Tag Archives: Shudder

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The Passenger

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Hellcat

by Hope Madden

Writer/director Brock Bodell’s Hellcat keeps you guessing and intrigued with a tight premise, two locations, and a cast you can count on one hand.

Dakota Gorman is Lena, and she’s not having a good time. She’s awake, her head is spinning, her stomach is not right, and she’s moving. Unsure of how she got here, Lena’s in an Airstream, rolling down a highway to God-knows-where.

For the majority of Hellcat’s 91-minute runtime, Gorman is alone to throw fits, connive, sleuth, convulse, and rebel inside that camper. Physically alone, anyway. Over a sound system rigged to the pick-up hauling the thing is the voice of Clive (Todd Terry). Clive wants Lena to stay calm and stop busting up his home until he can get her to a doctor. She’s been infected, he says.

It’s a clever but simple premise, and the tensions and questions are mined well. Lena is quite sure she’s been drugged and kidnapped. Bodell drops well-timed hints and clues to keep you leaning one direction and then the other. Evidence suggests that Clive is not what he says he is, although there’s still some proof that maybe he’s not a villainous liar. It’s tough to know.

Gorman’s physical performance is impressive and grueling. She gives Lena a savvy, angry edge that makes you believe she’ll find or fight her way out of this.

Likewise, Terry makes you want to believe Clive.

The long, lonesome highway allows for some clever attempts at escape, and given your conflicting loyalties throughout, Bodell is not afraid to twist the knife.

As we head into the third act, things get a little contrived but weirdly, entertainingly so. The full backstory/mythology is never entirely articulated, which is a bit convenient given the direction things take. And the practical FX are slightly hokey.

But on the whole, Hellcat is lean, mean, and effective.  

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Dead of Winter

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The Yeti

by Hope Madden

The year is 1947. The location? The Alaska Territory.  A little expedition led by oil tycoon Merriell Sunday (Corbin Bernsen) has gone missing. Sunday’s son (Eric Nelson) mounts a search party, but it wasn’t oil his old man was after. It was something hairier.

The Yeti boasts a cast full of talent, Nelson, Bernsen, Brittany Allen, Jim Cummings, and William Sadler among them. And it’s a period, practical FX creature feature! I didn’t expect Godzilla Minus One, but I was hoping maybe for something as fun and interesting as last year’s Monster Island.

It actually reminded me a little bit more of Roseanne Liang’s 2020 creature feature Shadow in the Cloud for its retro vibe and girl power attitude.

Writers/directors Gene Gallerano and William Pisciotta buoy a soft script with their casting, and they hit a fun, hokey tone by mining the era for a newsreel vibe. The stagey sets, hard-boiled dialog, and practical FX are endearingly compelling.  The filmmakers are clearly going after a 40s B-movie feel without leaning parody, and it mainly works.

A couple of shots are beautifully lit, and every actor pulls their weight and then some.

As Sunday Jr.’s expedition hits some bloody snags and the horror of the story begins to gel, the script’s weaknesses start to really draw attention to themselves: forced backstory sharing, burdensome daddy issues, and plot holes that don’t get filled.

Naturally, like a werewolf movie, a yeti film lives and dies on creature design. Wayne Anderson’s design is solid. On occasion, the filmmakers seem unable to shoot, light, and edit the scenes for maximum impact/minimum “that’s a mask and a suit” disbelief. But the physical presence of the beast gives dimension to scenes. Plus, thank you for going practical instead of ruining the film and its throwback vibe with AI.  

In the end, a script that needed a couple more drafts keeps The Yeti from truly satisfying. It has its moments, though.

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Night, Mommy

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Nightborn

by Hope Madden

Finnish filmmaker Hanna Bergholm (Hatching) once again explores horrific maternal themes with Nightborn. Don’t confuse it with Neil Blomkamp’s soulless AI short film. This is not that.

Bergholm’s film stumbles into a classic Finnish folktale. Saga (Seidi Haarla) and her husband Jon (Rupert Grint) move to her grandmother’s old, long vacant home deep in the forest. Gran was a bit of an eccentric. She kept old junk—tractors, machinery, wire—around the property because the creatures in the woods hated cold iron.

What a nut!

Saga and Jon settle in to reclaim the cabin from the encroaching woods and to start their family. Jon is immediately besotted with little Christian regardless of how hairy he is. Saga can’t seem to bond with him, although she does try to find her place as a mother, first by asserting that his name is Kuura.

Bergholm’s film, co-written with Hatching writing partner Ilja Rautsi, takes us deep into a post-partum nightmare. While the film is far less original than Hatching, examining maternal horror from the mother’s perspective gives the film dimension.

Haarla looks and acts the part perfectly. Bergholm and Haarla work together to bend your expectations and sympathies. There is something wrong with this child and we’re as frustrated as Saga with the way she’s dismissed as being depressed and exhausted. The next minute, we see Saga as a narcissist whose personality disorder is now on display because she can’t find love in her heart for her baby. Then, clearly Saga is just delirious and exhausted and suffering from post-partum, all issues exacerbated by society’s demand that motherhood is precious and perfect.

Nightborn weaves these likelihoods without asking us to turn against anyone. The film empathizes with Saga, even when her behavior does seem too prickly. Likewise, we’re never asked to hate Jon—a good thing because Grint is endlessly sympathetic as a man who wants desperately to be a good dad and husband.

Though Nightborn is not perfect—the creature and baby effects leave a bit to be desired—its exploration is fascinating. Never tidy, never patronizing, but not quickly forgiving, the film embraces what’s monstrous in us. It’s not the complete success of Hatching, but it’s a vivid nightmare worth your time.

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Running to Stand Still

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Find Your Friends

by Hope Madden

I love Shudder. Truth is, Shudder is the only station I know how to find on our TV. I mean it. How I look forward to each new Shudder original! Happily, most of them live up to the excitement.

But every once in a while, you get a Find Your Friends.

Five unreasonably attractive and clearly alcoholic twentysomething besties wreak havoc on their livers and look good doing it. And screw the a’holes at this yacht party because these party bitches are headed to Joshua Tree to a better party followed by some desert tripping. Hell yeah!

I rarely stop watching a movie once I start it because it’s my job to finish the movie. I had to remind myself of this during Find Your Friends no fewer than four times before we even got to Joshua Tree.

We spend time with Amber (Helena Howard), Lavinia (Bella Thorne), Zosia (Zión Moreno), Lola (Chloe Cherry), and Maddy (Sophia Ali) twerking, doing shots, slapping each other’s asses, taking Molly, smoking joints, taking ‘shrooms, more shots, making out with strangers, driving wasted, saying “pussy” hundreds of times, talking incessantly about dick, and living as if we don’t exist in a country where you get away with rape but go to prison for defending yourself.

But that’s sort of writer/director Izabel Pakzad’s point, I suppose. That humans aggressively oblivious to their own safety still deserve safety, which is true. And that young women are often so frequently coerced and misused that they bond over it, joke about it, numb themselves to it. Also valid.

And that no women live in Joshua Tree at all. Only pick-up truck driving rapists and rifle carrying misogynists. This seems less accurate.

The heavy handedness of the film’s story and the one-dimensionality of its characters make it hard for Pakzad to build any momentum. There really is a story of female rage swimming beneath the sea of alcohol, but the story is so slight and the film so long and the climax so abrupt and the final shot so unearned that the message is tough to get behind.

The Screening Room

Screening Room: Devil Wears Prada 2, Hokum, Deep Water & More

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On this week’s Screening Room Podcast, Hope & George look at the new releases: The Devil Wears Prada 2, Hokum, Deep Water, Animal Farm, Swapped, Heresy, Salt Along the Tongue, and Didn’t Die. PLUS! The Schlocketeer Daniel Baldwin joins us with movie news & notes!

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Women Talking

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1000 Women in Horror

by Hope Madden

Shudder has produced some fascinating and enlightening documentaries about the genre they serve. Both the film Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror and the series Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror shine overdue light on the history of films and filmmakers genre lovers need to know.

In that vein comes Donna Davies’s 1000 Women in Horror. The doc is written for the screen by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, on whose nonfiction book it’s based. Longtime film critic and genre expert, Heller-Nicholas contributed brilliantly to Alexandre O. Phillipe’s 2024 Texas Chain Saw Massacre doc Chain Reactions, as well as Kier-La Janisse’s 2021 doc Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched. She knows her way around a horror documentary, is what I’m saying.

So does Davies, for that matter, whose 2009 TV doc Pretty Bloody: The Women of Horror swam similar waters.

The title is an intentional joke. As the film makes clear, women have been a driving creative force in horror films for more than a century. But the film doesn’t spend much time focusing on individual women as much as it does basic genre themes that relate to women: childbirth, the depiction of women on screen at different stages of their lives, and rape, for example.

We do hear from some powerful creators, though. Mary Harron (American Psycho), Nikyatu Jusu (Nanny), Jenn Wexler (The Sacrifice Game),Gigi Saul Guerrero (Bingo Hell) and loads more shed light on how women create and are reflected in horror cinema.

The interviews are sometimes fascinating and often ferocious. Kate Siegel expresses the conflict underlying childbirth in horror better than most could. Throughout, it’s such a joy to deconstruct certain tropes with women, to hear how these tropes—for better or worse—influenced these filmmakers.

A little more of a history lesson would have been appreciated. I’d love to have made myself a list of vintage horror and, more importantly, early pioneers to dig into after the film was through. But when I think of the number of documentaries on cinema I’ve seen over the decades that included solely the voices of men, having just one that asks the opinions of only women experts feels revolutionary in itself.

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La Vida Loca

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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

Found and Lost

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House on Eden

by Hope Madden

Can you watch a found footage horror film and not be constantly asking yourself, who edited this footage together? Who pulled from one camera, then another, spliced in security cam stuff? Who looked at all the footage from all the different cameras and decided what we would see when? And how did they get it all? And where did they go?

If it does not bother you, then it’s possible that you will enjoy writer/director Kris Collins’s House on Eden more than I did.

This found footage horror clings close to real life. Spooky content creators “KallMeKris” Collins, “celinaspookyboo” Celina Myers, and filmmaker Jason-Christopher Mayer play versions of themselves, social media handles and all. The trio is out to make a great video, not one of those boring videos everyone makes. So instead of going to the cemetery Celina has researched, Kris diverts the road trip to a house she found online that she’s sure no one has ever been to.

Sure. Because totally anonymous houses post themselves online.

And what’s the draw? Why is it spooky? Because maybe a girl went missing somewhere in the vicinity 60 years ago.

For context, wherever you are standing at this very second, some girl has gone missing from that spot in the last sixty years.

So, three youngsters break and enter into a beautiful, well-maintained home, not a speck of dust anywhere. But it’s really, really far away from everything else so surely, it must be abandoned.

That is to say, three people break into a well cared for, isolated home to unravel no mystery they know of in one of the more tedious, uninspired, lazily written found footage horror films in recent memory.

It’s not as if found footage can’t be done well, even the ghosthunter variety. Deadstream is epically watchable, funny and scary at the same time, and it maintains the integrity of found footage pretty well. My advice to you is to watch that instead.

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Sea Creature in Paradise

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Monster Island

by Hope Madden

Thanks in part to the success of Dan Trachtenberg’s 2022 Prey, period piece creature features have come into vogue. Nice!

Writer/director Mike Wiluan’s Monster Island (originally titled Orang Ikan) is the latest. In a case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” two men—a Japanese traitor (Dean Fujioka) and a British POW (Callum Woodhouse)—are shipwrecked on an island in the Pacific. That chain that binds them together at the ankle is not the biggest obstacle to their survival. Certainly not the toothiest. 

Neither man speaks the other’s language, which is another hurdle Wiluan uses wisely. Thanks to subtitles, we know what each man says, and the moments when they don’t understand each other offer more about the story Monster Island is telling than the action ever could.

That’s not to disrespect the action. This is a nicely edited b-movie, cut to create the most tumult and action possible given the circumstance (meaning, the budget and the big rubber suit).

And while some of the early shipboard explosion footage is clearly (and not very convincingly) created digitally, the monster is not. That’s a benefit and a curse. It’s not to say Orang Ikan, the name given to the big island beastie by an unlucky castaway, looks bad. It just looks a little bit borrowed, sort of Predator meets Rawhead Rex (that underbite!) meets Creature from the Black Lagoon. In terms of screentime, less would probably have been more.

But both Fujioka and Woodhouse are so fully committed to their characters—an introvert haunted by his decisions and a punch-first-think-later Englishman—that the blossoming bromance makes up for whatever originality Orang Ikan lacks.

We spend 75% of the films brisk run time with just those three characters. In lesser hands, that could become tedious. But Wiluan and his dedicated trio deliver action and fun.