31 Days of 2024 Horror - Day 15 - Double Blind (2023)

  Another Irish horror, notwithstanding this international poster.  Content warning:  animal death (mouse), needles, blood, some gore, allusions to child abuse

Seven twentysomthings join a stage-one drug trial.  Amir (Akshay Kumar), a med student hoping for an internship, becomes increasingly concerned about the side effects, especially after it seems that all participants in the study have received the experimental drug with no control group.  Oh, and they've gone over 100 hours without sleep.  Stuck in a facility-wide lockdown, the seven strangers must stay awake for a further 24-hours until help arrives or their brains will basically boil inside their skulls.  

The movie actually follows Claire (Millie Brady) but she doesn't really do anything to move the plot.  It just kind of happens around her.

Sound design was critical in this film, even more than the visuals, for creating an atmosphere of unreality.  Visuals are good, nothing ground-breaking but executed well.  For me, the standout is the dialogue.  It nails that feeling of having been awake too long but still expected to perform at top capacity.  I did find that I deducted some points for Claire being a weak protagonist but your mileage may vary.  Maybe you find her sympathetic and relatable.  It's currently streaming on Kanopy with a library card or on Tubi with ads.  About half of my ads were for prescription drugs, which I found very funny.

31 Days of 2024 Horror - Day 14 - Handling the Undead (2024)

  Here's your obligatory zombie movie.  Wish it was a better one.  Content warning:  dead child, animal killed on-screen (rabbit), suicide attempt

A strange power surge in Oslo causes the dead to re-animate, throwing three families into chaos as they try to cope with the return of a loved one that's not quite right.

This is based on a novel by the same guy who wrote Let the Right One In and there are moments that have the same feel, but overall this is a very weak film.  It doesn't say or do anything new with the genre and the overall message of letting go of grief is facile and frankly, condescending.

Can't even give it props for performances.  Everybody acts like they're on anti-depressants already and I don't know if that's just because they're Norwegian or what.  It's boring, it's sad, and it's insulting.  It's streaming on Hulu.

31 Days of 2024 Horror - Day 13 - Blackout (2023)

  Halloween checklist:  vampires?  Check.  Demons?  Check, check.  Werewolves?  Check!   Content warning:  gore, drunk driving

Charley (Alex Hurt) has a problem.  Three nights a month, he goes on a bender and can't remember anything the next day.  Also, his late father might have been involved in shady shit with the local developer (Marshall Bell) to poison the town, his relationship with said developer's daughter (Addison Timlin) is on the rocks, and to top it all off, all the nights he can't remember are correlated with a series of brutal murders.  

This movie understands that all werewolf stories* are ultimately sad.  They have been sad since 1941.  At their heart, they are about loss of control and humanity, guilt and personal and societal responsibility.  

There are a number of references to the original Wolf Man.  The town is called Talbot Falls, the practical werewolf prosthetics are updated versions of the original look, and there are a couple of references to Lon Chaney, Jr.  It also stars a famous actor's son.  Alex Hurt looks so much like his father it is unreal.  Kid's mom's genes never stood a chance.  Horror legend Barbara Crampton appears briefly as the lawyer, Kate.  

I'm going to stress again that this is not a movie you put on for a good time.  But it is a good movie.  And it's streaming for free on Tubi.

*This does not include book werewolves, whose defining characteristic is horny.  They can also be sad, but mostly just very horny.

31 Days of 2024 Horror - Day 12 - Arcadian (2024)

  Content warning:  mild gore

Paul (Nicolas Cage) survived the apocalypse and managed to get his infant twins to their teens.  They live in a farmhouse and abide strictly by rules about lockdown, making sure the house is securely fashioned by dusk.  It works, until Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins) falls for the girl next door (Sadie Soverall) and begins to push the boundaries in an effort to spend every waking minute with her.  Meanwhile, Joseph (Jaeden Martell) believes there is a pattern to the nightly attacks and that the monsters might be smarter than previously realized.

This isn't bad for creature design, although when you finally see the whole thing it's a little goofy.  It reminded me of the descriptions of boogeymen in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels.  There is more shaky cam than I would like, but it's not constant at least.  Performances were good.  Cage is damn near  demure and as the movie focuses on the sons, he kind of fades to the background.  Martell (née Lieberher) and Jenkins are both seasoned pros, despite their tender years and I look forward to following their careers with interest.

Arcadian is basically a better version of A Quiet Place and a much better allegory for fatherhood.  It's currently streaming on Shudder.

31 Days of 2024 Horror - Day 11 - In a Violent Nature (2024)

  Content warning:  gore

Six twentysomethiings find a gold locket in an abandoned fire tower in the woods and take it, unknowingly waking a revenant.  "Johnny" (Ry Barrett) was murdered 70 years ago but it didn't take and only his mother's amulet keeps him from wandering around, hacking people to bits.  

This movie was made by people who fundamentally misunderstood what a slasher movie is.  Where is the joy?  Where is the creativity?  Where is the madcap manic glee??  Nowhere to be found!  

There was a lot of potential here for a Hatchet or Tucker and Dale style hillbilly slasher.  The camera stays with the killer nearly all of the run-time which would have been really cool if he had been at all interesting.  Same thing for the conversations that don't happen on-screen.  You can't build any sympathy for the victims because you don't see them for much of the film and I personally found it harder to place voices with faces so I didn't even know who was getting murdered half the time.  

The dialogue itself was so stilted and unnatural.  Like somebody browsed Reddit and just wrote down "how young people talk" as a direction.  And the last 15-minutes of the film are taken up by a boring, long-ass story about a bear attack that had nothing to do with anything else.  

It's like a student film trying to use the slasher genre to make a point about human impact on nature that is completely obtuse and again, misses the entire point of slashers in an effort to "elevate" horror.  D-

It's currently streaming on Shudder.

31 Days of 2024 Horror - Day 10 - Oddity (2024)

  This was such a good movie!  Content warning:  gore

While renovating her new house, Dani (Carolyn Bracken) is violently murdered.  A year later, her blind twin sister, Darcy (Carolyn Bracken), shows up at the house determined to punish Dani's killer by any means necessary.  Dani's widower, Ted (Gwilym Lee), thinks Darcy is harmless if kind of a crackpot but soon can't explain the things she seems to know.

There are jump scares but no surprises.  The villain is exactly who you think it is and that could have made for a really boring movie but it's saved by being stunningly well-executed.  I think there's a particular dread? in the anticipation of something bad.  You see something, you think "that's about to do something bad," and then it does, and your thoughts and feelings are validated and reinforced.  Oddity has a cascading series of those moments, which feels vindicating especially if you've ever been told something is just your imagination playing tricks on you.

The characters have normal reactions to what's going on and that's always nice to see.  Performances are great across the board, but special shout-out to Tadhg Murphy as Ollin Boole.  I'll probably end up buying this one at some point.  It feels like the kind of movie that I will enjoy making other people watch and feeding on their reactions.

Currently streaming on Shudder.

31 Days of 2024 Horror - Day 9 - You'll Never Find Me (2023)

  Oh, Australia, never change!  

A woman (Jordan Cowan) seeks shelter from a storm at a trailer owned by a loner/pariah (Brendan Rock).  As the wind howls outside, a different, quieter storm is gathering inside.  Both of them are lying about who they are.  What they are.  

I loved fully 7/8ths of this movie.  I don't know if I liked the ending.  I have to sit with it a little longer to decide.  There's no gore, very little violence really, just violin-string tension the whole way through.  Everything is carried in the performances and dialogue.  The characters are trapped by the excruciating politeness of social convention more than locks and that is like catnip to me, specifically.  

I don't want to spoil it, even though I wouldn't necessarily call it a twist.  I think it's better to go in knowing less.  It's currently streaming on Shudder.

31 Days of 2024 Horror - Day 8 - The First Omen (2024)

  Content warning:  pregnancy horror, sexual assault (off-screen), suicide, moderate gore, spiders

Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) has come to Rome to take her vows as a nun.  Until then, she works as a teacher in an all-girls orphanage, where she quickly grows attached to Carlita (Nichole Sorace), a troubled girl who has the same kinds of issues Margaret had when she was young.  But Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson) believes that Carlita is in danger, that there is a splinter group within the Church that is trying to bring forth the Antichrist.

This is meant to be a prequel to The Omen, a classic Evil Child movie, but comes off much more like a remake of Rosemary's Baby with nuns.  It's fine.  It's just not original in any way.  It's big and loud and the third act "twist" is obvious from the first 15 minutes of the movie.  However, the performances are good!  Nell Tiger Free has changed a lot since she played Myrcella on Game of Thrones.  Veterans like Bill Nighy, Sonia Braga, and Charles Dance show up to lend some gravitas to the whole affair, and Maria Caballero steals scenes as Luz, a fellow novitiate.  Horror visuals are standard but well-executed.

I would have liked this to swing a little harder for the fences.  It feels very safe.  It's currently streaming on Hulu.

31 Days of 2024 Horror - Day 7 - Out of Darkness (2022)

  I say again, the past sucks.  1750?  Shitty year.  43,000 BCE?  Worse.  Content warning:  some gore, cannibalism

Adem (Chuku Modu) leads a splinter of his tribe across the sea to a new land in search of better prospects.    Instead, they find a wasteland and something snatches Adem's son, Heron (Luna Mwezi), in the dark.  The elder (Arno Lüning) thinks they have angered a demon that must be appeased.  Adem believes it's a beast that can be tracked and killed.  

The neatest thing about this movie is that every line of dialogue is in a made-up language created for the film.  It adds an otherness where it's almost something you could recognize (based on Arabic and Basque, according to the director) but isn't.  Otherwise, this isn't really a novel take on survival horror.  There are long stretches where the camera just pans over each character in a way that's meant to increase tension but just ends up being boring.  

The cinematography is great when it's gliding over the Scottish highlands but it devolves into shaky cam during action and you know I hate that.  (I'm pretty sure I recognized the same ridge from Braveheart but I could be wrong.)  The "twist" at the end isn't particularly well done and the message isn't as clever as it thinks.  It is based in actual historical evidence, however, so that's nice.  All in all, not super worth your attention.  It's streaming on Paramount+ with the Showtime option.  Which I think is just included now?  Whatever.  Paramount+.

If you're wondering, it was released in festivals in 2022 but didn't get a wide release, i.e. to the States, until 2024 so it counts as being from this year.

31 Days of 2024 Horror - Day 6 - The Devil's Bath (2024)

  This is a genre I like to call Women's Horror because it presents life just being a woman and voila!  Horror.  Content warning:  infanticide, suicide, open wounds, rotting flesh, maggots, decapitation, dead animals (goat, fish)

Agnes (Anja Plaschg) was looking forward to being married and having a house and family of her own.  But her husband (David Scheid) doesn't touch her, her mother-in-law (Maria Hofstätter) is overbearing, and the chores expected of her are drudging misery.  What's an emotionally sensitive girl to do when the most attractive option means you won't get into heaven?  She looks for a loophole.

Love that the premise is "what if you were a peasant in 1750" and that's it.  The past fucking sucks.  The movie does a good job showing that no one is really at fault here.  Agnes' husband does love her but it is heavily implied that he prefers men, so he can't give her what she wants --a baby-- but he also can't really tell her why.  And there's no divorce.  So Agnes is left shouldering the burden of being childless, trying to learn a lifetime's worth of skilled labor in a couple of weeks, feeling judged and found wanting at every turn.  In modern times, she would probably be vegan but that's also not an option, so she feels guilty and surrounded by death with every meal she makes.  And up until around 1970, that was the reality for literally millions of women.  

There's a super depressing end title card detailing the court statistics that inform this movie, just in case you thought it was me being a rabid feminist again.  But if you like rural folk horror like Hagazussa, this might be one for you.  It's currently streaming on Shudder.

31 Days of 2024 Horror - Day 5 - Abigail (2024)

  I love vampire movies!  Content warning:  heavy gore

Six strangers are recruited to kidnap a billionaire's 12-year-old daughter, Abigail (Alisha Weir).  The plan is to hole up in an isolated manor house and wait for the ransom demand to be paid.  But Abigail has some bad news for them.  Her father runs an underground crime empire and he's not about to pay to see her returned.  Also, she's not locked in with them; they are locked in with her.

This movie was such a fun time but I really wish the marketing hadn't spoiled Abigail's identity.  It would be so much more fun to anticipate, rather than know.  That being said, Weir is a tiny powerhouse in this role.  Also, shout out to Kevin Durand as the heavy.  He was hilarious.  

The idea of a bloodthirsty ballerina is such a Cabin in the Woods roulette wheel choice and I loved that.  I also enjoyed that nobody is afraid to say the word "vampire."  I hate when franchises use euphemisms like no one has ever heard of this kind of monster before.  

There is a lot of fake blood in this so if you are squeamish maybe give it a pass.  Otherwise, grab some friends, put on your sparkliest tutu, and settle in to enjoy some pint-sized ass-kicking.  It's not currently on streaming services unless you rent.  It was on Peacock for a while.  I bought it in anticipation of this month, so that's also an option.

31 Days of 2024 Horror - Day 4 - Stopmotion (2024)

  I wish this movie lived up to its visuals.  Content warning:  some body horror, dead animal (fox)

Ellie (Aisling Franciosi) loves making stop motion animation but struggles coming out of the shadow of her famous mother (Stella Gonet).  Especially when her creations seem to have a mind of their own.

I'm so disappointed.  This movie had nothing to say except the same old cliches about creation as birth, destruction of the artist, and even inner child creativity.  Just lame, navel-gazing pretension masquerading as horror.  

And the visuals were so good!  Weird little things made of mortician's wax and roadkill!  Ventriloquist dolls!  A little girl singing creepy songs in a stairwell!  Just let down by a script aspiring to mediocrity and coming up short.

It's streaming on Shudder.

31 Days of 2024 Horror - Day 3 - Infested (2023)

  Content warning:  spiders, bugs, dead animal (dog), mild gore

Kaleb (Théo Christine) fends off despair over his mother's recent death, his antagonistic relationship with his sister, Manon (Lisa Nyarko), and the low-grade but constant grind of poverty, by buying rare and exotic invertebrates with the dream to open his own vivarium someday.  One of these purchases, a venomous spider with no provenance, escapes into Kaleb's run-down apartment building, filled with mainly immigrants.  It's not long until the spiders take over.

This is a decent creature feature, especially if you have fond memories of watching Arachnophobia in the 90s.  There are spiders everywhere and it looks like a lot of them are real with a mix of CGI for some behaviors and size.  There are some jump scares, mostly of the "small thing that suddenly moves FASTER THAN EXPECTED towards you" variety.  If you've ever been surprised by a spider in the shower, you know the feeling.

But this isn't really a movie about spiders.  It's very much a movie about reacting to the pandemic, especially if you are poor and non-white.  After the first death, masked officials order all the residents to lock themselves inside their apartments and quarantine the building, blocking the exits and refusing to allow anyone to leave containment.  Which is not what you do with an infestation, but is 100% what you do with a pathogen.  

So if you liked District B-13 but wished there were spiders doing parkour instead of people, Infested is currently streaming on Shudder, which I get as an add-on with Amazon Prime.

31 Days of 2024 Horror - Day 2 - Late Night with the Devil (2024)

  I was very excited to get to watch this and it does not disappoint!  Content warning:  cancer, some gore

Late night host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) has been riding Johnny Carson's coattails in the ratings for years.  Now, in 1977, with Night Owls on the brink of cancellation, Jack plans a desperate live Halloween episode featuring a renowned psychic (Fayssal Bazzi), a professional skeptic (Ian Bliss), and a parapsychologist (Laura Gordon) who claims to have rescued a patient (Ingrid Torelli) from a Satanic cult.

I had such a good time watching this!  Dastmalchian has become one of my favorite Weird Little Guy actors and it was so good to watch him play against type as Normal and Charismatic.  Plus, I am a total sucker for a good possession story.  

The film stays simple; doesn't try to get too flashy or bogged down in any more exposition than is necessary to set up.  Other than Dastmalchian*, the cast are professional character actors and their performances are great.  

*I actually have no idea if he counts as famous yet.  He's been in a bunch of really high-profile stuff but I don't know if regular people who don't watch 300 movies a year know who he is.

It's currently streaming on Shudder, which is available as part of AMC+ now?  I have it as an add-on to Amazon Prime but it doesn't matter.  Totally worth watching.

31 Days of 2024 Horror - Day 1 - Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

  Happy Spooky Season!  We're going to do things a little differently this year.  Instead of watching whatever horror happened to be up next on my To Be Watched Queue, we're going to highlight 31 films from this year.  Starting with this one!

Astrid Deetz (Jenna Ortega) has grown up in the shadow of her famous mother Lydia's (Winona Ryder) paranormal TV show and she hates it.  For her part, Lydia is sick and tired of seeing dead people everywhere but her smarmy producer boyfriend (Justin Theroux) keeps pushing her to milk that cash cow.  A family tragedy brings them all back to Winter River and Astrid accidentally gets trapped in the spirit world.  Lydia has to broker a deal with her nemesis, Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), to get her daughter back.  The Ghost with the Most demands Lydia marry him, both to fulfill his decades-long fantasy and to stop his vengeful ex-wife (Monica Belluci) from destroying his undead life.

Belluci, of course, filling the Barely Disguised Director's Fetish role previously occupied in Burton's films by his wives.

Look, no one needed this film to be made.  It is shameless nostalgia-bait for people born in the 80s who are now having a mid-life crisis.  That being said, it's not terrible.  It's a comforting level of predictable plot, returning stars, and campy fun.  Catherine O'Hara steals every scene she's in while newcomer (to me, at least) Arthur Conti was a fun surprise talent.  

It's family friendly popcorn entertainment that is specifically designed to appeal to the most people.  And it does.  I went to the theater as part of a group and everybody (teenagers included) had a good time, whether or not they were familiar with the original.  It's probably going to be on (sigh) Max and possibly Disney+ sometime this month.  Keep an eye out.