s astral plane,” Haley sighs.

Naturally, their irreverence is repaid.

Savage treads the same aesthetic as The Den or Unfriended: Dark Web, but in many ways his effort is even more successful—perhaps because it speaks so articulately to our immediate condition. Host is incredibly simple and spooky in the way that it exploits our isolation and the vulnerability that comes with that.

And while the medium itself is hardly groundbreaking and is sometimes irritating, Savage takes advantage of the limitations of found footage horror. The likability of the characters help you suspend disbelief during the portions where they’d clearly have put down the damn computer, and because the film manages to keep your interest, you get to enjoy the spook house effects. A lot of these jump scares are old school fun.

Lean and mean, running a brisk 56 minutes, the film doesn’t busy itself too much with why or how or really even what. Instead it quickly upends our new normal with old fashioned scares.

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In Search of a Purpose

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In Search of Darkness

by Hope Madden

The first thing you know about Shudder’s new original doc In Search of Darkness is that it’s an encyclopedic look at horror movies from the Eighties.

The second thing you need to know is that it’s 4 hours and 20 minutes long.

Right?!!

Why filmmaker David A. Weiner decided this had to be a standalone doc rather than a short series is beyond me. Certainly you can (and no doubt will) pause the film and come back to it, which is simple enough to do with Shudder. Still, having devoted about 1/3 of my waking day to a single documentary, I feel as if I should have learned more about Eighties horror than I did.

The bright spots: Tom Atkins is as delightful as you hope he is, as, of course, is Barbara Crampton. John Carpenter and Larry Cohen are as curmudgeonly; Keith David’s saucy baritone makes every anecdote extra fun; Alex Winter makes some interesting connections between films and society at large; and some of the industry insider talking heads seem knowledgeable.

There’s no real rhyme or reason to the specific titles discussed, but more problematic is the superficial treatment of the genre. In four and a half hours, I should have learned something, should have heard of a movie I’d never known about. In Search of Darkness refuses to connect any dots.

Some of the asides about VHS cover art, for instance, are briefly interesting, but other such tangents only emphasize the film’s overall weaknesses. The discussion of the final girl or of gratuitous nudity in 80s horror lacks any kind of insight, but when the piece on horror soundtracks did not mention Goblin, it dawned on me that in early 4 ½ hours, not a single foreign title is discussed.

No Argento, no Fulci, no Deodado – niente.

A ninety minute doc that contents itself with a nostalgic traipse down VHS store aisles would be fun. A doc series that contextualizes the phenomenal explosion in the popularity of horror in the Eighties, digging into sexism, feminism, foreign titles, changing music, the Reagan influence, the impact of VHS and MTV – that would be amazing. In Search of Darkness is neither.

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Skin Trade

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Impetigore

by George Wolf

In a remote Indonesian village, a garden of small headstones marks the effectiveness of a Shaman’s curse. Newborn after newborn dies, the one survivor growing to endure a mysterious, painful existence.

Creepy, right?

Shudder’s Impetigore scores some definite points there, which help to offset a narrative often hampered by convenience and confusion.

Maya (Tara Basro) and Dini (Marissa Anita) are best friends trying to make a go of it in the city. With no family to speak of, they scrape by with menial jobs while dreaming of a better future.

Though raised by her aunt, Maya learns of a spacious home left behind by her wealthy parents. Maya could very well lay claim to this valuable property through inheritance, so she and Dini make their way to the remote village, unaware of the curse and their place in it.

Writer/director Joko Anwar (Satan’s Slaves), an Indonesian genre veteran, seems to know he’s got some solid benchmarks here while not worrying too much about the strength of what binds them together.

Dialogue can range from awkward to WTF-worthy, amid a few convenient plot turns and one humdinger of extended curse explanation that strains coherence.

But when Anwar hits his creepy marks, Impetigore can leave one. The atmospheric isolation in the village feels authentic, and once blood begins letting, the tension is well-paced, bolstered with some satisfying visual payoffs.

There will be eyerolls, but if you’re keeping score, also enough frightful eyebrow-raising to make Impetigore a winning dive into twisted family values.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RfEwT2LI2M