Intensity 🩸🩸1/2 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
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.
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Kombucha brings body horror to the workplace. Symbio is a company that positions itself as a place where struggling Liberal Arts creative types can achieve the same professional success as those who went into the technical fields and prospered. Luke is a struggling musician who takes the bait. Soon, he will find out that Symbio's secret to success lies in the mysterious drink Kombucha.
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False start. Production team. Five-yard penalty. Retry third down. Him (2025) is a rare commodity: a sports horror film, and sadly, it fumbled the opportunity away. The production is artistically very ambitious, but it fails to make much of its visual assertiveness. Too weird for your average football fan. Too much football for your average horror fan. Him proudly bears the backing of horror mogul Justin Peele, has the cinematic flair of a Peele film, but it lacks the skilled storytelling that the producer is known for.
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Final Destination has taught us that you can't cheat death. In Bloodlines, we reset the clock back to what might be the original sin for cheating death. It is 1969, and the site of the impending disaster is the Space Needle-like Sky View Tower. As is tradition for this series, a premonition of disaster saves all the would-be victims. Death is nothing if not patient, and it pursues the lucky survivors... and their descendants. This was a breath of fresh air into a series that had become stale.
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Australian shark shocker Beast of War balances its drama and creature feature elements impressively, boasting good performances and plenty of great-white gore.
A film that roils in equal parts gore, humor, and the paranormal, Silent Night Deadly Night is a true Yuletide crowd pleaser. By playfully pulling apart the most sacrosanct holiday figure of all time — Ol’ St. Nick — this film manages to have something for the entire family to enjoy on Xmas morning.
Intensity 🩸🩸.5 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
We return to Southport in the reboot/sequel I Know What You Did Last Summer. A new crew of pretty teens is put through very similar paces to the 1997 cast. Bad decisions lead to murderous revenge from an assailant in a fisherman's slicker, wielding a meat hook. It's a better-looking movie than its predecessor, but it lacks the star power and charisma of the original. Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. return to lend credibility to the film, and the writing struggles to effectively use the legacy cast. Unfortunately, like its source material, The Fisherman is an uninspired generic villain.
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Judge Stefan Mortensen suffers a stroke during a trial and is sent to a nursing home to recover. As the wheelchair-bound judge struggles with his physical ailments, he encounters Dave Crealy, a psychopathic resident who bullies all of the other residents with a puppet-clad fist. Stefan clings to reason and rules but is overwhelmed by Dave's chaotic presence and has become the focus of the madman's rage. Two great actors, Geoffrey Rush and John Lithgow, bring their A-games to this elder-care thriller.
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In Keeper, a dating couple takes the next step by going to the boyfriend's lodge in the woods, which, given the opening credit montage of screaming women, might not be the best idea. Osgood Perkins delivers a stylish modern thriller delivered on the bones of a folk horror skeleton. Tatiana Maslany is in top form as a horror actress, delivering quirk, pathos, and proper survivor smarts. The plot hides its secrets well. Perhaps too well, as you might leave the theater still trying to fill in the mental puzzle pieces.
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The revisioning of the Predator franchise is in full swing and continues to impress. Dan Trachtenberg is revitalizing what was a brand that was stuck in neutral, and now bristles with excitement and fresh turns. In Predator: Badlands, we flip to the Yautja (the name now given to the Predators) point of view. Dek is a young Yautja looking to redeem his honor by claiming a trophy prize from an unkillable creature of legend. On his hunt, he partners with an unlikely android on a planet where every living thing is out to kill them. The movie is much more action-hero than horror, and it uses the Marvel M.O. of destroying lots of non-humans to stay in the PG-13 category. It's still plenty violent, despite the lack of human bloodshed. Predator: Badlands makes up for the lack of gore with a superior story and wonderful character interactions.
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The Dangerous Animals of the title are sharks, but they are the weapons, not the killers. Jai Courtney is Tucker, a serial killer who uses his shark dive boat as an excuse to take victims on a one-way trip out to sea. Zephyr is a target who proves to be a greater challenge than most of his prey, and Tucker likes a victim with some spunk. Oz horror is notoriously brutal, where happy endings are rare. The man who brought you The Loved Ones and The Devil's Candy has returned with a highly entertaining and original variant of the serial killer film.
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The Long Walk delivers exactly what it promises: a death march competition across the backroads of Americana, where fifty young men look to be the last one standing, where death awaits the rest of the competition. Themes of brotherhood and complacency within an autocratic society are explored. Primarily, however, it's a pretty thin plot bolstered by a pair of terrific leading young actors.
Chain Reactions is an incredibly intellectualized love letter to one of the most gruesome films ever laid down on celluloid. Unlike the varied nature of many of Alexandre O. Philippe films — save for Leap of Faith William Friedkin on the Exorcist — the film is a straight forward and linear affair.
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Messiah of Evil offers a deliciously confusing early 70s cross between art film and horror, setting the stage for horror tropes to come.
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Edgar Allan Poe's The Oval Portrait is an adaptation of one of Poe's shortest works. It visits the intersection where life, art, and death collide. The story is brought to modern times, where a thief, an artist, and an art dealer are all drawn into the influence of a spirit bound to a remarkable portrait. As is the tradition for translations of Poe's stories, the film is suitably melancholy, but it injects some welcome humor into the proceedings, while maintaining the core theme of the original story.
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Betrayal. At its core, A Blind Bargain is a movie about the worst kind of betrayal you can imagine. Desperation and greed convince a young and troubled Vietnam veteran to submit his own mother to the schemes of a mad scientist. This groovy '70s retro thriller takes a cosmic turn through life-extending experimentation. This was the centerpiece movie of the 2025 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.
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Curiosity is a dangerous thing. In cosmic horror, the exploration of truths can lead to fates worse than death, and yet, people will still seek to know things they really should leave alone. In Tribe, a man lost in the remote badlands in the southern Sierras is going through a horrible physical transformation. His hope is that some media drives he found in his Airstream trailer will tell him why he is in the predicament he is in. His salvation may come in the form of his own found footage material, but it also may foretell his own doom.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way. This is a bad film. You knew this going in. You were fully aware and your eyes were wide open. The question is why you decided to watch this?
Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
The Conjuring: Last Rites is another solid entry into the Warren Saga. Once again, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson are on point as Lorraine and Ed Warren, providing grounded and passionate performances. The film is once again loaded with first-rate jump scares and fantastic period piece production design. The ghost story this time out is a muddled mess, though, and some of the secondary characters feel forced, preventing it from achieving the greatness of the first entry in the franchise.
It should come as no surprise, or for some of you it will come as massive surprise, but the Toxic Avenger is a great film. Not just a fun romp at the movies, but a true-blue brilliant piece of horror wrapped in some of the best satire seen in years!
Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
RABBIT TRAP offers a hypnotic serving of Welsh folk horror that boasts evocative sound design.
