CategoryReviews
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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Reviews
From Executive Producer Dario Argento, U.K. chiller She Will seeps under the skin at a slow-burn pace that builds to a fitting climax. Director Charlotte Colbert’s feature successfully blends themes of feminism, aging, and trauma with occult and psychological horror. Veronica Ghent (Alice Krige of Ghost Story and Sleepwalkers) is an actress who shot to stardom in her film debut as a 13-year-old but who is now in her mid-sixties and has recently undergone a double mastectomy. She heads to a touchy-feely retreat in the Scottish Highlands, thinking that only she and her young, put-upon nurse Desi (Kota Eberhardt) will be there. Instead, the place is loaded with seemingly well-off New Age types headed up by a man named Tirador (Rupert Everett). Relegated to a cabin set off from the main building, Ghent and Desi find themselves in a place where oozing mud contains ashes of women burned as witches centuries earlier — and Veronica becomes increasingly drawn to the
Continue reading →
GamingIndieProductReviews
The need to feel nostalgic is ever-growing as those of us who have grown up in the 80s and 90s are (un)admittedly getting older. One field of nostalgia some crave is in the realm of interactive entertainment… for the whipper snappers, Video Games. LCB Game Studio and Chorus Worldwide are working together to bring the looks of gaming in the 80s back with Mothmen 1966. I would like to thank LCB Game Studio and Chorus Worldwide for the reviewing opportunity. Mothmen 1966 follows three playable characters who are having quite the out-of-this-world experience one night in rural West Virginia at the height of a meteor shower that only occurs every 33 years that has a strange effect on the local wildlife as well as spawning sightings of an infamous resident of West Virginia, The Mothman. Now onto the game itself. When it comes to a game based on 80s-style dos games, there’s not a whole lot to expect control or
Continue reading →
MoviesNewsReviewsTrailers
Horror films often mirror reality and real fears. And that’s the case with American Carnage by director Diego Hallivis. The movie, laced with humor, tackles some heavy subjects, including immigration, and the fear of growing old. In the film, a party for PJ’s sister is interrupted by an ICE team based on a law passed by a twisted governor who wants both illegals and their US-born children gone before election day. PJ is one of the teens sent to a senior facility to serve for three months to have the charges of aiding an illegal (his mom) dropped. But things take a very sinister turn when PJ and his new friends learn the truth about the center and the fate that awaits them. Of course, they refuse to go down without a fight. The big twist is a nasty one that will leave you thinking twice about ever eating fast food again. Part of the story is taken right out
Continue reading →
Film FestivalsForeignMoviesReviews
Cruise Once, many, many moons ago, I worked a temporary job at a call center, and it was the most soul-sucking employment I have ever experienced. Writer/director Samuel Rudykoff’s horror comedy Cruise ratchets up things to another level as his short sees employees at a scam cruise-contest call center lose their souls along with their lives if they don’t close calls successfully. Jake (Chad Andrews) and Mark (Simon Pond) both give it their best shot, with an unforgiving supervisor (Ray James) keeping a close watch. The performances are all super solid, and Rudykoff does a great job building suspense while delivering laughs. Exo Sapien South African science fiction suspenser Exo Sapien, written and helmed by Fried Barry director/cowriter James C. Williamson, finds space explorer Cass (Lisa Scholtz) trying to survive on a hostile Earth after her vehicle crashes in a remote area. Suffering memory loss and being hunted down by scavengers and other dangers, she carries with her a mysterious
Continue reading →
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Film FestivalsMoviesReviewsThriller
Night Breakers Here’s a creature fraught with suspense not only from potential monster attacks but also from the apprehension and paranoid feelings between characters. A group of people — leader Joel (Andrew Tarbet), Mei (Chacha Huang), Sunna (Anna Gonzalvo), Trevor (Pol Fernandez), Martin (Marc Padró), and Jacob (Sergi Subirà) — are traversing a dark path through maze-like caves to reach a city. Each member is wearing strings of bright lights powered by ever-weakening batteries. These lights fend off vicious beasts but as soon as someone’s lights go out, they become monster chow. As batteries become more scarce, tensions rise and the humans become as dangerous as the creatures pursuing them. Cowriters/codirectors Gabriel Campoy and Guillem Lafoz have crafted a terrific, tension-filled short that cries out to be turned into a feature, and their cast members all give top-notch performances. Unicorn Bisexual man Charles (Charles Gould) has arranged a first-time meeting with couple Bella (Brianna Baker) and Larry (Patrick Woodall) to
Continue reading →
IndieMoviesReviews
Professor Nugent (Michael Cutt) ostensibly teaches anthropology, but his real obsession is bigfoot… basically this mother fucker teaches Bigfoot 101, replete with newspaper handouts with headlines screaming such newsworthy events as “Lettuce”, and gory flashback inserts where a woman with sizeable… hair (seriously, that helmet had to be a wig) watches her paramour being grabbed mid-coitus by our hirsute antagonist and being left to bleed out on the roof of his shaggin’ wagon. Naturally when Carla Thomas (Shannon Cooper) asks Nugent to help her locate the creepy cryptid she believes is responsible for her father’s murder he can’t say no… and soon he, and his select group of victims… err, I mean students trek off to do just that. Soon the Prof. and co. are on the trail of a local recluse named Wanda (Melanie Graham), the daughter of a lunatic preacher who’s parishioners engaged in cannibalism, inbreeding, and human sacrifice, whom they find engaged in an occult ritual in
Continue reading →
ForeignMoviesReviews
Less than five minutes into Jorge Grau’s 1974 terror tale, The Living Dead in the Manchester Morgue (or Let Sleeping Corpses Lie as it’s sometimes known) we get psychotronic imagery, mod motor-bike riding, full-frontal nudity, and excessive bongos… none of you know just how much this speaks to me… Brash (read: kind of douchey) artist/Richard Branson clone George (Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot!‘s Ray Lovelock), he of the motor-bike mentioned up yonder, is country bound to help his friends fix-up a house when his bike is smashed by Mini Cooper enthusiast Edna (Cristina Galbó), who in turn is heading out to visit her heroine-addicted sister, Katie (Jeannine Mestre)… who also lives in the ass-end of nowhere, which results in the duo becoming road buddies! After immediately becoming lost as fuck and stopping to ask for directions, the duo discover that farmers in the area are using radiation treatments to reduce the number of insects destroying their crops. Speaking of
Continue reading →
MoviesReviews
In the fantastic future year of 20XX, man has reached distant planets, and brought with them the most valuable substance in the galaxy; pizza! Enter: Intergalactic Pizza delivery dude (Edgar Nevarez), a man that delivers pies galaxy wide in his flying sensible sedan. All isn’t smooth space sailing however as soon our main man has to deal with space pirates and dissatisfied customers (Cosmic Karens?) while trying to take good care of his mental health in the process. As you can easily surmise from that sinister synopsis up yonder, Jerry S. Gonzalez’s Intergalactic PizzaBoy is a pretty batshit affair… and as you lascivious lot well and truly know, that is just the way yours cruelly digs it! Running approximately nine minutes (with credits and alien death metal song), this sci-fi short has the vibe of a cartoon that would have hit around the time of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon and Troma’s foray into children’s shows; Toxic Crusaders…
Continue reading →
MoviesReviewsSci-Fi
The Return of Captain Invincible begins with World War II-era newsreel footage of the eponymous super-powered hero (Academy Award winner Alan Arkin) in outrageous action, which sets the stage perfectly for the clever superhero deconstruction that follows… Before long we see the good Captain catching static during the McCarthy witch-hunt for red sympathizers, after which he vanishes from the public eye to become a drunk nomad in the wilds of Australia. Fast forward to the early 1980’s (and cue the disco take on the Theme From Peter Gunn) and we learn after two musical numbers… one comprised strictly of the word “bullshit”, and the other a jaunty gospel number which comes complete with it’s own band (which is odd since the scene in question takes place in a top-secret government war room) that a powerful hypno-ray has turned up missing, and those same official officials, including the President (Michael Pate) himself (the same cat responsible for those swingin’ songs mentioned
Continue reading →
IndieMoviesReviewsSci-Fi
This is gonna be a stone-cold bitch of a review to write, cats n’ creeps. Ya see, legendary genre filmmaker Larry Cohen’s (The Stuff, Q: The Winged Serpent, the It’s Alive series) God Told Me To, while bein’ a bone-a-fide classic in my book, contains elements so batshit bizarre that I would like nothin’ better than to flap my jaundiced jaws about every last one of ‘em, but that would do any GTMT virgins in the audience a Kong-sized disservice. All right, read on to see if I can pussyfoot through a potential mine-field of spoilers and still grab your interest enough to make you buy this damn thing! God Told Me To concerns the adventures of Peter (Tony Lo Bianco), a New York City detective who is all hot ‘n’ bothered by a series of brutal shootings, all of which contain a unifying element: the perpetrators simply say that god told them to commit the murder-foolery. As a special
Continue reading →
More from Reviews
Reviews
From Executive Producer Dario Argento, U.K. chiller She Will seeps under the skin at a slow-burn pace that builds to a fitting climax. Director Charlotte Colbert’s feature successfully blends themes of feminism, aging, and trauma with occult and psychological horror. Veronica Ghent (Alice Krige of Ghost Story and Sleepwalkers) is an actress who shot to stardom in her film debut as a 13-year-old but who is now in her mid-sixties and has recently undergone a double mastectomy. She heads to a touchy-feely retreat in the Scottish Highlands, thinking that only she and her young, put-upon nurse Desi (Kota Eberhardt) will be there. Instead, the place is loaded with seemingly well-off New Age types headed up by a man named Tirador (Rupert Everett). Relegated to a cabin set off from the main building, Ghent and Desi find themselves in a place where oozing mud contains ashes of women burned as witches centuries earlier — and Veronica becomes increasingly drawn to the
Continue reading →
GamingIndieProductReviews
The need to feel nostalgic is ever-growing as those of us who have grown up in the 80s and 90s are (un)admittedly getting older. One field of nostalgia some crave is in the realm of interactive entertainment… for the whipper snappers, Video Games. LCB Game Studio and Chorus Worldwide are working together to bring the looks of gaming in the 80s back with Mothmen 1966. I would like to thank LCB Game Studio and Chorus Worldwide for the reviewing opportunity. Mothmen 1966 follows three playable characters who are having quite the out-of-this-world experience one night in rural West Virginia at the height of a meteor shower that only occurs every 33 years that has a strange effect on the local wildlife as well as spawning sightings of an infamous resident of West Virginia, The Mothman. Now onto the game itself. When it comes to a game based on 80s-style dos games, there’s not a whole lot to expect control or
Continue reading →
MoviesNewsReviewsTrailers
Horror films often mirror reality and real fears. And that’s the case with American Carnage by director Diego Hallivis. The movie, laced with humor, tackles some heavy subjects, including immigration, and the fear of growing old. In the film, a party for PJ’s sister is interrupted by an ICE team based on a law passed by a twisted governor who wants both illegals and their US-born children gone before election day. PJ is one of the teens sent to a senior facility to serve for three months to have the charges of aiding an illegal (his mom) dropped. But things take a very sinister turn when PJ and his new friends learn the truth about the center and the fate that awaits them. Of course, they refuse to go down without a fight. The big twist is a nasty one that will leave you thinking twice about ever eating fast food again. Part of the story is taken right out
Continue reading →
Film FestivalsForeignMoviesReviews
Cruise Once, many, many moons ago, I worked a temporary job at a call center, and it was the most soul-sucking employment I have ever experienced. Writer/director Samuel Rudykoff’s horror comedy Cruise ratchets up things to another level as his short sees employees at a scam cruise-contest call center lose their souls along with their lives if they don’t close calls successfully. Jake (Chad Andrews) and Mark (Simon Pond) both give it their best shot, with an unforgiving supervisor (Ray James) keeping a close watch. The performances are all super solid, and Rudykoff does a great job building suspense while delivering laughs. Exo Sapien South African science fiction suspenser Exo Sapien, written and helmed by Fried Barry director/cowriter James C. Williamson, finds space explorer Cass (Lisa Scholtz) trying to survive on a hostile Earth after her vehicle crashes in a remote area. Suffering memory loss and being hunted down by scavengers and other dangers, she carries with her a mysterious
Continue reading →
Film FestivalsMoviesReviewsThriller
Night Breakers Here’s a creature fraught with suspense not only from potential monster attacks but also from the apprehension and paranoid feelings between characters. A group of people — leader Joel (Andrew Tarbet), Mei (Chacha Huang), Sunna (Anna Gonzalvo), Trevor (Pol Fernandez), Martin (Marc Padró), and Jacob (Sergi Subirà) — are traversing a dark path through maze-like caves to reach a city. Each member is wearing strings of bright lights powered by ever-weakening batteries. These lights fend off vicious beasts but as soon as someone’s lights go out, they become monster chow. As batteries become more scarce, tensions rise and the humans become as dangerous as the creatures pursuing them. Cowriters/codirectors Gabriel Campoy and Guillem Lafoz have crafted a terrific, tension-filled short that cries out to be turned into a feature, and their cast members all give top-notch performances. Unicorn Bisexual man Charles (Charles Gould) has arranged a first-time meeting with couple Bella (Brianna Baker) and Larry (Patrick Woodall) to
Continue reading →
IndieMoviesReviews
Professor Nugent (Michael Cutt) ostensibly teaches anthropology, but his real obsession is bigfoot… basically this mother fucker teaches Bigfoot 101, replete with newspaper handouts with headlines screaming such newsworthy events as “Lettuce”, and gory flashback inserts where a woman with sizeable… hair (seriously, that helmet had to be a wig) watches her paramour being grabbed mid-coitus by our hirsute antagonist and being left to bleed out on the roof of his shaggin’ wagon. Naturally when Carla Thomas (Shannon Cooper) asks Nugent to help her locate the creepy cryptid she believes is responsible for her father’s murder he can’t say no… and soon he, and his select group of victims… err, I mean students trek off to do just that. Soon the Prof. and co. are on the trail of a local recluse named Wanda (Melanie Graham), the daughter of a lunatic preacher who’s parishioners engaged in cannibalism, inbreeding, and human sacrifice, whom they find engaged in an occult ritual in
Continue reading →
ForeignMoviesReviews
Less than five minutes into Jorge Grau’s 1974 terror tale, The Living Dead in the Manchester Morgue (or Let Sleeping Corpses Lie as it’s sometimes known) we get psychotronic imagery, mod motor-bike riding, full-frontal nudity, and excessive bongos… none of you know just how much this speaks to me… Brash (read: kind of douchey) artist/Richard Branson clone George (Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot!‘s Ray Lovelock), he of the motor-bike mentioned up yonder, is country bound to help his friends fix-up a house when his bike is smashed by Mini Cooper enthusiast Edna (Cristina Galbó), who in turn is heading out to visit her heroine-addicted sister, Katie (Jeannine Mestre)… who also lives in the ass-end of nowhere, which results in the duo becoming road buddies! After immediately becoming lost as fuck and stopping to ask for directions, the duo discover that farmers in the area are using radiation treatments to reduce the number of insects destroying their crops. Speaking of
Continue reading →
MoviesReviews
In the fantastic future year of 20XX, man has reached distant planets, and brought with them the most valuable substance in the galaxy; pizza! Enter: Intergalactic Pizza delivery dude (Edgar Nevarez), a man that delivers pies galaxy wide in his flying sensible sedan. All isn’t smooth space sailing however as soon our main man has to deal with space pirates and dissatisfied customers (Cosmic Karens?) while trying to take good care of his mental health in the process. As you can easily surmise from that sinister synopsis up yonder, Jerry S. Gonzalez’s Intergalactic PizzaBoy is a pretty batshit affair… and as you lascivious lot well and truly know, that is just the way yours cruelly digs it! Running approximately nine minutes (with credits and alien death metal song), this sci-fi short has the vibe of a cartoon that would have hit around the time of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon and Troma’s foray into children’s shows; Toxic Crusaders…
Continue reading →
MoviesReviewsSci-Fi
The Return of Captain Invincible begins with World War II-era newsreel footage of the eponymous super-powered hero (Academy Award winner Alan Arkin) in outrageous action, which sets the stage perfectly for the clever superhero deconstruction that follows… Before long we see the good Captain catching static during the McCarthy witch-hunt for red sympathizers, after which he vanishes from the public eye to become a drunk nomad in the wilds of Australia. Fast forward to the early 1980’s (and cue the disco take on the Theme From Peter Gunn) and we learn after two musical numbers… one comprised strictly of the word “bullshit”, and the other a jaunty gospel number which comes complete with it’s own band (which is odd since the scene in question takes place in a top-secret government war room) that a powerful hypno-ray has turned up missing, and those same official officials, including the President (Michael Pate) himself (the same cat responsible for those swingin’ songs mentioned
Continue reading →
IndieMoviesReviewsSci-Fi
This is gonna be a stone-cold bitch of a review to write, cats n’ creeps. Ya see, legendary genre filmmaker Larry Cohen’s (The Stuff, Q: The Winged Serpent, the It’s Alive series) God Told Me To, while bein’ a bone-a-fide classic in my book, contains elements so batshit bizarre that I would like nothin’ better than to flap my jaundiced jaws about every last one of ‘em, but that would do any GTMT virgins in the audience a Kong-sized disservice. All right, read on to see if I can pussyfoot through a potential mine-field of spoilers and still grab your interest enough to make you buy this damn thing! God Told Me To concerns the adventures of Peter (Tony Lo Bianco), a New York City detective who is all hot ‘n’ bothered by a series of brutal shootings, all of which contain a unifying element: the perpetrators simply say that god told them to commit the murder-foolery. As a special
Continue reading →
