The ambitious host of an amateur ghost hunting show called Ghost Seekers who wants to keep his show pure, unlike the competition but is sick of the same old boring haunts that every other show encounters. He drops the entire budget of the season by asking another host to tell him what houses they plan on exploring and heads to a place that may really be more than his team is ready for.

This movie is directed by Dean Alioto, who also created Alien Abduction: Incident In Lake County, a found footage film that predates The Blair Witch. He co-wrote it with Peter Dukes, who wrote and directed 2017’s Escape Room.

The Dalva house, where the haunting in the movie happens, is really the place where Ben Affleck and Matt Damon wrote Good Will Hunting.

Ryan Merriman is the lead and he’s been in plenty of stuff, from the TV series Pretender to The Jurassic Games. The producer of his show is played by Jamie Tisdale, who was on the From Dusk ‘Til Dawn TV series the film The Devil’s Candy.

Perhaps the best-known actress in the movie is Heather Langenkamp, who was Nancy in the A Nightmare on Elm Street films. She’s now the co-owner of AFX Studio and was doing the effects for American Horror Story: Cult by day and shooting this film in the evening.

I’ve seen enough ghost chasing movies to last me until 2030, but this is a well-made movie that fans of this genre will enjoy.

Portal is available on demand and digitally from Vertical Entertainment.

DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent by its PR team.

Newlyweds Mary and Matt are celebrating Christmas with her parents when he gives her a gift for their honeymoon – two tickets to Africa’s biggest race, The Furnace, which will take them across the biggest animal reserves in the world. Then, in the second it takes to kiss, a bus wipes out their truck and Matt dies.

A year later, Mary is grieving and using an oxygen tank to breathe. That’s when she meets Coffin, a man who was once a doctor in Africa that came to America after civil war destroyed his village.Now, he digs graves, and somehow is able to push Mary toward recovery and eventually being able to run again.

However, she still has the goal of running The Furnace. Is it possible?

Director Darrell Roodt is South Africa’s most prolific director, working with Patrick Swayze in Father Hood, James Earl Jones in Cry, the Beloved Country and Ice Cube in Dangerous Ground. He also directed Dracula 3000, Sumuru and Sarafina!

You may recognize the actress who played Mary from I Spit On Your Grave: Deja Vu. She’s Jamie Bernadette and has appeared in plenty of smaller roles and indie movies like The 6th Friend.

I love getting movies to review, because there’s no way I would have watched this otherwise. It’s got a great message and really makes you consider how much you have going for yourself in life.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR team.

On Christmas Eve, a young woman is looking for a last-minute gift. A mysterious shopkeeper (Jeffrey Combs, The Frighteners, Re-Animator) tells her the stories behind four potential choices, like killer dolls, witches and evil Santas. However, there’s real danger at foot for the girl, who has until midnight to choose the perfect gift and get out alive.

Honestly, I feel like I’ve seen way too many Christmas horror anthology films. But if you want one more, you’re in luck. This film, directed by Jeremy Berg, David Burns, Jeff Ferrell and Jeff Virgil (the latter two were also the writers), is for you.

The first story, “Dollface” is a straight-up slasher about a killer wearing a cracked doll mask. It’s followed by “The Hand That Rocks the Dreidel,” which is pretty much a Pupper Master-style thriller about a babysitter out to rob a family and the evil rabbi puppet standing in her way. Up third is “Christmas Carnage,” which sees Joel Murray — yes, the brother of Bill — go crazy after his wife cheats on him and he loses out on a promotion. Finally, “Room to Let” is about a cult town that gave birth to our female hero in the main story, outing Combs’ character as someone who collects the stories behind the treasures he has stolen from his victims. Obviously, Needful Things was an influence.

This movie has the biggest failing of all modern anthologies. The stories never rise beyond their main plot point. There’s a slasher? That’s it. There’s an evil doll. That’s also it. There’s nothing new, only recycled events shoved into a bag of coal that is supposed to pass as gifts for the good boys and girls.

You can watch this for free on Amazon Prime and Tubi. It’s also available on DVD from Uncork’d Entertainment.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR company.

Why does this movie exist? Who does it exist for? Why do people love it so much?

These questions reverberated inside my head as it played in front of me. I was waiting for a moment where I would be awestruck, blasted by its sublime genius that so many people had trumped up or maybe even worried by the philosophy that so many people were worried about.

I felt absolutely nothing.

Joker might seem like a good movie if you’ve never seen Taxi Driver or The King of Comedy. But here’s my struggle. Those movies have something to say. Something to prove. They aspire to be art when this film is simply commerce.

If you think this is a good film, tell me what it has to say. Tell me the meaning of it and why it exists other than, “The Joker is cool” or “This is the Joker’s origin story.” What is the purpose of watching a man’s horrible life that never gets better and only gets worse and then the lives he touches get destroyed along the way.

I mean, is it a cliche to use that sound and fury signifying nothing quote when this movie is so rote that it uses the song “White Room” in perhaps the most obvious of ways? Nothing is unexpected. Nothing is unique. This movie is the definition of wallpaper, albeit wallpaper bought by a tween at Hot Topic because they desperately yearn for something, anything, to make them seem different than the herd while mooing their way through the fields of utter boredom.

Director Todd Phillips started his career by directing Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies while he was still a junior at NYU. His second film, Frat House, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance before HBO bought it. It never aired, as many of the film’s particpants claimed they were paid to enact the scenes in the movie.

A third film, the Phish-following Bittersweet Motel, was his last documentary before making the movies Road Trip and Old School for producer Ivan Reitman. His career since has been a series of successes, like Starsky & Hutch, School for Scoundrels, Due Date and The Hangover series.

Which brings us to this movie.

It’s written by Scott Silver, who wrote 8 Mile — good — and X-Men Origins: Wolverine — bad. He also wrote The Fighter, which won him an Oscar nomination.

I always feel like you should say something nice first.

So here’s goes.

Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is great. It’s acting desperately searching for a better movie to be in. His goal was to play a character that audiences couldn’t identify with — that seems odd for the main role in a movie — studying assassins instead of people who had played the Joker before.

He plays Arthur Fleck, who starts out the film as a party clown and aspiring stand-up comedian who lives with his mother Penny (Francis Conroy, every season of American Horror Story). A disorder causes him to laugh out loud for no reason and he depends on the government for his meds.

An attack while working as a clown leaves him needing a gun, a gun that falls out of his pocket while working in a children’s hospital. He also begins dating his neighbor Sophie (Zazie Beats, who was in Deadpool 2 and Slice) and finds that a video of him on stage has gone viral, ending up on his favorite TV program, The Murray Franklin Show.

The fact that Robert DeNiro is inversing his The King of Comedy role, playing Jerry Langford instead of Rupert Pumpkin, is the type of creativity normally reserved for college freshmen who believe they are the first people to ever read Herman Hesse.

Arthur is beaten up by three drunken Wayne Enterprises businessmen. He shoots two of them in self-defense before feeling so good about himself that he kills the third. This leads to Thomas Wayne — who Arthur’s mother believes is her son’s father — denouncing whoever did this killing as a clown.

Soon, people are rioting in the streets wearing clown masks and Arthur is finally feeling like his life has meaning. However, two Gotham cops visit his mother, looking for the killer of the businesmen, and she has a stroke. This causes Arthur to either go off the deep end or become sane, as his meds have run out. He realizes that he has no girlfriend and that everything in his mind has been a lie.

This brings him to The Murray Franklin Show, where he embraces the name The Joker, inciting another riot that also leads to Joe Chill killing the Waynes inside Crime Alley after a showing of Zorro The Gay Blade. Yes, that really happens.

Another potentially crazy person was angered by this movie. Jared Leto, who portrayed the Joker in Suicide Squad and reportedly sent used condoms and dead rats to his co-stars, was alienated and upset by the fact that Warner Brothers was making a Joker movie without him. He even left his agents over this and attempted to get people to cancel this movie.

I’ve heard words like groundbreaking and Oscar being thrown about because of this movie. As a society, we’ve really devalued those two words, huh?

This is a movie that may not even be about the real Joker. It might not even connect to anything. And it’s a movie about a man forgotten and thrown away that becomes somebody before being nobody. It’s also a waste of two hours of your time.

Man, I should work in some other nice things. The cinematography feels large in scope, when so many other films seem small these days. I also loved seeing the old Warner Brothers logo.

I mean, this won the Gold Lion at the Venice Film Festival. It also had an eight-minute long standing ovation.

I sat there waiting, hoping, struggling to find one moment of entertainment and relevance and walked away saying, “That was a movie.” It should be something more.

Instead, I’ll have to see people wearing this costume and thinking it has some significance. These are the same people who think naming the comedy club “Pogo’s Comedy Club” is daring because it references John Wayne Gacy instead of hammer soft irony.

We deserve better and have become so mired in the dross that we think that movies like this are worth something. I’m not being an elitist — I love popcorn films and if you read this site you know I have a soft spot for Italian horror and 80’s slashers — but when I see something that is shit, I have to call it the purest shit I’ve seen in years.

Fifteen years ago, two teenage girls were murdered at Merrymaker Campgrounds. Everyone thought it was just an animal attack, the case was closed, the camp was condemned and the killer never found. But whatever or whoever it was, it still waits in the woods, ready to kill again. This film from director John Woodruff — his first full-length movie — was written by Jonathan Murphy. They had previously worked together on the project The Stalker Experiment. 

Larisa Oleynik plays Anita Bishop and you may remember her from 10 Things I Hate About You, Mad Men, The Secret World of Alex Mack and The Baby-Sitters Club. That’s not the only person you’ll recognize in this movie. Heather Tom from The Bold and the Beautiful shows up, as does Christian Oliver (Snake Oiler from the Speed Racer movie) and Don Frye. That’s right — former UFC fighter and New Japan Pro Wrestling monster heel and the man who turned Yoshihiro Takayama’s face into pudding, Don Frye!

Seriously, this film is worth watching just for seeing Frye. He should be in The Expendables. He’s a legit tough guy, after all.

Oliver plays Roland Baumgarner, a writer who wrote a famous book all about the murders. He’s been invited to cut the ribbon at the grand opening of the new Merrymaker Camp. That seems like a bad idea. Guess what? It is. The horror that Roland wrote about has now come back to potentially end his life.

You can get this from on DVD or via on demand from Uncork’d Entertainment, and as mentioned, you can also stream this for free on Tubi.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR company. That has no bearing on our review.

Echoes of Fear premiered at the 18th annual Shriekfest Horror Festival, the longest running horror festival in Los Angeles, where it won Best Supernatural Horror Feature. Since then, the film has won six Best Feature Awards at other festivals.

Directed by the team of Brian and Laurence Avenet-Bradley — and filmed in the house that they live in — Echoes of Fear follows Alysa, who has inherited her grandfather’s home. As she puts it up for sale, she starts to sense that there’s a presence in the home that is not from our world.

The film was inspired by several real life killings, from the Hillside Strangler being two cousins to the ghost rapes of Bolivia, where women in a Bolivian Mennonite community were convinced that ghosts or demons were attacking them in their sleep when it was really men using animal anesthetic. Closer to home — the South Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh — Roy Kirk’s murder of Ann Hoover also had a hand in this film. That killer dug a tunnel to her house from  his home to break in and dismember her.

This movie takes a definite turn in the last part, so the rug gets pulled out from under you. It’s better than most of the WalMart straight to streaming dreck out there and certainly worth a watch.

Echoes of Fear is still playing theaters, so to see if it’s going to be paying near you, check out the official site and Facebook.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR team.

A down-on-his-luck archaeologist returns from a cave expedition that contains a cursed relic that’s also a portal to Hell. He discovers that the only way to stop the curse on his family is to go back to the cave and destroy the relic.

Is that enough reason to watch this movie? What if I told you that William Shatner plays his dad? Now you’re in, right? What if they threw in Jeri Ryan, Seven of Nine herself, for you lovers of Star Trek? Now you’re hooked, huh?

John Brock is an archaeologist who returns from an expedition through the caves of rural Kentucky. He’s been looking for the same mysterious relic his family has been hunting for generations. But now, he’s haunted by dream-like visions of a ferocious bird-like creature from ancient folklore. Now, he knows she must take his family back to the cave, find the relic and destroy it. 

Ever since American stars started making Italian and Japanese films, I’ve always loved when they do scenes that have them alone, talking on the phone and not connected to any of the characters in the movie that they’re in. This movie follows suit.

That said — the monsters are awesome and Shatner is as crazy as you want him to be. I dream of the day that he and Nicholas Cage get to emote together in a movie that makes even less sense than this one.

This film is available now. You can read more on the official site.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR team.

A notorious gunslinger is slipped a slow-acting poison by an heiress and told he has three days to track down and rescue her sister, who has been kidnapped by a band of hoodlums if he wants the antidote. Is this an Escape from New York sequel? No, it’s the latest Robert Bronzi film. Yes — Robert Bronzi, who was in Death Kiss, an attempt to create a modern Death Wish.

Jeff Miller, who was also behind The Toybox, said of the film, “If you liked Death Kiss, you’ll love Bronzi again delivering his brand of justice. We filmed at recognizable locations where Bronson stood 50 years ago on the classic Once Upon a Time In the West, and I can’t wait for fans to check out this latest chapter in our series of films with Bronzi.” The movie was filmed in California as well as in Western Leone, near Almeria, Spain, where the famous Leone film was also made.

Bronzi plays The Colonel, who as was discussed above, is hired by Ursula in the hopes of rescuing her sister from the pimp Swearengen, who is played by Michael Pare (Streets of Fire). He does a good job of playing the mysterious tough guy and this film feels like an improvement over the last one I saw him in, Death Kiss.

It’s a pretty audacious title, though, taking from Tarantino, referencing Leone and then castig aspersions to the HBO series that just had a movie of its own. That’s a lot of borrowed interest.

That said, if you rented a lot of Cannon knockoffs in the 1980’s, you’ll be happy with what this movie is. I’m not a fan of digital shot films as much as the good old fashioned movies, but this was an entertaining watch.

Once Upon A Time In Deadwood is already out via on demand and will be released on DVD November 19.

DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent to us by its PR company.

Returning to the abandoned Detroit television station where they once delighted a generation of children viewers, master puppeteer Mister Jolly (Bill Oberst Jr., 3 From Hell) has brought his puppets back for one last battle with Richard Crane (Bill Moseley, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Otis from the Rob Zombie movies).

This movie was shot in the abandoned studios of WJBK in Detroit, Michigan — the same place where Milky’s Movie Party and Sir Graves Ghastly were filmed.

The battle between the evil ventriloquist and Richard gets more complicated when his son Steffen and his friends arrive at the studio on the night of a blood moon, just as Mr. Jolly unleashes his evil puppets, including Handy Dandy.

This all comes from Jeff Broadstreet, working under the pseudonym Roy G. Biv. Yes, the director of Night of the Living Dead 3D was so proud of this, he didn’t use his real name.

There are dudes with sledgehammers wandering around. Masonic subplots. And a cast of disposable college kids ready to be offed. If anything, it looks better than your average direct to video film.

DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent to us by its PR team. That has no impact on this article.