Let Us Prey (2014)

Let Us PreyWe’re in a small town in Scotland, where rookie police constable Rachel Heggie is on patrol. Suddenly she witnesses a car strike some mysterious man in a trenchcoat, who seemingly disappears after getting hit. The driver of the car, Francis Caesar Sargison, is a familiar face to the police so Heggie is quick to arrest him. After she brings him into the police station, Sgt Jim Macready charges Caesar for reckless driving. So in a cell he goes, where there’s already another guy who is in for beating his wife. Now, the only thing Heggie needs to do, is finding the mystery man wearing a trenchcoat (and no, it’s not Castiel, but this could have easily belonged somewhere in the Supernatural universe) and she radios two other police officers for the task. It appears his disappearing act wasn’t too solid, as they quickly locate him and brings him in for questioning. He’s covered in scratches, goes by the name Six, and carries a notebook with a list of names. Soon, it becomes apparent that this mysterious dude is on a mission, and the names in his notebook are from people who have committed horrible acts and not done anything to atone for them. And it is also soon revealed that nearly everyone in the police station have dark secrets of their own…it’s not only the ones behind bars that are the bad guys…

 

Let Us Prey is a supernatural horror film from 2014, directed by Brian O’Malley (who also directed The Lodgers from 2017) and co-written with Fiona Watson and David Cairns. And if you’re in for something fun, gory and supernatural this might just be right up your alley! While you become aware very early in the movie that you’re watching one of those pray for your sins kind of story, it does so with a bit of almost cartoonish glee by giving us a bunch of characters that truly deserves it. The characters are all interesting enough, where he have the protagonist Heggie who is struggling with something from her past, and is pretty much the only likable character among the bunch, except from perhaps Six himself. The others are…mostly a bunch of horrible a-holes. They’re all having a history of violence and wrongdoings, and we’re certainly looking forward to see them finally pay for their misdeeds.

 

The movie is mostly very fast-paced with few dull moments, with a fitting John Carpenter-esque synth score by Steve Lynch. It also becomes bloody and gory at times, where especially towards the end we get full-on mayhem where one of the bad guys covers himself in barbed wire and tries to become Rambo and blast everything to pieces. Crazy and fun! And since the majority of the characters here are deliberately unlikable, it goes a long way to have a devilish antagonist who isn’t really the bad guy here.

 

Let Us Prey is one of those popcorn movies that is simply a good time, with lots of violence and fun and a finale that goes wild!

 

Let Us Prey Let Us Prey

 

Director: Brian O’Malley
Writers: Fiona Watson, David Cairns, Brian O’Malley
Country & year: UK/Ireland, 2014
Actors: Liam Cunningham, Pollyanna McIntosh, Bryan Larkin, Hanna Stanbridge, Douglas Russell, Niall Greig Fulton, Jonathan Watson, Brian Vernel, James McCreadie, Sophie Stephanie Farmer
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3148348/

 

Vanja Ghoul

 

 

 

 

 

It Follows (2014)

It FollwsA girl is running out of her home, terrified and constantly looking after someone…or something. After getting inside a car, she drives away and later that night she ends up at a beach all alone. On her cell phone, she tells her parents that she loves them, and that’s the last call she ever makes. The next thing we see is the girl’s brutally mutilated corpse in the morning sunlight. And yes, this remains one of the very best opening scenes in modern horror movies, as it effectively introduces us to what could happen to the victims here in a very simple yet brutal and terrifying way!

 

Then we head over to our protagonist, Jay Height (Maika Monroe), who goes to the movies with her boyfriend Hugh (Jake Weary). Suddenly, Hugh asks her if she can see a girl wearing a yellow dress, which she can’t. He then freaks out and urges them to leave. Well, we all have those moments of not wanting to meet a specific someone from our past, right? Nothing to worry about…and absolutely no red flags when a guy freaks out so much over seeing someone that he makes you leave the theater before the movie is finished. At least Jay’s naive enough to not put much thought into it, and later they have sex for the first time in his car. How romantic…until he chloroforms her. When Jay wakes up, she’s tied to a wheelchair in an abandoned building, and while she might have a thousand and one different reasons circulating in her head why he wanted to do this to her, at least there’s no way she expected this: he explains that he is followed by some demonic entity that wants to kill him, which takes appearance of random people and only he can see. The only way to throw it off your trail (at least for a while) is to have sex. Yes, you just need to fuck around, plainly and simply. Then the entity will follow the person you had sex with instead, but here’s the catch: once that person is killed, it will come back to get you. So: he urges Jay to keep having sex with people to keep the entity at bay. Talk about the worst STD ever.

 

Jay is of course bewildered and probably a little heartbroken too. One thing is being unlucky enough to encounter a man (or woman) who only uses you for sex, but this is on a whole other level. At school, she notices an old woman walking towards her. And surprise, surprise…no one else can see this lady. And what is essentially a rather normal-looking old grandma who might have escaped from a nearby care home, is here turned into one of the most creepy scenes ever, just outright chilling…and that’s pretty much what the movie delivers throughout the rest of the playtime: lots of really creepy and even outright scary scenes, packed with tension and paranoid suspense throughout!

 

It Follows

 

It Follows is a supernatural horror film from 2014, written and directed by David Robert Mitchell. It grossed $23.3 million worldwide against its $1.3 million budget, and has later been deemed a modern horror classic. Mitchell’s inspiration for the film was based on some recurring dreams he had in his youth, all centered around him being followed. The movie was shot in Detroit, Michigan, and in the scene where Hugh has Jay tied to the chair, the interiors were shot at the abandoned Packard Automotive Plant. They had originally planned to shoot it at some other location, but that place became an active crime scene as a murder had been committed there. Always good to have a backup-plan, I guess.

 

I remember back in the day (yikes, it’s already been 12 years since this movie’s release already!) when It Follows hit the theaters. Naturally, we were excited to check it out as it had received a fair amount of buzz, and to be fair, this movie certainly deserved it. It’s actually the last movie that was able to give me the willies. To be honest, I actually miss the feeling of a movie being able to scare me a little…not that there haven’t been any scary movies afterwards, of course! There’s been plenty of them…but the more horror movies you see, then, well…desensitizing can be a bitch. Then again, I certainly don’t miss the times of not wanting to go to the bathroom at night, so I’ll take that win at least.

 

Much of the movie’s unsettling atmosphere and tension is thanks to Mike Gioluakis, who said that both he and Mitchell were fans of the still photographer Gregory Crewdson, with the somewhat surreal suburban imagery which suited It Follows so well. There’s a heavy use of wide-shots, making us constantly looking for something within the frame that might be creeping towards the protagonist. This is what makes It Follows so genuinely creepy! It is all about how it makes the entity look like everything from completely normal people to something a lot more uncanny. You never know who it is, or where it is. It makes you paranoid, and it craves that you pay attention to everything that happens on screen. I also love the retro music score, composed by Disasterpeace (Rich Vreeland).

 

And while there have been many interpretations about metaphors, including that it’s about STD’s (Sexually Transmitted Disease, except in this case it would be more like a Sexually Transmitted Demon), it mostly serves as allegories for transition into adulthood, assault, and the inevitability of death. Death always creeps towards us, and it might have been very close to us at certain times too. And, to quote the director himself: We’re all here for a limited amount of time, and we can’t escape our mortality, but love and sex are two ways in which we can – at least temporarily – push death away.

 

It Follows remains, and will most likely do so, a horror classic that still holds up very well and has for sure been an inspiration to many others. A sequel has been in the talks for years, but it wasn’t until 2023 when a sequel entitled They Follow was announced to be in development. Filming is set to begin sometime this summer.

 

It Follows It Follows

 

Writer and director: David Robert Mitchell
Country & year: USA, 2014
Actors: Maika Monroe, Jake Weary, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Zovatto, Olivia Luccardi, Lili Sepe, Bailey Spry, Claire Sloma, Mike Lanier, Ingrid Mortimer
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3235888/

 

Vanja Ghoul

 

 

 

 

 

Father’s Day (2011)

Father's DayFather’s Day started as a fake grindhouse trailer (like Hobo with a Shotgun, Machete and Thanksgiving), produced by the once small independent film company Astron-6, based in Canada. In their early days, they made a bunch of silly short films through the lens of 80s and 90s nostalgia, and began experimenting with feature-length films with Manborg. Producers Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz from Troma got an eye for this creative ensemble from Mapleland and spat out a generous budget of $10,000 for them to make Father’s Day into a full movie. The main team behind Astron 6, Adam Brooks, Jeremy Gillespie, Matthew Kennedy, Steven Kostanski and Conor Sweeney wrote and directed it. And the result is, well, it’s a movie.

 

Father’s Day starts right off the bat with a deranged chubby homosexual rapist/cannibal/serial killer with the classic Jeffrey Dahmer glasses who is sawing bodyparts, ripping out guts and organs of fresh corpses, plays with sawed-off heads, French-style. This particular serial killer’s name is Chris Fuchman, and his way to, well, Fuckkmanize his prey is to hunt down and kill as many dads as possible on every Father’s Days after cumming into their crusty cornholes. Ugh. A vengeful vigilante named Ahab, wearing an eye-patch, a big nod to Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973), hunts down Fuchman’s ass in some dark alley and declares Happy Father’s Day before he blows his head straight to Hell with a shotgun. The bad news is that he just shot and killed an innocent man he mistook for being Fuchman…or did he? Hmmm… Later we learn that Fuchman is assumed for being dead for thirty years. Huh…

 

Then we jump to the gay teen-prostitute boy, Twink, who’s in a police interrogation after he got caught with a fresh corpse in a motel room and being suspected of… being Chris Fuchman, aka The Father’s Day Killer. Something like that. After being released, his dad drives him home, who is soon to be assplayed, and burned alive by said killer in front of Twink. Twink gets approached by Father Sullivan, for whatever reason, where the amateur-acting kicks in. And a Catholic Priest played by a teen-looking altar boy is always believable. I guess Eric Roberts was unavailable. Anyway, Twink spits in Father Sullivan’s face and tells him to stay away. Who wouldn’t. Father Flynt, a blind old sentinel on his deathbed, tells about Ahab whom he raised after his dad was killed by Fuchman. The mother? Who knows. Ahab is the one and only man who can kill Fuchman, because…because. Father Sullivan travels far away to the middle of nowhere to drag Ahab out of exile and bring him back to Tromaville to hunt down Fuchman and end him once and for all.

 

Before going on the mission, he hooks up with his sister, Chelsea, whom he hasn’t seen in ages. She’s, of course, a go-go dancer and The Foxiest Bitch in the City. Sounds groovy. The plot and the direction here is a muddled mess, but it all boils down to Ahab, Chelsea and Twink joining forces. And I almost forgot to mention that Chelsea gets kidnapped by Fuchman. Maybe The Foxiest Bitch in the City cured his homosexuality. Brainfart. Father Sullivan, the boy priest, chimes in as we maybe also have a demon to deal with. Of course.

 

The film has, as mentioned, four writers and directors going crazy, and it shows. The gritty grindhouse filter/style switches on-and-off when it feels like it. The forced humor and jokes, mixed with amateur acting, falls mostly on its face. The film is a tonal mess as it jumps from Jörg Buttgereit territory with close-ups of tasteless penis mutilations to crazy talk about maple syrup. Welcome to Canada. The third act falls completely off the rails and looks more like a YouTube skit by Nostalgia Critic. It’s overall a fun watch though, with lots of entertaining moments, like a wild car chase where the actors do their own stunts. We have a soft-porn sex scene, colorful special effects (mostly old-school), gruesome kills, dick-eating, mutilation, necrophilia, cannibalism, exploding guts, head-smashing, lots of gore, demon possession and more unpredictable madness and surprises. Woof! We’re in Tromaville, that’s for sure, where Lloyd Kaufman makes a quick appearance as someone I won’t spoil. A crazy movie for a crazy Friday night to enjoy with sausage and knight cheese.

 

Father's Day Father's Day Father's Day

 

 

Writers and directors: Adam Brooks, Jeremy Gillespie, Matthew Kennedy, Steven Kostanski, Conor Sweeney
Country & year: Canada/USA, 2011
Actors: Adam Brooks, Matthew Kennedy, Conor Sweeney, Amy Groening, Garrett Hnatiuk, Brent Neal, Kevin Anderson, Meredith Sweeney, Zsuzsi, Lloyd Kaufman, Mackenzie Murdock, Billy Sadoo
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1727261/

 

Tom Ghoul

 

 

 

They’re Watching (2016)

They're WatchingGreg, Alex and Sarah are a film crew running a popular home-improvement television series. This time they’re going to visit Becky, an American woman who has moved to a remote village in Moldova and bought a very old and rundown house with her husband, and turned the place into something out of a fairytale. As the crew meets up with their bitchy producer Kate and a cheerful Moldovian businessman named Vladimir, they first get some footage of the town. Like the disrespectful tourists they are, they even try to sneak into a funeral and film it, causing an angry crowd and a police officers that treats them a lot more mildly than they deserved.

 

Oh well, the show and the filming continues over the next few days, as they experience hostile locals and some really weird behavior from some of them. Vladimir, letting the crew know a little bit more about the village’s history and folklore, tells them about a plague that struck the place several generations previously, where a woman who lived in the outskirts of the town was accused for being a witch and causing said plague. She was, like so many people accused of witchcraft of course, burned alive. And the house this witch used to live in? Yeah, yeah, you already guessed it. Of course it is the same place that Becky and her husband bought and renovated into their dream home. When they visit Becky, they really see that she and her husband has turned the place into quite the cozy home indeed. The husband is away at the moment, so Becky is all alone. Well, not anymore now that the crew has arrived, of course. But things start happening. The locals act more and more weird. Animals act weird. Even Becky acts weird…

 

They’re Watching is a found footage horror film from 2016, written and directed by Jay Lender and Micah Wright. While many found footage movies suffers a bit from overused and generic locations (with forests being the most worn-out locations of them all), this movie did at least spice it up a bit with more interesting filming areas, as it’s filmed in Romania. Before heading over to the more generic forest/cabin-in-the-woods stuff, we get to see some villages, cobbled streets, locals, and even a restaurant scene where the actors are actually playing the instruments and the audio was recorded live. Fun!

 

The characters are fine enough, with most of them being a bit douchy and unlikable, with the producer Kate being so overly bitchy and mean it becomes comedic. Vladimir, the somewhat cheesy businessman, is the only character that actually comes off as likable. As far as kill counts and blood ‘n gore goes, there isn’t that much of it until much later in the movie. There is one that’s visceral enough to stand out, but other than that it’s mostly a rather slow journey that focuses more on the mystery about the place and the witch lore. There’s always a certain comedic tone underneath which helps to hold up the entertainment value, plus a few twists and turns here and there…but gosh darn, that ending! It honestly made the entire movie, turning it all into one of the most bonkers finales I’ve seen in a found footage horror movie. Maybe that wild craziness shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise considering that the director-duo previously made things like Spongebob Squarepants and Phineas and Ferb episodes…

 

They’re Watching is a found footage horror movie that doesn’t really stick that much out from the rest, until you get to the final part. Well worth checking out for those who like the found footage genre, with an insane climax!

 

They're Watching They're Watching

 

Writers and directors: Jay Lender, Micah Wright
Country & year: USA/Romania, 2016
Actors: Brigid Brannagh, David Alpay, Kris Lemche, Carrie Genzel, Mia Marcon, Dimitri Diatchenko, Cristian Balint, Mircea Constantinescu, Cici Caraman
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3096858/

 

Vanja Ghoul

 

 

 

 

 

Sea Fever (2019)

Sea FeverSiobhan is a young woman who is a PhD student studying deep sea fauna. While she prefers working alone, she’s pushed way out of her own comfort zone when she needs to do some research which requires her to go onboard the fishing trawler Niamh Cinn Óir with a crew of six other people: the Captain, Freya, and her skipper husband Gerard, the ship engineer Omid, with Johnny, Ciara and Sudi being the rest of Siobhan’s company. They set off like just another normal day for the crew, and have a planned destination which is supposed to be rich with fish. A problem arises though: the Irish Coast Guard alerts them and lets them know that their planned destination is within an exclusion zone. Yup, we already know how this story goes: the boat owners are of course nearly sunken in debt so the skipper decides to take them there anyway, as a large amount of fish is needed to keep the boat and jobs floating. And of course he doesn’t tell any of them, including his Captain wife, until they’re at the destination.

 

Once there, the boat gets tangled into something which makes it impossible for them to move on. Strange breaches are discovered in the hull, from which oozes some kind of slime. Uh-oh. Those definitely aren’t just some innocent barnacles. Since Siobhan has brought with her some diving gear for her research anyway, she’s going down into the ocean to see what’s holding the boat. There, she notice several tentacle-like bio-luminescent organisms attached to the boat, all of them attached to some strange, giant creature. She uses a knife to cut the tentacles from the boat, but that’s just the start of their problems. They also notice an other boat nearby, abandoned and with several bodies inside. Gerard says they must have gotten sea fever, and in a way…he’s kind of right…something they soon discover once members of their own crew starts falling ill.

 

Sea Fever is a science fiction horror thriller from 2019, written and directed by Neasa Hardiman. And in this movie, despite there actually being some kind of giant sea creature, it’s not the monster itself that brings along the biggest threat, but rather what it brings along with it. Being a very low-budget movie with obvious limitations, there wasn’t much focus on the sea monster effects or anything. The little we did see was intriguing enough, and oddly, kind of beautiful…because here’s the thing: this isn’t a movie about the big ‘n bad coming to get people, it’s very much portrayed as just a sea animal doing what’s natural to it. Strange enough, this could’ve been said about most monster movies…everything’s gotta eat, right? But in this movie the creature isn’t really all that monstrous, and isn’t portrayed to make us feel fear just by looking at it. So yeah, while it’s big and has tentacles, this isn’t a horror movie about a Kraken. It’s about the isolation, claustrophobia, fear and paranoia when something deadly starts spreading and they have no ways of escape.

 

Sea Fever is somewhat limited and slow-paced, but the execution and overall themes makes it interesting enough to stay put. There are even some scenes that are effectively tense and icky. Sure, if you want some fast-paced popcorn-fun B-Horror sea monster movie with tentacles, Deep Rising would more likely be your thing, but if you’d also be in for a sea adventure that’s more of a thriller kind than an outright horror one, you should give this decent low-budget movie a chance!

 

Sea Fever

 

Writer and director: Neasa Hardiman
Country & year: Ireland/UK, 2019
Actors: Hermione Corfield, Dag Malmberg, Jack Hickey, Olwen Fouéré, Dougray Scott, Connie Nielsen, Ardalan Esmaili, Elie Bouakaze
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2716382/

 

Vanja Ghoul

 

 

 

 

 

Savageland (2015)

SavagelandIn the border town of Sangre de Cristo, Arizona, something inexplicable happened on the night of June 2, 2011. The town’s entire population of 57 residents was either found dismembered and covered with human bite marks, and the rest of them were never found at all. The only exception was the only survivor of the incident, a man named Francisco Salazar… so the only natural thing to do was labeling him as the prime suspect, of course, as this loner and drifter had also illegally entered the country some years before. Yup, gotta be him! No matter how it would have been impossible for a single guy to commit all those murders in such a short timespan, and how he lacked any motive at all, plus having some of the same bite marks as his supposed victims had. Gotta put the blame on someone, and nothing is better than being able to pin it on an illegal immigrant. However, things definitely do not add up, because here’s also another thing: Salazar brought a camera with him on that night, taking photos of some of the events that transpired. Despite being dismissed by the police, the court, and even his lawyer (of course, as they couldn’t have anything proving he could be innocent, right?) the footage shows that something very sinister really happened on the night of June 2 that year.

 

Savageland is an mockumentary horror film from 2015, written and directed by Phil Guidry, Simon Herbert, and David Whelan. The trio were colleagues at UCLA and began working on this movie with the intent to create an independent film outside a studio, ultimately making the decision to tie it to the local landscape and have an immigration angle. Most of the actors in this movie didn’t star in any other movie except this one, a common thing for mockumentary movies. Not only is this of course often due to a low budget, but there’s also the big plus of keeping the realism since having well-known actors starring it would take away from that. The man who plays Francisco Salazar, Noé Montes, is also a photographer in real life and an artist whose works deals directly with immigration.

 

While the found footage horror genre really includes a huge bag of mixed content, it appears there are still some hidden gems to be discovered. Savageland is definitely one of them, and really caught us by surprise. We do tend to quite enjoy a lot of found footage horror movies that are done in the mockumentary style (with the most recent being Strange Harvest, and other goodies involving Lake Mungo and the more lighthearted Digging Up the Marrow), and this was definitely one of the highlights to add to our collection!

 

Like many typical crime documentaries, this movie aims for as much realism as possible by looking and feeling much like one with authentic-looking interviews and footage. And of course, it displays a narrative where we have an obvious victim (the poor Salazar who’s being framed for everything) and the sleazeballs who wants nothing but seeing him put on death row, guilty or not. Not only does the movie mock how broken the justice system can be, but it also portrays how big a role public media can have in turning people against someone if only one side gets to voice their opinions, here displayed by how the local Sheriff is using the media to influence the case by only focusing on his views while suppressing all other evidence.

 

While most found footage and mockumentary horror movies focus on showing glimpses through filming, Savageland twists this around and makes it all about found photos instead. And the effect of that is actually pretty darn creepy, with some of the photos being pure nightmare fuel. They’re purposefully distorted, blurry and unfocused, depending on both your eyes and imagination to make out what the hell we’re actually looking at. It reminds me of the good old (very, very old) days on YouTube where you could watch those scary videos compilations that actually featured an array of creepy photos and footage that didn’t just involve some something moved in my bedroom TikTok rot. Ah, those good old days…what a time to be a ghoul. And seeing movies like this gives that good old feeling back again, when you see something that can actually give you a little bit of the heebie jeebies…because hell knows, that’s getting more and more rare these days.

 

Savageland is not your typical found footage/mockumentary horror, and proves that there’s always new ways to tell a familiar narrative!

 

Savageland Savageland

 

Writers and directors: Phil Guidry, Simon Herbert, David Whelan
Country & year: USA, 2015
Actors: Heather Moore, Lars Nielsen, J.C. Carlos, Lawrence Ross, George Lionel Savage, Noe Montes, Daniel Kafer, Monica Davis, Renee Davies, Len Wein, Dan Trabulus
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3899154/

 

Vanja Ghoul

 

 

 

 

 

The Wolf House (2018)

The Wolf HouseWe start off with a prologue in the form of a typical Nazi propaganda film, showing what is apparently an idyllic community in Chile where everyone is happy while working, singing and helping each other. And the farm animals, the flowers and the bees are happy too! This colony also has a motto: Helping makes Happiness (yeah at this point you’re probably already thinking about that Arbeit macht Frei slogan on the Nazi concentration camps). The narrator of this film calls himself the shepherd of the colony, and vaguely refers to how this place has gotten horrible rumors about what is going on there, and how that’s of course not true. Well…we’ll see about that.

 

After this somewhat unsettling intro, we go straight over to an animated stop-motion (mixed with a lot of other techniques) narrative. It’s about María Wehrle, a girl who escapes from the Colony. While fleeing through the woods she barely escapes the Wolf, and she hides inside an abandoned house. Inside she’s accompanied by two pigs, and the place starts shaping itself into her dream home. Even the pigs slowly transforms into real people, a little boy and an older girl, whom she names Pedro and Ana. While all three of them are living in isolation inside the house since they can’t leave because of the Wolf outside, things eventually go bad once they start running out of food. And yeah…that’s more or less the gist of the story….but believe me when I say that no matter what descriptions you will read of this film, there’s just no way anything can properly prepare you for the experience of watching it!

 

The Wolf House (Spanish: La Casa Lobo) is a Chilean adult animated film from 2018, created by Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña, with a screenplay co-written with Alejandra Moffat. It is inspired by an actual post-World War II Chilean colony, called Colonia Dignidad (Dignity Colony). The colony’s longest continuous leader was a man named Paul Schãfer (whose last name translates to shepherd in German, which puts it all into context with the propaganda video we saw in the beginning), who arrived there in 1961. Both he and other members of the colony were deeply religious, and his place did indeed become notorious for all the fascist and sect-like shit that went on there: torture, murder, internment, child abuse and more. And it wasn’t until around 2005-2007 that the sect’s control over the place was ended. Today, it is open for tourism. The creators of this film decided to use a story based on this and present it in a fairytale-like setting, filled with arthouse and avant-garde elements, and it took five years to develop the film.

 

Visually, there are few things I can really compare this to. There’s so many techniques used here: stop-motion animation, paintings, papier-mâché, puppets, and the workshop and set pieces must have been messy as hell. It was shot in several studios and exhibitions at museums of different cities from Latin America and Europe. The sets were also built in real human size, which differs a lot from most stop motion movies that mostly use miniature set pieces…and I mean, holy shit, this must’ve been absolutely painstaking to pull off! The dedication, artistry and patience here is beyond impressive.

 

The movie also feels like one shot (with the exception of the propaganda film at the start), and it’s like everything is just breathing, dying, disintegrating and coming to life over and over again in the most hypnotic way. Visually, it is very atmospheric and haunting in the most bizarre ways possible, where the tone is always having the kind of faux safety vibe to it and you just keep expecting something really bad to happen. And mostly it doesn’t…for the most part it’s the underlying tension and how you know everything is just totally messed up. While always having a certain ominous and unsettling atmosphere, it also has this simultaneously strange ASMR-vibe to it, like some kind of bizarre, hypnotic lullaby. It’s uncanny in the same way a dream starts to slowly morph into a nightmare.

 

While the story underneath isn’t that complex, it takes a while to digest all the hidden meanings and metaphors shown throughout the film. Like for example the pigs in the house, which have obviously been human from the start. María, despite escaping from the colony, is still having much of a fascist mindset and looks upon the Chilean children as uncultured natives no different than animals, which is why we first see them as pigs. It’s only when she starts caring for them that they transform into humans, and she inserts herself as the mother figure in their lives. All the while still seeing them as ugly and inferior to her, until they eventually reach the Aryan ideal with the blonde hair and blue eyes and all. And the Wolf, which I take is pretty much an allegory for the colony itself and the fascist mindset, often tries to tempt María into returning to the colony. Overall there’s a lot to interpret here, and you’d probably notice new things each time you watch it.

 

Trying to describe The Wolf House with words borders on being impossible. It’s like describing the strangest and most surreal dream you’ve had, there’s no way anyone can properly relate to how it felt. This isn’t just a movie you simply watch, it’s a movie you experience. It is simply very extraordinary, and a smorgasbord for anyone who loves to watch something really strange and creative. Whenever someone say they feel like they just watched a cursed movie, this one certainly belongs on that list!

 

The Wolf House The Wolf House The Wolf House

 

Directors: Joaquín Cociña, Cristóbal León
Writers: Alejandra Moffat, Joaquín Cociña, Cristóbal León
Original title: La casa lobo
Country & year: Chile/Germany, 2018
Voice actors: Amalia Kassai, Rainer Krause
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt8173728/

 

Vanja Ghoul

 

 

 

 

 

Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead (2011)

Zombie Ass: Toilet of the DeadWhat if Quentin Tarantino had a serious mental collapse and flew to planet Japan to make his 10th and final movie? Well…

 

The film starts exactly how you’d expect: A crazy-like scientist makes a zombie puke something in the mouth of his young daughter who has blood cancer. Saitei! After a groovy and quick opening credits which I won’t spoil, we meet a group of friends who are on a camping trip: we have the schoolgirl Megumi, the druggie Tak, his airhead girlfriend Maki and the geeky goofball Naoi. Megumi, the one dressed in the classic and cute Sailor Moon uniform, knows her karate just to make sure that she’s the star here and not one to mess with. She’s also grieving after her sister killed herself in shame after she farted in front of her bullies. Oof. That’s brutal. My condolences. Anyway: the airhead Maki wants to be a model and catches a trout to find a tapeworm so she can speedrun her loose-weight process. Always a great idea. She slurps a big fat tapeworm like a noodle, and hopes for the best.

 

And to say that shit starts to happen is the biggest understatement of the century.

 

Maki’s stomach starts to act funny, and she has to take a shit. Uh-oh. Well, girls have to shit too. As they enter a small empty village, she finds the nearest outhouse toilet where a zombie grabs her buttcheeks. Makes me wonder if this is the same guy from Headhunters (2011). A dozen of shitty zombies emerge from the toilet of the dead, called Shit men, plain and simple (thanks to the subtitles). They vomit and throw shit, and from here on we can say that the film surely lives up to the title. Maki unleashes an epic yellow cloud of fart that forms into a demonic shape. Absolutely diabolical, as Ed Warren would have said. An alien-looking parasitic monster comes out of her brown hole, not so unlike what we saw in Dreamcatcher (2003), and our group of friends are surrounded by shit men and parasites. All this is caused by the scientist we saw at the beginning. Why and how? To find a cure to save his young daughter. Good news is that Megumi also knows how to handle a shotgun.

 

What we have next is a, well, an epic shitstorm where director Noboru Iguchi (The Machine Girl, RoboGeisha, Dead Sushi) turns his extreme fart-fetish all up to 11. He started his career with the fetish porn film Doctor Enema and continued to work in that side of showbiz throughout the 1990s to mid 2000s. So, this is clearly his alley. The year after Zombie Ass, he got the golden ticket to direct a segment of the horror anthology The ABCs of Death, and you can guess which letter: F for Fart, which also actress Arisa Nakamura (who plays Megumi) got the pleasure of being in. If that’s not the most embarrassing kind of typecasting, I don’t know what is. 

 

While the film is as silly, goofy and cartoonish as it is, here’s some of the more thought-provoking dialogues: I’m bleeding from my butt!Why am I releasing a neverending fart?You fart and fart until you die. That is your fate!I just farted! That butt ate my bat! I killed him with my butt!Dumb ass! You’ve got shit for brains!ANAL VOLCANO!

 

And there you pretty much have Zombie Ass in a nutshell, more brown than usual, with lots of farting, fetish-driven grossness, exploding heads, karate fights in manga-style and tentacle/body horror sprinkled with some more serious topics such as bullying. Just a normal day in Japan. It has it all, almost. The blood is mostly cheap CGI, but(t) while the green-screen effects look like something from a YouTube skit. The shit seems at least real. So real, in fact, that actress Asana Mamoru (Maki) had to control her bowel movements while filming the outhouse scene so she didn’t poop on the zombie who had the pleasure of grabbing both her buttcheeks. Some of the farts heard were also real! Amber Turd or Blake Lively wouldn’t hold back for even a split second. Working in showbiz is so glamorous, innit? Can’t wait for the cocaine and the hookers that don’t fart. In an alternate universe, Siskel & Ebert gave this Two Brown Thumbs Up! …eew. Eating a can of chili beans beforehand while wearing a fresh skid marked underpants could also add some nice Smell-o-Rama effect. Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead can be found at the one and only streaming site that (fecal) matters — Tubi. Enough cringe wordplay for today.

 

Couldn’t actually find any watchable trailer for this masterpiece, but the screenshots, if not the title alone, speak loud and clearly for themselves.

 

Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead

 

Director: Noboru Iguchi
Writers: Noboru Iguchi, Tadayoshi Kubo, Ao Murata, Jun Tsugita
Original title: Zonbi asu
Also known as: Zombierumpe: De dødes toalett (Norway)
Country & year: Japan, 2011
Actors: Arisa Nakamura, Mayu Sugano, Asana Mamoru, Yûki, Danny, Kentaro Kishi, Demo Tanaka, Asami, Sayuri Yajima, Haru Shiina, Yûya Ishikawa, Hideki Kurauchi, Takeo Gozu
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2061869/

 

Tom Ghoul

 

We Are Still Here (2015)

We Are Still HereThe year is 1979, and Anne and Paul Sacchetti are grieving their deceased son Bobby who died in a car crash. They have decided to start afresh by moving to a new home in rural New England, and while Anne seems to be in a near catatonic state on the way to their new place, Paul hopes that her spiraling into a deep depression might lift with some new scenery and a new house. Well…her spirits are in fact quickly uplifted once they get to their new home, but not for the reasons Paul had hoped. Anne claims that Bobby’s presence can be felt in the house, and this eases her grief a bit. After barely having settled in, they also get a visit from two elderly neighbors who comes inside and immediately tells them about the house’s sinister past. It used to be a funeral home, run by the Dagmar family until it was discovered that they had been swindling their customers by selling the corpses of their deceased family members and burying empty caskets. Then, as the elderly couple are about to leave, the man tells them how good it is that they’re here, and how the house needs a new family. And upon leaving, the woman gives them a note where she warns them by having written get out in big capital letters. Hmm…a little mixed messaging here, for sure.

 

Anyway, Anne doesn’t really give a shit about any of the things that happened in the house earlier, her only focus is on her dearest son Bobby. She’s convinced that he’s there, and she invites her friends May and Jacob who are both spiritualists. Paul scoffs at the entire thing, but promises to keep an open mind for her sake. And then…things go bad. And it appears it’s not only the house that carries secrets around here.

 

We Are Still Here is a supernatural horror film from 2015, written and directed by Ted Geoghegan. He began working on the film as some kind of tribute to The House by the Cemetery (1981) by Lucio Fulci. He had also previously worked with Andreas Schnaas on some of his various low-budget schlocky gore movies as both writer and producer, but We Are Still Here is his directorial debut. After completing the script, Dark Sky Films and Snowfort Pictures agreed to produce it. The filming took place on February 7th, 2014, in Rochester New York where they used the villages of Palmyra and Shortsville.

 

And yes, I can see how Geoghegan had a Lucio Fulci vibe in mind here, where it’s got the blood and gore (not the maggots though), the isolated house, someone troubled and grieving, the clairvoyant character, a town with secrets, mixed with some Lovecraftian ideas. And yes, there’s more than enough easter eggs to behold here: first of all, the Sacchetti couple is most likely a reference to the screenwriter Dardano Sachetti who worked a lot with Lucio Fulci. Then we have the name of the town, Aylesbury, which is a reference to Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror. The Miskatonic River is also mentioned during the credits.

 

While the movie does play into several of the typical haunted house tropes, it’s still a solid experience which balances an intriguing plot and a sinister atmosphere throughout. Some scenes manage to be a little creepy, despite never really going into full-on scares but more leaning towards a creeping notion of something sinister at play. I love the retro style of it, and enjoyed the homages. This is not merely a haunted house/ghost story, it’s playing it a lot darker and venturing into a bit of folk horror as well. And when we get to the ending, and the climax itself, then whoa…! It’s like his old buddy Andreas Schnaas jumped onboard and demanded mehr Blut und mehr Tod!, as we get a crazy, bloody gorefest! It’s vicious and cruel, and a delight to behold which gives the movie a nice little pang of an ending.

 

We Are Still Here is a pretty nice retro haunted house flick set in the cold winter time, perfect to watch now that the weather is cold and it’s good to stay inside, preferably with a cup of warm cocoa and a horror movie on display.

 

We Are Still Here We Are Still Here

 

Writer and director: Ted Geoghegan
Country & year: USA, 2015
Actors: Andrew Sensenig, Barbara Crampton, Larry Fessenden, Lisa Marie, Monte Markham, Susan Gibney, Michael Patrick Nicholson, Kelsea Dakota, Guy Gan, Elissa Dowling, Zorah Burress
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3520418/

 

Vanja Ghoul

 

 

 

 

 

Army of Frankensteins (2013)

Army of Frankensteins―We’re from the future, and it’s time to kick some Frankenstein ass.

 

And no, this is not Bill & Ted’s Another Bogus Journey to put Frankenstein into the Iron Maiden… Army of Frankensteins is a… movie… where weird shit happens, all over the place, literally. Made by a group of young, ambitious and hyperactive amateurs that apparently had the time of their lives while making it. And not to be confused with Frankenstein’s Army, which was released the same year as this. The plot for Army of Frankensteins goes, uuhm… starts something like this:

 

We’re in Virginia, the year is 1809 in the middle of a civil war. A nurse named Maggie is escaping from a group of Confederacy soldiers. She runs into some dude…and is about to have sex… suddenly, a horde of Frankenstein’s monsters show up and rips the dude’s arm off. Maggie runs screaming into the woods.

 

We jump to present time where the young grocery clerk is preparing to propose to his girlfriend Ashley. And that goes straight into the shitter as Ashley is an NPC who’s not programmed to be proposed to. She loves him though, even though the stiff and wooden high-school play-acting and dialogues is as convincing as Mr. Beast’s creepy smile.

 

After the failed proposal, Alan walks home and gets beaten by two slobs. A kid with a gun comes and rescues him and makes sure that he gets zapped unconscious so he can bring him to a warehouse lab where he wakes up, in a dentist chair. He gets met by a strange old man that he earlier met in the grocery, and yes, he is Victor Frankenstein himself. He goes by the name Dr. Tanner Finski, but he’s not fooling anyone. The twelve-year old kid is, of course, Igor (yes, really). Victor rips out his right eyeball which he puts into his Frankenmonster. After some more shit happens, an interdimensional portal gets opened that creates several dozen of Frankenmonsters before they all get sucked in and transferred back to 1865, in the midst of the battleground of the American Civil War. Of course.

 

So… where do we go from here? The script says… who the fuck knows. We just make shit up as we go along. Alan and Victor get rushed to the nearest medical tent, where Maggie also comes in. Maggie who? The maid we saw in the beginning. And Igor? He’s somewhere, getting chased by Frankenmonsters. Some soldier with one of the many epic fake mustaches takes a green serum from Igor. Alan sees visions of the original Frankenmonster’s POV. They must die…ALL OF THEM, Victor shouts before he dies. Alan teams up with Igor, Maggie and a Union soldier with a fake mustache to kick some Frankenstein ass… and a handful of Confederates/South Boys on the way, because, well, it’s the civil war, boy!

 

While it all sounds big and epic on paper, it looks like some role-play gathering at the local woods, where you can say that, well, some people got hurt. Army of Frankensteins is full-on homemade goofy schlock from start to finish and doesn’t try to be much else. There’s some legit qualities to point out here though, such as some solid make-up effects and cheesy fake n’ heavy mustaches that never seem to fall off, even during the battle scenes. The gore is cheap and the use of green screens is what to expect. The plot gets sillier when even Abraham Lincoln chimes in, here looking like he has stage 4 stomach cancer. God bless. And yeah, then there’s Mega Man. Yup, because, why not. Pure infantile amateur-hour movie madness and fun enough if you’re in the right mood. So there you have it. It’s on your favorite streaming site, Tubi.

 

Army of Frankensteins Army of Frankensteins Army of Frankensteins

 

Director: Ryan Bellgardt
Writers: Ryan Bellgardt, Josh McKamie, Andy Swanson
Country & year: USA, 2013
Actors: Jordan Farris, Christian Bellgardt, John Ferguson, Eric Gesecus, Rett Terrell, Raychelle McDonald, Thomas Cunningham, Lucas Ross, Billy Bean, Shellie Arizu Sterling, Jami Harris Shine
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2620490/

 

Tom Ghoul