Domestic

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.

Arcadian (2024)

Once upon a time…

Told as a post-apocalyptic fairy tale, Arcadian stars Nicolas Cage as an anxious father of twins trying to navigate single parenthood while fighting off vicious monsters come nightfall.

Bummer. At least he doesn’t have to drive them to soccer practice.

For 15 years, Paul (Cage, in an extremely understated role) has forged a hardscrabble existence putting food on the table for his adopted sons Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins) and Joseph (Jaeden Martell), whom he rescued as infants during the initial collapse of civilization.

Holed up in a remote farmhouse, Paul teaches the lads everything they need to know about off-the-grid survival, most importantly, being home by sundown to secure their hacienda from nightly visits by protean creatures with sharp claws and turbo-charged choppers that show up like broke relatives at suppertime.

Joseph is a homeschooled DaVinci, intuitively figuring out how things work and devising ingenious inventions. His brother Thomas has the hots for Charlotte (Sadie Soverall), a lovely lass who lives on a farm some distance away, causing the crushed-out kid to test the limits of Paul’s strict curfew.

Arcadian director Benjamin Brewer and writer Mike Nilon tell a simple story as simply as possible. When Thomas visits Charlotte on her farm, they play a game in which they have to explain how the world ended in 10 seconds. Charlotte theorizes that alien insects infected humanity, and Thomas says that a purple haze turned people into werewolves.

After providing us with that handy exposition summary, Thomas realizes he’s been wooing Charlotte for too long, and is forced into a cross-country sprint to get his ass home before dark. He ends up unconscious at the bottom of a ravine, necessitating a rescue from Paul.

Poor old Dad barely survives an explosive confrontation with the burrowing alien wolf bugs, and now it’s up to the boys to adapt and survive on their own. Arcadian works best as a coming-of-age story, with the brothers painfully applying the lessons they’ve learned about their nocturnal enemies.

Jospeh is methodical, taking careful notes about the intensity and duration of the attacks. Thomas, ruled by his passions, favors direct action, but benefits from listening to his wiser sibling.

The action is occasionally marred by poor lighting and clumsy edits. Paul, finding Thomas at the bottom of a crevasse, suddenly appears at his son’s side after finding some alternate route down.

The ensuing battle with a suddenly subterranean foe is almost all quick cuts with a shaky camera in the darkness so we don’t really figure out what happened to Paul until the sun comes up.

The monsters are formidable, though vague, never holding still long enough to get a gander at. Their inexplicable hive-mind decision to assemble into a giant flaming attack wheel is certainly a head-scratcher.

Ultimately, the pros of a fast-moving story outweigh the clunky cons in Arcadian, and you will be sufficiently entertained.

The end.

Parasite (2019)

When was the last time a horror movie won a Best Picture Oscar?

How about a horror movie from South Korea?

Wait! Is this even actually horror?

Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite was recently named the best movie of the 21st century by the New York Times, as well as in a poll of more than 500 actors, writers, and assorted Hollywood riff raff.

The accolades were enough to prompt a rewatch, so the wife and I buckled in with a tasty spread from Hawaiian Bros Grill, and let the good times roll.

We open on the Kim clan, a quartet of creative and industrious con artists living in a smelly basement apartment in Seoul. Bong’s set design standards are incredibly detailed, with the Kims’ ridiculous elevated toilet serving as a mocking throne over their scheming degradation.

From the squalid floor of their stinking dungeon, the Kims watch as a parade of drunks pee on their window to the outside world.

Fortunately, son Ki-woo (Lee Sun-kyun) lands a gig as a tutor to a bored rich high school girl (Jo Yeo-jeong) and soon, through Machiavellian machinations and good old teamwork, the enterprising Kims have securely attached themselves to the wealthy, but blandly oblivious Park family, serving comically in a number of unlikely household occupations.

As the title implies, the Kims dig deep into their new situation, even taking on airs of pretension themselves, while pillaging the fancy foods in the bourgeois pantry.

Speaking of pantries, the Parks’ fabulous modern house is itself a metaphor for a society that could do a better job of feeding and housing its less-prosperous citizens.

Consider the plight of Oh Geun-sae, (Park Myung-hoon) the hider in the house with nowhere else to go. The husband of the Parks’ former housekeeper has gone insane living on food scraps in a hidden underground bunker. It’s his terror at the prospect of being homeless that’s responsible for the blood that eventually flows all over a beautifully manicured backyard.

Parasite is a marvelous creature, neither fish nor foul, bursting with darkly comic observations about the pathetic need to feel superior—to anyone. The Kims want that smug insulation of their own, but they don’t pass the smell test.

The American Dream, at least in South Korea, involves fastening yourself to a fat host. While waiting for the trickle down to take effect, you must keep others away from the living meal ticket.

Bong’s masterpiece makes for a wondrously uncomfortable safari through a human ecosystem. Parasite is mind-growing artistry containing an ocean of insights on the class struggle, all awaiting your repeated viewing.

That’s called time well spent. Ask the New York Times.

Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

Note: Final Destination: Bloodlines works just fine as a stand-alone feature. It’s not necessary to be familiar with the previous films, but it helps provide context.

The Final Destination franchise is pure boilerplate. Someone has a realistic, sweat-inducing vision of an impending disaster and manages to save lives that would have otherwise been lost in the carnage.

In Bloodlines, it becomes painfully clear that rules are rules when it comes to your expiration date. Through careful vigilance, Iris Campbell (Gabrielle Rose)—who saved a ton of folks from perishing in the nerve-wracking collapse of a Space Needle-like restaurant 50 years ago—is able to keep the Reaper at bay by cloistering herself away as a hermit in a one-room fortified cabin in the middle of nowhere.

Even so, you can’t hide forever.

Iris’s granddaughter Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) and Stefani’s younger brother Charlie (Teo Briones) are next in line to be shredded out of existence unless they can somehow solve the pattern of Death’s List.

Recurring character William John Bludworth (Tony Todd) is a mystical mortician who provides cryptic clues for at-risk protagonists throughout the six-film series. As he tells the latest batch of soon-to-be goners, “Death doesn’t like being cheated.”

Note 2: This was Todd’s last screen performance, and the distinguished horror actor exits in classic fashion, addressing the characters (and us) thusly: “I intend to enjoy the time I have left, and I suggest you do the same. Life is precious. Enjoy every single second. You never know when. Good luck.”

The prospect of being exceedingly vulnerable to dismemberment in everyday situations is the cake and frosting in this formula. Here is the reason we bought the tickets. How do these poor fools meet their doom? Will it be artful and intricate or just the sudden splat of another ill-timed bus?

As usual, the focus falls on objects seen around the house or existing in nature, and directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein helpfully tick off all the nearby instruments of destruction for our consideration, just before the tragic events unfold in Rube Goldberg fashion.

A wayward shard of broken glass in someone’s cocktail should cause a bloody catastrophe, and it does, but the process is open to variables coming into play.

The only certainty here is someone is going out with a bang, style points appreciated.

“Death doesn’t take no for an answer,” Bludworth reminds us.

So it’s no surprise when Death catches up with you, he’s justifiably pissed that you got away, and that’s why the elements leading to the inevitable demise are so squishy and graphic. It’s a warning to anyone who thinks they can escape a (gruesome) fate.

It also provides us with the “aahhh” moment; a cathartic conclusion of a fancy fireworks display.

Final Destination: Bloodlines is a succinct, stylish summation of the entire series, an invitation to certain death that deals us in; a rousing game of Clue with extra corpses.

Like a heckling a good/bad movie, the joy of watching Final Destination: Bloodlines is best shared interactively with friends and family. Everyone can choose a victim and figure out their own Mousetrap method of mutilation.

Wheee!

There’s Something Wrong with the Children (2023)

Camping and looking after someone else’s kids? There’s a pair of concepts I find extremely disturbing!

Director Roxanne Benjamin and writers T.J. Cimfel and David White definitely know how to create the potential for a scary experience as they put two couples into a paranormal powder keg and hand a book of matches to some thoroughly corrupted moppets .

In There’s Something Wrong with the Children, Ben (Zach Guilford) and Margaret (Alisha Wainwright) are cabin camping with longtime friends Ellie (Amanda Crew) and Thomas (Carlos Santos), and their two kids Lucy (Briella Guiza) and Spencer (David Mattle).

While exploring some industrial ruins nearby, Lucy and Spencer become fascinated with a mysterious well found on the abandoned property. And by fascinated, I mean hypnotized and enslaved by a malevolent entity, who soon has the little rug rats doing the devil’s business, which primarily consists of driving Ben loony.

Not that they had to drive very far.

The most rightfully horrifying element at play here, are the malicious kids. Lucy gads about in a red devil hoody, evil-eyeing everyone in sight, and her younger brother shows genuine promise as a budding psycho killer.

There is much subtext given over to the topic of Breeding versus Not Breeding, and the latter wins by a country mile. As evidenced here by a reasonable body count, expanding your brood beyond the number two is like inviting Evil to share your campfire and sharpening them up a weenie stick.

Margaret becomes the de facto Final Girl and she’s not a very good one. But by the end of the movie it’s apparent that she has finally resolved any conflicts she may have had about family planning.

It’s a middling effort, let’s give it a C (see).

Boys from County Hell (2020)

You can count me among those short-sighted sods who’ve overlooked the obvious connection between Ireland and vampire lore, namely author Bram Stoker. He served as a theater manager and a drama critic for the Dublin Times, before he’d spun Dracula into existence.

Filmmaker Chris Baugh’s extremely entertaining The Boys From County Hell, takes place in a blighted Irish backwater called Six Mile Hill, where legend has it an ancient vampire named Abhartach lays buried beneath a cairn of stones in a nearby field.

At least that’s what bored locals Eugene Moffat (Jack Rowan) and William Hogue (Fra Free) tell the occasional tourist that comes to town looking for historical information about Bram Stoker. The lads insist that Abhartach was the original vampire that inspired Stoker to create his own version.

Coincidentally, Eugene’s no-nonsense father Francie (Nigel O’Neill) gets handed the contract to build a new road that’s going straight through Six Mile Hill and the accursed pile of rocks.

Eugene and his drinking buddies, SP McCauley (Michael Hough) and Claire McCann (Louisa Harland), are recruited by Francie to start breaking local ground. When they reach the rock pile, a bloody accident involving a runaway bull and Eugene’s friend William leads to the resurrection of a very pissed off, ancient vampire.

Rather than push his bloodsucker into the spotlight, Hough opts to keep Abhartach in the shadows; his mere malignant presence causes the townspeople to start bleeding uncontrollably.

Even with a monstrous creature on the loose, we can’t help admiring Francie and Eugene, a devoted father and son who can always find time to bust each other’s chops to welcome comic effect.

We’re also witness to some major mythology retooling, as it turns out you can’t kill a vampire with a wooden stake. Or decapitation. Or sunlight. This leads to an assortment of survival challenges for the principal players—and most of them simply don’t have what it takes.

What we have in Boys From County Hell is a bloody good time with funny, fleshed-out characters matching wits with an inhuman adversary that just won’t stay grounded.

Recommended to anyone in search of something fresh.

Frailty (2001)

The late Bill Paxton (1955–2017) will always be remembered for his distinguished genre credentials. As the not-so-brave Private Hudson in Aliens (1986), he got all the best lines, including “Game over, man!”

A year later he was part of a kick-ass vampire gang in the criminally underrated Near Dark, reunited with his Aliens costars, Lance Henriksen and Jenette Goldstein.

Still not impressed? How about this action? Paxton is the only actor to play a character killed by a Predator (Predator 2, 1990), a Xenomorph (Aliens) and a Terminator (The Terminator, 1984).

Serious respect!

In Frailty, Paxton directs and stars as a mild-mannered mechanic who becomes a divinely inspired killer after a visitation from an angel.

Rather than keep this to himself, he awakens his two young sons Fenton (Matt O’Leary) and Adam (Jeremy Sumpter), informing them that they will be helping Dad destroy demons in human form.

Adam, the younger son, is gung-ho to please his avenging father, while older brother Fenton doesn’t like the idea one bit.

Too bad the Lord’s will must be served.

The brothers’ upbringing is recounted years later by a grown-up Fenton (Matthew McConnaughy) to incredulous FBI agent Wesley Doyle (Powers Boothe), who reluctantly gets reeled into a twisted tale of a family under the dominion of a terribly unbalanced man.

As a director, Paxton imbues Frailty with a naturalistic, small-town feel that makes the episodic violence particularly jarring. As an actor, he delivers a nuanced, but emotionally reserved performance that evokes a little sympathy and a whole lot of terror.

Anyone expecting the unhinged Hudson, or perhaps the belligerent bully Chet from Weird Science will see nothing of the sort here.

By the time he locks Fenton in the basement for a week (no food, one glass of water per day) in an effort to drive out any demonic influences, the horror has gotten uncomfortably real, as Paxton dons the face of unblinking fundamental fanaticism, reminiscent in tone of Kevin Smith’s Red State.

Bill Paxton’s ability to goose the tension as a filmmaker in Frailty, is more than matched by his extraordinary performance as an ordinary man called upon to serve God by fighting evil.

But it’s not easy. Just ask Abraham.