IN THE SHADOW OF GOD – Horror Short

As a woman packs up her childhood home following the passing of her father, she comes to learn that there may have been a more sinister threat behind his death, long buried on the grounds of the family home.

 

In the Shadow of God is a creepy horror short with a lot of dread-inducing atmosphere.

IN THE SHADOW OF GOD - Horror Short

 

Director: Brian Sepanzyk
Writer: Brian Sepanzyk
Country & year: USA, 2022
Actors: Sara Canning, Andrew Roy Drury, Mark Kandborg, Adam Lolacher, Brittany Willacy
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt21051782/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Part 2 (1996)

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Part 2 There’s a lot of people who hate Henry and he can’t let them win.

 

Part 2 of Henry’s Portrait of a Serial Killer, or just simply Henry the 2nd starts off not so long after the first one ended (I assume). Ottis is dead as his headless corpse is floating in a river somewhere while Becky is chopped to pieces and stuffed in a bag suit, discarded at the side of a rural road. Nothing but happy memories all around. Now Henry is a homeless drifter wandering aimlessly through the streets of a nameless, midwestern town and sleeps at various homeless shelters. One day he’s applying for a job on a port-o-john company where he gets the lovely task to clean and empty the porta potties (or the shitters as cousin Eddie would simply say).

 

Here he meets Kai and his wife Crickets, a lower-middle class couple who allows Henry to stay at their house after they feel sorry for him for being homeless. They are a shady couple that fits perfectly within Henry’s beacon of bad vibes. They also have a mentally unhinged teenage niece in the house, Louisa, who suffers from some severe BPD and that starts to creep on Henry (not the other way around). We learn that Kai and Crickets has a pretty dysfunctional relationship as Kai is a moody alcoholic, who also practice some really shady side job as an arsonist to set up some insurance scam to make money for their slobby boss, Rooter. After Henry finds out and becomes a liability, he joins Kai to fire up one building after another as the nights goes on. Things seems to go smooth until they stumble upon a couple of squatters in one of the buildings. Henry finally does what he does best by pulling out his gun and killing one of them while he forces Kai to kill the other one. I’ve never killed anyone before, Kai nervously says. Sounds familiar? Can’t have any of that if you wanna be buddy with Henry, you know.

 

This relatively obscure sequel was a mild surprise, given that Michael Rooker declined to reprise his debut role and John Mc Naughton is not in the directing chair. Writer and director Chuck Parello (who also made Ed Gein and Hillside Strangler) was clearly a big fan of the original and manages to duplicate much of the same cold and downbeat tone, although the visuals are more flat and melancholic. Like its predecessor the film follows most of  the same narrative with slices of life and death and the psychological aspects with the tense buildup around the chaotic relationship between Henry and Kai, which is getting dragged more and more into the hopeless pit of empty and meaningless life of serial killing. Nothing more, nothing less. All actors were unknown faces for my part and the task to fill the shoes of Michael Rooker went to Neil Giuntoli, who does a good performance, far better than I expected. He has the same lost boyish look with empty death stares and the raw intensity when he kills random victims for the kicks. Here we also briefly see some new sides from him to learn some of his motivations.

 

Overall Henry the 2nd is nothing too special but an OK sequel at best with a sharp knife and dedicated actors.

 

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Part 2 Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Part 2

 

Writer and director: Chuck Parello
Also known as: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer 2 – Mask of Sanity
Country & year: USA, 1996
Actors: Neil Giuntoli, Rich Komenich, Kate Walsh, Carri Levinson, Daniel Allar, Marco Santucci, Rich Wilkie, Kevin Hurley, Richard Henzel, Fran Smith
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0116516/

 

Related post: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)

 

 

Tom Ghoul

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)

Henry: Portrait of a Serial KillerHenry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole were two middle-aged fugly-looking serial killers, which I would never guess after glancing at a picture of them. Huh… looks can be deceiving. Henry had the distinct dead rigor mortis eye and his epic Bugs Bunny grin, while Ottis looked like a white trash side character from a Rob Zombie film that I would guess had liked to dip his mosquito-nibbled penis into a chicken’s butthole. And among most of the classic and glorified serial killers like Ed Gein, Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and let’s also throw Fritz Honka in the club while we’re at it, they eventually got their hook in the mainstream pop-culture with a dedicated fanbase. Because serial killers fascinates us and we can’t get enough of them, it’s as simple as that.

 

Henry was especially a popular figure in Japan. A four-hour long documentary split into four episodes was released in 2019, titled The Confession Killer, where we see a film crew from Japan that were totally starstruck by finally meeting the legend. They even gave him a present after shaking hands and the ecstatic fanboys were all smiling ear to ear until Henry said I’ve been in your country, too. Har har. Henry was eventually proven to be a compulsive liar (wow, what a shocker) who hadn’t been in an airplane once in his life and didn’t even know that Japan is an island nation. The documentary is available on Netflix.

 

Henry Lee Lucas Henry has already been in and out of prison like a ping-pong ball, once for killing his mother at age 24, before he met his boyfriend and partner-in crime Ottis Toole in the mid 1970s. Their victims were mostly women as Henry hated them with a passion. If we put on the Dr. Phil glasses for a second we can assume that his hatred for women may stem from him allegedly being abused as a kid by his mother. Together the couple killed over hundreds of people, which Toole claimed after being arrested in ’83. When Henry got arrested some months after, he took the confession a bit further, to put it mildly, by claiming he’d killed well over 600 (!) people and went on a quiet bizarre confession-circus tour around the country with the law enforcement dangling clueless by his tail, all of which left more questions than answers. Only three (yes 3) of his victims were found and the whole thing happened to be a big, monumental prank/scam by Henry just to get more juicy media attention by falsely confessing a bunch of killings while the police wasted god know how much time, money and resources. A complete shitshow. Ottis died in 1996, age 49 while Henry got his last laugh in 2001, age 63.

 

Fun fact: Henry was one of the very first who got the serial killer description after the FBI Special Agent Robert Ressler coined the term in the 1970s.

 

Henry: Portrait of a Serial killer starts direct and brutal with some graphic images of Henry’s recent victims who’s suffered painful deaths, as we dive straight into his grim world filled with depravity, rage and nihilism. We spend the first ten minutes with Henry (played by the young aspiring actor Michael Rooker in his first movie role) as he’s roaming the suburban streets of Chicago with his rusty car, scouting for his next victim like an emotionless Terminator. He finally catch a victim when he picks up a hitchhiker, a young lady with a guitar. And that’s good for the day. The next thing we see is Henry entering his apartment – a crampy, stinky shithole he shares with his friend Ottis (Tom Towles). He’a an older dude with a comb-over and bad teeth. They’re not a gay couple here though as they were in the real life, just some buddies who met in prison. When they’re not out to fuck some hookers in their car, who normally ends up getting killed by Henry’s lack of impulse control, they have at least a TV to watch, only until Ottis, that clumsy buffoon, smashes it.

 

Anyway, Ottis’ sister Becky (Tracy Arnold) comes to stay for a while after being on the run from a violent relationship. As Henry and Becky both shares trauma, they connect and she gets aroused by hearing how Henry killed his mother. This monologue alone, which starts with she was a whore shows what a top tier and intense actor Michael Rooker is by displaying his inner, explosive rage just with facial expressions while showing vulnerability like a lost child.

 

Ottis has never killed anyone but that’s about to change when he one day gets punched in the face by a teenage kid. I wanna kill somebody he says to Henry who then takes him out for a killing spree to teach him how to be a serial killer. It builds up to a home invasion scene where Henry has gotten the absolute worst out of Ottis as he snaps some woman’s neck like a deranged caveman in a pure gleeful psychosis and starts to show some tendencies of necrophilia, which even gets too much for Henry. A nasty scene that truly rips, much because of how we see the whole act through the grainy lens of Ottis’ camcorder like a snuff film.

 

The film is not heavy on plot, like most of the films in this subgenre, as it works more like a slice of life and death, and a psychological study of serial killers’ empty and nihilistic existence from their own perspective. We see the daily (and nightly activity) with Henry and Ottis as the time goes by, all filmed handheld on 16mm like a pseudo-documentary with a layer of unfiltered grittyness, surrounded with urban decay and dark, piss-smelling alleys – where also two serial killers happen to be lurking around, killing people just for the thrills. Nothing but bad vibes all over the place and not so far from William Lustig’s Maniac (1980) when it comes to the vacant tone and the overall grim atmosphere. Both Michael Rooker and Tom Towles are just fabulous in their role as a deadly and self-destructive duo, the one more sick in the head than the other, with a fucked-up dynamic which makes them amusing and entertaining to watch, just like two train-wrecks coming together with Ottis’ poor sister Becky being a clueless passenger.

 

And like Henry would say to sum up it all up in only three words: Fuck the Bears.

 

Henry - Portrait of a Serial Killer Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

 

Director: John McNaughton
Writers: Richard Fire, John McNaughton
Country & year: USA, 1986
Actors: Michael Rooker, Tom Towles, Tracy Arnold, Mary Demas, Anne Bartoletti, Elizabeth Kaden, Ted Kaden, Denise Sullivan
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0099763/

 

Related post: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Part 2 (1996)

 

 

Tom Ghoul

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DEATHLY – Horror Short

After the tragic death of his wife in a house fire, Richard returns home on the night of her funeral to find he may not be as alone as he thought.

 

Deathly is a creepy horror short where you could say that in this case, revenge is best served hot!

DEATHLY - Horror Short

 

Director: Mike Williamson
Writer: Mike Williamson
Country & year: USA, 2015
Actors: Alan Ruck, Kathleen Wilhoite, Christina Elizabeth Smith, Mickey Keating
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt4572400/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blackenstein (1973)

BlackensteinAh HELL Nah, It’s BLACKENSTEIN ya’ll, starring … Lori Lightfoot? Bruh..!

 

The most intriguing aspect about this hopeless misfire of a motion picture is that the writer and producer, Frank R. Saletri, was a Criminal defense lawyer who woke up one day and decided he wanted to work in the movie business and become a monster movie mogul. Yeah, we all have to start somewhere – but: he had big hopes that Blackenstein would latch on the success of Blacula (1972) and already had the scripts for two sequels ready to shoot: The Fall of the House of Blackenstein and Blackenstein III. One of the sequels would have the alternative title The Black Frankenstein Meets the White Werewolf. Sounds fun, but that never happened as Blackenstein ended up like something Ed Wood would make during his drunken feverdreams after binge drinking all cocktail bars in Hollywood. And no, that’s not the former mayor of Chicago we see on the cover, it’s none other than the legendary Joe De Sue. Joe De who? He was a client of Saletri and a perfect definition of a non-actor. But both Frank R. Saletri and first-time director William A. Levey seemed optimistic.

 

Eddie Turner is a war vet who got his feet blown off after stepping on a mine in Vietnam. The more optimistic wife, Winifred, knocks on the door to Dr. Stein’s villa and private hospital in Hollywood Hills to ask for him to fix Eddie. And just for clearance, Dr. Stein is a white dude, so don’t get further confused by the full title Blackenstein The Black Frankenstein. After Eddie get transported to Dr. Stein’s lab, the shady assistant Malcomb falls in love with Winifred, and in jealousy tries to make sure that Eddie dies by messing with Dr. Stein’s lab equipment. Well, that doesn’t go as planned as Eddie wakes up, looking like a cheap cosplay version of a familiar monster.

 

Blackenstein wakes up in some random dungeon we’ve never seen before and shuffles his way through the lab as he makes some weird snoring sound where the term sleepwalk through gets its fullest meaning. We see him walking through some empty hospital corridor in the slowest pace possible to drag out some extra screentime, until he approaches a patient we see gets killed by the monster behind the bed curtain in silhouette. And the effects are probably more lousy than you’d expect.

 

There’s absolutely nothing that works in this turkey, other than Blackenstein being a perfect study in inept filmmaking while having some cheap laughs. Sunny days suddenly transform to thunderclapping nights and actors who perform the stiffest and driest dialogues in the style of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. No colorful and offensive ghetto talk here, unfortunately. The editing is a trip in itself which makes Blackenstein teleport himself back and forth to his dungeon cell between his murder sprees, completely unnoticed. And why would he go back to his cell? I guess the script just said so.

 

We also have a brief shot of some bare breasts and a complete random scene in a bar with some comedian.

 

Blackenstein didn’t hit the pulse on the blaxploitation market and writer Saletri wouldn’t work on a film again, nor his client Joe De Sue got any phonecalls from Tinseltown. Saletri still wrote several scripts which included two Sherlock Holmes films titled Sherlock Holmes in the Adventures of the Werewolf of the Baskervilles and Sherlock Holmes in the Adventures of the Golden Vampire where he had Alice Cooper in mind to star as Dracula. Sounds completely batshit and epic. And speaking of Sherlock, Saletri was later a victim of an unsolved murder mystery when he was found dead in his mansion (formerly owned by Bela Lugosi) in 1982. The police described it as gangland style. So maybe it’s fair to ask what some of his former clients have been up to lately. Let’s start with the guy he failed to make a movie star of, Joe Dee… what’s his name again?

 

Blackenstein

 

Director: William A. Levey
Writer: Frank R. Saletri
Original title: Blackenstein The Black Frankenstein
Country & year: USA, 1973
Actors: John Hart, Ivory Stone, Joe De Sue, Roosevelt Jackson, Andrea King, Nick Bolin
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0069795/

 

Tom Ghoul

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monster Dog (1984)

Monster DogAlice Cooper was already at the peak of his musical career in the late 1970s with fifteen studio albums in his discography, having sold several Platinums, lived a wild rock’n roll life and outlived his first drinking buddy Jim Morrison. Alice Cooper has been quite transparent about his alcoholism and the bumpy journey on the yellow brick road to sobriety throughout the last four decades, and how he was just few drops away to join his former drinking-buddies six feet under. After he got caught up in the cocaine blizzard, which has wiped all his memories of the recording of his three final albums (also called the blackout albums), he got into rehab for one last time before he’d risk ending up as a corpse looking like a combination of an emaciated Auschwitz victim and a horrifying drag-show version of Bette Davis. While it all just sounds like a cliché synopsis for a biopic, he was far from ready to tour again and just the thought of performing on stage in full sobriety seemed to be the most frightening thing ever. He was now in his mid 30’s without any record label, and thus back to square one. So, now what …

 

Well, why not kill some time by starring in an Italian low-budget horror film? Seems fun enough, right? Alice wanted the film to be cheap and sleazy, and that’s what he got. He also got to play a musician, not so different from himself and even record a music video for the film. However the film ended up, if it was released to cinemas or straight to VHS, wasn’t important to him. The one and only thing that mattered was if he was able to work while being sober which he hadn’t been for fifteen years. And with that being said, he couldn’t have picked a better director than Claudio Troll 2 Fragasso. Monster Dog became his rehab movie, so to speak, and the segway to his next life-chapter with his comeback tour The Nightmare Returns. And as I’m writing this, the guy is 75 years old, still active and let’s hope he’s kicking it for five more years so he can celebrate with the song I’m Eighty.

 

Monster Dog starts off with a music video of a rather catchy song Identity Crisis by the new age rocker Vince Raven (Cooper) who is heading for his childhood home with his wife and crew to shoot a new music video. And to be honest, I don’t see much point in trying to explain the plot here, because there isn’t much. People get attacked by dogs, people having nightmares, we have several foggy night scenes, more dogs appear before the film slides into more obscurity as a gunslinging western. Claudio Fragasso also co-wrote this with his wife Rossella Drudi, just to mention it.

 

Given that we’re talking about a Claudio Fragasso film it has to at least be entertaining, right? Yeah, most of the known trademarks are here with bad acting, cheesy effects that goes from half-decent to absolute pure dung that has no business being on screen, and overall filled with 80s schlock all across the board. And except for Alice Cooper, who walks through the film with a stone cold face, the rest of the cast  acts like silly cartoon characters, all of which are Spanish with laughable English dubbing. The dubbing of Alice Cooper done by Ted Rusoff is the only convincing thing here. Yeah, he actually fooled me big time. Applause.

 

All us ghouls love Alice Cooper and I really wish I could say that he is worth the film alone. But that isn’t much of the case here. Although he appears in most of the scenes, the guy seems bored, withdrawn and apathetic. And yeah, fifteen years of daily alcohol abuse does that to you. He says his lines and couldn’t be bothered with the rest. It’s quite the opposite of what we’re used to see when he’s on a stage feeding his Frankenstein, to put it that way. It isn’t before the final act when Alice seems to loosen up and having fun when he gets to shoot some badguys straight in the skull with a shotgun. Even though this is his only major role in a feature, he later appeared in other films with minor appearances and cameos, such as a creepy mute hobo in John Carpenter’s The Prince of Darkness (1987), Freddy Krueger’s dad in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991), and as himself in Wayne’s World (1992) and Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows (2012).

 

And with all this said, I’m not so sure that the director is fully to blame for the incoherent final cut here though, as the film was completely cut to pieces in post-production by the producer Eduard Sarlui. He cut out as much as 20 minutes, reconstructed the scenes, assumingly with blindfolds or in pure resentful spite towards the director, and the whole thing was a mess that got Fragasso heartbroken when he saw it. It was at least a big triumph for Alice who got through the whole filming process clean and sober with Coca-Cola.

 

Monster Dog did never get an official DVD release expect a couple of cheap bootlegs with shitty VHS quality which explains the muddy screenshots below. For a far more watchable viewing, look for the 2016 Blu-ray release from Diabolik DVD.

 

Monster Dog

 

Director: Claudio Fragasso
Writers: Claudio Fragasso, Rossella Drudi
Original title: Leviatán
Country & year: Spain, USA, Puerto Rico, 1984
Actors: Alice Cooper, Victoria Vera, Carlos Santurio, Pepa Sarsa, Carole James, Emilio Linder, Ricardo Palacios, Luis Maluenda, Barta Barri, Charly Bravo, Fernando Conde, Fernando Baeza, Nino Bastida
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0087616/

 

Tom Ghoul

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OTHERKIN – Horror Short Film

Scarlet visits her estranged birth parents in hopes of forging a long-desired connection and learns that they’re weirdly, if not dangerously, obsessed with foxes.

 

Otherkin is a creepy horror short starring Georgina Campbell (Barbarian).

OTHERKIN - Horror Short Film

 

Director: Dawson Taylor
Writer: Dawson Taylor
Country & year: USA, 2022
Actors: Georgina Campbell, John F. Higgins, Trenita Lindsay
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt21087496/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Graveyard Shift (1990)

Graveyard ShiftJohn Hall is a widowed drifter, who arrives at a small town and is hired to work in a rat-infested textile mill. Despite an eccentric exterminator having been hired, Tucker Cleveland, the rat problem persists. Hardy little buggers, indeed. When the exterminator admits defeat and tells the cruel and thick-headed foreman Warwick that he is unable to kill all the rats and recommends that the mill should be shut down, work still continue at the place as normal anyway of course. But people start going missing. Did they just pack up and leave, forgetting their letters of resignation and simply high-tailing out of the place…or is something else lurking at the mill, other than the rats?

 

Graveyard Shift is a Stephen King adaptation based on a story from Night Shift. The movie was directed by Ralph S. Singleton, and filmed in the village of Harmony, Maine at Bartlettyarns Inc which is the oldest woolen yarn mill in the US. Now, as with most Stephen King movie adaptations, it’s not exactly a masterpiece, and Stephen King heavily disliked it and stated that it’s one of his least favorite adaptations, calling it “a quick exploitation picture“. A comment which might drive away everyone looking for “quality”, but also pique the interest of horror ghouls who sometimes want to feast on a quick exploitation meal. So, how does Graveyard Shift fare in that regard?

 

Let’s start with the negatives first. It does seem that the low budget killed off some of the potential this movie could have had, as the monster scenes are never on full display. Every character is a stereotypical archetype and you’ll probably find more interesting personalities in the dozens of rats on the screen, which you’ll end up rooting more for than the actual “heroes” here. Andrew Divoff “Wishmaster” has a little role here but he’s nothing more than a simple stock character whose main purpose is to become monster nourishment. The pacing is sometimes a bit odd, focusing on some character love drama in between which doesn’t really bring anything forward.

 

Now for the positives: while it should be obvious that it does not have the same wacky entertainment value like for example The Mangler (which is also based on one of the short stories from Night Shift), it does actually have a bit of atmosphere, with the old mill area and underground surroundings making a claustrophobic setting. There’s a little bit of gore, and the monster doesn’t look that bad the few sparse moments you actually get to see it. The characters, while being stereotypical to the point of being slightly ridiculous, adds some enjoyment into it and steer the movie away from being too boring. There’s some scenery and props that heightens the entertainment value as well, and if it had just been spruced up a bit with some extra gore and additional monster screentime, the end result could have been much better.

 

I’d say that, all in all, Graveyard Shift is an okay 90s creature feature for horror ghouls. A totally silly horror flick with nothing memorable or great, but a fun enough thing watch if you want to waste an hour and a half.

 

Graveyard Shift Graveyard Shift Graveyard Shift

 

Director: Ralph S. Singleton
Writers:
Stephen King, John Esposito
Country & year:
USA, 1990
Actors:
David Andrews, Kelly Wolf, Stephen Macht, Andrew Divoff, Vic Polizos, Brad Dourif
IMDb:
www.imdb.com/title/tt0099697/

 

 

Vanja Ghoul

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Evil Dead Rise (2023)

Evil Dead RiseHalloween came a bit early this year with Evil Dead Rise – where I was first and foremost hoping for a direct sequel to the 2013 Evil Dead to finally catch up with Mia, that poor girl who fought till the end against demons and her drug addiction with one arm ripped off while it was raining blood. But instead we get a standalone film with an uncertain timeline, this time written and directed by the Irishman Lee Cronin (The Hole in the Ground and the horror short Ghost Train). Evil Dead Rise was originally scheduled to be released direct-to streaming on HBO Max, but when the film got overly positive reactions from the test screenings, the studio, Warner Brothers, decided to take a U-turn and rather go for a wide theatrical release. And what a genius decision that was, as this is yet another strong entry in a four decade old horror franchise that still manages to rip everyone a new one in full Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster force filled with carnage, mayhem, grim diabolical violence, gallons of blood and it’s probably the goriest since Evil Dead II (1987).

 

After a brutal opening which includes head scalping and a severed head, followed by a delightfully sinister and creative title sequence for Evil Dead Rise to set the tone, we take a big leap from the known primitive cabin setting to an old, deteriorated apartment complex in Los Angeles (even tough it’s filmed on a location in New Zealand). Here we meet the fresh single mother and tattoo artist Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) and her three kids in the midst of some rough times as the complex is soon to be demolished and her cheating husband recently left her. After her sister Beth (Lily Sullivan) comes for a visit, an earthquake strikes which blocks the building’s entries and makes them isolated (just like the flood did in the first one). The quake also uncovers a secret room with a vault which has been hidden under the building for hundreds of years, filled with hanging crucifixes, a gramophone and – yeah of course – a certain familiar book made of human flesh that was never meant to be found.

 

Ellie’s son takes the book, the gramophone and some old records up to his room, and as he plays one of the records on it while the book opens up to show some gory illustrations, it conjures an angry, sadistic demon which then possesses Ellie in the elevator. After they find her in the bathtub in full demon makeup, she gives an evil grin to ensure us that mommy’s with the maggots now, and it’s a non-stop pandemonium from here on.

 

Sam Raimi, who’s only been behind the scenes as producer alongside with Bruce Campbell, have been pretty careful to handpick the right filmmakers for the projects, and Lee Cronin proved to be a bullseye for this franchise. He adds a lot of raw energy, tension and flexible camerawork with the cinematographer Dave Garbett who also worked on Ash vs Evil Dead. We have several nods to the earlier films and a pretty awesome tribute to The Shining. The film also has much of the same gritty and slightly more realistic tone as Fede Alvare’s Evil Dead which makes it easy to imagine these two sharing the same universe.

 

Evil Dead Rise is also the first in the franchise to include child actors, which can be seen as a red flag. But don’t worry ’bout that, the film doesn’t hold much back regardless, and with its R-rating, 1,720 gallons of fake blood, it delivers, even more than I expected. The violence is relentless, as it should be, with flawless effects that goes more and more over-the top to the point it made me think of Peter Jackson’s Braindead. We also have the fair share of injuries, one of which being a cheese grater peeling someone’s leg, and of course some glass chewing which always looks unpleasant.

 

Also great performances across the board, most notably Alyssa Sutherland as the possessed Ellie, which is on an unstoppable beast mode here.

 

So, even though this entry doesn’t have anything much to offer on the surface, other than a new claustrophobic setting in a decaying apartment building and a briefly expanded lore of The Book of the Dead, it’s at least a highly entertaining and adrenaline-filled thrill ride with dedicated actors and solid film-making in general. And I’m not expecting more from an Evil Dead film.

 

Evil Dead Rise Evil Dead Rise Evil Dead Rise

 

Writer and director: Lee Cronin
Country & year: New Zealand, USA, Ireland, 2023
Actors: Mirabai Pease, Richard Crouchley, Anna-Maree Thomas, Lily Sullivan, Noah Paul, Alyssa Sutherland, Gabrielle Echols, Morgan Davies, Nell Fisher
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt13345606/

 

 

Tom Ghoul

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THIS DARK THOUGHT – Animated Horror Short

While babysitting her newborn sister, a young astronomer struggles with a dark thought after encountering something eerie in the night sky.

 

This Dark Thought is an atmospheric animated horror short about sometimes having dark thoughts we’re not supposed to have.

THIS DARK THOUGHT - Animated Horror Short

 

Director: Kris Theorin, Kurtis Theorin
Writer: Kris Theorin, Kurtis Theorin
Country & year: USA, 2019
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt10909092/