CategoryReviews
Honest horror reviews of films, series, games and books — no hype, no spoilers, just whether it is worth your time and your nerves.
3,430 stories
GamingHalloweenNewsReviews
It’s officially Halloween season, and Spirit Halloween is celebrating with their brand new Spirit Halloween Monopoly board game which is available now. This no regular, boring game of Monopoly, no. It’s based on the store that is as iconic to the holiday as ghosts and ghouls. In the box, featuring the company’s logo, you will find player pieces, that I’m guessing are made of pewter. They are in the form of a spider, a cat, a coffin, a pumpkin, and the Spirit Halloween spirit. Like the standard game, you will find cash ($10 to $500). There are also buildings, and “Trick” cards that let you buy things like costumes, but beware, there are Trick cards that put the trick in trick ‘r treat. These cars can make you do things like go back spaces. There are also Treat cards that feature cool surprises. The board and pieces really give you the sense that you are in the store. The board
Continue reading →
GamingParanormalProductReviewsSci-Fi
The adventure into Tabletop RPGs continues for me, and I’m starting to get into the concept of world-building. By world-building, I’m talking from a terrain-building point of view. The most important part of creating your world is Basing, this is when you make the base for your character or base for props more lively with decorations. The most common method is adding grass or texture to your base, but sometimes, you need to add a little more oomph to tell the story. This is where Epic Basing comes in! First, I would like to thank all the awesome folks at Epic Basing for making this adventure possible! Epic Basing makes 3D-printed bits that you can use to add some flare to your miniature’s base OR to the terrane you’re creating. In the main picture returns the Werewolf miniature from 1985 Games but this time, he has a little friend on his base, a skull that came from the Skull Collector
Continue reading →
Film FestivalsMoviesReviews
Director Lindsay Anderson Beer’s Pet Semetary: Bloodlines takes a portion of Stephen King’s novel Pet Semetary and expands it into a feature-length film, resulting in a gory, dread-filled prequel to the book and preceding film adaptations. In 1969, teenaged Jud Crandall (Jackson White) is set to be the first of his family line to leave Ludlow, Maine since the town was founded. He and his girlfriend Norma (Natalie Alyn Lind) are about to leave for Peace Corps duty when she is attacked by the dog belonging to Timmy Baterman (Jack Mulhern), one of Jud’s childhood friends, who has just returned from active duty in Vietnam and whose father Bill (David Duchovny) tries to keep visitors away from the increasingly disturbing Timmy. The attack hospitalizes Norma, keeping the couple in Ludlow longer than they planned, and naturally violent events involving the titular burial grounds occur. Manny (Forrest Goodluck), another longtime friend of Jud’s and Timmy’s, and his sister Donna (Isabella Star
Continue reading →
Film FestivalsForeignMoviesReviewsShort Films
Australia’s A Night of Horror International Film Festival has a bounty of fear-fare shorts from around the globe on tap. Here is a look at four of the selections that run less than 10 minutes each. Stop Dead (United Kingdom, 2023) Director Emily Greenwood, working from a screenplay by David Scullion, has crafted a highly atmospheric short that sets up an intriguing premise worthy of a feature-length treatment. Police officers Samantha Hall (Sarah Soetaert) and partner Nick Thompson (David Ricardo-Pearce) are stuck on a country road at nighttime because of a flat tire. A young woman (Priya Blackburn) suddenly appears, refusing to heed Hall’s order to stop, telling the officers that if you stop, you die. This supernatural shocker boasts solid production values, good performances, taut direction, and some fast-paced editing that helps the world building and ratchets up the suspense. Merger (United Kingdom, 2022) Working late in a dark office is rarely a good thing to do, but in
Continue reading →
Film FestivalsForeignMoviesReviews
STRANGE DARLING (2023) Do yourself an immense favor and learn nothing more about the plot of writer/director JT Mollner’s Strange Darling than what I am about to tell you. This film absolutely requires being gone into as cold as possible for maximum effect. The film opens with a preamble about a serial killer’s path through the United States, and then cuts to a coke-snorting man (Kyle Gallner) in a pickup truck chasing down a bloodied woman (Willa Fitzgerald) in a Ford Pinto. She totals the car and runs into the woods, with the rifle-toting man following in pursuit. Mollner takes the concepts of a cat-and-mouse thriller and first-date-gone-wrong horror and over the course of six nonlinear chapters, toys with viewer expectations to mind-blowing effect. The film is beautifully shot by actor Giovanni Ribisi in his debut as a director of photography, with several scenes depending on pure, dialogue-free cinema, which he pulls off swimmingly. Fitzgerald and Gallner are both magnificent
Continue reading →
HuluMoviesNewsReviewsStreaming TVTrailers
A new sci-fi horror film, Now One Will Save You, has just premiered on Hulu and has quickly taken the rank as the number one movie on the service. Let’s talk about it. Warning! Spoilers! Starring Kaitlyn Dever as Brynn, the film sees a young woman who is a shut-in, avoiding everyone because of a terrible mistake she made when she was young. One night, an intruder breaks in, but it is no human; it’s aliens! Watch as she fights to survive the onslaught of creatures that come for her. Dever gives a fantastic performance even though not a single line of real dialogue is spoken in the entire movie, a risky choice by the writer-director Brian Duffield, still it pays off, adding to the feeling of isolation. Dever is able to tell her story by showing emotion. It’s really quite impressive. Let’s talk about these aliens. They come in five forms, each with different body shapes, with some looking
Continue reading →
GamingProductReviews
Fans of the Resident Evil 4 remake can look forward to more action today with the release of the DLC titled Separate Ways which features the mysterious Ada Wong and her activities during the events of the game’s main story. I want to thank CAPCOM for helping out with making this review possible! In Separate Ways, players take on the role of Ada Wong as she’s on a secret mission in the Spanish countryside home to the Los Iluminados cult. For returning players, the controls are the same as in the main story except for a couple of new unique mechanics. Just like I said in my review of the main story, when it comes to sound, headphones are a must! The sound design is great, the soundtrack gets your heart pumping, and Lily Gao’s performance fits with the character of Ada. Gao’s performance of Ada took her from being a flirty mystery eye-candy to what Ada truly is: a
Continue reading →
Film FestivalsMoviesReviews
Writer/director Nicholas Tomnay’s What You Wish For caught me off guard several times, and for best results, I recommend going as cold as possible into this horror feature that also serves up social commentary. I certainly won’t spoil any of its intrigue here. Ryan (Nick Stahl), deep in debt to the wrong kind of people to whom to owe large amounts of money, flies to rural Latin America to meet his friend and roommate from their culinary school days, Jack (Brian Groh), after not seeing each other for 12 years. Jack is currently seemingly living the high life as a private chef, being flown from one country to another by his bosses and given lavish places to live as he prepares event dinners for high-end clients. Although Ryan envies Jack’s extravagant lifestyle — including his bank balance, at which Ryan gets a peek — Jack seems to be in a rather gloomy state of mind, and when events lead to
Continue reading →
ForeignMoviesReviews
Writer/director Adam Sigal’s Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose (U.K., 2023) is not a horror film, but for fellow fans of Fortean phenomena, it’s an entertaining watch based on the true-life story of Gef the Talking Mongoose, AKA the Dalby Spook. It wavers from the amusing to the comical to the philosophical throughout, never quite settling on any of these tones. Simon Pegg portrays Dr. Nandor Fodor, who was a real-life parapsychologist and psychoanalyst. Fodor learns about Gef from Dr. Harry Price (Christopher Lloyd playing another real-life person, a psychic researcher and author), who implores him to travel from London to a rural area of the United Kingdom to investigate the absurd-sounding mystery. Price claims to have heard Gef speak without ever seeing the animal, so Fodor is skeptical from the get-go. Fodor travels with his assistant Anne (Minnie Driver) to the farm of the Irvings (Tim Downie and Ruth Connell), who claim that Gef (voice of Neil Gaiman) is
Continue reading →
AdaptationGamingProductReviews
I’m still just getting into dungeon crawlers and tabletop RPGs, so when the opportunity arises for me to dip my feet into the blood-soaked earth of these worlds, I’ll take it. This brings us to Gloomhaven, a tactical RPG dungeon crawler based on the 2017 multi-award-winning board game of the same name. I want to thank Twin Sails and Saber Interactive for the reviewing opportunity. In Gloomhaven, players take control of and guide mercenaries through the world. You also have encounters before the scenario (quests) you’re going to. The choices you make will affect your mercenaries in the upcoming battle. In every dungeon, the combat is turn-based, and players use cards with two options on each. These cards usually have options for movement, attack, and abilities like healing, buffing teammates, etc. There are tutorials, but if you’re new to this gameplay, you should set time aside to learn. I enjoy the art of the world of Gloomhaven, including the character
Continue reading →
More from Reviews
GamingHalloweenNewsReviews
It’s officially Halloween season, and Spirit Halloween is celebrating with their brand new Spirit Halloween Monopoly board game which is available now. This no regular, boring game of Monopoly, no. It’s based on the store that is as iconic to the holiday as ghosts and ghouls. In the box, featuring the company’s logo, you will find player pieces, that I’m guessing are made of pewter. They are in the form of a spider, a cat, a coffin, a pumpkin, and the Spirit Halloween spirit. Like the standard game, you will find cash ($10 to $500). There are also buildings, and “Trick” cards that let you buy things like costumes, but beware, there are Trick cards that put the trick in trick ‘r treat. These cars can make you do things like go back spaces. There are also Treat cards that feature cool surprises. The board and pieces really give you the sense that you are in the store. The board
Continue reading →
GamingParanormalProductReviewsSci-Fi
The adventure into Tabletop RPGs continues for me, and I’m starting to get into the concept of world-building. By world-building, I’m talking from a terrain-building point of view. The most important part of creating your world is Basing, this is when you make the base for your character or base for props more lively with decorations. The most common method is adding grass or texture to your base, but sometimes, you need to add a little more oomph to tell the story. This is where Epic Basing comes in! First, I would like to thank all the awesome folks at Epic Basing for making this adventure possible! Epic Basing makes 3D-printed bits that you can use to add some flare to your miniature’s base OR to the terrane you’re creating. In the main picture returns the Werewolf miniature from 1985 Games but this time, he has a little friend on his base, a skull that came from the Skull Collector
Continue reading →
Film FestivalsMoviesReviews
Director Lindsay Anderson Beer’s Pet Semetary: Bloodlines takes a portion of Stephen King’s novel Pet Semetary and expands it into a feature-length film, resulting in a gory, dread-filled prequel to the book and preceding film adaptations. In 1969, teenaged Jud Crandall (Jackson White) is set to be the first of his family line to leave Ludlow, Maine since the town was founded. He and his girlfriend Norma (Natalie Alyn Lind) are about to leave for Peace Corps duty when she is attacked by the dog belonging to Timmy Baterman (Jack Mulhern), one of Jud’s childhood friends, who has just returned from active duty in Vietnam and whose father Bill (David Duchovny) tries to keep visitors away from the increasingly disturbing Timmy. The attack hospitalizes Norma, keeping the couple in Ludlow longer than they planned, and naturally violent events involving the titular burial grounds occur. Manny (Forrest Goodluck), another longtime friend of Jud’s and Timmy’s, and his sister Donna (Isabella Star
Continue reading →
Film FestivalsForeignMoviesReviewsShort Films
Australia’s A Night of Horror International Film Festival has a bounty of fear-fare shorts from around the globe on tap. Here is a look at four of the selections that run less than 10 minutes each. Stop Dead (United Kingdom, 2023) Director Emily Greenwood, working from a screenplay by David Scullion, has crafted a highly atmospheric short that sets up an intriguing premise worthy of a feature-length treatment. Police officers Samantha Hall (Sarah Soetaert) and partner Nick Thompson (David Ricardo-Pearce) are stuck on a country road at nighttime because of a flat tire. A young woman (Priya Blackburn) suddenly appears, refusing to heed Hall’s order to stop, telling the officers that if you stop, you die. This supernatural shocker boasts solid production values, good performances, taut direction, and some fast-paced editing that helps the world building and ratchets up the suspense. Merger (United Kingdom, 2022) Working late in a dark office is rarely a good thing to do, but in
Continue reading →
Film FestivalsForeignMoviesReviews
STRANGE DARLING (2023) Do yourself an immense favor and learn nothing more about the plot of writer/director JT Mollner’s Strange Darling than what I am about to tell you. This film absolutely requires being gone into as cold as possible for maximum effect. The film opens with a preamble about a serial killer’s path through the United States, and then cuts to a coke-snorting man (Kyle Gallner) in a pickup truck chasing down a bloodied woman (Willa Fitzgerald) in a Ford Pinto. She totals the car and runs into the woods, with the rifle-toting man following in pursuit. Mollner takes the concepts of a cat-and-mouse thriller and first-date-gone-wrong horror and over the course of six nonlinear chapters, toys with viewer expectations to mind-blowing effect. The film is beautifully shot by actor Giovanni Ribisi in his debut as a director of photography, with several scenes depending on pure, dialogue-free cinema, which he pulls off swimmingly. Fitzgerald and Gallner are both magnificent
Continue reading →
HuluMoviesNewsReviewsStreaming TVTrailers
A new sci-fi horror film, Now One Will Save You, has just premiered on Hulu and has quickly taken the rank as the number one movie on the service. Let’s talk about it. Warning! Spoilers! Starring Kaitlyn Dever as Brynn, the film sees a young woman who is a shut-in, avoiding everyone because of a terrible mistake she made when she was young. One night, an intruder breaks in, but it is no human; it’s aliens! Watch as she fights to survive the onslaught of creatures that come for her. Dever gives a fantastic performance even though not a single line of real dialogue is spoken in the entire movie, a risky choice by the writer-director Brian Duffield, still it pays off, adding to the feeling of isolation. Dever is able to tell her story by showing emotion. It’s really quite impressive. Let’s talk about these aliens. They come in five forms, each with different body shapes, with some looking
Continue reading →
GamingProductReviews
Fans of the Resident Evil 4 remake can look forward to more action today with the release of the DLC titled Separate Ways which features the mysterious Ada Wong and her activities during the events of the game’s main story. I want to thank CAPCOM for helping out with making this review possible! In Separate Ways, players take on the role of Ada Wong as she’s on a secret mission in the Spanish countryside home to the Los Iluminados cult. For returning players, the controls are the same as in the main story except for a couple of new unique mechanics. Just like I said in my review of the main story, when it comes to sound, headphones are a must! The sound design is great, the soundtrack gets your heart pumping, and Lily Gao’s performance fits with the character of Ada. Gao’s performance of Ada took her from being a flirty mystery eye-candy to what Ada truly is: a
Continue reading →
Film FestivalsMoviesReviews
Writer/director Nicholas Tomnay’s What You Wish For caught me off guard several times, and for best results, I recommend going as cold as possible into this horror feature that also serves up social commentary. I certainly won’t spoil any of its intrigue here. Ryan (Nick Stahl), deep in debt to the wrong kind of people to whom to owe large amounts of money, flies to rural Latin America to meet his friend and roommate from their culinary school days, Jack (Brian Groh), after not seeing each other for 12 years. Jack is currently seemingly living the high life as a private chef, being flown from one country to another by his bosses and given lavish places to live as he prepares event dinners for high-end clients. Although Ryan envies Jack’s extravagant lifestyle — including his bank balance, at which Ryan gets a peek — Jack seems to be in a rather gloomy state of mind, and when events lead to
Continue reading →
ForeignMoviesReviews
Writer/director Adam Sigal’s Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose (U.K., 2023) is not a horror film, but for fellow fans of Fortean phenomena, it’s an entertaining watch based on the true-life story of Gef the Talking Mongoose, AKA the Dalby Spook. It wavers from the amusing to the comical to the philosophical throughout, never quite settling on any of these tones. Simon Pegg portrays Dr. Nandor Fodor, who was a real-life parapsychologist and psychoanalyst. Fodor learns about Gef from Dr. Harry Price (Christopher Lloyd playing another real-life person, a psychic researcher and author), who implores him to travel from London to a rural area of the United Kingdom to investigate the absurd-sounding mystery. Price claims to have heard Gef speak without ever seeing the animal, so Fodor is skeptical from the get-go. Fodor travels with his assistant Anne (Minnie Driver) to the farm of the Irvings (Tim Downie and Ruth Connell), who claim that Gef (voice of Neil Gaiman) is
Continue reading →
AdaptationGamingProductReviews
I’m still just getting into dungeon crawlers and tabletop RPGs, so when the opportunity arises for me to dip my feet into the blood-soaked earth of these worlds, I’ll take it. This brings us to Gloomhaven, a tactical RPG dungeon crawler based on the 2017 multi-award-winning board game of the same name. I want to thank Twin Sails and Saber Interactive for the reviewing opportunity. In Gloomhaven, players take control of and guide mercenaries through the world. You also have encounters before the scenario (quests) you’re going to. The choices you make will affect your mercenaries in the upcoming battle. In every dungeon, the combat is turn-based, and players use cards with two options on each. These cards usually have options for movement, attack, and abilities like healing, buffing teammates, etc. There are tutorials, but if you’re new to this gameplay, you should set time aside to learn. I enjoy the art of the world of Gloomhaven, including the character
Continue reading →
