MOTEL HELL arrived only months after FRIDAY THE 13TH, poised to be regarded as merely another slasher imitator looking to cash a quick buck. However, Kevin Connor's horror-comedy, penned by brothers Robert & Steven-Charles Jaffe, deceptively avoided the pitfalls of its contemporaries. This movie, about a farmer and motel owner (Rory Calhoun) killing wayward travelers to grind into the blend for his famous smoked meats, dives into psychedelia, satire, even thoughtful discussions regarding social fears of the time.
If the world is overpopulated, isn't Farmer Vincent doing the greater good by eliminating the riff raff? The sex workers, the weed-smoking rock and roll ruffians, the degenerate swingers, the health inspectors working as pawns for a meddling bureaucracy? Vincent's crusade might even be a calling from the Almighty.
But nobody's perfect and when Vincent takes a liking to his newest would-be victim, a beautiful blonde named Terry (Nina Axelrod), the threads of this backwoods operation begin to unravel.
Cue chainsaws, hypnosis, pig masks, mass hysteria and a stellar country song. Can you really ask for anything better?
MOTEL HELL is available to watch on Tubi.
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*Apologies for the audio: I tried recording in the car & tweaked the sound as best as possible.*
POSSESSION is simply a feel-bad movie. Andrzej Zulawski's chaotic magnum opus of divorce, abuse and horny tentacled fucks has to be seen to be believed. For those who grew up with Sam Neill as the heroic Dr. Alan Grant in JURASSIC PARK, prepare to have your childhood chewed up, spit out and bombed. This is a movie I don't often understand but within its swirling camera movements, frenetic performances and sickening score I relish. It's a movie made to be discussed for hours after every viewing, a communal experience built out of our human need to try and explain what in the flying fuck we just witnessed was.
If you're into the two mighty Davids, Cronenberg & Lynch, this movie's gonna be your new freak flag to fly. Let's talk about it.
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THE MONSTER SQUAD brings the Universal Monsters of yore into the '80s with a healthy dose of sugar-blasted cereal and unmedicated ADHD.
Directed by Fred Dekker (NIGHT OF THE CREEPS) & written by both Dekker and Shane Black (THE NICE GUYS, LETHAL WEAPON, KISS KISS BANG BANG, most of your favorite movies ever), this combined family drama, top-notch makeup effects and preteen comedy with unapologetic horror.
Dracula calls a 5-year-old girl a bitch, because of course, he would? As was done to Freddy Kreuger in this decade, the Universal Monsters were sanitized into cereal mascots and plushies but Dekker and Black's script remind us not to be fooled. These are still vampires and werewolves, after all, ready to carve into flesh and crush whatever magic amulet threatens to lock them into Hell for good.
So, who do you call to handle these beasts of death? A bunch of kids, obviously. The motherfuckin' Monster Squad.
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SCARY MOVIE is a staple of my childhood, an entryway into horror movies during a time where I wasn't allowed to watch most of them.
It's a time capsule, for better and worse, of the late '90s/early '00s sense of humor & general fatigue regarding the slew of teen slashers riding SCREAM's coattails.
This was my intro to the Wayans Bros, Regina Hall, Marlon Wayans, Shannon Elizabeth during their own first Hollywood at-bats, before Hall would act for Paul Thomas Anderson & Wayans would do his best J.K. Simmons in HIM.
Sophomoric? Absolutely. Problematic? You bet your ass. But the Wayans carried the parody torch into the millennium, better than their contemporaries. WAZZUP?!
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WE ARE STILL HERE occupies a crossroads in the horror genre: that of the '70s & '80s-inspired supernatural chillers, the gorefests from guys like Lucio Fulci and the patient character studies of grief popularized in the '10s (anything A24 would touch).
These elements shouldn't work so well together but I guess when you got a horror nerd like Ted Geoghegan writing and directing, it simply does.
Paul and Anne Sacchetti (Andrew Sensenig & Barbara Crampton) have just suffered the death of their college-aged son, Bobby. In an attempt to lessen the pain, they pack up everything and move to a remote New England house with a strange 100-year-old history.
The rest moves as you'd expect: Anne hears noises, sees things shuffling about on their own. She's convinced Bobby is somehow in the house trying to connect with his parents. Her husbands drowns the pain with whisky and denial. Once the supernatural grows too obvious to ignore, Anne calls their friends, Jacob and May Lewis (Larry Fessenden & Lisa Marie) to give the house a once-over and provide some much needed friendship.
If you're equally a fan of movies like THE CHANGELING, DEAD & BURIED and CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, you'll find the threads tying these elements together. It's patient enough with its characters to allow them the space to grieve while also brisk enough to satisfy any genre thrill-seekers. It's a unique balance that leaves me talking about every individual piece for hours after it's over. WE ARE STILL HERE is a pizza-and-beer-and-shoot-the-shit-forum of a flick and isn't that what we want from a proper Halloween watch?
WE ARE STILL HERE's 10th anniversary Blu-ray is available to buy now from Dark Sky Films.
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We're 10 days into the 31 Days of Halloween and I feel like we need a palate cleanser. Recently, we've been talking about reanimating dead bodies, torturous twins, eating warm pizza off of cold corpses. I think it's time we take the holiday back to a more innocent, nostalgic time, where we only concern ourselves with what costume we're gonna wear and how much candy we can score.
IT'S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, CHARLIE BROWN is a 1966 TV special directed by José Cuauhtémoc "Bill" Melendez starring Charles M. Schulz' gallery of PEANUTS characters: Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Sally, Snoopy, the works.
Linus, in lieu of trick-or-treating, elects to spend his Halloween night sitting in the pumpkin patch, waiting for The Great Pumpkin to arrive and give him a pile of presents. It's a reward for sincerity.
Most of the others think Linus is crazy for believing in a C-grade Santa, but there's something admirable in Linus' valuing honesty of one's motives rather than the transactional element of trading "goodness" for material wealth.
The movie operates more like a hodge-podge of PEANUTS strips and gags than as its own singular narrative but much like the ways in which memory flashes through our heads, the mosaic of musings about Halloween and the fall season leads to a highly emotional, nostalgic appreciation for the good times.
Though if anyone were to ever give my kid a rock instead of candy, I'd slingshot that fucker through their teeth.
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GOODNIGHT MOMMY is the feature debut of aunt-nephew duo Veronika Franz & Severin Fiala (THE LODGE, THE DEVIL'S BATH). Patient, tense and psychologically disturbed, this movie drew me in and kept me guessing all the way to the end.
Twin brothers Lukas and Elias (Lukas & Elias Schwarz) live in pastoral Germany, spending their summer days exploring pitch-black tunnels, bouncing on trampolines during rainstorms, harboring any stray cat or gigantic cockroach who happens to cross their path - typical 9-year-old shit.
This idyllic season grinds to a halt when their mother (Susanne Wuest) returns from the hospital, head covered in bandages post-cosmetic surgery. She asks them to keep the house's blinds drawn, leave any newly discovered animals outside wherever the fuck they've found them, and for the love of God, just play quietly.
Reasonable demands at first but the mother starts to grow impatient with the boys. She'll split them up, instruct one not to talk to the other, increasingly losing her temper. It also doesn't help that she mostly keeps herself cooped up in her room, not addressing or barely acknowledging the boys unless they trigger her ire. This isn't how a mother behaves. Is this lady even their mother? No. She must not be. Who is this intruder and what does she want with the twins?
GOODNIGHT MOMMY excels in drawing me into the boys' points of view, almost like a perverted Amblin film. These kids have no qualms regarding taking responsibility into their own hands, investigating, interrogating their "mom." The entire movie is constructed like an elaborate tightrope walk, throwing in the right red herrings and turns in order to keep me on my toes, never comfortable affirming any conclusions to which I've arrived.
And this finale? This last 20, 30 minutes? Some of the most disturbing visuals since I last watched Miike's AUDITION. It's different when kids are involved; what can I say?
GOODNIGHT MOMMY is available to watch on Tubi.
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In Karyn Kusama's THE INVITATION, Will (Logan Marshall-Green) is invited to his ex-wife Eden's (Tammy Blanchard) dinner party in the Hollywood Hills after two years of radio silence following the accidental death of their 5-year-old son.
Returning to his old home and stepping back into his son's room conjures the guilt and pain Will's tried to bury for two years. Eden, however, not only seems to be unbothered by this but never acknowledges the awkwardness or sorrow of the situation.
The dinner party clashes on these fronts as Will hyperfocuses on every change to the house and odd behavior while Eden, along with her new partner, David (Michiel Huisman), deflect any concerns.
But wait a minute. Why - are - there bars on the windows? Why does David lock the front door from the inside so no one can leave without a key? If this is supposed to be a reunion of old friends, who are these random people David invited from his and Eden's retreat to Mexico? Why are they talking about this commune of wellness gurus with evangelical fervor? What pills are in that unmarked bag in Eden's nightstand? Why does it not...feel safe to be at this dinner?
There's a reason this made it to the 31 Days of Halloween, friends.
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After a long week of watching Halloween movies, it's good to grab some friends, get cozy in your pajamas, munch on a pizza, sip some beer, smoke some weed and settle into a slumber party. If you're lucky, it might even be a slumber party MASSACRE!
1982's THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE, directed by Amy Holden Jones, is one of my all-time favorites: a clever satire on slasher flicks through the female gaze.
When a slumber party hosted by a group of teen girls is crashed by a drill-wielding maniac on the loose, they've got to band together to stay alive and fend this fucker off, assisted by two sisters from across the street.
Perspective is the name of the game here, as Jones' lens eschews most of the slasher subgenre's conventions. FRIDAY THE 13TH blew the doors wide open in 1980. The next year, its gang of imitators hacked on through, giving audiences a crash course in the cinematic language of masked men, their gruesome kills and POV shots. Jones grounds her killer, often using these conventions as red herrings, to contrast the blunt and rather matter-of-fact approach of the killer. Women constantly need to keep their head on a swivel because, as Jones reminds us throughout the film, the difference between life and death can last only seconds, occur in broad daylight and be perpetrated by your everyday Joe.
It doesn't take much for you to become the pizza boy lying face-up in someone's living room with drill holes where your eyes used to be.
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Donate to the Go-Fund-Me for Gabe Bartalos here.
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Just cause I've wrapped up the Universal Monsters series doesn't mean I'm quite yet done with the classics! Frank Henenlotter takes his goofy and gaudy turn with the FRANKENSTEIN story in his 1990 opus FRANKENHOOKER.
This movie sees Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) as certifiably cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs after the accidental death of his girlfriend, Elizabeth Shelley (Patty Mullen). Obsessed with using his self-taught medical and surgical knowledge to revive her, Jeffrey decides to harvest body parts from the sex workers of New York City, reinventing his girlfriend in his own sexually fantasized image.
Henenlotter is a master of exploitation, crafting disturbed yet humorous stages from which I can't look away nor stifle the naughtiest giggle. However, unlike Elizabeth (and Jeffrey, post a few drill sessions into the back of his skull), this movie is not brainless. Slipped in-between some nasty bouts with explosive super-crack and a tunnel of lady legs lie some sharp commentaries about the exploitation of women's bodies in a patriarchal image and an advocacy for legalizing sex work in this country.
All this while a re-animated Elizabeth goes on a hooking spree, accidentally coursing hundreds of thousands of watts of lightning through each trick she finds. God, it's rarely felt this fun to engage in such bad taste.
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Today, we're wrapping up the Universal Monsters with CREATURE OF THE BLACK LAGOON!
The Monsterverse jumps into the Atomic Age of the '50s as a group of scientists/archeologists venture on a fossil-finding expedition in the Amazon. What are they looking for? An evolutionary missing link between animals of the sea and land, teased by a webbed long-fingered claw found in a cliff face.
But this undisturbed lagoon holds on to its ecological history much longer than expected. The Gill-Man breathes the past into modern day, a survivor of history. And he's not too pleased with a bunch of whites fucking with his home.
I love this movie. We're no longer chained to the folklore of yore but rather using their examples to look forward to the promise of the future, the what-ifs of space travel and colonization. By examining the Gill-men and other sea creatures (about which we know woefully little), we can potentially grab clues as to how to adapt ourselves to strange new worlds. But lest we forget, all discovery comes with responsibility. It's only new to us. It's old hat to the Gill-man. Be a good guest.
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🎶 On the 3rd Day of Halloween, my true love gave to me a stone knife to the stomach and promises of eternal life as a mu-mmy 🎶
1932's THE MUMMY sees Boris Karloff (now marketed as KARLOFF THE UNCANNY after FRANKENSTEIN's success) as an ancient Egyptian sorcerer, revived after 3,000 years with a mission to revive his love, Princess Anck-es-en-amon.
How? No big deal. He's just going to find the last woman (Zita Johann) in the princess' bloodline, kill her, plug in the princess' soul and play beloved immortal couple forever. For some reason, these archaeologists (David Manners, Arthur Byron & patron saint of the podcast Edward Van Sloan) are acting like that's a bad thing.
See, ladies? if he really wanted to, he would.
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*God, if I can somehow get Clancy Brown to introduce this show, it'd be beautiful but now, you'll just have to imagine his deep, rich voice* DAY 2! GIVE IT UP FOR DAY 2, EVERYONE!
31 Days of Halloween continues down the Universal Monsters track. Not even a year after DRACULA's release, wunderkind producer Carl Laemmle Jr. comes back swinging with FRANKENSTEIN, a James Whale-directed adaptation of Mary Shelley's novel.
Bela Lugosi is interested in returning. Junior is stoked! Lugosi reads the script and waitaminute, this is for the monster; I wanted to be Henry Frankenstein, what the fuck?
Enter Boris Karloff, a veteran English stage actor with 80 credits to his name before taking on the role of the lumbering Creature.
Borne of the crude surgery of dead parts and a good ol' blast of lightning, this Creature is the product of Frankenstein's (Colin Clive) defiance against God, the natural order, showers (Look in my eyes and truthfully deny it, I dare you. Henry be stinky.) and sanity.
This movie established the benchmark for many who would follow. Any mad scientist crafts their lab in response to the bubbling breakers and sparkling electronics of Whale's movie. The locked-knee hobbling accentuated by grunts and baritone moans for any monstrous brute comes from Karloff's performance. Even cartoons joke about angry mobs with torches and pitchforks, aping this movie's ending. The influence reaches further than one can imagine.
And while I dock points for the movie meandering about Henry's wedding (The dude just created life and you people wanna think about bouquets?) and a lack of time developing the Creature's intelligence, as does the novel, that influence makes this a must-watch. For this Universal Monsters run, it's important to see where we've been to better chart where horror can go.
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Merry October, you beautiful people! For a holiday as fun as Halloween, who has the right to limit the party to one day? No-fucking-body.
That's why on THE MOVIES, I'm celebrating for 31 straight days. This project allows me to further dig down the rabbit hole of my favorite genre, horror, discovering subterranean weird-ass, BARBARIAN-esque detours I've yet to witness. Hold my hand and don't let go. For this entire month, we're gonna get scary.
How better to start this bacchanalia of blood than with five days of the Universal Monsters? And how better to begin this run than with the eternally imitated progenitor, Count Dracula?
Tod Browning directed and Karl Freund directed the photography (and the whole movie, depending on who you ask) but for my money, this is Bela Lugosi's movie. He's hypnotic, alluring, even amiable at times but don't cross him. He'll just as soon eye you like a panther and in one move, strike. This performance is so iconic, even SESAME STREET had to ape it. Does an Academy Award even MATTER at that point?
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NICKEL BOYS is one of a kind. That's not to say the narrative is brand-new. Two Black teens struggling to keep their sanity while stuck in an abusive institution brings to mind ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, THE GREAT ESCAPE, the millennial cinematic classic HOLES.
But where NICKEL BOYS differs, as the great Roger Ebert wrote, is in HOW it's about what it's about. The camera is an extension of the main characters, their first-person perspective. But unlike other films that've adopted this approach, NICKEL BOYS invests its energy into the authenticity of this perspective.
Think about yourself reading this. You might glance down, turn your head to see a phone notification. You might reread the last paragraph and conjure a mental image of Jack Nicholson or Nurse Ratched. Is that thought confined by a tiny editor in your head, INSIDE OUT-style, reacting with the timing of someone who wants the smoothest cut? No. It's instant. How can the experience of being human and all its minutia be translated to a cinematic language? That's where NICKEL BOYS shines.
Ross, along with cinematographer Jomo Fray, move their cameras patiently, deliberately in a manner that attempts to pull this off, described in interviews as a "sentient experience." As such, the result is immersive, at times feeling like I or you or she or he have possessed Elwood (Ethan Herisse) or Turner (Brandon Wilson) as they navigates their Black body through 1960s Florida.
By doing so, Ross reminds us that while we may not be Black, the story of Nickel Academy and its culture of murdering children, contrasted with the promise of new civil rights and space exploration, is not merely a subgenre of history. It's our collective memory. It's our duty and responsibility to accept, from which to learn and rebuke.
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DROP follows Violet (Meghann Fahy), a widow/single mom going on her first date after the violent death of her abusive husband.
All looks promising across the dinner table: Henry (Brendon Sklenar) is a charming, attractive, thoughtful guy. He's a photographer for the mayor. He bought a trinket for her 5-year-old. He's got a good wit. Perfect first outing, right?
The problem lies in Violet's' phone. She's receiving these anonymous airdrops from someone in the restaurant. What starts as a couple of dumb memes quickly devolves as the dropper gets personal and eventually instructs her to kill Henry or the masked man in her house will kill her son and sister. One glance of her security cameras confirms the worst. The game is on.
Who's doing this? Why her? Why Henry? How's Violet gonna save her family? This is the wind of the car that's gonna send us through DROP's Hitchcock-inspired story. I enjoy Fahy and Sklenar's chemistry & the production design dazzles my comfort-seeking soul. However, bringing Violet's panicked state to the screen results in some distracting lighting setups, framing and VFX work (You've likely never before seen cell phone text glare onto 70% of the screen across multiple instances.) The end of the movie goes for entertaining, if stupid, gonzo; The blend of serious subjects and pulpy execution leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
It's not a worst offender by any means, so I'd mildly recommend DROP as a watch with the kind of people who love tossing themselves into wild scenarios, calling out their own escape plans, critiquing the movie's lapses in logic. Click play on a chill Friday night and I don't think you'll be so disappointed.
DROP is currently available to purchase in 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD formats at your favorite home video retailer. Thanks to Universal and Mandy Kay Marketing for the review copy!
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Film critic Megan Loucks, better known as Wonder Meg, comes on THE MOVIES to share who she is using only four films.
The Lansing, Michigan native and I chat about an encyclopedia of topics: motherhood, growing up in a tight-knit family, the Snyder Cut fandom (Meg co-founded Justice Con, an virtual charity convention that brought together Snyder Cut, DCEU, and comic book fans to raise money for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention), a lifelong devotion to fantasy stories, pillow fort architecture, the art of physical media collecting and so, so much more.
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Meg's four films:
LA BELLE ET LA BETE (1946) dir. Jean Cocteau (watch on Max or YouTube)
DO THE RIGHT THING (1989) dir. Spike Lee (watch on Netflix)
EXCALIBUR (1981) dir. John Boorman (watch on Internet Archive)
LADY BIRD (2017) dir. Greta Gerwig (watch on Max)
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Follow Meg on Instagram, YouTube. Read her interview with THE PENGUIN production designer Kalina Ivanov on Wonder Watchlist & other reviews on InSession Film.
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Thanks once again to Universal Pictures Home Entertainment for shipping me a review Blu-ray copy of THE WOMAN IN THE YARD!
This has been a good way to catch up on movies I missed in the theaters. The teaser for this movie sucked me in right away because it's simple: a family living at a farm house, with no neighbors as far as the eye can see and almost as far as the foot can walk...but then they see a creepy veiled woman, dressed in all black, sitting at the end of the driveway.
There's the thinnest veneer of civility in our daily lives. All it takes to send us into paranoid or hostile spirals is one uninvited person approaching our space. Shit, we really are just animals, aren't we?
Now imagine this person carries herself with the kind of calm yet firm demeanor reserved only for folks who know they can back up what they say. They can overpower you at any time and the only reason this movie doesn't end in five minutes is strictly due to the fact that they're not just here to rob or pillage or fight. There's something deeper going on.
This Woman (Okwui Okpokwasali) is here for Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler). She's the matriarch of a young family: young teen Taylor (Peyton Jackson) and elementary-aged Annie (Estella Kahiha). Ramona's husband has just died in a car accident; the movie starts with her getting around on crutches.
Taylor's trying to be the man of the house with the limited resources a 14-year-old has: no groceries, no license, no electricity. Bills pile up; Ramona lies in bed, rotting in her own mind. It's within this scenario the Woman arrives, revealing she knows more about Ramona and her family than any stranger ever should.
The movie plays out like a wind-up toy, setting up all the necessary pieces and letting the tension play out, watching Ramona and the kids try to figure a method of escape or deterrence. As the Woman grows closer, almost at the pace of shadows cast by a gliding Sun, secrets are revealed and Ramona's state of mind continues to warp, influenced by the Woman's otherworldly presence. Collet-Serra crafts genre set pieces that work as metaphors for Ramona's deteriorating mental illness, though leave me focused more so on how this works within the movie's world rather than how Ramona's mind is reflected within these scares.
I've always appreciated Deadwyler's gusto in pursuing a wide variety of projects (this to I SAW THE TV GLOW to THE PIANO LESSON, TILL and the upcoming siege thriller 40 ACRES carves a wide swath). She plays so much internal strife within her eyes and expressions; there's a woman who's fighting not only to survive, but also stave off this nagging reminder that she never wanted this kind of life. This isn't the plan she had for herself. It's hard not to wallow in self-pity. Deadwyler carries all of this in a way that never feels maudlin, always relatable.
The movie doesn't overstay its welcome, coming in at a breezy 88 minutes. Some sci-fi elements threaten to overstuff the story and I wish they'd been developed more throughout the movie rather than explained within the climax. Regardless, the movie, much like most of Collet-Serra's filmography sits at a comfortable 5-6 out of 10, perfect for a lazy Saturday afternoon.
The Blu-ray release? I can't understand why I'd pick up a "Collector's Edition" without so much as a commentary. The two featurettes into the making of the movie and design of the Woman are nice, but in 2025, falls below the standard for home video ownership.
Streaming's already made Blu-rays rarer and more expensive; this sparse set of bonus features wouldn't make me feel any better about dropping $20 for the disc. It shouldn't entice you to do the same.
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I interviewed John Maclean, the director of the coming-of-age samurai revenge movie TORNADO. The titular character is a teenage girl (Koki) avenging her father's murder at the hands of a band of thieves led by Sugarman (Tim Roth) and his son Little Sugar (Jack Lowden).
I swear I didn't mean for this episode to drop on Father's Day but it feels appropriate. The movie features two sets of father and child struggling with communication and good old-fashioned rebellion. It doesn't matter that Fujin (Takehiro Hira) nurtures and disciplines his daughter while Sugarman has left his son to fully grow into adulthood with little more than an idea of how to lead a group of ruffians. Either way, kids will roll their eyes. They'll pull a 180 to spite whatever you say.
Maclean and I discussed the importance of leading by example, the necessary shift of perspective from one who rejects their parents' tutelage to one who embraces it with warmth.
But don't worry, I didn't forget this is a samurai flick, spraying blood and sword-slashed limbs as Tornado's wind-blown hair shrouds her face in captivating mystery. You know I had to talk the Kurosawa influence, especially one shot that genuinely looks like an anime finisher.
This was a fun conversation. Maclean is a thoughtful guy, in love with so many different facets of what film has to reveal. I hope y'all enjoy this as much as I did recording it.
Pre-order TORNADO on Fandango at Home
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