CategoryReviews
Honest horror reviews of films, series, games and books — no hype, no spoilers, just whether it is worth your time and your nerves.
3,465 stories
IndieMoviesReviews
Jack and Amanda Harms (Tom Zembrod and April Hartman respectively) are dealin’ with that ultimate fright flick family buzzkill; a dead kid…namely their young daughter. As is often the case in films like this, the couple haul ass to the most secluded spot they can find and move into a seemingly nice abode (which of course is anything but). Of course that tyke won’t stay dead and soon begins appearing to our heroes which increases their marital woes roughly a billionity (it’s a real number) percent! What is this kreepy kid’s endgame, and will our protagonists make it long enough with their sanity intact to find out? Writer/Director Mitch McLeod has worked a bit of magic with Silhouette; while the flick is definitely well-stepped in horror biz tropes tried and true; his film is elevated by a stellar cast and a keen visual sense. Tom Zembrod and April Hartman really knock it out of the putrid park as the troubled
Continue reading →
MoviesReviews
Ahh…the classic, star-studded disaster movie; they sure don’t make them like that anymore…well, sure they do make star-studded movies that are disasters, just not specifically about disasters. This seems like a long reach for a chuckle from you lot, so let’s just jump into my revoltin’ review of 1974’s Earthquake! Our story begins with Graff (Charlton fuckin’ Heston baby) getting nagged by his wife Remy (Ava Gardner)…because that’s what the kids dig; hen pecked husbands and their pill-poppin’ wives. Following that we get a “high speed” police chase (complete with Zsa Zsa Gabor’s bush…technically a hedge) and that heart-warming ol’ chestnut; a dead child, a mustachioed Marjoe Gortner giving a lady with a sky-high perm (Dallas‘ Victoria Principle) a big slab of his free meat (it involves store credit), Richard Roundtree sportin’ the slickest motorcycle threads/Black Vulcan costume known to mankind and doing his best Evel Knievel bit, Walter Matthau dressed like a pimp sipping booze…pretty much every rando (and
Continue reading →
HuluMoviesReviewsStreaming TVTrailers
June’s episode of “Into the Dark”, titled “They Come Knocking”, is about a father and his two daughters on a road trip to spread the ashes of their mother. Once they have arrived at the remote spot where the father purposed, the episode takes a frightening turn when the struggling family is stalked by black eyed children. The episode is the most emotionally driven episode to date. As we watch flashbacks and see the family’s tension, the story of the mother’s illness and death comes to light. I’ll be honest, this part of the episode got under my skin. The mother’s passing and the emotional wreckage hit so close to home for me. You see, my father went through something so similar as cancer took him. I could relate a little too well to the family. I may have even shed a tear or two. The blacked eyed children, characters we do not see often enough in film, are creepy
Continue reading →
MoviesNewsReviewsTrailers
How far would you go for a better life? Would you go through torture for a shot at $1,000,000? That’s the premise of writer-director Bob Giordano’s The Odds. In the film, nineteen players in nineteen locations must survive multiple rounds, each more painful than the last. Helped through the game by their “Game Master”, players face the loss of appendages and their lives, all for a game bet on by mysterious gamblers. This intense film is set in one room and features two main stars, played by Abbi Butler (the player) and James J. Fuertes (Game Master). Bob Giordano took a huge risk by making a film set in one room with just two actors. It’s a concept that’s so hard to pull off. Luckily, he pulled it off flawlessly. The film pulls you in, you have to know what the next challenge is and you have to know if the player will go through with it. Butler made “the
Continue reading →
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GamingMoviesProductReviews
Fans of Layers of Fear better get ready to raise anchor and sail off into a living nightmare! Gun Media and Bloober Team allowed me the chance to try out their latest trip into terror, Layers of Fear 2. Does it hold up to its predecessor? Join me as we take a look. Layers of Fear 2 follows the same story arc of the first where instead of a world-renowned painter being tormented by supernatural mental baggage, it’s a popular actor. The actor is not just an actor but a method actor who’s known for really getting into character. The unnamed actor is on a cruise ship where the latest film he’ll be working on is being filmed. The film’s director (Voiced by Tony Todd) is mysterious and is known to make his actors go through “tests” to get them into peak performance almost adapting an extreme version of Stanislavski’s Method. These trials consist of traversing a nightmarish reality where
Continue reading →
MoviesNewsReviews
Today I sat down to watch Climax, a film from Argentinian director Gaspar Noé who was also behind the films Enter the Void and I Stand Alone. The film opens to a young woman covered in blood, running across the snow. I came to learn later on in the film that the woman was fleeing from a dance school where a party had gone terribly wrong. At the party, someone has spiked the punch with a heavy dose of LSD and the dancers go from happy to a drug-filled orgy that causes utter chaos and murder. The way the film was shot and presented is a Suspira-like vision in neon colors. Between the colors, chaos, and strange angles, the film will leave your head spinning. If Noé was aiming to make you feel like you are drugged, he accomplished it. When the credits rolled I felt like I had just stepped off of a tilt-a-whirl. By god, the cast was
Continue reading →
MoviesParanormalReviews
Larissa and Matt Kane (Amanda Crew and Adam Brody) move on down to the bucolic town of Sarasota Springs where the livin’ is easy and nothing could ever possibly go wrong. And they lived a quiet happy life… The fuck they did…you see in among the whole “getting ready to start a family” bullshitery, Larissa meets her creepy as balls neighbor Ann Pelway (Sheila McCarthy) as her even creepier daughter Isabelle (Zoë Belkin) glowers down from a window above, and then immediately has a late-term miscarriage right there in the driveway (following which she sees her dead baby return to demonic life in her fevered dreams…seriously tacky movie, seriously tacky). Time passes, Larissa keeps imagining her baby is alive, and Isabelle keeps playing her staring contest long game…I mean she has fuck-all else to do being a satanic presence confined to a wheelchair…which makes the fact that L-dawg starts seeing her in her own abode pretty damn shocking (those glowing
Continue reading →
IndieMoviesReviewsThrillerTrue Story
On April 23rd, 1991, former New York Dolls guitarist and notorious heroin addict Johnny Thunders was found dead at the St Peter House in New Orleans. How this happened as long been one of rock n’ roll’s greatest unsolved mysteries, as an autopsy report found only a minimal amount of drugs in his system (he was attempting to get clean at the time)…but murder has always been a strong contender in his demise. Written and directed by The Cordero Brothers, Room 37: The Mysterious Death of Johnny Thunders presents a fictionalized version of the events surrounding Johnny’s (played to razor sharp perfection by Leo Ramsey) exit from this mortal coil. As our protagonist rolls into town he’s a broken man; his wife has left him, he hasn’t seen his kid in ages, and he’s trying to give up chasing the dragon. Johnny manages to continue his career in The Big Easy, and find some small companionship with hotel staffer Iris
Continue reading →
ForeignMoviesReviewsThriller
Tycoon John Alexander (the ever sedate and totally sane Klaus Kinski) has found himself in a marriage with the comely Helen (Margaret Lee) who gets the seven year itch five years t early and begins an affair with her friend Liz. John gets wise to this but Helen soon finds herself tits up as her car crashes due to an explosive device planted on the vehicle. How does our hero deal with his never-ending grief at his wife’s demise? Why by attending one of those “hippie parties” that the kids are so into these days, with a chick that decided to take up residence at his pad while he was away. At that soiree John featuring a chick (sporting a veil) with the same ring and scar Helen had! John then attempts a mad quest to find the woman… Since Double Face contains elements of murder and mystery, and was directed by Italian Riccardo Freda, you may expect this flick
Continue reading →
ForeignMoviesReviews
You know how sex and violence oft times collide in our beloved horror biz? Well, wait until you feast your putrid peepers on A Record of Sweet Murder… Sang-joon (Yeon Je-wook) is a murder machine on the lam for the kill krazy antics he has pulled all over town. Enter journalist So-yeon (Kim Kko-bbi) who takes it upon herself to interview that rascal, in truth a childhood chum who got stabby to right a wrong that has plagued the pair for a damn sight, along with her cameraman (played by Writer/Director Koji Shiraishi) in the loon’s claustrophobic, grungy-ass apartment in the hopes of gleaning a bit of knowledge as to the deadly goings-on. What does our heroine discover? Why that if Sang-joon kills all 27 poor souls on his shit list (he’s on 25 for the record) then all his victims, and the one he is trying to avenge, will magically rejoin the land of the living. Seems reasonable. Soon
Continue reading →
More from Reviews
IndieMoviesReviews
Jack and Amanda Harms (Tom Zembrod and April Hartman respectively) are dealin’ with that ultimate fright flick family buzzkill; a dead kid…namely their young daughter. As is often the case in films like this, the couple haul ass to the most secluded spot they can find and move into a seemingly nice abode (which of course is anything but). Of course that tyke won’t stay dead and soon begins appearing to our heroes which increases their marital woes roughly a billionity (it’s a real number) percent! What is this kreepy kid’s endgame, and will our protagonists make it long enough with their sanity intact to find out? Writer/Director Mitch McLeod has worked a bit of magic with Silhouette; while the flick is definitely well-stepped in horror biz tropes tried and true; his film is elevated by a stellar cast and a keen visual sense. Tom Zembrod and April Hartman really knock it out of the putrid park as the troubled
Continue reading →
MoviesReviews
Ahh…the classic, star-studded disaster movie; they sure don’t make them like that anymore…well, sure they do make star-studded movies that are disasters, just not specifically about disasters. This seems like a long reach for a chuckle from you lot, so let’s just jump into my revoltin’ review of 1974’s Earthquake! Our story begins with Graff (Charlton fuckin’ Heston baby) getting nagged by his wife Remy (Ava Gardner)…because that’s what the kids dig; hen pecked husbands and their pill-poppin’ wives. Following that we get a “high speed” police chase (complete with Zsa Zsa Gabor’s bush…technically a hedge) and that heart-warming ol’ chestnut; a dead child, a mustachioed Marjoe Gortner giving a lady with a sky-high perm (Dallas‘ Victoria Principle) a big slab of his free meat (it involves store credit), Richard Roundtree sportin’ the slickest motorcycle threads/Black Vulcan costume known to mankind and doing his best Evel Knievel bit, Walter Matthau dressed like a pimp sipping booze…pretty much every rando (and
Continue reading →
HuluMoviesReviewsStreaming TVTrailers
June’s episode of “Into the Dark”, titled “They Come Knocking”, is about a father and his two daughters on a road trip to spread the ashes of their mother. Once they have arrived at the remote spot where the father purposed, the episode takes a frightening turn when the struggling family is stalked by black eyed children. The episode is the most emotionally driven episode to date. As we watch flashbacks and see the family’s tension, the story of the mother’s illness and death comes to light. I’ll be honest, this part of the episode got under my skin. The mother’s passing and the emotional wreckage hit so close to home for me. You see, my father went through something so similar as cancer took him. I could relate a little too well to the family. I may have even shed a tear or two. The blacked eyed children, characters we do not see often enough in film, are creepy
Continue reading →
MoviesNewsReviewsTrailers
How far would you go for a better life? Would you go through torture for a shot at $1,000,000? That’s the premise of writer-director Bob Giordano’s The Odds. In the film, nineteen players in nineteen locations must survive multiple rounds, each more painful than the last. Helped through the game by their “Game Master”, players face the loss of appendages and their lives, all for a game bet on by mysterious gamblers. This intense film is set in one room and features two main stars, played by Abbi Butler (the player) and James J. Fuertes (Game Master). Bob Giordano took a huge risk by making a film set in one room with just two actors. It’s a concept that’s so hard to pull off. Luckily, he pulled it off flawlessly. The film pulls you in, you have to know what the next challenge is and you have to know if the player will go through with it. Butler made “the
Continue reading →
GamingMoviesProductReviews
Fans of Layers of Fear better get ready to raise anchor and sail off into a living nightmare! Gun Media and Bloober Team allowed me the chance to try out their latest trip into terror, Layers of Fear 2. Does it hold up to its predecessor? Join me as we take a look. Layers of Fear 2 follows the same story arc of the first where instead of a world-renowned painter being tormented by supernatural mental baggage, it’s a popular actor. The actor is not just an actor but a method actor who’s known for really getting into character. The unnamed actor is on a cruise ship where the latest film he’ll be working on is being filmed. The film’s director (Voiced by Tony Todd) is mysterious and is known to make his actors go through “tests” to get them into peak performance almost adapting an extreme version of Stanislavski’s Method. These trials consist of traversing a nightmarish reality where
Continue reading →
MoviesNewsReviews
Today I sat down to watch Climax, a film from Argentinian director Gaspar Noé who was also behind the films Enter the Void and I Stand Alone. The film opens to a young woman covered in blood, running across the snow. I came to learn later on in the film that the woman was fleeing from a dance school where a party had gone terribly wrong. At the party, someone has spiked the punch with a heavy dose of LSD and the dancers go from happy to a drug-filled orgy that causes utter chaos and murder. The way the film was shot and presented is a Suspira-like vision in neon colors. Between the colors, chaos, and strange angles, the film will leave your head spinning. If Noé was aiming to make you feel like you are drugged, he accomplished it. When the credits rolled I felt like I had just stepped off of a tilt-a-whirl. By god, the cast was
Continue reading →
MoviesParanormalReviews
Larissa and Matt Kane (Amanda Crew and Adam Brody) move on down to the bucolic town of Sarasota Springs where the livin’ is easy and nothing could ever possibly go wrong. And they lived a quiet happy life… The fuck they did…you see in among the whole “getting ready to start a family” bullshitery, Larissa meets her creepy as balls neighbor Ann Pelway (Sheila McCarthy) as her even creepier daughter Isabelle (Zoë Belkin) glowers down from a window above, and then immediately has a late-term miscarriage right there in the driveway (following which she sees her dead baby return to demonic life in her fevered dreams…seriously tacky movie, seriously tacky). Time passes, Larissa keeps imagining her baby is alive, and Isabelle keeps playing her staring contest long game…I mean she has fuck-all else to do being a satanic presence confined to a wheelchair…which makes the fact that L-dawg starts seeing her in her own abode pretty damn shocking (those glowing
Continue reading →
IndieMoviesReviewsThrillerTrue Story
On April 23rd, 1991, former New York Dolls guitarist and notorious heroin addict Johnny Thunders was found dead at the St Peter House in New Orleans. How this happened as long been one of rock n’ roll’s greatest unsolved mysteries, as an autopsy report found only a minimal amount of drugs in his system (he was attempting to get clean at the time)…but murder has always been a strong contender in his demise. Written and directed by The Cordero Brothers, Room 37: The Mysterious Death of Johnny Thunders presents a fictionalized version of the events surrounding Johnny’s (played to razor sharp perfection by Leo Ramsey) exit from this mortal coil. As our protagonist rolls into town he’s a broken man; his wife has left him, he hasn’t seen his kid in ages, and he’s trying to give up chasing the dragon. Johnny manages to continue his career in The Big Easy, and find some small companionship with hotel staffer Iris
Continue reading →
ForeignMoviesReviewsThriller
Tycoon John Alexander (the ever sedate and totally sane Klaus Kinski) has found himself in a marriage with the comely Helen (Margaret Lee) who gets the seven year itch five years t early and begins an affair with her friend Liz. John gets wise to this but Helen soon finds herself tits up as her car crashes due to an explosive device planted on the vehicle. How does our hero deal with his never-ending grief at his wife’s demise? Why by attending one of those “hippie parties” that the kids are so into these days, with a chick that decided to take up residence at his pad while he was away. At that soiree John featuring a chick (sporting a veil) with the same ring and scar Helen had! John then attempts a mad quest to find the woman… Since Double Face contains elements of murder and mystery, and was directed by Italian Riccardo Freda, you may expect this flick
Continue reading →
ForeignMoviesReviews
You know how sex and violence oft times collide in our beloved horror biz? Well, wait until you feast your putrid peepers on A Record of Sweet Murder… Sang-joon (Yeon Je-wook) is a murder machine on the lam for the kill krazy antics he has pulled all over town. Enter journalist So-yeon (Kim Kko-bbi) who takes it upon herself to interview that rascal, in truth a childhood chum who got stabby to right a wrong that has plagued the pair for a damn sight, along with her cameraman (played by Writer/Director Koji Shiraishi) in the loon’s claustrophobic, grungy-ass apartment in the hopes of gleaning a bit of knowledge as to the deadly goings-on. What does our heroine discover? Why that if Sang-joon kills all 27 poor souls on his shit list (he’s on 25 for the record) then all his victims, and the one he is trying to avenge, will magically rejoin the land of the living. Seems reasonable. Soon
Continue reading →