Hack-and-stack

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.

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.

Scathing (2016)

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 (2024)

Nice to have something to fall back on.

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.

The Prey (1983)

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.

Ewww. Gross.

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.

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.