Badland drops us right into the wreckage of Jerry Rice’s life. He’s a guy who made it out of Fallujah only to find himself trapped in a different kind of war back home. Between a soul-crushing job at a gas station and a marriage that’s hitting the rocks, it doesn’t take much for the pressure to blow. Following a false accusation that acts as the final spark, Jerry snaps, leaving his old life in literal ruins and taking his young daughter, Celina, on the lam.

They’re ghosts in the machine, drifting through the desolate American heartland, living in squats and motels while the news brands Jerry a monster. Celina, who has a chillingly innocent way of chatting with God like He’s a buddy sitting at the breakfast table, renames herself Rose and tries to find a normal life in the fading town of Fineman. But you can’t outrun the past. When they cross paths with Max, a local sheriff who’s also a veteran, the walls start closing in. It’s a collision course between two men who understand the same darkness.

Badland feels like the cinematic equivalent of a bruised rib. It’s bleak, it’s quiet, and it captures that specific, suffocating feeling of being an outsider in your own country. It eschews the typical action-hero-on-the-run tropes for something much more uncomfortable: a character study of a man who has lost his compass. The cinematography emphasizes the decay of small-town America, making every abandoned farmhouse and lonely highway feel like a tomb.

The way Celina/Rose handles the trauma, almost filtering it through her conversations with the Divine, adds a haunting, ethereal layer to what would otherwise be a straightforward crime thriller. It’s deeply unsettling to hear a child talk about such heavy topics with a terrifying, calm clarity.

This isn’t a popcorn movie. It’s a slow-burning tragedy about the cycles of violence we bring back from the desert and the impossible choices we make when we think we’re protecting the people we love. It’s a rough ride, but it stays with you long after the credits roll.

The Ruby Max Entertainment/MVD release includes extras such as a commentary by director Francesco Lucente and cinematographer Carlo Varini, interviews with Jamie Draven and Joe Morton, an electronic press kit, makeup VFX, a music press kit, auditions, deleted scenes and the soundtrack on CD. You can get it from MVD.

If you’ve spent any time digging through the bargain bins of independent horror, you know that clown movies are usually a dime a dozen. Most of them rely on a scary mask and some greasepaint to do the heavy lifting. But every once in a while, a movie comes along that decides to swap the greasepaint for five-gallon buckets of stage blood.

Enter Marcus Koch’s 2007 splatter-fest, 100 Tears.

Gurdy (Jack Amos) was just an average, introverted circus clown until a false accusation of rape led to a brutal beating by the circus strongman. Gurdy didn’t take the turn the other cheek approach; instead, he took the strangle everyone and start a cross-country massacre way. 

Fast forward, and Gurdy is now the Teardrop Killer, an urban legend following the circus from town to town, leaving behind a trail of bodies and a signature teardrop drawn in blood. When two reporters, Mark Webb (Joe Davison, who also wrote the script) and Jennifer Stevenson (Georgia Chris), start sniffing around the trail of bodies, they find themselves trapped in a warehouse of horrors.

But this isn’t just a “kill-the-intruders” flick. Gurdy finds his long-lost daughter, Christine (Raine Brown), and instead of a heartwarming reunion, they decide to make mass murder a family business.

If you know Marcus Koch, you know he’s an effects wizard first and a director second. The budget here was a mere $75,000, but every cent is on the screen in the form of viscera. We’re talking giant meat cleavers, decapitations, and a halfway house massacre that sets the tone early: this movie wants to make you lose your lunch.

100 Tears is the definition of a cult film. It’s rough around the edges, the acting can be “theatrical” (it is a circus movie, after all), and the plot logic occasionally takes a back seat to the next practical effect.

Extras include two commentaries—one with director Marcus Koch and a second with Koch and Stephen Biro; an interview with Koch; a making-of; behind-the-scenes; outtakes; Koch’s childhood shorts; and a trailer. You can get this from MVD.

Most people know Ray McKinnon as the tortured preacher from Deadwood or the guy who created Rectify. Most people know Walton Goggins as one of the most electric character actors of his generation. But before they were icons of the new Prestige TV era, they were two guys from the South making some of the weirdest, most soulful, and downright funniest indie cinema of the early 2000s under their Ginny Mule Pictures banner.

Randy Pearson (Ray McKinnon) is a good ol’ boy who is perpetually one bad decision away from total disaster. This time, he’s stepped into it deep by borrowing money from the Mob. When the bill comes due, and the Italians come knocking in rural Georgia, Randy has to turn to the only people left who haven’t completely written him off.

This leads to McKinnon pulling double duty, playing both the hapless Randy and his estranged, gay twin brother, Cecil. It’s a performance that could have devolved into a cheap caricature in lesser hands, but McKinnon gives it a surprising amount of heart.

But let’s be real: the movie belongs to Walton Goggins as Tino Armani. Imagine a modern-day prophet who obsesses over high fashion, cooks high-end Italian meals in the middle of the woods and has a supernatural knack for making money appear and disappear. Goggins plays Tino with a flamboyant, mysterious energy that feels like he stepped out of a Fellini film and got lost in a Cracker Barrel. Throw in the late, great Lisa Blount (Prince of Darkness) as Randy’s long-suffering wife, and you’ve got a mafia comedy that is way more interested in character quirks than hits and heists.

There’s even an uncredited Burt Reynolds in this.

This special edition release also includes the Academy Award-winning The Accountant and a making-of feature. You can order this from MVD.

In the video game Elf Bowling, the elves of Santa’s Workshop are on strike so Santa abuses them by using them as bowling pins as they yell, “Is that all the balls you got, Santa?” The perfect game to adapt into a kid movie! I mean, just look at this fact about the game: It became an internet sensation in 1999 when people originally thought it was a computer virus.

This movie even gets the sequel in, where Dingle Kringle — Santa’s brother — hooks up with Mrs. Claus as they all go to a tropical island and meet the Moai statues of Easter Island. There were eight of these games, including Elf Bowling – Bocce Style and Elf Bowling 6: Air Biscuits, in which the elves could fly by way of flatulence.

So…this movie. Take it away, Wikipedia.

“The film was panned by critics for its writing, animation, directing, humor, plot, musical numbers, voice acting, characterizations and for having little to nothing to do with the premise of the game.”

Santa Claus (Joe Alaskey, who voiced many of the Looney Tunes and Droopy the Dog) started in life as a pirate captain. He redeemed himself somewhat by taking took toys from the rich and giving them to orphanages. He battles his half-brother Dingle Kringle (Tom Kenny, yes, Sponge Bob) and like Holmes and Moriarty, they’ve both taken off the board. But you know, instead of the Reichenbach Falls, they get frozen into blocks of ice. Lex the elf sees them and thinking like the Eskimos did to Sub-Mariner, the elves start to worship Santa as some kind of god who will fulfill a prophecy of leadership, at which points he starts bowling with them once he’s thawed out.

Unlike the game, the elves in this love being smashed by a bowling ball. Dingle takes them to Fiji and Santa has to rescue everyone. The Moai also show up, despite Fiji being 4,600 miles from Easter Island. This is topped by dialogue that is quite intelligent, such as “I have a teensy question for you…who pooped in the peanut barrel?”

At least Tom Kenny got his wife Jill Talley (Karen the Computer Wife on Sponge Bob) a job as Mrs. Claus. He would later say that hen he got a call to do the project, he’d never heard of the recording location, which led to him driving around LA and ending up in a bad neighborhood where the recording took place inside a rundown apartment building.

A U.S./Fiji/South Korea co-production directed by Dave Kim with Rex Piano as co-director, this had animated outsourced to South Korea with the editing happening inside a Simi Valley house owned by Kim’s mother. Kim was so hands on that he did the motion capture for the dance scenes.

The credits tell you that Elf Bowling 2: The Great Halloween Pumpkin Heist is coming. Somehow, the world was not ready for that and it was cancelled.

I warn you: this is the kind of CGI that makes strike and spare animation at a bowling alley look like Katsuhiro Otomo by comparison. There are theories the world ended in the 2000s and we’re just the residual memories of dead souls, floating through a lifeless galaxy. This movie is a real argument for the truth of that presumption.

You can watch this on YouTube.

This is based on the Japanese urban legend known as Kuchisake-onna. She was a woman who missed her samurai husband while he was away at war and began to sleep with other men. When he returned and learned of how she was stepping beyond the bounds of their marriage, he sliced her face. She came back from the dead as an onryo who covered her face and appeared to people, asking if she was beautiful. If they answered no, they died. If they said yes, she removed her mask and asked again. Now, if they say no, they will die. If they say yes? They will be given a face like hers.

This legend dates back to Japan’s Edo period but came back in the late 1970s, when rumors of her reappearance led to children needing to be walked home by parents from school.

In this movie, rumors of Kuchisake-onna have spread through a small town. School teacher Noboru Matsuzaki (Haruhiko Kato) hears a voice asking “Am I pretty?” while students begin to disappear. One of the students, Mika (Rie Kuwana) doesn’t want to go home to her abusive mother (Chiharu Kawai). The teacher she tells this to, Kyoko Yamashita (Eriko Sato) has lost her daughter to her ex-husband. She hesitates in dealing with Mika and the girls runs away, meeting Kuchisake-onna.

Noboru and Kyoko start to look for the missing children and learn that Kuchisake-onna can possess other women. That’s when Noboru reveals that a woman in a photograph who may be the evil demon is actually his mother Taeko Matsuzaki. She used to abuse him until one day she disappeared. Later, she came to him and asked him to kill her. He slit his mother’s mouth and stabbed her, then dressed her body up in a coat and mask, and hid it in the closet. He thought that would stop the demon but it has only led to decades of possession and torment for women and children.

Directed by Kōji Shiraishi, who wrote the movie with Naoyuki Yokota, this followed his movie Noroi: The Curse.

Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman is one of the films on Arrow’s new J-Horror Rising set. It has extras including commentary by Japanese folklore expert Zack Davisson, a new interview with director Koji Shiraishi, a video essay by Japanese horror specialist Lindsay Nelson and an image gallery.

You can buy it from MVD.

Warner Brothers hired David Kajganich to write they wanted to be a straight-forward remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but Kajganich changed the script to reflect contemporary times. I believe that each generation gets the body snatchers that it deserves, from the Cold War McCarthy menace of the 1950s, the end of the world gloom of the 1970s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the gory yet doomed 1990s Body Snatchers.

The explanation for the aliens in this version is very scientific. A space Shuttle crash lets loose a fungus that is scattered across the country. It infects people and when they go to sleep, it reprograms them. CDC director Tucker Kaufman (Jeremy Northam) is the first to be changed and his ex-wife Carol Bennell (Nicole Kidman) notices that he has become someone else. One of her patients, Wendy Lenk (Veronica Cartwright), says the very same thing.

This film is way ahead of the conspiracy theories of today, as Kaufman uses a flu vaccine to further spread the alien contagion throughout the world. I’m shocked more Twitter — sorry, X, I forgot — users haven’t been screaming about how this movie was the government telling us what they were going to do.

Carol and Dr. Ben Driscoll (Daniel Craig) attend a dinner party where they witness the transformation of a human into an alien. By now, they’ve been doing research with Dr. Stephen Galeano (Jeffrey Wright) that shows that anyone who has had acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM) is immune from the aliens. Thanks to movie logic, this includes Carol’s son Oliver (Jackson Bond).

Carol is eventually infected but this also brings in a bit of Elm Street as you must stay awake or you will be an alien. Luckily, she remains alert and her son is the key to fixing things, even if the society that the human race returns to is violent and emotional, unlike the perfectly ordered world that the aliens promise.

Originally directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel as a nearly effects free invasion movie, the studio was unhappy and asked for The Wachowskis to rewrite and reshoot some of the movie. After a year of the movie not progressing any further, James McTeigue was hired to shoot action scenes. During these, Kidman was injured and broke her ribs. That said, she made $17 million off this.

Remember when I said that each generation gets the bodysnatchers it deserves? This one is very 2007. I can’t remember much of that time and it seemed that everything was being remade as a faster and less soulless version of what came before. It’s a great looking film, it has pleasant leads and it tries to be about the forces that rule the world. Yet it comes after three versions of Jack Finney’s story The Body Snatchers that each had a point of view about the world and how it needed to change. This one ends with no horrifying conclusion, just the pod people waking up as if they were in a dream. Compare that to the horrific closes of the 1970s and 1990s takes.

The Arrow Video release of The Invasion has so many extras, including audio commentary by film critics Andrea Subisati and Alexandra West, co-hosts of The Faculty of Horror podcast; visual essays by film scholars Alexandra Heller Nicholas and Josh Nelson; archival features from the 2007 release; a trailer; an image gallery; an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by film critics William Bibbiani and Sally Christie; a reversible sleeve with original and newly commissioned artwork by Tommy Pocket and a double-sided fold out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Tommy Pocket.

You can order this movie on UHD or blu ray from MVD.

Inspired by Season’s Greetings, an animated short created by Trick ‘r Treat writer and director Michael Dougherty, this film tells the story of the night of Halloween in Warren Valley, Ohio. It’s nonlinear the way it all plays out (think Pulp Fiction) and several of the stories cross over. They all have one thing in common — Sam, a little trick or treater dressed in pajamas and a burlap sack for a mask. If anyone goes against the rules of the holiday, he’s there to ensure they pay for it.

I love the look of Sam. For the first part of the movie, I was sure he was just a little trick or treater who was left behind by his friends and was witnessing everything going on. Once you realize what he’s doing, you start rooting for the little guy.

From a couple who take down their decorations too soon to an obese boy who can’t stop smashing pumpkins, everyone gets their reward. There’s also the school principal and potential serial killer Steven Wilkins, the elderly recluse Mr. Kreeg (the always great Brian Cox), a gang of kids trying to frighten Rhonda with the Halloween School Bus Massacre urban legend and a group of four girls out to party (including Anna Paquin as a shy virgin). Each of their tales will all be intertwined, complete with murder, gore, werewolves, zombies and finally, Sam’s secret face.

This feels like the great lost 1980’s horror movie and I loved every single minute of it. They’ve been teasing a sequel for a few years and now I can’t wait for everyone to get their act together. Writer/director Michael Dougherty was also behind the film Krampus.

The Arrow Video limited edition Trick ‘r Treat release has a brand new 4K restoration by Arrow Films, approved by writer-director Michael Dougherty.

Extras include brand new audio commentary with writer-director Michael Dougherty moderated by James A. Janisse & Chelsea Rebecca from Dead Meat Podcast; an archival audio commentary by Michael Dougherty, conceptual artist Breehn Burns, storyboard artist Simeon Wilkins and composer Douglas Pipes; interviews with actor Quinn Lord, production designer Mark Freeborn, director of photography Glen MacPherson, costume designer Trish Keating and creature designer Patrick Tatopoulos; Mark Freeborn Remembers Bill Terezakis, a new tribute to the late make-up effects designer; archival features and interviews; Season’s Greetings, a short film from 1996 directed by Michael Dougherty with optional director commentary; school bus VFX comparison; deleted and alternate scenes with optional commentary by director Michael Dougherty; FEARnet promos; a Sam O’ Lantern; a storyboard and conceptual artwork gallery; behind the scenes gallery; a comic book set in the Trick ‘r Treat universe and a trailer.

It’s all inside a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sara Deck and has a double-sided foldout poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sara Deck, six postcard-sized artcards and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Becky Darke and Heather Wixson.

You can get this from MVD.