Reviews

Honest horror reviews of films, series, games and books — no hype, no spoilers, just whether it is worth your time and your nerves.

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Movie Review: ‘Cobweb’ Is Creepy As Sh*t

I watch A LOT of horror movies; it’s one of the best parts of my gig. So you can understand that I’ve become a bit jaded, hard to impress, and even harder to scare. But once in a while, a movie will come along that, by some miracle, can get under my skin. That’s the case with director Samuel Bodin’s new horror Cobweb. In the film, “A mysterious, constant tap plagues, Eight-year-old Peter taps from inside his bedroom wall – a tapping that his parents insist is all in his imagination. As Peter’s fear intensifies, he believes his parents (Lizzy Caplan and Antony Starr) could be hiding a terrible, dangerous secret and questioning their trust. And for a child, what could be more frightening than that?” The film and the cinematography look absolutely fantastic. The movie has a rich look that plays off shadows and hidden spaces. The special effects, which were surprisingly mostly practical, were really well done, especially

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Kelli Marchman McNeely

Jul 25, 2023

MoviesNewsReviewsTrailers

Movie Review: No Sympathy For ‘Sympathy For The Devil’

From writer-director Luke Paradise comes Sympathy for the Devil. The film stars Nicolas Cage (Renfield) as an unhinged psychopath who kidnaps a man (Joel Kinnaman) at gunpoint, taking viewers on a wild ride during a night filled with action and insanity. While en route to the hospital where his wife is in labor, a man is taken at gunpoint by a red-headed stranger and is forced to drive him to various locations where the stranger takes out his anger by killing innocent people. The stranger is played by Nicolas Cage, who comes off like a sadistic asshole with zero f*cks to give. He’s clearly unhinged, but not in a good way. It’s just weird. Maybe I expect too much out of Cage, I mean, he’s usually an expert at playing crazy. As for Joel Kinnaman, who starred as the driver, a worried husband, and father, he did a fine job. However, his character is lackluster and a bit boring. We

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Kelli Marchman McNeely

Jul 25, 2023

Film FestivalsForeignMoviesParanormalReviewsThriller

Spoiler-Free Reviews: LOVELY, DARK, AND DEEP and STAY ONLINE (Fantasia)

Lovely, Dark, and Deep (2023) Followers of Fortean phenomena and aficionados of surreal and sylvan horror should find plenty to admire in writer/director Teresa Sutherland’s slow-burn creeper Lovely, Dark, and Deep. Ranger Lennon (Georgina Campbell [Barbarian] in an engaging lead performance) has finally been assigned a job she has long waited for: being in charge, for 90 days, of a backcountry area that requires being taken there by helicopter and that leaves her virtually cut off from civilization except for communication by walkie-talkie and contact with hikers, campers, and fellow rangers. Riffing on what is discussed in David Paulides’ Missing 411 books and videos, the forest in which Lennon works is the site of many missing-person disappearances and occasional solved cases. Lennon’s backstory and motivation for being assigned to the remote spot she has requested involves that scenario, and giving away anything more about the plot would be traversing into spoiler territory. Sutherland, who wrote the screenplay for The Wind,

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Joseph Perry

Jul 24, 2023

IndieMoviesReviewsSci-Fi

Movie Review: Robot Monster (1953) – Bayview Blu-ray

SEE: Two kids wandering around in space helmets! SEE: Two archeologists farting around in the caves of Bronson Canyon! SEE: A nap… after a picnic! And let me tell ya boils n’ ghouls, all of that pulse pounding excitement is only in the first few minutes of reel one… of course 2 seconds later a burning object screams through the skies as pilfered footage of lizards that are supposed to be dinosaurs (and a little stop-motion dino action… also borrowed) ‘rassle! It’s about then that one of those kids mentioned up yonder awakens from his egg-salad slumber, let’s call him Johnny (Gregory Moffett)… mostly because that’s the character’s name… and discovers a gorilla in a space helmet named Ro-Man (George Barrows with voice acting provided by John Brown) has arrived from the stars, and he has wiped out most all of Earth’s inhabitants with his Calcinator death ray (minus our main cast, who have all been injected with a super-serum

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DanXIII

Jul 21, 2023

HalloweenProductReviews

Review: Haunted Forest Lamp By The Lucid Bazaar Company

Mood lighting is everything when it comes to a night-in, may it be a gaming session, unwinding/chill, catching up on some movies or shows, hosting a small gettogether, or you just want to brood and plan world domination while petting your cat. But why stop at setting the mood with lighting, why not also transform your room with it? That’s what the folks over at The Lucid Bazaar Company are doing with their lamps! I would like to give a big thank you to Joe and Julie over at Lucid Bazaar for helping to make this review possible and sending over the Haunted Forest Lamp for me to check out! At first, you may think this little lamp is not much with its size but like anything else, looks are deceiving! The lamp is an infinity mirror and the dimmer switch will either make the lamp as bright as a candle OR as bright as a headlight! When the light

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Daniel S. Liuzzi

Jul 20, 2023

GamingProductReviews

Game Review: ‘Antstream Arcade’

Fans of retro games, may they be gamers of the past or present, always try to find a way to play some of the old classics to either pay respects to the forefathers of modern gaming OR to relive past glory. Either way, it’s hard to get a hold of functional classic game consoles. This is where Anstream comes in to try to help gamers get in touch with the classics with their Arcade. Antstream has brought its massive collection of classic games to the Xbox and PC for the first time as it was previously only available on PlayStation and Nintendo. The game library consists of games from Arcade, Atari 8-Bit, Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Commodore 64, DOS, Game Boy, Atari Lynx, Genesis, MSX, NES, PlayStation 1, SNES, ZX Spectrum, MSX2, ATARI 5200, Amiga, and Amstrad. Before you get too excited, I’m afraid to say…the games are not ported well. While trying to play some of the games, I’ve

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Daniel S. Liuzzi

Jul 20, 2023

Giveaways & ContestsProductReviews

Creature Cups Review And Giveaway!

It may only be July, but it’s never too early to get ready for the coming cooler months coming, especially with the spooky season coming every step closer like a monstrous heartbeat. Nothing goes better with the spooky season than a nice cup of coffee or tea to warm you up, but you need a special cup when you’re enjoying something, may it be reading, watching it rain, snuggling in to watching a spooky movie, or playing a game. Well, it’s time to up your hot beverage game with Creature Cups, the drinking cups with a special surprise waiting just under the surface. If you would like one of these cups for yourself, keep on reading to learn about your chance to WIN a cup! I would like to thank the awesome folks over at Creature Cups for making this review possible and offering to give one of our readers a cup! Inside every cup is a little ceramic critter

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Daniel S. Liuzzi

Jul 17, 2023

Film FestivalsForeignMoviesReviewsSci-FiThriller

Spoiler-Free Review: COYOTE (Romford Film Festival)

U.K. science fiction thriller Coyote (2023) combines current social issues with lo-fi science fiction elements. The result is a film that boasts solid performances and thought-provoking themes. Partners Ekaterina (Therica Wilson-Read) and Anya (Borislava Stratieva) pay heavily to have one of them instantly transported using cutting-edge tech from Rasskazovo, where a violent crackdown on LGBTQ people is taking place, to a safe house in London for female immigrants. Orla Miller (Ailish Symons), the woman in charge of the safe house, is hospitable at first before she eventually informs Ekaterina that, as an immigrant, she stands to make money more quickly and in greater amounts if she provides sexual services to highly-placed men, which Ekaterina learns that the other women staying there are doing. Coyote is a lower-budget indie effort that wisely relies on minimal special effects, and the teleportation scenes are well done courtesy of Visual Effects Supervisor Howard Gardner. As with many good speculative fiction films, the focus is

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Joseph Perry

Jul 13, 2023

Film FestivalsForeignMoviesReviews

Spoiler-Free Reviews: VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS and TO FIRE YOU COME AT LAST (Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival)

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) Director Jaromil Jires’ surreal horror fantasy Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Czechoslovakia, 1970) is a wild trip that combines a teenage girl’s (Jaroslava Schallerová as Valerie) sexual awakening beginning on the first day of her first menstrual cycle with a vampire tale — but that is only a bare bones description. There is so much to this film and to spoil a single, fantastical frame of it is to do a disservice to first-time viewers. Those interested in the sociopolitical climate of the time should find plenty to read into with the film, while viewers whose interests lean more toward enjoying the splendidly strange — and often sensual — events unfolding as sheer entertainment will find a great deal at which to marvel. To Fire You Come at Last (2023) Writer/director Sean Hogan’s 43-minute horror short To Fire You Come at Last is a satisfyingly wicked slice of British folk horror. In

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Joseph Perry

Jul 10, 2023

GamingReviews

Game Review: Stay Out of the House (2023) – Nintendo Switch

In an effort to make us experience first-hand the kind of terror present in the sinister slashers that appeared just a tick before the genre’s Golden Age, Puppet Combo brings us Stay Out of the House; a new vicious video game now available on the Nintendo Switch. In direct defiance of the games title, your ass definitely does not want to Stay Out of the House, in fact it won’t be much of a game if you do! Rather, after playing through a couple of prologue stories (which aren’t mandatory, but naturally they add considerably to the world building at hand while offering a tense yet less intense experience than the main event… and one of them has a playable, Driller Killer-esque arcade game, so HUGE fuckin’ plus there boils n’ ghouls) you make your way to the eponymous structure, in which you will stealthy avoid the cannibals (including hiding from them underneath various pieces of furniture) that call the

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DanXIII

Jul 7, 2023

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