Tag Archives: bad horror movies

Fright Club: Skeletons in the Closet, 2025

January 28, 2025 maddwolf Leave a comment

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Maybe our favorite podcast of the year, the annual celebration of all the terrible horror movies that the new crop of Oscar nominees might just want you to forget they ever made. But will we? Never!

Happy to see so much horror appreciated this year: The Substance, Nosferatu, Alien: Romulus. But that’s for another podcast. Today, let’s pry open some closets and see what’s festering in there.

5. Sebastian Stan: The Apparition (2012)

Yawntastic! Ben (Stan) participates in a college experiment with Patrick (Tom Felton), who believes that if you believe hard enough in a spirit even if you know it doesn’t exist, it suddenly will exist.

And if that’s not dumb enough, it will also reappear suddenly many years later. And also hunt you down even if you’re far away, haven’t believed in it again, or I don’t know? And it turns into mold? Because it’s affected by energy? Or something? And it doesn’t like camping? Or it does?

Here’s what I know for sure. It’s boring as hell.

4. Guy Pearce: The Seventh Day (2021)

You know what every Guy Pearce fan should see? You should see Ravenous. It’s so good! Scary, tense, weird in the best way. You know what you probably shouldn’t see? The Seventh Day.

First of all, Justin P. Lange’s follow up to his underseen gem The Dark with an exorcism movie. Yawn. Then he goes on to waste real talent—Keith David and Stephen Lang. Pearce plays a legendary, no-frills, even controversial and brackish exorcist who’s taken on a trainee. But all is not what it seems and none of it’s very interesting. There’s a kind of intriguing premise hidden underneath all the boring whatnot, but it does seem like Pearce is trying to elevate the material.

3. Adrien Brody: Giallo (2009)

Dario Argento made some incredible films. Giallo is not one of them. It fits squarely into the uninspired, visually bland, poorly plotted output we saw from him post-Opera.

Adrien Brody, in duel roles, didn’t seem to care for the film, either. He used the pseudonym Byron Deidra, but you’ll know it’s him. Both times. There was a time when Argento’s films were so stylish, so visually arresting and gloriously weird that no one cared how silly the plot was. But rob a film of that panache and the borrowed, bland, dumb plotting is hard to miss.

Brody’s no stranger to horror, and while none of these are masterpieces, all but Giallo is decent: Wrecked, Predators, Splice, The Jacket, The Summer of Sam. We’re obligated to mention The Village, too, although we’re not fans.

2. Isabella Rossellini: Infected (2008)

What on earth was the tortured ingenue in the masterpiece Blue Velvet doing in Adam Weissman’s 2008 made-for-TV contagion/alien invasion flick? She’s great, actually, and her big-reveal scene is no doubt the reason she took the role. It’s inadvertently hilarious.

Judd Nelson co-stars. He may have been actively in a coma. But it’s worth it just to see Rossellini’s big scene. It’s on YouTube and dailymotion—wouldn’t want you to pay for it!

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2612003353/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk

1. Demi Moore: Parasite (1982)

Friend of the show Charles Band directed this treasure of low rent cinema. Demi Moore stars ad spunky, lemon loving Pat in a post apocalyptic desert town. “Sickies” run wild, often topless. Work camp escapees are even worse. Still, somehow Pat trusts the stranger (Robert Glaudini), a doctor who used to create parasites for the government and is now infected with one. She’s just helpful like that.

Moore does not embarrass herself, and that’s tough given the terrible writing and stiff scene partner. Best part is the creature, which we believe inspired the look of the beast in Killer Condom. High praise!

New In Theaters

Into the Woods

January 8, 2016 maddwolf Leave a comment

The Forest

by Hope Madden

I like a good twin movie as much as the next guy – probably more – but let’s be clear. The Forest is not a good twin movie. It’s not a good movie at all.

Through her freaky twin telepathy, Sara (Natalie Dormer: Hunger Games, Game of Thrones) knows something’s wrong with her sister Jess, living in Japan. She knows she’s alive and in danger, although the authorities calling to verify Jess’s missing person status believe she is dead because she’s gone alone into the suicide forest on Mount Fuji.

Well, off to Japan Sara goes, to enter the forest alone, stray from the path, see ghosts, listen to the advice of creepy school girls who appear in the middle of the forest at night (because there’s nothing at all suspicious about that), and just generally make bad choices.

Every individual has specific buttons horror movies can push. Some people are afraid of clowns, some of enclosed spaces. Some of us have a pathological terror of the woods. Some of the same of us have a twin sister. So, the idea of getting lost in the dark in a forest full of angry ghosts and ghouls as you hunt desperately for your twin sister – well, for some of us, these are buttons that should make it really easy for a movie to be scary.

Here’s what I’m saying – I am the audience for this movie, and it was as scary as an episode of Three’s Company.

Dormer’s performance is far more lifeless than those stiffs hanging from the trees, and director Jason Zada’s overreliance on jump scares and inability to develop atmosphere guarantee a tedious walk in the woods.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi1wU872I-I

New In Theaters

Sarcrapagus

December 6, 2014 maddwolf Leave a comment

The Pyramid

by Hope Madden

The Pyramid could not have better timing. Had the film been released just a few weeks later it would missed its opportunity to rank among the very worst films of 2014.

To be fair, a really good creature feature is incredibly difficult to make, so you can hardly blame first time director Gregory Levasseur for not even trying. Instead he’s crafted a The Descent knock off that can’t rise above the caliber of a late night, made for cable TV movie.

His Egyptian horror sees a father and daughter archeologist team and the documentarians who want to film their discovery – a mysterious pyramid sitting hundreds of feet below the desert sands.

The bickering parent and child are played by American Horror Story’s Denis O’Hare and bad actress Ashley Hinshaw, respectively (but not respectably). That Hinshaw plays an archeologist seems less ludicrous only if you remember that Denise Richards played nuclear physicist Dr. Christmas Jones in The World is Not Enough. But at least that was back when the Bond films embraced their campy awfulness. The Pyramid is just awful.

O’Hare serves an unseemly purpose in his American Horror Story roles, but he’s not a strong enough actor to elevate this dreck. Hinshaw’s worse, and Christa Nicola is community theater bad as the documentarian risking life and cameraman for that elusive Emmy.

The only castmate to acquit himself with any level of respectability is former Inbetweener James Buckley, who still struggles mightily with this script.

An aside: When you’re writing a screenplay and you’ve trapped all your characters with unnamed beasties in a labyrinthine catacomb hundreds of feet below the earth’s surface, you may want to limit your use of the lines “we have to get out of here” and “we need to find a way out of here” to fewer than 200 instances apiece. It sort of goes without saying.

Oh, yes, and the beasties – if you squint and pretend they are ill-conceived but earnest odes to Ray Harryhausen and not simply weak, uninspired, fake looking props … Basically, it’s just too much work to have to pretend they don’t suck. Like the movie itself. It’s best just to accept it.

Maddwolf