Review of Late Night with the Devil

I thought Late Night with the Devil was pretty good. Pretty much a slow burn for most of the movie, but the ending was good. Don’t expect a lot of scares.

Review of The Last Voyage of the Demeter

I saw The Last Voyage of the Demeter. It was good. It featured one of the ugliest vampires I’ve ever seen. An old-school vampire like Nosferatu. If you’re expecting to see a suave Louis Jourdan treading the boards or a Hugh Hefner-like vampire in a smoking jacket from Dario Argento’s Dracula, you’re in for a rude shock.

Review of Suitable Flesh

I saw Suitable Flesh on Shudder. The movie is a retelling of Lovecraft’s short story “The Thing on the Doorstep.” It was a decent movie that doesn’t skimp on the gore. Interesting idea using psychiatrists as the main characters. It also reminded me of Chucky. To say more would be a spoiler. 

Smile review

I just saw Smile. This movie has some genuinely creepy moments in it. It’s much more unsettling than Barbarian. If you want your skin to crawl, take a look at Smile by Parker Finn.

Watcher review

Watcher directed by Chloe Okuno is one of the best horror movies I’ve seen this year. An American woman living in Romania with her husband feels alienated because she can’t speak Romanian. She can’t understand what other people are saying. A la Hitchcock’s Rear Window while in her apartment she sees someone watching her from across the street. She sees him in stores following her. Nobody will believe her when she says she’s being stalked. The movie conveys an eerie sense of her mounting dread. Well-done horror flick. The watcher himself is quite a reptilian creep, who actually demands an apology from her for accusing him of stalking her.

The Sadness review

I saw The Sadness on Shudder. This is one of the most violent zombie movies I’ve ever seen. Or maybe it just seems like the most violent zombie movie because the infected people are turned on by their violence. Torture, mutilation, and buckets of blood abound in this gore fest, which is rife with sadomasochism. Bloodthirsty S/M sex fiends run rampant through the Republic of China painting the streets with blood. If you like the gross and obscene, this is your cup of tea.

Review of X directed by Ti West

I saw X directed by Ti West. It’s a horror movie about a film crew shooting a porno. It’s much better than his Innkeepers, which I found boring. X moves along at a good pace and delivers the goods in the horror department. Guys trying to make it in the movies instead of working at nine-to-five jobs, they find out it’s not easy. Some ghoulish kills, a crocodile–what’s not to like? If you’ve seen Lucio Fulci’s Zombi movie, you’ll anticipate what’s going to happen to that guy peeking through a hole in the wall. And I liked the scene where the guy in the barn steps on the nail. Nicely shot from the viewpoint of the nail.

Virus:32 Review

I saw Virus:32 on Shudder. It’s a pretty decent zombie movie. A tad slow in the beginning, but it gets bloody and grim in the vicious struggle of a mother and her child to survive in a world where the infected turn into flesh-eating zombies.

Titane review

I saw Titane. This is a gut-wrenching body horror movie that could well have been filmed by David Cronenberg, very reminiscent of Crash, his adaptation of the novel by J. G. Ballard about a couple who make love at car crashes. But Titane also has male/female identity confusion. When the heroine first appears in the movie, I thought she was a boy riding in her car with her father. This confusion about her gender continues throughout the movie.

“Titane” is French for titanium, which is what the plate is constructed of that doctors insert into her head after she is in a car accident while her father is driving. This plate has strange effects on her body as she gets older, causing her excruciating pain–so much pain, in fact, that she frequently mutilates herself in attempts to stop the pain. There is a lot of self-mutilation in this movie. She breaks her nose in a stomach-churning scene to hide her identity from the cops. I’ve seen a lot of horror movies, but, frankly, I had to turn away from the screen in that particular scene. The way it was filmed was brutal. Julia Ducournau, the director, kept drawing the scene out, increasing the dread. Ducornau seems to revel in the revolting. I noticed the same thing in her grisly horror film Raw.
There are other scenes equally as disturbing in Titane.

Oh, yeah, the heroine happens to be a serial killer, which is why she’s on the run from the cops. Most of the film is about her concealing her true gender from a man who thinks she is his long-lost son. This isn’t easy for her, considering she’s pregnant. I wouldn’t call this movie scary, more like an exercise in revulsion with some black humor thrown in.

And then there’s the scene where she’s having sex with her car while in bondage while sitting on the backseat, which again reminded me of Crash–and The Counselor, too, for that matter. I found her car sex scenes rather erotic, I have to admit. Cars turn her on. It’s that titanium plate in her head, you see. I think this is an interesting movie, but it’s definitely not for the squeamish. The movie hits you in the gut, rather than in the emotions.

A Classic Horror Story review

A Classic Horror Story on Netflix starts out in predictable horror fashion. Five strangers are riding in an RV in the middle of nowhere, they have an accident, and a nightmare ensues. Their cell phones don’t work. They can’t summon help when one of them breaks his leg in a car accident. They run into a cult whose members wear animal skins and worship three gods that demand torture and maiming as part of their religion. The five strangers fall into the cult’s clutches. And then the movie becomes unpredictable and even more bloody. I found it worth the wait with its twist ending.