horror movie review – Page 2

Aquanoids (2003)

Posted on July 29, 2025July 29, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

Aquanoids, or Aquanooooids, like Johnny Depp would have said it, is a silly Z-grade amateur-hour creature/feature flick where we have a sea monster that looks more like a rejected, drunk band member of Gwar who’d fallen into the ocean, and just decided to stay in the water and kill everyone who comes near him.

The film starts in the year 1987 in Santa Clara Island, California, where a couple is having a swim. Guess what happens. They get dragged down the water and killed by an unseen monster as a random guy is watching the “traumatic“ incident through his binoculars. And, of course, this random guy will be important later. Much later. Sixteen years later, to be precise, in the present day (2003) where a coastal town in sunny California is celebrating the 4th of July. God bless America. As the town is in full festive mode, the young girl-next-door, Vanessa, actually has far more important things to do. Because she’s an environmentalist, you see, and would rather spend her time to save our green planet by diving into the ocean to pick up trash. Greta Thunberg would be impressed. As she gathers her good karma points, she gets a glimpse of our sea-creature. Ooh, scary. She hops on a water scooter and heads straight to the town’s mayor, Frank Walsh, to beg him to close down the beaches. Because the aquanoids are back, she says, despite we’ve only seen one. Dream on, honey. Haven’t you seen Jaws, or if you dig a little deeper, Humanoids From the Deep? Here we also meet Clifton Jefferson, a mafia-looking guy who does some dirty work for Mayor Walsh, and who also looks like a Joe Pesci cosplay from Goodfellas. And if Mayor Walsh talked like Kermit the frog, I wouldn’t doubt for a second that he was played by Jordan Peterson.

Anyway, as Mayor Walsh won’t do shit because he’s exactly what he looks like: a super-shady bad guy, Vanessa and her roommate are handing out warning papers while they shout dangerous waters! dangerous waters! No one believes them though. The only one who does is Ronald Jackson, the random guy we saw at the beginning. And no, he’s not played by Eric Roberts. He’s the one and only witness of the aquanoid that killed 17 people back in 1987, and is just seen as the town’s crazy person. He now spends most of the time at the local bar being a traumatized alcoholic, and just wants to be left alone. The news and rumors of the aquanoids start to spread, and suddenly the local Hard Boiled News (yes, really) pops up to have a quick chat with none other than Jackson. Poor guy doesn’t get a break. Mayor Walsh and Joe Pesci, sorry, Jefferson, don’t like that the rumors of the aquanoids are spreading to the public, and that’s for more than one reason. The “plot“ here is thrown all over the place, and there’s just too much to spoil (or maybe not), but let’s just say that you’ll be more shocked than anything by how corrupt this Mayor is. And I also bet that he’s on a certain client list.

Aquanoids is directed by Reinhart ‘Rayteam’ Peschke. Rayteam who? He worked primarily in the Camera and Electrical Department on films such as Volcano (1997), The Usual Suspects (1995), and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (1993) With Aquanoids, you’d get the impression that Rayteam one day went through some of his old and forgotten childhood stuff in the attic, found some tapes of a home-made horror movie he made with some friends, neighbors and uncles during some summers in his early teens, and said to himself: I want to release this hidden gem on DVD. This is also the one and only film he directed.

The title, screenshots and the trailer speak more or less for themselves. If you’re familiar with these kinds of retarded, zero-budget home-made turd movies, you know what you’re gonna get. It’s amateur-hour from start to end (with a short and welcoming runtime of 1 hour and 13 minutes) with a dumb plot, bad acting, absurd dialogue, cheesy music, a series of WTF-moments, an unexpected and “shocking“ twist, and of course some cheap gore.

The highlight of Aquanoids is actually not the monster itself, which we barely get a clear glimpse of, but our two goofy antagonists, Mayor Walsh and Jefferson, as these two actors try very hard to act dead seriously. If Walsh looks somewhat familiar aside from Jordan Peterson, he’s the guy who had the deadly handshake with the Joker in his most-known-for-movie on IMDb, Batman (1989). And I’m not surprised if the one who looks like Joe Pesci has auditioned for all the Martin Scorsese films, and in his all-boiled-up frustration tricks people into believing that his most-known-for-movie, Aquanoids, is actually an alternative title for Jaws. And enough schadenfreude for today.

Director: Reinhart Peschke
Writers: Mark J. Gordon, Eric Spudic
Country & year: USA, 2003
Actors: Laura Nativo, Rhoda Jordan, Edwin Craig, Ike Gingrich, Laurence Hobbs, Suzan Spann, Robert Kimmel, Christopher Irwin, David Clark, Doug Martin
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338726/

The Bay (2012)

Posted on July 25, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

On Maryland’s Eastern Shore, there’s a cozy town called Claridge. A reporter named Donna Thompson, totally fresh in the game, has decided to cover the local’s celebration of 4th July, but amidst all the fun a lot of the citizens start falling ill. And severely so. The hospital gets overwhelmed with patients, and the head doctor calls the CDC who believes it must be some kind of viral outbreak. Things keep getting worse, with people dying showing some really bizarre symptoms, like severe lesions and their tongues missing. What could be the cause of this? Well…some months earlier, two oceanographers discovered that the bay had high toxicity levels, and even encountered multiple fish that had been consumed from the inside out, by some kind of mutated isopod. Hmm…could this have something to do with the chicken farm nearby that have polluted the bay when dumping their chicken excrement and god knows what else into the water? One thing is for certain: everything turns into full chaos mode as people keep dying.

The Bay is a found footage horror movie from 2012, directed by Barry Levinson and written by Michael Wallach. It is based on a story created by the duo. The inspiration for the film came when Levinson was asked to produce a documentary about the problems facing the Chesapeake Bay, a project he chose to abandon when he learned that Frontline was already covering the issue. Deciding to make use of all the research, he produced a horror film instead and promoted it as “80 percent factual information“. The movie was shot on locations in North Caroline and South Carolina.

The Bay is a horror movie that may feel like yet another zombie-outbreak movie at first, but instead its playing around with a concept that sells itself as something that “could have happened“. While that is a bit of a stretch, of course, it’s still a horror movie that can make you quite uncomfortable, especially if you’ve either experienced or are aware of just how much damage bacteria and parasites can do to a human body. I’m still getting chills from remembering some of the episodes of the Monsters Inside Me series that was broadcast on Discovery…bloody nine hells, how disturbing some of that actually was..! And while a horror movie like this is of course exaggerating things, it’s kind of nasty to think of how close it still is to reality. Yes, the parasitic isopod eating tongues is a real thing: it’s called Cymothoa exigua. Not believed to be harmful to humans in real life, though…so, uhm, I guess that’s a relief…

The format, found footage docudrama, works pretty well for a movie like this. It feels a little chaotic at times with all the “footage“ put together in order to form the narrative, but this only adds to the perceived realism as the citizens are literally thrown into a deadly chaos. The extremely fast-acting way the parasitic infections occur in people reminds us a bit of the typical zombie-infestation buildup where things go from zero to a thousand in the blink of an eye. No one knows what’s happening until it’s too late, and then there’s the inevitable societal crumble. In that regard, the realistic approach falters a bit, but strengthens the horror elements.

Overall, The Bay is a nice found footage horror film which makes you more afraid of the tiny things in the water that you can’t see, rather than any big monster. Probably not a good watch for those suffering from Parasite phobia, though…

Director: Barry Levinson
Writers: Michael Wallach, Barry Levinson
Country & year: USA, 2012
Actors: Nansi Aluka, Christopher Denham, Stephen Kunken, Frank Deal, Frank Deal, Kether Donohue, Kristen Connolly, Will Rogers, Kimberly Campbell, Beckett Clayton-Luce
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1713476/

Sharktopus (2010)

Posted on July 22, 2025July 22, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

Nathan Sands is a geneticist (or just a mad scientist, if you will) who has been hired by the U.S. Navy to create a new weapon. Together with his daughter Nicole, they have created a large intelligent shark with the tentacles of an octopus, because that sounds like an excellent idea where nothing can go wrong. A sharktopus, in other words, but for some reason they have decided to simply call it S-11. They control the creature by using a device on its head, which gives electromagnetic pulses. Because an attachment to such a creature’s head which is the entire means of control over it sounds like the greatest idea ever, right? Well, as can easily be imagined, the S-11 gets rid of the annoying device, and swims along to Mexican waters to create some mayhem and perhaps enjoy some human burritos. Sands and Nicole must find someone that can help them capture the monster, and meets up with a cocky dude named Andy Flynn who is apparently the most suited for the job. The catch is: the monster must be captured alive. Easier said than done! As Nicole and Andy tries to follow its tracks, a pesky news reporter called Stacy Everheart and her henpecked cameraman Bones starts pursuing the story of the year.

Sharktopus is a SyFy horror film produced by Roger Corman and directed by Declan O´Brien, which later sparked a franchise. And ohhh boy, could this one have been a total rotten fish of a stinker if it wasn’t for the obvious tongue-in-cheek approach and the self-awareness displayed here. It’s made as a “so-bad-it’s good“ movie, and that is a much harder achievement than one might initially expect. Few movies that aim for this setup manages to pull it off, but Sharktopus is one of those exceptions. It delivers exactly what it promises, and you’d have to be an idiot if you were to take it seriously for even a split second. It’s yet another movie where I’m glad we have badges instead of ratings here on Horror Ghouls…

The setup is pretty simple: crazy scientist creates monster, monster runs amok, heroes must stop it. The characters are pretty bland, with Eric Roberts as Nathan Sands being the most decent of the bunch. That being said, the over-acting and clunky performances from several of the actors here is what offers some decent laughs, plus the hilarious kill scenes mixed with bad CGI effects. Not to mention campy lines like:

– Oh no, not like this! Arrrgghhhhhh! (while attempting to convince the viewer they have really been caught by those crappy CGI tentacles)
– Damn you Sharktopus!
– You can stop staring at my rack. They’re just boobs. They’re not gonna get up and dance or anything.
– That guy was killed in front of us inches away. Inches away! Gosh. He was kind of a nice guy, you know? Smell a little funky, but he was okay. Now he’s dead.

Yeah…if I haven’t made it pretty clear already, Sharktopus is indeed a horrible movie, but for all the good reasons. It’s a lot of stupid fun, and a nice watch for the shark week!

Also, in 2023 the movie actually had a remake…from China, of all places. And to be honest it looks more like they tried to make a remake of Deep Rising. Currently not available officially anywhere outside of China…but as of now, there’s YouTube…and here’s a link to the trailer.

Director: Declan O’Brien
Writers: Mike MacLean, Stephen Niver
Country & year: USA, 2010
Actors: Eric Roberts, Kerem Bürsin, Sara Malakul Lane, Sara Malakul Lane, Héctor Jiménez, Liv Boughn, Julian Gonzalez Esparza, Blake Lindsey, Peter Nelson, Maija Markula
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1619880/

I Drink Your Blood (1971)

Posted on July 15, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

This grimy, low-budget Grindhouse classic wastes no time as we are thrown straight into an obscure Satanic cult ritual in the woods in the middle of the night, led by the charismatic sociopath Horace Born. He is a self-proclaimed Capricorn who was born in Hell and reborn on Mother Earth to do Satan’s work with his group of hippie Satanists called “The Sons and Daughters of Satan“. Sounds wholesome. They drink blood spiced with LSD as they’re buck naked before sacrificing a poor chicken (for real). A trigger warning for animal cruelty. The whole act is spied on by Sylvia, who is the girlfriend of one of Horace’s cult members. And Horace won’t have any of that. After a quick chasing scene with some funk music, she is caught, where we can only assume that she is gang-raped off-screen, before she barely makes it home alive. Next day Horace and company’s hippie truck won’t start and have to walk to the nearest town, which is Valley Hills, a small hillbilly town in the bumfuck of nowhere.

They buy a box of meat pies at the local bakery before they seek shelter in an abandoned hotel – where they completely trash the place and wreck havoc while they chase a bunch of scared rats to barbecue and eat for dinner. Yum, Burp and Hail Satan. These were trained rats, by the way, which were also used in Willard, another horror film from the same year. The dead rats we see in the barbecue scene were already dead prior to the film, if we’re gonna trust the trivia section on IMDb. Anyway, when Sylvia’s grandfather learns that this Satanic cult is in town, he decides to pay them a visit to confront them with a shotgun. But because he’s a slow, old fool, he fails miserably and gets beaten before they pour some LSD into his mouth. Even though they’re kind enough to spare his life, his grandson and Sylvia’s younger brother, Pete, who’s also been spying on them, is the next to spit on their grave. He takes the shotgun to finish his granddads’ revenge, but on his way he shoots and kills a rabid dog. And one can say that things gets really interesting from here on.

Because listen to this: Pete, the smartass, takes a sample of the dog’s rabies-infected blood, mixes it with the meat pies that Horace and co eventually eat and… well, it doesn’t go exactly as imagined. Instead of dying instantly, they slowly turn into deranged zombie-like foaming flesh-eaters, who end up attacking the townsfolk and turn Valley Hills into an apocalyptic rabies warzone which can be described as Night of the Living Dead meets The Crazies. Only, this one is far more out there than these two combined, sprinkled with more LSD, schlock and unhinged, unapologetic B-movie madness. We can say the intention of Pete was good, but man, talk about shitting the bed. Heads are rolling, limbs chopped apart, and one dude has his teeth falling out as he gets piggybacked stronghold, and some other bizarre WTF moments. It’s a full-on riot with lots of sadistic, goofy fun. Plain and simple, and not much deeper than that. I Drink Your Blood was also the first film to have the historic achievement to be stamped with an X-rating. Hats off.

I Drink Your Blood is available on Blu-ray from Grindhouse Releasing, and was once upon a time on Tubi. Don’t bother looking for it on YouTube as it’s filled with pixelization censoring.

Writer and director: David E. Durston
Country & year: USA, 1971
Actors: Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury, Jadin Wong, Rhonda Fultz, George Patterson, Riley Mills, John Damon, Elizabeth Marner-Brooks, Richard Bowler, Tyde Kierney, Iris Brooks
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067229/

Robowar (1988)

Posted on July 11, 2025August 14, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

This Italian-produced Predator ripoff starts in the midst of a full-blown bulletstorm mayhem in the jungle of the Philippines, and a group of commandos are sent to the green inferno to see what the hell is going on. We meet the four trigger-happy testosterone-filled walking ballsacks with the colorful code names Killzone, Blood, Papa, Diddy Bop and Quiang. And together they make the team called BAM, which stands for (yeah, you already guessed it) Bad Ass Motherfuckers. Can’t get more 1980s than that. They stumble upon fresh-fried corpses as they explore the territories. They rescue a damsel-in-distress from getting chased by a group of horny guerrillas. She is a young, blond nurse who goes by the name… Virgin. Sounds like she’s in the wrong movie, no?

Anyway – As they go deeper in the jungle, things start to smell more cheesy, as they’re getting hunted by an alien-looking killer robot, called ~~Predator~~ Omega One. He’s a high-tech renegade humanoid who shoots the deadliest lasers through an arm cannon and wears a silly costume where a biker helmet was used to give him the flair of RoboCop, another well-known film you’ve maybe heard of. Instead, we have just another thick layer of cheese. Now it starts to smell. And his appearance is as intimidating as…someone who has dressed up to attend a Halloween party at the local gay bar. To build up some suspense and tension, we see from his POV perspective through his lousy, low-pixelated sensor while he mumbles gibberish like a demented Indian scammer on crack cocaine. So, come get some!

Robowar is directed by schlock maestro of Italian Trash Cinema Bruno Mattei (here under his most used pseudonym as Vincent Dawn), written by the couple Rosetta Drudi and Claudio Fragasso. Fragasso also got the honor of playing the RoboPredator, which made him faint two times during the shoot due to the extreme heat. Claudio Fragasso also did the most Claudio Fragasso thing to shoot a random sequence without zero context to the rest of the film. Of course. Robowar was originally meant to just be a Vietnam-war film, inspired by Apocalypse Now (1979), shot in the hot n’ sticky Philippines and all, but when Mattei saw Predator during a lunch break, he did what he usually did: put in elements of said film to cash in on its current success. And we can only imagine what the film would look like if he had also played Contra. That being said, Mattei had already made the war film Commando Strike the year before, also in the Philippines, where I guess the leftovers of ammo, cheese, testosterone and set pieces to blow up were enough to fill Robowar. Mattei also made Commando Strike 2 the same year, aka Trappola diabolica. So yeah, Signor Mattei sure got to make his epic war films, one of which by coincidence became a Predator ripoff, and one of the mockbuster films I bet that The Asylum wish they had made some 30 years ago. And that alone says it all.

Some quoteworthy (white) lines:

– Fuck it, Diddy. Quit moving around like you’re jerking off, you’re making me seasick.

– Why do they have nicknames?
– You should know what the group is called. “BAM”.
– BAM?
– Big Ass Motherfuckers!

– Drug addicts and fags. I bet they got AIDS too, huh, Quang?

– Technology hasn’t got feelings! (I bet that Jason Blum does not agree on that one, bwhahahahaha…!)

Director: Bruno Mattei
Writers: Claudio Fragasso, Rossella Drudi
Original title: Robot da guerra
Country & year: Italy/Philippines, 1988
Actors: Reb Brown, Catherine Hickland, Massimo Vanni, Romano Puppo, Claudio Fragasso, Luciano Pigozzi, Max Laurel, Jim Gaines, John P. Dulaney, Mel Davidson
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096000/

Bad Moon (1996)

Posted on July 8, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

Ted Harrison is a photo journalist who’s on an expedition in Nepal, together with his girlfriend Marjorie. While making out in the tent, they get attacked by a werewolf who rips the tent open and snatches Marjorie out from it. Ted tries to save her, but the werewolf bites him. It then kills Marjorie, before the injured Ted manages to shoot it with his shotgun. Then, we head over to the States where his sister Janet lives together with her son Brett and their dog Thor. Then Ted suddenly contacts her and invites them over to his “home“ by the lake (he’s living in a camper trailer). When they get there, Thor is immediately picking up some strange scents and scurries off into the forest. There we see some severely mauled human remains hanging from a tree branch. And just where Ted has relocated, what a coincidence! Or not. It’s very obvious that Ted is now a werewolf since he got bitten.

When the authorities start investigations after finding the remains of several hikers and a forest ranger, all found in the woods where Ted has been staying, he gets afraid he’ll become a suspect, and decides to stay at Janet’s property. She senses no danger, of course…but Thor, on the other hand, can sniff out the threat immediately. While Ted is trying to keep his dark side under control by handcuffing himself to a tree in the forest at night (because here’s a twist: he doesn’t just turn into a werewolf every full moon, but every single night), this doesn’t always work and the consequences are…bloody. And messy. Thor is trying desperately to make Janet realize the danger they’re in, and is hellbent on protecting his family from this wild beast.

Bad Moon is a Canadian-American werewolf horror film from 1996, written and directed by Eric Red and produced by James G. Robinson. It is based on a novel by Wayne Smith, called Thor. And yes, this story is actually told mostly from the dog’s perspective, and this mixed with a score where several scenes have a slightly kitschy soundtrack, the result produces an odd family-movie-night vibe. But don’t be fooled, because this werewolf movie actually has both teeth and a bite to it (which unfortunately cannot be said about this year’s Wolfman movie). There’s some really vicious gore and kill scenes here, and despite some not-so-good CGI effects in a scene later on, the movie doesn’t have many issues in the visual part. I also found the “dog perspective“ to be both charming and fun, giving the movie a personal flair. This works especially well since Ted, whom I guess would have been the natural protagonist otherwise, is kind of a mixed bag when it comes to having any sympathy for him. While he struggles with his urges and tries some half-assed attempts to chain himself up at night, he also shows no restraints when it comes to putting his loved ones in danger. Like his wants and needs should conquer everyone else’s safety. Like in most werewolf movies, you do kind of feel for the character since what they’re going through is more or less out of their control, but Ted is going too far in the “ah well, can’t help this shit anyway“ direction. Or maybe the werewolf part has gotten too much control over him. So, Thor: go ahead and sic him, boy!

Bad Moon wasn’t received well upon its release. On a budget of $7 million, it only earned back $1.1. million. And despite some really bad CGI effects in a scene that was reminiscent of what you could see in Sleepwalkers, I think the remaining werewolf effects and costume were pretty neat, and that goes for the gore effects as well. I found the movie to be some nice, cheesy fun with a cute doggy hero in one of the leading roles. A werewolf horror movie with an odd charm to it. Well worth a watch!

Writer and director: Eric Red
Country & year: USA, 1996
Actors: Mariel Hemingway, Michael Paré, Mason Gamble, Ken Pogue, Hrothgar Mathews, Johanna Marlowe, Gavin Buhr, Julia Montgomery Brown, Primo
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115610/

Choose or Die (2022)

Posted on July 4, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

We start off by seeing Hal, a man who is the husband in a dysfunctional family. He’s a retro video game collector, and he receives a copy of a game called CURS>R. It’s supposed to be a classic text-based adventure game from the 80’s, but once Hal starts playing it he realizes that the choices the game gives him have a direct interaction with things in his own life. One of those choices he makes ends with some serious consequences. Then, we fast-forward to three months later, to the college student Kayla and her friend Isaac who is a computer geek. Kayla’s younger brother, Ricky, died a while back which turned her mother into a drug addict. On top of that, the rent collector is her supplier and forces Kayla’s mother into prostitution as an exchange to keep the apartment. So at this point we’ve already established at least one kill count we hope to see coming.

One day, Kayla visits Isaac and discovers the CURS>R game along with a phone number that’s offering a prize of $125,000. Just out of curiosity, she calls the number and then gets a recorded message from “The Terror Director“ (with the voice of none other than Robert Englund himself, and yes, even in the movie he is presented as Robert Englund which doesn’t really make a lick of sense, but whatever). The recording tells her to complete the game, and insert the number code she will get at the end of the game, and she will become the winner of all that money. Kayla starts playing it, and makes a deal with Isaac to share the money. Of course, just like we saw what happened to Hal in the beginning, Kayla soon finds out that the game intervenes with what happens in her real life, and the choices she must make often have deadly consequences.

Choose or Die (formerly titled CURS>R) is a Netflix horror film from 2022, directed by Toby Meakins as his feature directorial debut. It was originally planned to be a “short form“ series for the Quibi streaming service, which didn’t even last a year. So, over to Netflix as one of their originals then.

The premise itself, being a cursed video game from the 80s, sure does sound like some easily consumed fun. And it is. It is also very generic, and despite having the opportunity to set up a lot of very nasty situations, it has decided to play (no pun intended) everything pretty safe. There’s a scene where Kayla only sees how something is unfolding in her mother’s apartment through the game’s simple pixel graphics and MIDI music, and that’s the most exciting scene of them all as it leaves a lot to the imagination and also makes it slightly hilarious. I realize that what I just wrote there isn’t necessarily a good thing in a movie like this, though, but I actually enjoyed the setup for that scene. Now, regarding the Robert Englund cameo with the recording, it really didn’t make any sense, because he’s got fuck-all to do with the rest of movie. I was actually expecting him to show up for some kind of surprise role at the end but nah.

Despite its obvious flaws, though, I won’t lie: I found the movie to be fairly entertaining. It’s one of those simple dime-a-dozen “curse“ horror movies we’ve already seen so many variants of, but just like a cheap fast-food meal, it’s sometimes all you need. The performances are fine, and there’s a few moments that are effectively atmospheric and tense. Choose or Die, while suffering from being very generic and not going far enough with the kills, is still an okay movie to watch on a lazy day. Just turn down your expectations, and you might simply have a fun time!

Director: Toby Meakins
Writer: Simon Allen
Country & year: UK, 2022
Actors: Iola Evans, Asa Butterfield, Angela Griffin, Ryan Gage, Eddie Marsan, Kate Fleetwood, Pete MacHale, Kayleen Aires Fonseca, Caroline Loncq, Robert Englund
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11514780/

Until Dawn (2025)

Posted on July 1, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

Clover’s sister Melanie has gone missing. Desperate for any answers or at least a clue, Clover goes on a trip in search of her missing sister and brings her ex-boyfriend Max, her friends Nina and Megan, and Nina’s boyfriend Abe. They try to retrace Melanie’s steps according to the last places she was seen, and ends up by the gas station where she had sent a message before going missing. When talking to the station attendant, he claims that people tend to go missing near the mining town called Glore Valley. Alright, there’s a pinpoint to check out. When they drive to this place, a heavy rainfall makes them seek shelter at a visitor center. There, they notice the heavy rain is…strangely local. Hmm. Inside the abandoned visitor center, they find a wall that’s filled with posters of missing people. No surprise that they also find Melanie’s photo there. Nina signs the guestbook just for the fun of it, and soon a masked assailant attacks and kills everyone. And that’s the start of a time loop where they will be brought back to the first night, having to sign their names in the guestbook once more and try to survive the night. If they die 13 times, however, they will end up missing just like the previous visitors…including Melanie.

Until Dawn is a horror film directed by David F. Sandberg, and written by Gary Dauberman and Blair Butler. It’s loosely based on the 2015 PlayStation video game by the same name, where the movie is using the same universe while featuring an original standalone story.

Movies based on horror games do not, unfortunately, have many home-runs to brag about. Most of them are either underwhelming, straying too far from the source material and thus alienating the game’s fanbase, and sometimes they’re just outright awful. Sure, there are some exceptions, but they’re few and far between, and of course there’s also a few that could end up in the fun-bad category. So, where does Until Dawn belong? While I have not played the PlayStation game and have no way to compare the game to the movie, I have noticed that many have placed it in the category of movies that strays too far away from the source material. So if you’re a fan of the game, I guess it’s a safe bet that this movie would be a disappointment. All in all, I have to admit we didn’t have high expectations when watching it, but as we more or less just watched it without any comparisons in mind it actually turned out to be….fairly okay? By no means any masterpiece, but it was entertaining enough with some decent atmosphere and visuals. The pacing is fine, the deaths are sometimes quite gory, and there’s a mystery that keeps you engaged. In no way does the movie rely on you having any prior knowledge of its source material, making it a movie where you can go in completely blind.

So overall, Until Dawn didn’t turn out to be the disaster we more or less expected. It’s a pretty fine supernatural horror film, works fine on its own and gave us a decent ride. Yeah, I’m certain our opinions might have been completely different if we had played the game and were devoted fans of it. Personally, I have rarely seen a movie based on a book where I’ve read the book first and actually fully enjoyed the movie version, for example. That’s just the way it works for most people, the level of depth and engagement you use when reading a book or playing a video game will always be considerably different from a movie.

Director: David F. Sandberg
Writers: Gary Dauberman, Blair Butler
Country & year: USA/ Hunagry, 2025
Actors: Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Odessa A’zion, Ji-young Yoo, Belmont Cameli, Maia Mitchell, Peter Stormare, Tibor Szauervein, Lotta Losten, Mariann Hermányi, Willem van der Vegt, Zsófia Temesvári
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30955489/

M3GAN (2022)

Posted on June 27, 2025June 28, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

Cady is an 8-year old girl whose parents are killed in a car accident, where she is the only survivor. The girl is sent to live with her aunt Gemma, an eccentric woman who is a roboticist at a high-tech Seattle toy company called Funki. Without the company’s consent, she’s been using their resources in order to develop a highly advanced humanoid robot doll, simply named M3GAN (model 3 generative android). Things go horribly wrong during the first presentation test in the lab, where the boss orders her to discontinue any work on M3GAN. So on top of that failure, Gemma is also struggling with connecting to her niece Cady, until the girl discovers Gemma’s old motion capture robot Bruce. An old project Gemma created back at college. When she watches how Cady plays with Bruce, she becomes motivated to get rid of M3GAN’s bugs and complete her anyway. And so she does.

The finished M3GAN then ends up getting paired with Cady, and this time the presentation goes way better than the first one. M3GAN totally exceeds expectations, and even though a mass-production of her would result in a rather steep price, most children would never want another “toy“ again anyway. M3GAN proves to offer everything to a child: she can be a friend, a playmate, a therapist, a teacher…and a parent. Which, all in all, isn’t necessarily a good thing. Cady’s therapist, Lydia, mentions that she finds it worrisome that Cady appears to be developing an unhealthy attachment to M3GAN, but that’s not even the biggest problem. The problem is M3GAN herself, who appears to become more and more protective over Cady, to the point where everything that can be considered a threat to Cady’s well-being is considered something that must be eliminated…

M3GAN (or simply Megan) is a sci-fi horror film from 2022, directed by Gerard Johnstone (who also directed Housebound from 2014) with screenplay from Akela Cooper, and based on a story by Cooper and James Wan, Allison Williams and Violet McGraw. The film grossed over $181 million against a budget of $12 million, so a big success without a doubt. The sequel M3GAN 2.0. is hitting the theaters soon, and a spin-off called SOULM8TE (yes, playing around with numbers in the titles seems to be a thing here) is set to be released in 2026.

The idea for this film came when James Wan’s production company Atomic Monster was brainstorming ideas and chose to go for one with a killer doll, and going for a concept about embracing technology too much and letting it run amok. Wan said “it’s a commentary on the world we live in and it feels relevant“. It sure does, and now more than ever. An animatronic puppet version of M3GAN was used for dialogue and close-up scenes, plus stunt versions that were not puppeteered (yes, that famous dance scene would have been hard to pull off otherwise). And overall, the killer robot actually looks pretty good. They managed to give her just the right amount of realistic movements mixed with obvious robotic motions, which gives her a perfectly uncanny expression.

The movie is generally fast-paced, and mixes humour and horror in a lighthearted way which gives it a fun and campy feel. As expected it never goes very far with the kill scenes, despite there being several opportunities for it to have done so. They had to make some changes and cut down certain scenes in order to get the desired PG-13 rating for the theatrical release. Thus, the unrated release teased “more blood, more violence and more M3GAN“, so naturally we wanted to see that version! We expected to get some additional nasty and gory scenes, and what we got, was…well…barely anything at all. To be honest, it was surprisingly lackluster with very little additional meat to the bone, and I guess the most major difference was a few extra f-bombs. I guess it’s fun for the most eager fans to see the small differences, but this was so far from what we’re used to seeing in an uncut version of a movie that it felt a bit pointless. Oh well.

Overall though, M3GAN is a fun A.I. robot slasher film which works as a fine entry into the robot-killers genre. Never taking itself too seriously, never being too bloody (and yes, that goes for the unrated version as well), it’s a fine campy popcorn-flick for a lazy evening.

Additional note: the sequel M3GAN 2.0 (which we recently watched at the theaters) unfortunately ended up being quite the disappointment. While I can see how they tried to go for a “M3GAN Impossible“ version here, all horror elements are completely gone. The theme in this movie is also largely focused on what can be best described as pure pro-AI propaganda trash, which comes off as rather bad-tasting after Blumhouse’s “I H8 AI” blunder from last year. Blergh.

Director: Gerard Johnstone
Writers: Akela Cooper, James Wan
Country & year: USA/ New Zealand, 2022
Actors: Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Ronny Chieng, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis, Brian Jordan Alvarez, Jen Van Epps, Stephane Garneau-Monten, Lori Dungey, Amy Usherwood, Jack Cassidy
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8760708/

28 Years Later (2025)

Posted on June 24, 2025June 25, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

28 Years Later starts 28 years earlier with an opening sequence somewhere over the hills and far away in the countryside of the Scottish Highlands. The rage virus has spread across the country and a group of kids have been locked inside a living room with the Teletubbies on TV to be kept calm and safe, which doesn’t last long. One of the kids are Jimmy, who escapes from the home as the freshly infected are raging their way in while Jimmy’s dad, a priest, has gone completely insane as he’s on his knees at the church, welcoming the apocalypse to kill him and the rest of humanity. Because the Bible says so. Amen. Jimmy escapes, followed by a childhood that we only can imagine as a traumatic hellride that will segway itself into a fine and stable adulthood. Ha-ha. And no, this is not the first and last we see of Jimmy. He will be important later, you can be sure of that.

Then we take the huge leap of 28 years later where parts of Britain are still in full quarantine, after the rage virus has been wiped out from the rest of Europe. So maybe the last ten seconds of 28 Weeks Later happened after all in the lost tapes of 28 Months Later. We’re in a small community of survivors on the island of Lindisfarne off the northeast coast of England that is connected to the mainland through a causeway. Here they have their own fortified Animal Crossing village where the modern technology that we once knew is a faded memory. No smartphones, no internet, no telly, no cars and no botox. Most kids today wouldn’t even survive a day without their daily dose of Guess My Fart on TikTok. We meet the twelve-year-old boy Spike (Alfie Williams), his dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and the bedridden mum Isla (Jodie Comer), who’s suffering from an unknown disease. And since there are no doctors on the island to examine her, there’s only to hope for the best.

But today is a big special day when Jamie takes Spike outside of the village to the open world mainland for the very first time, to teach him to scavenge and protect himself with bow and arrows. Because the infected is still roaming, which has since mutated into new variants. Now there’s not just the regular infected to be aware of, but also the Alphas, this film’s version of the Volatiles (yes, another Dying Light reference). These giants are not sensitive to light though, and once they spot you, it’s Game Over, unless you’ve unlocked the skill to run like Tom Cruise. And all the infected are buck naked, and if you’ve never seen tits before and especially dicks, you may get traumatized. Just a friendly warning/sarcasm. Another new type of species we may stumble upon is the fat slobs (jabbas) that mostly crawl deep in the forest and slurps worms like noodles. Maybe that explains why all the jabbas are… Asians. I still have questions.

It’s all quite a surreal and eerie experience for Spike, and we feel it too, as the soundtrack is mixed with disturbing chants from the poem Boots by Rudyard Kipling, while we have some grainy war clips from the middle-ages to set up the mesmerizing mood. As Spike lets The Breath of the Wild sink in, he and Jamie enter an abandoned house where they find an infected that is hanging from his feet from the ceiling. The name Jim is carved on his chest. Huh. The infected is still alive and Jamie orders Spike to give him an arrow to his skull to make him his first kill. The trip escalates into getting chased by an Alpha all the way to the village gate. Safe and mission accomplished.

The village celebrates Spike’s coming-of-manhood quest with a big party where Spike witnesses Jamie cheating on his wife. At the same time, Spike has a little chat with his grandad (if I remember correctly), who mentions Dr. Kelson (Ralph Voldemort Fiennes), a mysterious hermit who lives some hills and forests away from the island. And Jamie is very aware of this doctor. Spike confronts Jamie the next morning and understandably gets angry at him when it’s obvious that Jamie just wants Isla to die so he can be with his new mistress. After Jamie slaps him, like the first-class scumbag that he actually is, Spike tells Jamie to fuck off and later sneaks out of the village with Isla to get her to this Dr. Kelson. Who’d know that Spike has bigger bollocks than the Alphas. Balls with Spikes, if you will.

Spike and Isla also come across a Swedish Nato patrol soldier, Erik (Erik Sundqvist), who’s been stranded in Britain after his unit patrol boat got destroyed. Since he has got nothing better to do, he joins the quest for Dr. Kelson. He also has this thing called a smartphone, something that Spike has never seen before. Erik proudly shows a picture of his girlfriend, a standard botox doll with duckface and all. You know, the regular stuff. Spike then asks what’s wrong with her face. Ooof… the comedy writes itself.

28 Years Later, where director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland returns to the franchise since the first one, was not exactly as expected. I’d say that. What we basically have here is a very spiritual coming-of-age film where the subject of death is explored in such a raw and honest way, but at the same time, with an empathic, somber and unpretentious approach which I can’t remember to have seen in any horror film. I especially like the whole concept of the bone temple, without going more into that. It’s beautiful, emotional, and it’s been eons since I actually got teared-up in a movie theater. And I’m not that easy to manipulate. And yeah, there is action and several wild and brutal scenes here as the threat of the infected looms everywhere, even though the weather in Britain is better than ever. The gore doesn’t hold back, which is all good old practical.

While the ground story itself is nothing new, the execution is quite something else. The cinematography, the use of the idyllic summer landscapes with the blue sky and all, makes a stark contrast to the morbid and ugly, almost like a dreamlike paradox. There are some really haunting images here and some brilliant use of silhouettes while the kinetic camerawork amps up the intensity. That this thing was shot on iPhones with a budget of 60 million dollars and looks more crisp, lively and just overall way more vibrant and epic than a 200 million Disney film is just hilarious. The acting is top-tier and the newcomer Alfie Williams has a bright future ahead as he manages to carry the whole film. Jodie Comer is fantastic as the more and more sick and disorientated mother, and Ralph Voldemort Fiennes as Dr. Kelson is an eccentric oddball I’d like to see more of. Also say hello to Cillian Murphy’s long-lost twin brother. So yeah, I was highly impressed with this one, how it explored some themes in a new, fresh way, the world building and the overall vibe and atmosphere. It all just clicked.

28 Years Later is the first part of a trilogy. The second one, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, was shot back-to-back and is directed by Nia DaCosta. And I won’t deny that the director choice has given me some mixed feelings. I just hope for the sweet love of Belzebob that this trilogy is, at the very least, carefully planned with a clear roadmap so we don’t end up with another slow and embarrassing car crash incident like The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker …

And then we have the quite special and super-non-controversial ending, which connects some elements from the opening scene in the most British way that I actually found to be pure genius. It comes straight from the blue with the zany apocalyptic madness that we’re most used to in Mad Max and Dead Rising. No spoilers here, but some of the clothing choices of these individuals that pop up in the last minutes have made people on the internet completely lose their collective minds, as the one and only thing they now see is The Great Satan himself, Jimmy Savile! Yes, the former best buddy of King Charles and the once protected golden pedophile of the BBC (not big black cock). Some NPC’s are programmed to see only what they wanna see with zero ability to pick up any nuances and the several additional layers here. During the rewatch they’ll maybe also spot Epstein, Pootin and the double chin of Dan Schneider. That being said, have a cold one, smell some flowers, have sex, enjoy the summer and Memento Mori.

Director: Danny Boyle
Writer: Alex Garland
Country & year: UK/USA, 2025
Actors: Alfie Williams, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Christopher Fulford, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes, Edvin Ryding, Chris Gregory, Celi Crossland, Rocco Haynes
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10548174/

Prequels:
– 28 Weeks Later (2007)
– 28 Days Later (2002)