In a small town in Texas, an annual endurance contest in which contestants have to keep their hands on the body of a new pickup truck may offer entertainment to spectators and the chance of a lifetime to participants, but things spiral out of control.

If you’ve seen Hands On a Hard Body, you know how these contests work. German director Bastian Günther takes that idea and turns it into an examination of several people and their reasons for this test of will.

The player destined to win seems to be Kyle (Joe Cole), an unemployed local with a young wife and baby daughter. He seems obsessed to get the Nissan truck to the point that he begins to lose his sanity. There’s also a churchgoing woman named Ruthie (Lynne Ashe) who has her Bible and fellow worshippers on her side. They are amongst the twenty people gathered by Maria Parsons (Carrie Preston), the happy go lucky divorcee who has been doing this contest for years, but has never had one turn out like this.

The end of the film gets beyond dark, but it’s left to the viewer to wonder if it’s happening or the flashback shows what really happened. But real life is just as bleak. 24 year old Richard Vega threw a garbage can through the window of a K-Mart next door, walked to the sporting goods section and stole a shotgun. He was stopped by police before he could leave, at which point he shot himself. He had consumed six energy drinks over the past several hours and seemed like the most driven of all the people trying to win.

The idea of people doing anything for a prize while everyone watches won’t go away, particularly as the elite and lower castes grow further apart in America. The truck salespeople have already made it; they’re not giving an opportunity to the twenty people fighting against exhaustion to stand next to a truck. They’re giving us a way to stare and watch people fall to pieces.

I’ve been waiting for this movie for three years. Principal photography began in New South Wales in early March 2020 — just when COVID-19 started — and wrapped that June. While it had a premiere in Sarasota, Florida on October 23, 2020, it was as if this movie were never made. That is, until RJLE bought the rights and released it in theaters this March, with plans for a blu ray in May and an eventual run on Shudder.

The first movie in this series to play theaters since 1993’s Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice — there are ten other movies in this series as well as the short film that predates them, Disciples of the Crow — none of the movies have ever lived up to the original Children of the Corn.

Does this?

The town of Rylstone, Nebraska — well, Rylstone, Australia, but let’s go with what the movie tells us — is considered a government buyout for their failed corn. Robert (Callan Mulvey) plans on selling, but his daughter Boleyn (Elena Kampouris) argues it. Then there are the town’s children, led by Rylstone Children’s Home resident Eden (Kate Moyer), who come to the town meeting to weigh in before being laughed at by the grown-ups.

However, Eden speaks to He Who Walks, the demonic presence within the cornfield and soon the children of the small city have risen up and come at their parents with death in their hearts. Eden learned from an incident in your youth when Boyd (Rory Potter) emerged from the corn and killed every adult in the orphanage and when the cops unleashed halothane gas, all the kids died as well. Now, Bolelyn must figure out a way to stop the carnage when the kids go wild.

I kind of like how this film got in a message about herbicides and GMOs. There’s also a scene where Bolelyn’s beother Cecil (Jayden McGinlay) Cecil walks through town and notices just how much child abuse — not to mention his mother cheating on his dad — there is in this falling to pieces town. He joins Eden, as she claims the entity she serves will help them kill everyone.

While most of the important town leaders are placed in prison, the rest are led to a mass grave, gassed with that same halothane and then buried under dirt. It’s a really well-done and rough scene. Other than the shock ending that sets up — you know it — another sequel, things work pretty well in this, if still in the shadow of what came before.

The main reason I was excited for this was that it was directed and written by Kurt Wimmer, who wrote Sphere and the remake of The Thomas Crowne Affair before directing two wild early 2000s movies that showed off his riff on Hong Kong action called gun fu, Equilibrium and Ultraviolet.

The results? Not the worst film in the series and one that takes its own path away from the cult idea and presents more ecohorror. It’s an interesting idea and just ends up being an okay movie, but when you’re the 12th film in a series, okay sometimes is more than okay.

Vampus (Saturnino García, El Dia de la Bestia) digs graves up night for bodies that he opens at night and feeds the interned remains to his pet Toby. And when he’s not doing that, he’s telling stories of horror to you, the viewer. Each of the four horror stories in Vampus Horror Tales are directed by a different first time filmmaker with the wraparound directed by Víctor Matellano and co-writers Victoria Vázquez and Diego Arjona.

“La Boda” is directed and written by Manuel Martínez and is all about the bride Marta and the best man Santi finding themselves trapped in a basement as he attempts to get her to leave the groom at the altar. “Cumpleaños” directed by Erika Elizalde and written by Ignacio López has another couple, Arlin and Daniela trapped inside a carnival ride. “Segunda Cita,” directed and written by Isaac Berrocal, has the blind Margot (Erika Sanz) being menaced by Alex (Nacho Guerreros) on a date at his county house. “Linaje,” by director and writer Piter Moreira, has Marcos (Federico Repetto) dealing with keeping his newly vampiric wife (Vicky Jorge) hidden and fed during a pandemic created by tainted hot dogs.

Inspired by Spanish horror comics and movies of the past, this isn’t perfect — no anthology is — but I was overjoyed to see Paul Naschy (Ignacio López) make an appearance as well as Franco regular Antonio Mayans. I really loved the cannibalistic and dark humored Vampus way more than the stories he tells, which seem to rely on basic horror ideas instead of the self-aware nature of the bookend segments. That said, I like the choice to have everything in black and white. This is still much better — even as it is imperfect — than so many streaming anthologies.

Vampus Horror Tales is available on demand and on digital from Uncork’d Entertainment.

As a global war begins to burn itself out, a young filmmaker named Diane (Alexandra Slade) is trapped in a military bunker with the increasingly unhinged General Gore (Nick Young). That’s a simple explanation for this film’s plot but it gets much stranger than that sentence.

Director and writer Brian Patrick Butler has made something that lives up to its prophetic tagline: Just because you are saved, doesn’t mean you’re safe. This is neither all comedy or all horror or all political but all those things jammed into a cocktail of so many more ingredients, like body horror and the stated influences of Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Carpenter and David Cronenberg.

What starts in a bunker filled with dead bodies and ends up with the two diametrically opposed characters finally engaging in conflict, this movie gets absolutely wild and does so in a black and white look that is positively jarring and, of course, causes one to think of the Twilight Zone but here it’s a positive connection. Or propaganda films, which this movie goes out of its way to show the two sides of.

In just fifty minutes, this gets some big ideas out there and has two leads who are more than up to the task of the heavy dialogue they’ve been given. This is definitely worth watching, as is where Butler takes his career next.

You can watch Friend of the World on Troma Now and Tubi.

I missed this when it first came out and I’ve always had it on my list, wondering what it was about. Once the sequel, Becky 2: The Wrath of Becky, I figured it was time to see a movie I lost track of during the pandemic.

I’ve gone on record saying that I’ve overcome all manner of violence in my life and never thought twice about it, but still remember mean things preteen girls would say decades ago. Becky (Lulu Wilson, who is great in everything she’s been in, including The Haunting of Hill House, Ouija: Origin of Evil, Annabelle: Creation and Deliver Us From Evil) is a young woman bullied in school and still struggling to get over the loss of her mother. Somehow, all that pain doesn’t come out as mean words but as the kind of violence usually reserved for male action stars.

Her father Jeff (Joel McHale) takes her to his cabin for the weekend in the hopes of reconnecting and getting her to like his new fiancee — well, that’s a surprise for her — Kayla (Amanda Brugel, Jason X) and her son Ty (Isaiah Rockcliffe). That doesn’t last long, as a gang of Neo-Nazis led by Dominick Lewis (an incredible Kevin James; the role was meant for Simon Pegg but wow, James is astounding) that includes Roman Hammond (James McDougall), Sonny Cole (Ryan McDonald) and the monstrous Wallace “Apex” Landham (Robert Maillet, who wrestled in WWE as Kurrgan) come to the home, kill one of the family’s two dogs and demand a key that Becky keeps in her treehouse fort. This McGuffin is said by Lewis to be part of his master plan that he’s spent a decade in jail putting together and that it will unlock everything for him and his people. He even has it tattooed on his body. And no, that key is never explained. It’s just the device that starts a 13-year-old girl on the path of bloody vengeance against a gang of men larger, tougher and more frightening — well, not for long — than her.

I was shocked by how hard this movie goes and loved every minute of it. I mean, did I think that I’d see a movie where a young girl goes Fulci on the King of Queens when it started? No, I was not. This movie is packed with grisly and imaginative doses of pure violence and kept me in the whole time, even if the opening and closing police moments are pointless. Yet when the movie gets to Wilson cosplaying First Blood, this movie doesn’t just sing. It screams its head off.

Co-directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion also made Cooties together, while writers Ruckus and Lane Skye were also behind The Devil to Pay and Rattle the Cage. Nick Morris, an executive producer, also worked on the script.

The Ronin Flix blu ray release of Becky has introductions from directors Jonathan Millet and Cary Murnion, a featurette about directing the film, interviews with McHale and Wilson, fan art, behind the scenes photos and commentary with Wilson and screenwriters Ruckus and Lane Skye. You can get it from Ronin Flix and MVD.

This movie was co-directed by Ross Snyder and William Hellfire, who worked for Gary Whitson, the founder of W.A.V.E. Productions, in the 90s and was astounded to learn in 2016 that his old boss was still making his strange films. He pitched him on the idea for this and Whitson gave him full access to all of his movies as well as the people who made — and still make — them on spec.

That’s right. If there’s a horror movie you want to see or more to the point, a death or struggling scene with an attractive actress, W.A.V.E. will film it for you with our their actresses, including Clancy McCauley, Debbie D., Laura Giglio, Deanna Demko, Pamela Sutch and Tina Krause, who all appear in the film.

If you have any love for SOV — I mean, this site just spent nearly three weeks on these movies, so if you’re reading this, you might — this has so may folks show up like Goregasm director High Gallagher, Tempe Video’s J.R. Bookwalter, the guys from Bleeding Skull and Lunchmeat and nearly everyone else associated with W.A.V.E.

There’s also great footage from old Chiller Theater conventions, Debbie D. on The Joe Franklin Show and most of the cast laughing about both the silliness of so many of the movies and the conditions that they were made under.

This movie has no judgment for the films that W.A.V.E. creates and is so good natured about movies that are basically just about women being stabbed, strangled, drowned and even devoured by a giant woman in Eaten Alive: A Tasteful Revenge. Instead, these sleazy movies seem to be made by a strange family of sorts that ended up creating outsider art, if outsider art made several films devoted to women in quicksand.

Man, instead of talking head horror docs that tell us everything we want to know about safe subjects, more people need to go all in on the dark alleys of the genre. This movie is incredible.

You can get this from Saturn’s Core, a partner label of Vinegar Syndrome. You can also watch it on Tubi.

In director and writer Keith Boynton’s The Scottish Play, Sydney (Tina Benko) decides to escape the big world of Hollywood by heading to New England and acting in a Shakespeare festival. She likes her leading man Hugh (Geraint Wyn Davies) and gets along with the director Adam (Peter Mark Kendall). And then she meets William Shakespeare himself (Will Brill), who reveals to her that the curse of Macbeth is all the fault of his ghost, as he was never happy with what he wrote. He’ll leave her production alone if she’s open to some rewrites, however.

If you told me that this would be a movie that I’d find fun, funny and charming before I saw it, I’d have called you a fool. But after watching it — actually I wouldn’t be that rude, but I wouldn’t expect to like this — I really fell for it. It’s a cute little concept, told well by a good cast and an interesting script.

I like the idea that someone from the outside — not knowing that the bard himself was writing the new version — would be upset that someone was messing with Macbeth. That’s the conflict that drives this film, as well as gives an actress the chance to meet the playwright that inspired so many stories of his own.