While staying at an Airbnb in upstate New York, Robert and May find themselves in a haunted house. The problem is, they can’t remember anything that happens downstairs. Quickly acknowledging that their rental is haunted, they endeavor to leave, but every time they exit their room, supernatural hoodoo returns them to it, absent any memory of what happened outside. The couple must put aside their habit of bickering to come together and solve the mystery of their haunting in order to escape.
What Happened Downstairs is a cheesy horror short about a couple finding their rental is haunted..
Director: Andrew Nisinson Writer: Andrew Nisinson Country & year: USA, 2021 Actors: Andrew Nisinson, Meilin Gray, Katy Rea IMDb:www.imdb.com/title/tt16452602/
At a website called FreeGirlsLive, Alice is working as a camgirl and broadcasting sexual live shows from her little home studio, using the nickname “Lola”. Like most camgirls, Alice has people around her who knows what she’s doing, and people who are completely unaware. Her mother thinks she’s working on some kind of web development, while her younger brother is well aware of her cam girl actions but has promised to keep it a secret. It isn’t all just sexy fun though, and like any follow/like-obsessed SoMe dependant, Alice is totally desperate to rise on the website’s rankings, hoping to one day finally be the number 1 camgirl on the site. After simulating her suicide by slitting her throat using fake blood, her popularity finally increases, and on the next show she’s gotten as far as the top 50 camgirls on the site (whooo!). Things seem to be going rather well. That is, until next morning when Alice finds that she can’t log in to her account anymore, but that’s not all, not even the major part of her problem…because even though she cannot log in to her account anymore, “Lola” is still active and streaming. Logging in through another account, she watches the stream only to see what looks like an exact replicate of herself, even the studio she’s made in her own home looks exactly the same. Confused and completely weirded out (understandably, who wouldn’t be) she tries to contact customer service, at first thinking it must be some kind of replay of her old shows. They tell her that the show is indeed live streaming, and Alice is now finding herself falling through a digital rabbit hole…
Cam is a 2018 horror thriller directed by Daniel Goldhaber. At first glance, it may appear to be a simple cat/mouse thriller where the camgirl is the victim of a stalker, but when Alice’s doppelganger appears in the movie it shifts into a mystery thriller where you feel just as confused about the situation as the main character is. It’s a creative way of presenting a horror story about the desire for digital fame and identity theft, where many of us are already so linked to the digital world that much of our work and personalities have their home there. Seeing someone taking over your accounts is something that would be a nightmare for many people, not just those who are using it for their income. I mean, there have been stories about people calling 911 and the police because Facebook and Instagram were down. Jeez. Some people literally have their entire lives online, and the concept of someone or something stealing your identity digitally, not just hacking your account but literally stealing you, that’s an idea that ought to give most people the heebie jeebies.
The movie has some references to Alice in Wonderland, and not just the character’s own name. Her other online screen names include “MadHatter” and “MrTeapot”, for example. While Alice during her travels in Wonderland was fueled by innocent curiosity, the Alice in this story is driven by low self esteem and the desire to become popular. Not just popular, either, she wants to be number 1, top of the list. And in order to achieve this, she’s willing to do something that she originally promised herself to never do: fake something (her “suicide”). It’s an obvious metaphor for being a sell-out: she ended up doing something she had vowed to never do, just to achieve those extra views/followers/hits/likes/validation/fame.
Visually, the movie is appealing and does a solid job on portraying the Cam Girl culture without being condescending, and the story is fast paced enough to keep the viewer interested in how it all unfolds. The actor who plays Alice does a believable performance. In the end, the movie’s conclusion may feel a little too open and leaving some loose threads, not completely explaining what was really going on, but still giving enough hints throughout that makes you able to puzzle some of the pieces together. Cam is a digital nightmare, and with an increasingly more complex AI that’s all over the place these days, a theme like this becomes even more relevant.
Director: Daniel Goldhaber Writers: Isa Mazzei, Daniel Goldhaber, Isabelle Link-Levy Country & year: USA, 2018 Actors: Madeline Brewer, Patch Darragh, Melora Walters, Devin Druid, Imani Hakim, Michael Dempsey, Flora Diaz, Samantha Robinson, Jessica Parker Kennedy, Quei Tann IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt8361028/
A lonely 50s housewife undertakes radical atomic surgery to win back her husband’s wandering eyes and to become the perfect wife in the process.
Satisfaction Guaranteed is a horror short about a loving wife who tries to do everything for her ungrateful piece-of-shit husband, going to rather extreme measures..
Director: Yue Ma Writer: Mary Mehrkens, Amber Morris(story), Ken Morris Country & year: USA, 2017 Actors: Alexandra Marian Hensley, Paul Keany, Craig Bruenell IMDb:www.imdb.com/title/tt4794842/
Twenty years ago, there lived a deranged teenager by the name Carl Bryce, who killed his parents. Carl’s body was never found, and his story has created an urban legend that the place he lived at with his parents is cursed, causing madness to everyone who trespass the area. The graduation student Mark is working on writing a study on contemporary myths, and gets an interview with the psychiatrist who once treated (or, at least tried to treat) Carl Bryce back in the day. Intrigued by this urban legend, Mark gets his friends to join him in his research on the old Bryce estate. Of course, once they’re there, they soon figure out that someone or something is after them.
Evil Remains (aka Trespassing) is a 2004 horror movie directed by James Merendino, with a premise we’ve seen several times before and lots of times after: a group of college students finding themselves in a situation with an unknown killer at their heels. Slasher movies present this formula with hardly any variation: it’s either a murderer on a revenge-fueled killing spree (or some other motive), or it’s something supernatural. Going in for a movie of this kind, you mostly know what’s in store for you. The film obviously references well-known classics, stirring little snippets of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Evil Dead, Halloween, etc. into the pot, in typical low-budget style. Its attempt at combining slasher with haunted house kind of works, though, especially with the use of an old plantation house. The same house was also used in the 2005 horror film Venom (which was made by the I Know What You Did Last Summer director Jim Gillespie).
While neither story nor characters offer anything in terms of originality, and production value is considerably limited, it still manages to grant the viewer enough mystery and a little atmosphere to make the experience compelling enough. While the acting and characters are nothing to write home about, it’s still familiar territory for those who have trodden through the familiar paths of the typical teen-slasher before. I think I’ve made it evident by now that this is nothing new, nothing spectacular, and clearly low budget, but take it for what it is and it’s actually decent enough for a quick watch.
Overall, Evil Remains aka Trespassing is a fairly subpar horror slasher, filled with the regular tropes, but it’s not entirely without value. Works well as an easy popcorn flick, just don’t expect any kind of masterpiece or memorable experience.
Writer and director: James Merendino Original title: Tresspassing Country & year: USA, 2022 Actors: Jeff Galpin, Maryam d’Abo, Will Rokos, Daniel Gillies, Jeff Bryan Davis, Clayne Crawford, Estella Warren, Ashley Scott, Brandon Martin, Linley Thomas, Adela Johnson, Virginia Lamoine IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0350232/
A late night shift at the movie theater, what could go wrong?
Night Shift is a fun little horror short, where things do indeed go wrong..
Director: Alex Magaña Writer: Jed Brian, Alex Magaña Country & year: USA, 2022 Actors: Amy Drake, Becky Bush, Jed Brian, Landon Tate, Bentley Brian IMDb:www.imdb.com/title/tt25406252/
From the director who gave us Sperm Bitches, Intercourse with the Vampire, Sexmares, Bad Girls 5: Maximum Babes and the Edward Penishands trilogy, here comes his magnum opus Ice Cream Man – a goofy comedy horror, this time aimed for the mainstream surface audiences with a budget to buy an old ice cream truck, gallons of ice cream and fake sun flowers.
Ice Cream Man starts off with a quick opening in black and white in a Californian suburb during the 1960s. It gets straight to the point where the local ice cream man (with the letters Ice Cream King on his truck) gets randomly shot in a pure gangsta-style drive-by shooting. Among the witnesses is the boy Gregory Tudor who grows up to be an Ice Cream man himself – a deranged, retarded, homicidal Ice Cream Killer Man which uses body parts as flavors to his ice creams.
After the scene with the Ice Cream King’s murder, we jump to present day where Greg Tudor (Clint Howard) roams around in his blue ice cream truck, acting like a demented freakshow that should be as far away from children as possible. He likes to taunt the kids, as he speaks with an affected growling, raspy and cheesy voice while serving them cockroach-infested ice creams. Yummy! That ice cream guy is pretty freaky, one of the kids says. No, you don’t say. At least, they like his ice creams. But still, I wouldn’t recommend anyone to eat ice cream while watching Ice Cream Man, just trust me on that one.
Tudor randomly kills Binky, a dog (off screen) which he puts in the grinder to use as a flavour to his ice cream. One of the kids, that blonde one with the round glasses which looks like Maculay Culkin from The Pagemaster, gets kidnapped one night and shoved into his ice cream truck and locked in a cage in his parlor where he later grooms him to be his successor. When Tudor spots one of the other kids that witnessed the act, he yells with his raspy voice:
You little turds are gonna have to learn, you can’t run from the ice cream man! … I know where you live … you tell anybody, I’m gonna get your mom and dad!
Boy o’boy…This is a weird little oddball of a movie. Already ten minutes in, the tone is all over the place while you ask what the fuck this is supposed to be. On its first glance it looks like if the whole thing was meant to be a short episode of Goosebumps, but midways they instead decided to stretch it out to a feature, throw in some gore, fill in a series of nonsensical scenes with bad actors and not much further plans than just see what happens. And don’t forget the fake sunflowers.
The film is regarded as a black comedy, and a comedy it is for damn sure, no question about that. What’s intentional and not, however, is not easy to tell, but that’s what makes it even more funny. There’s enough of bad acting, weird dialogues to laugh of, and watching this with the right mood it’s overall some fun, dumb, light-hearted entertainment that could have been suitable for the whole family if it wasn’t for the gore. But I can’t deny that the star himself, Clint Howard (the younger brother of Ron Howard), is the main reason to give this slightly obscure film a watch. Calling him eccentric is an understatement, the guy is the purest definition of bizarre which both acts and looks like a live-action figure straight out from Looney Tunes. Howard has been in over 200 films which he has had the lead role in only … two: Ice Cream Man and Evilspeak, another horror flick from 1981. And since Clint Howard was recognized as the ice cream man on the streets by fans throughout the years, a sequel had to happen. A kickstarter campaign was set up by Howard and director Apstein in 2014 to crowd fund the sequel Ice Cream Man 2: Sundae Bloody Sundae with a goal to collect 300.000 dollars from fans. Only 4 grand was donated from 70 backers. Ouch, how embarrassing. This was also the only mainstream film Apstein made before he went back to the porn industry.
But at least, the fans can still enjoy Ice Cream Man on Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome and on several streaming sites, including Full Moon Features where we watched it.
Director: Norman Apstein Writers: David Dobkin, Sven Davison Country & year: USA, 1995 Actors: Clint Howard, Justin Isfeld, Anndi McAfee, JoJo Adams, Mikey LeBeau, Sandahl Bergman, Andrea Evans, Steve Garvey, Olivia Hussey, Doug Llewelyn, Lee Majors II, David Naughton, IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0113376/
In a fairy tale world, a winemaker creates the most exquisite wine in the world. When Death herself wants to taste the wine, he discovers that his bride is next on Death list.
Death and the Winemaker (Le vigneron et la mort) is very atmospheric dark/gothic fairytale with beautiful animation.
Director: Victor Jaquier Writer: Victor Jaquier, Damien Mazza Country & year: Switzerland, 2021 Actors: Kacey Mottet Klein, Virginie Meisterhans, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Jacques Roman, Séverine Bujard, Stephanie Schneider, Marie-Claire Dubois IMDb:www.imdb.com/title/tt7227252/
The year is 1830, and we’re in a cold October month. Augustus Landor, a widower who lives alone and is also a retired detective, is asked by the military to investigate the hanging of one of their cadets. After the cadet was hanged, his heart was removed from the body. Upon examining the corpse in the morgue, Landor finds clues suggesting that this is not a suicide case, but a murder case. He meets the weird Edgar Allan Poe, who is another cadet at the academy, and the two team up in order to solve the case. Ritualistic animal murders makes them think the murder could be linked to some occult black magic rituals, and when another cadet is also found hanged, with both his heart and genitals removed, Landor and Poe begin to suspect the family of Dr. Daniel Marquis whose daughter Poe has become quite enchanted by.
The Pale Blue Eye is an mystery thriller written and directed by Scott Cooper, and it’s an adaption from a 2003 novel by the same name, written by Louis Bayard. Scott Copper also directed Antlers, so it comes as no surprise that he is able to competently master stories that are dark and atmospheric. Despite the famous Poe himself being a major character here, the story itself is based entirely on fiction, although there are some small slivers of facts mixed in: Poe did indeed attend West Point Academy as a cadet from 1830-1831 (of which he later got himself purposefully kicked out from). There are also a few names and things in the movie that are references to some of Poe’s stories (Landor’s Cottage, for example). And not unexpectedly, you’ll see at least one Raven. Poe fans will probably have a fun time looking out for all the little tidbits referencing his work.
The movie plays out as a standard murder thriller where little bits and pieces are coming into place one at a time. Hidden notes, secrets revealed, red herrings, etc. The common components of a mystery thriller are all there. The pacing is a bit slow, but the focal points here are the gothic, spooky atmosphere, and the performances where both Christian Bale (as Landor) and Harry Melling (as Edgar Allan Poe) do a solid job portraying these characters and their chemistry. While Poe isn’t displayed with his identifiable mustache, you can definitely see the likeness here. And aside from the characters and performances, the murders are grotesque enough to keep you interested in knowing who could be behind such crimes (and why), and the cold wintry scenery puts an extra chill into it all. The fitting soundtrack was made by Howard Shore, who is most known for composing the soundtrack for the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit film trilogies, but is also behind the score of a lot of well-known (and some lesser known) movies in different genres, including horror.
Overall, The Pale Blue Eye is an entertaining whodunnit thriller with some dark twists and turns, blended with gothic atmosphere.
Writer and director: Scott Cooper Country & year: USA, 2022 Actors: Christian Bale, Harry Melling, Simon McBurney, Timothy Spall, Toby Jones, Harry Lawtey, Fred Hechinger, Joey Brooks, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Lucy Boynton, Robert Duvall, Gillian Anderson IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt14138650/
A family’s new rescue pup is terrorized by deceased pets in this mind-bending horror.
Ghost Dogs is a truly weird animated horror short where we witness a ghost story seen from an innocent puppy’s perspective. It is atmospheric and slightly surreal, with usage of liminal spaces and occult symbols. And of course, the strange feeling of watching the puppy who only seems threatened by the robot vacuum cleaner, oblivious to everything else that happens around him..
Director: Joe Cappa Writer: Joe Cappa, J.W. Hallford Country & year: USA, 2021 Cast: Joe Cappa, J.W. Hallford, Sean Dugan, Olivia Carmel IMDb:www.imdb.com/title/tt13795964/
Jack is probably many things, but he’s first and foremost a psychopathic serial killer. And this is his story, Jack: Portrait of a Serial Killer if you will, which spawns throughout twelve years, told in a series/segments of “incidents” with the lens of our favorite Danish drunk uncle, Lars Von Trier.
The 1st incident starts almost straight to the point. We’re on some road in the woods where a lady, simply called Lady 1, (Uma Thurman) is stranded with her broken car and broken jack, and makes sure that the first driver stops to help her. And it’s her lucky day because here’s Jack himself, yes with a capital J, (Matt Dillon) with his red van which he uses to transport his fresh victims with. This lady seems to have have some kind of death wish, or Autassassinophilia (the fetish of the risk of being killed) as there’s not many other ways to rationalize her sardonic behaviour as she taunts Jack by saying he could be a serial killer as he drives her to the nearest blacksmith. We all know what the scene leads up to as she continues to push his buttons and hits the jackpot with the final straw by calling him “too much of a wimp to kill anyone.” He slams the breaks and bashes her skull in with her broken jack. How … symbolic, if not the best ironic punchline ever, where we can already see the cynical pitch-black humor that starts to reek. He hides her car and takes her body to a freezer storage that he bought from a pizza shop, a place we’ll visit frequently as the stock of bodies starts to fill the place. And why does he collect the bodies? Oh, you’ll see…
The 2nd incident shows us the more calculated and manipulative tactics of Jack by making an elderly woman, or Lady 2, to believe he’s a policeman despite he cant show her a batch. This lady seems to have the bullshit alarms somewhere, but as the sneaky manipulator he is, she finally lets him inside the house where Jack strangles her. While it seemed to go pretty smooth and easy, the lady suddenly wakes up, gasps after air and Jack has to finish her off by stabbing her. Oh shit. Oh shit, indeed, because we also learn that poor Jack has Obsessive Compulsive Disorders, the worst handicap a serial killer can possess. And now with blood stained around the floor and walls, he spends the rest of the day cleaning up, going back and forth inside the house and his van as a yo-yo, even when hearing police sirens approaching. The only thing he always seems to forget is using gloves. If this is intentionally or a slip-up in the script is not easy to tell.
So, what about his romantic life? Any bird in his cage? We see a segment of Jack’s attempt to be in a relationship with a young girlfriend (played by Riley Keough), a scene I won’t spoil further other than it’s bizarre and as romantic as a moisty shithouse infested with flies, and just like we would imagine to be in a hollow and destructive relationship with a psychopath. Jack practices to smile in front of the mirror to do a shallow impression, like a politician preparing for a speech, but the only thing he can pull off is a smirk. Yeah, that narcissistic, arrogant smirk. Brrr, gross! We also see other sides of Jack, of course, as a struggling artist with an interest in photography. He drags his dead victims out of the freezer to take group photos of them, just some normal hobby activities for Jack. He has more plans with the corpses, by the way, just wait and see. He’s also an architect who, as the title itself says, wants to build a house which never seems to live up to his compulsive perfections.
And I haven’t even mentioned Verge yet. Who? His imaginative listener and debater which he confesses all his actions and highlights of his life as a serial killer to. Verge has the voice of a fragile old man (performed by Bruno Ganz) and further we go into the bleak, meaningless and hellish world of Jack, he seems more and more repulsed, shocked, and drained, just like the us, the audience. But if even he can sit through two and a half hour of Jack’s depraved insanity, then so can you. It does, however, reach the top in the 3rd incident which I won’t spoil, other than this is the sequence that sparked the controversy at the Cannes Film Festival where the audiences stormed out in shock, anger, disgust and all that which is always an effective selling strategy for the next film by Lars Von Trier.
And having in mind that this is a Lars Von Trier film, where his name alone is a huge trigger-point for many for whatever reason, I had no clue what to expect when preparing myself for this in the movie theater back in 2018. As a character study of the mind of a serial killer, I would almost call this a masterpiece and undoubtedly one of the very best in the sub-genre of this type. It’s a raw and unfiltered portrait of a serial killer where we see how Jack evolves in his craft of killing, his deranged view on life, art and…grapes. Yeah, there’s a fifteen-minutes or so screentime dedicated to a discussion between Jack and Verge about grapes and vine. Start to sounds a little pretentious, you say? Well, serial killers and psychopaths are pretentious. Super duper uber-pretentious they are, just look up interviews/clips of John Wayne Gacy, Dennis Rader, Ted Bundy and numerous politicial figures that’s dominated the limelight for the past two years.
Matt Dillon, who took his main inspiration from Ted Bundy is phenomenal in his role and makes Jack into his own unique beast of a character. I can’t deny that Dillon looks more like a slightly younger version of Bruce Campbell here, but that’s probably just me. However, he truly embraces it to make sure to give us a wild, entertaining ride into a crazyman’s odyssey into pure, demented darkness which you can only guess where it ever will end. And of course the film has some of the well-known trademarks of Von Trier with his artistic ways, freedom with its use of symbolism, metaphors and all that shit that pretty much makes his films so devise, polarizing and generally makes people go nuts. He puts a lot of his identity into his films, and to a certain extent it pisses people off, but that’s art, I guess. Trier himself views The House That Jack Built as an nihilistic celebrating of “the idea that life is evil and soulless“. Sure, can’t disagree on that. But, still on the surface there’s enough of a straight-forward story to enjoy here for us serial killer-buffs, and with the right sick and dark sense of humor the lengthy runtime will fly by.
Writer and director: Lars Von Trier Country & year: Denmark, 2018 Actors: Matt Dillon, Bruno Ganz, Uma Thurman, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Sofie Gråbøl, Riley Keough, Jeremy Davies, Jack McKenzie, Mathias Hjelm, Ed Speleers, Emil Tholstrup, Marijana Jankovic, Carina Skenhede, Rocco Day, Cohen Day IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt4003440/
