Sick Girl (2006) (USA/Canada)

⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

Lucky McKee reunites with the amazing Angela Bettis (if you haven’t seen May, what are you doing?) to get a little icky in this Masters of Horror addition. Our girl Bettis plays an awkward entomologist named Ida who receives an anonymous package from Brazil containing an unclassified insect. It breaks free and ends up biting Ida’s new gorgeous and odd girlfriend Misty (Erin Brown). Misty begins a slow transformation into something horrifying and when Ida receives a letter from her old professor (also, her new lovely lover’s papa) about the strange insect and its methods of reproduction, she begins to catch on to what her current girlfriend is undergoing and a contagion that is at high risk of spreading. The risks of moving a relationship way too fast are magnified into a ridiculous realm of body horror much to the benefit of any viewer who likes things to get a little weird in their horror. McKee’s consistently fresh spin on genre material continues as he utilizes a strong leading lady and a demented twist on a familiar warning. Big bug horror (but not too big), body horror, intolerance and relationship horror combine into a somehow cute, somewhat disturbing and undoubtedly strange combination. It may push into territory that gets a little too quirky but that’s a minor issue when it comes to this series that started out way too bland for my tastes.

Loner (2025) (UK)

⭐️⭐️

A social media giveaway is won by an aspiring vlogger and Angus Mattock happily makes his way to the wilderness retreat he’s been awarded. Documenting his digital detox in the gorgeous wilds has him following directions deep into the middle of nowhere, where a freshly set up mini cabin awaits him. He attempts to make the most of his time cutoff from modern amenities even if it sure as shit ain’t exactly roughing it. He picks up some unsettling sounds on his equipment and then begins hearing them with his own ears as night falls. The sound of screams has him snuffing out all his light sources and hiding in his tiny cabin. A frantic woman appears at the door and claims that something is after her and she needs to be let inside. Angus refuses and even pushes the woman down when she makes a desperate attempt to get in. She then wanders off into the darkness. The next day Angus walks into the woods in an attempt locate the woman he was no help to the night before. His axe gets stolen from him while he’s taking a dump in the woods and he returns to his cabin to find the place ransacked of anything that would help him in the situation he’s ill-prepared for. He decides it’s time to hike on out of the area and get back to regular life… sure, that’s gonna happen. A quick sojourn into a cave proves to be disturbing and he’s back at the cabin as night falls and something out in the perfect dark terrorizes him. The film stumbles on as our hero shares a recent tragedy and attempts to survive and get help however he can. Some nasty foot violence happens, forcing Angus to put a halt to any hiking out and madness comes knocking along with whatever is hanging about out of the viewer’s eye-line. Self discovery at least feels earned but boredom is still boredom and that boredom is even worse than regular boredom when spending all of your time with a mildly wet blanket of a man.

I Eat Your Skin (1964) (USA)

aka Zombie/Woodoo Island/Zombie Blood Bath/Voodoo Blood Bath/Invasion of the Zombies/Caribbean Adventure

⭐️⭐️

Walking venereal disease and novelist Tom Harris takes some time away from banging anything with two gams and a vagina to join his agent on an expedition to an island where voodoo is being practiced. The island’s name is Voodoo Island so that’s not just some racist guess on my part. It’s not just a trek about inspiration for his next novel, not at all, it’s mentioned to the likely very itchy Mr. Harris that a hurricane wiped out the island’s fishing fleet a few years back, leaving the female to male ratio at about five to one. The agent thinks the island would serve as a great setting for Tom’s next novel and the excitement of the island’s danger and strangeness is enough to impress the frustrated agent’s eccentric (unbearable) wife. The place is also home to a reclusive scientist who secluded himself from the public eye to work on cancer research and as we all know that’s way easier to do in a private villa surrounded by jungle that may or may not be crawling with the living dead. Yep. It all checks out. Off our ragtag group of “heroes” fly to a vacation spot riddled with dangers known and unknown with only enough fuel to barely make it to their destination. Ooops. The cancer researcher has discovered that by injecting natives with snake venom he can turn them into oatmeal-faced zombies with eyes that seem to be haphazardly painted ping-pong balls. I suppose that’s the next best thing to curing a horrible disease but I’m no scientist. The overseer of the island, Charles Bentley, is using these goofy zombies to his own nefarious ends and forcing the doctor to carry on with his work. Tom will be far too busy to poke the natives thanks to his lecherous eye zeroing in on the doctor’s daughter. He’s already seen what she has to offer thanks to a rescue attempt from a spying zombie with a machete while she was skinny dipping. This did lead to the decapitation of a local fisherman after warning the walking erection of an upcoming sacrifice but I guess you just can’t win ‘em all. Danger looks to be coming for Tom’s love life so he steps up to be a hero and to do this he’ll have to unmask the true evil on the island. There are bits of interest throughout the runtime but a lot of meandering and staleness rob it of being a true garbage classic. The low-jack zombie action is wonderful and I’m always a fan of sixties bikinis but I can’t imagine that this films ‘71 release date offered up much excitement to anyone who took this in when it got attached to the “Great Blood-Horrors Double Feature” with I Drink Your Blood. Hell, I can’t imagine outside of some leering sexiness and a graphic (and hilarious) decapitation that this bad boy would have offered up much excitement if it hadn’t sat on the shelf for six years. It’s a watchable curio but not much else.

The Fair-Haired Child (2006) (USA/Canada)

⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

“Master of horror” William Malone (such universally recognized classics as Feardotcom and the remake of House on Haunted Hill… which I know isn’t all that great by critical standards but I do fucking love) works from a Matt Greenberg (the man who blessed the world with screenplays for both Reign of Fire and Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest and no, there is no sarcasm in that statement) for this Masters of Horror outing. Teenage outcast Tara gets herself abducted by a psychotic couple and because she’s no idiot, ends up locked away in the basement of their isolated estate after figuring out some bullshit is going down when she comes to in a supposedly care facility. Anton and Judith (fuck yes, it’s Lori Petty and the always welcome William Samples) have made a pact with something ancient to bring their drowned son back from the dead. Said pact calls for the sacrifice of twelve virgin teenagers and our girl Tara happens to be the final one. What a horrible way to be needed for the first time. Tara shares the cellar with the couple’s teenage son who is definitely off because black magic is no way to adapt to death, even if it’s not by your own doing. She rescues him from an attempted suicide upon waking up in the basement and assumes he’s another victim of the lunatics. The longer Tara stays in the basement, the more convinced she becomes that there is something supernatural in the works and she really needs to get her ass out of her current situation. Judith is dead-set on bringing her departed boy back but Anton seems to be losing his marbles the deeper they get into the unsavory business of resurrection. Tara and the mute boy she has befriended uncover more and more awfulness as they await the girl’s fate and do what they can to escape. Warnings of a “fair-haired child” etched into the walls point towards the fact they do not want that ticking timer to come to an end. There’s a nice weird edge to everything and this outing from the first season proves to be one of the more pleasant surprises to get produced. It successfully comes off like a Lovecraft outing from his cycle before he went balls deep in the Elder ones and is purposefully melodramatic and harnessing the right level of camp for something this inspired by a late 60’s American International horror flick and reruns of Night Gallery. A charming slice of macabre that I really feel like the Masters of Horror series should have aimed for more than it did. A likable leading lady, a couple of intriguing villains and a weird-ass monster… that’s all I really want.

Cigarette Burns (2005) (USA/Canada)

⭐️⭐️⭐️

John Carpenter enters the Masters of Horror fray and tackles the always interesting idea of lost media. Of course, the lost media in question is a notorious film that was screened once and supposedly drove the audience into a homicidal frenzy. Now an eccentric private film collector, the enigmatic Mr. Bellinger (the enigmatic Udo Kier), hires a bankrupt theater owner with the kind of bendable morals desperation causes (Norman Reedus before he had a real handle on dramatics) to unearth the lost film La Fin Absolue du Monde. After Berlinger shares a horrific souvenir with the young man, Kirby Sweetman begins hunting down what information he can and discovers a history of death for the people behind the movie and a curse that supposedly comes along with the film that may be better left unseen. Bellinger is completely aware of the power the rare cinema holds but he has no qualms about the dangers or the cost of a single viewing. There’s tragedy in Sweetman’s past and the downward journey into Hell he’s traveling on is going to rip those wounds right open as he navigates cryptic critics, snuff filmmakers and the dangerous power of cinema. An incredibly satisfying story helps this bad boy along even if some shaky performances and melodrama produces a few hiccups along the way. So, excellent inspiration, it’s the execution that falters.

House at the Edge of the Woods (2025) (USA)

⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

A documentary crew is brought to an isolated home when the unstable man living there begins to experience strange things. He shares footage with the crew of his dad wandering out into the woods in the direction of bright lights, never to be seen again. The crew is there to document and get to the bottom of what strangeness is going on. It would seem there is something supernatural inhabiting the surrounding woods and you better believe the team of filmmakers are going to have to journey deep into the unknown to get any answers. The homeowner shares that things got disturbing with his son after grandpa vanished and a government agency started poking around. One hell of an obnoxious cameraman is also the main character, so he haunts the runtime with his tucked-in shirt and novice rockabilly sideburns. I may be overdramatic there. He’s not unbearable and surprisingly ends up being kinda likable when the shit hits the fan… a complete reverse on the usual character flaws of the found footage obnoxious cameraman. Actually, the quartet are all pretty damn likable and the young man who owns the property may give off Charles Fleischer in Zodiac vibes but I still didn’t mind him and he’s supposed to be suspicious enough to keep ya on your toes. The paranormal tomfoolery festering in the darkness is interesting and well-crafted considering the tight budget our filmmakers were working with. The desperation of the team’s leader inspires some dangerous decisions but at least the motivation makes sense. I’m a sucker for high strangeness and this is some fine high strangeness that just lets itself sink into the weirdness of all of it. Of course, I don’t think your found footage film should have a score if it’s not wrapped up in a mockumentary package but whatever, it admittedly elevates the climax.

The Third Shift a Paranormal Horror Story (2026) (UK)

⭐️1/2

Gloucester prison is reportedly one of the most paranormal locations in all of the United Kingdom. It’s easy to make this claim when there’s no scientific basis for anything except the self-fulfilling pseudo-science being used but I digress. A team of five paranormal investigators descend upon the haunted hotspot unaccompanied and, as paranormal investigators exploring the confines of a super haunted location are want to do, vanish without a trace. Well, there’s a trace and it’s this footage. Opening credits immediately tell you to do some stretching if you want to buy this as actual found footage and the footage of some guy watching a news report as electronic disruption happens pretty much takes that suspension of disbelief out back and fires a bullet into its head. Rambling introductions from the very British team let us know who we’ll be following around and the team reveals they landed on this location after reading favorable Google reviews. I found that hilarious. We spend time wandering around with the group as they make small talk and hear noises. So, the banality of ghost hunting is presented for you… the viewer at home. It seems that a team of ghost hunters shot uninteresting footage at an abandoned prison, realized there was no value to it and then decided to make the trip worth their time by attaching a bullshit psychopath plot to the proceedings in a desperate attempt to salvage a found footage horror flick out of it. The problem with building your half-baked story around meandering footage of walking around in the dark is that the meat of your adventure offers no real thrills… unless a moving ball gets your heart racing and loud bangs give you goosebumps because the laughing lunatic that eventually shows up just feels like it was shoehorned in for no good reason. If so, man it must be nice to be that easily amused. Good for you. I’m a little jealous. You will see a stainless steel colander used as a helmet for an electric chair, a group of paranormal enthusiasts attempt to act and a discount Halloween shop mask as a signature look. So, in the end this is either a really stupid ghost hunt or a really pathetic movie. Either way, the I’m the sucker who watched the whole damn thing.