⭐️1/2
A midwife-impersonating evil spirit gets its horrific kicks by stealing and feeding on babies. She pokes a hole in the kid’s cranium with her lethal claws and restores her age through finger feeding... maybe. No subs so this is mostly guesswork. A young mother and her hubby come to the village, and she begins to worry about the risk the Wewe Gombel poses to her child after the locals share some stories. With more than a couple kids getting snatched, you’d think her husband would listen to her concerns. There’s a piece of shit rapist hanging around who bangs the witch and gets up to some scuzziness. There’s some out of place comedy and fist fights but not a whole lot of excitement. The supernatural shit is fun in the usual bargain-bin Indonesian way but the surrounding drama is a drag... and we don’t get nearly enough of the flying and cackling fiend.
aka The Haunted
⭐️⭐️⭐️
A mountain-dwelling malevolent spirit brings a bit of chaos into the life of a young woman when her boyfriend goes missing. The peculiar thing is, his grandmother had just vanished a few days before. Grandma went on a little senior hiking trip and got herself marked by the creepy specter that looks like a little girl in red and calls the forested mountainside home. A little folklore goes a long way in adding substance to the familiar ghostly shocks and the dramatics between family and lovers hit the right notes. It does suffer a little from a feeling of traveling down a well-worn path but the haunted-forest-set climax brings a good amount of crazy to the proceedings... I mean, who wouldn’t want to see poorly-rendered cgi monster babies chasing our heroes through the woods like some pissed-off monkeys?
⭐️⭐️1/2
The transfer of a sarcophagus on a luxury ocean liner leads to the resurrection of a one-thousand-year-old mummy. The dried-out fiend does away with a few poor saps and falls for the coffin-transferring doctor’s assistant who reminds him of his long lost love. There’s some silly severed heads, a fat detective who never seems to be sober and some uncomfortable “browning” makeup for the predominantly Spanish cast. The cruise ship setting feels a bit underutilized but the cheap-o special effects should warm your horror-loving heart. It’s a standard plot with enough stupidity to bring a few smiles.
aka Red Reunion
⭐️⭐️
Using her awkward high school years as a basis, Rebecca Crane wrote a popular coming-of-age novel and is now a celebrity. Planning alongside her new mouth-breather boyfriend (former-jock current-douchebag Matt), Rebecca throws a reunion for her classmates and must come face to face with the folks she used as blueprints for her characters in the book… which doesn’t paint everyone in the best light. There’s drugs, sex, booze, jealousy and revenge on the horizon. But mostly there’s awkward chatting followed by some awkward ad-libbing spiced up with rancid acting and line delivery better suited for a third grade theatrical production. A killer in budget knight’s armor shows up and starts killing off the sentient potatoes one by one. Why knight’s armor, you may ask. Well, I’m guessing because the filmmaker had it readily available or it was their old school mascot… yeah… that’s it. Opening with a ludicrous sex scene (not in that they’re doing the kind of things you pay extra for in the alley behind your third favorite Mexican restaurant but in that the complete lack of chemistry makes it look like extra noisy marionettes are going at it), followed by a jam session where a dude plays an unplugged electric guitar, sweetened up with an entire game of Never Have I Ever played in real time and finally wrapping everything up with a revelation of spiked drinks and vengeance born from being turned in for cheating on an exam. If you manage to stay awake, you’ll be treated to more dialogue and incompetence. If you have a hard-on for somber piano music, inept murders and a cast of friends working with a non-existent script, then you are in the right place. It exists in that odd dimensional space where the void of entertainment is so prevalent it becomes magically entertaining but only just.
⭐️⭐️
Adaptation of James Herbert’s solid novel (I happen to prefer its sequel The Ghosts of Sleath because I like it when shit goes nuts) manages to cast two solid leads in the usually dependable and always handsome Aiden Quinn and the mostly dependable and drop-dead gorgeous Kate Beckinsale. Quinn portrays psychology professor David Ash who is a respected skeptic and has disproven several accounts of paranormal tomfoolery. Two decades earlier, Ash lost his twin sister to a drowning accident and it haunts him to this day. Grief stricken, he and his family left for America. He has returned to England to take a teaching position at Cambridge. He’s already written a book on his experiences disproving mediums and the like. The elderly nanny for the Mariell family continually reaches out for help with the supernatural, claiming she’s being held prisoner by evil spirits. With his extended knowledge of frauds and the world beyond the veil, our boy Ash appears to be the best person to contact and assist. He’s invited out to the remote British estate supposedly being plagued by psychic phenomena where he can hopefully ease the worries of the stressed old woman. Christina Mariell picks him up from the train and since it’s Beckinsale he’s just as taken with this young woman as I am. She drives him to the impressive family estate and meets her two brothers who are kind of weirdos. Younger Simon is a practical joker who acts way younger than he is and stuffy Robert may have a thing for his sister. I know she’s Kate Beckinsale but yuck. All of the siblings appear to be up to no good and David believes the same thing because on the first night he hears scratching and tapping. When he questions the group, they laugh it off. The nanny gets more and more upset as the professor refuses to believe there’s anything spooky going on even as the skeptic begins to see things himself. Christina plays at seduction with David, Simon behaves like his parents are first cousins (possible, it is 1928 England) and Robert wants the man of science to leave. David is sure there’s a human behind all of this bullshit, thinking his mind is playing tricks on him when the specter of his much-missed sister begins to appear. It’s a slow-going affair working with a bunch of time that it doesn’t necessarily need. The melodrama feels a bit ill-handled thanks to insisting it needs to be taken seriously. It’s a bit of a fumble on the film’s part and leads to a bit of awkwardness between what the strong cast should be delivering. Quinn seems drugged throughout the runtime, never fitting in with what comes off like a BBC television production with a little more money behind it. There’s still a few fun haunted house shenanigans at play, Beckinsale is Beckinsale, Quinn bugs his eyes with the best of them, the underlying vibe of rot is well utilized, David Ash gets some mad hops during a car accident and there are a few laughably dumb bits to break the sluggish pace… unfortunately they’re almost completely relegated to the climax.
⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
The lovely Beverly Garland (who stole my heart upon my first viewing of It Conquered the World) plays a young nurse who recounts her sad story through hypnosis to a couple of doctors. Newlywed and on a train heading to their honeymoon, a telegram disturbs her husband Paul and when he jumps off the train at the next stop to make a phone call, he vanishes. A distraught Garland spends months looking for her lost husband and finally traces him back to an old address, the Cypresses plantation, found deep in the bayou. There she meets the (obviously hiding something) woman of the house, a kindly “swamp doctor” with a secret and Lon Chaney JR as the gator hating, hook-handed groundskeeper with a constantly faltering accent… you can pretty much smell the booze seeping out of the man’s pores. She comes to find her husband is there but something has gone horribly wrong. A war injury had left him near death and disfigured beyond recognition, the swamp doctor had been experimenting with the healing powers of alligator pituitary glands and, while at first it seemed to be a miracle cure, after about a year a mutation set in. Now poor Paul has the skin of a gator and may be going insane. All is not lost because it would seem radiation is helping to curb his reptilian transformation and a last ditch effort is being made to cure him for good. It seems to be working until some Chaney interference fucks up everything and a boost of gamma rays transforms Paul into something more gator than man. Beautiful settings, rubbery monster heaven and some of the best bullshit science around all combine for some perfect matinee monster madness. A complete joy anchored by the beautiful Garland’s performance.
aka Three Letters 3: Black Magic
⭐️⭐️
Mediocre horror from the land that used to make some of the best bat-shit insane ripoffs in the world. An unhealthy mother/son relationship causes problems for two women when the mama in question wants her son back home so she decides to do a little cursing. Tea consumption triggers horrific visions of ghosts and very real fears of insanity. It’s pretty yawn-inducing J-Horror shenanigans as the man’s wife and landlord do what they can to figure out what the hell is going on. There’s some creepy looking things hanging around a crazy woman in a cave but nothing else stands out.
