american horror movies – Page 6

Dark Was the Night (2014)

Posted on August 23, 2024September 3, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

Maiden Woods is a small, isolated town surrounded by forest. We start off with a team of loggers that goes missing, and when the foreman tries to find out what happened to them, he encounters the body of one of them. Or, that is…a part of it. Upon finding a severed arm, he is then attacked and killed by some kind of unseen monster. Later, Paul Shields who is the sheriff in town goes together with Donny Saunders, his new deputy from New York, to speak to a farmer who insists that one of his horses has been stolen. Paul believes that the horse has simply escaped and decides to not think too much of it, and goes on to pick up his son Adam who will stay at his place for the night. He and his wife, Susan, no longer lives together after their other son, Tim, died in an accident. During the night, Adam claims he’s seen a creature in the back yard, and Paul also hears some strange noises but doesn’t see anything. The next morning, there are large hoof-like footprints in the snow around his house. Shouldn’t be too strange since they live nearby a forest and all that, but what’s quite peculiar is that the footprints appear to come from an animal that walks on two legs. On top of that, the footprints are left all around town. Paul, of course, believes it to be a prank. What else could it be, right? But then he hears about more animals that have gone missing, and the hunters informs him that all the deer and other animals in the forest seems to have left, indicating that some kind of large predator may have come to the area.

Dark Was the Night (released as Monster Hunter in the UK) is a creature feature horror film from 2014 directed by Jack Heller and written by Tyler Hisel. It is loosely based on the story about “The Devil’s Footprints“, a phenomenon that occurred in 1855 in England where people in a small town woke up to find biped hoof prints all over the place in the freshly fallen snow. Also, the title of the film addresses the 1927 blues-folk song Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground by Blind Willie Johnson.

What sets the movie apart from many typical creature feature films, is the focus on mystery-fueled horror suspense during the majority of the playtime. It’s kind of a slow-burn, the monster is lurking in the dark and out of sight and the atmosphere is much more sinister and dark than the simple premise would make you expect. Hiding the monster is actually a good thing here, as it works wonders for creating the creepy tone. Kevin Durand, which was most recently seen in a role in the vampire horror movie Abigail (2024), does a good job on portraying a worn out and drained sheriff who’s had more than enough on his plate as of late, only to be dealing with something quite out of his comprehension.

And night surely is dark in this movie! And the day is…blue. Just as blue as the sheriff who looks like he’s on the verge of a breakdown at any moment. To be honest, I’m not really sure what the deal with the color palette is, but I have a feeling it’s used to somehow enhance the emotional state of the characters, or to provide a feeling of it being chilly since it’s set during the winter time.

Unfortunately, the movie does fall a bit apart during the final moments, mostly due to the rather lackluster reveal of the monster (could have been a cool game boss, but as something scary in a horror movie, not so much), and a somewhat cheesy ending. Overall, though, Dark Was the Night is a decent mystery-fueled creature feature film.

Director: Jack Heller
Writer: Tyler Hisel
Also known as: Monster Hunter (UK)
Country & year: USA, 2014
Actors: Kevin Durand, Lukas Haas, Bianca Kajlich, Nick Damici, Heath Freeman, Ethan Khusidman, Sabina Gadecki, Steve Agee, Jacob Grigolia-Rosenbaum, Billy Paterson, Terry Fiore
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2251281/

Alien: Romulus (2024)

Posted on August 20, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

Rain Carradine is an orphan who works with her adoptive brother Andy at the mining colony Jackson’s star. Andy is a reprogrammed synthetic human, whose only mission is to do what’s best for Rain. As can be expected, the mining colony is a shithole that treats its workers like slaves, and when Rain’s contract is unexpectedly extended, she’s had enough and wants out of the place in whatever way possible. Tyler, her ex-boyfriend and some of their fellow friends have found a derelict spacecraft nearby, and they decide to go on a salvage mission in order to retrieve the cryonic stasis chambers before others beat them to it. They all want to leave and travel to a planet called Yvaga, and together they fly a mining hauler to what they find is an abandoned research station called Romulus and Remus. Of course it proves to not be so abandoned after all, which is revealed when two of them are trying to retrieve some stasis chambers in a room filled with facehuggers. This inevitably leads to one of them getting an unwanted facial, which again leads to, well…you know what. All hell breaks lose and they must avoid both facehuggers and Xenomorphs while also having a time limit as the space station is getting closer to crashing with Jackson’s planetary rings.

Alien: Romulus is a sci-fi horror action film from 2024, co-written and directed by Fede Alvarez. It is the seventh installment in the Alien franchise, but it serves as a standalone “interquel” which is set in a timeline between the events of the first Alien film from 1979, and Aliens from 1986. It doesn’t take too many glances before you realize how it is definitely a love letter to the original movie from 1979, and Fede Alvarez even sought out the special effects crew from the 1986 movie to have them work on the creatures. Thus, the movie includes physical sets, practical creatures and miniatures which were used wherever possible. The animatronic effects were created in collaboration with Legacy Effects and Studio Gillis, where Legacy Effects is the successor to Stan Winston Studios, who worked on the 1986 film Aliens, and Studio Gillis is the successor to Amalgamated Dynamics, who worked on Alien 3 (1992) and Alien: Resurrection (1997). Aside from that, Fede Alvarez was also inspired by the video game Alien: Isolation from 2014, a game he played around the same time as his movie Don’t Breathe (2016) was released, and said: “I was playing, and realizing how terrifying Alien could be if you take it back to that tone“. So, yeah, there’s definitely a lot of love for the original movie and the franchise here. Is it nostalgic? Yeah, of course it fuckin’ is, and no, that’s not a bad thing.

The characters are much younger than in earlier Alien movies, none of them are fully fleshed out but it works well enough and makes them all moderately interesting. The interaction between Rain and her “brother”, Andy the artificial human, gives the movie a bit more heart without trying too desperately to pull on your heartstrings. The gore (although there isn’t any abundance of it) is decent, and the visuals and atmosphere are good. The use of practical effects though is very much the icing on the cake in this movie, and oh boy does some of those effects show the obvious rape analogies with phallic and yonic designs all over the place. A scene where a Xenomorph emerges from what I could best describe as an enormous slime-vagina on the wall, showing its phallic head in full display, very much leaves little to your imagination and if you’re one of those who never saw these obvious phallic designs in earlier Alien movies, then, well…here you have it. Now you cannot unsee it. Then again, if you’ve ever seen some of H. R. Giger’s other works (the guy who was responsible for the visual design of the creatures in the 1979 Alien film) you shouldn’t be too surprised over its obvious sexual undertones.

Overall, I thought Alien: Romulus was a blast when viewing it in the theater, and while it was nowhere near as bloody and gory as Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead (2013), it was fun and felt as one of the Alien movies as of late that gave much of the same feeling of claustrophobia and unsettling atmosphere as the first.

Oh, and if you want more Alien, check out the impressive animated fanmade horror short Alien: Monday which was also released this year after having been in production for 6 years!

Director: Fede Alvarez
Writers: Fede Alvarez, Rodo Sayagues
Country & year: USA, UK, 2024
Actors: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, Aileen Wu, Rosie Ede, Soma Simon, Bence Okeke, Viktor Orizu, Robert Bobroczkyi, Trevor Newlin
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18412256/

Mirrors (2008)

Posted on August 16, 2024August 31, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

We start off with a security guard running through a subway station, and upon entering a room and seeing his reflection in a mirror, he starts freaking out and begs for his life. This doesn’t end well, as his reflection takes a shard and cuts its own throat, and the same thing happens to him. Then we move over to the life of Ben Carson (Kiefer Sutherland) who is a suspended police detective on mandatory leave from the New York police department after a shooting that went terribly wrong. Now, he works as a security guard and will start working at the Mayflower, which is a luxury department store that was destroyed by a fire five years earlier. And of course: the building has a vast array of mirrors still standing from when the store was open. How convenient. On his first night of patrol, he notices eerie things like how the mirrors are covered with handprints which seems to be from the other side of the glass. Couldn’t be anything suspicious about that, right? He also finds the wallet of the guard we saw in the opening scene, who he was told had killed himself. Inside the wallet is a note saying “Esseker”. He starts seeing more and more visions, and Ben becomes convinced that the mirrors play a part in what is happening here. And when his sister is also killed by her own reflection, Ben is fueled by rage and fear for his family’s safety, and becomes determined to figure out the mystery behind the mirrors and the mysterious note in the previous guard’s wallet.

Mirrors is a supernatural horror film from 2008, directed by Alexandre Aja (High Tension, Piranha 3D, Crawl). The film is based on a South Korean horror film from 2003 called Into the Mirror, and it was originally supposed to be a straightforward remake until Aja was brought on board to read the script, which he then wanted to change as he was quite dissatisfied with the particulars of the original film’s story. Thus, Mirrors only includes the basic idea involving mirrors. It was shot in Romania, most of it in Nicolae Ceausescu’s unfinished Academy of sciences which is located in Bucharest.

Abandoned places and spooky mirrors is of course a fine setup for a horror movie, merged with a protagonist who is troubled, divorced and having an alcohol problem (funny how those things always go hand in hand) we are left with what will inevitably not bring much new to the table, but at least it will offer some good creepy atmosphere and a mystery that keeps you intrigued enough to keep watching. Another plus is that there’s some really effective scenes, especially that of the sister’s death. If you watch this movie with some of the directors other gorier and grittier movies in mind, however, this one’s very different. There’s none of the really gritty vibe which can be found in High Tension for example, or any abundance of gore like in the incredibly gory Piranha 3D. This one’s a different meal, and Aja’s movies does indeed come in varied forms, you can rarely expect the same thing over and over from him. Which is not a bad thing.

Overall, Mirrors is a nice supernatural horror film where Jack Bauer, uhm, I mean Kiefer Sutherland plays the role as the alcoholic ex-cop pretty well. The best part of the movie is when everything is still a mystery, as the creepy vibe does diminish a bit once the supernatural goings-on are revealed, but this isn’t exactly uncommon in mystery-fueled horror movies. I have also seen the original movie this one was based on, and this is one of the (rare) cases where I actually prefer the re-imagined version. This is probably largely due to this movie being a re-imagination rather than a remake.

A sequel, called Mirrors 2, was released in 2010.

Director: Alexandre Aja
Writers: Alexandre Aja, Grégory Levasseur
Country & year: USA, 2008
Actors: Kiefer Sutherland, Paula Patton, Cameron Boyce, Arika Gluck, Amy Smart, Mary Beth Peil, John Shrapnel, Jason Flemyng, Tim Ahern, Julian Glover
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0790686/

Cherry Falls (1999)

Posted on August 9, 2024August 9, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

– HAIL, HAIL, Virgin HIGH! Drop your pants it’s FUCK, or DIE!

And that’s a classy, colorful quote from the more obscure Scream clone teen slasher that is Cherry Falls. That Shakespearean line didn’t just come from nowhere, by the way, because listen to this: In the small, idyllic town of Cherry Falls, teens start to get killed, one by one. And one particular thing the victims have in common is that they’re (- drumrooooll -) virgins.

One of the town’s young virgins is Jody (Brittany Murphy). She’s also the teenage daughter of the sheriff Brent (Michael Biehn). And when he starts to see the clear pattern of the killers motive, we have a pretty awkward father/daughter moment where he straight out asks her while she’s lying in her bed if she’s…you know…has lost her innocence with her current boyfriend, and the conversation continues like this:

You don’t have to worry about it. We broke up the other day, she says.

Yeah…., dad replies with a sigh.

Then she asks with a straight face Are you disappointed? Are you still disappointed that I’m still a virgin?

Dad answers No, no, not at all (Yes, you are). I’m very, very proud of you.

Good acting saved this scene from the ultimate cringe.

But, still though, since the script seems to be written by an alien boomer, we have some eye-rolling moments sprinkled all over the place with some questionable thought of logic. This is also what makes Cherry Falls so amusing, odd and weird. And the sweet cherry on the top is a borderline zany Britanny Murphy (RIP) with her teen angst boiling up to eleven and looks like seconds from bursting out in a panic attack. Please have someone give the girl a box of Belgian chocolate and a big teddy bear. It gets weirder when the news about this mysterious virgin-killer reaches all the kids at the Cherry Falls High School, and they have the plan of the century you’d never guess: To organize a huge event where all the virgin teens in the town gather to have a big, fat sex orgy, a fuck fest, with the T-shirt worthy slogan “Hail, Hail, Virgin high, drop your pants its fuck, or die!“ Alcohol included. Good luck and have fun. The title for this film should have been Fuck or Die. The German title is the closest with Sex oder stirb (Sex or Die). It’s far from the bloodiest slasher film out there, but it’s certainly one of the horniest. So I’ll give it that. Meanwhile, our protagonist Jody, sets her own little investigation to track down the killer.

Fun fact: Ken Selden actually wrote the script as an X-rated movie, so the orgy scene at the end could go full-out in softcore style. I bet Showgirls would look like My Little Pony in comparison. Too bad it never “came” to its full climax, that would have ended the 90s era of teen slashers with an epic orgasmic bang.

And if you find the tone of the film somewhat confusing and completely off, you’re not wrong, as director Geoffrey Wright and scriptwriter Ken Selden were clearly not on the same page. You see, Selden wrote the film from a more silly and satirical angle on the slasher genre, whereas Wright went for a far more serious approach. He also cut out many of the comedic elements to add more horror. Unfortunately, the kills are nothing much, where the only memorable death scene is the girl who gets tied and nailed to the ceiling after being stabbed to death. That’s at least the only one I can remember.

Despite its troubled production, Cherry Falls has its qualities. It’s polished, well-directed and goes its own unique way. So it’s not just a blatant copy of the more well-known teen slashers of that era. In the midst of the weird, muddled silliness, the film manages to keep on track with a serious mass-murder mystery to be solved. We also have an intriguing killer, spiced with some elements of true-crime to keep you invested. The killer also gives some Malignant vibes where I wouldn’t be surprised if James Wan took some inspiration from.

As mentioned, Cherry Falls didn’t have a smooth production, to put it mildly. The creative differences between the writer and the director are one thing, but the film is most notoriously known for being the most expensive movie made for TV with a budget of 14 million $ (approx the same budget as Scream.) The film was originally set up for a wide theatrical release in the US, but did never get an approval through the censorship – which is kinda odd since this is far from the most graphic mainstream slasher out there. But just the thought of teens having sex scares the bureaucrats at the rating boards more than anything else. The film also crashed with protests from the residents of Richmond where part of the movie was shot. So the film was dumped on TV (way before streaming services were a thing), and I would guess seen by few. It was only screened at theaters in the UK and other places in Europe with great success, even though the box office numbers are unknown. It has gained a cult-following throughout the years and was released on Blu-ray by Scream Factory in 2016, where they did their best to get the license to the fully uncut version through USA Films, but to no avail. Maybe there were some real orgy scenes to dig up there. Who knows.

Director: Geoffrey Wright
Writers: Ken Selden
Country & year: USA, 1999
Actors: Brittany Murphy, Jay Mohr, Michael Biehn, Jesse Bradford, Candy Clark, Amanda Anka, Joe Inscoe, Gabriel Mann, Natalie Ramsey, Douglas Spain, Bre Blair, Kristen Miller
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0175526/

Humanoids from the Deep (1980)

Posted on August 6, 2024September 18, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

It’s summer and the place is a sleepy hillbilly fishing town, Noyo, in northern California, where the local women are starting to get raped by humanoid fish monsters. Some context: it all starts with a fishing trip going horribly wrong when they catch one of the humanoids in their fishnets. It goes from bad to worse when the fisherman’s young son falls overboard and gets pulled under the water and killed. The boat gets blown to pieces when a flare gun accidentally fires into the gasoline-soaked deck.

Fishmonsters must be on everyone’s mind who witnessed it, right? Of course not. The locals suspect Johnny to have caused the explosion, because he’s an Indian and those who died on the boat didn’t like those kinds of people. Racist alarm. Well, there’s not much of a mystery here as the viewer is fully aware of what really happened. A dog disappears and gets found by the shore, totally mangled. Poor doggie. But that’s not the only one, as all the dogs in town have been brutally killed overnight and discarded like trash by the docks. And the only dog left alive is Johnny’s, the Indian guy. Not the greatest start when the town is preparing for a festival, sponsored by the legendary Olympia Brewing Company.

It gets more serious when more townspeople are getting killed. The schlock elements really kicks in with a teenage couple having a swim at the beach and getting attacked by some humanoids. Here we see them in full costume, which actually doesn’t look too bad. But that’s until we see them in motion, because actors in big, heavy rubber costume suits are not a good combination. A scientist, Dr. Susan Drake, enters the scene to get to the bottom of the case and her research can inform us that the town is being plagued by mutated salmons.

Killing dogs is one thing, but the most alarming thing must be that the humanoids rape the female victims, something that was not originally included in the rough cut. First-time film director Barbara thought a rape scene with a rubber-looking fishmonster would look dumb. She has a point, though. And her being a feminist, she refused to film such a scene. Roger Corman (RIP) was a producer on this thing, which explains a lot as his fingerprints are spotted all over the place. But why he hired a female feminist to direct under his New World Picture company is a ball-scratcher. Well, he never hired a woman to direct again. So, he fired Barbara (even though she’d already completed the principal shooting) and hired Jimmy T. Murakami (Battle Beyond the Stars, When the Wind Blows) to shoot the scene. Corman got some backlash for this, so for the hell of it, he recycled it one year later in Galaxy of Terror with a giant, horny maggot.

Another fun trivia: actress Ann Turkel, who plays the scientist, once said why she chose to do this film: “It was an intelligent suspenseful science-fiction story with a basis in fact and no sex“. It also had the working title Beneath The Darkness, which she loved. Oof, talk about being totally duped. Roger Corman, you little rascal. Because, not only did Corman add more scenes of graphic nudity, and spiced up the sleazy nature and monster rapes to amp up the schlock elements, he also changed the title to Humanoids from the Deep, which Turkel of course hated.

The script is very unfocused which blends some out of place slasher elements with melodrama between the Indian and the other locals that escalates into cheesy mass-fistfights while we’re waiting for some fishmonster action. It’s still a silly, entertaining and campy B movie that walks the tiny line between the more wooden Z movie territory. Surely not a masterpiece. The climax at the carnival is a highlight where we have some really bad acting to laugh at, and the film is as cheesy and fun as the title suggests. The awesome cover art for the Blu-ray does not lie, in other words. The gore is minimal, though, so don’t get too excited. But the little we have is pretty solid. Some of the makeup crew later worked on films like Cocoon, RoboCop, The Blob, Night of the Creeps, Blade II and more, so that should say something. It’s also worth mentioning that the film has the first musical score by James Horner, who was to become one of the most prolific composers in Tinseltown.

Director: Barbara Peeters
Writers: Frank Arnold, Martin B. Cohen, William Martin
Country & year: USA, 1980
Actors: Doug McClure, Ann Turkel, Vic Morrow, Cindy Weintraub, Anthony Pena, Denise Galik, Lynn Theel, Meegan King, Breck Costin, Hoke Howell, Don Maxwell, David Strassman
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080904/

Longlegs (2024)

Posted on August 2, 2024August 2, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

We’re in the 1990’s, where FBI agent Lee Harker has been assigned to work on a case involving a series of murder-suicides. In each of these cases the father in the family has killed everyone else and then himself, but the big mystery is how each case also involves a letter written in Satanic coding, signed by “Longlegs“. If someone or something has influenced the fathers in these families to commit the murders, then how and why? Upon investigating, Lee discovers that in each family there’s been a 9 year old girl born on the 14th of each month. And all the murders occurred within six days before or after the birthday, which makes the dates of the murders form an occult triangle symbol on the calendar. One date is missing, though. And Lee receives a coded birthday card from Longlegs, and he threatens her that revealing the source of the code will end up getting her mother killed.

Longlegs is a horror thriller film written and directed by Osgood Perkins, starring Maika Monroe as FBI agent Lee Harker and Nicolas Cage as Longlegs. It was released in the U.S. on July 12, and have since grossed approx. $74 million worldwide on a budget under $10 million, making it Neon’s highest grossing film so far and the highest grossing horror film of 2024. It seems to be steadily creeping closer to surpass the box office total for last year’s indie horror hit Talk to Me. How it became such a massive success is not only favorable reviews from critics and audience, but a devilishly (no pun intended) clever marketing campaign: the promotional teasers have been effectively chilling and with taglines like “The best serial killer horror film since The Silence of the Lambs“ and “The scariest film of the decade“, then yeah…expectations were set high, and the hype got real. And we all know that too much hype can ruin the experience for some. Of course, Longlegs isn’t the first horror movie to suffer a little from extreme hype, Talk to Me from last year was also so hyped that a certain type of people were ready to release bash-reviews on YouTube in pure spite. And that’s something both of these movies have in common, aside from being really good movies.

With the movie premiering in the U.S. several weeks before we (finally) got the premiere here in Norway (which is August 2nd, but we got to see it on an early screening on July 31st), we couldn’t avoid having new videos and reviews popping up all over the place during those weeks of wait. We did our best to avoid major spoilers prior to watching it, and as always: lowered our expectations a bit. And we both had a great time in what was a fully booked auditorium. That’s actually a first in a very long time, that a screening we went to was full, so that’s something.

Visually, Longlegs look great (I mean the movie, not the actual character who looks like something dredged up from your deepest fever-induced nightmares. Hmmm…I guess that’s actually a compliment in this setting). The cinematography and clever use of color is pure art, and I really liked the use of 4:3 format for the flashback scenes. The use of sound and music adds the perfect layer of ominous vibe to the movie, created by Zilgi which is a pseudonym for Elvis Perkins, the director’s brother. Performances are strong, with Maika Monroe’s portrayal of the FBI agent Lee Harker who appears to be somewhere on the spectrum, but also possibly influenced in other ways which I will not spoil here. But the icing on this Devil’s Food Cake is without a doubt Nicolas Cage as Longlegs. While the titular character has a limited screentime, whenever he’s on screen his uncanny appearance and freakish behavior evokes a perplexing mix of feelings: it’s a blend of goofy, disturbing, and zany. He talks in a Tiny Tim-esque voice, heightening the creep factor a dozen notches.

Cage said that he drew inspiration from his own mother for this role, channeling his late mother’s mental health issues. She suffered from schizophrenia and depression throughout her life, and in an interview Cage stated:

“It was a deeply personal kind of performance for me because I grew up trying to cope with what she was going through. She would talk in terms that were kind of poetry. I didn’t know how else to describe it. I tried to put that in the Longlegs character because he’s really a tragic entity. He’s at the mercy of these voices that are talking to him and getting him to do these things“.

So yeah…all of that gives an even eerier and tragic vibe to the whole character. Speaking of mothers, Osgood Perkins also stated that Longlegs is his most personal film as of late, and an ode to his own mother and the secrets she kept about her husband’s sexuality and how “a mother can lie out of love“. Perkins’s father was Anthony Perkins (yep, the Psycho guy), and his mother’s name was Berry Berenson, who perished in the first plane to hit the World Trade Center. So yeah, a lot of dark and depressing stuff to take inspiration from here, that’s for sure.

The movie also seems to have planted a seed in certain religious and devil-fearing circles. On r/Christianity it seems like it’s about time to pray some more. “I don’t believe you can say hail Satan that many times and not call upon anything. I just haven’t felt right and I’ve been praying a lot since I watched the movie“. I don’t know about you guys…but if this was supposed to be some kind of deterrent from seeing the movie, it did at least have the exact opposite effect on us.

Longlegs, being the great horror movie it is, is probably best viewed if you don’t let your expectations elevate too high prior to watching it. It’s not going to make you faint, have a miscarriage, puke snakes or have the devil hitch a ride back with you from the theater. It’s just a good, slow-burn atmospheric horror movie that really hits the sweet spot on oppressive, nightmarish and nihilistic mood. Having seen and appreciated some of Perkins’s earlier movies is a plus, but not completely necessary as this is the most straightforward horror film I’ve seen from him thus far. But it is a slowburner, it does focus a lot more on atmosphere than narrative (in order to repeat myself from my review of Gretel & Hansel), and it is made in total Oz Perkins-vibe. So if you can appreciate movies like this, go see Longlegs and Hail Satan!

Writer and director: Oz Perkins
Country & year: USA/Canada, 2024
Actors: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt, Michelle Choi-Lee, Dakota Daulby, Lauren Acala, Kiernan Shipka, Maila Hosie, Jason William Day, Lisa Chandler, Ava Kelders
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt23468450/

Last Shift (2014)

Posted on July 26, 2024August 2, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

Jessica Loren is a rookie police officer, ready to take on her first assignment: taking the last shift at an abandoned police station that will soon be closed down for good. For some reason she doesn’t quite understand, her mother calls her and pleads with her to not take the job. She believes it must be because her father was killed on duty many years ago. Anyway, Jessica ignores her mother and leaves for duty. The commanding officer at the police station gives her a quick tour, and tells her that a Hazmat team will come around sometime later in order to collect evidence that is difficult to expose of. For this reason, she’s ordered to never leave her post. Sounds like a pretty easy task for a rookie, right? Nothing bad could happen here…right? Well, what sounds like a dull job, soon proves to be anything but as Jessica soon finds herself in stranger and stranger situations. The first incident is when a hobo enters the place and acts all weird, but it gets more disturbing when she receives a series of distress calls from a woman named Monica, who claims that she’s been taken hostage by a cult and believes they’re going to kill her. The thing is: no emergency calls are supposed to come into that police station anymore, as they have been rerouted to the new station. Jessica also finds out that in this exact police station the members of an infamous cult committed suicide one year ago, and she starts suspecting that the calls from Monica indicates that this cult still has some living members. Something is going on at this police station for sure, and while the place may be abandoned by people, something is definitely still there…

Last Shift is a horror film from 2014, directed by Anthony DiBlasi, written by DiBlasi and Scott Poiley. It was filmed in Sanford, Florida, in an actual abandoned police station. The script for the movie had actually not been written yet until the director and writer came upon the place. Sometimes you just need to find the right location and setting first, especially when you’re an indie filmmaker.

DiBlasi’s vision for the film was to have one that focused on atmosphere and would keep the audience wondering and intrigued by the mystery, and on this it definitely hits the sweet spot perfectly. Despite being a one-location movie, it keeps the pacing up and rarely falters. Much of the horror elements and sinister atmosphere comes from the main character’s isolation and increasingly bizarre and creepy events that keeps unfolding around her. Going from the subtle incidents at the beginning to a gradual rise in bizarre occurrences, the tension always keeps building. It’s also obvious that DiBlasi used the Manson Family as inspiration for the cult, while adding some occult and satanic elements into the mix. I guess you could define this movie as a little bit of a slow-burner, where indeed the focus on creepy atmosphere and a tingling sense of foreboding is what drives a lot of the movie forward, keeping its mystery elements in the shadows and revealing little bits and pieces along the way.

Overall, Last Shift is a creepy and effective psychological horror film featuring a satanic cult. DiBlasi also directed a remake titled Malum in 2023 where it appears the focus is a lot more on gory effects and an expansion on the cult elements.

Director: Anthony DiBlasi
Writers: Anthony DiBlasi, Scott Poiley
Country & year: USA, 2014
Actors: Juliana Harkavy, Joshua Mikel, Hank Stone, J. LaRose, Sarah Sculco, Kathryn Kilger, Natalie Victoria, Mary Lankford Poiley, Matt Doman, Lindsi Jeter, Randy Molnar
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2965466/

Lovely, Dark and Deep (2023)

Posted on July 12, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

In Arvores National Park, several rangers and other people have gone missing over a span of many years. Lennon is a backcountry ranger who starts working at the place, after her predecessor became one of the missing people. Of course, Lennon also has a motive for working at this place: when she was a child, her sister Jenny disappeared there, and she hopes that maybe she will find some answers. In her ranger cabin, she also keeps track of all the people that have gone missing over the years, including her sister. Soon, there’s report of another missing person as well: Sarah Greenberg, who went missing during a hike. The rangers form a search party, but the head ranger orders Lennon to stay at base camp, an order she quickly disobeys. She starts searching for Sarah as well, and finds her bloody and disoriented. What sounds like a happy ending to what could have been another missing persons case, ends up getting Lennon fired and she is asked to await airlift out of the place in five days. Well, five days can be a long wait…and strange things start happening when Lennon then decides to take a hike through the park…

Lovely, Dark and Deep is a horror film from 2023, written and directed by Teresa Sutherland. It’s her feature debut, and stars Georgina Campbell (from Barbarian) in the leading role. The movie was filmed in Portugal, providing many great forest and landscape shots.

The feeling of total isolation comes through well during the film, where the infrequent appearance of other rangers and hikers almost come as a surprise. It is both beautiful and unnerving, where Lennon walks through the confines of the forest on a sunny day, while also feeling like the entire place is ready to swallow her up and leaving no trace. Every year, hundreds of people go missing in national parks, and many of them are never found. While it comes as no surprise that this could easily happen due to the lack of proper planning, not having proper gear, unpredictable weather, sudden illness and even wildlife, it’s still something that’s fruitful for fanciful explanations and creepy theories: from the more down-to-earth speculations like serial killers roaming these places to supernatural explanations, Bigfoot, ufo’s, you name it. And while Lovely, Dark and Deep does offer some supernatural elements, most of it is subtle enough and without any thorough explanation, which works just fine for a movie like this.

Lovely Dark and Deep is a slow-burner which focuses on mood and mystery, providing an unsettling and often dreamlike atmosphere. It’s primarily about a woman who returns to the place where a childhood trauma happened, in order to seek answers. Not only does she get isolated in the vast forest landscape, but she’s already mentally isolated by dwelling on her past terrors and conflicting feelings and self-doubt, partly blaming herself and wondering if she could she have done something to save her sister. It does take a certain turn after a while where it ventures into the supernatural and surreal, which may take some people out of it, but which I personally found enjoyable. Recommended if you want something beautiful, mysterious and atmospheric. Or something lovely, dark and deep if you will.

Writer and director: Teresa Sutherland
Country & year: Portugal/USA, 2023
Actors: Georgina Campbell, Nick Blood, Wai Ching Ho, Mick Greer, Celia Williams, Maria de Sá, Ana Sofia Martins, Ivory Lee Smith, Letícia Assunção
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15560132/

Nazis at the Center of the Earth (2012)

Posted on May 3, 2024June 12, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

Nazis at the Center of the Earth. How can you go wrong with a title like that which sounds more like a drive-in flick from the 1970s, or something that Robert Rodriguez, once upon a time, could have made under his Grindhouse banner? Well, first off – this is from the cheap film company The Asylum which is, in the most recent decade, most known for its own original Sharknado franchise. Besides that, we can mention a neverending list of shitty low-to-non budget mockbusters such as Titanic II, Transmorphers, Atlantic Rim, AVH: Alien vs. Hunter, Invasion of the Pod People, Independents’ Day (yes, really), Battle Star Wars … And the list goes on like a non-stop diarrhea of the most shameless clickbait titles to fool people with one brain cell to trick them into watching something familiar to a mainstream Hollywood film. Their Paranormal ~~Activity~~ Entity wasn’t the worst as far as I remember, although it’s ages since I saw it.

The one we’re talking about here is their own warped version of Iron Sky, only here the Nazis aren’t coming from the moon but from the depths. And mockbuster or not, the title is enough to get my attention as I eat fat turkeys like this for breakfast, and it turned out to be as fun and crazy as the title would suggest, with even more surprises. In other words; the best way to experience this loony ride is to go in blind as this review will contain some spoilers.

We are at the research center Niflheim in Antarctica where two scientists are out on the snowy fields, ready to sample the surface for their research. When they unfold something metallic under the snow with a swastika painted on it, they get captured by a group of Nazis wearing gas masks, and they take them to a bunker somewhere deep underground. The leader of the research team, Dr. Adrian Reinstad (Jake Busey, the son of madman Gary Busey) heads out with his crew to find them.

One of the crew members, named Silje, is supposed to be Norwegian, by the way. And she speaks the language just as clearly and fluently as Brad Pitt speaking Italian – or like these two guys from an episode of The X-Files.

Anyway – they descend into a huge, dark pit that takes them to something that at first looks like an alternative Narnia dimension. But with a further look, it’s a huge underground world with trees, plants, and a forest where a fortress can be seen in the distance. Here they meet the evil Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele (Christopher Karl Johnson), with the infamous badass nickname The Angel of Death, who performed torturous experiments on victims at the Auschwitz II concentration camp during WW2.

So, the big question is: why is he still alive, and what’s his agenda?

Wikipedia can tell us that Mengele died by drowning after he suffered a stroke while swimming in 1979. That’s of course BS and pure falsification of history as we here learn that he actually kept himself alive all these years by taking organs from victims and replacing his bones with mechanical skeletons. And with his army of Nazi zombies, he’s still experimenting, so he finally can reanimate none other than der Führer himself. The plan here is to rise up to the surface with a war spaceship, so they can finally take over the world and create the perfect Arian race. Of course.

The film has apparently one of the highest visual effects shot counts in an Asylum production with a budget of $200,000. And still, it looks like a Lada trying to be a Plymouth Fury flooded with empty bottles of Vodka, Smirnoff and Jägermeister. Not a single outdoor scene looks realistic with its cheap digital backgrounds. The snow vehicle we see at the beginning looks like something from PlayStation 2. We see people who are supposed to be in the distance in the fake-looking Antarctica when they’re clearly copied and pasted with lousy use of green screen. It’s also made in a serious way with actors who really try to act professionally, which just makes it more amusing. A great recipe for a funny-bad movie, for sure, and in my judgment, not made bad on purpose like the Sharknado films. There’s some decent gore here, which is the only legit quality to point out.

But what’s takes the cake here, or the big Golden Raspberry, if you will, is the true star of the film: Please kneel and give your salute to – Robo-Hitler (James Maxwell Young), where Hitler’s head is attached to a cyborg machine. Yes, you heard that right. This actually took me off guard, I did nazi that coming, and my eyes teared up from laughing. Everything here is just perfect; the way he stomps with his cyborg body like a mecha boss from a Sonic the Hedgehog game, the amateur acting, the goofy faces, the whole naive, enthusiastic energy. What more is there really to say? Nazis at the Center of the Earth is an epic schlockfest and a true gem in its category which is available on Blu-ray at Amazon.com, and last time I checked, on Tubi.

Director: Joseph J. Lawson
Writer: Paul Bales
Country & year: USA, 2012
Actors: Dominique Swain, Jake Busey, Joshua Michael Allen, Christopher Karl Johnson, James Maxwell Young, Lilan Bowden, Marlene Okner, Adam Burch, Maria Pallas, Abderrahim Halaimia, Trevor Kuhn
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2130142/

Absentia (2011)

Posted on April 23, 2024June 12, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

Tricia is a woman who lives alone in a house in Glendale, California. Her husband has been missing for seven years, and the time has finally come to declare him in “dead in absentia”. This is a tough decision for Tricia, and her younger sister Callie comes to stay with her during this time. Daniel’s death certificate is being worked on, and Callie helps Tricia look for a new apartment. However, when the date for declaring him dead approaches, Tricia starts having nightmares and experiences terrifying hallucinations of him, where he appears to be angry and frustrated. Her psychologist says this all stems from the guilt she feels, but declaring him dead after all these years is still the right thing to do so she can finally move on. Callie, who is a former drug addict, tries to keep her days busy by jogging around the neighborhood, and one day she runs into a creepy tunnel where she sees a man who appears to be shocked that she can see him. He begs her to contact his son, but she assumes this man is just a confused and possibly dangerous hobo and runs off. She later comes back and leaves some food for him, but he’s not there anymore. Later, when Callie has decided to finally sign Daniel’s death certificate and get it over with, she sees a bloody and barefoot person in front of her house. When she sees that it’s Daniel, she is first a little confused as she thinks it might be yet another of her creepy hallucinations of him…but then she realizes it really is him, in flesh and blood. At the hospital, he appears to be disoriented and severely malnourished, and can only explain that he’s been “underneath”…

Absentia from 2011 is written, edited and directed by Mike Flanagan and produced by FallBack Plan Productions. It was partly funded by over 300 donors through a Kickstarter campaign, where the goal was to raise $15.000 and they ended up with $25.000 which was a bit more than one third of their final budget. Mike Flanagan has been serving several titles into the horror genre over the years, including Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016), Dr. Sleep (2019), the TV mini series The Haunting of Hill House (2018) and many more. While Absentia is one of his very earliest work, there is actually a little bit of an easter egg here where in the psychologist’s office we see the Oculus mirror on the wall, which had been previously used in Flanagan’s short Oculus: Chapter 3 – The Man With the Plan from 2006, and was later included in his feature film Oculus from 2013.

This movie is definitely a slow burner, where the mystery regarding Daniel’s disappearance and the tunnel nearby keeps you guessing and curious throughout the movie. The mood is dire and depressing, with a steady build of unease. There’s a fair amount of subtlety here, which doesn’t always work in the movie’s favour, but at other times perfectly boosts the underlying feeling of unease. Like, the small detail of seeing posters nearby the creepy tunnel of missing dogs, implying that it’s not only Daniel’s that’s gone missing in that neighborhood. The small nudge to the old children’s tale The Three Billy Goats Gruff, an old Norwegian folktale which was first published in 1844, is also a nice touch where using something from old folklore and twisting it into something else in modern time.

While Absentia is by no means any masterpiece or a must-see, it’s still a nice watch if you want something eerie and slow-paced where it’s all more about mood than substance.

Writer and director: Mike Flanagan
Country & year: USA, 2011
Actors: Katie Parker, Courtney Bell, Dave Levine, Justin Gordon, Morgan Peter Brown, Jamie Flanagan, Doug Jones, Scott Graham, Connie Ventress, Ian Gregory
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1610996/