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.
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.
Writer-director Max Tzannes opens Pandora’s Box in Found Footage: The Making of the Patterson Project, and what emerges is a very entertaining hot mess.
As we’ll see, there are no other outcomes possible.
See if you can follow this. Chase Bradner (Brennan Keel Cook), a low-budget filmmaker, makes commercials for used furniture salesman Frank (Dean Cameron).
Chase and Frank decide to make a found footage horror film about Bigfoot that somehow attracts the attention of a French documentary crew that tags along for the ride.
Funding for the movie comes from a $20,000 loan from Frank’s dotty client Betsey (Suzanne Ford), under the condition that her favorite actor, Alan Rickman, will play the lead. This becomes especially difficult when they figure out the actor passed away eight years before.
Chase and Frank are under the impression that they have secured the talents of Daniel Radcliffe to act in their feature, but he turns out to be a chick named Danielle (Rachel Alig).
The location, a remote time-share cabin belonging to the parents of Chase’s girlfriend and producer Natalie (Erika Vetter) appears to be inhabited by a demon from Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead universe.
Add to that a conundrum straight out of Waiting For Guffman, when it proves too dangerous to have anyone running about in the meticulously made Bigfoot costume after the first actor is shot by a hunter.
It’s to his credit that Tzannes manages to keep most of his subplot balls in the air. We actually care about Natalie’s growing frustration with Chase and her budding romance with his best friend Mitchell (Chen Tang), despite the silly chaos erupting all over the place.
Natalie gets respect points by being the only adult on the set capable of seeing the big picture, but her boyfriend is too preoccupied with his vanity project to pay attention.
And it all builds to what is called the Grand Jubilee, a surprisingly downbeat WTF ending, that explains why no bodies were ever found.
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 bya 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.
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.
Enthusiastically recommended and watch out at awards time!
Sinners is the fifth collaboration between writer-director Ryan Coogler (Creed, Black Panther, Fruitvale Station) and star Michael B. Jordan, and it’s an epic whopper of a movie with a blistering blues soundtrack and a depth of soul not typically found in an era of easily disgested entertainment options.
Twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Jordan) return to Clarksdale, Mississippi—after working for Al Capone’s mob in Chicago for seven years—determined to open a juke joint, a place where hard-working sharecroppers and field hands can be free to eat, drink, and dance the night away.
The brothers have contrasting demeanors, but their ambition, to own something free and clear that’s designed to serve the black community, is helped greatly by the large amounts of cash they’ve brought back from the Windy City.
Smoke recruits his former lover Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), a New Orleans hoodoo practitioner, to cook catfish for the crowd, while Stack hustles hooch and henchmen in an effort to keep the peace in their new joint.
On opening night, the club is jammed with folks stomping away to spirited music provided by guitar prodigy Sammy Moore (Miles Caton) and blues elder statesmen Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo).
Coogler is in absolute artistic control of the frenetic proceedings, and the verve and excitement he is able to capture during the dance sequences is unreal. We’re talking mesmeric scenes flowing so organically they’re worthy of repeated watches on their own.
While patrons shake and shimmy, Coogler enlarges the cultural lens to include a heartfelt vision of artists—past and future—caught in the dervish rhythms of the juke joint, and the effect is breathtaking.
“Blues weren’t forced on us like that religion,” Slim tells Sammy. “We brought this with us from home.”
Just when we’re having a peak cultural moment, a trio of vampires disguised as itinerant Irish folk musicians, crash the party and a bloodbath ensues.
There is no reason to believe, as some grumpy critics have implied, that Sinners unexpectedly goes off the rails at this point. Coogler doesn’t bring in the undead as a deux machina or as a concession to a larger, edgier demographic.
The taking of blood and the quick assimilation (exploitation) of blacks into a “protective” white society is a historical hot-button issue at play in Sinners, but it’s far from the only one.
There’s subtext and pointed references worth investigating everywhere, including a mysterious connection between the Choctaw Tribe and Irish immigrants. It’s all intentional on Coogler’s part, as he dares us to consider alternative histories to the ones we’ve been spoon fed.
Visually, musically, and dramatically, Sinners kicks more ass than a 1000 superhero flicks. Add yours to the queue.
Prolific genre dynamo Mike Flanagan (Haunting of Hill House, Oculus, Dr. Sleep) created this prequel to Ouija (2014), and consensus opinion holds that Ouija: Origin of Evil, is far superior to its predecessor, though that may have more to do with the “meh” quality of the original material, rather than an auteur’s magic wand.
We travel back to the year 1967, where widowed mother Alice (Elizabeth Reaser) makes a modest living as a phony fortune teller, aided in her deceptive practices by daughters Lina (Annalise Basso) and Doris (Lulu Wilson).
Alice and eldest daughter Lina consider adding a Ouija board to their seance shtick, but all too quickly this occult stepping stone gets a grip on Doris, the youngest, resulting in a once-innocent child playing host to a number of spiritual entities, good and bad, including her late father (good) and a fiendish Nazi doctor (bad).
Flanagan and cowriter Jeff Howard weave together enough plot points for seven sweaters, but don’t sweat the details. Ouija: Origin of Evil is trademark Flanagan territory, as a fractured family faces a perilous paranormal presence coming from inside the house.
The technicians Flanagan puts to work on his projects are first-rate, intuitively establishing the tone, time, and terroir in which his particular domestic terror can take hold of hearts and spines.
Here, art director Alberto Gonzalez-Reyna and cinematographer Michael Fimognari mute the sunny ’60s California scenery in dark shades of green and gold, so wardrobe colors appear especially vivid and blooming—a keen counterpoint to the carnage being carried on behind closed doors at the local fortune teller’s house!
Despite being a minor entry in Mike Flanagan’s filmography, Ouija: Origin of Evil is a compelling and highly watchable film in its own right, and needn’t be seen in the company of any other Ouija entries in the hopes of additional illumination.
When I was a wee sprout, and the family hive mind turned to televisual entertainment options, I invariably lobbied for something “scary” or something “funny.”
My conservative-leaning, middle-class family would not have tolerated a moment of Shining Vale, and, truth be told, most of the adult humor would have been lost on me.
Shining Vale ran for two seasons on Starz, and was created by Jeff Astrof (The New Adventures of Old Christine, S#!* My Dad Says) and Sharon Horgan (Catastrophe, Bad Sisters). Over the course of 16 half-hour episodes, we get cozy with the Phelps family, possibly the most dysfunctional brood since the Bundys showed up on Fox in 1987.
Pat Phelps (Courteney Cox) is in a dark place. She wrote a tawdry, best-selling lady porn novel 14 years before, but the follow-up hasn’t been forthcoming, and her agent Kam (Merrin Dungey) is giving her an ultimatum: deliver the book or return the advance money.
When Pat has a torrid affair with a handyman, her stubbornly optimistic husband Terry (Greg Kinnear) packs the whole family off to a huge haunted house in rural Connecticut for a fresh start, much to the dismay of teenaged daughter Gaynor (Gus Birney).
“Mom boned some rando and now we have to move,” she grumbles. Though a freewheeling sexpot herself, Gaynor becomes the unwilling head of the household, after Mom and Dad lose their marbles.
Her younger brother Jake, a plus-sized introvert, is mostly concerned with gaining levels in his Virtual Reality game, and is slow to realize that change is afoot.
“Why did we move to a hotel?” he asks, upon arrival at the dilapidated Victorian mansion they will now call home.
Jake is also the butt of (fairly benign) fat kid jokes, but gets comic revenge by farting most foul at the worst possible moments. Seemingly an innocent, he gets his own demon adversary courtesy of VR.
Once the family is settled, Pat makes instant contact with the spirit of Rosemary (Mira Sorvino), the former owner of the house who went mad and hacked up her own family with an axe.
Rosemary does a little ghost-writing on Pat’s unfinished manuscript, and an uneasy partnership is formed when Kam digs the new, darker direction the book is taking.
This is all just tip of the iceberg stuff, as Pat, Terry, and the kids go through individual transformations of various magnitudes, while dealing with ghosts, cults, demonic possession, hereditary mental illness, and infidelity in a weird little town that features homegrown businesses like The Lucky Wiccan.
As for the title of the series, yes, there are many references to The Shining. For crying out loud, it’s about a writer trying her best not to chop everyone up with an axe.
For my money, Shining Vale is the funniest and finest-written domestic horror series since TheAddams Family. The cast is flawless. You’re welcome.
Sounds like a Hardy Boys Mystery that never made it to the editing stage, but TheSecret Of Crickley Hall is a cracking good BBC miniseries (three one-hour episodes) based on the book by James Herbert.
Written and directed by Dr. Who alum Joe Ahearne, the story straddles past/present timelines, spilling the dramatic details of the Caleigh family, who are hoping for a fresh start in the North of England after the disappearance of their son.
The idea of turning the page on tragedy seems highly unlikely at this location, as Crickley Hall turns out to be a former orphanage that was overseen by seriously damaged WW I veteran Augustus Cribben (Douglas Henshall) and his seething sister Magda (Sarah Smart).
In keeping with the popular paranormal theory that those who’ve experienced loss are more sensitive to the plight of the deceased (The Changeling, et al), motivated mom Eve Caleigh (Suranne Jones), intuits that her still-missing child is somehow connected with the orphans who died in a flood at Crickley Hall during WW II.
This leads to a parallel narrative from the past about Nancy Linnet (Olivia Cooke), a determined young teacher hired to educate the wayward waifs of Crickley Hall. Instead, she uncovers terrible abuses visited upon the children by the cruel Cribben siblings, who unfortunately remain above suspicion in their community.
With a few splashes of redemption, revenge, and romance, and featuring a realistically frightening ghost, The Secret Of Crickley Hall is well-above-average haunted house hoopla handled by a cast of top drawer talent that includes David Warner and Donald Sumpter in crucial character roles.
Ghosts may or may not be scarier in the English countryside, but their tales fit this bleak territory like a black glove.
Cinema doesn’t get more international than The Damned, a UK-Belgium-France-Iceland coproduction, filmed in the furthest reaches of Iceland’s Westfjord’s region, as convincing a frozen hellscape as you’re likely to find this side of Ice Station Zebra.
The Damned takes place in the latter part of the 19th century in a remote arctic fishing camp, where a small but determined band of anglers grind out a meager existence wrangling fish from the unforgiving sea.
The recently widowed Eva (Odessa Young), the owner of the fishing boat (and possible Vermeer model), calls the shots around the camp, though she often appears lost and childlike in the presence of her crusty crew.
One particular day, they spy a ship foundering on the rocks, and after some debate, decide that they can’t rescue survivors due to their own lack of food and supplies.
It’s this weighty decision that places the crew in metaphysical danger, as superstitions about vengeful drowned sailors take root in the hearts and minds of the simple fisher folk.
Devotees of the winter horror sub-genre will be right at home amongst the wind, snow, and angry tides, as reason gives way to fear and guilt in the face of powerful elemental forces, all captured by Eli Arenson’s breathtaking cinematography. Skating effortlessly between warm firelight intimacy and the brutal splendor of the Icelandic tundra, the camerawork underscores nature’s icy indifference to human ambition.
Director Thordur Palsson allows the chilly isolation to exacerbate the dread that haunts the crew until something has to give—in this case, sanity. The Damned delivers demons that we didn’t expect, in a winter wonderland of lost souls on thin ice.
Stoke the fire and get another blanket in case of the shivers.
horrificflicks.com 
You must be logged in to post a comment.