Peter Strickland also made Berberian Sound Studio, The Duke of Burgundy and In Fabric, so I always look forward to what he does next. Even if I don’t completely like it, I know that it’ll definitely be interesting.

Since the 90s, Strickland has been part of the Sonic Catering Band, which creates music from the sounds of cooking, so it’s already piquing my interest when this movie is set at Sonic Catering Institute. Run by Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie), it’s the setting of this film and where a trio made up of Lamina Propria (Ariane Labed), Billy Rubin (Asa Butterfield) and Elle di Elle (Fatma Mohamed) is in the middle of a series of concerts that combine food and sound creation.

They’ve added another member for the three-week stint, a writer named Stones (Makis Papadimitriou). The great food within the center has left him with both indigestion and gas, so he visits Dr. Glock (Richard Bremmer) who warns him that he may have a life-ending bowel condition.

Have you ever watched a nude woman dance while pigs are slaughtered and chefs cook behind her? Well, get ready. And at the end of each show, the group has an audience tribute which is basically an orgy that only adds to the issues between Elle di Elle’s group, who have all been her lovers at one time. There’s also a rival group called Mangrove Snacks who are trying to sabotage everything.

Flux Gourmet is a strange film. I’m certain that a ton of people who watch it on Shudder will hate it because it’s not really horror. It’s…something. Where Strickland has made a giallo, Eurohorror and a British 70s horror movie, now he’s making a film about the inherent silliness of art movements. I didn’t exactly love it but I didn’t hate it — kind of like a high end meal where I definitely enjoyed the flavor but stopped at a convenience store to get a roller hot dog on the way home.

Danish city family — Bjorn (Morten Burian), Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch) and Agnes (Liva Forsberg) — meet a Dutch family from the country — Patrick (Fedja van Huêt), Karin (Karina Smulders) and Abel (Marius Damslev) — and they decide to get together after getting along so well on vacation in Tuscany.

Of course, this is a horrible idea.

Turns out the Danes and the Dutch don’t get along all that well. And when it comes to getting back to real life after a holiday, vacation friends rarely work out.

Bjorn and Louise are really turned off by how loud and overly romantic behavior from Patrick and Abel. Before you know it, everyone is talking badly about one another in their native languages. But is this a horror movie? We’re going to get to some blood and scares, right? I mean, having someone else discipline your child is starnge but is it scary?

Be patient.

The insults increase slowly: Patrick begs vegetarian Louise to eat roast boar. Karin makes a bed for Agnes on the floor of her son’s room and doesn’t ask if that’s acceptable. Then Patrick gets Bjorn to pay the bill for a meal that’s beyond unaffordable. Then he just casually goes to the bathroom while Louise is taking a shower. One or two of these things is something. All of them building up feels like a trap.

Directed by Christian Tafdrup, who co-write the script with his sibling Mads, this may take a long time to get to the terror, yet when it does, it’s brutal in its sheer intensity. You’ll get what you want out of this, but you just need to be as patient as possible.

Nora Thompson (Nicole Cinaglia) has become an overnight celebrity when she reports on Senator Morrison’s illegal activities, causing him to kill himself. His daughter Carolyn (Vienna Hayden) responds by kidnapping her and taking her deep into the woods, but now thee enemies must work together to survive because they’re not alone.

Of course, Carolyn was hoping for a The Most Dangerous Game situation, but instead they’re both on the run from a creature. Well, they’re also still arguing despite this supernatural beast hunting them. The majority of the movie uses POV for the monster, which is smart, because it doesn’t look all that frightening when we finally see it.

Director Alexander T. Hwang (Lilith) and writer Deanna Gomez — who worked on the short Ravening Woods together with Cinaglia and Hayden playing the same roles* — try to make this a story about the news media in parts and in others, try and get some scares. The end at least has a nice drone shot that pulls above the screaming survivor.

It’s also another movie that presents two horrible people and asks us to choose which one to cheer for. As always, I am on the side of the monster.

*IMDB lists it as a short but for all I know, it could have two entries for the same film.

Something In the Woods is available on demand and on DVD from Uncork’d Entertainment.

On November 3, 2020, the most monumental presidential election in modern memory was held in the United States. We’d been through four years of Donald Trump, a global pandemic and a growing divide between the people of our country. You know, I do my best not to get political on this site — it’s my escape from that world — but this movie forces me to.

This Land looks at Americans from all walks of life, like a Native American man dealing with his past, an elderly gay couple made up of a white liberal and a black Trump supporter, and a rodeo clown trying to be a good father. They all have someone they want to win.

Director Matthew Palmer doesn’t pick sides or push any narrative in this film. He just documents the stories of people as they prepare to cast their vote. It’s surprising when the gay couple goes home to the liberal partner’s family and how they seem to gang up on the conservative; this makes me think of how we don’t even communciate any longer. We’ve made our minds up. Debates are just endless pro wrestling promos. No one is undecided. Much like our favorite football teams, we’ve all picked our colors and cheer them as they play their game. We’re all just watching the ratchet effect in motion, as Crimethinc once describe as “… the Republican Party steadily pulling public policy and permissible discourse to the right while Democrats, in seeking to acquire power by chasing the political center, serve as a mechanism that prevents policy and discourse from shifting back.”

I wonder a lot about what the truth is. I think I know, as much as I can, but I have no idea how anyone can see facts and ignore them. How they can see the truth and still willingly move past them or worse, say that those rules don’t matter or that someone is smart because they know the ways around them.

When I hear these voices, I’m reminded of the buillies that battered me in my youth, that dragged me all over a concrete parking lot and left stones embedded in my back and told me they’d kill my parents if I ever told on them. When I saw a man imitate a man who couldn’t stop shaking and laugh and call people snowflakes for being upset, I thought that this wouldd be the end of their campaign, that we’d see through it, but now the streets of my small hometown are lined with flags that say f*** your feelings and people speak in code like FJB and Let’s Go Brandon, but you know, everyone is complicit.

We’re just circling the wagons as we know that the Earth is growing too hot and we have just years, not even decades, to fix it. Everyone knows the problem and there’s nothing we can do short of revolution and that seems too hard. I’m not blameless. Sometimes I sit here all night and just bombard myself with movies and wonder just how I can bring it all together and realize that I can’t.

This movie made me consider those things and wonder if the choice that it presents was even really a choice. I’d like to think it was. But I also feel like we’re all just covering up the truth with bread and circuses.

This Land is out now on digital platforms from Gravitas Ventures.

In 2030, World War III is wiping out most of humanity, save for a small group of survivors who make it into a bunker. Two years later, they decide to head out into the wasteland, but of course, dinosaurs are waiting for them.

Originally called Jurassic Valley, this movie follows those survivors — Daniel (Clint Gordon), Louise (Chelsea Greenwood), Drew (Mark Haldor), Mia (Antonia Whillans) — as they try and make it in the future world. Louise is already pregnant with Daniel’s child, so she’s worried that leaving the safety of their base is a bad idea. Well, she’s right.

Directed and written by Scott Jeffrey (Jurassic Island, Exorcist Vengeance, Dinosaur Hotel, Hatched), this has big ideas and a budget that is in no way ready to bring that vision to life. It does have some CGI dinosaurs that work, many that don’t and a cast larger than you’d expect for the money.

Believe it or not, this is better than Jurassic World Dominion. That’s not the highest of bars, but this makes it through its commitment and also the fact that it isn’t content to just be one movie, it also has Louise go into labor during a dinosaur attack, kind of like A Quiet Place and somewhere the ghost of Bruno Mattei is smiling and saying, “Yes, yes, why take from one movie when you can take from two?”

Kingdom of the Dinosaurs is available on demand and on DVD from Uncork’d Entertainment.

Rose (Taysha Farrugia) has just turned nine and every night, she asks her mother Natalie (Kestie Morassi, Wolf Creek) if they can check under the bed for monsters. Even though she does the best she can for her, Natalie still worries that not having a father will hurt her daughter. Now, she has an even greater worry as Rose tells her that she keeps getting pinched by something throughout the night.

Then Natalie wakes up bleeding. She’s taken to the emergency room where she’s told that she’s just had a child, a fact she refuses to believe, even when child services agent Lauren (Jane Badler from V!) comes to investigate. That’s when the bruises show up on Rose’s back and the true mystery begins.

The only hope might be Malcolm Akard (Matthew Crosby) and his psychic daughter Ava (Ellie Stewart) who may be able to find the evil spirit targeting this family. The Surrogate doesn’t give into the herky jerky possession camerawork that has dominated the genre for the last decade. Instead it plays its possessive moments as dark and slow burn as possible, which is a great credit to the skills of director David Willing, who co-wrote this with Beth King.

Surrogate is now available TVOD on Amazon and will be on Tubi and GoogleTV on September 16 from Indie Rights.

“What Margaux wants, she gets. As a group of seniors celebrates their final college days at a smart house, the house’s highly advanced Artificial Intelligence system, called “Margaux”, begins to take on a deadly presence of her own. A carefree weekend of partying turns into a dystopian nightmare as they realize Margaux’s plans to eliminate her tenants one way or another. Time begins to run out as they desperately try to survive and outsmart the smart home.”

I mean, when you read a sell like that, don’t you want to see it? I mean, a house as the slasher? Right?

Director Steven C. Miller hasn’t really made much horror, but is best known for action movies like The Aggression Scale, Submerged, Extraction, Marauders, Arsenal, First Kill, Line of Duty and Escape Plan 2: Hades. Then again, he did the remake of Silent Night. The screenplay was written by Chris Beyrooty, Chris Sivertson (the director of I Know Who Killed Me!) and Nick Waters.

There’s a gorgeous cast — Lochlyn Munro (Hal Cooper from Riverdale and Greg from Scary Movie, which definitely prepped him for this), Richard Harmon (The 100), Madison Pettis (who was in one of the American Pie spin-offs, Girl’s Rules), Vanessa Morgan (who was also on Riverdale as Tina Topaz), Jedidiah Goodacre (Dorian Gray from Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) and Phoebe Miu (Jessica on Riverdale) — who find themselves battling Margaux which can possess people as well as activate Doc Ock looking robotic arms and all manner of traps within the home.

Look, I’m going to love any movie that starts with a man’s head violently exploding in the face of his girlfriend, showering her in chunks and blood. Maybe the rest of the film doesn’t live up to that quite literally in your face — in her face? — ending, but if you liked the 90s and 00s trend of slashers that put pretty WB teens against killers, well…this is definitely for you.

Margaux is available on digital from Paramount.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

A war film implementing genre movie elements, writer/director Ben Parker’s U.K. feature Burial involves a small crew of Russian soldiers secretly bringing Hitler’s body to Stalin. German soldiers bent on obtaining the body for themselves in an effort to continue the Nazi line by proclaiming that the body is a fake and Hitler is still alive await the Russians in Polish woods, with the locals trapped between the two forces. The Nazis hiding in the forest — called werewolves to induce terror — use psychotropic drugs and fear-inducing costumes to make the Russians believe they are being attacked by werewolves and other occult entities.

The film kicks off with elderly exile Brana Vasilyeva (Harriet Walter) turning the tables on a home invasion by a neo-Nazi (David Alexander) bent on learning the truth about Hitler having not really committed suicide. She handcuffs and drugs him, at which point Burial goes to an extended flashback about young Brana (Charlotte Vega of Wrong Turn (2021) and The Lodgers (2017) and her comrades attempting to bring Hitler’s body, which they must bury every night to keep it hidden from Nazis, to Stalin. Walter and Vega both give outstanding performances in their roles, and the supporting cast members are all quite good, though several of the latter are given trope-heavy characters with which to deal, from the no-goodnik commanding officer to the valiant comrade who seems unkillable to the “Kill them all!” Nazi commander. 

Parker (The Chamber, 2019) does a fine job at the helm, delivering a good deal of suspense and peppering the proceedings with some mystery and gore. Viewers expecting actual lycanthropes will likely be disappointed, but those in the mood for a captivating war thriller with admirable production values should find plenty to enjoy in Burial.   

Burial, from IFC Midnight, is available in select theaters and On Demand from September 2, 2022.