★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Intensity 🩸🩸 for vampiric violence
Jakob's Wife is an essay on a mid-life menopausal crisis, by way of vampirism. Jakob's Wife delivers great character arcs and engaging acting. Barbara Crampton has been given a meaty role, and she delivers perhaps her best screen performance in memory. Larry Fessenden also is stellar as the well intentioned minister Jakob.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★ Right around the corner from Horror Street, just next to Parallax View Way, and right near Marathon Man Drive, is a fascinating analog look at the lengths obsessives will go to in feeding their obsessions.
★★★★.5 out of ★★★★★
To describe this film, one must invoke the voice of Bill Hader's Saturday Night Live character, Stefon. The audience cheers as Stefon slides in from stage right. Hands rise to face. Breathe deep. And release.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★ Make no mistake, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror is not a generalist survey course and this is not a casual hike in the woods. This is a full on PHD thrill ride in to one of the most mercurial of all horror genres, folk horror.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Mother Earth just may have it in for us, according to the South African Eco-Horror showcase Gaia, which had its World Premiere at the SXSW film festival. It's beautiful, quiet, creepy, and full of spores. (Cough! Cough!)
★★★★ out of ★★★★★ “If you go in to the woods go with an open mind.” Famed Bigfoot videographer, Bob Gimlin.
If you're a regular listener to our little ol' podcast you've probably heard us wax poetically about the (sadly) uneven implementation of one of the greatest horror plot lines of all time -- the Amityville Horror. If you're of a certain age Amityville and the Lutz family was all the talk. On the newsstands, in the classroom, at the water cooler. People were...um...obsessed...with this sad family and their demonic plight.
Put on your best spandex, studded leather straps, and break out the hairspray. It's time for Heavy Metal Horror! Your professors for this episode are Mike and Liz, true metalheads both, as Eric plays the role of the general population of metal familiar, but not metal saturated fandom.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
These unsettling vignettes involving clever audio effects may be just the "something different" you've been looking for.
★★ out of ★★★★★ The tried and true tattered family dynamic. Kids love their Mom. Dad’s nowhere to be found. Sisters vigorously fight for their Mom’s love. Resentments emerge. The sister’s commitments to the family quickly fall to the insidious and ever-present need to feed the social media beast. We’ve all heard this tale before. Or have we?
★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
Freaky takes the body swap idea from Freaky Friday, and gives it a slasher film twist. It's a fun concept, and is off and on entertaining, but the film's sloppy and predictable plot keep it from reaching the standard for similar Blumhouse fare like Happy Death Day.
IIn a truly awful year, we just didn't get a whole lot of movies released, reducing the pool of the bad movies as well as the good movies. If you were going to describe the years less than stellar movies, I think you'd say they were disappointing rather than infuriating. But there's still plenty for us to throw shade at in this episode. The Scariest Things gets our adrenaline up, discussing our worst films of 2020.
★★★ out of ★★★★★
Monsters! The rest of the movie is a mess, but man those monsters are cool!
Vienna, Austria’s SLASH Filmfestival spotlights horror, science fiction, fantasy, and other genre films from around the world — both features and shorts — and the fest is now open for submissions for two outstanding events this year. Following is the official press announcement.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
The Vigil puts a unique cultural spin on evil entity horror and boasts an incredible lead performance.
★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
Barbara Crampton steals the show in this Norwegian folk-horror affair replete with vivid nightmares, tentacles, and the sea.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
The latest offering from the collaborative team of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead once again delivers a philosophical, slow burn of a movie. This film about two paramedics in New Orleans uncovering the truth of a new synthetic drug that has time travel properties is grim and heady material. Brooding and moody can be a good thing if anchored properly, and Anthony Mackie holds this film down with a fine acting performance.
★★ out of ★★★★★ It’s everything you’ve ever wanted! It contains film footage likely derived from 10 different film shoots over the course of nearly 40 years. It’s got Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (Louise Fletcher). It’s got Indiana Jones pal Salah (John Rhys-Davies). It’s got the super crooked hillbilly cop from Rambo, Galt (Jack Starrett). It’s sort of got a couple scenes with a grizzly bear. But just don’t be fooled, there’s not a whole heck of a lot of Charlie Sheen, Laura Dern, and George Clooney.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★ It should come as no surprise that record collectors are an awfully weird and obsessive bunch. They perseverate over every possible pressing, color, variation, and vinyl release of individual artists. Their search is endless and somewhat pointless. They fixate on whether to open a sealed copy of a rare record. Most importantly, record collectors won’t stop until their search is complete. Dead or alive.
★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
Osgood Perkin's horror take on the children's fairy tale is a brooding and moody spin on the most familiar of stories. It has some gorgeous art direction, and a winning performance by Alice Krige, but the plodding script tries to mask the intent of the story. It tries very hard to provide new wrinkles to the old fable, but ends up feeling over-long even at a fairly short run time of 82 minutes.
★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
A worthy reboot of a much-beloved gateway horror fan favorite. Anne Hathaway chews up the scenery in the Robert Zemekis helmed adaptation of the Roald Dahl dark fantasy classic.
Oh sure, who doesn't love to revel in the lunacy that is Evil Elvis AKA Glenn Danzig AKA the linchpin to the greatest horror punk band of all time, the Misfits. His comics, his music, and his enigmatic approach to life are so fascinating, and easily parodied and barbed, but it's his film outings that are quite simply ...indescribable.
★★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Prepare to have your horror prayers answered by Saint Maud!
Do you like your horror with a side order of bullets? Do you find that horror and kung fu are completely compatible? Do you wish there were more superhero horror tales? This week we're talking action-horror in episode 117! Lights! Camera! Start the squibs!
★★.5 out of ★★★★★ A stunningly beautiful film that follows a not so beautiful period of time in Guatemala's tumultuous and unfortunate history. This horror film, that's awfully light on the horror, shows audiences that sometimes the scares don't come from ghouls, but they come from right-wing juntas.
If you listen to our podcast or read our posts, you are already somebody looking to know more about horror. If you really have an appetite for horror knowledge, check out these documentaries, all of them hugely entertaining. Welcome to the world where all the movies have a colon in the title: Horror Documentaries.
Home invasion thriller meets zombie horror in The Curse of Hobbes House, which hits DVD and Digital download in the U.K. beginning March 8, 2021, and The Scariest Things has the trailer for you!
Print Maker Pop Chart has taken the interactive nature of scratch-off lottery tickets and applied it to horror movies! Now you can track the progress of seeing the essential horror canon by scratching off the movies you've seen.
★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
Sometimes cheesy, occasionally nonsensical, but kept solidly on the rails by an interesting story and some splattery goodness. Werewolves get all scientifical!