Tag Archives: horror movies

New In Theaters

Content Re-creator

Leave a comment

Faces of Death

by George Wolf

It’s almost quaint now to remember the word-of-mouth infamy achieved by the original Faces of Death in 1978. By the mid-80s it was a cult favorite at the video store, with a lurid promise to unveil shocking video of real fatalities.

Though the non-stock footage was faked (yes, even the monkey scene), hyperbolic stories of the film’s effect continued to gain traction and the sequels were cranked out.

This new Faces is not one of those. Writer/director Daniel Goldhaber smartly brings that pre-viral legend into the internet age, tucking the bloody hunt for a serial killer inside the dulling nature of modern-day voyeuristic fetishes.

Barbie Ferreira stars as Margot, who works as a website content moderator for a company promising to protect “the young and innocent.” Though she occasionally flags a video for violations, most make it through – which is just how her manager prefers it. But when Margot sees some videos of murders that look alarmingly real, it sets her off on the trail of a killer (Dacre Montgomery) intent on recreating scenes from the original Faces of Death.

Though employees at Margot’s firm are strongly discouraged from researching the videos they moderate, she begins sleuthing. What Margot finds, of course, is an internet audience eager for the brutality, and online footprints that aren’t difficult for a tech savvy psycho to follow.

Stupid decisions (especially by young people) are a staple of horror films, and Margot makes a maddening amount. But Goldhaber (How to Blow Up a Pipeline) is able to mirror most of them alongside the questionable bargains we’ve made as a web-obsessed society.

“It’s an attention economy, and business is booming.”

Our killer (Montgomery gives him both Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon vibes) knows his audience, and Goldhaber gives the funny games he plays with both his victims and Margot a nice sense of tension. Sure, you may want to slap some sense into most of these people, but then again, is your own browser history MENSA worthy?

The rough patches in the story go down easier thanks to the savvy, in-the-moment winks Goldhaber flashes while telling it.

Why has the explosion of technology that holds so much positive potential continued to reveal the worst parts of ourselves? If you give the people what they want, how culpable are the people that want it?

Michael Haneke may have asked the question more eloquently, but Goldhaber and Faces of Death have more trashy, finger-wagging fun.

Fright Club

Fright Club: Teenage Vampires in Horror Movies

Leave a comment

Those teenage years can be beastly! A lot of vampire movies channel the alienation, hormones, angst and general misbehavior into a cautionary tale about teeth. Here are some of our favorites.

5. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)

Back in ’92, Rutger Hauer and Paul Reubens played vampires (thank you!) bent on draining a California town. But one superficial mean girl at the local high school happens to be the Chosen One, the Slayer, or so says Donald Sutherland, and it generally seems like a fine idea to listen to him. Kristy Swanson then flirts with Luke Perry while training to stake some bloodsuckers.

Swanson is joined by Ben Affleck and Hilary Swank as vacuous teens in a highly dated but no less fun horror comedy. Reubens was a huge inspiration for our own short film Drunkula. Plus, anytime you crown Rutger Hauer prom king, you can count us in.

4. The Lost Boys (1987)

Out and proud Hollywood director Joel Schumacher spins a yarn of Santa Carla, a town with a perpetual coastal carnival and the nation’s highest murder rate. A roving band of cycle-riding vampires haunts the carnival and accounts for the carnage, until Diane Weist moves her family to town. While hottie Michael (Jason Patric) is being seduced into the demon brethren, younger brother Sam (Corey Haim) teams up with local goofballs the Frog brothers (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander) to stake all bloodsuckers.

Michael’s a recent high school grad, and the coven of vampires seems to also be allegedly the same roundabout age. Certainly Sam and the Frog Brothers would be high school age, although none of them turn. (Spoiler!)

What’s most fun about this movie is how gloriously gay it is, from the “will he or won’t he” chemistry between Michael and David to Sam’s Rob Lowe poster to the grinding sax man, Schumacher’s film finds sexuality in the vampire tale that swings.

3. Fright Night (1985)

Fright Night takes that Eighties, Goonies-style adventure (kids on an adult-free quest of life and death) and uses the conceit to create something tense and scary, and a bit giddy as well. The feature debut as both writer and director for Tom Holland, the film has some sly fun with the vampire legend.

Roddy McDowall got much deserved love at the time for his turn as a washed-up actor from horror’s nostalgic past, and Chris Sarandon put his rich baritone to campy, sinister use.

Still, everyone’s favorite character was Evil Ed, the manic, pitiful loser turned bloodsucking minion. Credit Stephen Geoffreys for an electric and, at least in one scene, heartbreaking performance.

2. My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To (2020)

Making an unnervingly assured feature film debut, writer/director Jonathan Cuartas commingles The Transfiguration’s image of lonely, awkward adolescence with Relic’s horror of familial obligation to create a heartbreaking new vampire tale.

Many things are left unsaid (including the word “vampire’), and My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To confines itself to the daily drudgery of three siblings. Dwight (Patrick Fugit) longs to break these family chains, but sister Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram) holds him tight with shame, love, and obligation to little brother, the afflicted Thomas (Owen Campbell).

What could easily have become its own figurative image of the masculine longing for freedom mines far deeper concerns. Cuartas weaves loneliness into that freedom, tainting the concept of independence with a terrifying, even dangerous isolation that leaves you with no one to talk to and no way to get away from yourself.

1. The Transfiguration (2016)

Milo likes vampire movies.

So, it would seem, does writer/director Michael O’Shea, whose confident feature debut shows us the relationship between the folklore and the life of a forlorn high school outcast.

Eric Ruffin plays Milo, a friendless teen who believes he is a vampire. What he is really is a lonely child who finds solace in the romantic idea of this cursed, lone predator. But he’s committed to his misguided belief.

O’Shea’s film borrows ideas from George Romero’s Martin, Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In, and openly gushes over Murnau’s Nosferatu.  Inside and out, the film draws on the best in vampire cinema to help Milo deal with a world in which he is a freak no matter what he decides to do.

New In Theaters

Who Has Ears to Hear, Let Him Hear

Leave a comment

Undertone

by Hope Madden

Ian Tuason’s paranormal podcast feature Undertone offers a lot of reasons to be impressed. It’s a single location shoot, and almost a one-hander. Aside from a catatonic mother (Michéle Duquet) and a variety of voices, Nina Kiri is on her own.

Kiri plays Evy, who is recording her paranormal podcast Undertone from her dying mother’s house. Evy’s been staying at Mom’s for a while now, and if she’s honest about it, she’d like it to just be over with. Evy’s waiting for the death rattle.

She loves Mama, but the relationship is thorny with Catholic guilt and shame. We sense this more than see it as Tuason crowds his set design with Catholic iconography. It’s a busy if impressive set, and Tuason makes great use of it with fascinating camera work. He uses mainly stationary cameras, often set off-angle so they feel more like a voyeur’s or ghost’s point of view, or even a security camera. The movement reinforces that sense. On the rare occasion that the camera does move, it does so in an obviously mechanical way that even more closely resembles security footage.

This gives the film a Paranormal Activity vibe—fitting, as Tuason is slated to write and direct the next installment in the found footage franchise.

But Undertone is less about what you see and more about what you hear. The somewhat oppressive sound design is intentional, of course, and frequently effective.

Kiri delivers a heroic performance. Not only has she no conscious actor to react to, but the vast majority of her performance is simply Evy, in headphones, listening to something.

The film falls apart at the story level. Evy and her podcast co-host Justin (voiced by Adam DiMarco) decide to listen to a set of 10 audio files emailed to them anonymously. The files conjure up something supernatural that, combined with Evy’s isolated, spooky, guilt-laden environment, starts affecting her headspace.

But the sound files and podcast are silly. The mythology within the house—Evy’s relationship with Catholicism and her mother, the demonic yarn being revealed by the audio files—none of it comes together into a coherent horror story. And worst of all, nothing happens.

Undertone is an impressive technical achievement but the story’s just not there.

Shudder Premiere

The Camera Never Lies

Leave a comment

Bodycam

by George Wolf

Take the frenetic desperation of The Blair Witch Project‘s final minutes, move it to a more urban battleground and layer it with plenty of first-person shooter sequences, and you’re in the ballpark of Bodycam, director Brandon Christensen’s shaky cam shakedown of two cops and one very bad choice.

Officer Bryce (Sean Rogerson) and officer Jackson (Jamie M. Callica) respond to a domestic dispute, and we follow along thanks to their bodycams. The house is dark and plenty creepy, and things escalate to the point of a fatal shooting. The possible fallout spurs Bryce to panic.

He has too much to lose for this situation to go public and convinces Jackson to help him cover up what happened. But when a techie colleague tries to scrub the cam footage, she notices some strange graffiti on the wall, and realizes it’s already too late to keep the killing a secret.

At least from certain, very scary people.

Uh oh. Bryce and Jackson are in for a bad time.

Christensen (Night of the Reaper, Z, Superhost, The Puppetman), co-writing again with his brother Ryan, doesn’t waste any time getting down to nasty business. And once the 75-minute film hits the midway point, the bloody fun is amped up a notch or three as the two cops come to grips with the promise of retribution for their actions.

“Why couldn’t you have done the right thing?”

In today’s climate, that question from one cop to another carries some serious weight. And though the implications are clear, Christensen is more committed to the repercussions.

Bodycam dishes them out in frenzied, crowd-pleasing glory.

Shudder Premiere

La Vida Loca

Leave a comment

Crazy Old Lady

by Hope Madden

In a provocative and assuredly nuanced riff on the old hagsploitation genre so popular in the Sixties and Seventies, Martín Mauregui’s Crazy Old Lady dares you to look away.

The agist, often misogynistic originators of the genre—What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, Straight-Jacket—eventually made way for more thoughtful, but no less terrifying, meditations on the horrors that await us all. The heartbreaking nature of dementia in Natalie Erika James’s Relic and Adam Robitel’s The Taking of Deborah Logan struck a nerve.

Crazy Old Lady traps us in a home with a dementia sufferer who’s stopped taking medication and has embraced a violent unreality. But Marengui, an Argentinian filmmaker, is less interested in what the future holds as what the past hides.

The great Carmen Maura is Alicia. Alicia has her daughter Laura (Augistina Liendo) worried. By the third time Alicia calls Laura inside of ten minutes, always asking for the same recipe, Laura panics. Hundreds of miles from home with no one else to turn to, she phones her ex-boyfriend Pedro (Daniel Hendler) with a desperate request: stay with Alicia until Laura can get back home tomorrow morning.

Pedro complies. But he’s not Pedro to Alicia. He’s Cesar, her first love, an abusive man with whom Alicia shared dark, even brutal secrets.

Mauregui takes a Death and the Maiden approach to the balance of the film. The result is a profoundly uncomfortable, breathtakingly performed exhumation of the kind of dark past that refuses to stay buried in the garden.

“People disappeared every day back then,” Alicia casually recalls.

Through most of the film’s runtime, we’re alone with Alicia and Pedro. Maura’s masterful performance hardly comes as a surprise. Broken, seductive, self-righteous, naïve, sinister—the veteran weaves from one tone to the next with alarming flexibility.

Hendler keeps pace. There is such humanity in his performance, confusion and terror and, most heartbreakingly, empathy. It’s a beautiful, aching turn. Though both actors are aided immeasurably by Mauregui’s deft writing, their chemistry and deeply felt performance elevate the film far beyond its genre trappings.

Mauregui builds tension, delivers unexpected shocks, and lets his exceptional cast compel your attention. Despite its exploitation title, Crazy Old Lady delivers a gripping tale.

New In Theaters

Play Thing

Leave a comment

Dolly

by Hope Madden

Fans of Savage Seventies Cinema, rejoice. Filmmaker Rod Blackhurst channels The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Tourist Trap, and even a little bit of Ted Post’s 1973 freak show The Baby for his wooded horror, Dolly.

Macy (Fabianne Therese) and Chase (Seann William Scott) hike through the woods to a breathtaking overlook where Chase will pop the question. But they probably should have turned back at the first sign of those baby dolls nailed to the trees.

Soon enough, they meet Dolly (Max the Impaler, that’s quite a name), an enormous person whose whole noggin is hidden inside a cracked ceramic doll’s head. Dolly has a shovel, puts it to unusual use, and soon enough it’s just Dolly and her new baby, Macy, back at Dolly’s house.

Blackhurst nails the look and vibe of a 70s grindhouse horror show. And it’s not just tone, it’s also the content. Dolly gets nasty. Blackhurst intends to horrify you far more than frighten you. Whether it’s blood or body fluids or rancid food stuffs or broken bones that trip your gag reflex, he’s aiming to find it.

Ethan Suplee—you remember, the happy singing football player from Remember the Titans–cuts a far more intimidating presence as Daddy, and you can’t help but wonder about the backstory here at Dolly’s place. Kudos to Blackhurst, who co-writes with Brandon Weavil, for keeping it ambiguous.

Yes, if it’s an indie Seventies horror aesthetic you’re after, and logic and common sense are of less importance, then Dolly is for you. But if you crave one single scene of realistic behavior, the movie comes up short.

Therese can’t be blamed. She does what she can, her attempts at carving a heroic character are in and of themselves heroic. But Macy’s every action is made exclusively to further the plot and never, ever to create a believable character. If you have a tough time watching a person constantly abandoning weapons along with common sense, this film will frustrate you.

The excellent grindhouse violence and style are only equaled by the utter and distressing ridiculousness of the plot. So, even Steven, I guess.

New In Theaters

C’est Ce Se

Leave a comment

Psycho Killer

by Hope Madden

Gavin Polone’s Psycho Killer had one strike against it going in, for me. The film takes us along for the ride on the Satanic Slasher’s cross-country killing spree.

And while James Preston Rogers cuts an impressive figure as the serial killer at the center of this cat and mouse chase, a Satanic murderer is a conservative straw dog cliché as tired and damaging as witches, maybe worse.

That aside, Polone, working from a script by Andrew Kevin Walker (Se7en, The Killer, Metalocaplyse: Army of the Doomstar), crafts a taut thriller.

Georgina Campbell (Barbarian) is Trooper Jane Archer. After witnessing her husband’s murder, Archer determines to take the shot she missed and put an end to the Satanic Slasher.

Campbell delivers a properly heroic performance. Smart, driven, and with an aggressive lack of cooperation from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies but nothing to divide her attention, Archer figures out the psycho’s trajectory.

And though her story involves one almost inescapable cliché, having a woman play the cop who misses the shot that could save their spouse and then, job be damned, scours the country to kill the bastard—it’s a nice gender role reversal.

The villain’s concept impresses: the hair, the mask, the coats, the voice. His mythology is sometimes clunky, other times lazy, but it’s rarely the backstory that makes a villain memorable. This guy’s creepy.

Logan Miller offers solid support with limited screentime. Likewise, Malcolm McDowell lends his unmistakably infernal voice to great effect, providing the film with a bit of dramatic flourish. But otherwise, Psycho Killer blends police procedural and revenge flick with plenty of tension and not a lot of fanfare.

There’s fairly little onscreen violence. Though an awful lot of grisly carnage is mentioned, there are only a few scenes in the film depicting it. Two of them are grimly subversive and worth the ticket price.

The third act comes seems to come from nowhere, but it’s a big capper to the slow building momentum of the Slasher’s bloody journey. Psycho Killer isn’t perfect, but it’s a tight, entertaining bit of a thrill.

New In Theaters

Monster-in-Law

Leave a comment

The Dreadful

by Hope Madden

Have you ever seen Kaneto Shindô’s1964 masterpiece Onibaba? Dude, you should!

Writer/director Natasha Kermani’s latest film, The Dreadful, reteams Game of Thrones stars Sophie Turner and Kit Harington, alongside the flawless as ever Marcia Gay Harden, in a medieval retelling of the same Buddhist parable that inspired Shindô’s tale.

Turner is Anne, a pious young woman whose husband Seamus (Laurence O’Fuarain) has been called up to fight in 15th Century England. She lives on the outskirts of a tiny hamlet near the sea, in a hovel with her mother-in-law, Morwen (Harden).

Times are tough for the two women, and before too long, Morwen’s exploiting Anne’s naivete with ever darker schemes to earn money. But when Seamus’s friend returns home without him, Morwen sees a future without a son, without Anne, and with very little hope for survival.

Morwen tries to convince Anne that leaving her would be an unforgivable sin, damning Anne to hell. Out of the other side of her mouth, Morwen contends that the increasingly bloody criminal activity the women are involved in is, in fact, entirely forgivable.

Seamus’s friend Jago (Harington), the bearer of bad news, has other plans for Anne and they definitely do not include her mother-in-law. Because Kermani’s take on the parable sees Anne as the protagonist, the battle then is her own fight between piety, devotion and pity, and a second chance at love.

Unfortunately, Anne is an impossible character. There is no conceivable logic to a choice to stay with Morwen, so no real conflict of any kind. While she seems to feel pity and some fear for her mother-in-law, she doesn’t seem to harbor any guilt for her own complicity in the crimes, or worry over punishment of any sort, criminal or spiritual.

If Turner never manages to convey a clear character, Kermani seems equally mystified. The final act of the film is unearned and unsatisfying.

It might be too much to hope for some of the visual majesty and honest to God horror of Shindô’s film, but Kermani can’t find her own way through the parable well enough to leave an impression.

You should definitely watch Onibaba, though.

New In Theaters

Point of No Return

Leave a comment

Return to Silent Hill

by Hope Madden

When I used to pick my son up from his dorm, invariably there was a video game on whether anyone was playing or not. Mainly it was badly articulated characters delivering stilted, unrealistic but wildly dramatic dialog on an endless loop because, with no one playing, there was no action.

I could also be describing Christophe Gans’s twenty-years-in-the-making sequel, Return to Silent Hill.

I did not care for the filmmaker’s 2006 Silent Hill, a film that followed a mother into a supernatural town to save her adopted daughter. The sequel, also based on the incredibly popular video game of the same name, follows a distraught man (James Sunderland) who returns to a supernatural town to save his girlfriend (Hannah Emily Anderson).

Gans’s original at least boasted Radha Mitchell, who can, in fact, act. Gans didn’t give her much opportunity, but she tried. Do not look for that here. Though it doesn’t seem that acting is what Gans is after. He lights and frames actors specifically to make them seem less fleshy, less human. Their movement is stiff and unnatural, their dialog stilted and dumb. You truly feel like you’re watching a video game you’re not playing. Nobody’s playing.

You would hope that in the 20 years between projects, the creature design would have improved. Not the case. You rarely get a good eyeball on any of the creatures—and the video game does have a slew of creepy beasties to choose from—and when you do see them, they’re bland and they do nothing.

Because nothing happens in this movie. The entire film feels like being trapped in the between action set ups of a video game that nobody is playing. Nothing happens. There is no action.

Somebody thought the storyline, sans shootouts, without monster carnage, just the storyline of a video game was interesting enough to make a movie out of. They were incorrect.

New In Theaters

Zulu Up in Here

Leave a comment

Night Patrol

by Hope Madden

Crime drama, social commentary, action flick, vampire movie—Night Patrol bites off a lot. But since director Ryan Prows and writers Tim Cairo, Jack Gibson and Shaye Ogbonna’s last teaming combined an organ harvesting crime caper with the life of a luchador, it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Night Patrol opens on a young man (RJ Cyler) bleeding from a weapon still poking out of his ribs. He’s in police custody, sitting across from a nonplussed LAPD officer (Nick Gillie), who’d like him to explain himself.

Prows then flashes back a couple of days, introducing the young man, the girl he loves, and the LA cops known as Night Patrol. What follows is an allegory about white supremacy dressed up as some kind of higher calling but behaving as bloodthirsty beasts.

Apt, particularly after what we all witnessed in Minneapolis last Wednesday night.

Justin Long co-stars as a cop looking to get to the bottom of whatever it is Night Patrol is up to, and he’ll go to some regrettable means to meet those ends. But he hopes to be remembered as “one of the good ones”.

It’s unfair to compare Prows’s film with the similarly themed Sinners because it’s unfair to compare any film at all with Ryan Coogler’s masterpiece. Prows’s ire is focused on the here and now, and probably bears a closer resemblance to Bomani J. Story’s 2023 film The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster as well as Remington Smith’s 2025 festival favorite LandLord.

The theme is clear-eyed and relevant: Systemic racism in the U.S. is monstrous, its willing participants are monsters.

Prows solicits game performances from Cyler, Long, and especially Nicki Micheaux who dominates every scene she’s in, as only her character could.

Where Night Patrol falters is in its wild mix of tones and genres. For all its bloodsucking, this is no horror film. The violence is action violence, but even that is sometimes lost in the loonier, funnier moments. The rival gang is preoccupied with supernatural entities, including Lizard Men, giving the film a bizarre sense of humor that doesn’t fully fit.

The hodgepodge approach to genre hampers its castmates—Cyler, in particular—from finding a suitable performing style. Long is custom designed for this character, and Micheaux elevates the material, but with no discernable genre, Night Patrol leaves you a little dizzy.