Creep (2014)

Mark Duplass is a funny guy.

You may know him as Brendan Deslaurier, the mega-sensitive male midwife from The Mindy Project, or as Pete Eckhart, a member of The League, a raunchy dude sit-com that ran for six years on FX network.

Creep is also funny, but in a really uncomfortable way. It’s a found-footage duet with director Patrick Brice, in which Duplass is Josef, a terminally ill man spending a day with hired videographer Aaron (Brice), on hand to document Josef’s farewell statements to his unborn son, Buddy.

From the moment Aaron accepts the job, driving way out hell and gone to a remote cabin in the woods, things just get gradually weirder and darker, his unease growing like a pea plant.

Josef turns out to be a human hurricane of passive/aggressive tactics, finding every opportunity to frighten Aaron, and then quickly apologize for his increasingly bizarre behavior.

Push and pull back. Push and pull back. It becomes a dance between the two men, as Josef tells Aaron disturbing stories about his life and wife, as they wander through the woods, eat pancakes at a diner, and return to Josef’s cabin.

Aaron, the consummate professional, is rattled by Josef’s manner that oscillates between pledges of warm friendship and frozen moments of cold confession that should be setting off screaming alarm bells in the head of someone with more common sense.

After having spent the day with Josef, he’s in a hurry to get home and work on the footage—or more likely to escape his merry menacing employer.

Sadly, like Chris Washington in Get Out, Aaron can’t find his car keys.

Josef is many things, chief among them a manipulative predator, but he is also a conflicted artist exploring his (romantic?) feelings for Aaron—and indeed the rest of humanity—by making his own films about the people he meets, that he keeps stored like treasured mementos.

Or lost lover letters. And he definitely has a type. When Aaron receives a heart-shaped locket delivered inside a stuffed wolf, he probably should have considered a change of address.

I will endeavor to find out more about the titular antagonist in Creep 2 and The Creep Tapes on AMC. Apparently, Josef’s been a busy boy, making all sorts of new friends.

Ash (2025)

Get off the planet, or don’t! Makes no difference to me.

Directed by musician Tiny Lotus, Ash is an artsy, indulgent amalgam of sci-fi/horror plot points (from Alien, The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers) that never coalesces into anything terribly original or memorable.

Riya Ortiz (Eiza Gonzalez) is the only survivor of a crew of terra-farmers on KOI-442, a dark, distant planet nicknamed Ash, due to its volcanic activity. Her fellow farmers have been murdered and Riya’s own memories of the traumatic incident are bloody, strobe-light fragments, that Tiny Lotus thoughtfully inserts every few minutes or so.

She is soon joined by another crew member, Brion (Aaron Paul), who’s dropped in from the observation satellite after receiving a distress call. Is he here to help or does he have his own agenda?

Ash provides a teachable moment for aspiring directors. If you’re going with a tiny cast, a little time spent on character development would help immeasurably. Riya and Brion are cyphers in space, and might as well be Nancy and Sluggo for all we care.

A 50-50 chance that one of these nonentities has been infected by a vague assimilating presence from the planet’s defense system isn’t really bringing anything hot and tasty to the table.

Add to this a halting narrative told in flashback, a meandering pace, low lighting (when it’s not strobed), and an intrusive techno score, and you have ample reason to skip it.

Tiny Lotus has his moments as a visual stylist, creating a believably unstable alien landscape. But there’s nobody home, dramatically speaking.

When TL reheats a trope from a better movie, it’s just a bitter reminder that Alien, The Thing, etc, are superior examples of dynamic genre filmmaking—that we could be watching instead.

Whether or not Ash is a complete waste of time depends on one’s fondness for a concept that’s already used up several miles of celluloid, namely, who, what, where is the alien menace and who can I trust?

Trust me, you’re not missing anything interesting on planet Ash.

Marrowbone (2017)

I very much recommend Marrowbone, a visually splendid example of gothic storytelling, and I want everyone to see it.

Then you can tell me what happens at the end! Send your theories to horrificflicks@gmail.com.

Written and directed by Sergio Sanchez, it’s a tragic romance, a ghost story, and a murder mystery focused on the reclusive Marrowbone siblings, who live with their ailing mother on her family’s tumbledown estate in Maine.

The Marrowbones fled England, leaving behind their father Simon, a prodigious murderer, and all-around evil bastard, to rot in jail while hoping for new hopes in the New World.

Jack (George MacKay) is the eldest son, tasked with keeping the family together at all costs, as instructed by his bedridden mother Rose (Nicola Harrison), shortly before she shuffles off her mortal coil.

Fearing that the Marrowbones will be divided up, Jack, Billy (Charlie Heaton), sister Jane (Mia Goth), and youngest brother Sam (Matthew Stagg), continue to insist that Rose is still alive to any interested parties.

The most interested party is Tom Porter (Kyle Soller), a nosy lawyer handling the transfer of the estate over to the now deceased Rose, necessitating Jack and Jane to forge documents and lay claim to ill-gotten family funds.

Tom proves to be a recurring problem, because he’s also got a thing for Jack’s beautiful neighbor Allie (Anya Taylor-Joy). Which is too bad, because Jack saw her first!

As if that crisis wasn’t enough, their notorious daddy escapes from prison and is reportedly on the trail of his absent kinfolk!

Marrowbone is a gorgeous movie to watch, like a creepier Days Of Heaven. Sergio Sanchez photographs the dilapidated mansion with natural light making it into both a living place filled with new opportunities, and a sepia-toned memory in the corner of Jack’s mind.

The cast really brings it, with Mia Goth standing out as the sensitive sister with her own tragic backstory, and Anya Taylor-Joy exudes unwavering love and support for the troubled Marrowbone clan.

Allie’s devotion is one of many questions that will occur to wide-awake viewers, and to the best of my knowledge, Sanchez offers only hazy clues leading to dark possibilities. The lack of concrete answers might sink a lesser film, but Marrowbone is worth puzzling over on a number of fronts.

If it was merely a well-made gothic ghost story, then that would be the end of the discussion. However, that there continues to be Reddit debate as to what actually takes place onscreen, nine years after its release, is evidence of a movie with genuine staying power.

Join the discussion and get back to me, please.

Bring Her Back (2025)

There is a bottomless well of sorrow in Bring Her Back. It belongs to Laura (Sally Hawkins from The Shape of Water), a foster mom with an occult agenda that requires real sacrifice.

This soon becomes apparent to her latest charges, Piper (Sora Wong) and her step-brother Andy (Billy Barratt), after their Pops cracks his coconut in a tragic shower fall.

Laura lives on a decaying MCM estate in rural Australia, with her stuffed dog, Pom Pom, a cat named Junkman, and her mute son, Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips). While she clearly adores Piper, a legally blind girl, Laura doesn’t care for her protective older brother, who wants full guardianship when he turns 18 in a few months.

But a few months is ample time for Laura’s deeply demented strategy derived from browsing some quality Russian Dark Web videos on the subject of resurrection.

Fresh off the success of their debut Talk To Me (2022), Aussie siblings Danny and Michael Philippou have landed another emotional whopper. In both films, the meticulous character development is every bit as important as the rising menace. It’s a simple equation: Better written parts result in more audience buy-in.

Piper and Andy squabble adorably, but their loyalty to each other is sorely tested by Laura, a master manipulator, and by the frighteningly feral Oliver. Philips will surely win Best Performance By a Creepy Kid in a Horror or Drama feature.

He sinks his teeth into the role and never let’s go!

Yet it’s Sally Hawkins’ harrowing madness that fuels Bring Her Back. Laura is terrifying in her fanaticism, and also somehow sympathetic, because her sense of loss is demonstrated so profoundly over the film’s running time.

These are unhappy campers. Laura’s grief has defined and ruined her, turning a mother into a monster willing to inflict harm on children, just so she can have another shot with her own deceased daughter—currently residing in a freezer.

The intricacies of Laura’s ritual and the growing discomfort of Piper and Andy is a tough pill that might need a gallon or two of water to get down. Bring Her Back is a gripping piece of cinema, but the human devastation depicted will likely not inspire multiple viewings.

Buckle up, there’s no escaping this trip to the trauma dump.

A Desert (2024)

Remember, everything in the desert is trying to kill you.

Yuppie art photographer Alex Clark (Kai Lennox) is returning to the Mojave, in search of fresh inspiration. His artistic milieu includes sun-baked landscapes bereft of humanity, abandoned structures left to the forces of ruination.

Alex is seeking freedom, he explains to his wife Sam (Sara Lind) over the phone. She duly reminds him of his financial obligations awaiting him back in Los Angeles.

Trying to salvage the remains of his enthusiasm, Alex makes friends with Renny (Zachary Ray Sherman), and his blistering hot sister Susie (Ashley Smith), the next door neighbors at his seedy hotel in Yucca Valley.

And quicker than you can say Trap Door Spider, Alex obliviously falls under the influence of Renny, a diabolical desert rat with Manson eyes, freshly emerged from the depths of heck itself.

Renny, as we discover in about two seconds, is a 100 percent, 24-7 predator that sees the agreeable Alex as an easy mark—and so he is.

Back home, Sam hires troubled private investigator Harold Palladino (David Yow) to track down her absent hubby.

Writer-director Joshua Erkman has worked with Ty Segall (who composed the brassy soundtrack) as a video director and he brings a keenly developed eye to the minimalist, sunstroke noir of A Desert.

There is one shot in particular, of Renny sleeping shirtless in a culvert of old electronics gear, that absolutely screams “vampire in his coffin.” Yes, the sun is out, but this guy is as bloodthirsty as the next Count.

We are witness to all the expressive catharsis that Alex is seeking, even as he’s being stalked by one of the creepiest villains in recent memory. Zachary Ray Sherman’s portrayal of Renny is unnerving; a charming opportunist killer with a better game face than Norman Bates.

A Desert is visually dazzling and highly recommended, but upbeat it ain’t. Shit gets mighty grim out there. This moral wasteland is where weaklings go and are never heard from again, becoming a tiny part of the vicious and unforgiving topography.

Don’t ask directions, just flee.

Strange Harvest (2024)

What happens when all the clues point to the stars?

Cleverly disguised as a true-crime documentary, Strange Harvest unfolds around a pair of Inland Empire detectives on the trail of an extremely fiendish serial killer known to the fearful public as Mr. Shiny.

Writer-director Stuart Ortiz has an infallible sense for the trappings of true crime television, designing a mockumentary that clears every hurdle of credibility.

From the sad parade of victim friends/relatives grieving for an off-camera journalist, to police body cam footage that gets mighty hairy, Ortiz gets all the familiar elements exactly right, further blurring the reality line.

Most significantly, the soul weariness of the cops (played by Peter Rizzo and Terri Apple) is entirely convincing as they painfully recall every harrowing step of their pursuit of Mr. Shiny (Jessee Clarkson), a phantom butcher whose murderous motives and penchant for occult ritual defy mundane explanation.

Borrowing a page from the Zodiac Killer’s stylebook, Mr. Shiny, aka Leslie Sykes, taunts the police with lunatic letters, signed with a mysterious tripod symbol that also shows up at the disturbing crime scenes.

Any reader of Lovecraft will recognize the red flags that pop up during the course of the investigation (Shambler from the Stars? Mysteries of the Worm?), leading inevitably to a showdown during a cosmic event that only happens every 800 years.

And wouldn’t you know it? The sacrifice of an infant is required. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.

The good news is that you don’t have to wait till the stars are aligned to reap this Strange Harvest. It’s on Hulu and it’s a lulu.

Dark Skies (2013)

You can’t run, you can’t hide.

There is an air of grim inevitability that permeates Dark Skies, the feeling that any precautions taken are futile, because the extraterrestrial enemy faced by the Barrett family is simply beyond their comprehension.

“People think of aliens as these beings invading our planet in some great cataclysm, destroying monuments, stealing our natural resources,” states UFO expert Edwin Pollard (J.K. Simmons).

“But it’s not like that at all. The invasion already happened.”

The Barretts are a normal, run-of-the-mill family just trying to make ends meet. Mom Lacy (Keri Russell) is a real estate agent in a slump; Dad Daniel (Josh Hamilton) is an unemployed architect working on his anger issues. Older son Jesse (Dakota Goyo) has a crush on a neighborhood girl, while younger son Sammy (Kadan Rockett) is more of a sensitive introvert.

Without warning, weird shit starts happening. Food and garbage gets strewn around the kitchen. Household items are stacked in geometric configurations. Photographs disappear. Swarms of starlings hit the house.

Even more disturbing, episodes of sleepwalking plague various Barretts, resulting in a tightening noose of paranoia and distrust between Lacy and Daniel, who despite their dire financial circumstances, continue to invest in pricey home security measures that prove fruitless.

After enduring a series of inexplicable events, Lacey reaches out via the internet to Pollard, a man who has been visited by aliens known as “the Grays” since he was a youngster.

“I don’t even fight them anymore,” he tells Lacey and Daniel, and further informs them that one of their children is being groomed for abduction, sooner rather than later,

Instead of providing the parents with hope, all Pollard can suggest is to fight back and hope the extraterrestrials get frustrated and move on to other specimens.

Writer-director Scott Stewart dispenses with the usual CGI wonder parade, and keeps things low-tech, naturalistic, and increasingly tense. The absence of special effects adds a mundane realism to Dark Skies, that sharply contrasts with the utterly unknowable nature of the Grays.

“What answer would a lab rat understand from a scientist in a white coat putting electrodes in its brain, giving it cancer?” Pollard asks.

Best of all, Dark Skies is a riveting example of story craft that shows, rather than tells us what we need to know. Even so, answers are few and far between.

Heavily recommended.

Bad Fish (2024)

If Shadow Over Innsmouth was adapted as a Grade-Z horror film, it might play out something like Bad Fish, written and directed by West Coast indie filmmaker Brad Douglas.

Filmed for measly money over a two-year period in locations near Brookings, Oregon and Crescent City, California, Bad Fish follows alcoholic marine biologist John Burton (Jonny Lee) on a quest for clues in a remote coastal community where fishermen’s body parts keep washing ashore.

After confabbing with Sheriff Porter (Mark Schneider), Burton examines a mangled torso and concludes that this was no boating accident. But it wasn’t a shark either, he decides.

Giant squid? Not known to inhabit these water. And what’s driving away all the salmon?

Turns out it’s all the work of Abby (Abby Wathen), the beguiling bartender at the local boozer, who comes with a whopper of a backstory. Seems when she isn’t mixing martinis, Abby is the leader of a nasty deep-water cult in search of fresh blood (and other fluids).

Despite a few too many talky scenes enacted by amateur thespians, Bad Fish is an admirable, atmospheric, small-town mystery that concludes with Burton getting left without a leg to stand on in a very bad domestic situation.

Not to worry, Douglas has Bad Fish II in the works, so maybe someone will throw the poor sap a lifeline.

Just don’t buy him socks for Christmas.

Frogs (1972)

Ray Milland won a Best Actor Oscar courtesy of his spirited dip into dipsomania in Billy Wilder’s Lost Weekend (1946), so let’s cut him some slack for Frogs, an unintentionally hilarious stinker from American International Pictures.

First things first: At no point in the film is anyone eaten by a giant frog. The poster is complete bullshit.

Since it’s a horror movie with an environmental message, Milland is cast as Jason Crockett, a venomous industrialist in a wheelchair ruling over a polluted private island plantation, fussed over by his feckless family intent on currying the old man’s financial favor.

Keeping Milland company is a naked-lipped Sam Elliott playing Pickett Smith, a hippie nature photographer in a canoe accidentally swamped by Clint Crockett (Adam Roarke), one of the patriarch’s progeny of sycophants and spoiled brats.

The exception is Karen Crockett (Joan Van Ark from Knot’s Landing), a lovely and luminous free spirit, who naturally gravitates to Smith, the stranger in the group, and the only other decent human being for miles.

It seems the senior Crockett wants his island free of frogs, and presumably snakes, spiders, gators, gulls, geckos, skinks, skunks, squirrels, and any other member of the animal kingdom that dares show its face.

“I still believe man is master of the universe,” he sneers at Smith.

Crockett instructs his minions to spray pesticides on the flora and fauna surrounding the estate. The flora and fauna don’t care for this one bit and mount a counter attack.

There is not a single sequence in the movie that isn’t punctuated (padded) with additional nature footage of creeping critters hopping and slithering closer to the Crockett house. Frogs are lobbed haphazardly into frame by production assistants, occasionally piling up in abundance, and photographed from menacing low angles to show they clearly mean business.

Directed by TV veteran George McCowan, Frogs boasts some of the most howlingly cheap and awful death scenes ever, rivaling poor Bela Lugosi wrestling an inanimate octopus in Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster.

I was reminded of this as I watched Stuart Martindale (George Skaff), a bald guy in a velour suit, forced to grapple with an unconscious crocodile.

A snapping turtle claims one victim! Another gets lost in the swamp chasing butterflies, and after what seems like several weeks of wandering and weeping, finally succumbs to a surfeit of snake bites.

Yet another of Crockett’s foppish relatives ends up poisoned in a closed greenhouse thanks to a bunch of reptiles shattering multiple bottles of industrial strength pesticide, as is their wont.

The best/worst demise, undoubtedly belongs to Michael Martindale (David Gilliam), which involves being cocooned by moss and having spiders spilled upon his person, including one right in the mouth.

As for Ray Milland, the conservative think-tank commander goes down with the ship, deserted by everyone including his dog. He is seen taking his final agonizing breath amidst another barrage of tossed toads, glaringly accompanied to the grave by Les Baxter’s shrieking, atonal score.

What a sorry way to croak!

Frogs isn’t so bad it’s good. But the low-rent laughs are all over the place, just like the titular terrors who pounce on Crockett’s star-spangled birthday cake, ruining his crappy family celebration.

Remember: Environment good! Old rich white men bad! Too bad this populist message didn’t help George McGovern in ’72.

Weapons (2025)

And now, the rest of the story.

If we examine Weapons alongside Zach Cregger’s previous oddball odyssey, Barbarian, what we’re seeing is the emergence of a different school of narrative filmmaking, in which a mystery morphs into a profound horror.

Both movies feature people disappearing under outré circumstances, and the subsequent investigation, told Pulp Fiction-like in chapters from assorted points of view, reveals the “monster” lurking at the center.

In Weapons, an entire classroom of children awaken in their beds at 2:17 am, leave their homes, and go missing. Only their teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), and a single student, Alex (Cary Christopher), were unaffected by this strange occurrence.

Justine bears the brunt of her community’s rage, but the real story unfolds quietly around Alex, and the coincidental arrival of his eccentric Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan) into the family home.

Recounting plot details diminishes the wonderful WTF factor at work in Weapons. Letting the story open up and swallow you is the correct path forward, as the interested parties play their parts in nonlinear fashion, leading to another shit-crazy finale full of strange shots and unhinged images you aren’t likely to forget, such as a pack of possessed children pursuing Aunt Gladys through an entire neighborhood of homes and their stunned denizens.

As for Madigan’s very specific portrayal of the uniquely wicked Aunt Gladys, it’s the stuff of nightmares, a thermometer-shattering motherlode of malevolence. Small wonder that Creggar is busy working on a prequel based on Gladys’ origin story.

The horror that lives beneath the surface in Weapons, has to do with influence, and the impossibility of truly knowing one’s neighbors and what they’re up to. Anyone can wake up weaponized.

So basically, no one is safe, not even in their own home with Mom and Dad.

Creggar’s roundabout approach to the genre trumps traditional terror tropes at every turn. And that’s reason enough to to see Weapons, post-haste.