A Horror Film Blog

Downrange , directed by Ryuhei Kitamura, is okay, in a sort of super reductive way.  Instead of standard stalk'n'slash fare, which usually being stalked across various locations and slashed one by one, or even trapped in one fairly large location with lots of hidey-holes, this film is limited to one, very small location - the lee side of a car, with a sniper taking potshots at any part of the luckless road trippers huddling on the far side of their crippled vehicle.  It's impressively minimalist, and that bare-basics attitude is applied to the script as well as the narrative.   We get virtually nil character development beyond some basic young slash fodder stereotypes.    This isn't Wolf Creek , which took its time and developed pleasant, rounded characters before making bad things happen to them in the second half.   The sniper is never given any motivation or development - though we are allowed to see him - something denied his victims until the...

A family shelter in an isolated cabin.  A hostile group of relentless marauders lay siege to them.  This is the stuff of many films, and it is also the stuff of 2017 Jackals .  A film about which the best thing you can say is it does what it sets out to do pretty well, and the worst thing you can say about it is it could have been a much better film. "Daddy, we will have a lot of things to talk through once this is over." The idea underpinning the narrative - a family attempts to 'deprogram' their son, the brainwashed member of a cult - was interesting and could have been developed a lot more. There was scope for an intriguing cat-and-mouse battle between the family and their ex-army deprogrammer, and the swivel eyed son; and the belief system of the cult could have been explored.  Instead, the intervention aspect is really just a MacGuffin, used to set up the plot of the film, because it requires these people to be in an isolated area so they can be assailed by the ...

Having watching Jane Schoenbrun's  We're All Going to the World's Fair it is almost impossible to say quite what I have watched. My initial comments on Shudder were condescending, faintly praising the director doing something other than a slasher clone.  There's an implied criticism in that, suggesting (not too far below the surface) that what ever they did they did not do it terribly well.  And I imagine a lot of people watching We're All Going to the World's Fair would have left it at that.  At best, a sporadically interesting attempt at micro-budget film-making.  At worst, a near unwatchable pretentious mess. But thinking about the film again as I tried to write this review, I found myself feeling much more positive and intrigued, about the film itself.  Its refusal to give a conventional narrative or establish a diegetic reality with observable rules prompted an intellectual response and forced me to either reject the project altogether (as I suspect m...

1988, Idiana.  Three girls attend a heavy metal concert, pick up some guys and take them to one of the girls' parents nice pad to drink, take drugs, play Never Have I Ever, get jiggy ... and carnage ensues. I will admit I watched wanting next to nothing in terms of mental stimulation, and was really in search of things lurid and sleazy.  But We Summon the Darkness was ... much better than I expected.  So much so that I didn't feel disappointed when it failed to deliver the lur and sleaze. Instead of a flatlining exploitation flick channeling Last House on the Left, what I got was surprisingly fun comedy.  The cast are good, the direction shows flair (and on one occasion, flare). "This is not what I meant when I said I wanted things to get hot!" While no-one will mistake the screenplay for Tolstoy (thank God) it is witty and clever, addressing the (resurgent, if it ever actually went away) conservative Satanic panic nonsense associated with rock music, drinking, drug...

This is a hilarious black comedy.  It has everything virtually apart from zombies - a creepy babysitter, a demonic child, a lunatic mother and a selfish, perverse father, child abuse, LSD, necromania, multiple murders, dead rabbits ... So much the script writers are clearly struggling to keep all the different plot elements moving in sync, but they just about pull it off. We meet Millicent attending at job interview as a baby sitter for a very high needs child.  Millie presents as 21-year-old, and says she is studying medicine.  She quickly forms a rapport with the boy, Johnny. Parents, Jacob and Rebecca, hire her. Turns out Millie isn't quite what she seems - addiction to LSD being just one 'problematic' aspect.  She casually disregards Becca's rules about child care - which are many - and seems not unresponsive as Jacob starts making advances on her.  And there is more, so much more, about her. Okay, so she's a psycho.  That isn't any big reveal.  I...

This is authentically terrible.  Written and directed by hardcore musical legend (allegedly) Glen Danzig and drawing on stories and visual stylings of the verotik magazine established by hardcore publishing legend (very allegedly) Glen Danzig, this reeks of being a vanity project with a lot more vanity than project.  It just sucks, on any level. Now, if I say there all the stories are seedy, gory and rank with nudity, this will give entirely the wrong idea of what we are dealing with here.  It does not suck because it is morally repugnant.  It sucks because it sucks. It's just not good film making.  It isn't even good bad film making, or good nasty film making.    Perhaps calling it bad film making is being too generous.  It's just bad. The film comes in three part, each a brief half hour that is made to feel endless by the plodding inanity.  In the first part - a prostitute with eyes for nipples (why?) gets upset when a client is less than t...

If you can overlook the ludicrous premise of this film there is a lot of fun to be had here. The story is nonsense but the film makers play it absolutely straight. Christmas Eve, and foul mouth record store owner Tori (the awesome Riley Dandy) is knocking off.  Reluctantly, she allows her employee Robbie (Sam Delich) to talk her out of going on a Tinder date and get wasted with him instead.  They drink and bicker, which makes up the first act of the film.   Meanwhile, the ex-military war robot, reprogrammed as a Christmas Santa at a local toy store (I told you it was stupid) develops a bug and - I guess - re-sets to factory settings, which means it is looking for people to kill, ho ho ho.  For reasons unclear, in the second act, it decides Tori is its prime target and sets out to rain Hell fire down on her boozy 'default date' with Robbie.  Being a true and worthy Final Girl, she doesn't take to this idea, and the final act consists of the two of them mauli...

This is a Troma film. If you don't know what that means, avoid. You won't regret not experiencing the Troma trauma.  If you have encountered Troma before, you know what to expect - terrible script; dire performances (with the exception of Carla Ferrigno [aka Mrs Lou 'Incredible Hulk' Ferrigno] who appears in a spikey cameo); clueless direction (the director would go onto to do script work on some notable films, bizarrely) awful special effects; gratuitous nudity; witless, juvenile humour. This one has the added 'attraction' of a bad metal soundtrack.  Because this is shamelessly piggybacking on the 80s 'Satanic panic' about how Alice Cooper was going to make our children worship Belzebub, or some such.  Basically, a terrible light metal band announce they are going to do a special show at the dead end town of Mill Basin. MILL BASIN!! ARE YOU READY TO ROCK?! In spite of never having toured before, they are apparently the biggest thing in the universe and ...

For ardent fans of my musings (I know you are out there) the Evidence of 2013 is a totally different cheapie found footage film to Evidence (2012), previously reviewed on A Horror Film Blog. Though - such are the conventions - or constraints - of the found footage genre they might as well be the same film.  You could argue we could just title most found footage films Evidence and be done with it.  Which would at least save someone having to think up a snazzy new title to make their identikit products stand out.  In case you are not too good at reading between the lines this Evidence is yet another specimen of by the numbers found footage malarkey, similar to 99% of other films in the genre. Which isn't necessarily bad, if you like that sort of thing (I do); but if you don't, there aren't any reasons to watch this. For people that do like FF type films, this is a mix up of shakey-cam and more traditional style film as a bunch of cliched cops try to work out what happened t...

What, exactly, were Stuart Gordon's claim to be cinema's pre-eminent adaptor of HP Lovecraft? The hideous monster that lurks in the darkness, tormenting the innocent with his depravity.  Image Bauer Hosting His credentials: Reanimator , a witless take on one of Lovecraft's most morbidly (literally) funny stories; Dagon , a blundering rendition of The Shadow over Innsmouth, and a few odds and ends like Castle Freak which owes a few vague ideas to The Outsider;  From Beyond (a lurid 'reimagining' of a  minor story) and a brief, camp rendering of The Dreams In The Witch House - where he added the sex scenes Lovecraft carelessly forgot to include in his original mind bending yarn. This is the only Lovecrafty bit in the film, where monstrous Gorgio comes face to face with ... himself Thing is, none of these films are actually any good, on any level.  Nor are they worthy failures, like the recent The Colour Out of Space .  Stuart Gordon's 'Lovecraft' films a...

I have vague memories of watching this film years ago.  I remember not liking it very much.  Seeing it appear on Shudder, I thought I would revisit it, in case I had judged it unfairly. Perhaps.  It's an okay film, blessed with a good cast and budget 'all on screen' as they say; but it struggles to put its story across convincingly. Torches.  There are a lot of torches in this film.  at least these guys came prepared. The producers include Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver.  Big name producers guarantees a decent budget and access to resources but it also puts some limitations in terms of tone and story.  It can't be too dark, it's a Robert Zemeckis film.  It has to be brash and loud and in-your-face, it's a Joel Silver film. So, to the story.  A crew of rugged, tough-as-nails salvagers are commissioned by a completely unsinister stranger called Ferriman (geddit?) to locate and salvage a liner that has been drifting in the Bering Sea for 40 yea...

 A sort of interesting idea that doesn't come off.  Weakness in writing, plotting characterisation and acting prevent this micro-budget effort generating effective terror. Angie meets the big worm.  I don't think we need to spend too much time deconstructing this image. Our main character is 'erotic performer' Angie, a dancer in a sex shop called Revealer.  For those of us not familiar with the 1980s sex industry, this kinda like a cam girl deal where a guy would pay a girl on the other side of a plexiglass screen to take her clothes off.  No, it doesn't sound much fun.  The 80s were a terrible time and I am amazed we survived.  The other main is and League of Decency type Sally.  The End of the World happens and somehow they end up huddled in the cramped confines of Angie's booth as all Hell literally breaks out around them. Soon they are fighting wriggling penis monsters and the demon lord Asmodeus - though I am almost sure it was just some dude...