Directed By: Carl Medland

How do you follow up something like Paranormal Farm? Well you just make another one. Is making another one a good idea? Well…no. I don’t think so.

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Directed By: Carl Medland

“Orbs. I thought I was going to see orbs and now I got bloody Freddy Kruger to deal with.”

Look on Amazon and type in either ‘Paranormal’ or ‘Haunted’ and you will get a plethora of garbage looking movies to choose from.  You want haunted streets, haunted lanes, haunted hospitals, haunted cul-de-sacs, haunted Ford Fiestas well you got it. They’re all the same low-budget, cheaply made schlock but they can’t all be bad can they? Even something called Paranormal Farm.

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(Yeah there’s no poster to put up here)

Directed By: Jean Teddy Filippe

This isn’t something you’ll find on any best of lists or generally any conversations about the found-footage genre. I daresay this isn’t something you would’ve even heard of and that’s fair enough. Best I can tell is that it was made for TV and technically I’m cheating because it’s not even a movie but is instead a series of 12 shorts (I’m also cheating again because technically they were split into two, being produced years apart).

So what the hell is The Forbidden Files?

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Directed By: Stephen Susco

I dug Unfriended when I saw it (I think I wrote about it last year) being as I dig anything that has a gimmick and I’m easily pleased. I didn’t think it needed a sequel but here we are anyway. There’s no supernatural gimmickry here though and instead, we’re thrust into the world of the ‘dark web’, in a story that’s somehow more preposterous than the supernatural goings-on of the first.

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Directed By: Stephen Cognetti

Last year’s Hell House LLC was a little gem I came across on Amazon Prime and, like most movies on there, I assumed would be garbage. Instead it was an effective single-location movie that worked on me both times I watched it. I’m only human of course so when I saw there was a sequel I was on board, despite my reservations about horror sequels in general and of course just in time for the season this popped up on Shudder.

And…well my thoughts are mixed. Continue reading →

Directed By: Ron Honthaner

First of all, lets just appreciate that amazing title.

Blacksploitation has often, unfairly, been derided among movie fans in general, let alone horror fans. Movies like Blackula or the awesomely-titled Scream, Blackula Scream are uttered with a snicker for being cheap or starring unknown actors. This isn’t to say that the genre is nothing but hidden-gems, but the whole wheat and chaff thing applies to horror just as much as it applies to anything else. Sadly while you’ll see a ton of YouTube videos talking about Halloween, you’d be hard pressed to find many talking about Ganja and Hess, even though it’s great.

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Directed By: Steve Kostanski & Jeremy Gillespie

“You’d be surprised at the things you find when you go looking… ”

There’s a unique kind of dissapointment you get when you watch a movie that seems made for you but you end up struggling to recommend it. Your brain goes between thinking up reasons why you should’ve liked it while trying to reconcile with the fact that it’s simply not very good. You’d think homages to John Carpenter, Clive Barker and with a dash of Lovecraft (Not too much though, the big ole racist) and with all practical effects would be right up my street. On paper it was and still is.  Continue reading →

Directed By: Mark Rosman

“My water bed got slashed to shreds and all you can do is joke about it. I swear she was trying to kill me.”

It’s funny, think of the 80s for horror movies and chances are you’re thinking of a slasher flick. It’s fairly natural to do so being as it was a decade dominated by scantily-clad actresses getting offed in various ways, or so it seemed. I unapologeticlly dig those movies – while understanding that they’re objectifying in the worst ways – and yet it’s always surprising to see that wasn’t really the case.

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Directed By: Dominique Rocher

What do you do when the zombie apocalypse starts? Yeah sure you get to a secure place and all that. But what do you actually do? That’s the central question of this Paris-set thriller, which probably tells you that by and large, the horror element is a formality.

It’s one night in a fashionable Parisian apartment and Sam (Anders Danielsen Lie) has shown up to pick up some ‘tapes’ from his ex. She thinks he should stay and have a good time, though she reveals herself to be both a terrible host and ex-girlfriend by yukking it up with her new beau. Sam, for his part, is understandably awkward around these people and retires to a room where he falls asleep and in a herculean effort the likes I haven’t seen since my Dad slept through workmen drilling in the house one day, manages to sleep through everyone else getting slaughtered during the night.

So it’s bye-bye ex, who we glimpse one last time, disfigured and angry before the movie moves on from that and more or less everything else. We get a brief scene involving some neighbours over the road to show why Sam shouldn’t try leaving the building he’s barricaded in and then after that it’s just a case of following Sam through his routine. He cleans the floors, scavenges for food and clears the building of any straggling undead (Aside from a family of them that he instead just leaves locked in their apartment). He locks and elderly and now undead neighbour in an elevator for company and he sits around making music and generally looking forlorn. Maybe there was something I missed but he doesn’t even try turning on the TV or the radio. Far as I can tell no one in Paris has a mobile phone.

Not to cast aspertions but this feels like one of those times where the filmmakers feel as though the genre they’re in is beneath them, like when Danny Boyle described 28 Days Later as an “eco-thriller” despite the fact it borrows liberally from The Day Of The Dead. At least it’s not so egregious here though, whereas the earlier movie very much trades in the language of the horror genre and then denies it. With this it’s all very ennui with the undead attached.

That’s…kind of it. Not to make generalisations but this all feels very French. Ok, that is a generalisation and a very purposeful one at that. There’s certainly nothing wrong with what the movie does and honestly given how oversaturated the genre is it’s nice to see something that’tries for something different, even though I don’t buy that the movie has as much on its mind as it thinks it does, but I would’ve liked to have seen a little more variety. I get how unusual that seems given that it’s a movie about boredom but I don’t think it’s exactly fair to the audience to make them feel what the main character is.

Alright, that was a little mean of me and I’ll try not to be catty. I appreciate that they were at least going for something different and I give credit to Lie for making his character’s unravelling believable, even in a second language (Much was made of the fact the movie was shot in both English and French, but it doesn’t really matter since the dialogue is so threadbare it’s almost a silent movie). I just wish there was a way to make boredom more interesting, or at least more cinematic. As it is the movie is visually flat – If it had been in black and white it would’ve tipped it over into glorious parody – and wait for it…lifeless.