When Hollywood mega-star Cooper Bradley goes to a special-effects lab in Atlanta to get his head molded for his latest film, all hell breaks loose. Not only must he try to escape from this freakish funhouse of props and make-up, but in the process he must retrieve his very soul, which the VFX master has stolen.
For this Horror Short Sunday, we’ve decided to present Good Head from 2021, being shown on Alter. It’s written and directed by Matt Servitto, who also plays the role as the Hollywood star who ends up having a not so pleasant experience in a special effects lab. It’s fun and energetic, with comedy moments that are both crazy and freakish. Imagine having to fight with Jackie Chan’s hands, the butt of Meryl Streep and seeing Jennifer Lopez’s leg hop around? Yep, all of that actually happens here. It’s Voodoo, baby!
Director: Matt Servitto Writer: Matt Servitto Country & year: USA, 2021 Actors: Henry Zebrowski, Matt Servitto, Addie Weyrich, Dan Triandiflou IMDb:www.imdb.com/title/tt15463340/
A quiet evening at home takes a bizarre turn when a man goes to investigate strange noises in his yard.
It’s Horror Short Sunday once again! This time, we take a look at Occupant which is a horror short that starts with a man’s mundane, everyday life: he’s putting his daughter to bed, and tells her a good-night story. Then, after speaking briefly to his wife, he hears strange noises from outside and decides to go investigate. It’s very simple, yet effective enough to be both atmospheric and provide enough mystery to keep you guessing what will eventually happen!
Director: Peter Cilella Writer: Peter Cilella Country & year: USA, 2018 Actors: Caroline Jennings, Dan O’Brien, Lauran September IMDb:www.imdb.com/title/tt8760354/
An American fisherman attempts to smuggle two Cuban immigrants into Miami, passing them off as day laborers. While the group trawls for shrimp, a fourth person boards the boat, carrying a secret at the bottom of the Ocean.
Sea Devil is a creepy sea monster horror short!
Director: Dean Colin Marcial, Brett Potter Writer: Dean Colin Marcial, Brett Potter Country & year: USA, 2014 Actors: Moise Brutus, Antoni Corone, Taylor Rouviere, Mario Ernesto Sánchez IMDb:www.imdb.com/title/tt2503344/
A deliciously depraved trilogy shot entirely on Super 8 film. Set in the ’60s, THE LANDLORD’S DAUGHTER, a couple’s twisted desires lead them to abduct an engaged couple. BAG FOR LIFE is a psycho-sexual thriller about a murderous bag with an unhealthy attraction to its owner. Lastly, THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE about a psychopathic office worker who embarks on a deadly rampage to exterminate anybody unlucky enough to share her peculiar name.
Twisted Tales: A Super 8 Anthology is a weird horror short shot on one continuous roll of Super 8 film, made by the same director of Rhyme or Die!
Director: Max Lincoln Writer: Max Lincoln Country & year: UK, 2024 Actors: Abayomi Oniyide, Rose Lucas, Aiste Gramantaite, Giovanni Mocchi, Victor Alli, Daisy Moore, Amanda Urvall Nyren, Alicia Britt, Cherrelle Skeete, Shiloh Coke, Elizabeth West, Nick Finegan
The Man sits, sipping tea in an endless void, until a chandelier comes crashing down. The pieces transform into a Woman and the newly met couple wonder endlessly as the void presents objects and events that disrupt time, space and logic.
The Brass Elephant in the Room is a surreal and really strange horror short with a dark fairytale vibe to it.
Director: Junior Day, Eleanor Dolan Writer: Junior Day Country & year: UK, 2020 Actors: Tatjana Anders, Edward Saunders IMDb:www.imdb.com/title/tt12032850/
In a rural Irish village, a strange calf is born. And it won’t stop screaming.
Calving is an atmospheric allegorical horror short.
Director: Louis Bhose Writer: Louis Bhose Country & year: UK, 2021 Actors: Steven Mackintosh, Liz Fitzgibbon, Philip O’Sullivan, Gerry O’Brien IMDb:www.imdb.com/title/tt13607452/
When a hiker awakes in the wilderness to find herself separated from her friend, she hears a familiar voice crying for help.
Last Words is a mysterious and creepy horror short, proving that scary stuff can also happen in broad daylight!
Director: Teal Greyhavens, Nikolai Von Keller Writer: Teal Greyhavens, Nikolai Von Keller Country & year: USA, 2023 Actors: Julien Crane, Ari Fromm, Charlotte Hjerpe, Jake Jeffers, Jacobii Leal, Nick Luberto, Ché March, Richardson Palmer IMDb:www.imdb.com/title/tt27707083/
Mercy Falls is an old hospital that’s about to get closed down, but due to a horrible train accident the main hospital, St. James’s, can’t take in any more patients. Thus, Mercy Falls will need to stay partly open for a while more, keeping some of their patients there and the children located in the children’s ward. One of these children is Maggie, a little girl suffering from cystic fibrosis. She is terrified of “Charlotte”, someone she claims to see. One of the new nurses, Amy Nicholls, bonds with Maggie as they have something in common: they’re both orphans. Maggie confides in Amy, telling her about this Charlotte character which Amy later finds out is some kind of urban legend at the hospital, where several children have claimed to see her over the past two decades. When Amy starts looking even further into the mystery about Charlotte, she discovers that all the other children who claimed to have seen Charlotte are deceased, and she fears that Maggie might be next.
Fragile (aka Frágiles) is a supernatural horror film from 2005, directed by Jaume Balagueró (who is most known for the two first REC movies). He came up with the idea for this film after seeing an old photo of a little girl suffering from Osteogenesis Imperfecta, a horrible disease where bones are easily fractured, also known as “brittle bone disease”.
Fragile is going in a well trodden path, but the savoring points of the film is the atmosphere from the old, gloomy hospital where the Bearwood College in Berkshire, England, was used for the exterior shots. There’s certainly a fair amount of good old-fashioned gothic atmosphere, tinged with mystery. The story unfolds slowly, where you’re being introduced to the main character Amy Nicholls (Calista Flockhart), various nurses and the sick children in the hospital. Since the plot starts with knowing that the hospital is about to be completely abandoned, but having to postpone it for the children due to the full main hospital after the train accident, you get a feeling of the characters being in an even more isolated and threatening situation. And of course, there’s the abandoned floor where we know something terrible happened. It’s all a nice recipe for a solid, albeit not especially strong, ghost story. Its suspenseful, atmospheric, and quite decent.
The ghost here, though…well, she’s something that looks more like she came from a Hellraiser movie and wandered into the wrong set. While there are certainly a lot of horror movies where the ghosts appear a bit over-the-top malformed (like for example the Insidious franchise), she does feel a little bit misplaced here amongst the otherwise traditional gothic elements. Then again, this does make her first full appearance an unexpected surprise. The scenes when she is more obscured works a lot better though than the ones where we see her full on, but overall we don’t really get to see all that much of her.
There’s a scene where the children are watching an animated “Sleeping Beauty” film (nope, not the Disney one, as you might have guessed), and this animated film was actually created specifically for this movie. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be anywhere in its entirety, aside from in the clip from Fragile. This animated clip does have a certain significance to the movie’s sad but sugar-coated ending.
Overall, Fragile is a familiar-looking entry into the supernatural genre of vengeful spirits, mostly held up by its atmosphere and moody locations.
Director: Jaume Balagueró Writers: Jaume Balagueró, Jordi Galceran Country & year: Spain, UK, 2005 Actors: Calista Flockhart, Richard Roxburgh, Elena Anaya, Gemma Jones, Yasmin Murphy, Colin McFarlane, Michael Pennington, Daniel Ortiz, Susie Trayling, Michael Gatward, Scarlet Carey, Cameron Antrobus IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0422272/
Fifty-year-old Barry is a special kind of cleaner: he cleans crime scenes where demons have wreaked havoc. While making a corporate film about his work, a normal working day for Barry gets out of hand in a bloody way.
Shiny New World is a fun horror short where you get a look into the amusing job of being a demon crime scene cleaner!
Director: Jan van Gorkum Writer: Jan van Gorkum Country & year: Netherlands, 2021 Actors: Patrick Stoof, Gijs Scholten van Aschat, Maarten Prins, Marije Coralie Loermans IMDb:www.imdb.com/title/tt12619824/
Nazis at the Center of the Earth. How can you go wrong with a title like that which sounds more like a drive-in flick from the 1970s, or something that Robert Rodriguez, once upon a time, could have made under his Grindhouse banner? Well, first off – this is from the cheap film company The Asylum which is, in the most recent decade, most known for its own original Sharknado franchise. Besides that, we can mention a neverending list of shitty low-to-non budget mockbusters such as Titanic II, Transmorphers, Atlantic Rim, AVH: Alien vs. Hunter, Invasion of the Pod People, Independents’ Day (yes, really), Battle Star Wars … And the list goes on like a non-stop diarrhea of the most shameless clickbait titles to fool people with one brain cell to trick them into watching something familiar to a mainstream Hollywood film. Their Paranormal Activity Entity wasn’t the worst as far as I remember, although it’s ages since I saw it.
The one we’re talking about here is their own warped version of Iron Sky, only here the Nazis aren’t coming from the moon but from the depths. And mockbuster or not, the title is enough to get my attention as I eat fat turkeys like this for breakfast, and it turned out to be as fun and crazy as the title would suggest, with even more surprises. In other words; the best way to experience this loony ride is to go in blind as this review will contain some spoilers.
We are at the research center Niflheim in Antarctica where two scientists are out on the snowy fields, ready to sample the surface for their research. When they unfold something metallic under the snow with a swastika painted on it, they get captured by a group of Nazis wearing gas masks, and they take them to a bunker somewhere deep underground. The leader of the research team, Dr. Adrian Reinstad (Jake Busey, the son of madman Gary Busey) heads out with his crew to find them.
One of the crew members, named Silje, is supposed to be Norwegian, by the way. And she speaks the language just as clearly and fluently as Brad Pitt speaking Italian – or like these two guys from an episode of The X-Files.
Anyway – they descend into a huge, dark pit that takes them to something that at first looks like an alternative Narnia dimension. But with a further look, it’s a huge underground world with trees, plants, and a forest where a fortress can be seen in the distance. Here they meet the evil Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele (Christopher Karl Johnson), with the infamous badass nickname The Angel of Death, who performed torturous experiments on victims at the Auschwitz II concentration camp during WW2.
So, the big question is: why is he still alive, and what’s his agenda?
Wikipedia can tell us that Mengele died by drowning after he suffered a stroke while swimming in 1979. That’s of course BS and pure falsification of history as we here learn that he actually kept himself alive all these years by taking organs from victims and replacing his bones with mechanical skeletons. And with his army of Nazi zombies, he’s still experimenting, so he finally can reanimate none other than der Führer himself. The plan here is to rise up to the surface with a war spaceship, so they can finally take over the world and create the perfect Arian race. Of course.
The film has apparently one of the highest visual effects shot counts in an Asylum production with a budget of $200,000. And still, it looks like a Lada trying to be a Plymouth Fury flooded with empty bottles of Vodka, Smirnoff and Jägermeister. Not a single outdoor scene looks realistic with its cheap digital backgrounds. The snow vehicle we see at the beginning looks like something from PlayStation 2. We see people who are supposed to be in the distance in the fake-looking Antarctica when they’re clearly copied and pasted with lousy use of green screen. It’s also made in a serious way with actors who really try to act professionally, which just makes it more amusing. A great recipe for a funny-bad movie, for sure, and in my judgment, not made bad on purpose like the Sharknado films. There’s some decent gore here, which is the only legit quality to point out.
But what’s takes the cake here, or the big Golden Raspberry, if you will, is the true star of the film: Please kneel and give your salute to – Robo-Hitler (James Maxwell Young), where Hitler’s head is attached to a cyborg machine. Yes, you heard that right. This actually took me off guard, I did nazi that coming, and my eyes teared up from laughing. Everything here is just perfect; the way he stomps with his cyborg body like a mecha boss from a Sonicthe Hedgehog game, the amateur acting, the goofy faces, the whole naive, enthusiastic energy. What more is there really to say? Nazis at the Center of the Earth is an epic schlockfest and a true gem in its category which is available on Blu-ray at Amazon.com, and last time I checked, on Tubi.
Director: Joseph J. Lawson Writer: Paul Bales Country & year: USA, 2012 Actors: Dominique Swain, Jake Busey, Joshua Michael Allen, Christopher Karl Johnson, James Maxwell Young, Lilan Bowden, Marlene Okner, Adam Burch, Maria Pallas, Abderrahim Halaimia, Trevor Kuhn IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2130142/
