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
MoviesReviewsShudder
For those unfamiliar with the V/H/S series , here’s the eerie elevator pitch: an anthology of period terror tales is presented in the found footage format, more specifically via VHS tapes. I can safely say that V/H/S 94 sticks to that formula (which doubtless comes a shock to some of you lascivious lot). Moving on, V/H/S 94 begins with a woman in a strange compound huffing fumes from some sort of demonic jizz or another, before she begins a countdown with her eyes gouged out. Meanwhile, a SWAT team raids said compound finding all manner of ghoulish goings-on before a news broadcast begins… Written and directed by Jennifer Reeder, this is a nice, tension filled way to kick out the jams and get this fright flick rocking n’ rolling (as are the segments of the tale that appear between each story proper)! The above leads into Chloe Okuno’s Storm Drain, which tales the tale of Channel 6 news reporter Holly
Continue reading →
GamingIndieProductReviews
I’m nearing a major milestone of reviewing over 100 games for you the Horror Fuel reader but this review, in my opinion, is more important as it’s been both humbling and surreal. The game reviewed today comes to us from Sengi Games a Ukrainian-based indie game developer, even though their home country is in the middle of a war in which many of their countrymen have been murdered for simply being Ukrainian, they still worked on the game so it will be ready in time for its release date, the game: The Serpent Rogue. I want to thank Team 17 and Sengi Games (I hope you guys see this!) for the reviewing opportunity! The Serpent Rogue is a third-person adventure where players are in a dark world and play as The Warden, a plague doctor-looking alchemist tasked with saving the world from a corrupting dark force that reawakened and is taking over the lands. Now onto the game itself. The
Continue reading →
From the CryptMoviesNewsReviewsSci-FiTrailers
Ten years ago Patrick Wilson‘s (The Conjuring franchise) Brian Harper, an astronaut, was disgraced after claiming to see something strange in space. Now, Brian, along with Halle Berry’s Jocinda Fowler, and John Bradley’s JC. is the world’s only hope after the moon leaves its orbit, threatening the complete destruction of the earth in Moonfall. Directed by Roland Emmerich, who penned the script along with Harald Kloser and Spenser Cohen, Moonfall is a part disaster movie and part sci-fi flick and features out-of-this-world special effects including everything from giant waves taking out cities, pieces of the moon pelting the world, and amazing outerspace structures. Here’s where the spoilers start. The reason the moon is out of orbit is that it isn’t made of rock as we believe. Instead, it is a superstructure built by the ancestors of man to find planets where they could resettle after a war with AI gone bad. Now, one of the giant, biomechanical creatures has found
Continue reading →
GamingIndieProductReviews
It might be spring but the chill of winter can still be felt in the air for most people, but for the topic of this review, winter has just begun in Winter Ember, an isometric stealth sandbox action game taking players to the city of Anargal where they can lurk in the shadows as a former Nobel turned vigilante. A big thank you to Blowfish and Skymachine Studios for making this review possible! In Winter Ember you play Arthur, a Nobel playboy turned hooded vigilante after going into hiding leaving others to assume you met the same fate as your family after your mansion was destroyed. Arthur returns to the city he once called home to exact revenge and uncover a growing conspiracy involving cults, street gangs, and other wicked foes. Now onto the game itself. There are only a couple of issues with the game I’ll address first before getting into what I like about the game. There seem
Continue reading →
Reviews
Writer/director Brendan Muldowney expands his 2004 short film The Ten Steps into a feature length treatment with The Cellar (Ireland; 2022). The result is an interesting watch that doesn’t offer a lot in the way of originality, but is bolstered by a solid performance from Elisha Cuthbert (House of Wax; Captivity). Cuthbert plays Keira Woods, who is moving into a house with her family — husband Brian (Eoin Macken of The Forest), teen daughter Ellie (Abby Fitz), and preteen son Steven (Dylan Fitzmaurice Brady) — that just happens to be riddled with strange symbols and, of course, a creepy cellar. When Keira and Brian are at a late work meeting one night and the power goes out at home, Keira talks a petrified Ellie down the darkened stairs by candlelight over the phone, only for the girl to disappear. Though some write off Ellie as a runaway, Keira believes she is alive and that her disappearance has something to do
Continue reading →
MoviesNewsReviewsTrailers
Odds are you’ve had a friend that you really don’t like, but you kept around for some reason or another. That’s the kind of friendship that the two couples have in Barbarians, the new home invasion thriller from writer-director Charles Dorfman. Adam (Iwan Rheon, “Game of Thrones”) and Eva (Catalina Sandino Moreno, Maria Full of Grace) have been gearing up to sign on the dotted line for their new home, sold to them by their bully of a friend Lucas (Tom Cullen). Lucas and his girlfriend (Inès Spiridonov) join Adam and Eva for dinner in their new home. After listening to Lucas be an asshole all night, Adam and Eva learn Chloe is pregnant, which is a problem. Things come to a head when blows are exchanged between Adam and Lucas. Then the situation is suddenly made worse when three home invaders crash the party. Barbarians is wild, featuring constant drama and action, and gives viewers a story that will
Continue reading →
ForeignMoviesReviews
Two Roman soldiers saunter up and proceed to take the biggest of info dumps all-over the place… thus are we introduced to the atrocities Emperor Gaius “Caligula” Caesar has been committing since taking control, and thus begins 1981’s Caligulasploitation fracas, Caligula and Messalina. Following that we get things started in the tackiest way possible as Caligula has consensual sex with his sister, before we segue into a softcore orgy… but bear with me, things are about to go off the rails in a fantastic way… See, Caligula and Messalina is directed by none other than Bruno Mattei (Rats: Night of Terror, and Shocking Dark, to name but a few… ), and one thing ol’ Bruno digs is stock footage (I’m looking at you Hell of the Living Dead) and he uses it here to spectacularly ridiculous effect with large patches of this film being culled from 1961’s The Colossus of Rhodes, and to say it was integrated seamlessly would be
Continue reading →
Film FestivalsForeignMoviesReviews
South African offering Wesens (2020) is one of the more thoughtful found footage features in recent memory, focusing on the single-day investigation by four intelligence agents of a mysterious, unidentified object that fell from the sky onto remote farmland. Morné Visser plays the businesslike, skeptical head of the foursome; Pietie Beyers portrays a more open-minded character who becomes mesmerized by the dark, egg-shaped object; and Conradie van Heerden and Randy Januarie round out the group as assistants. As the men record their findings on what seems to be Super 8mm and 16mm film, the object begins to have weird, and possibly dangerous effects, on them. Wesens is wonderfully shot by cinematographer Tom Purcell, who thankfully avoids much of the shaky-cam trappings of the found-footage subgenre. Writer/director Derick Muller invests his science fiction film with elements of folk horror and psychological horror, and with the aid of his crackerjack cast members, serves up a thought-provoking film that addresses historical and political
Continue reading →
MoviesReviewsSci-Fi
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment provided me with a free copy of the DVD I reviewed in this blog post. The opinions I share are my own. Way the hell in the future, noble Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) is assigned a new position lording it over the desert planet Arrakis, home to “the spice” the most valuable substance in the universe (as it gains the user vast power of body and mind… which includes the ability to fold space itself, by the Padishah Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV to replace the repugnant and violent House Harkonnen, led by the bloated, floating psychopath Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård), whom the Emperor is in cahoots with to eventually eliminate the powerful Duke and weaken the strength of House Atreides. Along for the ride to that great dust-ball are Leto’s son Paul (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother, the Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), the Duke’s concubine and a Bene Gesserit witch who’s sisterhood possess vast
Continue reading →
MoviesNewsReviewsTrailers
The new Scream movie has horror fans split down the middle. So, I guess it’s time to put my two cents in, seeing that the movie is headed to home release. The fifth movie of the franchise, set 25 years after the original murders, kicks off with a scene that pays straight homage to the original film’s opening scene, you know the one, with Drew Barrymore? This time the young woman on the phone with a killer is Tara, played by Jenna Ortega. After she survives an attack from Ghostface she is put in the hospital and her older sister Sam (Melissa Barrera) rushes back to see her after being gone for five years, only to find that Ghostface is hellbent on killing them both. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Scream movie without franchise stars Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, and David Arquette. The new cast includes Jack Quaid and Marley Shelton. To be honest, I don’t have any complaints
Continue reading →
More from Reviews
MoviesReviewsShudder
For those unfamiliar with the V/H/S series , here’s the eerie elevator pitch: an anthology of period terror tales is presented in the found footage format, more specifically via VHS tapes. I can safely say that V/H/S 94 sticks to that formula (which doubtless comes a shock to some of you lascivious lot). Moving on, V/H/S 94 begins with a woman in a strange compound huffing fumes from some sort of demonic jizz or another, before she begins a countdown with her eyes gouged out. Meanwhile, a SWAT team raids said compound finding all manner of ghoulish goings-on before a news broadcast begins… Written and directed by Jennifer Reeder, this is a nice, tension filled way to kick out the jams and get this fright flick rocking n’ rolling (as are the segments of the tale that appear between each story proper)! The above leads into Chloe Okuno’s Storm Drain, which tales the tale of Channel 6 news reporter Holly
Continue reading →
GamingIndieProductReviews
I’m nearing a major milestone of reviewing over 100 games for you the Horror Fuel reader but this review, in my opinion, is more important as it’s been both humbling and surreal. The game reviewed today comes to us from Sengi Games a Ukrainian-based indie game developer, even though their home country is in the middle of a war in which many of their countrymen have been murdered for simply being Ukrainian, they still worked on the game so it will be ready in time for its release date, the game: The Serpent Rogue. I want to thank Team 17 and Sengi Games (I hope you guys see this!) for the reviewing opportunity! The Serpent Rogue is a third-person adventure where players are in a dark world and play as The Warden, a plague doctor-looking alchemist tasked with saving the world from a corrupting dark force that reawakened and is taking over the lands. Now onto the game itself. The
Continue reading →
From the CryptMoviesNewsReviewsSci-FiTrailers
Ten years ago Patrick Wilson‘s (The Conjuring franchise) Brian Harper, an astronaut, was disgraced after claiming to see something strange in space. Now, Brian, along with Halle Berry’s Jocinda Fowler, and John Bradley’s JC. is the world’s only hope after the moon leaves its orbit, threatening the complete destruction of the earth in Moonfall. Directed by Roland Emmerich, who penned the script along with Harald Kloser and Spenser Cohen, Moonfall is a part disaster movie and part sci-fi flick and features out-of-this-world special effects including everything from giant waves taking out cities, pieces of the moon pelting the world, and amazing outerspace structures. Here’s where the spoilers start. The reason the moon is out of orbit is that it isn’t made of rock as we believe. Instead, it is a superstructure built by the ancestors of man to find planets where they could resettle after a war with AI gone bad. Now, one of the giant, biomechanical creatures has found
Continue reading →
GamingIndieProductReviews
It might be spring but the chill of winter can still be felt in the air for most people, but for the topic of this review, winter has just begun in Winter Ember, an isometric stealth sandbox action game taking players to the city of Anargal where they can lurk in the shadows as a former Nobel turned vigilante. A big thank you to Blowfish and Skymachine Studios for making this review possible! In Winter Ember you play Arthur, a Nobel playboy turned hooded vigilante after going into hiding leaving others to assume you met the same fate as your family after your mansion was destroyed. Arthur returns to the city he once called home to exact revenge and uncover a growing conspiracy involving cults, street gangs, and other wicked foes. Now onto the game itself. There are only a couple of issues with the game I’ll address first before getting into what I like about the game. There seem
Continue reading →
Reviews
Writer/director Brendan Muldowney expands his 2004 short film The Ten Steps into a feature length treatment with The Cellar (Ireland; 2022). The result is an interesting watch that doesn’t offer a lot in the way of originality, but is bolstered by a solid performance from Elisha Cuthbert (House of Wax; Captivity). Cuthbert plays Keira Woods, who is moving into a house with her family — husband Brian (Eoin Macken of The Forest), teen daughter Ellie (Abby Fitz), and preteen son Steven (Dylan Fitzmaurice Brady) — that just happens to be riddled with strange symbols and, of course, a creepy cellar. When Keira and Brian are at a late work meeting one night and the power goes out at home, Keira talks a petrified Ellie down the darkened stairs by candlelight over the phone, only for the girl to disappear. Though some write off Ellie as a runaway, Keira believes she is alive and that her disappearance has something to do
Continue reading →
MoviesNewsReviewsTrailers
Odds are you’ve had a friend that you really don’t like, but you kept around for some reason or another. That’s the kind of friendship that the two couples have in Barbarians, the new home invasion thriller from writer-director Charles Dorfman. Adam (Iwan Rheon, “Game of Thrones”) and Eva (Catalina Sandino Moreno, Maria Full of Grace) have been gearing up to sign on the dotted line for their new home, sold to them by their bully of a friend Lucas (Tom Cullen). Lucas and his girlfriend (Inès Spiridonov) join Adam and Eva for dinner in their new home. After listening to Lucas be an asshole all night, Adam and Eva learn Chloe is pregnant, which is a problem. Things come to a head when blows are exchanged between Adam and Lucas. Then the situation is suddenly made worse when three home invaders crash the party. Barbarians is wild, featuring constant drama and action, and gives viewers a story that will
Continue reading →
ForeignMoviesReviews
Two Roman soldiers saunter up and proceed to take the biggest of info dumps all-over the place… thus are we introduced to the atrocities Emperor Gaius “Caligula” Caesar has been committing since taking control, and thus begins 1981’s Caligulasploitation fracas, Caligula and Messalina. Following that we get things started in the tackiest way possible as Caligula has consensual sex with his sister, before we segue into a softcore orgy… but bear with me, things are about to go off the rails in a fantastic way… See, Caligula and Messalina is directed by none other than Bruno Mattei (Rats: Night of Terror, and Shocking Dark, to name but a few… ), and one thing ol’ Bruno digs is stock footage (I’m looking at you Hell of the Living Dead) and he uses it here to spectacularly ridiculous effect with large patches of this film being culled from 1961’s The Colossus of Rhodes, and to say it was integrated seamlessly would be
Continue reading →
Film FestivalsForeignMoviesReviews
South African offering Wesens (2020) is one of the more thoughtful found footage features in recent memory, focusing on the single-day investigation by four intelligence agents of a mysterious, unidentified object that fell from the sky onto remote farmland. Morné Visser plays the businesslike, skeptical head of the foursome; Pietie Beyers portrays a more open-minded character who becomes mesmerized by the dark, egg-shaped object; and Conradie van Heerden and Randy Januarie round out the group as assistants. As the men record their findings on what seems to be Super 8mm and 16mm film, the object begins to have weird, and possibly dangerous effects, on them. Wesens is wonderfully shot by cinematographer Tom Purcell, who thankfully avoids much of the shaky-cam trappings of the found-footage subgenre. Writer/director Derick Muller invests his science fiction film with elements of folk horror and psychological horror, and with the aid of his crackerjack cast members, serves up a thought-provoking film that addresses historical and political
Continue reading →
MoviesReviewsSci-Fi
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment provided me with a free copy of the DVD I reviewed in this blog post. The opinions I share are my own. Way the hell in the future, noble Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) is assigned a new position lording it over the desert planet Arrakis, home to “the spice” the most valuable substance in the universe (as it gains the user vast power of body and mind… which includes the ability to fold space itself, by the Padishah Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV to replace the repugnant and violent House Harkonnen, led by the bloated, floating psychopath Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård), whom the Emperor is in cahoots with to eventually eliminate the powerful Duke and weaken the strength of House Atreides. Along for the ride to that great dust-ball are Leto’s son Paul (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother, the Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), the Duke’s concubine and a Bene Gesserit witch who’s sisterhood possess vast
Continue reading →
MoviesNewsReviewsTrailers
The new Scream movie has horror fans split down the middle. So, I guess it’s time to put my two cents in, seeing that the movie is headed to home release. The fifth movie of the franchise, set 25 years after the original murders, kicks off with a scene that pays straight homage to the original film’s opening scene, you know the one, with Drew Barrymore? This time the young woman on the phone with a killer is Tara, played by Jenna Ortega. After she survives an attack from Ghostface she is put in the hospital and her older sister Sam (Melissa Barrera) rushes back to see her after being gone for five years, only to find that Ghostface is hellbent on killing them both. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Scream movie without franchise stars Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, and David Arquette. The new cast includes Jack Quaid and Marley Shelton. To be honest, I don’t have any complaints
Continue reading →
