The fifth V/H/S film — plus the spinoffs Siren and Kids vs. Aliens — I think this was the best one that I’ve seen yet. It’s an absolute burst of fun and energy made by really talented creators and stands out amongst the recent glut of horror anthology films.

“Shredding” is directed and written by Maggie Levin. It’s the footage of a punk rock band that records their stunts for a web show. They’re broken into the Colony Underground, a former music venue that burned down and caused the deaths of each member of rising band Bitch Cat. One of the band’s members, Ankur, warns them that the legend of the bhuta says that anyone who defiles the final resting place of these spirits will be taken over by them. He runs away when his bandmates pretend to be possessed, but they won’t need to pretend for much longer.

“Suicide Bid” is directed and written by Johannes Roberts and its tale of sorority sisters burying one of their pledges alive feels like the kind of story that could have been expanded and made into a movie in the mid 80s. It’s filled with so many frights as well as a great twist ending.

Flying Lotus directed and co-wrote (with Zoe Cooper) “Ozzy’s Dungeon,” a segment that takes clips of a Nickelodeon-style game show that ends in tragedy and the family that has waited years for revenge. Beyond having a look that perfectly captures that style of entertainment, it twists and turns into something even better, as the family goes back into the dungeon to discover who Ozzy really is.

“The Gawkers” is directed by Tyler MacIntyre, who wrote it with Chris Lee Hill. The soldier sequences that show up throughout the film come from this, as some suburbans teens spy on their sexy new neighbor. It’s a scene we’ve seen before in other films, but here it becomes an experience of mythological terror.

“To Hell and Back” is by Vanessa and Joseph Winter, who also made Deadstream. On New Year’s Eve 1999, Nate and Troy have been hired by some witches to document a woman named Kirsten being transformed into the demon Ukabon. Yet during the ceremony, another demon named Ferkus drags Nate and Tony to Hell where they meet Mabel, a demon who decides to send them back if they promise to write her name in the witches’ book. Things don’t go so well from there, but they are awesome, as this is such a fun segment and I’m all for more Mabel, as her name is chanted through the credits, but not before Danzig’s “Long Way Back from Hell” blasts through the speakers.

I can’t wait for the next one, V/H/S/85. If the quality — and great stories — from this installment continue, I’ll watch as many of these as they make.

Probation officer Cathy Madden (Deirdre Mullins) has been assigned the case of Mary Laidlaw (Derbhle Crotty), a woman who’s just been released from prison following the murder of her husband twenty years ago. When she first drives her home, two children are waiting, wanting to meet the urban legend — she’s a witch, so they say — in person. Yet when those same two children soon go missing, Cathy learns she has so much more on her hands than a normal case.

Directed by Lynne Davison, this finds Cathy undergoing horror in her personal life as well, as her ex-husband Jason (Paul Kennedy) is remarried to a normal person who is with child (Roisin Gallagher) and even worse, Cathy’s son Luke (Jude Hill) calls her mom. This is something that Mary knows and uses against her, taunting her with how much it hurts to lose a child.

Of course, there’s also a demon, a wood baby made from roots and a town that wants to destroy Mary, who is now tied to Cathy through this horrific ritual.

While not the finest folk horror you can find, Mandrake is shot well and quite unsettling in parts. It’s definitely worth a watch if you’re struggling for something new to check out.

Directed and written by Andrew Semans, Resurrection is the story of Margaret (Rebecca Hall), a single mother and successful businesswoman. Her life is changing, as her daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman) is leaving for college and she’s having an affair with Peter (Michael Esper), a married co-worker. Then things get weird.

Abbie finds a tooth in her wallet, a tooth that may belong to the smile of David (Tim Roth), a man from her mother’s past. He once had a child with her named Benjamin, a child he claimed to have consumed, leaving two fingers behind. Now, he claims that the child is still in him and begins abusing her all over again.

Resurrection is not an easy watch, a film dominated by Roth who makes its protagonists engage in what he calls kindnesses to prove his love to her. As you can see, that love is anything but typical and filled with violence, cruelty and torture. If you’re ready to endure this darkness, it’s also a rewarding film.

You can watch this on Shudder.

Director Carl Sundström had an interesting thought he shared about this film: “Many years ago when I got my first glance of the second act of Cannibal Holocaust, I felt that faux documentaries was the best ways of touching the audience deep inside. A way to create a genuine feeling through a documentary format and bring the horror out from the screen into the real world. Ever since then I have been an avid found footage fanatic who appreciates the storytelling from a POV perspective. To have the slow burn concept where you get to know the characters thoroughly and you are feeling like a part of the story. A style of film where you cannot show more than the characters see. What they know, you know, and what you know, they know.”

In this film, the mysterious death of a mother and the disappearance of her child finds a group of freelance journalists within the unexplored — at least to Western audiences — outback of Sweden. Equipped with cameras and supplies to survive in the forest for days, Linn (Signe Elvin-Nowak), Joakim (Cristian Åsvik), Ola (Jonas Lundström) and Yasmin (Isabel Camacho) wander into the woods to find the truth.

As you may know, I am not a found footage fan, but if that’s what you love, well, then this movie is for you. At least you get to see some new scenery with all the shaky cameras.

Reportage November is on digital and VOD from Terror Films. It’s also on Tubi.

I really think that the better movie is the making of and what happened after this film, kind of like how WCW was actually pretty boring back in the 90s but what was happening away from the cameras was a million times more interesting. Instead of a stirring drama of a woman leaving the father of her children for a much younger rock star while dealing with a sex pest actor and alienating her leading lady which leads to frenzied drama as the cast tries to keep it normal at Cannes, we get a stilted take on The Stepford Wives at Los Alamos.

Olivia Wilde made a big jump from the sister bond gross-out humor of Booksmart to this and hey, more power to her. That movie was Superbad revisited nearly a decade later with women in the lead. Maybe that’s going to be her thing, revisionist filmmaking, but hey, it made nearly three times its budget back, so yeah, we’re totally going to see more of that. Who cares if we’ve seen it before?

That said, Florence Pugh is wonderful and will easily move past this trifle, a movie that finds her and Harry Styles as Alice and Jack Chambers, a young couple who live in the 50s neighborhood of Victory where everyone works for Frank (Chris Pine), who is making something amazing and reality-altering that can make planes fall out of the sky. Or, you know, it’s all a twist. I mean, you know it’s a twist.

Wilde plays Bunny, a neighbor married to Nick Kroll, so yes, this is somewhat science fiction. I kid, I kid. I kind of love that even in this artificial world of fantasy, Dita Von Teese is still the image of perfection no matter whether it’s on film or in our unreal life.

Anyways — this was written by Dick Van Dyke’s grandchildren Carey and Shane, then rewritten by Katie Silverman, whose last film Isn’t It Romantic is very much simulation theory as well.

I desperately wanted this to be more than it was, but damn if it doesn’t look gorgeous. And hey, any movie that pretty much has Jordan Peterson as the bad guy is a winner for me. Let’s just make a movie of all those Busby Berkeley scenes and Dita and really, I’d probably give it way more stars than this. I like the message, I get the idea, but I wish it had something more to it than a pretty update to show for all the drama that happened along the way.

Smile is everything I hate about modern horror: a plot hijacked from the 90s obsession with Westernizing J-horror, CGI blood, herky jerky cameras, an overreliance on jump cuts, interstitial drone shots and so many sins against my personal cinematic rules. Sure, I love Jess Franco, Jean Rollin, Bruno Mattei, Joe D’Amato and direct to streaming Amityville movies and have no taste, but I still know a movie that has no merit whatsoever when I watch it.

A longer version of director and writer Parker Finn’s Laura Hasn’t Slept, this is totally a short stretched to feature length and all of the issues that that brings. That same Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey) is a patient of Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) and she hasn’t slept since she watched her art professor kill himself after an entity hunted him through the smiles of people who proclaimed that he would die. Now she has the same issue and passes it on to our protagonist and then slitting her neck as computerized blood fills the floor. So, you know, The Ring-style curse gets passed on, strange moments of possession of people all around her, a past with a mother who died while she watched…you’ve seen it all before, but at least this one had a fun ad campaign of smiling people showing up on TV and smiling through news shows and baseball games.

Does the protagonist have a cop boyfriend still in love with her? Yes.

Does she have a curse that she has to pass on? Yes.

Does it toy with the hope of a happy ending only to pull the rug? Yes.

Derek Riggs, who created Eddie for Iron Maiden, once told me that someone smiling was the most unsettling visual. He’s right. I wish he could have also explained to these filmmakers how to make a better movie not so reliant on cliches, but then again, people have been quick to enshrine this along with other movies that really aren’t that special like It Follows and The Babadook, two very simple movies that simply aren’t anywhere near as wonderful as people hunting for something to evangelize, empty notions of film that would barely register were so many truly dreadful horror movies being made. In the kingdom of really dumb movies, slightly stupid ones have become king.

Lani McCall (Joanne Jansen) is a social media chef about to get her own TV show, so she needs someone to take care of her son. That means getting a male nanny — a manny — named Morgan Washington (Michael Evans Behling). Not being used to seeing a man be sensitive and act like a father, she falls for him, but yeah, this is a Tubi movie and that means that Morgan is still a child himself looking for a family even if he has to kill to keep them.

I guess we have reached the point where men can be the hand that rocks the cradle, so it seems as if we’ve made some progress, even if it’s the fact that psychotic murderous nannies can be any gender or race.

Directed by Doug Campbell, who has 49 credits to his resume including Zapped Again! and several TV movies that end with …At 17 or start with Stalked by… as well as Deadly Garage Sale and Swim Instructor Nightmare. It was written by Tamar Halpern and Scotty Mullen, who wrote the last two Sharknado movies.

I am somewhat relieved that I don’t have the career that warrants a manny and yet maybe if I stopped watching these movies maybe I’d have more time in my life to be more successful and become a social media influencer with my own TV show.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed and written by JT Kris, who also made 2020’s I Think We’re Alone Now, Ghosts of Amityville shares the same cast as that film and also places Junie Liv Thomasson in the way of a killer. That movie used a synth version of the Tommy James and the Shondells song, while this one, well, it uses a clown that is the way that Thomasson’s character Olivia perceives the demon of Amityville.

This isn’t the first Amityville clown movie. There’s Amityville Clownhouse. Yet this movie has a young girl try to process the grief over the death of her mother by seeing a clown that keeps coming out of the woods in a movie that is a little over an hour or a year, give or take. It feels like we’re in those woods forever, making me never want to hike anywhere that isn’t covered by concrete or asphalt.

The idea is right and there are some great shots in here by cinematographer Isla Marshall. Seriously, there are a few dreamlike moments that work, but they’re followed by moments that don’t. But any movie that ends with an old woman driving so slow away from the killer that he’s able to basically walk up to the car and catch it while it’s in motion is pretty great. I’m still laughing way longer and harder at that than I have at any comedy I’ve seen this year.

You can get this from MVD.

Jackie (Natalie Peri, who is also in Amityville Conjuring) and Danny (Paul Faggione, who played John Gotti in a series of documentaries and is also in a movie called Bad Ravioli, so you can expect exactly what he does, speaking in an exaggerated Italian accent) are having Thanksgiving at an intensive therapy session with Amityville’s best — and not only, believe it or not — marriage counselor Frank Domonico (Mark C. Fullhardt, who is also in Amityville Conjuring, so…it looks like I’ll have to watch that as well). The doctor has some strange ways of bringing couples together, although it seems like he wants to have sex with Jackie more than fix her marriage.

Yes, this is both a Thanksgiving and an Amityville movie and man, that means that I was duly bound to watch it. I mean — just look at this Amityville list of films I’ve already made it through.

Directed and written by Will Collazo Jr. (Bloody Nun, Night of the Zomghouls, Ouija Encounters of the Third Kind, Mothman: Mount Misery Road and yes, the upcoming Amityville Conjuring) has kind of, sort of assembled this movie from disparate scenes and several solo actors just filmed on their phones. Seriously, the film ends way before it actually ends and people just talk about events that happened within or after the story and there’s no reason at all for them being there.

Yet you know, to make an Amityville movie about Thanksgiving and not have it really about either and instead an excuse for old men with thick New York accents about having rough sex with other men’s wives is pretty much a genius concept. It also has Shawn Phillips and David Perry as a male couple that has the same marriage issues as everyone else.

I was going to say I have no idea who this is for, but I know that the answer is me. I’m the same kind of jerk that will write thousands of words saying how creatively bereft a movie like Smile is and then watch every single Amityville movie and if sixteen year old me knew that, he would be so happy with how things turned out.

Also: marriage counselor who puts the seed of a demon into women he’s steered into leaving their husbands and then eating them — as well as killing their marriage counselor competition — is the kind of career path no one tells you about. Cannibal Marriage Counselor is also not as good a title as Amityville Thanksgiving.

The SRS Cinema DVD of Amityville Thanksgiving has a commentary by director and writer Will Collazo Jr., an interview with the lead actor, a trailer and trailers for other SRS Cinema movies. You can get this from MVD.

This Tubi exclusive, directed by Adam Meyer, who also wrote Tubi’s Scariest Monsters in America, is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever watched and I say that with sheer affection. I mean, I’ve had this same debate stoned: who would win, Bigfoot or a Yeti? They gather a bunch of people like video game creators, pro wrestlers and cryptozoologists and straight faced people share why a monster would win when placed in front of a crowd and made to battle for entertainment. Have we not watched any horror movies? They would break free, work together to kill all the humans and then fight.

I really think between all the giallo, exploitation and previously impossible to find slashers, Tubi is being programmed by maniacs. I want to meet them, get to know them and pitch more shows like this, because let me tell you, I’ll probably watch this more than once. They should have made multiple endings where different monsters win and make it watch it several times to get the answer.

Bonus points for mentioning skunk apes and for having some of the worst CGI this side of a Full Moon movie. I demand ten sequels.

You can watch this on Tubi.