The Devil’s Mouth (2026)

There’s no need for a deep dive into The Devil’s Mouth, there’s not much to see.

Five easily forgotten college friends take a break from soaking up Thailand’s breathtaking scenery to follow a guide into a series of partially submerged caves currently inhabited by a very hungry shark.

I smell a bad Yelp review.

Blonde beauty Sara (Kathryn Newton) is miffed at her friend Max (Lara Condor) for being an irresponsible party princess. Max wanders off at one point, forgetting to tell anyone that Sara is swimming and not on the boat.

Thus she gets to watch her pals sail off into the sunset while she gets mugged by a gang of rogue jellyfish! The kids recover and retrieve her, but she’s rightfully pissed at Max, even though the latter is paying for the trip.

Somehow this passel of feuding tourists end up underground, snorkeling their lungs out in search of an exit soon after their guide detects the unmistakable signs of a maneater in the house.

Namely a pool of fresh blood and a scuba mask that’s got two huge tooth holes in the face.

The cave decor is sufficiently rendered as to produce a measure of anxiety that is desperately needed in The Devil’s Mouth.

The shark, clearly some sort of prodigy, thrives in a mixture of salt and fresh water and instantly adapts to hunting prey in a cave, ramming the limestone to knock trembling swimmers into his watering holes.

It can also leap and jump like a porpoise, pivot its head, and swim backwards.

Not to give away too much plot, but after watching this ravenous predator make a picnic out of a half-dozen humans in less than 24 hours, and continue to hammer away at the geology trying to get Max and Sara into its belly, one can only conclude that the shark has a severe eating disorder.

In any case, the size and scale of the shark fluctuates along with viewer interest. In The Devil’s Mouth, entertainment is chiefly derived from watching hapless nitwits get chewed upon, but there’s nothing noteworthy happening—apart from magic shark antics—to keep us afloat or awake.

We’ve been on this vacation. Bring a couple good books.

Horror Castle (1963)

Get used to the sight of Mary Hunter (Rossana Podesta) wandering the grounds of a gloomy castle in a blue nightgown, accompanied by a heavy handed James Bond-style jazz score that erupts whether the scene calls for embellishment or not.

Welcome to Horror Castle, aka The Virgin of Nuremberg, directed by versatile veteran Antonio Margheriti (Castle of Blood, The Long Hair of Death, Cannibal Apocalypse).

Mary, the new bride of Max Hunter (Georges Riviere), moves into his family’s ancestral estate in Germany, an imposing edifice loaded with bad juju, thanks to the legacy of Max’s maniac ancestor, The Punisher, who tortured local girls he suspected of sinful behavior.

In straight Rebecca fashion, Max has business elsewhere for much of the movie, leaving Mary in the care of Erich (Christopher Lee) a scarred and taciturn family retainer, and Martha (Laura Nucci) the morose, stoned-faced housekeeper.

If you’re one of those folks that can’t get enough gothic atmosphere and macabre accoutrements, Horror Castle is littered with skulls, secret passages, and vintage torture devices that are still kept in fine working order.

It’s a bit of a stretch, but Marheriti tries to make a case for the monster of the house, a sadistic freak skulking about in executioner garb (Mirko Valentin) being a sympathetic character, since he was himself disfigured by fiendish Nazi surgeons to resemble a skull.

However, eliciting pity for a guy that stuffs a woman into an Iron Maiden, and torments another with a hungry rat loosed on her face is a mighty tall order.

Maybe next time.

I wish Horror Castle rated a definitive restoration, because the version I saw had been heavily edited and dubbed in English to the point of absurdity. Even so, it’s a tingly tour in a creepy ass location, with the enchanting Rossana Podesta guiding us by candlelight.

Trust me, there are worse ways to spend a dark and stormy night.

If you can handle the rough edges of budget constraints and decaying filmstock, Horror Castle sustains an eerie charm, with all its roads leading straight to the torture chamber.

Watch your step!

The Barge People (2018)

London filmmaker Charlie Steeds is earning a reputation as a British Roger Corman, grinding out low budget shockers with machine-like efficiency, as we saw in Freeze, his community theater version of a doomed polar expedition.

In The Barge People, Steeds crams scraps and trimmings from Wrong Turn, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Humanoids From the Deep, and The Hills Have Eyes into a Turducken tale of hungry amphibian mutants living in the nasty waters of England’s canal boat system.

Kat (Kate Davies-Speak) and her sweetheart Mark (Mark McKirdy) rent a canal boat for a bucolic weekend with her sister Sophie (Natalie Martens) and toffy-nosed boyfriend Ben (Matt Swales).

It doesn’t take long for snobby Ben to rub everyone the wrong way, including a feral couple living on their own barge that gets sideswiped thanks to Ben’s nonexistent navigation skills.

Before we can settle into a rousing chorus of Dumb City Kids vs Rural Ruffians, a pack of scaly predators board the tiny ship and start gnawing away on everybody in sight.

This forces Kat to strike up an uneasy alliance with Jade (Makenna Guyler), one of the boat invaders, to rescue Mark from captivity, that’s undermined by their mutual distrust of each other’s social class.

“I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth,” Jade sneers. “You’re on your own.”

When confronted with a boatload of hostile monsters, Ben somewhat whimsically offers to buy them off with a deposit of $5,000 pounds into their bank account.

Ben didn’t get the assignment.

Once again, Steeds manages to offset his lack of funds with a commitment to create something reasonably fresh, and the timeless wonder of the English countryside helps considerably.

The Barge People features vegetarian gore, with not much meat to go with all the sauce, but serves as another reminder that no one should ever go anywhere for a relaxing weekend, other than back to bed.

Stay at home and read a book. You’ll live longer.

Wind and Bone (2024)

The problem with Algonquin cannibal spirits is they never know wendigo.

In Wind and Bone, budget-conscious filmmakers Michael Tuthill and Kevin Troy drop us in the wild woods of West Virginia, where a carload of reasonably attractive campers decide to pick up Sierra (Julie Kashmanian), a reasonably attractive hitchhiker stranded in the middle of nowhere.

Lacking any sort of excuse, Sierra accepts an invitation from Alistair (Eric Henderson) to join his friends at a nearby cabin in the woods to celebrate a possible proposal from alpha dickhead, Jeff (Joshua Cody) to April (Alex Cody).

Along for the ride is Curtis (Guy Wellman), a Native American guide, who’s only there for seasonal work, and proves to be less than capable when the company is marked for destruction by a local legend that feeds on pain and misery

“I thought you were supposed to be an expert tracker,” Jeff growls.

“I’m from the Burbs, bro,” Curtis confesses.

Let the body count commence!

Only Sierra, the stranger in their midst seems to have the fortitude to fight back, as her newfound camping buddies succumb to a host of attacks by the creature itself, and each other under the wendigo’s malign influence.

Tuthill and Troy wisely elect to go with practical creature effects, pasting an elk-horn helmet on a handy stuntman as a reminder that there is, in fact, a monster on the loose. Periodically we hear it whispering in the trees.

Yes, West Virginia, there is a wendigo.

There are antlers all over the place in Wind and Bone, hanging from trees and peeping around the shrubbery. Thanks to the success of The Ritual, based on the Adam Nevill novel, antlers have become the ubiquitous symbol of folk horror, much like tentacles indicate the presence of Lovecraftian cosmic horror.

Wind and Bone is not nearly as good a movie as The Ritual, but it’s good enough for a fast folk horror fix.

Undertone (2026)

Curses! Foiled again!

The debut of Canadian filmmaker Ian Tuason, Undertone is unsettling entertainment that hopefully frightens everyone into not opening anonymous attachments to their email.

As it turns out there are much worse things than viruses out there and all the Norton Utilities in the world won’t fix them.

Evy (Nina Kiri) cohosts a paranormal podcast with her friend Justin (Adam DiMarco) while looking after her comatose mother (Michele Duquet) upstairs. Thus we have the key ingredients for a very creepy and crumbly cake and newcomer Ian Tuason gets it in the oven for a torturous slow bake.

Evy and Justin play a series of audio files throughout Undertone’s 94-minute runtime that get increasingly more disturbing, detailing a young couple’s entrapment by an Old Testament demon that preys on newborn children.

Isolated and on the outs with her boyfriend, Evy, a skeptic by nature, begins hearing strange things, her home seemingly infiltrated by the evil audio.

Tuason lets his camera wander freely around the house, occasionally keeping Evy in the frame at a watchful distance. She often turns and looks around, sensing another presence, but there’s no one there.

Filmed on a measly half-million dollar budget, Undertone isn’t popping with CGI or gallons of guts. It’s a slow burner that applies steady pressure, infecting protagonist and viewer equally with a subliminal menace, and it’s well worth your time.

Pro tip: If a recording of a demonic summoning comes up on your playlist, skip that track. Do not play it out loud especially if you have a ton of unresolved guilt issues, like Evy.

Nothing good will come of it.

Over Your Dead Body (2026)

Oh, munificent bounty!

Director Jorma Taccone (Lonely Island, MacGruber) blinks into elite company with Over Your Dead Body, a graphic and gruesome thriller that methodically sequences dark domestic comedy and Home Invasion horror into something special that perhaps belongs on the same Unicorn Noir shelf as True Romance, Brick, Fargo, Something Wild, and Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, movies that squeezed out quotably absurd dialogue between explosions of breathless brutality.

Like I said, elite company.

Dan (Jason Segel) is a hack television director married to untalented Australian actress Lisa (Samara Weaving). Separately they arrive at the same conclusion, that their stupid spouse is the reason for all the matrimonial misery.

And so begins a pair of murderous conspiracies culminating in a weekend trip to Dan’s family cabin for a Death Do Us Part party.

There isn’t a lot of witty banter flying around. Dan and Lisa are trying to destroy each other with words and deeds.

“I will give you one million dollars to shoot him in the fucking face,” Lisa snarls to Henry (Jake Curran), a would-be assassin in search of meaningful employment and friendship.

Henry isn’t the only visitor to their cozy cabin. Pete (Tim Olyphant), Allegra (Juliette Lewis), and Todd (Keith Jardine), a trio of escaped prisoners literally fall through the ceiling on top of the couple as they’re wrestling for control of a shotgun.

The power dynamic abruptly shifts. These are not your garden variety criminals. Happily deranged Pete, and his lady Allegra, a sadistic prison guard, are backed up by the towering Todd, one of the scariest and most formidable goons this side of Mike Mazurky.

Based on a Norwegian language film, Over Your Dead Body gets teeth-grittingly intense, particularly when Allegra announces she’s tired of the tedium and wants to play a game she learned on the job in lockup.

“Super easy to learn,” she explains. “We just go and grab a couple of guys, and we would drag them out of their cells, down to the laundry room where it was nice and quiet, and then draw this big circle around them, and then we would see who could fuck who first.

“The winner would get a pack of cigarettes. And the loser, well, the loser would just get fucked.”

To make matters worse, Todd, their burly bodyguard, is an undefeated champ. The depth of depravity brought by the convicts is indeed disturbing, sharpening the action to a fine edge.

Over Your Dead Body makes it frightfully apparent that bitterly feuding Dan and Lisa must somehow rekindle their relationship and join forces against a twisted trio of really mean maniacs. And so they do.

The makeup effects accompanying the inevitable battle royale are executed with artful exaggeration, gleefully maxing out the emotional payloads, as Pete gets hit by a car driven by Dan’s dad (Paul Guilfoyle) and Allegra’s foot is shot to pieces.

Durable Todd continues to terrorize Dan and Lisa after being knocked out with a pool ball in a sock, shot in the ass with buckshot, and stabbed half a dozen times with an entire rack of cutlery.

This lackey takes a licking and keeps on kicking!

That’s a small sample size of the delirious carnage on tap, but ultimately, Over Your Dead Body will win you over with its high-energy twists and humor the color of onyx.

Note: Fans of Jason Segel should also check out his show Shrinking on AppleTV. Segel and Harrison Ford play psychiatrists in need of counseling, and both the writing and acting are tops.

Segel has assembled a quality body of work, beginning with the absolutely essential Freaks and Geeks, and has quietly become one of our best actors, comic or otherwise.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (2026)

So where’s the mummy?

I can’t help but notice that anyone attempting to resurrect the mummy monster concept avoids the subject. Oh sure, we get Egyptian set dressing, maybe a fez or two from down Cairo way, but there are a distinct lack of bandaged baddies bringing undead justice from the tomb.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (not to be confused with Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy) is an awkward mix of family drama and occult investigation with all the blood and guts you can eat thrown in at no extra charge.

The story is all over the map to the point where we can’t remember if they’re in Egypt or New Mexico. Oh well, both locales have sand and rocks aplenty.

While stationed in Cairo, TV reporter Charlie Cannon (Jack Raynor, who looks like Seth Rogan’s health-conscious cousin) loses track of his daughter Katie (Natalie Grace) after she’s spirited away by a mysterious woman (Hayat Kamille).

Eight years later, the Cannons are numbing through their shattered lives in Albuquerque, when they are notified that Katie has been found living in a basalt sarcophagus.

Kids today! Am I right?

With no fanfare or preparation, the mostly nonverbal Katie is re-homed with Charlie, his long-suffering wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), invisible son (Shylo Molina), and new daughter Maud (Billie Roy).

From a catatonic cocoon, a new Katie messily emerges, shedding layers of skin at every turn in order to reveal herself as … a possessed murderous child!

Thud.

Irish filmmaker Lee Cronin (Evil Dead Rise, The Hole in the Ground) takes way too long to tell the tale, and the occasional grisly scene or splashy murder is only a reminder that there’s still lots of movie to go, much of it painted in familiar Raimi Day colors.

It’s not all bad news, by any means. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy offers damn fine freaky details and artisan-level craft in its depiction of an ancient curse that just keeps getting grimmer and grosser.

I dare you to watch it and not say “ewww” at least once or twice.

At a running time of two hours and thirteen minutes, you’ll have ample opportunity to admire Cronin’s technique and taste level in creating a competent creature feature, even though we don’t know whether to call a cop or an exorcist.

But you know what? I still miss my Mummy.

Across the River (2013)

Reasons for not writing reviews:

Sometimes the words ain’t flowing. Try as I might, nothing comes to mind other than regret for wasting a day off on poor quality entertainment.

On other occasions I may surf until my hand cramps and end up watching nothing—none of the pithy descriptions inspiring even a tentative look.

Not to put too fine a point on it folks, but it can be a chore to find source material worthy of extended coherent thought.

So it’s been a minute or two. My sincere apologies.

Like a desperate angler, though, I’m happy to report I finally hooked a specimen that warrants further study, an eerie Italian curiosity called Across the River, written and directed by Lorenzo Bianchini.

Warning! Even for a slow-burner, this one is real pokey. My advice is to stick with it, because there are treasures to be uncovered, and Bianchini succeeds in capturing a number of creepy scenes.

Biologist Marco Contrada (Marco Marchese) is hunkered down in a remote forested area near the Slovenian border, gathering data about the nocturnal habits of wildlife.

Marco duly checks and repairs his trail cameras, making recorded observations along the way, and eventually succeeds in strapping a small camera to a captured fox.

Whilst tracking the fox, the curious scientist stumbles upon an abandoned village littered with the remains of gruesome animal kills that appear to be alarmingly recent.

Across the River is rock-solid on mood and atmosphere, as Marco, the clinical observer becomes the one being watched by a pair of malevolent beings.

Bianchini makes use of minimal color adjustments throughout, with darkness having the rich, impenetrable quality of a nightmare from a past that threatens to envelope the hapless scientist.

The inky black and white footage is broken up by splashes of red, both blood and viscera, as Bianchini blends horrible history with present peril into a limbo of the lost.

I want you to watch Across the River and revel in its cursed landscape. It’s a film that grinds slowly, but surely, on a memorable mission to mess with your mind.

Widow’s Bay (2026)

If you’re late to the game, Widow’s Bay has been picked up for a second season by Apple TV! Hooray!

Fright fans are flocking to Widow’s Bay and with good reason. It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet of small-town terrors that somehow walks the finest line between horror and comedy imaginable.

Even the choice of font used in the title (Horror Paperback?) smells authentic to my nose.

Matthew Rhys (The Americans) is inspirational as Tom Loftis, the beleaguered mayor of the titular island town that may well be the most heavily cursed real estate on the East Coast.

His job, trying to get the island’s populace to tone down the spook talk while entertaining prosperous tourists proves an impossible task, but a highly amusing one.

Loftis does his darndest to disavow and debunk the many, many legends that plague Widow’s Bay, but soon realizes he’s in over his head against witches, hags, ghosts, undead killers, haunted fog, and an entire town of charming eccentrics that seem to be better informed on occult matters than he is.

Tom’s trusty assistant Patricia (Kate O’Flynn, who steals scenes, left and right), survived a murderous rampage by local maniac the Boogeyman, while she was a teenager, but finds him back in her life as an adult.

Lonely Patricia feels guilt about the girls who died, wondering why she was spared. The learning of lessons and the potential for personal growth amidst the vivid nightmare scenarios gives Widow’s Bay an extra gear, as we cheer Patricia’s steely determination in dealing with an uncanny enemy.

The third pivotal character is Wyck (Stephen Root), a, crusty, but well-read fisherman with a head full of arcane knowledge, including harrowing details of the original curse that befell Widow’s Bay hundreds of years ago.

There are satchels of intriguing subplots in the mix, but the one that affects everyone is the matter of whether or not you were born on the island—and what happens to people who try to leave.

Widow’s Bay is a big bowl of mystery with enough ghoulish garnish to tickle the fancy of folks in search of their next quality horror hang.

Series creator Katie Dippold is a former Parks and Rec writer, and clearly has a knack for birthing oddball and outré citizens that somehow steal our hearts.

Looking forward to Season 2, but a rewatch of the first is recommended. Lots of stuff going on here.

Life (2017)

Less.

Lifeless would be a more accurate title.

Even with Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, and Ryan Reynolds attached as astronauts in distress, this one never reaches orbit, and instead achieves only minimal trajectory.

Six crew members on the International Space Station discover a single-cell organism among recent samples from Mars. What starts out as a wondrous moment, the meeting of intelligent life forms, quickly becomes another bug hunt, when everyone freaks out.

The astronauts get popped off one by one, as the rapidly adaptable alien known as Calvin, decides the crew is expendable.

The creature effects are decent, giving Calvin a gliding tadpole-starfish-octopoid fluidity through the thin atmosphere as it chases down its prey.

Unfortunately, it’s not frightening, so there’s little tension at play, even as the two survivors race for the escape pods on a space station that’s set for self destruction.

As silver linings go, Life is at least good to look at. The modeling and effects techs do a bang-up job. The International Space Station registers strongly as both a vast and miraculous piece of technology, and a potential tomb that’s getting smaller all the time.

To his credit, director Daniel Espinosa handles the effects deftly, but the script by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick is a lemon, unfolding in all-too-familiar fashion—with one exception.

The end of Life is not a happy one. Is it worth sitting through the rest for a mighty grim payoff?

I’m trending negative on this issue.