★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Straight outta the Pacific Northwest comes another joint from the same team that brought you 2018’s Big Legend. A far more daring, if not a little less linear, than their first outing with Bigfoot, 2021’s The Stairs is a complex bit of business wrapped up in a cautionary camping tale.
🔪🔪🔪🔪 out of 🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪
Just when you thought it was safe to go to the movies, or watch a horror film, or be a woman, along comes a nasty bit of business courtesy of Frodo Baggins.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★ Is there anyone more qualified to tell the emotional tale of a mother and son relationship beset by ghostly visuals and a murderous mystery? If there is please tell us because as far as we’re concerned Stephen King is still sitting a top horror hill and there’s not anyone out there that will ever reach this pinnacle.
If you follow the ol’ Scariest Things Podcast you know that we love our posters! No poster is too weird, too gory, too strange, too horrifying, or too vague.
Well, it’s sort of a trailer.
★ out of ★★★★★ It looks like a horror film. It acts like a horror film. It’s directed by cinema great and heir to the Hitchcock throne. Its promotional materials portend horror is just around the corner. But don’t be fooled, this super-star-packed 1970s telekinetic hype machine is nothing but a boring and unnecessarily long after-school special.
★★ out of ★★★★★
Some will say the epicenter of the Fulci universe lie in the greatness of the gory triptych: The New York Ripper, The House by the Cemetery, and The Beyond. Others will point to the earlier, less gory but equally frightening confines of The Psychic, Don’t Torture a Duckling, and A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin. No matter where you fall on the Lucio Fulci spectrum it’s awfully hard to argue about his immense and ever-lasting output. Stanley Kubrik only directed 13 films. But Fulci? He directed 61.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★ Once a film franchise crosses over in to four, five, or six sequels, or god forbid a complete reboot, it deserves lampooning and a heaping dose of criticism. That many sequels is often a reflection of the imagination tank run completely dry. Take your original story/villain and wash, rinse, and repeat.
★★★ out of ★★★★★ Umm what just happened? Was that a dream? Did I just have a stroke? Did my ego and id simultaneously implode? Unclear on all fronts. One thing is certain. This is a film like no other and it’s not something you can ever unsee.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★ Everyone gets old. It’s no more complicated than this little horrifying truism. The world of horror is filled with ghosts, homicidal nutcases, Pazzuzu, creepies, crawlies, and robot-monsters. But, nothing, repeat, nothing, is more frightening at the prospect of losing your mental and physical faculties and facing the sad and potential finite end of life.
★★ out of ★★★★★ Crack open the dusty dictionary parked over on your bookshelf and look up staid British horror film. We’ll wait. What’s it say? 1976’s Satan’s Slave? Yep, that’s what we thought.
★★ out of ★★★★★
Gone are the days of Bub from Day of the Dead. Gone are the days of the zombie nurse, the fat guy, and the Hare Krishna from Dawn of the Dead. Gone are the half-dogs and headless zombies from Return of the Living Dead. Most importantly, gone is a fun but serious dissection of societal woes and man’s modern day pitfalls. IInstead we’re now being fed a pile of ghastly super-hero zombies, that shriek like space aliens, set inside a hyper-realized video game construct. It’s a sad state of affairs to be sure. One might even say that the zombie genre has jumped the shark, or in this case the albino zombie tiger.
Oh, Hollywood and your ever-clever marketing minions. You really had us at “…contemporary take on the classic horror film Rosemary’s Baby.” That just makes our hardened horror heart go pitter-patter.
Giallo and Texas Chainsaw mashed up? Uh, yes, please. We’d love to see that! Well, now you can! Those horror geniuses over at Netflix have officially dropped the official trailer for 2021’s A Classic Horror Story.
In light of all the insurrectionist lunacy that we faced in early 2021, it’s an incredible stroke of kismet that the horror gods would be throwing us the Forever Purge in the very same year. But they are.
The almighty George Romero has a new movie coming out in June 2021! Wait, hasn’t he been dead since 2017!?!? Indeed he has, but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t create a mountain of content never before seen by human eyes. In the same way that Prince will be releasing albums well in to the next century, Romero may have some additional gems that have never made their way out of the crypt. Until now!
★ out of ★★★★★ Serious question. Are horror movies required to be scary? Can they just pass off a sense of dread and doom in other less frightening but equally provocative ways? Answer: it sure makes horror more horrifying if there’s some actual horror in the horror film.
★★ out of ★★★★★ The horror anthology is one of the true staples of the horror genre. Always clever, always engaging. As we’ve said before, anthology horror is the traditional extension of gathering around ye’ ole campfire and scaring the hell out of each other. They hearken back to the oldest root forms of scary storytelling. It’s always frightening to hear a scary story, until it’s not.
Holy Beelzebub! The official/official trailer for The Conjuring III, AKA The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do it, is finally here! Complete with devils, god, witches, the Warrens, and waterbeds — which were a thing in 1981, trust us — this trailer has it all.
★★.5 out of ★★★★★ Pulling the perfect Lovecraftian film is a feat like no other. It’s been tried again and again. You might even say film makers repeated attempts to crawl inside Mr. Lovecraft’s tortured brain is rife with peril, failure, and madness. Or more to the point, it’s a cursed mission. Many have attempted to bring Lovecraft to the silver screen and most have failed. In the case, of 2021’s Offseason, it’s not so much a failure, but a dull attempt.
This Easter 🐰🐰🐰 you haven’t a hop in hell! Because…here comes Peter Cottonhell! If those aren’t two of the most hackneyed and shoe-horned taglines we don’t know what are. Because Beaster Day is real, it’s coming for you, and we’ve digested more crappy films that anyone should!
★★★★ out of ★★★★★ The rise of the podcast generation paired with a nation’s emerging fascination with rampant conspiracy theories is the perfect backdrop for a horrifying and mercurial folk tale. In both the case of podcasts and conspiracies people don’t stop until they’ve reached the ever-loving bottom of the barrel. The problem is these barrels have no bottoms.
★★★★.5 out of ★★★★★ Don’t. Turn. This. Movie. Off. Seriously, it’s a slow burn in grand tradition of slow burn horror films, but the payoff off is so deliciously evil and filling. If you stop after the aspic and the salad course you’ll miss a rather grisly desert.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★ Right around the corner from Horror Street, just next to Parallax View Way, and right near Marathon Man Drive, is a fascinating analog look at the lengths obsessives will go to in feeding their obsessions.
★★★★.5 out of ★★★★★
To describe this film, one must invoke the voice of Bill Hader’s Saturday Night Live character, Stefon. The audience cheers as Stefon slides in from stage right. Hands rise to face. Breathe deep. And release.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★ Make no mistake, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror is not a generalist survey course and this is not a casual hike in the woods. This is a full on PHD thrill ride in to one of the most mercurial of all horror genres, folk horror.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★ “If you go in to the woods go with an open mind.” Famed Bigfoot videographer, Bob Gimlin.
If you’re a regular listener to our little ol’ podcast you’ve probably heard us wax poetically about the (sadly) uneven implementation of one of the greatest horror plot lines of all time — the Amityville Horror. If you’re of a certain age Amityville and the Lutz family was all the talk. On the newsstands, in the classroom, at the water cooler. People were…um…obsessed…with this sad family and their demonic plight.
★★ out of ★★★★★ The tried and true tattered family dynamic. Kids love their Mom. Dad’s nowhere to be found. Sisters vigorously fight for their Mom’s love. Resentments emerge. The sister’s commitments to the family quickly fall to the insidious and ever-present need to feed the social media beast. We’ve all heard this tale before. Or have we?
★★ out of ★★★★★ It’s everything you’ve ever wanted! It contains film footage likely derived from 10 different film shoots over the course of nearly 40 years. It’s got Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (Louise Fletcher). It’s got Indiana Jones pal Salah (John Rhys-Davies). It’s got the super crooked hillbilly cop from Rambo, Galt (Jack Starrett). It’s sort of got a couple scenes with a grizzly bear. But just don’t be fooled, there’s not a whole heck of a lot of Charlie Sheen, Laura Dern, and George Clooney.
