horror movie review – Horror Ghouls

The Uncanny (1977)

Posted on April 22, 2025April 23, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

Wilbur Gray (Peter Cushing) is a horror writer who is preparing to show off his latest work to his sceptical publisher. With this, he’s going to reveal something truly sinister: that cats are supernatural creatures who’s got all of humanity in their controlling claws! Wilbur ventures off in the dark to visit his publisher, and a black cat appears to be following him. Inside his publisher’s abode, Wilbur also discovers that this man owns a white, fluffy Persian cat named Sugar. A fitting name for such a sweet furball. Wilbur, however, becomes even more terrified. The enemy is everywhere, oh my! He desperately tries to convince his publisher that the feline race is, indeed, a threat to humanity and the devil itself in disguise. And in order to prove it, he tells three tales about cats causing death and mayhem.

The Uncanny is a British-Canadian anthology horror film from 1977, directed by Fenis Héroux and written by Michel Parry. It stars Peter Cushing, Donald Pleasence, Ray Milland, Joan Greenwood, Donald Pilon, Samantha Eggar, and John Vernon. The movie was shot on location in Montreal and Senneville, Quebec, and Pinewood Studios in England. All of Peter Cushing’s scenes were shot in England, as Cushing wasn’t too keen on traveling abroad at that stage of his career.

The three tales told makes one thing pretty clear very early on: it’s not really the cats that are the baddies here. They pretty much just take revenge on horrible humans and gives them some well-deserved karma. In the first segment, taking place in London in 1912, the story is about a wealthy woman owning a bunch of cats, and she has decided that she wants her cats to inherit her fortune. The maid, who also happens to be the lover of this rich lady’s nephew, wants to intervene so the nephew and her can inherit the money (if this plot sounds a little similar thus far, you’ve probably seen Disney’s Aristocats from 1970). The cats won’t have any of this bullshit, of course, and the maid’s actions receive a well-deserved revenge.

The second segment, taking place in Quebec in 1975, takes a rather whimsical turn. The orphaned girl Lucy comes to live with her aunt and husband, and the mean cousin Angela. Lucy’s only friend is her black cat Wellington, but her cousin does everything she can to have the cat removed. In the end, everything turns into some pretty crazy and utterly cheesy scenes that I certainly didn’t see coming!

The final segment, taking place in Hollywood in 1936, is where everything goes completely into Looney Tunes territory however. The actor Valentine De’ath replaces the blade of a fake plastic pendulum with a real one, causing his wife to be killed during the shooting of a scene. His young mistress gets the role his deceased wife had, and he brings his mistress to his home immediately. There, we even get a Looney Tunes reference when the mistress sees the wife’s cat and says “I thought I saw a pussy cat! I did, I did!“ which is of course an obvious reference to little Tweety’s famous line. And Valentine, that bastard, dispose of the cat’s newborn kittens, just to prove how much of an absolute shitstain he is (like the killing of his wife hadn’t already established that). Once again the cat gets revenge, with several scenes of silly chasing and cartoonish fun.

In the UK, the film was originally given an X-rating (not really sure why, although there are some pretty decent gore scenes which was probably considered a little bit too much at the time), but it performed poorly at the box office. And, well…this movie certainly isn’t for everyone. While the first segment is having a more serious tone, the rest goes from wild to completely bonkers. Perfect Horror Ghouls material for sure, though!

The Uncanny is a movie where you really need to go in with the expectation of watching something truly silly, as this is one of those movies that shouldn’t be taken seriously for even a second. It’s just pure, cheesy fun, with lots of cute cats. And like several other cat-themed horror movies (like Uninvited and Cat’s Eye), you root for the cats of course, and you don’t really have any reason not to. The humans are the bad guys. Just like in real life.

Director: Denis Héroux
Writer: Michel Parry
Also known as: I kattens klør (Norway)
Country & year: Canada/UK, 1977
Actors: Peter Cushing, Ray Milland, Joan Greenwood, Susan Penhaligon, Simon Williams, Chloe Franks, Katrina Holden Bronson, Donald Pleasence, Samantha Eggar, and a legion of angry cats
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076853/

Abruptio (2023)

Posted on April 18, 2025April 18, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

Les Hackel is a guy who has just been dumped by his girlfriend, and has to live with his parents which includes a nosy and nagging mother. And of course, the “whatever mom says“ kind of dad. On top of that, he works at a dead-end job. Les hates his life, but of course he does the one thing that will surely make his life even more miserable: drowning his sorrows in a bottle. Yup, Les has got a severe alcohol problem as well. When your life is like an open wound, the sweet temporary relief of alcohol is all too tempting, but in the end it’s just making everything much, much worse. Les is apparently smart enough to have realized that, as he’s trying to sober up…but that’s never an easy task, of course. Then one night, he discovers a fresh incision in his neck. He gets a call from his buddy Danny, who’s also got the same incision in his neck, and he says to Les that someone has implanted a bomb inside them. Danny gets a mission on his phone, but refuses to comply…and his head goes BOOM! That, at least, proves to Les that the bomb stuff is all too real. He also starts getting messages with demands to carry out several missions, always with deadly results. As the violence escalates around Les, he tries to find out what is really going on in a world that seems to have gone completely insane.

Abruptio is an adult puppet Sci-Fi horror film from 2023, which was written, edited and directed by Evan Marlowe and produced by Kerry Marlowe. It screened at several festivals, and won 21 awards. The movie stars several well-known actors here for the voices of the puppets, including Robert Englund, Jordan Peele, and Sid Haig in his final film before his death in 2019. And yes, the movie was released in 2023, but the voice recordings started on May 23, 2015, and wrapped on December 2, 2017. A passion-project, for sure, where Marlowe mentioned in an interview with Dread Central that the very first idea for using puppets in this film came from a dream he had about everyone having turned into puppets. Dreams can, for sure, be quite the inspiration!

The puppets in this movie really belongs in the uncanny valley area, where some of them look like pure nightmare fuel. The puppetry is mixed with part live action, giving everything a really weird and surreal vibe. It’s a bit reminiscent of the British puppet show Spitting Image, but whereas the puppets in that show are pure comedy caricatures, the puppets in Abruptio leans more towards being outright grotesque. And it definitely works on establishing the otherworldly, sick tone. Aside from the visuals, the whole plot of the film feels like a fever-induced nightmare, and we start to expect that the film is also leading up to a certain reveal. We do get more than a few little snippets of information from the very start of the movie, which immediately makes you question what Les is actually experiencing and what significance everything has. I don’t want to spoil too much here, but even if you can more or less guess what the movie is leading up to from early on, the ride surely is an outlandish one.

Abruptio is, for sure, a one-of-a-kind horror movie. If you want something bizarre and different, give this one a watch!

Writer and director: Evan Marlowe
Country & year: USA, 2023
Voice actors: James Marsters, Christopher McDonald, Hana Mae Lee, Jordan Peele, Robert Englund, Sid Haig, Darren Darnborough, Rich Fulcher, Sohm Kapila, Patrick Cavanaugh, Carole Ruggier, John Wuchte
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3963226/

Octaman (1971)

Posted on April 15, 2025April 15, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

Octaman, or Octamaaaan, like Johnny Depp would have said it, is exactly what you think it is – a mutated, cheesy-looking octopus humanoid who shuffles around and kills people, played by a poor actor who can barely see shit through the costume. Yep, it’s one of those films. This is the type of vintage Z movie amateur campy schlockfest that could easily be mistaken for a lost Ed Wood film. And if you get some strong Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) vibes, you’re not wrong. Octaman is written and directed by Harry Essex, who also was a co-writer of said film.

The plot is something like this: we follow Dr. Torres as he goes on an expedition with a small crew to a primitive Latin fishing community in Mexico to uncover some atomic radiation. And they, of course, encounter Octaman, who’s actually credited in the opening sequence as Octaman, not the actor, just to add some extra flavor of mystique. It worked with Boris Karloff with Frankenstein way back in 1931, but here, though, with the cheesy costume and all that doesn’t even fool a blind person, it’s just comical. Anyway… Octaman starts to stalk and kill people one by one.

Octaman goes pretty fast into the monster action. And I’m using the words “monster action“ very loosely here, because there’s nothing much to get excited about, except for having some laughs at its overall incompetence, as the action has the impact like a pillow fight in your sister’s bedroom. The way Octoman attacks its victims is pure retarded slapstick comedy. He leaves his bodycounts with open wounds and an eye that almost pops out of some poor dude’s skull, yet he only slaps them like a drunk bitch with his overlong rubber suit tentacles as he also struggles to not lose balance. He’s as intimidating as, well, Octaman. Fun stuff. The monster costume was designed by the one and only Rick Baker, who later became one of the most prominent effect makers in Hollywood. This was his very first gig, and… we all have to start somewhere.

Writer and director: Harry Essex
Country & year: Mexico/USA, 1971
Actors: Pier Angeli, Kerwin Mathews, Jeff Morrow, David Essex, Jerome Guardino, Robert Warner, Norman Fields, Read Morgan
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067515/

Hide and Seek (2005)

Posted on April 11, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

David Callaway wakes up and finds the body of his wife Alison in the bathtub. Their 9-year old daughter, Emily, also comes in and witnesses her mother’s apparent suicide. As can be expected, this whacks a huge dent in the girl’s psyche. Who wouldn’t be a mess after witnessing a parent committing suicide? David is a psychologist so he should be well aware of some of the coping mechanisms, so when he decides to move to upstate New York and Emily starts interacting with an imaginary friend called Charlie, he doesn’t consider it much of a problem. Children always imagine things, and this imaginary friend could very well just be a way Emily deals with her grief. That is…until the actions of this “Charlie“ becomes quite sinister. One day David even discovers their dead cat in the bathtub, which Emily claims was killed by Charlie. Still, he refuses to get her help which should be quite apparent that she’s in need of right now. On top of that, something is up with David himself, where he keeps having nightmares about a New Year’s Eve party that took place before his wife’s death…

Hide and Seek is a psychological thriller from 2005, starring Robert De Niro as David and Dakota Fanning as Emily. It was directed by John Polson, and written by Ari Schlossberg. Originally, Albert Hughes was set to direct, but it’s said that he left “due to creative differences“. The movie grossed $127 million worldwide on a budget of $25 million.

As a psychological thriller, Hide and Seek works pretty fine. It’s mysterious, has a certain atmosphere, but never goes into actual scary territory. You keep wondering if Emily is just mentally broken, or if something else is going on. Whether it is something psychological, supernatural, or something else entirely, is kept a mystery for quite a long time without giving too much away early on, and the movie is also deliberately throwing a handful of red herrings at us. The movie is upheld by strong performances, and a young Dakota Fanning (who played the leading role in last year’s The Watchers by Ishana Night Shyamalan) plays her role as the disturbed child fairly well. There are some things about the character’s behaviour in the movie that, later on, feels quite illogical.. but that’s due to the script rather than the actual performances. It was also fun to see Famke Janssen in a minor role here.

The main problem with Hide and Seek is the nonsensical twist (yes, it’s one of those movies), where little actually makes sense, and it drags out a bit too much before wrapping things up entirely. Overall, though, it’s a fine and suspenseful thriller, it just happens to fall a bit apart due to a pretty muddled twist.

The movie was also given five different endings, and the one we watched was the US theatrical ending.

Director: John Polson
Writer: Ari Schlossberg
Country & year: USA, 2005
Actors: Robert De Niro, Dakota Fanning, Famke Janssen, Elisabeth Shue, Amy Irving, Dylan Baker, Melissa Leo, Robert John Burke, Molly Grant Kallins
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382077/

Run (2020)

Posted on April 8, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

Dian Sherman has just given birth to a premature baby, and while she watches it lying inside an incubator, she asks the nurses if the baby will be ok. The only answer she gets is total silence. Uh-oh, that’s a really bad sign. Then we fast forward to several years later, and we see that Diane lives a seemingly fine life with her teenage daughter Chloe. Chloe’s life, on the other hand…she suffers from arrhythmia, hemochromatosis, asthma, and diabetes. To top it all, her legs are also paralysed. Fucking yay. She’s confined to a life in a wheelchair, and needs to take a batch of medications everyday. Oh, and she’s homeschooled by her mother, of course. What a surprise. Chloe’s one and only desire (aside from better health, of course) is going to college, and she eagerly awaits an answer to her applications. Whenever Diane gets the mail, the answer she gives Chloe is always the same: no response from any of the colleges. Oh well, no choice but to stay stuck with mommy dearest for the rest of your life, girl. Or…maybe mommy dearest is not such a dear after all. One morning, Chloe finds a prescription bottle including some green pills, but the name on the bottle is Diane. The thing is…Diane wants Chloe to swallow these green pills. What’s in those pills? Are mommy’s intentions perhaps not so motherly after all?

Run is a psychological horror thriller directed by Aneesh Chaganty and co-written by Sev Ohanian. It stars Sarah Paulson as Diane (known for several roles in the American Horror Story series, and as Ratched in the netflix series) and Kiera Allen as Chloe. Kiera has been a wheelchair user since 2014, which makes this movie the first major thriller to use an actual wheelchair user since Rear Window (1998).

There’s no doubt that Run is a solidly made thriller, yet the biggest problem is that there really isn’t that much of a mystery here: we know very early on that Diane is off her fucking rocker, and is deliberately trying to keep Chloe confined in the home. Just to what extent she’s actually taking it, and what her reasonings might be, is what the plot is slowly unfolding. Is she just a worried mother that wants to keep her sick child close to her, or is something else wrong here? Well, of course it’s the latter, that’s not even a spoiler. Still, it’s fun to watch as Chloe continues trying to outsmart her mother and dig deeper into what is really going on.

There’s also some fun easter eggs in the movie, including a pharmacist named Kathy Bates, which considering the movie’s setting is an obvious nod to Kathy Bates’s role as Annie Wilkes in Misery (1990). Diane certainly ain’t no Annie Wilkes, though, and I have to admit that Chloe’s situation often didn’t feel quite as threatening as it could have been, but the movie still offers enough suspense and entertainment to keep you engaged. And as you probably start expecting already from very early on in the movie, there are a few twists and turns throughout the story.

Despite being a little predictable at times, Run is a pretty fine thriller with some solid performances and a decent suspension level. Recommended if you want a popcorn thriller on a lazy evening.

Side note: this film was the last film Aneesh Chaganty directed, before meddling with generative AI by creating the infamous I H8 AI short. And no, it’s not a short about actually hating generative AI, but rather a short that kind of tries to show how “creative“ a director could be if he had generative AI tools so he could, well…not be creative at fucking all. Unless you consider typing “plz make background look like Manhattan“ and hit a button as “creative“. The short was made as a collaboration between Meta and Blumhouse, and the reception was, as expected, not good. The backlash even caused it to be removed from Letterboxd. After this, Chaganty has been pretty silent and there’s currently no upcoming projects on IMDb under his name. If he does make more movies, I certainly hope he can take a Heretic in the credits and state that the movie was made without generative AI.

Director: Aneesh Chaganty
Writers: Aneesh Chaganty, Sev Ohanian
Country & year: USA, 2020
Actors: Sarah Paulson, Kiera Allen, Sara Sohn, Pat Healy, Erik Athavale, BJ Harrison, Sharon Bajer, Onalee Ames, Joanne Rodriguez, Ernie Foort
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8633478/

Cathy’s Curse (1977)

Posted on April 4, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

– She has the power…to terrorize. And to make us laugh.

This amusing French/Canadian-produced little clown show starts with a father and his daughter, Laura, who learns that the mom has left them and taken Laura’s brother, George, with her. Your mother is a bitch. She’ll pay for what she did to you, says the dad. Oki-doki. As they’re driving through the woods at the night, a white rabbit suddenly crosses the road that makes the dad lose control and crash. Dad and Laura get stuck in the car as it sets on fire where they get burned alive. At least, the rabbit got away unscathed.

Then we jump to present time (1977), where George, who’s now a middle-aged man, his wife Vivian and their young daughter Cathy, are moving into the house we saw in the opening sequence. George hasn’t been in the house since he was four and does his best to act emotional. Vivian has some mental and paranoia issues after she had a nervous breakdown and has some extreme mood-swings. Another one who suffers from sudden mood-swings, plus some late stages of dementia, is the film itself, because nothing here, absolutely nothing makes sense. As Cathy explores the house, she finds herself in the cobweb-filled attic where she picks up a ragdoll with both eyes stitched shut. Cathy then looks at a picture of the ominous girl we see at the movie poster, and Cathy gets possessed. Why? Not even the three screenwriters knows.

The film is all over the place with random stuff that just happens because the messy script just says so. A medium visits Vivian, a woman I almost mistook for Mr. Bean’s girlfriend. She holds an old picture of Vivian’s husband’s father, the guy we saw in the beginning. She sees flashes of the car accident as she talks in a cheesy demonic voice. Nothing here builds up, things happen sporadically just out of the blue. Cathy suddenly has telekinesis Carrie powers so she can make random objects in the house explode. In one scene, Cathy has breakfast, served by a nanny. Cathy throws a bowl to the floor, just randomly, with both hands to demonstrate that the bowl flies across the kitchen. Nanny acts like it was just an accident. After she picks up two pieces of the shattered bowl, she smiles and says: There, it’s all done. Ok, if you say so. I guess the screenwriters thought they did a great job here to not insult the viewers’ intelligence.

Another memorable scene, for all the wrong reasons, is where Cathy starts to teleport herself around the house to scare her mother. She acts way more irritated than scared, because none of the three scriptwriters would even imagine that anyone would shit themselves if they witnessed such a thing. Vivian must have some serious brain damage or some skills in pills, or maybe both. Cathy then makes the whole house shake. This movie is more tone-deaf than Yoko Ono. And, of course, I have to mention the classic scene where Cathy makes an old drunk geezer freeze while he sits by the kitchen table. And while he just sits there, stiff frozen, a snake and some spiders suddenly appear and crawls at him. And we have some stellar dialogues here:

– Old bitch. Fat whore. Fat dried up whore.
– Go on, you filthy female cow. Make us laugh!
– All women are bitches.

The eye-catching poster reminds me of the poster of James Wan’s Insidious. But don’t let that fool you. Cathy’s Curse is not even close. It’s barely close to even being a horror movie. I even doubt that the three screenwriters, that also includes the director, was never under the same roof during the writing process. I’d guess that all three took elements from The Exorcist (1973), Carrie (1976) and The Omen (1976), with the same idea of “children scary“ then tossed it together and maybe just hoped for the best. The messy and incompetent writing is just one thing, we also have some weird music choices, primitive effects (even for a 1970s film) and bizarre editing. In one scene the camera zooms slowly into a door with some ominous music, just randomly. We don’t see much of that door again. The acting goes from wooden to laughably bad. The “big star“ here is the child actress Randi Allen as Cathy. And she’s no Linda Blair, just to make that clear. This is the one and only film she appeared in, and said in an interview once that she only took the role to financially support her single mother. To add some extra quick cash, her brother, Bruce Allen, also had a small role in the film.

Cathy’s Curse is a nonsensical mess that only leaves questions rather than answers, and is as scary as My Little Pony, but the overall inept absurdity makes it a fun watch.

Director: Eddy Matalon
Writers: Alain Sens-Cazenave, Eddy Matalon, Myra Clément
Country & year: Canada, 1977
Actors: Alan Scarfe, Beverly Murray, Randi Allen, Dorothy Davis, Mary Morter, Roy Witham, Bryce Allen, Sonny Forbes, Robert V. Girolami
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075820/

The Booth (2005)

Posted on April 1, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

Shogo is the star of a popular call-in radio show, who is forced to broadcast from the infamous “Studio 6“ which is a creepy and abandoned booth. The last time someone used it was several years ago, when the DJ there committed suicide. Yay. Shogo is also a prime example of the douchebag breed, and of course he’s got some skeletons in the closet. His crew isn’t exactly treated fairly by him, either. When someone on the line starts whispering “liar“ to him, he starts fearing that someone knows about his troubled past. Or maybe…the studio is cursed and the same fate that fell on the previous DJ will also fall upon him? Shogo keeps getting more and paranoid.

The Booth is a J-Horror movie from 2005, written and directed by Yoshihiro Nakamura. The leading role in the movie is played by Ryûta Satô, and this was actually his first leading role. He’s most known for his role in the Netflix movie Fullmetal Alchemist from 2017.

There are many early 2000’s J-Horror films that are little known. Some for obvious reasons, while others never got the attention they deserved. The Booth falls a bit into the latter category, as it’s a very decent mystery horror film. It’s mostly a one-location movie, which focuses on the tension built from Shogo’s asshole-behaviour and creeping sense of unease as he fears that his bad attitude has started catching up on him. As the film opens with the reveal of the DJ having committed suicide in the notorious Studio 6, we already know that there might be some supernatural influences here. Or is there, really? The movie offers so many twists and turns underway, some which you’re very unlikely to see coming.

Limited location movies often depend a lot on the leading role character, and Ryûta Satô does a great job performing as the arrogant and despicable DJ Shogo. All throughout the movie, you get snippets from his past and several misdeeds, and there’s especially one that ends up revealing quite the unexpected turn of events. You don’t root for this guy at all, so you end up looking forward to see him get a bit of karma teeth on his ass. Whether or not it’s a curse, supernatural forces of some kind, or simply his barebones bad conscience that catches up with him…well, that’s something the movie keeps as a mystery until the very end.

The Booth is an obscure, creepy little J-Horror film, definitely worth a watch if you’re looking for a claustrophobic horror chamber film that will keep you guessing.

Writer and director: Yoshihiro Nakamura
Original title: Bûsu
Country & year: Japan, 2005
Actors: Maiko Asano, Makoto Ashikawa, Mansaku Ikeuchi, Seiko Iwaidô, Hijiri Kojima, Masaki Miura
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0760506/

Shakma (1990)

Posted on March 28, 2025March 29, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

You mad, bro? Shakma the baboon clearly is, that’s for sure. And who can really blame him, as he’s trapped inside a tiresome office building with a bunch of bland NPC characters that you rather want to flush down the toilet before you take the weekend off. Cuz this fluffy firecracker has zero tolerances for stupid people… and doors. Especially doors.

The story is even more simple than any of the Friday the 13th films: A group of young medical students are preparing themselves to be locked in a lab building during one night to role-play Dungeons and Dragons. And instead of a serial killer lurking around, we have a baboon named Shakma who starts to body-count them. And if baboons weren’t hostile enough animals already, this one has just been injected with an experimental serum that increases his aggression even more. If you play with fire, you’ll get burned, as we say, and Shakma will make sure of that.

Shakma is a very cheap-looking film, even for a budget of 1,500,000 bucks. The setting here, with the grey office environment, is as dull as it can get with the esthetics and vibes that ooze like a cancelled sitcom where the actors, who’s just graduated from the Disney Channel School of Acting, have to deliver lines such as You are soooooo male! Well, excuuuuuuse me, princess…

And speaking of: the one and only reason to give this silly B(aboon) movie a watch is thanks to Shakma himself. He’s “played“ by Typhoon – a real, unstoppable, demonic force of nature who’d bite off both of the ears of Mike Tyson in a heartbeat. Typhoon is not just the most badass name ever, but the most fitting, as he literally typhoons himself throughout the whole film, where you almost feel more sorry for the doors he tries to break, as his own life was depending on it. Fluffboy is so fucking pissed and full of rage that he makes Alec Baldwin look like Postman Pat, and no one can convince me that he was a joy to work with. I bet the feelings from Typhoon were mutual. At least he got snacks constantly between the takes to calm him down and was carefully instructed by his trainer, Gerry Therrien, so he didn’t murder the whole film crew. Baboons are, after all, nothing to joke with as they’re the most aggressive monkey species out there. The actors did what they could to not make eye contact with Typhoon as that was enough to trigger him. Actress Amanda Wyss, most known for being the first victim of Freddy Krueger back in 1984, was especially very afraid of the fluffy co-star. And I’m just assuming that most of the budget went to the doors. I’d love to see an hour of B-rolls of this, which I’d guess would be more amusing than the film itself.

That being said, Shakma works fine for what it is, and there’s enough of monkey rage, body-counts, some cheap gore and some even cheaper laughs, if you’re in the right mood, to keep you entertained. This was also David Lynch’s favorite film of 1990. And after learning that, I just can’t stop picturing a little, cute, fluffy baboon dancing in a certain red room.

Directors: Hugh Parks, Tom Logan
Writer: Roger Engle
Country & year: USA, 1990
Actors: Typhoon, Christopher Atkins, Amanda Wyss, Ari Meyers, Roddy McDowall, Robb Edward Morris, Tre Laughlin, Greg Flowers, Ann Kymberlie, Donna Jarrett
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100589/

Strange Darling (2023)

Posted on March 25, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

A woman is hunted by what appears to be a deranged killer, who is hellbent on taking her down. Who are these people, and what connection do they have? Well, we are soon to find out more but not in a chronological order. What we see in the opening is very much the middle of the film, and after an action-filled chase scene we backtrack to an earlier chapter where we find out that the woman meets the guy in order to hook up for sex in a local motel. Something is off right from the start, of course, and everything keeps spiraling into what ends up as a crazy cat ‘n mouse chase where you’re going to keep guessing.

Strange Darling is a thriller from 2023, written and directed by JT Mollner. The movie is told in a non-linear fashion, with 6 chapters, and very much centers around keeping you wondering what is going on, except the early understanding of this being a story about a serial killer. The movie was shot on location in Oregon on 35 mm film by Giovanni Ribisi.

When Mollner had completed the script for the film, he got three different offers and decided to meet up with Miramax first, where he wasn’t even three minutes into his pitch before Bill Block told him they had a deal. Things didn’t exactly go as smooth from thereon, however. It was shut down two days into filming due to some executives suddenly deciding to throw a fit, and stated “we hate everything about what you’re sending us. We’re not enjoying this at all. And we’re not sure if this is going to work“. They also wanted Willa Fitzgerald to be recast (who was excellent in the role) and hated that the movie was told in a non-linear way. Why they suddenly started to act like someone shoved a cactus up their ass is anyone’s guess, but it actually went as far as Miramax hiring another editor to recut the film as a linear story, to which Mollner clearly stated that he then would have his name removed from the film. He utilized a clause in his contract that stipulated that he could demand there to be a test screening of his director’s cut, and during this test screening the crowd started being very enthusiastic about the way the story was told, and Miramax finally let Mollner keep his final cut. Bill Block also later apologized to Mollner for the shitstorm during the film’s production.

While I have to admit that I have mixed feelings about stories not being told in a non-linear way (sometimes it works perfectly, other times it might just befuddle everything), this movie is a perfect example of how the non-linear storytelling heightens the experience. Yeah…I gotta admit that certain things were a little obvious already from the early part of the movie, but not being entirely sure what is going to happen and what has already happened, that is part of the viewing experience here. It’s entertaining and suspenseful, and the performances from both Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner are really well done and the cinematography is vibrant and beautiful.

Strange Darling is one of those movies that is hard to write very much about since it really is a movie where you need to go in as blind as possible, and while the “twist“ or whatever could be seen from a mile away (or at least from very early in the movie), it was still a very fun experience.

Writer and director: JT Mollner
Country & year: USA, 2023
Actors: Willa Fitzgerald, Kyle Gallner, Ed Begley Jr., Barbara Hershey, Madisen Beaty, Bianca A. Santos, Steven Michael Quezada
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt22375054/

Baby Blood (1990)

Posted on March 21, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

We’re somewhere in central Africa where a tiger has been captured to be a new supplement for a local circus in France. The circus is run by Mr. Lohman, an abusing scumbag who should be fed to the lions. The staff would agree, especially the young tiger trainer’s assistant, Yanka (Emmanuelle Escourrou). One night the new tiger explodes/bursts. Splat. Just like that. And out of the tiger we see a snake-looking parasite who slimes its way into Yanka’s trailer while she’s sleeping, and crawls into her vagina. I guess Aylmer would be jealous.

As she wakes up with morning sickness, she gets confirmed from a lab that she’s pregnant. And who’s the father? Yanka have a suspicion, but little did she know. The daily life at the circus goes as normal where Lohman acts like an unhinged lunatic who wants to pick fights with the whole staff. Yanka has had enough of the abuse and dead-end career bollshit, packs a bag, steals some cash and flees to the big open world of France.

We jump to one month later where Yanka has taken shelter in a rundown crack house apartment where she has lost her mind. I bet that happens when you have a monster baby parasite in your womb that speaks to you with a distorted telekinesis voice, and tells you to kill people so that it can feed on blood to grow. She gets an unexpected visit from Lohman, who’s tracked her down, only to be the first victim. At least, this one deserved it.

From here on we follow Yanka as she goes on a murder spree where she jumps from job to job, from the one scenario to the next. Prostitution would probably be the easiest choice to lure men, but she’s way too classy for that. She goes from being a part-time waitress to a taxi driver to, much later, becoming a police woman (in the sequel. Yes, really). Not much logic here, in other words, and the film doesn’t take itself seriously. The distinct tone is pretty clear from the start where we have a quick opening monologue from the parasite itself.

80 women auditioned for the role of Yanka, and it’s easy to see what director Alain Robak was looking for. Emmanuelle Escourrou is quite a remarkable sight, the camera is sure to show us that, but she can also act and gives a pretty raw performance. The film also has some stylish flavor to it and a uniqueness that makes it stand out rather than just being another low-budget schlock. And if you’re in for the gore, you won’t be disappointed as the film has the word blood in the title for a reason. No click-bait title, just to make that clear. Despite a middle-part that drags a bit, it gets pretty wild, and Baby Blood is overall a fun, zany and a tasteful little exploitation classic with its own spin on the pregnancy horror sub-genre.

The film became an urban hit as it sold exactly 10381 tickets in Paris before it grew up to be a half-obscure cult-classic. And speaking of obscure, in one scene we can actually spot an easter egg poster for Baby Blood 2, even though it took 19 years to make the sequel, titled Lady Blood – which, judging from the trailer, looks like an Uwe Boll film. No wonder why it has a solid 2.7 rating on IMDb from only 188 users. So… nah. I’d probably check it out if it sharts out on streaming.

Baby Blood is available on Blu-ray, also with the English dub version where you can hear Gary Oldman as the parasite.

Director: Alain Robak
Writers: Serge Cukier, Alain Robak
Country & year: France, 1990
Actors: Emmanuelle Escourrou, Christian Sinniger, Jean-François Gallotte, Roselyne Geslot, François Frapier, Thierry Le Portier, Rémy Roubakha, Eric Averlant, Alain Robak, Alain Chabat
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096871/