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.
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.
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.
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.
What Lives Here, a gore-strewn bloodbath about a hapless moving company hired to clear out a haunted house, is co-written (along with his wife Michele), directed, and starring New Jersey construction boss Troy Burbank, who deserves mention alongside other inspired dilettante filmmakers.
I can’t help but think of Harold P. Warren, the Texas fertilizer salesman responsible for Manos: The Hands of Fate, for instance, or welder Anthony Cardoza partnering up with Coleman Francis to make stupefying entertainment like The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961) and Red Zone Cuba (1966).
For a paltry $25,000, Burbank and a bunch of his friends filmed in and around the Strauss Mansion in Atlantic Highlands for 10 days and the result is What Lives Here, a movie that takes its sweet time about getting anywhere, but erupts with enough bloody mayhem to justify its existence.
There is a story here, about evil twins escaping from a mental hospital and taking up residence in the very house that Lee Duncan (Jeff Swanton) and his band of blue-collar boobs are scheduled to clean out.
But let’s not rush into anything. First, Duncan and his men have to drive from Pennsylvania to New Jersey for the job. This means stopping at a crummy dive bar to eat cheeseburgers for like eight minutes.
One character uses this opportunity to “go take a piss.” And the camera follows him!
Then they arrive at the mansion, and immediately leave again to go get something to eat, leading to another long sequence of beer drinking and crap dialogue.
Meanwhile, a delivery man and a nosy teen stop by and fall victim to one of the murderous grannies running amok in the old house that also very obviously serves as a local historical society, since there are glass display cases and newspaper clippings in every room!
The movers themselves and the Barfly Bettys they meet at the second bar and bring home to be eviscerated, are beer-swilling, working-class zeroes that have nothing on their minds but sex, food, and a paycheck, by gawd.
In other words, easy pickings for old ladies in their nightgowns. Indeed, the deaths carry What Lives Here, as the makeup effects of bodies being hammered, stabbed, and sliced, are actually worth sitting through the abundant blue-collar B-roll.
Even a construction boss director knows you’ve got to deliver the gross goods, or get outta the horror business.
Backcountry, written and directed by Toronto filmmaker Adam McDonald (Pyewacket), is based on a true story, and serves as a perfect illustration as to why couples in crisis should avoid the great outdoors.
Relationships are already subject to unimaginable stressors at the moment, from within and without. The idea that some magical symbiosis will take place around a campfire or running terrified through tall timber is laughably naive.
This captivating notion is dangled in front of the endangered duo as they paddle their canoe into a wilderness that is indeed beautiful. They even pass a happy, smiling mirror-image couple in their own canoe, heading back to civilization.
Sweetheart yuppies Alex (Jeff Roop) and Jenn (Missy Peregrym) are on a camping trip in a remote Canadian park. So far, so good.
Like most men in charge of movie expeditions, Alex is a poor choice for leadership. After arrogantly dismissing the need for a map, he gets them lost in a rogue black bear’s feeding ground.
For about the first 40 minutes, Backcountry is more of a relationship on the rocks/adventure film—until the bear enters the picture.
Once blood is shed, it’s buckle-up survival horror that explodes with very valid and very real terror on a painfully primordial level.
McDonald accentuates the panicky state of affairs with dizzying rotation shots that emphasize the lack of familiar landmarks and the growing uncertainty of Alex and Jenn.
The last third of Backcountry is super intense and frightening, because we have traveled a fair distance with these characters and their relatable idiosyncrasies, and a definite emotional investment has been made on our part.
While Alex apologizes for the umpteenth time, for getting them into this mess, Jenn tries to soothe his guilt, by telling him, “Could be worse. At least we’re together.”
It gets worse. Backcountry is a tense place to pitch your tent.
Somewhere amidst a monsoon of nature insert shots, filmmaker Edwin S. Brown managed to cobble together The Prey, a tedious Dead Camper drama of the sort that turned up in plentitude post Friday The 13th.
This isn’t a buried treasure or an overlooked gem. The Prey has more padding than the Philadelphia Eagles.
If you were to take a shot of whiskey each time Brown cuts away from the actors to show spiders, snakes, millipedes, ants, vultures, woodpeckers, frogs, and other woodland creatures, you will be unconscious long before the scarred giant killer (Carel Struycken, Lurch from The Addams Family) appears on the screen.
We can tell he’s there, though. His stupid heartbeat thumps wildly every few minutes. Just the heartbeat. Saves time and money on makeup (and tension).
As it stands, we get to know three vapid couples on a wilderness getaway being stalked by the mysterious survivor of a long ago forest fire.
The choices that Edwin Brown makes in order to further the plot can be blamed on the wee budget, with a chunk of change undoubtedly going to pay Jackie Coogan (Uncle Fester from a different The Addams Family) in his final film role as Ranger Lester Tile, who burns up the screen eating a cucumber sandwich in one the movie’s most pivotal scenes.
For sheer artistic goofiness, Brown’s decision to feature Ranger Mark O’Brien (Jackson Bostwick) playing a lengthy banjo solo and telling one of the world’s oldest (and slowest) jokes to a deer, demonstrates considerable artistic chutzpah in a rather barren entertainment landscape.
The anemic narrative actually gets pepped up when Joel (Steve Bond) shares the ancient tale of The Monkey’s Paw around the campfire. To his credit, he tells it reasonably well.
The only time The Prey gets truly horrifying is the ending, as Final Girl Nancy (Debbie Thureson) gets carried away to a cave to start a family with a huge murderous freak.
That’s some bullshit. No way she deserved that! But perhaps that’s why Edwin Brown included so many unpleasant shots of critters eating each other—it’s all part of nature’s eternal cycle of death and renewal.
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.
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.
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.
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