RIDE BABY RIDE – Horror Short

After an unbearably creepy negotiation with some skeevy car guys, a mechanic has to fight off a demonic monster inhabiting her dream 1978 Camaro.

 

Ride Baby Ride is a fun horror short about a Christine-like car sold by two creepy dudes to an unsuspecting mechanic!

RIDE BABY RIDE - Horror Short

 

Director: Sofie Somoroff
Writer: Sofie Somoroff
Country & year: USA, 2023
Actors: Celina Bernstein, Anthony Richard Pagliaro, Sam H. Clauder II
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt28493032/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kuso (2017)

KusoI LOVED this earthquake! It was the best one I’ve ever seen. All my enemies are DEAD! HAHAHAAA…!

 

And the earthquake we’re talking about is the one that took place in Los Angeles in 1994. One of the survivors from that brutal event was the eleven-year old Steve Ellison, aka Flying Lotus. 23 years later he would release his first feature film which took a lot of inspiration from the trauma of being an earthquake survivor as a child, and his overall fear of skin diseases and probably a laundry list of other phobias that followed. He also wanted to show how ugly people could be. Show their ugly asses, as he said. And ‘boy, he sure fucking did. This is the type of film that people like John Waters and Harmony Korine would gladly show on their first dates. Take that as a warning, if you will.

 

So, what’s Kuso really about? What’s the plot here? Uhm… yeah, good question. We’re in a trippy and surreal post-apocalyptic world where people have gone completely batshit insane while having their faces infested with big, nasty zits. The world of Mad Max is a walk in Disneyland in comparison. Here they don’t eat dog food straight from the cans but rather things such as a solid menu of stomach-turning “food” that includes worms and…bodily waste. Scat porn, several viewers say, and that’s not so far from it. This is juicy body horror to the extreme, disgusting and revolting, and if you have some certain boundaries when it comes to such, take also this as a warning. At the same time, it’s all done with a pitch-black sense of humor, so it’s not to be taken seriously. Still, there are moments here that even got a little too much for me, and my melted brain felt the after-effects while I slept through the following night.

 

But what is it really about? We follow a group of people who deal with their separate meaningless lives in their own post-apocalyptic environment. The film works more or less like an anthology with four vignettes which we bounce back and forth from: Royal, Mr. Quiggle, Smear and Sock. In between the segments we have some insane acid-trip scenes that even Terry Gilliam could be jealous of. It’s all dream logic and if you could livestream someone’s deepest cocaine-filled fever dream on a monitor screen, I wouldn’t be too surprised if this was the result. I don’t see much point in even trying to break down the segments. I would also lose the little I have left of my own sanity if I did. It’s just pure, perverted, unfiltered, experimental art-house madness where you can never, ever guess what’s about to happen next. Very graphic and visual, filled with details and even more unpredictable what-the-fucks you can imagine, and as far from mainstream audience-friendly as it can get. An overall unique experience for the senses that you would never watch with your mom and dad. And just to quote the director himself: This is definitely a movie for a certain kind of person.

 

Kuso was first distributed by Shudder and is also available on a DVD/Blu-ray combo on Amazon. The film is here reviewed from a very rare DVD edition from Sweden, just to point out.

 

Kuso Kuso Kuso

 

 

Director: Flying Lotus
Writers: David Firth, Flying Lotus
Country & year: US, 2017
Actors: Hannibal Buress, George Clinton, David Firth, Arden Banks, Byron Bowers, Shane Carpenter, Angel Deradoorian, Regan Farquhar, Pretty Ricki Fontaine, Zack Fox, Tim Heidecker, Bob Heslip, Anders Holm
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6131712/

 

 

Tom Ghoul

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Amazing Bulk (2012)

The Amazing BulkBy looking at the poster, you’d expect this to be one of the numerous mockbusters from The Asylum. But The Amazing Bulk is so much, much worse and not something you can fully be prepared for witnessing, even with your own eyes. Imagine if Sin City was written by Tommy Wiseau and directed by Neil Breen with the cheapest-looking green screen background effects from some Nintendo 64 games. There you have it. So yeah, this is a doozy one.

 

The plot goes like this: The young scientist, Henry Howard, is developing some kind of amazing purple serum for the government. The plan is that this serum will cure the world of famine and turn anyone who injects it into superhumans. Henry is also a grumpy-pants who mostly wears a frown which I honestly thought James Rolfe had trade marked. Anyway, Henry is in love with Hannah and wants to marry her. The problem is that Hannah also happens to be the daughter of General Darwin, who refuses Henry to marry her until after he has the serum ready.

 

All odds seem to be against poor Henry, and after being robbed on his way home after a date with Hannah, he’s had enough and decides to try the serum. Since there’s no budget here, don’t expect much of a transformation scene. Some dark CGI clouds covers the screen until it fades away and in front of us we have The Not So Amazing Bulk: a purple, retarded, babyface-looking, dickless stock cartoon monster with only one or two animations. He stomps at thugs and bad guys, but when he’s confronted by the only two lousy police officers in the city, he runs like a soy-filled bitch as if he’s crapped his pants.

 

And in a castle somewhere where it’s dark and gloomy and bats are flying everywhere, we meet Dr. Werner von Kantlove and his braindead cute-as-a-poodle wife Lolita. Dr. Kantlove is a wobbling super villain who looks like a cross of Javier Milei’s wig and a shady Nickelodeon producer who likes to sniff the bare feet of little girls. So, what’s his agenda? Just to blow up the moon. The Bulk now has a nemesis to take care of, but there’s more. Much more. The Amazing Bulk is a treasure chamber of ineptitude awesomeness, and when you think you’ve seen the worst, you’ll be surprised.

 

The Amazing Bulk

 

The film is directed by Lewis Schoenbrun and the only post on his trivia section says that he’s a fan of Stanley Kubrick. Who isn’t. His short Wikipedia page can tell us that he was born in 1958, has worked in the film industry since the 1970s and made his magnum opus The Amazing Bulk at the age of 52. Having that in mind, it’s almost impossible to even suggest that this was made with even the smallest nugget of seriousness. Well…

 

There’s a rare interview of the man where one can already tell by his picture that he’s certainly that kind of guy who’d make a film like this bad on purpose. The intention was to make a film in the same spirit as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Speed Racer, and clearly Sin City with some elements of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He bought a whole package of digital stock effects of figures, backgrounds, foregrounds, everything for 2,000 dollars, while a group of amateur actors used a treadmill to give us the illusion that they are walking in the environment as the background scrolls behind them. The whole thing took only five days to shoot in a garage in California with a complete budget of 14.000 dollars. 14.000 spent on what? God knows. Every single scene here is green screen filled with the shittiest cartoon backgrounds you can imagine. It looks worse than a YouTube skit from 2006.

 

After the film got the reaction it clearly deserved, with people almost dying from laughing, director Shoenburn decided to pull a Tommy Wiseau to say that the film was actually meant to be a comedy, you dummy. I would believe him, if it wasn’t for his Jupiter-sized ego getting in the way of commenting about the negative reviews. Because, in his mind, people are just jealous of not being a film director like him. Uhm, okay. Someone please pull his head out of his ass before he suffocates. During the past twelve years, he’s been retired from directing and has since worked at the International Academy of Film and Television as a teacher in the Philippines. Good for him.

 

The film gets better worse and more batshit as it goes on with scenes and logic that could only come from the brain of a six-year-old. So we thought. Two grown-ups actually wrote the script. One of my favorite moments is the chase scene between the Bulk and the two police officers as they run through a completely empty and lifeless city. I can’t describe how mindbogglingly horrendous the effects are, but we have a classic moment where the Bulk makes a car swirl in the air and lands on one of the officers. And the size of the car is the same, if not smaller, than the person. Top tier filmmaking, where everyone should take notes. Some of the effects looks like they were made in MS Paint while others are in such low resolution that the only thing we see is a blurry mess. The Amazing Bulk is a demented trainwreck of a shitshow that I can’t recommend enough if you like funny-bad movies. Truly a masterpiece in its category.

 

The film is available on DVD from Wild Eye Releasing and can be streamed on Tubi.

 

The Amazing Bulk The Amazing Bulk The Amazing Bulk

 

 

Director: Lewis Schoenbrun
Writers: Keith Schaffner, Jeremiah Campbell
Country & year: US, 2012
Actors: Terence Lording, Shevaun Kastl, Randal Malone, Juliette Angeli, Jed Rowen, Deirdre V. Lyons, Mark E. Fletcher, Mike Toto, Meghan Falcone
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1788453/

 

 

Tom Ghoul

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOU WILL NEVER BE BACK – Horror Short

Ana encounters an electrical black hole in her apartment building hallway, after which everything seems the same yet isn’t.

 

You Will Never Be Back (original title No podrás volver nunca) is a creepy and strange horror sci-fi short!

YOU WILL NEVER BE BACK - Horror Short

 

Director: Mónica Mateo
Writer: Mónica Mateo
Country & year: Spain, 2020
Actors: Ximena Vera, Chumo Mata, Laura De Pedro,
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt13266132/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Little Eye (2002)

My Little EyeIn a remotely located house, five contestants have agreed to take part on a reality webcast, where they have to spend six months there without anyone leaving. If they manage to do it, they will win $1 million, but if just one of the contestants leaves, everyone loses. All seems fine and exciting, but of course, a lot of tension between the contestants starts to rise after a while. Since they cannot leave the house, they get packages of food, and one day one of these packages contains a letter claiming that one of the contestant’s grandfather has died. And that’s not all: it also includes a gun with five bullets, one for each contestants. One of them, Emma, finds strange messages from someone who might be a person from her past. All kinds of weird things start happening, but they believe it might all be orchestrated by the people running the show, in order to trick them into leaving and thus losing the prize money. None of them have any idea what’s actually going on…

 

My Little Eye is a British horror film from 2002, directed by Marc Evans, where the plot is of course inspired by the reality TV show Big Brother, and the title refers to the guessing game “I spy (with my little eye)”. Prior to its release it had a test screening of a four-hour version of the film, which was pretty disastrous and all distribution interest died immediately. Eventually, though, the film was cut into less than two hours of playtime, and ended up getting released in theaters. The director was worried that his directing career would go straight into the shitter if this movie flopped, as his previous two films hadn’t fared well. And even though the response to the movie was quite unenthusiastic, it became a surprise sleeper hit. Lucky for Marc!

 

While Big Brother is apparently still a thing even today, it was quite popular upon the show’s initial release in 1999 and the upcoming years. Thus, My Little Eye was released at a time where pretty much everyone could draw the parallels between the popular reality show and the plot here about the five contestants locked inside a house. The setup is interesting, and it’s offering a claustrophobic and mysterious atmosphere. The tension slowly builds, and while you know something’s wrong you keep wondering what’s actually going on. While never offering any actual scares, there are some pretty effective scenes here and there, especially some of the shots done in night vision which comes off as both creepy and unsettling. The pacing is a bit slow, where you get a lot of character building at first, but this enhances the effect when the mysterious incidents start happening.

 

Overall, My Little Eye is a solid low-budget thriller with a creepy atmosphere, and well worth checking out.

 

My Little Eye

 

Director: Marc Evans
Writers: David Hilton, James Watkins
Country & year: UK, US, France, Canada, 2002
Actors: Sean Cw Johnson, Kris Lemche, Stephen O’Reilly, Laura Regan, Jennifer Sky, Bradley Cooper
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0280969/

 

 

Vanja Ghoul

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Little Eye – int trailer from PPC Film on Vimeo.

Summer of 84 (2018)

Summer of 84It’s the summer of 1984, where there are no mobile phones, no TikTok, and kids actually spend time together outside. What a time to be young! A fifteen year old, Davey Armstrong, works a paper route and spends time with his friends Dale, Curtis and Tommy. They live in Cape May, where a total of thirteen teenage boys have disappeared over the course of a decade. None of their disappearances have ever been connected, but after a local newspaper receives an anonymous letter from someone claiming to be their killer, or the Cape May Slayer, Davey starts suspecting his neighbor Wayne Mackey who is a popular police officer. His friends don’t put much value into his suspicions, though, as Davey is known for being easily drawn to all kinds of conspiracy theories and urban legends. Things change when a boy who Davey claims was inside Mackey’s house, ends up on a milk carton just a few days later. His friends agree to help him with the investigation of his suspicious neighbor, in the hopes of revealing him as the Cape May Slayer.

 

Summer of 84 is a horror film from 2018, directed by François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissel. It was written by Matt Leslie and Stephen J. Smith. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, to a fair amount of praise as many of the critics called it one of the best horror films of 2018. Since the main cast in the movie are teenagers and it’s set in the 80’s, some may think of the popular Netflix show Stranger Things, but they can’t really be compared. Summer of 84 is more like The Goonies turned into a mystery thriller, and while you’ll definitely get your fair share of the 80’s with the fitting soundtrack and certain elements from that era, this movie ventures into a much darker road.

 

As we follow Davey and his friends, we watch them do regular stuff like meeting in their tree house, watch dirty magazines, talk about who is the hottest girls in the neighborhood, and so on. Just normal teenage-boy stuff. When their attention is shifted onto a possible serial killer next door, we still have a bit of that whimsical Goonies-vibe. You’re not really sure what to expect, which makes it quite suspenseful. It also has quite a few little easter eggs: one of the missing boy posters displays one of John Wayne Gacy’s victims, and when the boys are in the clubhouse Tommy drinks from a bottle of MacReady’s Whiskey, which is a nod to The Thing (1982). While the first part of the movie builds up rather innocently when the kids are trying to figure out if Mackey really is a serial killer, offering both suspense and a few lighthearted chuckles here and there, it pretty much makes a 180 during the final act.

 

Summer of 84 is not your typical serial killer film, but offers something quite suspenseful and enjoyable. While some people really hated the ending of the movie, to the point where some said it literally ruined the entire movie for them, I personally found the choice for a dark and somewhat edgy ending to ground the movie into even more horror themed realism, and I’m glad they had the balls to do it this way.

 

Summer of 84

 

Directors: François Simard, Anouk Whissell, Yoann-Karl Whissell
Writers: Matt Leslie, Stephen J. Smith
Country & year: Canada, 2018
Actors: Graham Verchere, Judah Lewis, Caleb Emery, Cory Gruter-Andrew, Tiera Skovbye, Rich Sommer, Jason Gray-Stanford, Shauna Johannesen, William MacDonald, Harrison Houde
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5774450/

 

 

Vanja Ghoul

 

 

 

 

 

 

PLAY ME – Horror Short Film

A woman wakes in a car with no memory of how she got there, and a man tied up in the back seat. Stranger still, she finds an audio recording with her voice telling her what to do next.

 

Play Me is a simple yet suspenseful horror short, by the same director that also made Other Side of the Box!

PLAY ME - Horror Short Film

 

Director: Caleb J. Phillips
Writer: Caleb J. Phillips
Country & year: USA, 2023
Actors: Lindsey Garrett, Josh Schell
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt23642400/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cold Prey (2006)

Triangle Herre hær kjæm te å gjør littegrainnj vondt. E du klar? Æ tælle te tre.

 

And no, it wasn’t my keyboard that just had a stroke. It’s the Norwegian for This will hurt a little. Are you ready? I’m counting to three. Also in the dialect of trøndersk, just to mention.

 

The year was 2006, on Friday the 13th of October when we got our very first Norwegian slasher, titled Fritt Vilt (with the international title Cold Prey). Yay! So this wasn’t just any slasher you see, it was a cultural event that would have its new chapter in Norwegian film history. Yes I know, it’s quite strange that the country that had the biggest export of black metal, church burnings and Satan didn’t have any horror films to showcase until after the millennium. What held us back while the wave of New French Extremity was already near its peak, is a good question.

 

We, of course, had Villmark (Dark Woods) from 2003, which leans more into the thriller section, and from there on we have to rewind way, waaaay back to the year 1958 (!) with De Dødes Tjern (Lake of the Dead), which has not aged particularly well. What was left was decades of a pretty stiff, wooden and a ridiculously conservative film industry which had not much to offer other than sloggish, forgettable and painfully dry obscure drama films made for god knows who. Yawn. There were some very few exceptions much thanks to Ivo Caprino (RIP). So aside from that, a film like Cold Prey was a big fresh air in my tiny gnome country. A game changer and a complete shift on how films in Norway would be made from here on, which also included other genres.

 

With the success and the cultural impact of Cold Prey, it also opened the door to several young genre filmmakers to show their muscles, most notably Tommy Wirkola (Dead Snow) and André Øvredal (Troll Hunter). Roar Uthaug, along with the two mentioned, would also eventually work in Hollywood with various outcomes. But it’s also valid to say that we have our fair share of terrible, shitty horror movies and the last ten years hasn’t been much to be excited about. So I’m not being a blind patriot waving my flag here. There’s also several Norwegian horror movies that seem to be impossible to find anywhere due to lack of release and distribution, so for all I know there could be a hidden gem somewhere. The only titles I’ve seen which are worth watching from recently are Project Z and The Innocents, both from 2021. And soon Norway will give birth to its first sea monster flick called Kraken, which will start filming in the Norwegian coast later this year. So we’ll see how that one turns out.

 

Cold Prey follows a group of youngsters who are going snowboarding in the mountains of Jotunheimen. The sky is blue, the air is crisp with even some sprinkles of love, and life is good… until one of the poor bastards fall and breaks his ankle. Luckily, they find an abandoned hotel nearby where they take shelter. And nothing bad happens here. After spending the night, they get met by a rescue team and The End. I’m joking, of course. You know that they’re in deep shit when one of the in-love couple checks into one of the rooms that have the numbers 2 3 7. Redrum!

 

It’s not the biggest surprise that they’re not alone in the hotel. How boring would that be. We already learn in the opening sequence that the place has a dark history where a kid once disappeared under some questionable circumstances. Our group of friends also learn that a mysterious person called the Mountain Man lives like a hermit somewhere in the dark corners of the hotel, and kills anyone who has the nerve to trespass.

 

If the premise sounds familiar, you’re not wrong. On paper, Cold Prey is as formulaic as it can be, which basically follows the same footsteps of the most generic slasher films you’ve seen hundreds of already. There’s nothing much new on the surface here, nor was it back in 2006, and the film’s biggest sin is that it’s pretty tame with lackluster kills. The brutality from the early films of Alexandre Aja and other extreme Frenchmen are worlds apart, just to make that clear. Us slow Norwegians still have a lot to learn in the splatter and gore department, unfortunately.

 

And I almost forgot to mention that there’s no cringe sex scene here, so kudos for at least breaking that cliché.

 

That being said, there’s more to enjoy here. The setting itself gives the movie an eerie, grim vibe and the acting is solid. Ingrid Bolsø Berdal stands out as the heroine who can also handle a shotgun. The story is intriguing enough with a pacing that keeps the entertaining value on track. The film also looks fabulous, where the bleak coldness really spices up the claustrophobic tension and atmosphere. Cold Prey was filmed at Leirvassbu, a tourist cabin in Jotunheimen where the actors lived during the filming. So I wouldn’t be surprised if the isolated and stone-cold surroundings messed a little with their heads.

 

So overall, despite not being more ballsy with the violence, Cold Prey is an entertaining watch with some unique scenery, great suspense and a fine addition to winter horror. Still, I must be honest enough to say that it would work more as a horror film for beginners. This is also the directorial debut of Roar Uthaug, who in 2018 made Tomb Raider. If you want more of the primitive Norwegian landscape, check out Escape (2012), also directed by Uthaug.

 

The film got two sequels: Cold Prey II, which is more of a Halloween II (1981) ripoff, and I don’t remember much of Cold Prey III other than it was a prequel. The first two is on DVD from Anchor Bay and Shout Factory. Kos dåkk!

 

Cold Prey

 

Director: Roar Uthaug
Writers: Thomas Moldestad, Martin Sundland, Roar Uthaug
Original title: Fritt Vilt
Country & year: Norway, 2006
Actors: Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, Rolf Kristian Larsen, Tomas Alf Larsen, Endre Martin Midtstigen, Viktoria Winge, Rune Melby, Erik Skjeggedal, Tonie Lunde, Hallvard Holmen
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0808276/

 

 

Tom Ghoul

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Triangle (2009)

TriangleJess is preparing to take her autistic son Tommy on a boat trip with her friend Greg, and while getting both her and her son ready the doorbell suddenly rings. No one is on the other side. Later, Jess drives to Florida and meets up with Greg at the harbor. She arrives without Tommy, and explains that he is at his special needs school. They board the boat, together with Greg’s friends Sally, Downey and Heather. Soon afterwards, a storm is approaching and Greg picks up a distress signal from a woman pleading for help. She says she’s in danger as someone is killing off the crew members on the boat she’s on, but before this woman can complete the conversation Greg’s boat capsizes. The survivors then boards a passing ocean liner, which appears to be deserted, but they saw the silhouette of someone apparently ignoring their pleas for help when wanting to board the ship. Jess gets an uncomfortable feeling of déja vu when exploring the ship, and after discovering her own keys near a display case for the ship, which is named Aeolus, a lot of strange things start happening. Jess finds that she is stuck in a time-loop that keeps repeating itself, and she must try to figure out a way to break it.

 

Triangle is a psychological horror film from 2009, written and directed by Christopher Smith whose directorial debut was Creep (2004). The film is partly based on the story of Sisyphus, a Greek mythological figure cursed to repeatedly push a boulder up a hill without ever reaching the top. He was also inspired by Dead of Night (1945) and Memento (2000). The movie was filmed on sets and location in Queensland, Australia. It received favorable reviews upon its release, both from critics and audience, but still grossed only $1.3-1.6 million worldwide on a budget of $12 million. Ouch. But it also didn’t have a theatrical release in the US.

 

While Groundhog-day horror movies where time-loops keep the protagonists struggling with figuring out how to break them is nothing new, and some of them take on a more lighthearted variant like for example Happy Death Day. This movie on the other hand keeps everything considerably more dark and mysterious. Triangle is like a puzzle of pieces which start fitting together one by one, and small details which previously might have seemed insignificant proves to tie things together. What makes the movie even more effective is how the protagonist, Jess, keeps trying literally everything in order to break the loop, and while both she and the viewers think “aha, now she’s on to something!” we suddenly see that she’s already tried that exact same thing dozens of times in earlier loops. There is very little predictability here, and keeps you guessing throughout, making it a very entertaining watch.

 

On the whole, Triangle is a fun and thrilling time-loop horror movie, and despite having a conclusion that some might find a bit inadequate, it still ends up as a satisfactory ride.

 

Triangle

 

Writer and director: Christopher Smith
Country & year: UK, Australia, 2009
Actors: Melissa George, Joshua McIvor, Jack Taylor, Michael Dorman, Henry Nixon, Rachael Carpani, Emma Lung, Liam Hemsworth, Bryan Probets
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1187064/

 

Vanja Ghoul

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THERE WILL BE MONSTERS – Horror Short

Monsters exist. They live inside us. And sometimes, they win.

 

There Will Be Monsters is a nice Spanish horror short directed by Carlota Pereda who also directed Piggy (Cerdita), and it is also starring Laura Galán who had the leading role in both the Piggy horror short as well as the feature film.

THERE WILL BE MONSTERS - Horror Short

 

Director: Carlota Pereda
Writer: Carlota Pereda
Country & year: Spain, 2020
Actors: José Gabriel Campos, Alejandro Chaparro, Jorge Elorza, Laura Galán, Patricia Ponce de León, Álvaro Quintana
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt11638302/