Mom and Dad (2017)

Mom and Dad plays like a zombie movie if the undead were swapped for psychotic parents. Seriously stylish, from the beautiful retro opening credits to the expert use of music (satisfyingly Carpenter-like in places) to the rich cinematography, but also rapid and unforgiving in plot (you've got to respect a film that starts by showing a mother leaving her baby in the path of an oncoming train) this packs a hell of a lot of fun into its not even 90mins.

Which, when you realise it was written and directed by Brian Taylor, the writer/director of the Crank franchise, makes perfect sense!

We meet a white middle class household. Mom, dad, big sister and little brother. They're the kind of people who have those motivational/aspiration script-y signs everywhere in their home. The scene looks kind of perfect but quickly we see that, of course, things aren't that way.

Mom (Selma Blair) does a typical white woman "I'm an ally!" move of apologising to her Chinese housekeeper for something she deems offensive said at breakfast, but in the process offends the woman more. Dad (Nicholas Cage) seems close to his son, but at work turns the photo of his kids face down to jack off at his desk before taking a nap and ignoring a call from his wife. He's obsessed with his youth and all the opportunities he missed out on to have the life he does now.

No one is particularly likeable. But that's okay.

One of the best aspects of Mom and Dad is that we see the story unfold from both perspectives in the central family. As things start to go batshit the kids fight to stay alive, but more interestingly, we're shown what mom and dad are doing, too. It's chilling and hilarious how rational all the adults are about trapping and murdering their own children. Everything else about them is the same apart from this sudden, insatiable, specific urge to kill and it's highly entertaining to watch!

This was an excellent find after some false starts one evening. For sure worth checking out if you're in the mood for something blackly comic. Mom and Dad is fast, funny, mean, and streaming on Hulu at time of writing.

The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007)

The Poughkeepsie Tapes is on Tubi right now! Tubi comes through again!

After a serial killer leaves a cache of tapes to be discovered by New York murder investigators, we're shown "choice cuts" of the decades of footage; from the disturbing to the horrific, to the downright weird, while context and background are given on those featured.

Ya girl got some spoilers ⬇

We watched this on the brink of my being home alone for a couple of nights, and I'm REALLY pleased I didn't save it for then. And not because of the strange balloon stuff.

At this point, this film had become somewhat infamous to me, and I wasn't quite sure what to expect. What I got was a fictitious crime documentary that's often downright uncomfortable to watch. One scene in particular I couldn't get out of my head for a couple of days. Many aspects - including, obviously, the fact that it's found footage - contribute to this feeling very grounded in reality. 

Full of bleak moments and clips of terror and torture, this story is successfully very, very creepy. A thread that runs through it is one particular female victim (Stacy Chbosky as Cheryl Dempsey) and her abduction, imprisonment and forced complicity through physical and mental torture. 

Her interview and the information we're subsequently told about Cheryl is shattering. Hell, her entire story is shattering. This is probably the film's strongest aspect as it gives a heart to the story - even if it ultimately dissects that heart in front of our eyes.

❝I don't know what you want me to say...❞

− Cheryl Dempsey

As someone who deals with intrusive thoughts about home invasion (and yet watches horror movies and listens to true crime podcasts almost non-stop 👋🏻) the thought that his guy just moved on, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer style, and set up shop elsewhere is terrifying. The audience witnesses him begin, escalate, shatter countless lives through murder, torture and the justice system itself - then simply disappear. The only reason the police ever found the tapes was because he wanted them to.

The Poughkeepsie Tapes was shot in a staggering fifteen days, and was written (along with his brother Drew) and directed by John Erick Dowdle (As Above, So Below, Quarantine, Devil). He is also married to Stacy Chbosky. It must have been incredibly intense to direct her in some of these scenes.

If you like your scares stark, this is worth checking out. Not for those seeking buckets of blood; it's understated and implied a lot of the time, views often obscured or distorted so that we're forced to fill in the blanks. Nasty and unforgiving, if you're prone to movies sticking with you, this one just might.

The Loved Ones (2009)

I emerge from an unplanned break from horror, and The Loved Ones wasn't a brilliant one to come back with, but here we are.

This is from the same guy as The Devil's Candy but this grubby little Australian flick did not give me anything approaching the heart eyes 😻 that Candy did, sadly.

Sitting here wondering how to start this review, I was reflecting on our introduction to Lola, the main character, and it only further highlighted to me how aggravatingly one-dimensional she is. Robin McLeavy certain commits as this nightmare in a pink prom gown and Lola is never ever shown as anything other than delusional and psychopathic. Even when she appears by the locker of her crush Brent (Xavier Samuel), she's wide-eyed and manic. Always heightened, turned up to 11. That ended up being my main problem with The Loved Ones. Lola is annoying as shit, so I spent most of the time irritated and waiting for her to die - and even the death scene was annoying, too! More on that later.

There are two "dates" happening throughout this movie. Lola with a kidnapped Brent, and Brent's friend Jamie (Richard Wilson) with a sexy goth girl. This secondary story is ultimately revealed to be a tenuous (at best) link to the kidnapping and torture, and if its purpose was to serve as light relief or a way to break the tension of Brent's apparently hopeless situation, it doesn't really work. There's even a moment where we're led to believe the stories are about to interestingly converge... but it's a fake out. Thanks?

It's hard to imagine Lola existing in the real world well enough to successfully attend school and socialise, but we're shown that throughout her life, with the help of her father (who harbours incestuousness feelings for her) she's lived a cycle of crushes and rejection, followed by capture and torture in the name of her obsession.

Drills, forks, knives, syringes of bleach, a hidden pit under the kitchen; it's all here. Yet, I wasn't enjoying this ride.

When the moment finally came to see her die, she's treated like horror royalty in a Big Moment where time slows down. She watches her death approach, and we watch her watching. It goes on for-ev-er. This kind of end is fit for someone way more iconic and giving her this, when the writing and action have done nothing to flesh her out feels unwarranted and unearned.

The Loved Ones is streaming on Shudder at time of writing. Have I just woken up grumpy from my hiatus?!

The Devil's Candy (2015)

The Devil's Candy was pretty much buried on Netflix, and it's only because I regularly make a pass through the horror section that its artwork caught my eye (see above - how could it not?). So I read the blurb, took a swift look at the IMDB and Letterboxd pages (more to see what its average user rating was than anything else) and that was enough. Onto the list it went.

This was written and directed by Sean Byrne, whose only other horror credit seems to be The Loved Ones. The plot revolves around a close family of three (mum, dad, daughter) moving into a new house and strange, dark forces at work both inside and out of their new home. 

Daughter and father metalheads 

The house seems to speak to those with an open enough mind to hear it, including dad Jesse (Ethan Embry - who has come a LONG way since Empire Records) and Raymond (Pruitt Taylor Vince), a troubled individual who used to live there.

Jesse is a struggling artist and takes over the garage/barn area of the new place to paint. However, even for a metal fan, what ends up being committed to his canvas in this new studio takes an extremely dark turn.

Going into rapture-like states to create these images, Jesse loses all track of time, painting solidly for hours on end and failing to pick up his daughter Zooey (Kiara Glasco) from school on more than one occasion.

The images he creates are frightening. The reason he's creating them, we learn eventually, is extremely tragic.

Taking place during an unnaturally hot Texas summer, this feels oppressive and intense. Jesse most of all is seen sweating and/or shirtless, a panicked and pained expression permanently on his face as he tries to make sense of what is threatening his family. 

❝He's no mask in a Halloween store, he's not what you see in the movies. He is an active, violent, anti-God personal reality. And as much as we refuse to admit it, he lives through us.❞
− TV Preacher

An "active, violent, anti-God personal reality" is a perfect description of the villain in this movie.

I could not shake how much Raymond looked like Harvey Weinstein, too. Just to add another layer of evil repulsiveness on top of an already detestable character.

It's not just in atmosphere that this film succeeds; stylistically too, The Devil's Candy knows what it's doing. Watch for the use of light in the final shot, and for the scene with cross-cutting between paint hitting the canvas and blood spilling from a murder. There really isn't much gore to be had in general here, with the more brutal stuff happening off camera, but the glimpses of a bathtub dismemberment are more than enough to unsettle. 

This one may be my favourite new discovery so far this month. Simple, satanic, stylish, and streaming on Netflix now. At 1hr19mins it's definitely worth the time commitment.

Angst (1983)

Coming off the back of a true crime binge (I pretty much constantly listen to true crime stuff, but recently it's been particularly intense) I've been tempering my desire to watch home invasion horror movies. This is a sub-genre I really enjoy, but part of that enjoyment stems from the fact it's one of the most terrifying.

Nevertheless! Once I realised it was on Shudder, I couldn't put off watching Angst (alternative title Schizophrenia) for very long. This may well be the granddaddy of home invasion movies, and it is a relentlessly unsettling experience.

Made in Austria (in German, with subtitles) and directed by Gerald Kargl - causing such controversy and box office backlash upon its release that he never made another movie - Angst is based on the true case of mass murderer Werner Kniesek and even utilizes phrasing from real confessions...

(How do you know you're too deep into true crime? When you can identify real confession dialogue without being told...)

The story chronicles the first 24 hours of freedom of "K", a psychopathic murderer. We not only follow K (an astonishing performance by Erwin Leder, whose other roles include Das Boot, and er, Underworld) but we're inside his head, too; hearing all of the manic thoughts, twisted leaps of logic and sickening plans that pass through his damaged brain.

Angst has us witness, in painstaking detail and intimacy, every single moment of this man's mania; the entire spectrum from an almost hysterical bloodlust, through sweat (and semen :/) drenched murders, to the post-kill clean up and groggy comedown, to thinking about doing it all over again.

We see him leave prison and immediately begin the hunt. Like a true addict, he's desperately uncomfortable and barely able to function, he needs to spill blood so much. We watch as one-by-one he chooses victims and dismisses them, finally finding a satisfactory set-up: a huge but strangely devoid of furniture house to break into, and a family to terrorize.

Sparse of dialogue in-scene, much of the exposition comes from either a doctor, giving comprehensive background and the medical/criminal diagnoses of K; or the man himself, narrating his obsessive frenzy.

He speaks incessantly of his "plan", although this spree repeatedly plays out like he's close to losing control of the situation. In one of many choices made that tinge the film with horrible realism, K is not a "cool" looking dude (see: most serial killers are awkward, conventionally unattractive individuals). He is a thin, sweaty, rat-faced man. His strength comes from his psychosis, not from his physical stature, and so even though he possess a terrifying presence, he is also barely able to move his hostages, alive or dead. There are numerous, uncomfortably protracted scenes of him dragging his victims from room to room.

"Visceral" is a word that gets thrown around a lot in this genre, and there are definitely a couple of instances in this movie where that word springs to mind.

Learning that Gaspar Noé is a fan of Angst came as absolutely no shock, and the sickening violence and profound sadness of Irreversible now makes a little more sense. Tonally both films are brutal in subject matter and uncompromising in their portrayal of it. They're also both aggressively visual pieces of cinema.

The cinematography in Angst was by Zbigniew Rybczynski who, I was excited to learn, was the director of a short I became slightly obsessed with a couple of months ago! 

The camerawork often takes on a dynamic, experimental style: when K runs, the vertigo-inducing "SnorriCam" is used; our viewpoint appears abnormally high up in some scenes, and too low to the ground in others; outside, what today would be a simple drone shot, must have taken some doing in the early 80s to achieve, as the camera lifts so high we're able to watch K from a bird's eye view as he runs around the house's estate opening gates and jumping over walls. 

And good luck forgetting the faces of Angst, in all of their grotesque close-up glory.

Every aspect of this film was a choice to provoke unease. Even the soundscapes are unnerving, with the score a repetitive synth march or a low-note dread-filled dirge, and normally innocuous noises such as footsteps and chewing food are blown up on the soundtrack to monstrous versions of the real thing.

Films that dwell so heavily on the viewpoint of a cold-blooded killer are always going to be for the strong of stomach, and the depths to which K sinks are matched only by the fact that we sink there too, in witnessing every painful second of it. If you want a truly soul-destroying double bill, Angst and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer would be a hell of a way to spend an evening. If the thought of taking stock of what you just participated in doesn't appeal, then maybe give this a hard pass.

Personally, as deeply grim as this film gets, I "enjoyed" it an awful lot for its full on commitment to making me feel so uncomfortable. Like Irreversible, it'll leave you with an empty feeling afterwards - but it's a beautifully constructed, frightening representation of the mind of a psychopath. It's a fucking travesty Kargl never made another movie. I cannot imagine the sights he would have shown us, if THIS was the first thing he had in his head. 

On Shudder right now, and you'll get a content warning if you decide to watch it!

Oculus (2013)

I'll cut to the chase: this is a pretty pedestrian modern horror movie from Mike Flanagan. Which is surprising, given that he worked on Hush and Gerald's Game, both of which are far superior. At the risk of sounding like a snob, Oculus plays like a cash-in summer blockbuster: a hit with non-genre fans (those squares!) who fancy something scary, but a little too "horror by numbers" for anyone with a decent bit of experience.

Starring Karen Gillan (Doctor Who, Guardians of the Galaxy), Katee Sackhoff (Kara 'Starbuck' Thrace from Battlestar Galactica) and Rory Cochrane (the super stoned dude in Dazed and Confused), Oculus deals with family loss, and two siblings trying to overcome it. 

Unfortunately for her brother Tim (Brenton Thwaites), Kaylie (Gillan, sporting what I can only describe as a terrifying fringe) has become obsessed with proving that their father becoming a homicidal maniac 11 years ago was not your average psychotic break but in fact was due to a cursed mirror that hung in his office. She's managed to track it down and take possession, and she's invited Tim - himself fresh out of an institution for killing dad back then, in self defense - to come along and bear witness to the spooky goings on in their old house. What could possibly go wrong.

It's no more of a stretch than the average flick I suppose, but what doesn't help is Kaylie's general cold manner. She's an unlikeable lead character, and her odd rhythm of speech didn't do anything to warm me to her, either (I'd love to know if that was an actor or writer/director choice). We're to assume that her horrific family history affects her deeply, that she's never let go of the terrors she witnessed; yet I couldn't help but think this could've been played with more subtlety, rather than making her an obsessed robot. 

She reprimands Tim for his logical reading of those past events, telling him the doctors brainwashed him... because a killer mirror is so much more believable?! She's dismissive and withholding even to her fiance, too. It's no great tragedy when (spoilers) she kills him, because (a) we barely know the guy, and (b) she doesn't seem to have much of a connection to him anyway. Kaylie is a character born within this story to definitely die by the end of it, there's just nowhere else for her to go.

Additionally, most of the scares here are overworked and cheap. Creepy veiny people with weird eyes glide around the house, there's fingernail violence, and the old "accidentally killing someone who startles another character" plot twist. All of which do their job on a perfunctory level, but things never get any more interesting.

Anyone well versed in the genre will be able to call the majority of the eerie payoffs, they are signposted so blatantly - although the scene where Kaylie appears to bite into a lightbulb thinking it's an apple is one of the better moments here.

Flanagan is adept at fluidly transitioning the action between past and present. The young and older versions of the siblings all inhabit this space together, adding an otherworldly, untrustworthy quality to events happening within the house. Nothing is what it seems within the mirror's "sphere of influence", and this was definitely creepy... but only in a way that what I call the "Hotel California Effect"* always is.

NAILED IT. Full review here.

Oculus gets a 73% on Rotten Tomatoes, which kind of blows my mind.

It's on US Netflix now, but I'm pretty certain there are better choices you could make.


*This is when a character is trying to escape somewhere but the evil force at work manages to trap or loop them into always coming back. So named because my first memory of this eerie idea was from listening to the Eagles song 🎶 (sorry not sorry!).

The Facility (2012)

Deliberately made this large so you can see the hands, middle left.

Apparently based on a true story (obviously sexed up into horror fare) The Facility deals with a clinical trial gone horribly wrong.

Seven people accept £2000 - payable on completion, natch - to spend two weeks together, being administered a drug called "Pro9" and observed of its side effects. Problems arise on the first night, however, when one of the group starts behaving violently. It's the dickhead estate agent though, so we don't shed any tears.

When the meek hypochondriac wanders off and returns covered in blood, things start to get a little more intense.

The reactions to the drug are kind of like the rage virus in 28 Days Later, but way less scary and significantly less interesting.

One-location horror films with a set group of people usually really float my boat, but this one was disappointing. It burned too slowly in the beginning and even when the action and gore kicked in, it was already too far gone into snoozeville to redeem itself.

It's kind of laughably presented as fact, too, with sombre black title cards on the intro and outro to the movie.

But basically this film amounts to watching a group of people in surgical scrubs shout at one another until one of them turns red and starts punching things.

If all this wasn't bad enough, a huge amount of points have to be deducted for the sheer fact that the only "infected" ragey person to inexplicably rip off all their clothes and run around naked, was the young blonde girl.

This film should be sent to the isolation ward.

🍺 For this film I was sipping on... 🍺

Pumpkin UFO by Harpoon This might be my favourite so far of the pumpkin beers I've tried with a more moderate alcohol content. It's got the spice flavour as you'd expect but I feel like there's also a little more sweetness too? The pumpkin on the label is also super cute. I'd give it 3/5.