Torture Porn

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hush (2016)

Tonight! The War Between the Sexes! Right here on Pay Per View! Let’s give it up for Hush!

Writer-director Mike Flanagan (Haunting of Hill House, Fall of the House of Usher, Midnight Mass, Oculus) and his wife, writer-actress Kate Siegel constructed this lean, mean thriller about a deaf-mute author fighting for her life against a sadistic killer.

Hush also makes sense as an anxiety inducing metaphor about unwanted male attention, as Maddie Young (Siegel), a best-selling author, can’t even have a reasonable expectation of privacy IN THE MIDDLE OF A FRIGGIN’ FOREST!

Maddie lives in a nice house (with lots of doors and windows) somewhere in the deep woods. A bout with meningitis at age 13 has left her without speech and hearing, but she has a crafty writer’s brain that never stops ticking, as we squeamishly witness her reviewing potential escape options that never materialize.

The plucky scribe finds herself trapped in her bucolic hacienda by a masked madman (John Gallagher Jr) with a crossbow, who just recently finished an evisceration job on Maddie’s neighbor (Samantha Sloyan).

Who? Why? Not important. Perhaps Cupid’s in a real bad mood today. Flanagan and Siegel play the cat-mouse game to the hilt, which usually ends up plunging into someone’s neck or torso.

Nosey neighbors don’t fare well in Hush, but the timely arrival of a cat named Bitch provides Maddie with enough of a diversion to go on the offensive against toxic masculinity. The killer reminds Maddie that he’s enjoying himself, and that he can take her whenever he wants.

The maniac clearly derives grim pleasure in cutting off her limited means of communication (he also collects cell phones) and watching Maddie react to the mounting stressors he places upon her.

The entire movie is gaze-oriented. Maddie is either keeping track of her assailant roaming around in her yard (he makes no effort at stealth or concealing his identity, which makes the situation even more dire)—or the killer is feverishly observing Maddie as she tries to hide and barricade herself inside a house with too many access points.

As I mentioned, Hush is all killer, no filler. No competing storylines, no comedy relief, no shaky camera tomfoolery. Just two people (one of whom can’t call for help) airing their differences. To the death.

This is what happens when you don’t respect boundaries.

The Substance (2024)

Your attention horror shoppers!

The Substance should be seen, full stop.

Nominated for five Oscars including best actress for Demi Moore? As it should be.

French writer-director Coralie Fargeat (Revenge) turns up the rage to Nova, and opens the taps at the blood bank in a body horror spectacle that will likely leave a bruise on your soul. It’s definitely worth the uncomfortable moments.

Fargeat gives us the impression that The Substance is another tale of dashed dreams in the Hollywood meat grinder, and it certainly is. In fact, the meat grinding has never been portrayed in such glaring and grotesque detail.

Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is a beloved fitness guru who has gotten too long in the tooth to pump up sponsor sales. She is unceremoniously dumped by the venal head of the network (Dennis Quaid), who announces his plan to find a younger model, while angrily taking a pee.

Fearing for her fading career, Sparkle takes a chance on a miracle rejuvenation drug called The Substance, which promises a “a younger, better version” of yourself.

Her decision to join the program, which includes a grumpy operator, a squalid post office box, hellish injection regimen, and the gradual draining of her own vitality, is the trap springing shut.

It’s only proper that a trouper like Demi Moore has enough presence and pathos to make her vainglorious plight extremely moving, as she’s forced to grapple with her younger, better self (Margaret Qualley) for limited consciousness.

Of course, things get worse, and by the time the finale rolls around, with a mutated star trying to host a live New Year’s Eve special, it’s a straight-up Frankenstein heartbreaker, with an angry mob in pursuit.

Each time Coralie Fargeat reaches a narrative turning point in The Substance, she amps up the gore to the point of anguish, and I admire that audaciousness in the telling of this particular story.

Fargeat never delivers half measures or wimps out in any way, and in Demi Moore she has the perfect vehicle to bring home a brutal point.

“Women are bloody,” my wife reminds me. “Birth, menstruation, it’s gross.”

I get the picture, and so will you.

Heretic (2024)

This is a different Hugh Grant, though there is a passing resemblance to the rom-com Don Juan with the aw-shucks manner.

Written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, Heretic is another film set during a storm that makes the most of its few sets and small cast. Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) are young Mormon missionaries on bicycles visiting the home of Mr. Reed (Grant), a seemingly absent-minded scholar with an interest in religion and spiritual knowledge.

An approaching deluge induces the girls to accept Mr. Reed’s hospitality and enter his surprisingly roomy cottage. He mentions that his wife is in the kitchen making blueberry pie!

The front door closes and the camera backtracks down the foot path that approaches the house. It seems like a long way from the road.

Trap sprung.

Mr. Reed proves to be a highly intelligent and extremely well-read individual, who goes from asking questions about Mormonism to lecturing the girls on his own personal quest for the “one true religion.”

At times, he is a professor impressively expounding on several subjects at once to a class of freshmen, and Barnes and Paxton soon find themselves in over their heads as the subject matter becomes increasingly uncomfortable.

The time passes in conversation and the smell of blueberry pie fills a cozy sitting room that begins to look suspiciously normal.

Beck and Woods do a masterful job of gradually goosing up the tension without turning Mr. Reed into Dracula. Can this old duffer even be considered a physical threat?

Reed mostly remains reasonable, but the red flags are starting to pile up. Cell phones don’t work and the front door is on a time lock that won’t open till morning (!), so if the girls want to leave (and they’re always welcome to), they’ll have to exit through the back of the house.

Credit must be given to Chloe West and Sophie Thatcher for instilling their characters with brains and backbones, the ability to think and reason even when their situation hits nightmare territory.

As for Grant, the charmingly awkward Brit with the hots for Andie McDowell is a faded lobby poster, but he can still badger and beguile a captive audience. The ingratiating tendencies and ability to spin complex thoughts into amusing, provocative word bubbles remains intact in Heretic, and Grant digs deep to reach a rich vein of menace.

Dr. Giggles (1992)

“Laughter is the best medicine.”

As played by a thoroughly committed Larry Drake (Benny Stowitz from L.A. Law!), this titular sawbones could have been a contender, worth at least two sequels, minimum.

Dr. Giggles is an early release from Dark Horse Comics, so no reason for there not to be a franchise.

As a child, Evan Rendell Jr. (Drake) watched the angry citizens of Moorehigh haul his father, the town doctor, out of his home office and stone him to death. Apparently, the locals were none-to-pleased with Rendell Senior’s research methods, which included killing seven patients in search of a healthy heart to transplant into his own dying wife.

Hey! You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

Young Rendell is institutionalized and grows up into an adult lunatic with a fixation on physicians. He escapes after dissecting his captors, and heads back to Moorehigh tittering like a freshly sprung Michael Myers.

Final Girl Jennifer Campbell (Holly Marie Combs, Piper from Charmed!) is an anxious high school student with heart valve problems set on a collision course with the hysterical healer, while a bunch of her friends and neighbors fall victim to Rendell’s house calls, dying horribly under the madman’s medical ministrations.

A hearty round of applause to Drake, who giggles and puns his way through the slaughter with verve and panache, a maniacal glint in his bulging eyes.

“Wait till you see my bill,” he crows after skewering another unlucky chump with his antique surgical implements.

Like any good doctor, Rendell is torn between his duty to the community (killing them), and carrying on his father’s quest to find a heart, in this case to “save” Jennifer.

The fact that he’s a self-taught surgeon doesn’t inspire much confidence, though. That’s why the patient needs to be strapped to the table—for her own good.

Dr. Giggles is premium slasher carnage punctuated with corny jokes. If it’s wrong, I don’t wanna be right.

The doctor will slay you now.

In A Violent Nature (2024)

There’s quite a bit more here than meets the eye.

In A Violent Nature is not, as I had been told, a slasher movie told from the killer’s point of view.

Instead, writer-director Chris Nash dials up a multitude of perspectives, as if the doomed campers were being chased through a high-tech forest equipped with dozens of surveillance angles to choose from.

Stupid, soon-to-be-deceased college students rent a cabin in the woods. While hiking they disturb a memorial to Johnny, a mentally challenged boy who got bullied to death 70 years before.

Straight away we witness a now monstrous Johnny rise from the grave to seek revenge, and we spend considerable time riding shotgun alongside this unstoppable fiend as he makes an inspired mess out of the clueless kids.

Sometimes the murders are super gory, (the girl doing yoga gets some major stretching bodywork done) and some happen at a distance in the blink of an eye, as when a comely swimmer disappears below the waterline with a yelp from across the lake.

Nash keeps refreshing the views. He employs a static wilderness cam that dispassionately records long shots of the killer walking from one side of the frame to another. Next thing you know, we’re sitting on his shoulder, then a bird’s eye view, then a worm’s eye view.

With a string of cameras at his disposal, Nash asks us to consider the single-minded plight of a creative mutilator, in this case one that wears an old-time fireman’s mask, giving him the appearance of a predatory insect.

When Johnny occasionally pauses in his gruesome quest, we can get inside his horrible head and watch the wheels turn as he considers how best to maximize his menace, though he does remove his mask to play with a toy car at one point, a tragic reminder that this thing was once a happy child.

The undead death dealer featured in In A Violent Nature isn’t a killing machine, however. He wordlessly seems to enjoy the hunt and clearly takes pride in his victim-stalking and construction of murderous tableaux.

Johnny is obviously an artist, inviting us along to spy on his process. Now there’s a view you won’t see every day.

The Resident (2011)

It’s Hammer Time!

A release from the revived (and revered) Hammer Films imprint, The Resident traces its ancestry from gothic mysteries, slasher cinema, erotic thrillers, and Hitchcock’s Psycho.

It’s even got Christopher Lee in a supporting role! Doesn’t get more Hammer than that.

Oscar winner Hilary Swank portrays Juliet, a frazzled ER doctor on the fly from a failed relationship. In search of new lodgings, she chances upon an old building with a spectacular view of the Brooklyn Bridge, owned by Max (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a charming landlord who resides on the premises with his ailing grandfather August (Christopher Lee).

When Juliet flirts with and kisses Max, it seems perfectly natural. He and Juliet are both attractive and successful people, their mutual interest is a given. She’s also lonely and drinks too much wine.

Finnish writer-director Antti Jokinen infuses the standard melodrama in The Resident, with a willingness to get uncomfortably close to his characters. Juliet isn’t sleeping well and can’t shake the feeling that someone is invading her space.

It’s not much of a mystery, as we learn that Max, the guy who owns the building, is indeed a highly disturbed individual, but perhaps not unreasonably so. It could be argued that Juliet’s reckless behavior with the heart of an unstable suitor is the cause of all the misery.

“You kissed me first,” he reminds her. And when Juliet has the nerve to get back together with her asshole ex, the wheels really come off.

Jokinen’s use of floating and flying camerawork is absorbing, making a mostly single-set apartment appear to be filled with more passages and secret doors than the Vatican.

The Resident is better than it has a right to be, largely thanks to Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s impressively layered performance as Max, a tortured soul who maybe just wanted to meet a nice girl. And a doctor to boot!

Morgan isn’t shy about delving the creepier depths of Max’s obsession, whether it’s licking Juliet’s hand from beneath her bed while she sleeps, or having a little cuddle party with her clothes, he’s clearly an actor unafraid of committing to a role.

Anyone expecting an arrogant and antagonistic villain in the vein of The Walking Dead’s Negan will, I thnk, be surprised by Morgan’s ability to generate menace, revulsion, and sympathy—right up until the bloody nail-gun finale.