Jane Shipley (Montse Hernandez) and Merritt Sinclair (Cheyenne Haynes) were childhood best friends, but now Jane’s struggling to fit in with Merritt’s friend circle. To make matters worse in her life, teacher Mr. Aunspach (Christian Camargo) oversteps her personal boundaries and no one in power cares, which means that Merritt makes Jane get her own justice. But is that enough? And if she keeps pushing her further, how bad can things get? And what if Merritt’s friends convince the two to set up an elaborate prank over the weekend, forcing them to break into Allendale High School? And (last time, I promise) what if they’re not alone?

This is director and writer Lee Ann Kurr’s first full-length film and she really shines in the way that she frames the same scenes we may have seen in several slashers before, but gives them a different glance. There’s a bathroom-set murder that does so much with hiding the actual impact of the violence, but showing it in hints within a pool of blood and on the actors’ faces as they discover what has happened. The same can be said for the close of the film, as the framing and sound design allows our minds to fill in the gaps of what’s happening and how brutal it is without needing to push it right in our faces.

While there aren’t many faces in the cast that are all that well-known as of yet — save perhaps Harley Quinn Smith — don’t let that keep you from watching this. I’m all for more slashers, obviously, but I’m also even more for ones that work. This one does.

Student Body is available digitally from 1091 Pictures.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: G.G. Graham is a cult film cryptid, horror hag, and exploitation film explorer of the dusty and disreputable corners of cinema history. The street preacher of Z-grade cinema can be found at Midnight Movie Monster, as well as writing for various genre sites and print publications, or on Twitter and Instagram @msmidnightmovie. Visit her Blog at www.midnightmoviemonster.com and Twitter @msmidnightmovie.

Most coming of age rituals are more arbitrary than not. The end of your school years or your 18th birthday are important milestones, sure, but it isn’t like either one magically confers any deeper insight about what the rest of your life might look like. There’s no easy path to whatever comes next, but suddenly everyone around you expects you to have more answers than questions, and not everyone has a solid support system to guide them along. If anything, it just adds more stress and uncertainty to an already uncomfortably liminal time, a pile of awkward questions to avoid from every adult in your life.

Therapy Dogs‘ Justin (co-screenwriter Justin Morrice) physically tosses himself of his mother’s car when she starts in on that line of questioning. He’s not ready to give up having fun with his friends, or his long brewing movie project with best friend Ethan (co-writer/director Ethan Eng). In the guise of a yearbook project, they’ve been making a guerrilla film to tell “the truth” about their last year of school at Cawthra Park Secondary school, in the suburbs of Toronto.

Morrice and Eng started the project that became Therapy Dogs in 2017, when they were just 16. Shooting without cooperation from school officials, they assembled the film’s cast out of friends from their 2019 graduating class. The bulk of the film’s footage was shot on the sly using a mix of cell phones, Go Pros and lower grade professional equipment. The resulting movie’s rawness is one of its biggest strengths, documentary style footage and scripted segments woven together in a way that feels more immediate than the traditional narrative structure of a standard documentary ever could.

The film is a freewheeling sprint of free association, snapshots of various bits of teenage life whipstiched together with occasional text inserts and colorful title cards that resemble memes and notebook doodles. The subject swerves are often accompanied by the thump of the excellently curated pop playlist that serves as the soundtrack. Freed from the usual coming of age narrative arcs, what emerges is a messy portrait of how much of the supposed “best years of your life” are a hurry up and wait situation, be it for the end of the school day or for something different to happen. 

Justin, Ethan, and their friends unapologetically act out suburban teenage angst in its most poorly thought through forms. Be it doing donuts in a parking lot with Justin strapped to the hood of the car or our pair of protagonists jumping off a railroad crossing into a lake, Therapy Dogs is an object lesson in how suburban comfort often comes at the cost of emotional resilience, boredom leading to recklessness. In an environment where everything has been built to encourage a certain comfortable cruise control, it seems less ridiculous to fist fight your best friend just to feel something. This culminates in a messy blow up between Ethan and Justin, that is reconciled as quietly as the original conflict was explosive.

While Therapy Dogs has the ring of emotional truth to every frame, its manic energy and lack of structure does sag through the second act, feeling more like an aggregated social media feed than a film. A sequence taking place in a strip club adds some much needed black comedy to a pile of over wrought prom proposals and the three part saga of acquaintance Kevin’s (Kevin Tseng) attempts to find himself by disappearing into drama club theater productions. Right when the film is about to tilt into self indulgence, it makes a play for deeper, less performative emotional territory. The film and its characters handle a worst case scenario with a quiet empathy rarely seen in teen focused cinema. While it happens later in the film that it likely should have, the shift in gears gives Therapy Dogs a surprisingly affecting dose of heart and heft. 

Out of the premiers at this year’s Slamdance film festival, Therapy Dogs was one of the standouts, alongside Avalon Fast’s Honeycomb. Both are microbudget feature debuts from young filmmakers bursting at the seams with potential, and they pair well as opposite reactions to the uncertainty of the passage from childhood to adult. While Honeycomb‘s girl gang finds the refuge of isolation a dangerous illusion that collapses under its own weight, the protagonists of Therapy Dogs find the safe harbor of their insular friend group torn apart by the force of the external pressures. 

While technically and structurally raw edged, both films capture something truthful and immediate about adolescence, the gift of young creatives documenting their experiences in something approximating real time. Hindsight softens the sharp edges of growing up into cozy nostalgia, or crystallizes youthful recklessness into a sharply nihilistic scalpel rather than a clumsy cudgel. As the best bits of Therapy Dogs illustrate, the immediate experience of coming of age lies along a much less linear path. Adulthood isn’t marked in a birthday, or a graduation, or a career path. Growing up’s largest and most difficult to swallow revelation is finding out there are no easy certainties or absolutes. No one has it all figured out, and we’re all largely doing our best to make it up as we go along.

While searching for the parents she’s never known, Grace (Scout Taylor-Compton, Rob Zombie’s Halloween) has come back home to the south with her boyfriend Jack (Nolan Gerard Funk) to track down a clue as to where her family may have disappeared to.

But you know what I always say about never going home again? Well, when your home has an apocalyptic cult in it, maybe Grace should have stayed in New York.

Originally called The Coven, this story starts with Mr. Caldwell inviting the couple to his home and offering to share his research into where they’ve gone. But when Grace and Jack get there, he’s nowhere to be found. There’s a big snake in the kitchen, as Grace soon painfully discovers.

And then the car won’t start, leaving them stranded.

And then Mr. Caldwell’s brother Wayne (Jeff Fahey) shows up as a surprise.

And then there’s that cult that worships Uktena, who just might be involved quite intimately in Grace’s past, led by The Master (Deborah Kara Unger from the Silent Hill movies).

For a movie that starts out very cabin in the woods come back home to unearth dark secrets, this shifts into cosmic horror before it’s done, which is a nice surprise. Writers Robert Sheppe and Mark Young have created an interesting tale for director Richard Ragsdale, who has directed several music videos (The Sword “Cloak of Feathers,” Chevelle “Door to Door Cannibals”) and has also composed the music for several movies and video games.

The Long Night is available in select theaters and on digital from Well Go USA. You can learn more at the official site.

For almost a hundred years, The Locusts have treated their followers to one night — three hours — where they can do anything they want to a selected home and any of the people they find inside. The Locusts have selected the home of Daniel (Matt O’Neill, Candy Corn) and Jessica (Sunny Doench, Coffin). Complicating matters is that there may be a Locust who isn’t on the same side as everyone else, plus Jessica’s sister Liz (Andrea Sweeney Blanco) is hiding under the bed trying to escape.

Like a combination of The Strangers and The Purge, the film begins with John Doe (Bruce Davison, who has nearly 300 credits, but may be best known for being in X-Men as Senator Kelly; you may also recognize him from The Lords of Salem or The Crucible) invites the cult’s member to initiate the Night of the Locusts.

A family that barely gets along being surrounded by four cult members who can get away with anything that happens. Great set-up, right? Yes, it is. The execution — CGI stabbings instead of practical effects and costumes that look like the Wish version of Ghost from Call of Duty — take away the good will that the opening created.

Fans of TV’s Dynasty and The Colbys will, at least, be happy to see John James (Jeff Colby!) show up. His next movie is My Son Hunter, playing President Biden. It’s directed by Robert Davi and stars Gino Carano so…

Director, writer, producer, editor and one of the actors — he’s Truman — Kipp Tribble did more than just two or three things on this movie. I wish that he could have followed up on pieces he set in motion. That said, he’s figured out how to pull this movie together with a small crew and a low budget.

Evil at the Door can be found on digital and VOD platforms on January 28, one week after it debuts on the Terror Films Channel. You can learn more on the official Terror Films website or visit this movie’s official Facebook page.

I’ve never heard of the band Boy Harsher — the darkwave/new industrial duo of vocalist/lyricist Jae Matthews and producer Augustus Muller — but their music is the inspiration for this 40-minute film, which goes along with their new concept album, The Runner, set for release on January 21 (preorder here or order from their Big Cartel page).

There was also a limited edition drone pedal that went with this, but that’s sold out.

Written, directed and produced by the band, it has performances by King Woman’s Kris Esfandiari, FlucT’s Sigrid Lauren, and Lucy’s Cooper Handy. It’s the story of a woman (Esfandiari) traveling to a secluded town where her violent compulsions are slowly revealed. At the same time, Boy Harsher performs on a public access channel and their music provides a sinister undertone to the woman’s descent deeper into darkness.

This short film definitely has style to spare and a look that recalls 80s direct to video erotic thrillers mixed with no small amount of blood. It also has somewhat of a making-of mixed in, which is pretty intrigiuing. It definitely did its job, making me research the band and take notice of them.

The Runner is streaming this month on Shudder.

You can learn more about Boy Harsher on their official site.

Juliette and her husband plan on surprising her mother, who ends up being out of town, which is what her gardener (Eric Roberts, who in the mid 1990s was present for a deal I made with several demons to secure the future release of several Italian and American exploitation films on a format that would come to be known as 4K; you’re welcome and I’m cursed to watch every movie Mr. Roberts makes) tells them. At the same time, his junkie son and his pregnant wife are planning on stealing from the same mansion.

Director Nick Lyon has made quite a few movies like Isle of the Dead, Rise of the Zombie and Species: The Awakening, which gives him the experience to make this movie filled with nail-biting moments. It’s an interesting idea to pit two couples against one another from different castes and at different moments in their lives.

This movie claims to be based on a true story. You know that as soon as I saw that, I was going to watch this.

The Surprise Visit is playing in theaters and is also available on demand.

When famous horror author Raymond Grant dies under mysterious circumstances, his daughter returns home — oh man, how many times do I have to tell horror movie characters to never go back home and never settle affairs and never try to get any answers — to investigate his death.

Jasmin learns that her father wasn’t just writing about black magic, he was using it to finish his new book. And when the audiobook gets played, all manner of creatures emerge into our world. This story forms the story around several other shorter tales that play out in this anthology.

In “Please Kill Me Again,” a woman (Denyse Arlene Hollis, who co-wrote the story) is bitten by zombies and then decides that she wants to be killed by a human so she doesn’t have to live in that undead body. “Home Improvement” shows what happens when Tian and Zeke ( Luke Couzens and Carmilla Crawford) can’t agree on a plan to fix up their new home  with potentially horrifying results. “The One-Percenters” is about just how far the rich will go to cover up a crime — even a camping trip with numerous people isn’t safe. Finally, “Frankenstein’s Wife” is about a man accidentally killing his wife and bringing her back again and again until she’s happy.

All horror anthologies — even the best ones — have their highs and lows. This one has many more highs though, which is more than I can say from the majority of the unconnected horror portmanteau movies that get sent out way. The connective story and writing by The Snygg Brothers makes this one a winner.

Monsters in the Closet is available on digital and on demand from Gravitas Pictures.