★★★★ out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 for mild gore and a frayed family.
Weird babysitter. Weird kid. Weird parents. A deeply weird connection to regular usage of LSD. And to top it off a weird poster. Spoonful of Sugar definitely traffics in the world of weird. Not Skinamarink weird mind you, but still firmly in the weird camp.
★.5 out of ★★★★★
Anthology horror films are so full of creepy goodness! Moral tales. Freaky through lines. Peculiar and off-putting horror hosts and narrators. They give us everything we desire in spooky bite-sized chunks. Until they don’t.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
GWAR is the little band that no one has ever heard of, but absolutely everyone needs to know. Their horrifying musings are just that — horrifying musings. Don’t be mistaken there’s so much more this gore-filled party. So much more. After nearly 40 years they have perfected the art of soaking their weak and puny audiences with blood, guts, urine, and yes, semen.
★★★.5 out of ★★★★★
The 1930s and 40s brought us ghoulish voodoo zombies. The 1960s and 70s graciously brought us trundling brain-fixated zombies. The early 2000s somewhat quixotically brought us hyper-speed zombies. And now in the 2020s we’re being treated (emphasis on the sarcasm) to sadistic, cruel, and mean-spirited zombies. Good, bad, or indifferent this is the brutish zombie world we now live in.
★★★ out of ★★★★★
There’s nothing worse than living alone in a bleak and dreary apartment. Add Covid19 and some additional isolation. That’s pretty awful. Mix in conference calls with your patronizing ex-wife, her husband, and your best pal trying to help you transition in to the next phase of your life. Well, that’s really awful. Mix in some black magic, demons from another dimension, and true ghost hunters — then you’ve got a real recipe for demonic disaster.
★★.5 out of ★★★★★
To be clear, there’s not a lot of running in 2022’s The Runner. There’s some trundling through the woods and there’s some “running shoes”, but it’s not entirely clear if you you could actually run in the shoes featured in this Shudder film. Think clunky hipster orthopedic running shoes. Probably not optimal for running.
★ out of ★★★★★
It’s always disappointing when someone takes one of your favorite horror sub-genres and brutally bastardizes it. The “we’re trapped in a secret military base and there’s only one way out” storyline takes some care and feeding. The situation is made even worse when it’s given the ham-fisted SyFy treatment. Little attention, little point, and little effort.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Stylish, creepy and strange. Begin the countdown to Christmas with The Advent Calendar.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★ Everyone gets old. It’s no more complicated than this little horrifying truism. The world of horror is filled with ghosts, homicidal nutcases, Pazzuzu, creepies, crawlies, and robot-monsters. But, nothing, repeat, nothing, is more frightening at the prospect of losing your mental and physical faculties and facing the sad and potential finite end of life.
★★ out of ★★★★★ The horror anthology is one of the true staples of the horror genre. Always clever, always engaging. As we’ve said before, anthology horror is the traditional extension of gathering around ye’ ole campfire and scaring the hell out of each other. They hearken back to the oldest root forms of scary storytelling. It’s always frightening to hear a scary story, until it’s not.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Slow, steady and brutal, Violation is a beautiful gut-punch of a horror film.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★ The rise of the podcast generation paired with a nation’s emerging fascination with rampant conspiracy theories is the perfect backdrop for a horrifying and mercurial folk tale. In both the case of podcasts and conspiracies people don’t stop until they’ve reached the ever-loving bottom of the barrel. The problem is these barrels have no bottoms.
★★ 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?
★★.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.
★★ out of ★★★★★ Witches are a tricky lot. Literally. Filled with deceit and deception. They conjur up horrible thoughts in your tiny little brain. They’re always on the hunt for a new (or renewed) sacrifice. Most importantly they travel in unrelenting satanic packs of malice. The Pale Door has more fiends than you can shake a stick at, but, unfortunately, doesn’t do a whole heck of a lot with this spooky pile of occult weirdos.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★ How’d you like a little Chekhov with your Texas Chainsaw? A little Edward Albee with your Conjuring? Or even a dash of Ibsen with your Insidious? Sound too good to be true? Well it’s not.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★ There exists that great space in documentaries that take place decades after the event occurred. It’s this beautiful melange of revisionist history, lucid thoughts, purposeful sleepwalking, and repressed memories. All answers are correct and infallible when the documentary is filtered through the iconic lens of a single and thoughtful directorial darling. THE William Friedkin is the ultimate bridge between Hollywood’s glorious beginnings and the revolutionary young guns of the 1970s. It should come as no surprise the Friedkin has some rather insightful things to say about one of the greatest films of the 1970s, possibly the greatest horror film of all time, and in some camps, THE greatest film ever put down on celluloid — the Exorcist.
★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★ Host is highly effective Zoom-based horror in which the cast members were also responsible for their […]
★★★★.5 out of ★★★★★ Ghosts, doomed villages, tortured family dynamics, the blackest of black magic, and thousand year old Javanese curses all come home to roost in the latest spookfest from Joko Anwar. Possibly (read: possibly) the best horror film director out currently, Anwar knows his way around a story, cinematic shots, and the creation of truly sympathetic characters.
★★★.5 out of ★★★★★ If you’re not completely freaked out by the current pandemic, the strange and uneven response to the greatest crisis the world’s faced in the modern era, then have we got a film for you! This is not a fun filled family fete at the beach, oh no, The Beach House is a dark and twisted look at our current state of affairs filtered through the very real possibility that the worst is yet to come.
Walking Dead director and effects wizard, Greg Nicotero, is picking up the baton from George Romero and Stephen King, bringing a new Creepshow anthology show to Shudder! (Trailer linked here!)
