Intensity: 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Companion is one big love triangle. Literally and figuratively. It deftly balances a series of human and non-human relationships, while at the same time trying to thread a very delicate needle between comedy, horror, and the sci-fi thriller genres.
Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Here for Blood mixes wrestling suplexes and a murderous KISS-like death cult with a babysitting plot. Surprisingly, the movie pulls it off. The movie's action pounds through the plot with splattery glee and aplomb. Moreover, the unlikely partnership between hulking Shawn Roberts and 10-year-old Maya Miseljevic is pure magic.
Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
When the world begins to fall apart, civilizations do some pretty crazy shit. Caitlin Cronenberg's first feature film, Humane, explores the possibilities in this dark satire. The Canadian government offers compensation for voluntary euthanasia. A prominent and wealthy family patriarch intends to make a grand political, patriotic gesture, but it goes horribly, bloodily wrong.
A summoned creature. A history of genocide. A hotbed of disappearances. The sleepy little town of Newport's Valley has a lot going for it. Why not book a room at the Barn Owl Inn and see for yourself?
Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Don't Move is a surprisingly tight and tense thriller that knows the story it wants to tell and keeps its focus. The result is a highly stressful viewing that keeps you calculating the odds in anticipation of escape from our heroine who spends a large portion of the movie paralyzed.
Intensity: 🩸 🩸 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
There’s only question that needs to be asked about 2024’s remake of Speak No Evil. Why?
Intensity: 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Brimming with inventive promise, Never Let Go is a movie of half-moves that never resolves its post-apocalyptic and psychological horror concepts. Halle Berry tries her best, but it becomes a frustrating endeavor by its conclusion.
Intensity: 🩸 🩸 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
This is the first horror film in 2025 that you can safely skip. To be clear, it’s a good looking production with a great soundtrack, but The Wolf Man is one of the poorest excuses for a werewolf you’ll ever lay your eyes on.
Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
This one’s a real puzzler. On the one hand it’s a full-on gross-out B-movie, with questionable acting and an equally questionable plot. On the other hand Terrifier 3 is a real achievement. The gore is certainly like nothing you’ve ever seen before — unless you already watched Terrifier 1 and 2 -- and the mean-spirited depravity is something to behold. This is a film that would have Herschell Gordon Lewis, Tom Savini, and Lucio Fulci hunched over a stain-soaked toilet.
Intensity: 🩸.5 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Your Monster is that rare Horror Rom-Com that succeeds on multiple levels. It takes the breakup film and mashes it up with the Beauty and the Beast and Imaginary Friend tropes. And then it pours madness sauce on top. The comedy hits. The romance is likable and endearing. And, though it saves the horror for quite a long stretch, Your Monster eventually delivers a great coup de grace of horror.
Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Nosferatu is a staggering accomplishment. Visually stunning, with sublime acting, Nosferatu is everything you would hope for in a horror costume drama. It helps that the director is the master of the period-piece horror movie.
Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Blackout is a fair-to-middling werewolf movie. With much respect to horror Godfather Larry Fessenden, this movie struggles to get out of second gear. The werewolf makeup is effective, and there are some gory scares, but weak supporting characters and excessive exposition bogs down this effort.
Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
The Girl with the Needle is one of the darkest, most haunting, and most moving horror-adjacent films in recent memory.
Movies with no dialog. Are we calling this a trend now? It seems like making a movie isn't enough of a challenge for some folks so they're upping the ante and going speechless. Albeit with mixed results.
Intensity 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Be. Careful. What. You. Wish. For. The most quaint and playful of all the horror tropes is on full display in this masterful piece of body horror. Not your run of the mill body horror either. This is capital “B” body horror that would even make David Cronenberg blush.
Intensity 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
The Letter sumptuously recreates the era of H.P. Lovecraft's 1930's New England. This languidly paced mystery feels like a Call of Cthulhu adventure, set in an elaborate mansion, and stocked with scheming characters with old grudges. This little indie film has big aspirations and ambitions but could have used a little streamlining. Prepare yourselves for lots of exposition and dark musings in period dialogue, while appreciating the fine details and rich textures.
Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Things Will Be Different mashes together three tropes that require finesse and careful mechanics. The film fuses a bank heist, a time paradox, and a "don't cheat fate" theme, creating an intricate and complex plot. The story strings together an array of plot threads that could throw time out of balance. It elegantly presents its plot, but inevitably it challenges the audience to keep pace with the story.
Intensity 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Strange Harvest: Occult Murder in the Inland Empire documents a string of unsolved grisly murders in California's Inland Empire. This faux documentary is at once both sensational and plausible, treated as a real account of a heinous cosmically influenced serial killing spree. This film is hugely disturbing and is coated with a thick layer of bloody possible sauce.
Intensity 🩸 1/2 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Filmmaker Jason Trost serves up a side-scrolling genre film that will have you digging out your favorite action horror video games.
Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Cosmic Horror meets found footage in the parasomnia-infused Dream Eater. Documentarian Mallory and her boyfriend Alex retreat to a snowy cabin, celebrating Alex's 30th birthday. There, they hope to relax and get relief from Alex's violent sleepwalking episodes. Unfortunately, fate would have it that something ancient and evil is behind his psychological traumas, and Mallory struggles to make sense of it before it destroys them both.
Intensity 🩸🩸1/2 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Director Cristian Ponce's terrific Brazilian chiller A MOTHER'S EMBRACE weaves an eerie nursing home filled with mysterious residents, something weird winding through water, and trauma from childhood into a suspenseful, mysterious work with a riveting third act.
Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
The Daemon was a perfect vessel to be unleashed at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival. The debut feature from Devino and Yohe taps into all of the key tropes of Cosmic Horror: coping with inner demons, battling psychoses and grief, dreams from the underworld, and elder gods rising from the deep. Add in some wonderfully grotesque body horror and you get a banger of a movie. Plus: we get Azathoth. If you know, you know.
Intensity 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
This is not a dream, this is really happening...Apartment 7A , a prequel to the 1968 horror masterpiece Rosemary's Baby, is GOOD!
