The feeling that I get twenty minutes into a horror movie should be, “Where is this going to go next?” not “When are they going to screw this up?” But alas, this is 2021, when mumblecore horror and overpraised elevated nonsense and A24 movies with great trailers and horrible full-length stories are the norm. So yeah, twenty minutes into The Dark and the Wicked and I was getting the answer to that question.

Bryan Bertino made The Strangers and wrote the not-as-good sequel, as well as movies like Mockinbird and The Monster. This time, he’s gone back to his family’s farmhouse to tell the story of what happens when your mother tells you that you should never come back home.

The first fifteen minutes of this movie hit home in a way that few movies have in some time. Over the last year, my mother has had to care for my father, a man who is totally there one day and then gone mentally for days at a time. It’s not as horrible as this movie, where the father is slowly dying and the mother is the only one there, calling her children back home to let them see him before he dies.

Then, you know, the dad shows up as a demon to scare the daughter while she’s in the shower and the effect is really, really bad and then you realize that no matter how well art directed the beginning of this movie is, how great the trailer is and how cool the poster is art designed, this movie is going to be the same possession tropes that we’ve seen before.

Which is a shame, because the darkness of the opening is brutal. It is everything that loss feels like. I have no idea how you keep a movie going with that level of pure bleakness, but this movie does not do that.

Instead, it becomes a movie where I continually look at the time to see how much is left of it, which I hate, because I was with this movie and wanted so much more than a floating mom outside and a preacher who calls to mind Reverend Kane, which is not the intention but at this point, I started thinking of movies that really scared me.

Elevated horror wants to mean so much more than just being frightening. Cool story. And I want these movies to be successful. But you know, there have been movies that take horrifying moments out of real life, like Rosemary’s Baby and childbirth, Don’t Look Now and the loss of a child, The Shining and the pains of being a parent (and selfishly for me, the fact that no one understands just how hard it is to be a writer when everyone keeps bothering you) and, well, I could go on. What films like this, The Babadook and yeah every Ari Aster movie gets wrong is that you can make a movie about those moments and still be frightening.

Eh, I’m probably just being a jerk by comparing three of the best horror movies ever against movies that can barely get noticed outside of film twitter geeks who just want to have something that can belong to them. You have to feel for that kind of spirit, I guess.

You can still think these are bad movies.

But don’t make the mistakes I did. When you see that cool poster or DVD cover, when you watch that trailer, when you see the cool look that this starts with, maybe you can beat the disappointment of this unlike me.

Dennis Dugan is known for the movies he’s directed for Adam Sandler, including Happy Gilmore, Big Daddy, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, Grown Ups, Just Go with It, Jack and Jill and Grown Ups 2, which has made him a four-time Golden Raspberry Worst Director nominee. He also made Problem Child, Brain Donors, Beverly Hills Ninja and several other films that critics abhorred. Another of Dugan’s Sandler films, one that we reviewed, is Just Go with It. As an actor, Dugan appeared in everything, from The Girl Most Likely To… (1973) to The Howling (1980). He even had his own, short-lived TV series, Richie Brockelman, Private Eye, which spun off the more popular, long-running The Rockford Files starring James Gardner.

Dugan conceived the story with Eileen Conn and Larry Miller, while directing from his own screenplay. And what we get is, well, it’s one of those romantic comedies that have plotlines that intersect like Crash and not the one with Elias Koteas leading a cult of car crash sex lovers.

It’s interesting to me that if this movie was only about the relationship between the perfectionist chef played by Jeremy Irons and the blind photographer well-acted by Diane Keaton, this would have been a movie that people talked about. Instead, that story is just one thread in a much larger fabric that really doesn’t add up.

Also, this movie has more people tripping over furniture than any movie you will ever see. So many people trip over furniture that I was waiting for Dick Van Dyke to show up and fall over a chesterfield sofa.

I thought that with the death of Garry Marshall, we’d see the end of this kind of movie, a romcom that unites a cast of many to tell a story that brings them together and wraps up with everyone happy. God does not play dice, so all these coincidences in the story have to make sense. That said, She does allow movies like this to be made, I guess.

Some of the actors appearing in this are JinJoo Lee from the band DNCE, Jesse McCartney from Dream Street, German actress Veronica Ferres, Maggie Grace from Lost as the wedding planner around who this film revolves, internet creator King Bach, Rob Schneider’s daughter Elle King (this movie has a propensity of musicians as actors), musician Keaton Simons (who in addition to being a musician is the stepson of Eric Roberts), Melinda Hill, Richard Kline (Larry from Three’s Company) and Dugan himself as a game show host.

That said, I’m sure there’s an audience for this, someone that wants a big silly movie to get them through the loneliness of quarantine. The idea of someone who trashed a wedding becoming the person in charge of an important wedding is a good one. And who knows? You may love this. I kind of respected its commitment to being as loud as possible, as well as, like I said, a movie where people continually crash into one another and careen over all manner of armchairs and other examples of furniture.

Love, Wedding & Other Disasters has just been released on blu ray. It’s been streaming for some time, so there are many places where you can watch it. We were generously given a copy to review and obviously, the gift of free movies has not lured me into just giving away good reviews.

Man, I feel like I should say something nice, beyond the fact that I really liked the late age romance between Irons and Keaton. Hmm. Alright. Maggie Grave is beyond gorgeous in this with blonde hair. Also, I kind of liked the brother of the groom who is chained to an exotic dancer throughout the movie, all for opportunity to win a reality show.

Two years ago, we watched Mandao of the Dead, a film that was a lot of fun. Now the sequel — which was almost called Mandao of the Damned — is here and the good news is that it picks up right where the first one ended.

https://vimeo.com/490642178

This time around, Jay Mandao has astral projected back in time to save the life of a B-movie star. Assuredly, that seems like a noble endeavor. But the more Jay and his pals mess around with time, the deeper they go into conspiracy, death and a Hollywood cult. Oh yeah — it’s also Christmas.

Writer/director Scott Dunn returns as Jay Mandao, the titular character of this story, along with cousin Andy (Sean Lang, their driver Fez (Gian Gomez Dunn) and nephew Jackson O’Hare (Sean McBride).

This time around, Jay is feeling lost until he’s hired by Ted Williams (Jim O’Doherty), an agent to determine how an actress named Aura Garcia (Jenny Lorenzo) in his employ died. While Jay has only been able to communicate with his dead father before, now he learns way too much. He learns information that puts all of his friends in danger.

I get how Mandao feels. He just wants to escape into a world of cereal and slacking, but people keep pulling him into their schemes. I had a blast with this one, just like the original Mandao movie. The filmmakers know a wise fact that even big budget movies neglect: keep people wanting more. This clocks in at 70 minutes, which is the perfect running time for a movie.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime. I’m excited that it’s going to be a series soon!

This documentary offers a look back at the films that we love to cover most on this site, the grindhouse and drive-in horrors of the 70s and 80s. It has plenty of the stars lined up and doesn’t do anything to get in the way of them telling their stories, along with clips of the films for which they’re known best.

You’ll get to hear from everyone from Brinke Stevens (Slumber Party Massacre), Lynn Lowry (The Crazies, I Drink Your Blood, Shivers), Kevin Van Hentenryck (Basket Case), John Dugan (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), Mel Novak (Game of Death), John Russo (the writer of Night of the Living Dead, Midnight and The Majorettes), Carl Crew (Blood Diner), Jonathan Peacy (I Spit on Your Grave: Deja Vu), Marneen Fields (Hellhole), Camilla Carr (Don’t Look in the Basement), Craig Muckler (the producer of Microwave Massacre), John Naulin (special effects for Re-Animator), Frank M. Farel (writer and producer of Spookies) and Craig Reed (who played the one-armed zombie in Re-Animator).

The only downside I can think to this movie is that it has such a short running time. I would have loved to hear more stories from everyone involved. If you’re a fan of any of these movies, this is something you’ll enjoy watching.

You can watch this online on the So Cal Cinema On Demand page or buy the DVD right here. To learn more, visit the official SCS Facebook page.

Filmed in less than 2 weeks during the COVID-19 pandemic, Angry Asian Murder Hornets has just one more way that last year could have been the worst in our lifetime: yes, murder hornets getting into Chinese nuclear product.

The thing I loved best about this movie was that the first five minutes feel like a B-roll filled nature reality show all about these bugs which don’t really exist. I mean, murder hornets sound bad. Angry murder hornets are even worse.

Asian, well, I guess at least we know where they’re from.

Director Dustin Ferguson seems to make a movie every time he wakes up, but you have to give the guy points for being prolific and having a hefty sense of fun in the movies that he makes. Also, it’s kind of interesting that his movies seem to be 70s grindhouse movies upcycled to 80s video rental movies that have 90s and 00s soundtracks, what with the We’re Wolves cover of “Break Stuff” that plays when an angry murder hornet buzzes by, much less the second cover, this time “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor” over the closing credits.

He’s also pretty good at being meta, bouncing the film from location to location, often using cable news and a horror hostess, Malvolia The Queen of Screams, to keep things jumping.

By the time you’ve read this review, Dustin has made three more movies. One of them is Ebola Rex Versus Murder Hornets, which I really want to see. I kid — I watch just about everything the guy makes! You should too.

You can watch this streaming on So Cal Studios On Demand or order the DVD right here. There’s even an online game the filmmakers have hinted at. You can learn more on the official Facebook page.

Audrey (Sheila McCarthy) and Henry (Julian Richings) didn’t start out as Satanists*. But once their grandson Jackson dies, well, their lives have changed. They want him back no matter what it takes, no matter who gets hurt, even if their first rule is that the pregnant woman they have taken, Becker, is not to be harmed.

There’s no way this can end well for anyone.

Director Justin G. Dyck has somehow already figured out what older horror makers have gleaned, but at a much earlier age. He’s directing plenty of holiday movies like Christmas In the Rockies and Christmas Wedding Planner, movies that are full of innocence and joy, while also making a movie where a kindly older couple bakes cookies when they aren’t bringing animals back from the dead. I’d blame writer Keith Cooper for being a bad influence, but he’s also written several similar films like A Very Country Wedding (with Dyck directed) and My Dad Is Scrooge.

The closer the couple at the heart of this film gets to a reverse exorcism — putting Jackson’s soul into the place of an infant’s consciousness — the more people die in increasingly horrific, if not comedic ways. They also have a circle of black magic users, whose leader Ian may not have their best interests in mind. Imagine that.

This film seems like The House of the Devil, if we emphasized more with the Ulman’s than with Samantha. Sadly, where that movie picks up steam and blows you away with its ending, this one wildly shifts tone in the last few minutes and closes with an ambiguous ending that felt less like closure and more like filmmakers wondering how to finish things.

Imagine if Rosemary’s Baby didn’t end the way it did after all that build.

That’s why this is a pretty good movie — struggling for great — but the end just felt like a ton of monsters being thrown at the viewer and the focus being pulled from who we care about to someone who hasn’t been the protagonist. It’s hard to care about someone more than the people we’ve been told to care about, you know?

That said, this remains heads and shoulders above most of what passed for horror in 2020. I definitely think its worth a watch and you can check it out on Shudder.

*By this, we mean the kind of Satanists that this movie claims are Satanists. We all know The Church of Satan has nothing to do with this kind of thing, but would possibly appreciate the dark choices and black humor of this movie.

Somewhere in the North Atlantic, during the fading days of World War II, a life raft filled with the surviors of a destroyed hospital shop drift with no food or water until they come upon an abandoned German vessel, which seems to be salvation. If we’ve learned anything from movies like Death Ship, things are about to get much worse for all of them.

This Australian film, directed by Justin Dix (2012’s Crawlspace) and co-written by Dix and Jordan Prosser, is filled with style and substance, taking a story that may seem familiar and elevating it to a bloody, suspenseful and surprising film that you should take notice of.

After finding a little girl named Mya — clutching a doll that would fit right into a giallo or modern horror movie — it only takes a few moments before the survivors discover the patriarch and matriarch of a family of vampires that have already taken out every German on board. Their goal may have been smuggling their coffins — priceless artifacts — out of the country before the Allies made their way through Germany — but now, everyone must pay the price.

The film does a great job of setting up the mood in the first half, as it was shot in a legitmate vessel of that era, the HMAS Castlemaine, a WWII Bathurst Class corvette ship that is now an Australian museum.

If you can be patient for the first part of the movie, you’ll be rewarded with plenty of blood, bat-looking vampires who can psychically possess humans and a twist ending that perfectly  fits this film.

Unlike the majority of modern horror that is either all high budget gloss or low cost poorly shot digital video dreck, Blood Vessel was made by a team that understands that mood, lighting and even the color palette of your film go just as far as throwing blood and guts all over the place.

vessel of that era, the HMAS Castlemaine, a WWII Bathurst Class corvette ship that is now an Australian museum.

If you can be patient for the first part of the movie, you’ll be rewarded with plenty of blood, bat-looking vampires who can psychically possess humans and a twist ending that perfectly fits this film.

Unlike the majority of modern horror that is either all high budget gloss or low cost poorly shot digital video dreck, Blood Vessel was made by a team that understands that mood, lighting and even the color palette of your film go just as far as throwing blood and guts all over the place.

You can watch this on Shudder. For more information, check out the movie’s official Facebook page.

When Theresa Chaney (Nicole Fancher, Unchained Love), a socially awkward woman, emerges from a time travel experiment, she soon learns that she is shifting through the timestream out of control. She tries to keep this malady a secret, but as she keeps shifting more and more, she has less control. Even worse, even her entire existence begins to unravel.

Shifter is written and directed by Jacob Leighton Burns, who has dreamed of making films since the third grade.

While this film does not have a huge budget, it does have plenty of ideas, as well as a non-heterosexual romance at its core without coming off like that was an idea just to get press. It all feels very natural, as natural as a movie about a woman dealing with grief misusing the ability to travel through time can be.

The final shots of this film are harrowing and bleak. It’s rare to be able to generate that type of emotion and this movie pulls that off with aplomb.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime. You can learn more on the official website and Facebook pages.

Rot taught me something. I never, ever want to be a graduate student. Seriously, this movie makes it seem like the kind of living hell that I’d rail against.

Madison (Kris Alexandrea) is one of those under pressure grad students, so part of the life of academics that the one thing she can leave behind is her boyfriend Jesse (Johnny Kostrey). But once he goes missing, someone or something else has taken his body over. And being busy with the demands of a doctorate will be easy compared to this.

Writer/director/editor Andrew Merrill has put together a story that could be a possession film or something akin to a body snatcher movie, but it never really explains much about the evil force that is inside Jesse. What’s more important is how his rage explodes and how it impacts everyone in his life.

The how is quite simple: Jesse is injured by an attack by one of the patients in the nursing home where he works. At first, he seems fine, but before long, he assaults both his roommate Aaron (Johnny Uhorchuk) and girlfriend Nora (Sara Young Chandler) and then disappears.

The virus, if you will, has begun to spread all over town, with the very center of it being the nursing home. With a title like Rot, you can rest assured that things will get messy.

You can buy Rot right here.

Unleashed from the dungeon of the American Genre Film Archive (AGFA), this is a compilation of some of the wildest, most insane trailers they could find. Trust me, I have so many trailer compilations and this one even surprised me with some of its entries.

According to AGFA, this was “meticulously constructed by the mad scientists at AGFA to resemble an otherworldly night at the drive-in.” Unlike so many of the comps that I own, these trailers have been cleaned up with a 2K scan to make them look better than they have in years, perhaps even when they originally screened.

I like to be surprised when I watch these, so if you’re like me, you can stop reading now, because I’m going to spoil what movies are on this:

• Nightmare Weekend: A slasher in which a killer uses a computer to kill people.
• Dead and Buried: One of my favorite films ever, a dark and twisted tale of a small town with a secret.
• Witchcraft ’70: A recut version of the mondo Angeli Bianchi… Angeli Neri, this is nearly a totally different movie, filled with occult insanity. This is totally one of my favorite party films.
• The Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary (AKAThe Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies): What does it say about me that I knew which this movie was in under three seconds?
• Fear No Evil: They have the kiss fight in the trailer, so there’s that.
• The Corpse Grinders/The Undertaker and His Pals/The Embalmer: I love these triple feature trailers and this one even has a special contract you can fill out.
• Scalps: The Fred Olen Ray version, in case you were hoping for the Italian one.
• Carnival of Blood/Curse of the Headless Horseman
• Massage Parlor Murders!
• Hobgoblins: Woah boy. I also knew this one within seconds.
• The Vampire’s Coffin/The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy
• Splatter University
• The Velvet Vampire
• Magdalena Possessed by the Devil: My hope is that more people see this trailer on this collection and hunt down this completely deranged film.
• Meat Cleaver Massacre: I love that the producers doubled down on how they conned Christopher Lee into being in this by having him all over the trailer.
• Terror Sexo y Brujería: We just featured this movie, which is actually two movies shot decades apart.
• The Frenzy of Blood Double Feature, which I hate so much, as it features some of the most annoying people ever while trying to get you to see Blood Spattered Bride and I Dismember Mama
• The Slayer: Again, I want more people to hunt this movie down, because wow, it’s really out there.
• Brainiac: This trailer is nearly as deranged as the film.
• Drive-In Massacre
• FutureKill
• Lurkers
• I Drink Your Blood/I Eat Your Skin: Is this the best double bill of all time?
• The Manson Massacre
• Three on a Meathook
• Final Exam
• Body Melt
• Lucifer’s Women
• Demonoid: Seeing this trailer made me want to watch this movie again. And again.
• Demon Wind: I’ve never seen this trailer!
• Blood Hook
• The Man with 2 Heads
• Prey
• Evil Laugh
• The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman
• Psychos In Love
• The Worm Eaters
• Old Dracula

There are also some astounding food ads and one totally wild one for the Winchester Mystery House which has to be seen to be believed. Plus, they’ve also included Say Goodbye to Your Brain, a found footage horror experiment that combines multiple trailers.

Perhaps best of all, there’s a full hour of SOV trailers, The AGFA Horror Trailer Show: Videorage, which includes:

• Spiritual Challenge: This trailer is worth the price of this entire set!
• Horrorscope
• Blood Cult
• Catacombs
• A Night to Dismember
• The Burning Moon
• Forever Evil
• Death Nurse
• Enjoyment In Hell
• Mr. Ice Cream Man
• Jeffrey Dahmer The Secret Life
• Evil Island
• The Demons Inside My Head: This also looks worth tracking down.
• Evil Night
• Blood Massacer (Yes, that’s how it’s spelled)
• The Long Island Cannibal Massacre
• Terror at Tenkiller
• Cannibal Campout
• The Abomination: One of the greatest SOV brain destroyers ever!
• Battle of the Gods
• Woodchipper Massacre
• Death Metal Zombies
• The Ripper
• Hauntedween: This looks so amazing!
• Science Crazed
• Demons In the Land
• Bloody Anniversary/The Dummy
• Bloody Body Muscle Body Builder In Hell
• The Last Slumber Party
• The Dead Next Door
• Revenge: Blood Cult II
• Things
• Fungicide
• Haunted
• The Night Marchers
• Disembodied
• Zombie 90: Extreme Pestilence
• Things II
• Holla If I Killed You!: The Polonia Brothers made a SOV slasher that’s set in a black comedy club?!?
• Holy Moly

You can get this from Vinegar Syndrome. You totally should, because it’s so worth the money. Let me tell you, the TV commercials that are worked into this are so incredible, too. Get it and let me know what you think!