Hello? I’d like a room for the night.
Famous. Last. Words.
If you are tired and driving down a remote desert highway, and are feeling a bit tired, you will know that the last thing you should do is check into a skeevy Motel at the side of the road. The Scariest Things pulls off on the side of the road to scout the dodgy lodging in advance for you in Episode 163: Hotel-Motel-BnB Horror.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
🚫 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
It’s Spring Break Time! The Scariest Things has lined up some things for you to get ready for your Horror-Themed spring break!
– Robert advocates for Fright Rags for your Tee Shirt needs, before heading out for Festival Season.
– Mike has some great reading material for you from horror novelist Clay McLeod Chapman.
– Eric has found your Spring Break Horror Road Trip guide! And a wacky summer time horror camp.
Episode 9 Starts NOW!
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
🚫 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
If you know horror you know Satan. You might even say horror and Satan are best pals. They’ve been hanging around for a long time always pushing boundaries and always trying something cheeky and new.
Sometimes this friendship is on the down-low and sometimes Satan gets a pinch uppity and decides to out the entire relationship. Or at least his (or her) relationship to the general public. When that happens it’s a messy and ugly affair.
Joseph reviews two splatterific mayhem-and-mirth features from FrightFest Glasgow.
Here for Blood ★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Smoking Causes Coughing ★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
★★★★★ out of ★★★★★
🚫 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Surreal sci-fi in bite sized pieces, Shatter Belt will shatter your expectations!
★★★★.5 out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸for some gnarly gore, eye gouging, and repeated head wounds.
Each and every year there’s THAT horror film that shakes things up. Hits the festival circuit and creates tidal wave-sized buzz. Sometimes it’s deserved and sometimes it’s not. In the case of 2023’s festival darling Talk to Me, the buzz is profoundly deserved.
In Episode 8 of Spooky Time:
– Mike and Liz Report back from their experiences at SXSW
– Mike, got a chance to do some Texas Chainsaw Massacre touring .
– Eric comes to the table with his review of the Variety Top 100.
– Liz finds another favorite book of hers that is being given the chance at a premium TV series.
– Eric reports on Guillermo Del Toro’s next Horror Movie. (It’s familiar)
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 for mild gore and violence.
A hundred years on we’ve been blessed and not-so-blessed with hundreds, or maybe thousands or Frankenstein-related films. Remakes, reboots, re-imaginations, reworking of the Mary Shelley source material, and even re-re-working of Shelley’s book. The Frankenstein mythos has comfortable slipped into our collective horror zeitgeist.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 for mild gore.
If you’ve even run across Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, or Dinah Shore you’ll know that they all roiled in a very specific talk show space in the 1970s. Talk shows were smarmy, boozy, and informal affairs that gave audiences time each day to let their hair down and forget about the doldrums of the Viet Nam War and the crushing presence of socio-economic injustice in America.
These talk shows were also incredibly competitive. Johnny Carson was king, but there was a lot of room under him to vie for advertisers and Neilson ratings. Late Night with the Devil follows that exact story line, by exploring frustrated talk show host Jack Delroy played pitch perfectly by David Dastmalchian.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
🚫 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Raging Grace breathes new life into classic gothic horror.
★★.5 out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 for mild comedic gore.
Midway through Only the Good Survive the local sheriff and Dennis Miller impersonator (Frederick Weller) is interrogating young Brea Dunlee (Sidney Flanigan) about her involvement in a string of ritualistic murders and asks “…is this a comedy or a horror?” While the film chugs along like an Edgar Wright-inspired effort, this very sentiment is really the film’s problem. It wants to be both. Unfortunately, juggling these two juxtaposed art forms is a tricky bit of business that is almost never accomplished.
★★★★★ out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Get ready to join the SWARM…this is the future of horror, y’all.
★★★ out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
What happens when the voices inside you head start to show on the outside? You grow an Appendage!
The Scariest Things is heading down to Austin for SXSW and The Overlook Film Festival, two of the most influential festivals in America and we are previewing them for you in Episode 7 of Spooky Time!
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 for mild gore and a frayed family.
Weird babysitter. Weird kid. Weird parents. A deeply weird connection to regular usage of LSD. And to top it off a weird poster. Spoonful of Sugar definitely traffics in the world of weird. Not Skinamarink weird mind you, but still firmly in the weird camp.
It’s time for a zombie March Madness bracket fight! The scary ladies of The Jersey Ghouls, Marissa and Jacki, abducted Eric and Liz and forced us to participate in this fiendish experiment. And we had a BLAST! Check out the Jersey Ghouls Podcast, or click on the streaming feed on this post!
For the first time in its 117-year history, the venerable Variety, probably the most prestigious journal covering Hollywood has released its Critic’s ratings for THEIR Top 100 Films of all Time. And believe it or not, a HORROR movie is rated #1!
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸🩸
This is a grisly (not grizzly… the bear is a black bear) romp through the forest, amped up with narcotics and has some wildly entertaining moments. Elizabeth Banks continues her transformation from in front of the camera star to behind the camera, and she hit the comedic and gory tone just right with Cocaine Bear.
★★★ out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 for lots of gore.
Nothing’s better when a small indy production punches WAY above its weight class — especially in the visual effects department. Sometimes the effort is a miserable failure and sometimes, yes sometimes, its indy deficiencies don’t even show for a minute.
It’s the age old debate: Book vs. Movie. Which did it better? In the spotlight in Episode 6 of Spooky Time: Paul Tremblay’s novel: The Cabin at the End of the World vs. M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ out of ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
🩸🩸🩸🩸
What do you get when you combine the voice talents of Sid Haig, Jordan Peele, and Robert Englund with a cast of creepy life-size puppets and a story that might as well have been written by Philip K Dick? It’s called Abruptio.
⭐️⭐️⭐️ out of ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
🩸🩸🩸
What happens when you get a bunch of Canadian SFX folks together and let them loose in the snowy back-country of rural Canada? You get a giant mutant leech sucking onto people’s heads, that’s what!
★★★ out of ★★★★★
The Quantum Devil
★★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
Darker
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Virgil
Reviews of three films from Romford Horror Festival.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ out of ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
🩸🩸
A fantastic ghost story anthology about a very haunted apartment building in South Korea. Expertly interwoven tales that turn the spookiness up to 11!
⭐️⭐️1/2 out of ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
🩸🩸🩸
From the writer/director of Nati Morti (2022) comes horror straight out of an Albanian bunker!
It’s SPOOKY TIME! In this week’s episode:
Liz returns from Rome, with a report on the Profondo Rosso Store.
Robert found a highly curated horror book subscription service.
Eric announced a team up with the Jersey Ghouls for a Zombie March Madness Bracket Dance.
And… Mike was on a train to the great white oblivion.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸
The WWI trench warfare horror film Bunker follows a mixed squad of British and American doughboys who are trapped in a deserted German bunker and encounter something far more sinister than enemy forces waiting for them. With the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, it’s only appropriate that movie goers return to the horror of trench warfare.
We now have a Gore Intensity Rating for our reviews! Being that we are your gateway to the trends and tropes of the horror genre, we need to be able to convey to the newcomers (and our gore hounds) what to expect with these movies. Keep an eye out for the 🩸 on forthcoming reviews.
Joseph reviews three ★★★★ out of ★★★★★ horror shorts from the U.K.’s Romford Horror Festival.
