Intensity: 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Damian McCarthy is back with his signature moody atmospherics and concise storytelling in his haunted-hotel feature, Hokum. Adam Scott stars as a bitter but successful novelist who has come to the Bilbury Woods Hotel in Ireland to disperse his parents' ashes. Hokum is skillfully executed and soaked in melancholy dread and mystery, but the film is burdened by a difficult-to-like protagonist.
What if you mashed up Cool Hand Luke, Midnight Express, Escape from Alcatraz and added extreme gore, mayhem, and a dash of empathy? Well, put simply, you’d get one of the best prison films ever, Ghost in the Cell.
Intensity: 🩸🩸1/2 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
The Brazilian cosmic action/horror film Warhead: The World is No Longer Ours feels like it stepped out of Heavy Metal Magazine. It vacillates between stunning visuals and scenes that show the limits of a micro-budget. The story is a post-apocalyptic tale in media res that, overall, feels like the middle of a much larger story. It offers familiar science fiction beats and some terrific, escalating monster moments, but rushes to a very open-ended conclusion.
Intensity: 🩸🩸1/2 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
In Oddities, two young addicts flee from the scene of a crime and take shelter in a roadside antique store that they expected to be a refuge. It's not. The shopkeeper is more than she seems. This film hides its cosmic-horror roots until well into the third act, but it builds tension tightly from the start. The movie overcomes some unlikeable protagonists by developing a clever, ever-evolving story. Adrienne Barbeau and Xander Berkeley add star power and gravitas that elevate the production.
Other Mommy weirdly and jarringly dumps the audience into the third act of the film at the very start of the film. There’s no languid pacing. No exposition. No breathing room. It’s just an oddball other mommy hellbent on terrorizing a young family. Mind you there's no first or second acts. The entire film unfolds as an overly long third act.
There are many films of this ilk. Ghost hunters in mausoleums, film crews at abandoned mental institutions, and even the exceptional, Last Shift follows similar themes and tropes. But be warned, horror hounds, Infirmary is not worth your time.
If you’re looking for originality you may have to look elsewhere. Bloody Tennis is a literal homage to Suspiria. Replace ballet with tennis and you’ve effectively got the exact same film.
Intensity 🩸🩸🩸🩸1/2 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Deathgasm II: Goremageddon serves up all of gore you could want in a splatterfest horror comedy but is light on the charm that made Deathgasm such a fun, surprising watch.
The most recent entry into the fold is not only the best Resident Evil film made, it’s also one of the most pop-corn-chomping film that’s hit the screens in years. This is a five out of five with no notes. Well maybe one or two notes.
