Lisa (Annabel Barrett) and Adam (Ignacyo Matynia) wake up in a dog kennel, chained to the walls and yeah, treated and fed like dogs. They have no idea how they got there to why and they start to bond. Adam starts the escape plan and then everything changes.
Doctor Fischer (Katy Dore), George (Ryan Q. Tran) and Erika (Shay Denison) lead the experiments, but George has gone rogue and begun drugging Lisa and Adam, which just may put the entire experiment in jeopardy. You know, the one where you chain people like dogs to the wall with the goal of…what is the goal?
Director and writer Randy Van Dyke has put something interesting together, filled with more than a few twists and some major reveals about our heroine Lisa, who may not be all that heroic and even worse than that first big reveal.
This is a movie packed with no small amount of meanness, roughness and the courage to take everything you know at the beginning and just throw it away. Big choices and made in this one, which is awesome to see.
Like Dogs is available on digital from Terror Films.
Sarah (Belle Adams) may have never intended to be a witch but comes face to face with the craft when she meets a strange woman at a restaurant. In contrast, Masha has always known that she will one day become one.
In Sarah’s story, “The Boogeywoman,” our heroine is pregnant and her husband cooly informs her that all her visions of witchcraft are just the hormones talking. Oh yeah? Then who is the stalker in the woods casting spells on photos of your wife? Then, as these things happen, a Ouija board gets involved and the darkness sees out.
In “Masha,” the titular protagonist is a woman who knows that her magical powers are there and waiting for her grandmother to die and pass them on to her. Despite her inability to find the man she feels will complete her, she soon finds the power — and the madness — to do pretty much anything she wants.
Although these stories don’t seem to be connected, they are at the end, as the film hints that these women are part of a larger universe. Director Pierre Tsigaridis told Horror Obsessive that “I was really influenced by Italian cinema…Italian horror movies in the ’70s were criticized by Americans because they didn’t follow a typical structure, more visuals over story. In Europe, that was more common.”
This movie starts off with a bang, featuring a witch devouring a baby, and then doesn’t really slow down all that much from there. You can see hints of everything from Suspiria (both versions) and The Beyond to Carrie, Single White Female and Drag Me to Hell in these stories. And the fact that the villain from the first story has an impact on the second excites me for how this series — I hope it’s a series! — of films grows.
I saw Two Witches as part of Salem Horror Fest, where you can watch several shorts and features with their virtual pass now until the end of October. You can learn more about this film on the official Facebook page.
Adam Stilwell wrote and directed The Triangle, which is a film I’ve heard plenty of good things about. This time, he’s made a movie about a woman named Sara. She starts the film by waking up from a coma — she’d witnessed something traumatic with her parents and attempted suicide — into a life she doesn’t remember. And while her husband seems helpful, there’s the hint that he’s being a little bit too controlling.
How controlling? Well, most of their house is off limits to her and she’s constantly followed by her nurse Rose, who is played by V star Jane Badler and let me tell you, I’ve never seen Ms. Badler play a single heroic or nice person.
Also, when our heroine digs up her garden, she finds an intestine growing in it which is just one of the visions she’s seeing. Is she still alive? Is she being gaslit by her husband? Has she lost her mind? There’s a major shift that comes into the movie, so get ready for it. This is a dark exploration about recovering from suicide as well as the pain men can put into a relationship, so watch it at your own peril.
I saw The Free Fall as part of Salem Horror Fest, where you can watch several shorts and features with their virtual pass now until the end of October.
Thanks to Jack Hopkins for showing me that I always type Jane Balder and not Badler.
Coming five years after Raw, Julia Ducournau’s Titante (Titanium) is also Croenenberg-inspired but goes in its own direction. Or plenty of directions, to be perfectly honest.
When she was a child, Alexia was in a car accident that she caused by distracting her father. After years of painful surgeries, she’s grown into a woman (Agathe Rousselle) who wants nothing to do with her parents — despite living with them — and makes her living as a motor show salesgirl, writhing provocatively atop a car that us so moved by the experience that it makes love to her after she’s killed a man with her hatpin.
Yes, you read that right.
Alexia is also a serial killer who has a history of wiping out her human lovers. But the one thing she can’t kill is the new life inside her. After a victim escapes, she sets her parents house ablaze with them inside and reacts to being a wanted woman by assuming the identity of Adrien, a lost boy, by repeatedly breaking her nose and transforming her body by duct tape to take on a male appearance.
The boy’s father Vincent (Vincent Lindon), a steroid-addicted firefighter, doesn’t need a DNA test. Obviously, this is his son, returned from wherever he was, and he will now protect him as he didn’t before. Let the other firefighters discuss the mute and androgynous and obvious damaged “son” that is part of their crew; the captain is respected enough that everyone understands the loss he’s endured. Even his ex-wife, later in the film, who discovers that Adrien is Alexia.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, Vincent still believes that this is his son, even after he begins dripping motor oil and displaying a mechanical endoskeleton and bursting from whatever is growing within him or her.
The winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Titane won’t be for everyone. Just like the titanium structure holding together its protagonist’s skull, it threatens to break at any time but holds together by sheer force of will and the tenacity of lead Agathe Rousselle, who plays her as the most seductive and most frightening woman of all time seemingly in the same scene, appearing to be heartbreakingly gorgeous and near-death also within seconds of one another.
This is a film of juxtaposition, of the real and unreal. Beyond becoming a fake person, its lead is a horror movie cipher, a mechanical woman willing to become a man but to never stop seducing and destroying because that’s all she or he knows, the only tenderness to be found in the backseats of cars all alone as they jump and flash their lights into the too dark night. Meanwhile, Vincent is a very real character, a man whose strength has defined his life but is escaping him, a person who would rather accept the fake story that his son has returned than to accept that what he loves — and has recreated numerous times through the firemen who are the missing child’s surrogates — is gone forever.
Also: puke, black oil coming out of orifices, hatpin murders and dancing atop firetrucks.
A roommate stuck in a codependent cycle finds her burgeoning romance might lead to something unexpected. And when she brings her new man home, perhaps both she and her roommate might find some enjoyment out of him. Sure, I should have expected the ending, but it hit me just right. And I’m not going to spoil it for you.
Director and writer Avra Fox-Lerner knows something that very few filmmakers do this day: brevity is the soul of wit. This is just the right length and I’m not saying that in the way women do to make us men feel better.
I saw The Lovers as part of Salem Horror Fest, where you can watch several shorts and features with their virtual pass now until the end of October. You can read more about Meta at the official site.
I’ve watched multiple films in the last few weeks where people try to go back home again and set things right. This never works out.
What am I to learn?
Directed and written by Paul Owens, LandLocked brings his family into the film, playing fictionalized versions of themselves, as well as appearing in their old home movies which have become part of the narrative.
When Mason (Mason Owens) takes on the task of clearing out his father’s home, he discovers those films on an old video camera and begins to grow obsessed with the footage that he starts to watch and learn and document the past.
So yeah, you may be watching a family’s old films and the film feels long even though it has a short running time. But the idea of a camera that can show you any moment in time you ask for is solid, the footage works within the film and you can see what the director was going for. Nostalgia is dangerous (or a profitable place to make a movie) is the message and yes, while you can go home again, you probably shouldn’t.
I saw LandLocked as part of Salem Horror Fest, where you can watch several shorts and features with their virtual pass now until the end of October.
Ben (Oded Fehr) is in prison for murdering his wife and daughter, but his lawyer Wendy Coulson (Alexandra Gilbreath) is convinced that demonic possession is the cause. So how do you prove that in court? Steven, whose cursed object may have made Ben a killer, has created an apartment filled with multiple objects with the same demonic hold and rents it out to Carly (Alana Wallace), Maria (Aislinn De’Ath) and her daughters Joey (Anya Newall) and Lilly (Lara Mount). Now, that family’s demons are about to meet very real ones.
Adam Ethan Crow has some interesting ideas in here and it feels like this inhabits the same world as The Conjuring films while having a more progressive family at its center. While Steven and Ben have been faking ghost incidents for years, the air bob filled with occult objects actually begins to show them what the unknown really is.
Steven is as repellant a character as you’ll find, his plan is one made to unravel and woe be to the normal family caught within. If you enjoy possession and paranormal films, you’ll definitely enjoy this one, however.
Lair is now playing Salem Horror Fest, where you can watch several shorts and features with their virtual pass now until the end of October.
After witnessing the murder of her grandmother Deborah Voorhees — get yourself out of the way so that you can direct — Kelsie has ben traumatized. She’s also the only one that realizes that other Friday the 13th actresses are being killed by a fan who is redoing the death scenes from the movies. For some reason, he also wants Dee Wallace dead.
The result is a fine slasher — not good or great, but serviceable — that stays around a bit too long and has a few too many twists at the end, but hey — we have’t had one of these movies for this cast in too long. So it’s nice to see all of these actors on screen and getting paid, as the lack of conventions over the coronavirus shut down had to ruin their finances.
I wish the killer looked a little more unique, but the practical kills work well enough. I also kind of hope that everyone shooting digital realizes they can do more than a simple color pass on their film and works to make it look richer and more unique, but dare to dream, right?
Directed and written by Minsun Park and Teddy Tenenbaum, Koreatown Ghost Story starts as what feels like a comedy, with Hannah (Lyrica Okano, Nico Minoru from the Marvel series Runaways) getting acupuncture from Mrs. Moon (Margaret Cho, who executive produced this movie). That’s because Mrs. Moon is checking her teeth, commenting on her weight and generally asking some odd questions.
That’s because she wants Hannah to marry her dead son Edward (Brandon Halvorsen) from beyond the grave so that she has done right by him before she dies. The needles inside Hannah have shut down her ability to move and even cause her to openly weep at times.
Then, the movie completes its move from farce to terror, as whatever Mrs. Moon has made is now in our existence and ready to find its bride. As for our heroine, she wants out so badly that she’s willing to tear the skin off her ring finger to lose the chains that have bound her. But that shambling mass of flesh coming up the steps covered in cupping cups may have something to say about that. After all, their parents promised Hannah to Edward years before he lived and died.
Cho is absolutely perfect in this, as is Okano, whose face is tightly held by the acupuncture table. She acts a good stretch of this film paralyzed, which limits movement but really shows off her range. This is one of the best shorts I’ve seen in awhile and I urge you to track it down.
Koreatown Ghost Story is now playing Salem Horror Fest and you can watch this short and all of the features with their virtual pass now until the end of October.
Can a relationship be too perfect? Can a lover be so great at everything that their very devotion to always doing the right thing be too much? What if you got the exact relationship you always wanted and found that it was too much of a good thing? And what if that lover was also a demon planning on sucking out your brains after continually making you the best iced coffee you’ve ever tasted — that may have tennis root in it?
Director and writer C.J. Arellano’s short moves quickly, as if you’re being relayed relationship gossip by one of your most entertaining friends, even when things take a darker turn. James Dolbeare anchors it all with his narration and even when things seem like they could be, well, perfect at the end, we all know how most love stories turn out.
Griffin is now playing Salem Horror Fest and you can watch this short and all of the features with their virtual pass now until the end of October. You can learn more about this movie at its official page.
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