Joseph reviews two films from Another Hole in the Head Film Festival: "The Last Frankenstein" and "Night, Knight Teddy."
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Reviews
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
This super-fun, highly absurd horror comedy twists a family adventure movie with a gory tokusatsu vibe and delivers the mind-blowing goods.
Directed by Steven Kostanski
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Everything you never knew you needed to know about Psycho's killer shower.
★★ out of ★★★★★
Like all hyper-beloved franchises there’s no way to end them in a satisfactory way. Save for MASH and the great Hawkeye Pierce, every last franchise has fumbled, bungled, and tied themselves in the most Gordian of Gordian Knots. Sadly, even with a stellar writing and directing crew, Halloween was not able to properly end.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
A peepshow dancer and a religious zealot must try to work together during the apocalypse or suffer abominable fates in this wild eighties-set chiller.
★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
Bumbling burglars and crazy retro-suburbanites collide in the horror-adjacent home invasion comedy Villains, featuring a couple of familiar genre faces.
★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
A haunted WWII U.S. submarine. A great premise, but in the end: Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Eli Roth proves that he has a gentler comic touch with his tone-perfect gateway spook-fest The House With a Clock in its Walls, featuring Jack Black, Cate Blanchett, and young Owen Vaccaro.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
There’s nothing more devastating and frightening than a family at their wit's end who are also simultaneously at each other’s throats. One part drama, one part horror, one part nuclear family armageddon. You don’t want to watch the collapse, but you absolutely can’t peel your peepers from the impending chaos.
It's that time of year again! This is what's been stewing in the cauldron all year long. Welcome to my Top 10 for 2021.
★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
Like sands through an hourglass, these are the days of our lives.
★★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
A bleak tale of the fraying of a family's trust, and the creepiest goat in the history of film.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Intensity 🩸🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
A bloodied woman on the run begins a frantic chase in John Rosman's debut thriller, New Life. This film holds its cards tight for half the movie, allowing the major implications of the plot lines to simmer before revealing the root causes of the pursuit, like a bomb drop. New Life transitions from political thriller to body horror in a dramatic shift that moved me from curious to engrossed.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Hard to believe that a 25-page story could be turned into a feature length film, but it has! The Boogeyman, originally released in 1978, was a taut and rather dark affair that explored the most corrupt fears in parenting. Fast forward 45 years and the Boogeyman is back as a full-on fright-fest.
Stalker ★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
Mean Spirited ★★★ out of ★★★★★
Two premieres from Arrow Video FrightFest are well worth the attention of horror film fans.
★★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
The Argentinian possession as apandemic film When Evil Lurks took the horror community by storm this year. It is a tale spun by South America's greatest horror director, Demián Rugna, and it is bound to become a modern classic. With his latest feature film, Rugna has written the new rules for possession horror in a George Romero fashion. Brilliant and brutal, but also a downer.
❄❄❄❄❄ out of ❄❄❄❄❄
2017 gave us Get Out. 2018 gave us Heriditary. 2019’s dive in to intellectual terror is the Lodge. Just as its forefathers were dark, brooding, thought-provoking, and terrifying, so is this year’s entry in to the new age of thinky-horror. Note: thinky-horror is not yet an industry-accepted term, but you heard it here first.
★1/2 out of ★★★★★ Directed by Neill Blomkamp Way back in 2009, Neill Blomkamp burst onto the genre scene with...
★★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Avoid the life, keep your life! This Halloween is going to be Totally Killer!
★★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Mike Flanagan is back with another fantastic series for Netflix: The Fall of the House of Usher.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
A locked room mystery that explores how far one lawyer will go to get a Confession.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
British featureThe World We Knew combines a gangster film with supernatural and psychological horror elements. The result is a sharp-as-nails outing that delivers plenty of eeriness along with solid direction and crackerjack performances.
★★ out of ★★★★★
Buckle up for a very bumpy ride with Night Teeth.
Follow Her ★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
Ox-Head Village ★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
Yellow Dragon's Village ★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Joseph reviews three films from Brazil's Fantaspoa film festival, all of which are well worth seeking out!
★★ out of ★★★★★
The Yellow Night indicated it might be a psychedelic cosmic horror show. Nope! It is a teen-angst movie full of banal and unconvincing dialogue among a group of Brazilian high school grads. And, there might be a cosmic gate in the creepy shed at the beach house they are staying in, but the characters pay it no mind, and neither does the plot.
Combining both body horror and creature feature elements, Malaysian film TIGER STRIPES is a unique effort and an intriguing feature debut from a promising new directorial talent..
★★ out of ★★★★★ Who knew that there was a sub-genre of horror known as Coachella Horror? Well there’s not, but you heard it here first. Perfect millennials mixed with impossibly mundane feuding, throw in a couple very stylish floppy hats, a little paranormal fright (but not too much), and a gathering of genetically perfect young ladies and -- POW -- it’s Coachella Horror!
★.5 out of ★★★★★
Anthology horror films are so full of creepy goodness! Moral tales. Freaky through lines. Peculiar and off-putting horror hosts and narrators. They give us everything we desire in spooky bite-sized chunks. Until they don’t.
★★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
A near pitch-perfect possession horror comedy from Ireland, featuring one of the most endearing and unlikely horror heroines in recent memory.