Siobhan 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!
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/
In 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!
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/
We 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!
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/
What 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 alternative 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.
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/
The 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.
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/
―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.
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/
― Only the Nazis could think of something like this!
Before every found-footage film, there was ― Frankenstein’s Army (not to be confused with Army of Frankensteins), the first found-footage film ever. Yes, ever! We’re going way waayy back to 1945, believe it or not.
We’re at the end of WW2 where we follow a small group of Russian soldiers as they’re walking through some obscure and bleak countryside in Germany. Their mission is to hunt down a Nazi sniper nest, and Dimitri is documenting the whole thing on camera as a task from the Russian government to make a propaganda film for the Red Army. For some odd reasons they speak English, because… because. But the first thing that strikes the viewer in the glossy year of 2025 is how surprisingly clean and crisp the image quality is, considering it’s shot on a 8mm. Huh. Either Dmitri is a time-traveler, or the film spent several decades in the editing room to restore the quality to pitch-perfectness before it got officially released in 2013.
Anyway, as they move further into the zone they get a distress call that eventually leads them into something that looks like an abandoned factory. That there’s some shady business going on here, is an understatement, where we have minecarts and a shaft filled with bodyparts. Little do the Kalinka soldiers know that this is the lair of none other than Victor Frankenstein! And say hello to his horde of freaky murderous robomonsters. It’s death metal time, baby!
And jokes aside… Frankenstein’s Army is the passion project of the Dutch filmmaker and storyboard artist Richard Raaphorst that was eight years in the making. The original idea was a more ambitious horror comedy with the title Worst Case Scenario which he worked on for two years. And ironically, the film ended up as a, well, worst case scenario as it was canceled after the money ran out. The only thing that was left to show was a teaser and a trailer, which got nominated for Best Movie Trailer by the Golden Trailer Awards in 2006. And that was that.
So… what’s next? Instead of letting the delightful steampunk zombie designs from the canceled film go to waste, they were further used in Richard Raaphorst’s next film, or plan B, if you like, with Frankenstein’s Army. To save more money, it was shot in found-footage-style on very limited locations without any use of cheap Asylum/SyFy-looking green screens. Aside from the found-footage element, this is pure old school. We can also argue that the story has as much meat on its bones as a starved Holocaust prisoner as the film works more as a proof of concept that just as well could’ve been a DLC to a Wolfenstein game.
And speaking of games; In 2021 Richard Raaphorst accused Capcom for stealing the design for the one of the bosses in Resident Evil Village. Nothing but a desperate marketing stunt, I’d say. The first thing that came to my mind was actually Air Man from Mega Man 2. But that’s just simple me.
That being said, this is still an entertaining little flick with some great claustrophobic and grim, dirty atmosphere, gory highlights, superb practical effects, attention to detail in both set-designs and the monster creatures, sprinkled with some dark humor and morbid charm. And of course, the nightmarish and demented cybernetic experiments of Dr. Frankenstein, makes this alone worth a watch. Richard Raaphorst showcases some strong and creative directing skills here, with lots of twisted ideas that could further evolve into a sequel of two. This is so far the one and only feature-length film he’s made, so… we can only hope.
Director: Richard Raaphorst Writers: Richard Raaphorst, Miguel Tejada-Flores, Chris W. Mitchell Country & year: Netherlands/USA/Czech Republic, 2013 Actors: Robert Gwilym, Hon Ping Tang, Alexander Terentyev, Luke Newberry, Joshua Sasse, Mark Stevenson, Andrei Zayats, Karel Roden, Klaus Lucas, Cristina Catalina, Jan de Lukowicz IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1925435/
Tales of Halloween is a horror anthology from 2015, with segments that interlocks with each other. And all happening around Halloween, of course! And there sure are a good mix of treats here, with a total of 10 different segments spanning over a watch time of 1 hour and 32 minutes. This means these are more or less a collection of slightly intertwined shorts, so let’s start with breaking them down:
The first segment is called Sweet Tooth, written and directed by Dave Parker. Mikey, a kid who has just finished trick or treating, comes home to find that his parents are away, and the babysitter Lizzy and her boyfriend Kyle are there and watches a horror movie. While Mikey enjoys his treats, they start telling him about the legend of “Sweet Tooth“, which is an urban legend about a boy named Timothy Blake who had parents that never allowed him to eat candy. I guess you can have an idea how this one goes…it’s okay to tone down on the sugar intake for your kiddies, but be reasonable and let them enjoy some treats every now and then, too! Otherwise…things can go bad.
Then we get to watch The Night Billy Raised Hell, directed by Darren Lynn Bousman and written by Clint Sears. Billy Thompson, ready for some trick or treating, has dressed up as a red devil and is accompanied by his older sister Britney and her boyfriend Todd. They trick him into throwing an egg at Mr Abbadon’s house because he never gives out candy. Unfortunately, this seems to awaken the Halloween spirit in the old man, and he forces Billy to join him around the neighborhood and plays twisted tricks on people.
We’re far from done with tricks as the next segment is called Trick, directed by Adam Gierasch and written by Greg Commons. The friends Nelson, Maria, James and Caitlyn are smoking pot and handing out candy to the trick or treaters, while watching Night of the Living Dead. Sounds like a cozy Halloween evening. This takes an unexpected turn when one of the trick or treaters, a little girl dressed up as a witch, stabs Nelson in the stomach when he opens the door. More kids in Halloween costumes seem to be hellbent on taking these people out…but what could be the reason? Hmmm…
Then we head over to the segment called The Weak and the Wicked, directed by Paul Solet and written by Molly Millions. There we meet Alice, a sociopathic pyromaniac and her lackeys who is after some guy dressed up as a cowboy. Before they can do him much harm, they get interrupted by an other guy who is dressed up as some kind of demon and seems to on a quest for revenge. Don’t we all love seeing the bullies get their comeuppance?
Next up is Grim Grinning Ghost (no, not the Haunted Mansion kind), written and directed by Axelle Carolyn. Lynn is attending the Halloween party at her mother’s house (the mother played by a familiar face in the horror movie genre: Lin Shaye). Her mother tells her the story of Mary Bailey, a disfigured girl who was mocked all her life for her appearance. After she died, it is said that her ghost comes back every Halloween to laugh at how people look behind their backs, and steal their eyes if they turn around to look at her. So, this one’s easy-peasy: just don’t turn around and look if you hear someone laughing behind your back! Or…that would be too easy, of course.
In Ding Dong, written and directed by Lucky McKee, we meet a married coupled named Jack and Bobbie. Bobbie is totally distraught over not having any children of her own, and is treating her husband in rather disturbing ways…and if angered enough she transforms into her true self, which is a rage-filled red-skinned demon who could’ve been Lipstick-Face Demon’s younger sister. Yeah…I don’t think motherhood is the right thing for her, and it seems her husband also secretly agrees. Obviously a bit of a metaphor-segment, this one.
Up next is This Means War, written and directed by Andrew Kasch and John Skipp. Boris, who proudly decorates his house and lawn for Halloween each year with lots of great props and even an animatronic skeleton, is facing some serious trouble when the neighbors over the street scare the kids away by blasting some loud punk rock music. Neither of these rivals wants to back down, ending in a duel between them.
And then…ooooh boy…comes the segment called Friday the 31st, directed by Mike Mendez, written by Mendez and Dave Parker. Already from the title and start you see this is a Friday the 13th parody as a teenage girl is running through the woods, trying to escape some deformed and deranged Jason Voorhees-like killer. As cheesy as this setup is, just wait, as you’ve seen nothing yet. He manages to kill the girl, and then…a UFO appears overhead, where the cutest little claymation/stop-motion alien wants to Twick or Tweet! He holds up his little trick or treat bag, constantly repeating “twick or tweet, twick or tweet“, until the killer becomes frustrated and stomps on the alien. Ooops…shouldn’t have done that! This segment is probably the craziest, goriest and, somewhat ironically, cutest of them all.
Next is The Ransom of Rusty Rex, written and directed by Ryan Schifrin. Two criminals decide to kidnap the son of millionaire Jebediah Rex, and hold the kid for ransom. The kidnapping itself is a piece of cake, but when they call his father, they don’t get the response they expected. And they soon find out that they’ve made the worst mistake of their lives. The child in this segment was played by Ben Woolf, and this was his final film. The movie is dedicated to him.
The final segment is called Bad Seed, written and directed by Neil Marshall. Ray is carving pumpkins in the kitchen while his wife Ellen applauds his work. The pumpkin seems to be a harsher critic, though, as it bites Ray’s head off before scurrying away on spider-like root legs and heads out the back door. A murder spree is starting, all because of a literal killer pumpkin!
And that’s the playlist of sorts for this anthology horror movie, and if you haven’t already guessed, this one shouldn’t be taken seriously for a single second. Compared to Trick ‘r Treat from 2007 which has a far more serious vibe, this one ventures more into pure gorefest and campy schlock material. There are some fun practical effects in several of the segments, which gives everything a needed additional charm. Sure, the shorts are kind of a mixed bag, but the short playtime for each makes sure that none of your least favorite ones will outstay their welcome. Like many anthologies, including the aforementioned Trick’ r Treat but also other fun ones like Tales From the Hood (1995) and Mortuary Collection (2019) which have stories that are tied together, this one kind of tries to pull off something similar by making it all happen on Halloween, and (so it appears) around the same neighborhood. They aren’t really interlocked in the same way as the other anthologies, but taken into consideration how different each segment here really is they still managed to pull it off rather well.
Tales of Halloween is a fun collection of horror shorts, filled with gore and lots of crazy, hilarious stuff, sure to bring some treats to everyone. Happy Halloween!
Directors: Darren Lynn Bousman, Axelle Carolyn, Adam Gierasch, Andrew Kasch, Neil Marshall, Lucky McKee, Mike Mendez, Dave Parker, Ryan Schifrin, John Skipp, Paul Solet
Writers: Axelle Carolyn, Dave Parker, Clint Sears, Greg Commons, Lucky McKee, Molly Millions, Billy Jackson, John Skipp, Andrew Kasch, Mike Mendez, Ryan Schifrin, Neil Marshall
Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell is the one and only Japanese Evil Dead, also known as “The Lost Evil Dead remake“, and one of those films you’ve never seen. Well, thanks to Tubi, the only horror streaming service you need, we randomly came over this hidden relic earlier this year, and had no idea what to expect — other than some bizarre J-horror insanity, especially with a nutty title like this.
The best way to explain this short and simple, is as if a manic fifteen-year old got his religious calling card after watching Evil Dead, grabbed the parent’s 8mm and made his own magnum opus on pure impulse with his friends in the backyard. In other words: ultra-cheap, very primitive and Z-grade schlocky yet filled with crazy energy and dedicated, stubborn non-stop passion. And when it’s also from Planet Japan, you know you’re in for something extra and special. The film is written, produced, directed and edited by Shinichi Fukazawa, who of course, plays the bodybuilder from hell. He’s also behind the effects and make-ups. And this is, as we speak, the only film he’s directed.
We meet the young hunky bodybuilder Shinji, not Ashu, (played by the director himself) and his ex-girlfriend and paranormal journalist Mika. Since Shinji is without a job and has nothing better to do than pump iron, he tags along with Mika to investigate a local haunted house. They also bring a psychic priest. But this is not just some random house though; it’s the house of Shinji’s dad, who once lived there with a mysterious girlfriend. Aside from the trippy horrorshow that’s around the corner, we also have a lot of dark secrets and lore to be revealed during the one-hour runtime. The film was shot in Shinichi Fukazawa’s parents’ house, and since it was planned to be demolished, the young director got a whole free set on a silver platter to go wild and fire on all cylinders. And so he does.
The fun begins after the first dull twenty minutes. It all starts when the priest gets demon-possessed and trapped inside the house with our two protagonists. What we have next is more or less what the alternative title is: The Japanese Evil Dead, with some flair of Resident Evil, and even some well-known elements from The Grudge before The Grudge — and an extravaganza of splatter effects of various sorts with everything from cheap rubber limbs, eyes popping out, neck-biting, ball-grabbing, head-crushing with a barbell and even more trippy stop-motion effects. And gallons of blood. All done in the most naive old-school way possible. And yeah, there’s no Evil Dead without a golden shotgun, waiting to be used with the catchphrase See you in Hell… Baby! No sugar for the bodybuilder.
The production of Bloody Muscle Body Builderin Hell began in 1995 and making the film took 16 days. I’m kidding, it actually took him 16 years! Most of which I guess has to be editing stuff with some hardcore OCD involved, because, seriously. Body Builder in Hell got its first official release in Japan in 2012 when Shinichi Fukazawa self-distributed the film on a 100 limited DVD-R, in pure underground-style, before it was shown in theaters, only in Japan, of course. It was released on Blu-ray from Visual Vengeance in 2022. But if you expect some image restoration for your big 4K screen, you’d be disappointed. It’s necro like a death metal cassette tape from 1989, and that’s also the point, I guess. On the other hand, you get a c o o l poster. And owning a physical copy of this rare little gem is cool in itself.
Writer and director: Shinichi Fukazawa Also known as: The Japanese Evil Dead Country & year: Japan, 2012 Actors: Shinichi Fukazawa, Masaaki Kai, Masahiro Kai, Aki Tama Mai, Asako Nosaka IMDb:https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6403680/
Albert Wilmarth is a folklore lecturer at the Miskatonic University in Arkham. Albert have been receiving letters from a man named Henry Wentworth Akeley, who lives in an isolated farmhouse in Vermont. In the letters, this man claims that he’s got proof that there are creatures surrounding his farm, and they start exchanging letters back and forth. Albert, of course, is a skeptic, and he’s about to enter a debate with Charles Fort about the strange events during some heavy rains in Vermont. Unexpectedly, Henry’s son appears with photos of the creatures as evidence, and it all ends with Albert heading out to visit the man, and is shocked to find him in a completely frail state, immobilized to his chair and preferring the darkness. Yeah…nothing suspicious going on here, not at all…
Henry starts telling Albert about the creatures, how wonderful they are and how much knowledge they have. He also tells Albert something rather disturbing…they can, apparently, extract the brain from a human and place it in a canister where it can live indefinitely. In such a state, a human could even endure the dangers of space travel. How tempting! Or maybe not. Before Albert may start suspecting all this rubbish is only the result of too much isolation (and perhaps too much moonshine), he gets to see one of these “living brains“, who tells him about the journey to Yuggoth, which is where the creatures originally reside. And they urge Albert to take the trip too…
The Whisperer in Darkness is a sci-fi horrormovie from 2011, directed and produced by Sean Branney, Andrew Leman, and David Robertson, distributed by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. It is based on the Lovecraft short story by the same name. It’s made in black & white, intended to capture the look of the classic horror films from the 30’s. And just like their previous film, The Call of Cthulhu from 2005, they’ve managed to capture the moody atmosphere tinged with an underlying unease of the terror of the unknown. Visually, it looks great, and they’ve really captured the 30’s aesthetics.
Plot-wise, the movie follows the original story quite closely until the latter part where originally, the story ends much earlier. It’s during this latter part that the tone of the film takes a kind of shift, where new material is introduced that were not part of the original Lovecraft story. Then we get what I can best describe as some kind of adventure plot, and we even have full-on CGI monster displays which I honestly didn’t expect. And yeah…at this point it ends up straying far from the moody, mysterious vibe which is all about atmosphere and fear of the unknown (which is, of course, the substance of most Lovecraft stories), and they definitely took more liberties here compared to The Call of Cthulhu. Now, I personally don’t think any of this ruins the film in any way, and most of Lovecraft’s stories are a bit hard to put into a full-feature film since the main horror elements in the stories are not really the monsters or creatures themselves, but the mystery surrounding their existence and all the things we don’t know and their implications.
A big kudos to the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society for bringing some of Lovecraft’s work to the screen while keeping so much of the original mood and atmosphere of the original stories. It’s impressive what they’ve been able to pull off with a very limited budget and mostly dedicated, talented amateurs. These movies are made with obvious love and affection for the original work, and that’s a pleasure to see.
Director: Sean Branney Writers: Sean Branney, Andrew Leman Country & year: USA, 2012 Actors: Stephen Blackehart, P.J. King, Zack Gold, Barry Lynch, Autumn Wendel, Annie Abrams, Daniel Kaemon, Matt Lagan, Casey Kramer, Sean Branney, Andrew Leman IMDb:https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1498878/
Siobhan 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.
