Love Hurts, Love Scars: Strange Darling (2023)

Strange Darling (2023)

Rating: ***1/2

Starring: Willa Fitzgerald, Kyle Gallner, Madisen Beaty

It's a classic horror sight to see: a shotgun-toting madman in the woods, his wounded lady prey running for her life. What could be strange about this you ask? Well...

Two characters, simply named "Lady" (Willa Fitzgerald) and "Demon" (Kyle Gallner) meet up at a motel one night for a sexy good time of drugs, smokes and kinks, only for it all go brutal when one of them turns out to be a serial killer, accumulating to a backwoods cat-and-mouse chase where bloody casualties are to be expected. So far, so familiar? Perhaps, but Strange Darling (2023) opted to tell this narrative by chapters. Six of them and an epilogue. Each told in a non-linear path and revealing more of what exactly happened from dusk to dawn in that one motel room, all the while toying with our expectations and subverting what we may have already understood.

This seemingly randomized plot direction practically has the story's tone all over the place, establishing some of the strange aspects of the movie and welcoming a needed sense of uncertainty for what looked like your everyday slasher horror final girl scenario. This, though, isn't the only thing peculiar about Strange Darling (2023) as there's also a notable mumblecore quality to the writing done for the characters here, especially between the Lady and the Demon, echoing elements of toxic relationships and sexual tension tinted with dark humor, sometimes accompanied by a soft yet haunting soundtrack composed by artist Z-Berg. All of which being shot with a dream-like vibrant cinematography which goes so well with the jumbled plotting, no doubt punctuating how much this film is made to build intrigue, and it certainly does its job right down to the chilling finale!

Production for Strange Darling (2023) is said to be a difficult one as producers weren't exactly on board with writer and director JT Mollner's vision for the movie, resulting to momentary shutdowns and even production company Miramax hiring editors to re-work a linear cut of the film behind Mollner's back. Fortunately, creative heads prevailed when test screening of original cut proved to be greatly successful, the end result being this hauntingly captivating indie piece of backwoods violence with a devilish twist. It can get a little talky during some of the slower scenes, borderline being pretentious at times, and the fetishization of sexual violence roleplays-gone-nearly wrong did get rather uncomfortable to sit through until its awkward aftermath, but one cannot deny the thoughtful construction and execution of its increasingly dire and unexpected turns towards cruelty, heartbreak and gore. 

Refreshingly chaotic and fractured, Strange Darling (2023) is a simple movie told in a not-to-simple way, gracefully carried by hot messes of characters over the scenic beauty of forest landscapes, awaiting to be defiled by grit, sleaze and blood splatter. It's an art piece of a horror film, an exercise on cleverness and misdirection, and I, for one, appreciate that. How well one can take said practice of a backwoods horror movie is another question, however. What say you?

Bodycount:

1 male found bashed on the head with a landline phone, knifed in the chest

1 female stabbed in the neck with a buck knife

1 male had his neck bitten open, bled to death

1 female shot on the head

1 male shot

1 female shot, succumbs to her injuries
Total: 6

Really Dirty Beddings: Lucker The Necrophagus (1986)

Lucker The Necrophagous (Belgium, 1986)

Rating: *1/2
Starring: Nick Van Suyt, Helga Vandevelde, Let Jotts

I remember my very first Fangoria magazine; I was 13-years old and it's issue #252, with Michael Rooker's face in heavy and slimy alien mutant make-up gracing the front cover. Within those pages are DVD reviews and one of them happens to be of Lucker The Necrophagous (1986), and I recall the magazine being unfavorable about the film. I guess I should have taken that as a warning of what I'm getting myself into when I finally decided to see this grey market exploitation indie many, many years later, but the damn curious cat inside of me is egging to see just how much of a trainwreck this movie is.

And, boy, is it a trainwreck.

The story of Lucker The Necrophagous (1986) follows the titular serial-killer who likes to rape and murder women, though not necessarily on that order. The film opens with him heavily sedated in a mental institution after a suicide attempt, but his medication wears off too soon and Lucker is up killing orderlies, having his way on some of the bodies, and escaping into town to lay low. We eventually learn that it's been eight years since his reign of gross terror ended with his capture, a total of eight victims under his kill count. Should have been nine, though, and after hearing about this one gal, Cathy Jordan, surviving his rampage (and finding out where she lives through a damn phone book!), Lucker sets off to correct his mistake, taking a few lives along the way. (And, yes, the freak got his rocks off on a few of the resulting corpses)

Apparently, Lucker The Necrophagous (1986) is a film made to be purposely offensive as a way for the director, Johan Vandewoestijine, to get back at the Belgian Film Commission. The resulting production was rough, with Johan withholding the finer details of the movie from fiscal backers just to get the money to make it, only for the producer to destroy the negatives, leaving only bits and pieces of the film to work with for the final product. That would explain the choppiness of the story and the patchwork-editing quality of the movie itself, though that did little to null the extreme repulsiveness of its taboo subject matter, especially when an infamous "bed scene" was done leeringly long and filled with as much vomit-inducing gags you'd wish to could bleach away from your brain once the dirty deed is done. Past that, the story is basically a 68-minute short slasher (74 minutes for the Belgian VHS release) wherein we simply watch Lucker stab people to death with very little workable dialogue to go with, even more so by its climax when everything devolves into a cacophony of screams and grunts amidst the film's score, punctuated by a rather confusing ending. 

There's few in the way of substance here, but we do see some bit of style through the giallo-inspired candy-colored lighting and stylized photography. Gore and make-up effects are also a fair highlight, something a movie of this dirty of a plot would benefit from and did, but that's as far as the positives could go. Sad to say, Lucker The Necrophagous (1986), a button-pushing shlock made to test just how far one can go before feeling cold and dirty, is quite lousy as an entertaining horror piece, its overall quality just all sorts of bad. If all of this tickled your curiosity, then, a word of advise, prepare a barf bag...

Bodycount:

1 male stabbed in the eye with an icepick

1 female beaten to death against a steering wheel

1 female disemboweled with a knife

1 male bashed to death against a wall

1 female stabbed on the throat with a kitchen knife

1 female head seen (flashback)

1 male strangled, head beaten with a pipe

1 female knifed to death

1 female disemboweled with a knife

Total: 9

The Morbid Pursuit Of The Art Of Murder: R.S.V.P. (2002)

R.S.V.P. (2002)
Rating: ***1/2
Starring: James M. Churchman, Sharon Bruneau, Scott Workman

Picture Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948) reimagined as a slasher, written by Kevin Smith and featuring Patrick Bateman from American Psycho (2000) as the killer. This is what R.S.V.P. (2002) is, for better or worse.

Criminology student Nick 'The Prick' Collier (Rick Otto) is hosting a leaving party for his friend Jimmy (Lucas Babin), as the guy prepares to relocate with his girlfriend Jordan (Brandi Andres), who happens to be Nick's ex. One by one, the guests arrive, consisting of their friends (among them Jason Mewes of Jay & Silent Bob fame playing a stoner, because of course), Jimmy's family, as well as their professor, Hal Evans (Glenn Quinn), and it's mostly fun and games with a bit of tarot card reading, weed smoking and cocktail mixing. There is also Hal's discussions circling around the idea of murder being an art form, something that puts plenty of the partygoers on a sour mood seeing how passionate, borderline obsessed he is about it. 

And there's the matter of Jimmy not showing up to his own party which is starting to worry some of the guests. Not to mention Nick acting a little suspicious about a particular piece of decorative chest in the living room. Needless to say, something is very off about the party and things are about to get way worse when Nick begins murdering away one unfortunate soul at a time, seemingly inspired by the very atrocities he learned studying serial killers...

Rather than your routine stalk-and-stab, R.S.V.P. (2002) has its focus more on dark humor and trenchant characters, often delving into situational comedy territory following Nick's attempt to juggle running a party, killing off the guests and then hiding away the bodies just to keep things running as smoothly as he plans it. We're pretty much in on the joke and, frankly, it is a intriguing set-up for a slasher, more so a homage to Rope (1948), as the plot keeps a constant academic yet reckless angle on the murders, mostly within dialogues shared between Nick and Prof. Evans as they pretentiously yet captivatingly run their mouths toward philosophizing serial killing, all in the midst of good acting and writing. It's without a doubt this movie's engaging highlight, though this does mean it can get a bit talky and flaunty in its direction.

The kills themselves have little blood to speak of, preferring showy deaths than over-the-top splatter which may drive away gorehounds, though the film makes up for it with flashy effects and editing, as well as a lot of quirky scenes of our killer finding fun ways to dispose the guests and the troublesome tasks of storing away the remains right after. It isn't long before we're back with the usual slasher climax of a final girl fending off the villain, though this one comes with a rather amusing confession as Nick points out the absurdity of serial killers always needing an alibi for their massacres, and how his killing spree is brag-worthy different as he did it because he simply could. The oddity of it all continues to the film's last few scenes, wherein our survivors relax with a roll of joint after defeating the killer, capping off that night's dreadful experience by stating the dilemma of them needing new friends to hang out with now. It's dumb but, hey, it could be so much worse.

R.S.V.P. (2002) is weird, but it's the agreeable kind of weird! Ostentatious, sure, but it makes for a quaint and eccentric watch! 

Bodycount:

1 male stabbed in the gut with a knife

1 female knifed to death, blood splash seen

1 female brained with a cane

1 male kicked down an elevator shaft

1 female had her neck snapped

1 male shot with a nailgun

1 female shot to death with a nailgun

1 male strangled to death with a guitar string

1 female drowned in a pot of boiling water

1 male stuffed inside a chest, suffocated

1 male found dead inside a garbage bag

1 male shot, stabbed with a broken bong

1 male knocked off a building, lands on a parked car

Total: 13

One Hell Of A Date Night: Heart Eyes (2025)

Heart Eyes (2025)

Rating: ****

Starring: Mason Gooding, Olivia Holt, Gigi Zumbado

Did you ever wish, as a slasher fanatic, those run-in-the-mill Hallmark rom-coms would get interrupted by an insane masked killer, chopping down one, two or, hell, maybe even an entire room of annoying characters just for the maniacal fun of it? Well, you lovable yet disturbed creature, set your heart for Heart Eyes (2025)!

For the past two years, a serial killer donning a mask with red cartoon hearts for eyes have been slaying couples every Valentines Day, terrorizing Boston, and then Philadelphia. For this year, the "Heart Eyes Killer" (Or HEK for short) picks Seattle as their next hunting ground, opening the scene with them attacking a hilariously botched, hashtag-worthy proposal at a vineyard, gorily snuffing out a photographer, a random worker, and the unfortunate couple. The media, of course, caught wind of the massacre, which reeks nothing but trouble for young advertising executive Ally (Lauren O’Hara), whose campaign for a jewelry brand includes commercials focusing on doomed couples such as Romeo and Juliet, Bonnie and Clyde, and Titanic (1997)'s Jack and Rose. 

The focus group is disgusted and outraged, calling the campaign exploitative. The company head is upset nobody told her about the masked loon brutally dispatching couples every Valentines for the last two years, thus making her look bad for approving the pitch. Both are practically out for Ally's head but, as luck would have it, she's instead given a chance to save her own arse and all she has to do is help out the new hire Jay (Mason Gooding), an in-demand concept master. Funny thing about this is that both Ally and Jay met earlier at a coffee shop, where the two not-flirt with one another with awkward banter and dad jokes. Now Jay is asking Ally to join him at a fancy restaurant later that night to discuss their plans on fixing the project, a suggestion that gets into Ally's skin as she's practically helping a guy who could easily replace her, not to mention that she's still reeling from a break-up, something not helped by her social media stalking her ex-boyfriend.

With Jay's attempts to make the smooth and suave dinner business talk work not doing too well against Ally's hard front, who sees his romantic act as a sham, the two eventually agrees to just head out for the night. That was until Ally spots her ex and his new girl heading to the same restaurant, thus mindlessly posturing a passionate kiss with Jay in an attempt to make her former beau jealous. A classic rom-com trope, for sure, one that caught the attention of a spying Heart Eyes Killer, mistaking it as a genuine act of love. For the rest of the night, hilarity ensues. As well as a rising bodycount.

You could say that Heart Eyes (2025) is the best of both worlds; as a slasher, it's brutally red with its murders and killer themselves are an awfully fun callback to gimmicky villains of the old golden days, the first few to come in mind being Ray from He Knows You're Alone (1980), who targets soon-to-wed women, and Harry Warden from My Bloody Valentine (1981), a murderous miner whose urban legend-esque presence terrorizes Valentines Days! Whenever the film decides to go down and bear its bloody teeth, it's played with a straight face as heads get the crossbow and groins get the machete, sidelined with good jump scares and a sweet deal of tight tension. And yet, it's never too hateful. Never too cynical and angry. It knows its assignment as a bloody good popcorn flick and you can pretty much tell this from the fact, again, our killer is wearing a mask with cartoon hearts for eyes and, yes, it all works swimmingly as a romantic comedy, too!

For a comedy to work, it's all about well-crafted jokes and enjoyable characters, and Heart Eyes (2025) has a fair share of both! As the Heart Eyes Killer themselves say, Ally and Jay have great chemistry thanks to O'Hara's and Gooding's stellar performances as the traditional rom-com couple: antagonistic at first, chummy at the halfway point, one chasing down the other at a crowded airport to confess their feelings by the end of it. Or at least around the climax. Though written as satires of chick flick lead couples, the two are given enough wit and wry in their personalities to make enough jokes and odd reactions land on a hilarious mark, the best gag being a running one where the couple keep failing to convince anyone that they're simply friends, killer included! The comedic timing simply feels as natural as the tender moments shared between Ally and Jay, which thankfully the film occasionally slows down for just to give the endangered duo, as well as the audience, a breather to soak in the situation, just be casual and real with one another through gentle heart-to-hearts. It's hammy, but it's a welcoming sweet kind of jovial ham, one that balances out nicely with a chunky kill count piled up by a serial killer's cat-and-mouse game.

If there's anything that is a bit of a letdown, it'll be the reveal of who's behind the Heart Eyes mask; after a romantic, comedic and horrific hide-and-prowl between Heart Eyes and the two lovebirds around a Valentines drive-in, the movie strolls into a rather pedestrian final encounter with the holiday serial killer, whose identity and twist fail to be anywhere as remarkable as it's implying to be. The culprit is partially obvious and their reason for the slayings simply boils down to they do it because they could, and it's fun for them. Still, lackluster unmasking aside, there's enough bloody splatter and a little good brawl in this finale, ending on a time skip, a cheeky sweet gesture and a funny mid-credit scene!

Heart Eyes (2025) is described by some as a 'date movie slasher' and it lives up good on that claim! Its humor focuses more on being cute, its violence is satisfyingly sharp in its edges, an entertaining melting pot of mixed goodies for slasher fans and their dates! 

Bodycount:

1 male stabbed through the eye with a machete

1 male shot on the head with a crossbow

1 male gets a throwing dagger to the face

1 female crushed to death inside a pneumatic press

1 male shot on the head with a crossbow

1 female skewered with a flagpole

1 male had his groin split with a machete, slashed

1 male stabbed with a machete

1 male stabbed in the mouth with a tire iron

1 female impaled through the mouth with a tire iron

1 male slashed across the throat with a machete 

1 male gets a throwing dagger to the back, hacked with a machete

1 female hacked down with a machete

1 male stabbed through with a machete

1 female pushed neck first through a concrete sword, head torn off

1 male shot death with a crossbow

Total: 16

A You'tombed Prank Video: Milk & Serial (2024)

Milk & Serial (2024)

Rating: ***

Starring: Curry Barker, Cooper Tomlinson, Adlih Alvarado

It all started as a Youtube video for a channel called "Prank Bros", wherein social media personality Seven plans to pull a birthday prank on his roommate, bestfriend and creative partner, Milk. After acquiring a gun from a shady arms dealer and getting an acting class friend to agree playing the part of a terrorizing crazed gunman, Seven's gag goes swimmingly well with Milk laughing it all off once he gets past the initial shock, even admiring the elaborate planning that went into making it.

Funs and games continue for the party until an odd fella who claims to be Seven and Milk's neighbor arrives to complain about the noise. Creepily. Milk, thinking the guy is a part of an ongoing prank by Seven, antagonizes him, resulting to stranger things happening in the following days after the party. Things involving deadly secrets, manipulations and harrowing deaths.

Written, directed and starring actual Youtuber Curry Barker, despite being advertised as a slasher, Milk & Serial (2024) has more common grounds with a serial killer thriller, one that's done as a twisty, hour-long $800 found footage free to watch on Youtube. It may not sound much, but the film does surprisingly succeed in places one wouldn't expect from a micro-production like this, mainly the acting and the grounded tone its working with. The mystery as to what's going on after the surprise birthday prank could've been a lot better if some of its twists weren't so obvious (the movie is called Milk & Serial and its poster features a creepy blonde man in a transparent mask. Guess who's nicknamed "Milk" and also happens to be blonde?), but the sinister downward spiral to escalating horrors still makes this little passion project a captivating watch for how fluid the direction can get, plus Curry Barker and Cooper Tomlinson play their roles of Milk and Seven respectively with such an impressive range, it's hard not to feel a bit invested to where the plot is leading to. (Overlooking the odd nicknames, of course)

Seeing there's more emphasis here on a nightmare situation brewing than the hands-on handiwork of a masked killer, Milk & Serial (2024) is a little low on the creative kill count and splatter. The most brutal this film got is a savage neck stabbing, but apart from that, it's mostly gun kills and one beating that's mostly offscreen. This is likely not going to serve well passionate gorehounds expecting the typical bodycounting affairs, but if you're in it for unsettling creepiness and distress, then this may not be that big of a set back. 

Though far from reinventing anything, Milk & Serial (2024) shows quality you don't typically find in a lot of do-it-yourself horror titles and that's a respectable feat. Nothing too fancy, but a slight step above low-budget shlock, it's a creeper of a movie that's good enough to try!

Bodycount:

1 male shot

1 female brained with a brick, beaten to death

1 male knifed in the neck

1 male shot

1 male shot

Total: 5

With A Cuddle And A Kiss: Basement Jack (2009)

Basement Jack (2009)

Rating: ***

Starring: Eric Peter-Kaiser, Sam Skoryna, Michele Morrow

A serial killer with a severe case of mommy issues, Jack Riley (Eric Peter-Kaiser), AKA 'Basement Jack' for his naughty little habit of hanging around in the basements of houses before slaughtering the families who own them, gets recently released after serving an eleven-year sentence and goes back to doing what he does best, leaving a nice trail of murdered households. All the while, Karen (Michele Morrow), the only survivor of Jack's last family hack 'n slash before he got locked up, is out tailing the madman in hopes of putting an end to his killing spree, doing her damnedest to warn everyone of the impending evil on two legs. (Yes, Dr. Loomis and Laurie Strode rolled into one!)

The two end up prowling each other in a macabre cat-and-mouse game at the town of Downer's Grove, where Karen teams up with rookie cop Chris (Sam Skoryna) to try disentangling Jack's next move and targets, all the while Jack does his usual modus operandi of murdering families and creepily posing their corpses. As Chris and Karen get continuously chewed out for interfering with proper police work, thus ignoring their input on the investigation, we're also dealt with peppered flashbacks and hallucinations detailing what exactly caused Jack Riley to get this much loose screws in his head; long story simple, his mama (Lynn Lowry) loves to psychotically torture little boy Jack with 9-volt batteries and leaving him out chained to a pole during thunderstorms, so big boy Jack is warped in the head with a bloodlust for happy families. Particularly those with mums resembling his own.

Basement Jack (2009), in all honesty, didn’t really do anything new for the subgenre and it more or less suffers from common direct-to-video slasher pitfalls of overused CG effects, mediocre acting and oozing levels of fondue. It does, fortunately, approach its story with an interesting angle of making the killer a tad more fleshed out than your average masked psycho, generously focusing on his psychosis and the patterns to his madness which result to Jack being portrayed closer to how serial killers operate. There are times the movie almost feels like a character study for how much and often these little snippets of the killer's abused childhood get shown, only to share its limelight with the police work being done to capture our elusive serial slayer which does reduce a lot of the kills into offscreen massacres, the victims merely existing to be slain.

The last act of Basement Jack (2009) is where the absolute craziness kicks in, with Jack going further into slasher villain mode, donning himself a broken porcelain doll's mouth as a mask piece and wielding something best described as a wearable sword. By that point, we get a cop station massacre inspired by The Terminator (1984), littered with hilariously awful CG and some impossible yet outrageously fun kills, before going down on a brawl between Karen and Jack atop a hotel that's punctuated with a shot calling back to Halloween (1978) and an ending that reminds me of Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988). It's the kind of silliness that only a B-grade slasher can pull off and I love the fact that the film embraces its own shlock the further it goes down, even if some of it didn't exactly work. 

Not quite high art, but doable as a fun little timewaster that's a little more better than most video bin horror flicks!  

Bodycount:

1 female found beheaded

1 male found dying from his wounds

1 male repeatedly stabbed through with a knife

1 male found with half of his face missing

1 baby implied murdered

1 boy seen murdered

1 female found slaughtered

1 male stabbed in the gut with a machete

1 female found murdered

1 male gets a machete to the face

1 male and 1 female seen slaughtered with a machete

1 male gets stabbed though the gut with a machete, skewered unto a fuse box and electrocuted

1 male stabbed through the head with a machete

1 female stabbed through the gut with a machete

1 female seen slaughtered (flashback)

2 males double-scalped with a wearable sword

1 male killed with a wearable sword

1 male had an arm lopped off with a wearable sword, killed

1 male skewered through the gut with a wearable sword

1 female gutted with a wearable sword

1 female seen murdered

1 male seen murdered

Total: 24 

The Water Wants You: Smiley Face Killers (2020)

Smiley Face Killers (2020)

Rating: **

Starring: Ronen Rubinstein, Mia Serafino, Crispin Glover

From the late 1990s to the 2010s, a total of 45 young men were found dead in bodies of water across several Midwestern American states and it is theorized that these men were not accidental drownings, but were in fact victims of a possible serial slaying. Dubbed as the "Smiley Face Murders" after police discovered smiley face graffities near locations where the bodies were found in at least a dozen of the cases, the idea stems from the fact that the supposed victims collectively appear to resemble a serial killer victim profile, all popular, athletic, and successful students, mostly white and were leaving parties or bars where they had been drinking. This theory, however, is often met with skepticisms by responding investigators and experts due to little to no evidence of actual serial killing activity, nor did it have enough strong support linking the tragic deaths altogether.

What this hunch lacks in proof, it makes up for being morbidly fascinating, thus becoming the inspiration behind Smiley Face Killers (2020), a psychological slasher penned by screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis, who also wrote the controversial splatter novel American Psycho.

The plot follows one university student and college football star named Jake who decided to stop seeing his therapist and disregard his psychiatric meds in favor of living a more carefree life of parties and recreational drugs. This, to no one's real surprise, leads to him acting more depressed and paranoid, concerning his girlfriend and friends, even more so when he's starting to suspect his girl is cheating on him with her ex, as well as believing that he's being stalked. Truth be told, though, he is indeed being stalked and a figure in a hood is doing whatever they can to freak Jake out like sending weirdly cryptic text messages, messing up his electronics, leaving bath tubs and faucets running until they're filled with water, and too leaving a map littered with smiley face markings.

It does all this for a good hour and this is where Smiley Face Killers (2020) falters; the story around these parts is basically one long wait to Jake's eventual encounter with the titular killers and it passes the time toying around the idea that Jake may or may not be imagining the worries eating him. This could've been an intriguing plot to follow given that the movie didn't opened with a small taste of what our killers are up to and what they're capable of doing, thus very well killing off whatever mystery and sense of dread this movie is going for and instead acting more like an avoidable teen drama, a terrible direction to take when the leading character leans heavily on the unnecessarily and unsympathetically dumb side. We do get one decent kill scene in the midst of this, but it is around the last fifteen minutes when, thankfully, the movie remembers that it's a horror thriller and things go crazy the right way.

After losing it at a party where he blames his girlfriend's ex of all the insane shit he'd gone through for the past few days, Jake gets abducted by a trio of miscreants operating in a white van decorated in the inside with occult symbols and rituals. They're the kind of last minute craziness I can warmly welcome after a long dull stroll and they didn't disappoint with their bizarre practice of draining "pure" blood out of their victims and their decent run of gory killings in which they massacre everyone attending a gas station after Jake gets a streaky chance to escape there. For some, though, this is understandably a little too late to salvage what's very much a dying story dulled down by the wasted minutes focusing on the misadventures of a very glum boy.

Smiley Face Killers (2020) could have benefited more if it took a different angle other than a teen slasher with a psychological twist, or at the least went with a better story than this. I will give it credit for making the last act as insanely fun as they can with the short remaining time, but I cannot deny the film for being a really tedious test of patience for a slow burner. Not much will be lost if you skip this one.

Bodycount:

1 male abducted, corpse later found washed ashore

1 male abducted, corpse later found washed ashore

1 male brained to death with a hammer

1 male shot on the head

1 female hacked on the face with a hatchet

1 male shot to death

1 female repeatedly hacked on the gut with a hatchet

1 male shot on the head

1 male knifed through the neck

Total: 9

"Golden Title": Frozen Flesh (2001)

Frozen Flesh (2001)

Rating: LEGENDarily bad

Starring: Frank Gillis

I found it. I've seen it. The horror movie to end all horror movies. A macabre masterpiece of maniacal madness. A psychological shocker of surreal sins. An aberration of abnormal anguish. A presentation of putridness unmatched by many classics I've seen in my entire existence. A heart-stopping horrifying horrors of horror simply known as Frozen Flesh (2001)!

With a running time of almost two hours, we see the methodic mindset of a masked mass murderer expertly played by the one and only Frank Gillis, as they showcase to us what goes in the mind of a deranged individual as they feast upon what's not meant to be feasted. A gruesome buffet of human viscera and gore fills the screen every minute, artistically shot in red tint and sickening close-up, surely to sear it in our minds as we sit through this nightmare play of devilish directions. A true art of hellish sensibilities and a daring display of deadly malice, we would soon see this monster wield their blood-caked knife with furious frenzy, either to battle their own invisible demons or to succumb in their need to defile the human form with a swift carve of their blade, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over...

And over...

Okay, truth be told, that's two hours of my life I'm not getting back. Frozen Flesh (2001) is a weird little shit of a "movie" where we literally just watch a guy in a striped shirt and bag over their head just sitting there, while a plastic body part that you can buy at a Halloween goods store being passed on as this garbage's "gore effects" gets cooked inside an oven before our wannabe horror star just starts wielding the knife in the air repeatedly, in different angles. All of this in almost two hours of running time! Two fucking hours of red tint and bad score, while we watch what's basically some guy's take on a performance art without the striking and though-provoking sensibilities of actual art. I'm sure this is all good on paper at some point, maybe even philosophical or psychological even, but in practice and execution, I think a shitload of things got lost and tossed away, resulting to this head-on attack on our endurance and patience.

It's only fitting to cover this pile of cinematic excrement on April Fools Day as that's what it is. A joke. A big stupid joke of a movie that I guess only those with a certain warped mindset (or high on something both powerful and illegal) would find entertaining. If you're one of the people who enjoyed Frozen Flesh (2001) then more power to you! I'm glad this movie gave you joy while you find yourself strapped in a straightjacket and locked inside a padded room that one time you had a mental breakdown. In the meantime, the rest of us here would be better off seeing other movies to cleanse our palate of this worthless filth and that includes cheekier and hammier bad films that are Oscar winners when compared to this...

Bodycount:

1 victim seen with their pieces being cooked. For an hour. 

Total:1

The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of its Parts: Himeanole (2016)

Himeanole (2016, Japan)

Rating: ****

Starring: Gô Morita, Gaku Hamada and Aimi Satsukawa

Awkward and hilarious, disturbing and depressing. Yep, not your typical love story...

Starting up pretty light, we follow an uninspired assistant cleaner Okada (Gaku Hamada) as he discovers that his older co-worker Ando (Tsuyoshi Muro) is deeply infatuated with Yuka (Aimi Satsukawa), a waitress working at a nearby coffee shop. Ando, being the awkward person that he is inside and out, finds it hard building up the courage to tell Yuka how he feels, so he ropes in Okada to help him ease the way to her heart and the two soon learn that the waitress is having a spot of trouble dealing with a stalker. The two guys help Yuka avoid the creep, they became friends and things seem to be heading for the better despite Ando's ulterior motives to win Yuka's heart.

And then Yuka feel in love with Okada. Which the boy did not saw coming but welcomes either way. Not wanting to shatter Ando's fragile state of mind and emotion (and due to threats of being chainsawed to death), however, the young couple decided to date in secret, not knowing that the stalker they were avoiding all this time may have been closer than they imagined and it's only a matter of time before the freak finally loses it...

Curiously, all of this is just the first half of the movie and it is around this time that Himeanole (2016) fittingly opted to play it's credits, making way to the rawer meat and bone of the story. (Yeah, Friday the 13th (2009) has a contender for the longest opening act!) Shifting most of the focus away from Okada, Yuka and Ando, the second half follows the disturbed exploits of one Morita (Gô Morita), Okada's former high school classmate and Yuka's stalker, as he's forced to murder some of the people he's blackmailing after they attacked him in his apartment and then setting everything on fire to hide the evidence. Now wondering aimlessly in the city, Morita stalks, rapes and murders his way into houses, plays pachinko (Japanese arcade machines) for potential earnings and suffer from various flashbacks detailing the bullying he endured during high school which led to his current murderous and monstrous state.

As more people fall victim to Morita's unrelenting brutality and depravity, the closer he gets to reaching both Yuka and Okada, the two people he's aiming to end the most.

Based on the manga Hime-anole by Minoru Furuya, Himeanole (2016) is a weird yet fascinating craft that offers a palette of tone and emotions, navigating from the silly and awkward, to the devious and vile. It toyed with expectations by initially making itself look like an observational comedy drama about two weirdos trying to win the heart of a cute dream girl, a situational gag wherein our trio grows to be likable individuals despite their flaws and oddities, only for it all to twisted into a dark and emotional backlash of betrayals, murders and rapes stemming from a damaged man's trauma and abuse, all of it senseless and shocking.

What works to the film's advantage is its wonderful set of casts playing their roles effectively; Hamada and Tsuyoshi make an odd pair of friends, but both don their characters with a good balance of charm and sympathy that the friendship is endearing in their chemistry despite the troubles they're inadvertently causing to one another. Aimi Satsukawa does a well enough job to be the sweet cute girl any guy would want, which made it easy for us to understand why Ando fell hard for her to begin with. And, of course, we got Gô Morita as, well, Morita, probably the most memorable slice of talent in this number as he played his card as a disturbed serial killer and rapist with a frighteningly realistic angle, so much so that it's awfully conflicting to feel sorry for him even when the story decided to give us flashbacks explaining why he ended up so deep into the muck. All I got to say is when Himeanole (2016) became a horror film, Gô Morita owned it!

Production values of the film is great for most parts; the wide array of scoring branches from the whimsy to the haunting befitting the two faced-tone of the story. Camera work also found a way to play with the shift as it starts out static and focused at the mostly innocent first half to emphasize its calmness before gradually devolving into shaky, hand-held cinematography to show how out of control the second part has become. The minimal use of CG on the killings, too, gave the murders a more savage note, adding further horror to the already nightmarish crime spree. The rapes, thankfully, are toned down to offscreen assaults, though there is that matter of "less is more" being used here as the acts building up to the sexual violence have enough grit and intensity to them that the implications are just as horrifying.

Honestly, Himeanole (2016) is plenty of things; a real test of patience and gut, a say on bullying and guilt, a tour de force on unorthodox direction, all of these despite shuffling about some of the usual horror pitfalls like useless law enforcers and questionable character choices. I strongly recommend this for those who are more adventurous with their horror selections, those seeing to outdo themselves from the usual paint-by-number scares and bloodletting, looking for a real hidden gem to satisfy that urge!

Bodycount:

1 male killed offscreen, implied beaten with a baseball bat and strangled to death

1 male stabbed in the neck with a pen, brained with a steel pipe

1 female beaten to death with a steel pipe

3 victims mentioned killed in a burning building

1 female murdered offscreen

1 female found strangled to death with a power chord

1 male knifed to death

1 male had a knife pushed into his chest

1 male shot to death

1 male repeatedly knifed, had his head ran over with a van

Total: 12

An Argento Blind Act: Black Glasses (2022)

Black Glasses (Occhiali Neri) (Italy, 2022) (AKA "Dark Glasses")

Rating: ***

Starring: Ilenia Pastorelli, Asia Argento and Andrea Gherpelli

Last we saw of Dario Argento in the horror business, it was 2012 and he decided to do a creative take on Dracula, this including shooting the entire project in 3D and giving the titular vampire lord the ability to turn into a man-sized praying mantis for shits and giggles. Unsurprisingly, that little stunt sets a new low for one of Italy's horror maestros and we didn't see another horror flick from him until a decade later, in what can be described as the man's attempted return to form. And the key word here is "attempted".

In Black Glasses (2022), modern day Rome is terrorized by a serial killer who is slaughtering their way through sex workers with a cello string. One such high-end escort, Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli), gets a very close call to being another corpse for the bodycount when, after attending a client who got a tad too handsy on her, she suddenly finds herself being attacked by an obscured assailant. As she made her way to her car and speed off, her attacker catches on with their cargo van, leading to a pursuit that ends with Diana crashing through another car.

The accident leaves our leading call girl blind after her spine suffers a hemorrhage. She also learns that the occupants of the other car, a Chinese family, is survived by a single boy named Chin (Xinyu Zhang), now under a church's care home after the crash killed his father and slipped his mother into a coma. As Diana learns to cope with her condition, she finds help through a friendly educator named Rita (cult favorite Asia Argento), gets a trained guide dog and tries to make amends with Chin by visiting him at the care home.

Chin, tired of the racist kids he have to put up with, decided to run away and stay with Diana. The two soon bonds and will eventually have to rely on one another when our killer, keeping a close eye on the one who got away, starts to stalk them with the intent to finish what they started, murdering anybody who got in their way in the meantime.

From start to finish, Black Glasses (2022) practically runs on cheap thrills and basic slasher tropes which is something you'll either loathe or tolerate depending on how well you take your B-grade celluloid. Frankly, there is a lot of opportunities for the film to go a little deeper in its story considering the number of angles the plot could've focused on like Diana adjusting to her blindness or being a surrogate mother to an orphaned boy, but all of it was rushed and shallowed to make way for a more standardized slasher plot, complete with uselessly inept cops, a stalk and chase sequence in the woods and a moderately sizable killcount. (Curiously, though, for a film wherein the protagonist is a prostitute, we don't get a lot of onscreen sleaze here. Some boobs, yes, but that's it)

Any hinted mystery regarding the killer's identity also gets the short unexplored end as halfway into the movie, we're unceremoniously treated to a reveal that isn't really all that surprising, even more when the killer's motive behind their killing spree is so underwhelmingly staple. This leaves us to a whole final act of Diana and Chin running, limping and hiding in a countryside backwoods from the psycho, which does takes its sweet time bringing in as many shenanigans as possible (random snake attack, a couple of hunters getting into a brawl with the killer) before treating us with a climax that have our villain squaring off with Diana's guide dog (Carnivorous flies and chimpanzees in Phenomena (1985). Ravens in Opera (1987). I'm starting to see a pattern here, Argento...) at the sacrifice of a good spot of suspense that's unrealized throughout.

It may all sounds like an uninspired mess and you're probably right about that in many aspects, but Black Glasses (2022) does make itself worth its time with its slick pacing, efficient enough performances from its casts, a rocking electronic synth scored by Arnaud Rebotini and a better-looking production value all in all. Its outrageous premise is simply fun for how hammy it is, garnering some unintended humor, all the while delivering on the red stuff whenever the film felt like giving us a gruesome death so I wouldn't call it a complete loss as clunky as this movie in properly developing its plot and characters. 

It's entertaining in its efforts and if you're not looking for much, then I can safely say that this flick should do fine as a mid-tier horror genre offering, a somewhat sincere reflection to what Dario Argento used to do best.

Bodycount:

1 female garroted with a cello string, bled to death from throat cut

1 male had his head crushed in car crash

1 male hit with a van

1 female knifed in the back

1 female strangled with a rope

1 female implied to have succumbed to her injuries from a car crash

1 male mauled in the neck by a dog

Total: 7

Let's Do The Surrealist Boogie: Boogieman (1989)

Boogieman (1989)

Rating: **

Starring: Ken Tignor, John Murray, Patrick O’Brien

I guess it goes without saying that as a slasher fan and completist, one of the more exciting aspect of this hobby is finding rare titles and gambling said excitement for a chance the rarity I'll be subjecting my brain and eyeballs to would either reward my efforts just to find it, or punish me gravely for disturbing its decades long slumber in obscurity.

And then there's the chance that the movie would put me in a confused state where I cannot even fathom my feelings for it. Such being the case for Boogieman (1989).

Right off the bat, the movie begins with  a snippet of its director, Charles Cullen, being interviewed while he rocks a pair of pantyhose. Next thing we see is our titular boogieman laying waste to a bunch of locals through varying means of carnage, much to the grief of the town mayor who's so desperate to put an end to this nightmare, he hires a witch doctor and a bounty hunter once convicted for murder, rape and robbery to hunt the monster down and kill him. (The ole' send a monster to kill a monster gig, I think) 

Try as they might, however, the Boogieman continues his killing spree of torching people on fire, shooting random bystanders to death and pounding babies to a pulp with a damn hammer, (among many means) upping the kill count day by day. Will the mayor and his odd cohorts finally stop this madman in time before the town's completely depopulated? Or will the Boogieman succeeds in his senseless murder run? 

From what I can gather after finishing the entire thing, Boogieman (1989) is a real effort of little-to-no budget as seen with its avant-garde filming production. Story is almost non-existent as the movie basically pads itself with over-the-top kills and scenes where nothing much really happens, before remembering that it has a plot (of sorts) happening in the midst of all the oddity and over-the-top violence this film dishes and, unsurprisingly, treat us with writing and acting in par with the overall strangeness. Heck, I don't think they even bothered fleshing out our killer's motives for the murders at all!

I cannot help but both grimace and scratch my head to what exactly am I subjecting myself to while I watch this title but, if anything really, Boogieman (1989) is the type of film tailor-made for a specific audience, particularly those who can stomach a lot of cheese and appreciate the genius of using black-and-white to hide a film's budget while, intentionally or not, heightening the brutal aesthetic of its murder scenes. It's for the kind of people who can find the charm or even a snicker or two out absurdities like having a scene where our stereotype slasher villain cut a victim up with a chainsaw, only have said chainsaw murder animated instead with a crayon drawing because that's as how far the budget can afford the scene. If you see yourself as someone who can withstand such levels of shot-on-video filmmaking and hammy headscratchers then consider this piece the kind of shlocky entertainment you can subject one's psyche to.

One could say we might be looking at a so-bad-it's-good type here, or maybe even an experimental artsy kind of exploitation, but one thing is certain and that is Boogieman (1989) is an experience of the surrealist kind. Should luck be on your side (or against you, depending on the circumstances) and you see a chance to watch this, I say give it a try! I don't fully recommend it, but if your curiosity is peaking and you have the time to look into it...

Bodycount:

1 female hacked to death with a machete

1 female hacked apart with a chainsaw

1 male had his head blown off with a hunting rifle

1 female shot apart with a hunting rifle

1 male hit with a car, decapitated upon impact

1 male hit with a car, torn in half

1 female set on fire

1 male set on fire

1 male eviscerated with a chainsaw

1 female shot to death

1 baby pounded to death with a sledgehammer

1 female had her throat cut with a machete

1 elderly female had her neck snapped

1 female slashed to death with a chainsaw

1 boy hacked to death with a hatchet

1 male had his throat cut with a knife

1 male repeatedly shot, throat cut with a knife

1 male shot

Total: 18

Spiked Teenagers: Spiker (2007)

Spiker (2007)
Rating: *1/2
Starring: Carson Grant, Michael Fedele, Josh Folan

Serial killer Adam Brandis, AKA The Spiker, was to be transported from a local prison to a mental asylum when murders his way into escaping and makes his way to a house formerly owned by one of his early victims. Unknown to him, as a way to celebrate his supposed lock-up, three jocks and their respective cheerleader girlfriends crashed the place to party, have sex and, of all things, hold seances. One of the girls just happens to be the niece of the house's late owner, so it's not all too surprising she's suddenly seeing ghostly visions of an undead bride and Spiker menacing them. Can she figure out in time that their lives are in danger? Or will it all be too late by then to escape the serial slasher out for blood?

As a product, it appears Spiker (2007)'s purpose in existing is simply be one of many dime-in-a-dozen slasher movies you'll likely find in bargain bins. In all honesty, I wanted to enjoy this film a little bit more since I do like its gimmick of a tall, rail road spike-wielding, albino mute out killing people (because ghostly white skin and red eyes do look intimidating on a slasher, I guess), but there's not a lot else going on in the story aside from the standard dead teenager jig of bad dialogue, cheesy acting and hardly compelling plotting that are rather tiresome at their worst, and the production quality is distracting in its cheapness. 

Granted the story did try to twist things with a ghostly urban legend involving the Shaw house, thus the inclusion of a spectral bride and her cryptic history with the killer (and too one random hobo-looking dude that just pops out of nowhere from time to time), but its execution is still pretty weak as the ghost doesn't really do much but simply be there and look as mysterious as an afterschool play make-up and late-2000s low budget computer editing can afford, occasionally guiding our nominal final girl to some clues on how to survive Spiker's rampage. Basically, it's padding and not the good entertaining kind.

I will have to give the movie points for a pair of good scenes (Spiker emerging from the waters to do murder and another involving a wounded victim crawling to their friends while they nonchalantly talk), some of the gorier killings and bloody make-up effects, and too the surprisingly dark ending with its less-is-more approach. But apart from these little merits, I just find Spiker (2007) standardly forgettable despite still being watchable for its strive and tolerable amount of cheesiness. (The less we question where our killer's getting his endless supply of rail spikes, the better) Not much else to say but, eh, we can do worse. 

Bodycount:
1 male electrocuted in the head with an automatic defibrillator
1 male shot dead
1 male shot dead
1 male stabbed in the back with a pair of rail spikes
1 male stabbed through the head with rail spikes
1 female stabbed in the back with a rail spike, bled to death
1 male stabbed to death with rail spikes, pinned to the wall
1 female attacked mostly offcamera, later found stabbed to death with rail spikes
1 male hacked on the chest with an axe
1 male found stabbed to death with rail spikes
1 male gets a thrown rail spike to the back

Total: 11

Head Hunt Island: Lighthouse (1999)

Lighthouse (United Kingdom, 1999) (AKA "Dead of Night")

Rating: ***1/2

Starring: James Purefoy, Rachel Shelley, Christopher Adamson

In a prison ship enroute to a Scottish coast, infamous maniac Leo Rook (Christopher Adamson) escapes incarceration by murdering a couple of staffs and hauling himself out in a life boat, rowing to a nearby rocky lighthouse isle. There, he wastes no time putting his trusted machete to bloody use, snuffing out the keepers and disabling the lighthouse's beacon which, in turn, leads to the same prison ship to crash and sink.

Surviving the ordeal is a small band of petty criminals, guards and shrinks, one of them happens to have an extensive interest on Rook's brand of psychopathy for reasons to be revealed. It isn't too long before the poor lads (and lady) figure out something's off about the isle, especially when they start to thin down in numbers, snuffed out one-by-one with their heads missing and collected.

Story-wise, Lighthouse (1999) is barely a complex run; it's your routine hack-and-stab plotting in which people are finding ways how to escape their predicament only to fall into the blade of our killer. But what it lacks in big twists and turns is made up for its direction, particularly within its generous abundance of suspense scenes and stylized visuals, thus giving this film quite an impressive stance.

There are more than one occasion wherein the movie plays around with its scares and kills, shooting at odd angles, prolonging scenes and muting all noises and/or colors to justify the intensity of its set pieces. Best examples of this work include a claustrophobic loo horror as a guard tries to hide from the killer in a toilet stall as the latter inspects the room, and another involving an excruciatingly troublesome moment when a poor lad has to take drastic measures to free himself from a dead weight, continued further as he pleads for anyone at the other side of a door to let him in as the killer approaches by the second. Often perfectly timed and interestingly shot, the resulting attacks and/or murders are always a grand to watch, in turn.

The bloodletting accompanying these scenes may be far off your typical gore geysers, but they are still savage enough to feel the weight and impact of each machete fall, especially when the resulting bloodshed are done with full fairly gruesome practical effects and a lot of impressive dismembered latex bodies soaked in red stuff. The killer committing the spree also has a good deal of menace to them; mostly cloaked in shadows and barely uttering a word, Adamson made an effective human monster out of Rook, with his sick fascination for hoarding heads and the casual approach to his slayings.

If there will be any drawbacks I can point out regarding Lighthouse (1999), it would be the fact that the pacing within its first half can get really challenging to sit through. Seeing that the kills are far in between one another around these parts, we're mostly just watching our characters scoping out the isle and lighthouse for something that will get them off the island, not exactly fully aware of the severity of their situation yet. It wasn't until the second half, after a good deal of them already encountering and dying at Rook's hands that the movie picks itself up, rewarding our patience with a quicker pace and a spectacular finale.

The film's budget restraints also meant some shoddy acting and early day CG effects here and there, but it's not like these are some big tainting dreck that ruins the rest of the movie. Lighthouse (1999) is still a decent catch of a film, one that boasts an impressive production and genuinely creepy atmosphere. Yes, it's lacking a deeper plot and it can get a while before most of the action happens, but the overall final product is an underrated Euro-slasher with a slice of art house sensibilities, one that might fancy a viewing from a good horror fan.

Bodycount:

1 male had his neck crushed with a length of chain

1 female had her neck snapped

1 male had his throat cut with a machete

1 male killed off screen

A number of individuals killed in shipwreck

1 male had his neck sliced through with a machete, head torn off

1 male killed with a machete

1 male killed offscreen

1 female had her throat repeatedly cut with a knife (flashback)

1 male set on fire

1 male falls unto a rock, brained

1 male found decapitated

1 male stabbed in the gut with a machete, bled to death

1 male gets a flare shoved into his mouth, caught in an explosion

Total: 13+