★★★★ out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 for mild gore and violence.
A hundred years on we’ve been blessed and not-so-blessed with hundreds, or maybe thousands or Frankenstein-related films. Remakes, reboots, re-imaginations, reworking of the Mary Shelley source material, and even re-re-working of Shelley’s book. The Frankenstein mythos has comfortable slipped into our collective horror zeitgeist.
★★★★ 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.
★★★ out of ★★★★★
It’s a rampaging robotic Santa versus a clever, foul-mouthed record store owner in Joe Begos’ holiday horror Christmas Bloody Christmas.
★★★★.5 out of ★★★★★
If 2022 has you a little jaundiced with reboots, sequels, prequels, and re-imaginations your feelings are not unwarranted. Let’s face it, Halloween Ends was confusing and largely devoid of Michael Myers. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was silly and uncooked. Hellraiser was pretty to look at, but became an unnecessary and boring reboot.
Have no fear. The Indonesians are here to save us!
★★.5 out of ★★★★★
Black gloves! The stabiest of stabbings! Groovy Goblin-esque soundtrack! Mysterious subterfuge! A nod (maybe) to the 1971 classic Cat O’ Nine Tails. Argento is back! Well, maybe he’s back. The vote’s still out on that wild proclamation.
★★★ out of ★★★★★
As a horror film Moloch really has everything you’d ever want. Well-placed scares. A little blood, but not too much. Ghost-ish characters. Possession — sort of. Pre-christian Low Country mythology. And even — gasp — pagan demon cults!
★.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.
Mickey Keating’s OFFSEASON will be available exclusively to stream on the SHUDDER platform starting on Friday, June 10, 2022.
★ out of ★★★★★ Directed by Rob Jabbaz The Sadness, directed by Rob Jabbaz, begins the way your standard outbreak […]
★★★ 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.
★★★ out of ★★★★★
This hop, skip, and jump down memory lane provides an incredible gory realization that horror films from the 1980s were silly, confusing, and nasty bits of business. Sure they were rather amateur-ish, but they were also exciting jumping off points for the masters of horror for decades to come! There’s Sam Raimi, Ted Raimi, Greg Nicotero, Bruce Campbell, Renée Estevez, and even famed Tarantino producer, Lawrence Bender. Some parts are smaller than others, but rest assured, they’re all there!
★★★.5 out of ★★★★★
It is oft said that being a parent is the most unique and rewarding experience one could ever have. Simultaneously it’s the most dull and common experience among us. There are highs and lows to be sure, but most of the relationships are spent having a meal, doing laundry, and trying to figure each other out.
Hellbender spends the large majority of its hour and 26 minute run time focused on the more mundane aspects of the parent child relationship, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a wild and peculiar odyssey.
★★.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 👻👻👻👻👻
The go-to move for horror filmmakers in the modern era is the tortured family dynamic. It’s creepy, hidden, sinister, and above all tragic. When you mix in a heaping dose of the death of a child, tragic can take a very dark complexion and make it, well, darker.
★★★ out of ★★★★★
Great White delivers some effective shark-attack–movie thrills with solid acting but not many new elements.
★★★★ 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.
★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
The directorial debut from renowned screenwriter Simon Barrett treads familiar territory but is crafted with great affection for a few different horror subgenres.
The almighty George Romero has a new movie coming out in June 2021! Wait, hasn’t he been dead since 2017!?!? Indeed he has, but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t create a mountain of content never before seen by human eyes. In the same way that Prince will be releasing albums well in to the next century, Romero may have some additional gems that have never made their way out of the crypt. Until now!
★★ 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.
What The Exorcist is to possession movies, Jaws is to shark movies: a classic film that will likely never be equaled in its subgenre. There have been some fine shark attack films during the past few years, though, and absolutely some fun ones. RLJE Films and Shudder are releasing their entry into sharksploitation and survival horror this summer with Great White, and it sounds like it should be a winner.
★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
The Banishing serves up several haunted house tropes, but it looks good while doing so, with solid performances and conspiracy angles.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
The Power is a riveting U.K. supernatural horror film set in a hospital during that country’s 1970s rolling blackouts, following a nurse on her first night on the job. Real-world horrors are exposed by an otherworldly force in this first-rate chiller.
Directed by Corrina Faith
★★★★ 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 ★★★★★
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.
★★★★.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.
