Piranha—the debt to Jaws is obvious, and acknowledged at the beginning with someone playing the Jaws video game on screen, but this is like what if the first half of Jaws were the whole movie? So instead of a lengthy hunt sequence, we just have more and more people put in the path of the swarming genetically enhanced Piranhas, and this movie has the courage to put literally anyone in danger and kill them. Packed with great character actors like Keenan Wynn and Dick Miller, and featuring a movie-stealing performance from Paul Bartel as an evil camp director. Absolutely top-notch, with script co-written by John Sayles and direction from Joe Dante.

Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein— A re-watch, but this is a stone classic. Not just Frankenstein, but also Dracula and the Wolf Man are on board, and Abbot and Costello are very funny. It’s fun to watch this and see how Scooby-Doo and pretty much every other horror comedy took cues from this. Farcical and very funny!

Abbot and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde— A strange movie in that it’s really mostly a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story (featuring Boris Karloff!) with Abbot and Costello on board for comic relief including one fantastic sequence where Costello is transformed into…well, I won’t spoil it. Not as funny as Meet Frankenstein, but still an entertaining movie!

Grizzly II: Revenge—Of course, countless movies feature disposable horny teens who die in the first five minutes of the movie, but how many movies have the crazy good fortune to cast future stars in those roles? Just this one, apparently, with George Clooney, Laura Dern, and Charlie Sheen being horny and dying early. Someone clearly shot a new opening to give these three top billing in the credits, and it’s fun to watch their inevitable deaths. Sadly, the movie goes rapidly downhill after this, and even the fantastically and possibly unintentionally comic performance of John Rhys-Davies as some kind of 19th century French Canadian trapper inexplicably roaming a National Park in 1982, complete with fringed jacket, can’t save it. Didn’t finish.

Zombeavers— I love when a movie understands the assignment. If you’re turning on a movie about horny college students being attacked by ravenous undead beavers, you have certain expectations. I’m happy to report that they are all met. You want laughs? Horrible creature effects? Gore? This movie has you covered. Also wonderful comic sequence featuring Bill Burr and John Mayer to open the movie/kick off the zombie beaver outbreak. An hour and seventeen minutes very well spent.

#review #horror #movie

The Hostess

By Seamus Cooper

ScaryCon 2024 was in the books. Colleen wheeled her suitcase full of unsold DVDs, posters, stickers, and bobbleheads toward her Kia Forte. She’d nearly sold enough to break even, which made this her best con this year.

            If she had her way, she’d stop doing cons altogether. Posing for photos as horror hostess The Blood Countess was fine, but then there were the conversations she had to have as Colleen. Prove your horror bonafides by answering this dumb trivia question I’m framing as a conversational salvo. I have a raft of suggestions for the show. Would you ever do nude scenes/you should do OnlyFans. What are you doing after the con. It was exhausting.

            But everyone said this was the kind of thing you needed to do to maintain and grow a character. Smile, have the conversations so the fans would feel a connection with the show and hit those like and subscribe buttons.  So several times a year, she did it.

            She was tired. Her feet hurt from standing in ridiculous heels for eight hours, and she couldn’t wait to get home and ease into a nice warm bath. But she had a solid two-hour drive ahead of her.

             She hit the button on the key fob, and her trunk slowly slid open. She hefted the suitcase into the trunk and slammed it closed, only to find a guy in a Ghostface mask and robe standing right there.

            She had seen countless horror movies and introduced over 100 indie horror shorts on her YouTube channel, and she prided herself on being hard to scare. But it’s always startling when someone pops out at you unexpectedly, which explained her gasp of surprise.

            “What’s your favorite scary movie?” Ghostface said. She knew she had to maintain the character and grow the channel, but there was a limit as to what she was willing to put up with. She looked around the parking lot, assessing her options. She saw no one. Not even the reassuring blink of a night vision camera on the light poles. Just her and a weirdo cosplaying a slasher, alone at night. She decided on a strategy.

            “Well,” Colleen said with a little nervous chuckle, “I’ve seen so many and I love them all for different reasons.  I can see you like the Scream franchise. I think Wes Craven’s New Nightmare doesn’t get enough credit for starting the meta-horror trend, though. Scream was just Kevin Williamson being inspired by Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, and then getting Wes Craven himself to direct!  Don’t you think?”

            There. Horror bonafides established. Hopefully he’ll tire of this momentarily.

            “Would you ever do OnlyFans?”

            “Oh, I don’t think Ghostface asked Drew Barrymore that. Well, in any case, no, it’s not in my plans. No disrespect to anyone who goes that route—it’s just not what I do. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s late and I’ve been on my feet all day and—”

            “Which are you really? Colleen or The Blood Countess?”

            “Oh, well, just because I play a character certainly doesn’t mean that’s who I am.”

            Ghostface drew a step closer. He smelled of b.o. and energy drinks. “Did you know Elizabeth Bathory, the real Blood Countess, bathed in the blood of virgins to stay eternally young?”

            “Yep. Familiar with the story of Báthori Erzsébet. Anyway, thanks again, but I have to get going. I’ve got a long drive ahead of me. Remember to like and subscribe. My new season drops in two weeks!”

            She moved toward the driver’s door, not turning her back on Ghostface, who matched her step for step. “Am I..scaring you?” Ghostface said.

            And that was finally what broke her. Not the fact that he asked invasive questions in a lonely parking lot, not that he was keeping her from her car and therefore her bath and her bed, but the fact that he had the audacity, the temerity to think he could frighten her.

            The blades were in her hands before she even realized it. Hello, old friends. With lightning speed, she sliced through Ghostface’s black robe and several layers of fat and muscle in a single, bloody stroke. Blood began to pour from the wound. She thought she saw a little bit of intestine peeking out of the black robe. Ghostface clutched at it frantically, staggering away from her.

            “No, darling, you were not scaring me. Annoying me? Yes. Boring me? Oh, most certainly. But scaring me? With a Spirit Halloween costume and a bad impersonation of a second-rate movie villain? Yes, I said it. Second rate. Now. Kneel before The Blood Countess.” This last bit was superfluous, since Ghostface had dropped to his knees and was keening in pain and surprise.

            “I thought...you said this was just a character,” Ghostface burbled through a mouthful of what she assumed was blood but might have been vomit.

            “No no, fool. I said ‘just because I play a character doesn’t mean that’s who I am.’ Which of course doesn’t mean what you assumed it did. A pity no one ever taught you to listen to women. And now it’s too late.” The Blood Countess’s blades flashed again, sliding under the ghostface mask and severing both the carotid artery and the jugular vein, judging by the amount of blood now pulsing out from under the mask.

            “Shame to waste all this virgin blood,” The Blood Countess said. She reached her finger down into the puddle on the pavement and dipped it in Ghostface’s blood. She licked her finger, then spat. “Ugh, it tastes of self-loathing and Mountain Dew. You’d be useless for a rejuvenating bath anyway.”

            The Blood Countess pulled out her phone and made a call. “Yes, it’s me, fool,” she said. “Look at the fucking caller ID!” She took a deep breath. “There there. I’m sorry. Your Countess isn’t angry with you. That’s right. Now listen. I’m in the parking lot at the Midstate Convention Center. Call the ghouls. Tell them dinner’s on me.”

#horror #shortstory

Your mileage may vary. I know a lot of people are fed up with found footage, and I have some thoughts on why that might be in my review of

V/H/S Beyond. This is the, I dunno, forty-eleventh entry in this series, I really like horror anthologies as well as found footage, so I always watch them. This is a solid entry in the series, though I was disappointed that there was no satisfying crossovers between the segments as there were in V/H/S 94 and V/H/S 85. They’ve done away with the gimmick that all the segments are shot on VHS, which is a good move because who cares. Here only the frame story features VHS footage. And here, as in most entries, the frame story feels unnecessary and unsatisfying.

Every segment is well done, but here’s the problem. There is a found footage formula, which goes like this: people go investigate a thing. The thing is way worse/scarier than they anticipated. Things get worse until everybody dies. You can deviate from this formula, as many segments in the V/H/S series have, but here we get the same thing in 4 out of the 5 main segments, so that by the end, I was just kind of tired of the whole thing. “Live and Let Dive,” about a birthday skydiving trip gone horribly wrong, is probably the best segment, though “Dream Girl” was pretty good too. Each segment had some good, scary images, but the formula wore very thin for me by the end.

WNUF Halloween Special is another formulaic found footage film, but this one takes the form of a local TV reporter going to a haunted house in 1987. The movie is peppered with a TON of incredibly authentic 80’s-style TV ads, which cuts two ways—on the one hand, the many ads break up any suspense that the main plot is building, but on the other hand, they ad to the immersive feeling. I really felt like I was watching a recording of an 80’s TV broadcast. Paul Fahrenkopf gives a fantastic performance as the cynical, world-weary reporter who is trying to simultaneously sell and mock the proceedings. There are some laugh out loud funny moments in this movie, and I found the end both surprising and satisfying. In terms of both its format and sensibility, this is unlike pretty much any other movie out there. I recommend it!

Both movies are on Shudder.

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First of all, the performances are great: David Dastmalchian is both charming and slightly off-putting as the host, Ian Bliss is a delight as an arrogant, showboating magician-turned-professional skeptic, Rhys Auteri plays the long-suffering sidekick with just the perfect amount of supressed rage, and Ingrid Torellis is fantastic as Lilly, which is good because the entire movie depends on her performance.

It just makes such a difference when everyone in a horror movie can act. No weak links in this cast. The script is good too—not just another version of something we’ve seen a million times, but a pretty fresh twist on both found footage and demonic possession. You know what else I liked? The filmmakers drop some information early on, and I was pretty sure this was going to come out later in the movie as a Big Reveal, but, in fact, they trusted that their audience had seen enough horror movies to draw their own conclusions, and it wasn’t necessary to construct a big reveal on those points! I cannot stress enough how rare this is.

Also good—the movie captures the 70’s atmosphere perfectly, in everything from the look and feel to the show to the creepy kid, which was a strong trope in 70’s horror cinema. So far so good, and I enjoyed watching it.

I do of course have 2 quibbles. The first involves spoilers, so skip the next paragraph if you want to avoid them.

Okay, so Carmichael Haig has a rational explanation for everything, but then his rational explanation for the…initial event with Lilly is involuntary mass hypnosis, which he then demonstrates? Nah. Not buying it. I mean, I could buy it from another movie, but it seemed to violate the movie’s internal logic and therefore seemed like a cheesy development.

And, perhaps more importantly, the filmmakers made their own deal with the devil by using AI-generated, or, more simply, plagiarized, images on some of the “more to come” and “be right back” title cards that come up on commercial breaks. I mean, the title cards did help build the 70’s atmosphere (much as the non-AI-generated ones on Hanging With Dr. Z do), but why involve the Automated Plagiarism Machine on something a human graphic designer could do easily? It’s not like this was a low-budget production, by horror standards. Dumb, shitty decision. I knew this going in to the movie and so obviously didn’t boycott it as a result, but it’s actually mystifying to me why they did this unless it was simply to get us used to machine-plagiarized art in movies so they can phase out real artists in the future.

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It’s a very fun movie—not as good as the best of the V/H/S movies, but far, far better than the worst of the V/H/S movies.

The frame story, The Traveler, is pretty weak stuff despite Efran Ramirez’s excellent performance. The frame story is supposed to tie the other segments together, but in this case, it’s mostly Ramirez being interrogated by police and telling them stories that are completely unrelated to the stuff he’s trying to convince them of.

The first story, Tambien Lo Vi, is an unsettling tale of how a guy uses a Rubik’s Cube algorithm to open a portal to the land of the dead. It’s creepy and effective and Demian Saloman turns in a great performance as the unhinged cube solver.

The next, El Vampiro, was my favorite. It definitely hits the comedy harder than the horror, but I don’t mind that in a horror comedy as long as it’s actually funny. There’s one bit in particular involving vampiric hypnosis that goes on way too long and therefore goes through that cycle where it’s funny and then not funny and then suddenly funnier because it just doesn’t stop. Anyway, I’m always on board for bumbling vampires, and the end of this was actually quite sweet without being treacly or manipulative.

In Nahuales, a guy…I dunno, gets captured by some unded pre-Aztec tribe or something? Atmosphere was good, but there wasn’t really all that much of a story. (In fairness to the filmmakers, I should point out that this is the point in the movie at which the edible kicked in, so I may have missed subtleties or not-so-subtleties.)

The Hammer of Zanzibar was another comedic segment that…I mean, either you find dildos inherently hilarious or you don’t. I count myself in the former category, so I enjoyed this. I’ve seen complaints of this segment being homophobic, but I, a straight white guy and therefore the final arbiter of what is and is not offensive, did not read it that way. (spoiler incoming!) To me, the joke of the flashback story wasn’t that the guy was gay—it was that we think he’s going to tell a harrowing story of fighting a demon, but he winds up seriously oversharing about his sex life. Anyway, your mileage may vary, of course.

And then we get the wrapup of The Traveler, which is fun, but…well, like I said, the whole story was pretty meh.

Overall a movie I would definitely recommend to horror fans, especially those who want to see more diversity in the genre.

Honestly, horror from different perspectives and cultures is, for me, a small hopeful light in the darkness of….well, you know, everything. It reminds us of our shared humanity in a real and visceral way! What’s not to love?!

#review #horror #shudder

Last week I watched Christmas Evil, which asks the question, “what kind of psychological damage would it do to be the kid in ‘I saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus?’” (In this case it’s “I saw Santa perorming oral sex on Mommy,” but I guess the concept is the same.)

The answer is, “He’d develop an unhealthy obsession with Santa and eventually go on a killing spree!” The kills are nothing to write home about, gore-wise, but there’s a lot to recommend this. First, though it was released in 1980, it’s thoroughly grounded in the New York City of the 70’s. So if you dig that grainy, gritty 70’s vibe, this movie is for you.

Also, Brandon Maggart gives a fantastic performance as the guy who snaps. He’s believably beleaguered at the beginning, and even after he snaps, he maintains this weird, touching love for the idea of Santa and wants nothing more than to be loved by children, but not in a creepy way. (Except for Moss Garcia, who is on the naughty list and receives a bag of dirt! Shame on him for always talking about porn!)

Also the ending was completely unexpected and totally changes the movie. I really enjoyed this one.

But I just loved It’s a Wonderful Knife. It’s a slasher version of It’s a Wonderful Life that asks the question, “what if the final girl never existed?” Absolutely fantastic performance from Justin Long, but Jane Widdop and Jess McCleoud carry the movie’s pretty spectacular tone shift and both give great, winning performances.

(I guess it’s a work rules thing, but why does every movie cast people in their 20s as high school students?)

This is a slasher movie (great costume for the slasher, but the kills are, again, nothing special), but it’s got a squishy, sentimental heart. It was touching without feeling saccharine or maudlin, and, readers, I cried tears of joy at the end. (this is not much of an achievement—I have been known to cry at commercials—but it was thoroughly unexpected from a horror movie.)

This one will be joining Bad Santa in my regular Christmas movie rotation.

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When Evil Lurks is an Argentinian horror movie about a sort of epidemic of demonic posession? Maybe? Of which the rules are totally unclear. Don’t kill anyone who’s possessed because then the demon will get out and go elsewhere, but also it sometimes does that anyway.

The movie follows two hapless brothers who inadvertently unleash a new outbreak of possession and then spend the rest of the movie trying to fix it. It’s a scenario that could be played for laughs, but it’s not—it’s played totally straight, and you get some shocking deaths, some great suspense where you don’t know who’s possessed and who’s not, and a final scene that continues to haunt me.

It’s an excellent movie, and if you like horror movies at all, you should see it.

Wish I could say the same for Frankenhooker. Don’t get me wrong—this one definitely has its moments, particularly at the end when it kind of flirts with feminism. (No, really!) And the entire sequence of the title character running amok in Manhattan is great.

But man, does it take a long time to get there. The first half of the movie is pretty excruciating—not really funny, not really scary. I feel like, even in the horror community, horror comedies don’t get as much respect as “serious” horror movies, but bad horror comedies like this show just how hard it is to do a horror comedy well.

Anyway, I feel like this is one of those movies that everybody has seen, and now so have I, so if you’ve got a lil’ obsessive streak in terms of keeping up with the horror canon, it’s an okay way to spend 90 minutes. Otherwise, avoid.

#Review #movies #horror #shudder

Said bird attacks mostly consist of people being in rooms with a bunch of pigeons flying around. The pigeons fly, the people cover their faces with their arms and scream, and then there’s a closeup of a real pigeon pecking a fake face or a fake pigeon pecking a real face.

There are long sequences with secondary characters trying to hide from murderous pigeons, and there are a few decent set pieces, and if you’ve seen Hitchcock’s The Birds, you know how this ends.

A lot of low-budget horror movies achieve cult status because they’re charmingly inept, but that’s not really the case here. I mean, writer/director Rene Cardona Jr. clearly didn’t know how to build suspense or write a coherent script (which is surprising in light of the fact that he directed 99 movies in his life and this was 25 years into his career), but the actors are competent across the board, and while the dialogue doesn’t exactly sparkle, most of it isn’t laughably bad.

And while the gore isn’t spectacular, it’s serviceable, and it is fun to root for the killer pigeons. It was on Freevee and worth every cent I paid to watch it!

#review #movies #horror

The first half works really well, as we meet some winning characters, unearth some complex family dynamics, and observe the the terrible effects when people are dumb enough to do that thing you’re yelling at them not to do.

So far so good, but, for my taste, this one lost its way in the second half. I think this is a problem a lot of horror novels have—horror just works so much better in the short form that a lot of horror novels turn into action/adventure novels in the second half. So as our heroes try to fix what they messed up, we get some suspense, although not a lot—this is another problem with horror at novel length. It’s annoying in the extreme if you kill every character after we spend 400 pages rooting for them (lookin’ at you, The Ruins!) But knowing the author is too kind to do that to readers (Leeds reveals a strong sentimental streak early in the book that convinced me he wasn’t going to do that) kills the suspense.

So, ultimately, we get a lot of meh, and the presence of some recently dead folks helps kill the suspense (being dead doesn’t seem all that bad) and adds some comic notes that don’t quite fit the vibe of the rest of the book.

This is Leeds’ first novel, and I was engaged enough to finish even though the second half didn’t do much for me. So I think he’s got big things ahead of him, but, for me, anyway, this one wasn’t it.

#Review #books #horror

Anyway, the blurb called this a “forgotten classic” or something, and while that may be stretching it a little, it’s definitely worth watching despite its flaws. So let me start with the flaws. It just doesn’t really hang together as a story, and we never really get to know the protagonist (played by Marianna Hill) that well and anyway Michael Greer as Thom steals every scene he’s in. ( Apparently he did a couple of gay porn movies and basically ruined his non-porn acting career, which is a shame because he’s got a great screen presence, and the question of whether and how much we should trust him is the most engaging through line in the movie.)

The setting seems very creepy because we only see brightly-lit, mostly-deserted spaces at night. The island of fluorescent light in a sea of darkness turns out to be a creepy rather than reassuring image here.

And there are two sequences that are among the best I’ve seen in a horror movie. I’m not going to go into detail, but the supermarket scene and the movie theater scene are both absolutely top-notch. The movie theater especially is a masterpiece of slow burning dread.

The movie is surprisingly squeamish about gore for a movie about cannibals, but those two scenes alone make it worth your ninety minutes.

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