Even with Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, and Ryan Reynolds attached as astronauts in distress, this one never reaches orbit, and instead achieves only a template 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 no 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 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?
Perhaps Florida filmmaker Joseph Mazzafero was anticipating negative reviews?
I actually saw Scathing several years ago but somehow the memory didn’t burn bright enough for me to recollect, whilst sifting through Tubi’s generous inventory of low-budget indie horror.
Rebellious teen Amanda (Allie Sparks) is lured out of her house at 3am by horny boyfriend Adam (Michael Frascino) and driven out to a secluded petting spot for an all-night make-out sesh.
Upon awakening, still knackered from too much tonsil hockey, they discover that the car won’t start, so Adam calls his buddy Steve (Chris Shepardson) to come and fix it.
Steve soon arrives with Daisy Duke-clad Stephanie (Paola Duque), and after declaring Adam’s car “a piece of shit” proceeds to get stoned and tell a long stupid joke about a cat.
The cast is then set upon by a very tall, long-haired dude in a welder’s helmet (John Kyle), who makes short work of Steve and carries Stephanie off to the wood shop for some sicky-icky torture porn that culminates in a spike through the forehead.
While the killer takes Stephanie apart, Adam and Amanda await their turn locked in the car. For like three days. No food, no water, no pee, no poop.
The idea that the maniac might return at any moment causes paralysis of the mind and body, apparently. Couldn’t they have just run for it?
Too risky, I guess.
Adam finally grows a spine and steps out of the car—and is immediately taken by the towering weirdo back to the shed for an extreme vasectomy, the results of which are proudly displayed by the giant to the gawking Amanda.
There are plenty more lurid twists afoot in Scathing, and you can find them in Wrong Turn and Psycho. Here then is a buffet of bone basic brutality, that includes a baby in the microwave, with a WTF ending that doesn’t clarify shit.
Does the killer get away? It doesn’t matter, because you won’t.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
horrificflicks.com 
You must be logged in to post a comment.