Intensity 🩸🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Abigail pits a group of misfit criminals up against their captive, a little ballerina dancer named Abigail. Much to their surprise, she's a powerful vampire. The movie is action packed, with plenty of gore and laughs, but is a station to station production that while fun, telegraphs its moves well in advance. It's empty calories, but, for many fans, sometimes this is exactly what you crave.
Intensity 🩸🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Cuckoo is a wildly imaginative and original slice of mad science horror. It doesn't always feel coherent, but it constantly entertains with roaring action and fascinating characters. This is a showcase for rising star Hunter Schafer, who commands attention as the surly lead protagonist, Gretchen.
Intensity 🩸🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
While there’s a surprising lack of Rottweilers, The First Omen is chock full of reproductive rights, secularism, mental health, religious repression, and a gang of scares — most of them well deserved. Most importantly, The First Omen is a GREAT horror film that will make even the most hardened horror heart thump.
Intensity 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Is it a thriller? A sci-fi abomination? A psychedelic mishmash? A video game? An affront to Toho’s original vision? A horror film? Seriously, what the hell is this? Truth be told, it’s really of all these things crammed together in a gargantuan hodgepodge of CGI lunacy. Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire is a wildly chaotic film with an equally wild plot that makes little to no sense. Scratch that…no sense.
Intensity 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
As we’ve said before, pulling off a horror comedy is one of the most precarious feats a director can attempt. The feat is made all the more difficult when it’s done on a micro-budget with limited to no resources. Easter Bloody Easter manages to walk this tight rope with aplomb, while pulling in one of the coolest Black Sabbath horror references since the semi-eponymous Black Sabbath in 1963.
Intensity 🩸🩸1/2 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Joseph reviews Graham Skipper's horror film The Lonely Man with the Ghost Machine, from Make Believe Seattle.
Intensity 🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Hunting Daze explores the complications of stacking up bad decisions when a male bonding session in the woods of Quebec is injected with a headstrong young woman and a mysterious stranger entering their insular group.
Existential Dread 📺 📺 📺 📺 📺 out of 📺 📺 📺 📺 📺
Fandom, obsession and identity are illuminated in I Saw the TV Glow
Intensity 🩸🩸1/2 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Eddie Izzard steals the show in Hammer Films' DOCTOR JEKYLL.
🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Come for the kidnapping, stay for the teriyaki! Dead Mail...delivers the weird.
Intensity 🩸🩸1/2 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
SHIFT is a fun 1990s riff on Hitchcock’s Rear Window, complete with paranoia, mystery, and a sentient office chair.
Intensity and effectiveness of jump scares
🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Oddity is the horror who-done-it, supernatural, revenge thriller, comedy you have been waiting for!
🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
In a genre overloaded with movies inspired by the Frankenstein story, Lisa Frankenstein fails to catch a spark.
Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
If fear of the unknown is the most primal of horrors, imagine living in a prehistoric world and arriving on a new barren continent. In the new British Paleolithic horror film Out of Darkness, a group of stone-age nomadic survivors cross the sea and find a land bereft of resources and quarry. Everything is unknown, their worldview is limited to their tribe and the stories passed down from their elders. Their only protection is a spear and a campfire. Scary times, indeed.
Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
I will give points to A Creature Was Stirring (2023) for trying to do something that was original. A were-porcupine (A Porcupinecanthrope?) is a new addition to the monster lexicon. It's a parenting horror piece. Also, a home invasion. And a drug horror story. The problem is that in execution, it never finds its proper footing, and the narrative gets lost.
Intensity 🩸🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Joseph reviews Robert Morgan's UK macabre horror film STOPMOTION, a body horror movie full of unsettling stop-motion animation.
Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
HBO's acclaimed series True Detective returns to the horror roots it developed in season 1. In Season 4: Night Country, the franchise brings screen legend Jodie Foster to the TV streaming powerhouse production. Foster is paired with up-and-coming talent Kali Reis. They are investigating a grotesque mystery where a research station's entire crew is found frozen, naked, and apparently terrified out in the Alaskan tundra just as the permanent night of the polar winter is settling in.
Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
No One Will Save You is an ambitious and curious film. It is a tightly wound home invasion film with an Alien Invasion theme. That's not uncommon. What makes this film unique is that it has no dialogue. Actress Kaitlyn Dever carries this film, her emotional performance winning the day. That, and top notch sound and production values makes this worth a watch on HULU.
Wait 30 minutes after eating before going for a Night Swim.
Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
It Lives Inside is a fresh look at the assimilation of an Indian family into the United States that pits a teenage girl against a demon that feeds on loneliness and despair. The story is resonant, and the examination of Southern Asian -American culture is nicely done. The scares are as much as you can hope for in a PG-13 film, and the non-cultural elements feel a bit mechanical. Still, for those of us who have lived this experience, it is a welcome entry into the genre.
Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Quicksand (2023) is a straightforward wilderness survival horror movie that pits a struggling married couple in a pool of quicksand in a Columbian mountain bog. It's a stylishly shot film and features a pair of fine acting performances. However, to call the quicksand quick would be a misnomer, as the couple struggles... slowly... against the fate of getting sucked to the bottom of this quagmire.
🩸🩸🩸🩸 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.
🩸🩸1/2 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
After more than 15 years Eli Roth has made good on his promise and has come home for Thanksgiving!
Intensity: 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Godzilla Minus One: Oh, my... Godzilla! Takahashi Yamazaki created a powerful, emotionally resonant, and visually spectacular film. More than any other film in this esteemed franchise run, Godzilla is a reflection of a country in catharsis. It is steeped in survivor's guilt, post-traumatic shock disorder, family bonds, and the restoration of a nation's belief in itself... by way of Kaiju. As a film-going experience, this will get your blood pumping. Go see it on the biggest screen possible.
Intensity:🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Tentacled cosmic horrors besiege a seaside Greek town, and it's up to the patrons of a local taverna to save the city. The directors refer to this as "My Big Fat Greek Monster Movie." Minore punches well above its weight class, featuring top-shelf cinematography, complimented with high-end visual FX and an excellent ensemble cast.
Intensity 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Films like Scream and its ilk are self-referential in a coy way that employ a major wink of the eye towards the audience. They’re cute and bashful about their oblique references to horror films of the 1970s and 80s. When a film names itself Bad CGI Gator it’s anything but coy, and instead opts for brash aesthetic that screams “I DON’T REALLY CARE WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT THE TITLE OF MY FILM!”
🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Joseph Perry reviews show creator and writer/director Trevor Solway’s Tales from the Rez, a six-part Canadian horror anthology series with a focus on ghost stories from Canada’s indigenous peoples.