Survival

Marrowbone (2017)

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 centered around the reclusive Marrowbone siblings, who live with their ailing mother on her family’s tumbledown estate in Maine.

The family has fled England, leaving behind their father Simon, a prodigious murderer, and all-around evil bastard, to rot in prison while the remains of the family strike out for 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 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 soon tracks down his absent kinfolk!

Marrowbone is a gorgeous movie to watch, like Terrence Malick’s classic 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 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.

Join the discussion and get back to me, please.

Bring Her Back (2025)

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.

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.

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.

Found Footage: The Making of the Patterson Project (2025)

Layers upon layers upon layers.

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.

Yep. You should watch it.

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.