Intensity 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
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.
Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Messiah of Evil offers a deliciously confusing early 70s cross between art film and horror, setting the stage for horror tropes to come.
Intensity: 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
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.
Intensity: 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
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.
Intensity: 🩸 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
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.
Intensity 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Slayings! The supernatural?!? A child in peril! Seth Daly's gripping feature debut THE ROWS offers all this and more.
Intensity: 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Crossword (2024) is a psychological thriller that pays close attention to the smallest details and is rich in symbolism. James is struggling to come to terms with the drowning of his young daughter, Lily. His grief is expressed through the daily crossword puzzle, which he believes is an omen communicating with him.
Intensity: 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Being an independent horror movie maker isn't easy. Eddie Mathews sacrifices everything in his power to keep his directing dreams alive. If that means living in his disapproving mother-in-law's house and pitching presidential bobbleheads as a side hustle, then that's what he has to do. The horror must be made!
Intensity: 🩸1/2 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
What the Tide Dragged In (Lo Que Trajo La Marea) is an emotionally charged, Chilean tale of sisterhood and loss. Two sisters go to the coast to comply with their mother's wish to have her ashes cast to the sea. Their mom warned them of the mysteries of the sea, and it has a vast power that will come to claim what it wants.
Intensity: 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Teacher's Pet goes back to school and follows Clara, an overachieving foster care teenager who has become the target of a serial killer masquerading as a substitute teacher. The characters are compelling, even if the plot has some blind spots regarding distinctive red flags that should have exposed the villain's deception.
Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸1/2 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Weapons has arrived in theaters, and it is one of the most original horror mysteries in memory. Give Zach Cregger the keys to the horror castle. He has elevated himself to the top of the ranks of horror storytellers. With Weapons, he has delivered an engrossing and wicked puzzle that comes together with shocking revelations, dark humor, and brutal viscera. The movie is a masterclass in character building, non-linear editing, and bravura acting from the entire cast.
Intensity: 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Place famously eccentric actor, John Malkovich into a story about a messianic pop star leading a death cult commune, under the A24 umbrella and you have the makings of an art house classic, right? Almost. It's a combination of The Menu, Midsommar, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This A24 production falls a bit shy of its incredible promise.
A fun found footage mash-up of Paranormal Activity (2007) and The Amityville Horror (1979) with some DIY home renovation YouTubers thrown in for good measure.
Self-image, beauty norms, popularity. Grafted takes all that, mixes it with a corpse flower, and comes up with some murderously gnarly body horror.
Intensity: 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
When a film becomes so firmly ensconced in our nation’s, nay the world’s, cultural zeitgeist there’s often nothing left to say about it. The film score, the triad of perfectly perfect actors, one of the best villains of all time, and more metaphorical subtext than you can shake a stick at.
Intensity: 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Are you a fan of obscure and cheesy cult films? Odds are, you would appreciate the efforts of Sinister Cinema, the Medford, Oregon-based distribution company that lovingly restored and distributed thousands of almost-forgotten films. This documentary from Jack Perez goes in-depth on the company that wouldn't let these films die.
Intensity: 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
How is it that babysitting, traditionally the lowest common denominator flexible starter job, is so dangerous? Dooba Dooba is a lo-fi found footage film exploring the perils of a woman babysitting an odd girl full of tricks and dark secrets. If you think you know babysitter horror, think again; this movie has some wild twists. The film creates a moat of anxiety which will have you twitching from the dramatic irony of knowing too much, while the characters head blindly into awful decisions.