This is a fun horror comedy that plays around with the teen sex danger angle. Sure, it’s not the first to do this, but it feels like a pretty fresh spin on it.
Tag: Horror
Home Sweet Home aka Slasher in the House (1981, Nettie Pena)
We were looking for a Thanksgiving horror film and so we found our way to this god-awful mess, featuring some of the worst lighting you will ever see in a movie. The director has a single credit after this film, and I suspect it’s because nobody believes they can light a film.
X (2022, Ti West)
This is a fun spin on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre style of horror movie – the young people are filming a porno – that has a fairly fatal flaw, in my book. But I liked some things about it. SPOILERS
The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival
This was my first time attending TIFF in person in 3 years. It was a little exhausting, given how far out of downtown we now live but, once I got the hang of it, I fell back into the rhythm of it and thoroughly enjoyed myself. It also helped that, after a few movies that …
Project Wolf Hunting (2022, Hong-Sung Kim)
This is an extremely gory, bloody and bonkers action/horror film about a ship of inmates travelling from the Philippines to Korea. The theme of it is basically overkill – don’t just hit somebody once, do it seven times. Why shoot at someone once when you can use the entire magazine? It’s quite funny and entertaining …
Viy aka Forbidden Empire aka Forbidden Kingdom (2014, Oleg Stepchenko)
This is a bizarre Russian horror film starring an English actor (and so dubbed into English, at least on streaming services) that was made in 3D, so it looks extra bizarre on your TV. It is bizarrely listed as “Fantasy” on IMDB and, hence, on streaming services, but it’s horror (ish). I actually saw a …
Penny Dreadful (2014)
This is a slightly campy (but somehow very serious) British horror fantasy show with the rather old, but somehow not tired conceit of a bunch of characters from famous 19th century history novels exist in the same universe. (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen of horror, basically.) It’s a show that sometimes works well for what it …
The Crawling Eye aka The Trollenberg Terror (1958, Quentin Lawrence)
This is a pretty lame science fiction horror film with pretty bad effects and fairly cliche performances. However, um, it could have been worse. Um, SPOILERS
Killer Fish [L’invasion des piranhas] (1979, Antonio Margheriti)
This is an extremely lame film that attempts to combine the heist film with horror, I think, but which fails to do either even moderately well. SPOILERS
The Day Time Ended (1979, John ‘Bud’ Cardos)
This is one of those films that I watched courtesy of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and I can’t really imagine doing it without. I wonder if my rating would drop a point if I had to watch it on my own. It’s one of those terrible films that appears to be just very, very boring.
Crimson Peak (2015, Guillermo del Toro)
This is a series of set pieces in search of something more. It’s kind of mystifying how uninteresting – and specifically how unscary – the whole thing is given some of the reviews. This one is a big shoulder shrug from me.
Ghoulies (1984, Luca Bercovici)
It’s been a long time since I’ve been this disappointed in a bad horror movie. It should be called Chokies or Undead Warlockies or something like that, not Ghoulies. The cover of this movie terrified me as a child in the video store and it turns out that the ghoulies barely do anything, they’re utterly …
Fortitude (2015)
So this is a hard show to review for me because we watched the first season a few years ago, we watched the second season maybe at the beginning of the pandemic and we just watched the abbreviated final season this week. My memory of both the first and second season has faded and it’s …
The Final Girls (2015, Todd Strauss-Schulson)
This is a reasonably clever and inventive horror comedy which doesn’t have enough laughs and which has a few too many continuity problems whenever you start thinking about it.
Saloum (2021, Jean Luc Herbulot)
My first Senegalese film (as far as I know), this is a tonally inconsistent horror movie which tries to trick you into thinking it’s something else more than once. It’s super stylized and some of my confusion with it likely stems from having never been to Africa and knowing literally nothing about this part of …
Zalava (2021, Arsalan Amiri)
This is a psychological horror drama set in an absolutely gorgeous part of Iranian Kurdistan pre Iranian Revolution. There’s a bit of a Wicker Man vibe to it, though it is a little more grounded in reality (and a hell of a lot prettier). SPOILERS
Dashcam (2021, Rob Savage)
The people who made this movie are extremely enamoured with Annie Hardy. I didn’t know anything about her though she’s actually only a few months older than me. If I had encountered her music when I first encountered Anal Cunt or when I was, say, 22, I can imagine also being enamoured by her music. …
Final Destination 5 (2011, Steven Quale)
Aka Final Destionation in 3D. And we watched it on a normal TV which, as you know, is a bit problematic. I should also note that I’ve seen the first three films in the series years ago – the first one many times, and second one more than once – but I have not seen …
Woman in the Dunes [砂の女 or Suna no onna] (1964)
This is a really distinct and kind of crazy film that pairs a plot that could be in a horror film with a bit of a retelling of the story of Sisyphus. It is also, perhaps, the most incredible use of sand in a movie in film history. Very mild spoilers
Climax (2018, Gaspar Noé)
Well, I can honestly say I’ve never anything like this. So that’s something.
My Bloody Valentine (1981, George Mihalka)
I had suspect tastes when I was younger and cannot, for the life of me, figure out why I rated My Bloody Valentine 3D 5/10. Because, though this movie is bad – and it’s quite bad – I have a hard time believing it is worse than its remake, which I somehow rated 5/10. Does …
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997)
When I was younger and had recently fallen in love with serialized TV dramas, I had this idea that I was going to write a book about the antecedents of the Golden Age of Television. (At first this was going to be about the Golden Age of Television, but that book already exists.) This book …
And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989) by Nick Cave
Nick Cave is both one of my favourite songwriters and, I think, one of the great songwriters of the era. (He is in my 20th century songwriting canon.) But I don’t think too many would argue that he has greatly improved as a songwriter from when he first started out in the Boys Next Door …
It Follows (2014, David Robert Mitchell)
This is a refreshing horror film that takes the old trope about women getting punished for premarital sex by a supernatural force and spins it in a new way that feels far more real and effective.
Terror Train (1980, Roger Spottiswoode)
What is it with Americans and dressing up in costumes for New Year’s Eve? Or, rather, what is it with Jamie Lee Curtis starring in movies in which Americans dress up in Halloween costumes on New Year’s Eve?
Final Girl (2015, Tyler Shields)
This is one of the movies with a title that appears to have been chosen to trick people into watching it. And, friends, I regret to inform you that I thought it was Final Girls and that is why we watched it. Alas…
Scream 4 (2011, Wes Craven)
As Jenn said, if you’re Sidney, at this point, don’t you move somewhere where nobody has seen a Stab movie?
Ready or Not (2019, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett)
This is one of those movies where the premise sounds really great – a rich family plays a game to welcome new members of that family, but when that game is Hide and Seek, things turn deadly – but where the execution is just not up to snuff. There are moments that are pretty great, …
2020 Toronto International Film Festival
For what may be the third year in a row, I only saw 5 movies at TIFF. Every year I resolve to see more the next year but it never seems to happen. Now, this year is different, obviously. This year I watched TIFF films on my couch. And this year I only watched 5 …
Shadow in the Cloud (2020, Roseanne Liang)
This is a bizarre film with a premise that kind of appealed to me in reading about it but, which, in execution, is a giant mess. SPOILERS