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?!

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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.

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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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