Nagai Go no Horror Gekijo: Kirikagami (1992) (Japan)

⭐️⭐️

A small theater troupe unleash a glowing-eyed samurai entity and it begins picking ‘em off. Some characters turn on each other and there’s a lot of dialogue with no subtitles, so I have no idea why anything was happening. There’s a mysterious fog rolling around the building the troupe calls home and some cheapjack violence momentarily distracts.

Haunted Changi (2010) (Singapore)

⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

A small crew of local filmmakers are documenting an exploration into Singapore’s infamous Old Changi Hospital and the mysterious allure it has on the the locals. Its rich and dark history dates back to the Japanese occupation of Singapore and the executions, war-injury deaths and (possible) atrocious experiments performed by the Japanese on their prisoners. A daytime visit proves to be unsettling but things get worse when the crew comes back to search around after dark. It appears something is taking its toll even after the young folks leave the building. Headaches and illness follow and the director falls for what may or may not be a vampiric ghost girl squatting in the tunnels under Changi. The film plays out as a presentation on what was collected before the filming came to a tragic end. Fully utilizing the location and its rich history, Haunted Changi stands out among the found footage genre and even manages to add to the location’s folklore. Check it out.

8989 Redstone (2016) (USA)

⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

The host of his own home remodeling show titled Mastering Disaster along with his daughter and crew begin working on their latest project; a beautiful old home in the middle of a crumbling Detroit neighborhood. There’s still an inhabitant hanging around the building in the form of a specter who doesn’t wait to show itself to the hawt blonde daughter. There’s a door that doesn’t seem to lead to anything, the disturbing idea that the interior measurements are coming up larger than the outside would allow, a family history of hallucination which may make the daughter a little unreliable and the crumbling morale amongst the crew thanks to the host’s dwindling patience. Everything goes to hell in record time as some bad injuries occur on the first day of filming, a fire spontaneously erupts, one dude just walks off set and some people up and vanish. An old local warns the daughter that the house is just wrong and tells her she should leave town before it’s too late. He also shows her a picture of the man who built the place and it’s definitely the ghostly figure she’s been seeing. The job goes on and things get worse but a job is a job. The producer decides it’s weird enough that they can shoot a Halloween episode and they even do a cleansing ritual made possible by the Cuban Buddhist who they brought on when the crew abandoned the set. The monks tell them there’s something very wrong and the house shouldn’t exist. They also warn everyone to leave. Rebecca seems hypnotized by that locked door that goes nowhere and even the host is beginning to get a bad vibe from the Michigan home. Bits of unexpected and nasty violence may get you cringing because it feels so out of place which makes it surprisingly effective and the cast is solid across the board. Eric Allan Kramer (Little John from Robin Hood: Men in Tights) is spot-on in his portrayal as the show host and some of the best bits belong to the scenes where they ape the reality TV genre. A good mix of comedy, unspeakable horror and flawed but likable humans makes for an unexpected treat. The ending kinda blows but not enough to make the buildup feel like a complete waste of time.

Oasis of the Zombies (1982) (Spain/France)

aka Grave of the Living Dead/The Treasure of the Living Dead/Bloodsucking Nazi Zombies 

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Nazi gold is buried in an African desert, a lone survivor who fought for the Allies and ambushed the ratzis knows the location. He’s killed by a German treasure hunter who goes looking for the loot. The dead man’s son ditches college finals with some friends and, after journeying home and reading through his father’s diaries, he decides to find his dad’s treasure for himself. He also establishes a relationship with his grandpa, a sheik who ages like fine wine. Of course, some cool and cheap-looking zombies are guarding the patch of earth where the gold is buried and most of the cast is going to get their greedy asses eaten. There’s not much of Jess Franco’s artistic madness on display but the almost workmanlike feature has enough trash-flavored stupidity to leave a fond impression. A droning score and repurposed war movie footage add to the cheap vibes.

The Morrigan (2025) (USA)

⭐️1/2

An archeologist believes the legend of a Pagan goddess has a basis in fact and manages to convince a stuffy room of her male superiors to fund an excavation on the Irish island where the legend has its origins. Of course, they do not let her lead the trip but place that in the hands of a snobby younger male member of their board. Someone she’s been attempting to remove herself from the shadow of for a bit. She planned on leaving her angsty teen daughter with her papa but he’s left and the girl got herself expelled from boarding school so nine months after the approval to head of on out, our determined hero and her daughter are arriving to the isolated island to begin professor Fiona’s work joining the dig deep under the ruins where that asshole Horner (who has a history of taking credit for her work… it also looks like he sexually assaulted Fiona because why wouldn’t his ass have that in his history as well) is getting busy unearthing things. The island’s owner has a cozy inn despite the mounted animal heads and portrait of his drowned wife where everyone is put up. He also has an awkward son who has a crush on Fiona’s daughter Lily. Soon after arrival, Fiona uncovers a burial chamber and unearths the casket within. Horner wants to send the thing to Dublin but Fiona and Horner’s assistant think opening it would help them out. Of course with Horner heading things, the burial casket is left closed. Lily calls bullshit on her mother not being allowed to open her find and she also seems to have some connection to it… at least the quick flash of a spooky face she experienced when touching it hints at that. Scuzzball Horner shares a drink with Lily and gets really creepy, the island’s crow population acts up and a fast approaching storm may be causing some issues when it comes to contact with the outside world. A vodka-drunk Lily decides to open up the casket and the connection she has with the Pagan goddess buried within is strengthened, flashing back to the woman’s horrible fate at the hands of whatever religious dopes were going about ridding the world of an evil they made up at the time. Mom ain’t all that happy with her daughter’s actions as it kind of sunk her chance at tenure because of course Horner went and told the higher-ups what happened although it probably won’t matter much because Lily is acting strange and it’s the kind of strange that usually means something has set up shop inside a vessel. A power outage leads to a full transformation and thankfully Horner is the first to come into contact with the wall-crawling and glowing-eyed Lily. That’s one dead rapist right off the bat! James Cosmo shows up as an estranged family member (also holy man) of the island owner who knows the score because there should always be an old timer who has an idea as to what horrors are running rampant. Looks like Lily may need to be put down and the locals (well, the three we meet) don’t seem to have any problem with that. A lame chase and even lamer deaths follow. Digital crows and snakes show up and Lily creeps around sharing visions and being a jerk. Mom may hold the key to save her but you probably will have fallen asleep by that point. The movie looks nice with its forested location and quiet island setting but that’s about the only thrills it has to offer as it slogs through its bog-standard story, stubbornly refusing to switch anything up. Shoddy effects offer some smiles but everything feels like it’s pacing through quicksand with no real idea where it wants to go.

CreepyPasta (2023) (USA)

⭐️1/2

Some dude finds himself trapped in an abandoned house with no idea as to how the hell he got himself into this predicament. The disappearance of a teenage girl who wrote creepypastas (I think she’s the person who is poorly narrating the film) clues us in that this poor sap ain’t the first victim of whatever the hell is going on. He wanders around the house and finds a pile of corpses on the basement stairs, he then gets a text asking if he’s leaving. Fat chance. There’s more murdered corpses strewn about the place and an open laptop with a message on the screen telling him the way to get out is to check some flash drives that have been left for him. So he does and he watches the videos on there. First up a young woman gets a little freaked out in her empty home during a thunderstorm. Creaking doors and random power outages will do that. Especially since it seems like her home is just an extended attic. Instead of stretching it out into something a viewer could call tense, the thing abruptly ends and the viewer is left shrugging. Not a great sign. Nextly, a little girl’s super tall imaginary friend, Jumbly, proves his existence by kidnapping the little girl while simultaneously appearing to her bullying older sister. It’s like two minutes long. Ok. Thirdington, an old woman with an oxygen tank wakes up in the middle of the night to find a child specter in her home. I guess it ties into her past and leads to coughing fits and possession. At least they tried for something here, I’m not sure what but it was something. Fourth’d, a group of ladies just enjoying some wine and charcuterie talk about weird facts which leads to a conversation about shadow people. Discussing how they’re inter-dimensional beings that appear in the periphery and should never be acknowledged. Guess what happens. The red-eyed shadow person is a bit silly and again everything ends way too quickly to leave any lasting impression. The guy watching the very short short films begins bleeding out of his nose and looking a bit worse for wear. Fifth, some jerk who looks like a discounted Rami Malek if his DNA got mixed with Anthony Kiedis goes out of his way to not follow the rules which bites him on his ass when he ignores a DO NOT WATCH alert that flashes on his screen whilst watching the boob tube. The… ahem… “disturbing” footage involves some puppet-human (in that he’s got the combo of rope and fishhooks forcing him to make a call) on the phone. He calls our “hero?” and repeatedly warns him “Do not scream!” before the hooks are pulled, flesh is torn and lives are lost. Anthami Maliedis winds up hooked just like the poor Asian dude he just watched get torn apart. Bummer, man. Sixthler, some guy who definitely thought his nu metal band was gonna be bigger than the handful of bars he played before resigning to a life in the pizza delivery circuit, is lured into the woods by a poor-man’s Justine Bateman and gets ambushed by a religious cult or something. Latin is said and the former bassist (maybe drummer) wakes up in an abandoned building which resides next to a fiery apocalyptic world. There’s also a light being that runs into him and possesses his sorry ass. The cult (wearing the cheapest masks this side of a Bollywood gang of rapists) collect the dude’s soul (I think) and bring back that light being to our world. Now he and Justine Batman (so close) can be together. Good for them. That guy watching the flash drives isn’t looking that good and something in the house begins to stir. Seventhin, a middle-aged woman writes about her spooky creation The Grey Man with the edginess of a seventh grader given free rein in a creative writing class. Of course, The Grey Man begins messaging her and her night of writing turns to terror… at least it would if didn’t end immediately after it gets a pulse. Eighted, a little boy who just lost a tooth is scared of the dark and begs his grandma to leave the light on. She doesn’t listen and the kid is paid a visit by a ghost that really appreciates the aesthetic Georgie brought to the IT movies but he’s not the worst thing in the poor bastard’s room. Failed jump-scares seem to be why this short exists. Ninetherbed, a woman listens to a podcast about a serial killer who promises she’d come back through a mirror with a simple phrase used to summon her spirit. This woman, being an idiot, looks in her mirror and says the incantation immediately after hearing it. The creepy spirit pays her a visit and then texts her boyfriend to come on over. Nice that she picked up this new technology like a pro who didn’t die some 100 years ago. Jesus fucking Christ! At number ten a woman arrives at a house to watch a little boy. The kid’s mother is not there and calls her to let her know her boy wasn’t feeling well and she had to leave for work. I’d buy that for a dollar. The disheveled kitchen and boarded-up closet should be a dead giveaway that something is amiss but Angela seems pretty chill about it and keeps on babysitting the weird little goober. He’s worried that something called El Cuco, who is always hungry, is living in his closet and needs to be fed. We finally get to the last story and we find out why the dope who’s been watching these videos and bleeding out is stuck in this situation. It’s infidelity and murder in case you were curious. You feel the 84 minutes it takes you to get to the answer you had already figured out about three minutes in. It’s not something that one would call conventionally good but unconventionally… it would also be considered not good. A lot of the vignettes are pretty much the same damn thing just painted up with a different boogeyman. It’s like a bag of mixed jellybeans but the only flavors in there are black licorice and coal and the whole time you’re eating, some girl talks over it with the supernatural ability to somehow sound bored and hammy at the same time.

Altar (2016) (USA)

⭐️⭐️

Oooooph. Another camping trip goes to shit and unfortunately for us the cameraman with a developmental disorder is there to document it all. A college reunion in the Sierra Nevada Mountains allows for some pretty scenery and car trouble gets a small group of old friends separated and camping a few hours off course from the rest of their former classmates. Night exploration leads to the discovery of a Halloween-store-quality alter in the middle of the woods and when the cameraman grabs up one of the pretty blue lights surrounding the menacing totem, a barely seen but pretty cool looking evil is unleashed. There’s also a bald, plaid-wearing lunatic with an axe named Ripper but he runs a close second behind the videographer as the worst character in the movie... at least Ripper ain’t in it much. The college friends are surprisingly likable so that’s something... I guess.