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Ugly Cry joins the ranks of body horror movies written and directed by women that shine a light on the unfair beauty standards that women are held to. Emily Robinson wrote, directed, and stars in this dark comedy drama where facial expressions can doom you to getting a key acting job or not. "It's not body horror, but it is a film about the horror of having a body" (Robinson) This movie premiered at SXSW.
If the new A24 film Undertone is considered to be “liminal horror” then count me as a true blue liminal horror fan. Operating in between the spaces, notes, and shadows, this is a film that evokes surreal and unsettling perspectives from — the nothingness.
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Virtuosos get violent in Pretty Lethal as a troupe of American ballerinas find themselves in a dangerous situation facing Hungarian mobsters. This fun feature delivers genre thrills at an allegro pace.
If staring at video game for an hour and fifteen minutes is your idea of a swell time, then this might be the found footage film you’ve been waiting for all these years. The chaos isn’t too terribly chaotic. It’s far more controlled than any film in the VHS series, but not as staid as the now bland nature of the Blair Witch Project.
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Bagworm is intensely uncomfortable. Carroll is a loser living in a burned-out bungalow in decaying squalor. His love life reflects his living situation: rotting and getting worse. When this hammer salesman, ironically, steps on a rusty nail in his front yard, it adds a third leg to this stool of personal destruction. Tetanus overcomes him due to personal neglect, leading to madness and hallucinations. It is a story well told, and though it sprinkles in some humor, it is wrought with cringeworthy moments. Bagworm had its North American debut at SXSW.
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A young woman abandoned in the forest falls in with a pair of bank robbers in Canadian thriller A SAFE DISTANCE.
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Send Help is pure wicked entertainment. It borrows tropes from many genres. The ugly duckling turning into a swan. The horrible boss. Disaster survival. Obsession. All of these familiar elements are blended into something more than the sum of their parts. It's funny, brutal, and puts both of its main characters through real ethical paces. Your rooting interests may shift over the course of the movie, but it ends with a cynical twist that turns into the perfect sunset. (Fist pump!)
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Writer/director Kurtis David Harder comes back to his Influencer... dare I say it? Franchise?! And he’s kicking things up a notch. Count this among the rarities where the sequel is better than the original.
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Presence observes a family nearing a breaking point. The Paynes have just moved into a substantial craftsman home, and it came with a poltergeist. The audience watches from the ghost's perspective as it meanders around the house, ducking into closets and the shadows when necessary. This is a family drama first, with the apparition being the witness. You travel from room to room listening in on conversations intended to be private, and watch as certain decisions pull at the threads that threaten to undo the family. Presence is a quiet and beautiful film, though it is wrenching to watch. There is horror, but not in the traditional sense, and it arrives with a flourish at the conclusion of the movie.
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Night of the Zoopocalypse is a zany, goopy gateway horror film inspired by a Clive Barker graphic novel. A meteorite crashes into the Culpepper Zoo and infects the animals trapped inside, turning them into gelatinous mutant monsters. A wily wolf and a cantankerous mountain lion team up to try to save their zoo, with the help of a wacky assortment of untainted zoo-mates. This is a simple story, but it is a fine introduction to light horror for kids who want something a little gross and a little spooky.
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Writer/director Zak Hilditch focuses on personal grief and loss in this dramatically gripping take on a zombie outbreak.
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Hot take: It's time to shelve the V/H/S franchise and do an autopsy scrub. V/H/S Halloween is the latest iteration of the venerable horror anthology franchise. V/H/S has become an enabler (and, by way of production, Shudder and Bloody Disgusting as well) of ugly, uninspired, and dull shaky-cam short films. With one exception, I don't think any of these segments would be good enough to make an average horror-film festival short-film block. It's a sad indictment of a once-proud series.