For our final pre-Halloween foray into the Netflix instant streaming horror queue (your hint that I’m going to be too busy over the next couple days to do any more reviews prior to the holiday itself, but who knows — I’ve indulged in a “Halloween hangover” series in Novembers past and may just do so again, we’ll see), I couldn’t resist putting my gag reflex (not to mention my conscience) to the test one more time by checking out the long-delayed third (and last) installment of writer/director Tom Six’s notorious-for-good-reason Human Centipede series, this one entitled, as you’d no doubt expect, The Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence). The question as to whether or not that makes me  a brave explorer of the farthest reaches of the cinematic jungle or merely a glutton for punishment in one that I leave for you, dear reader, to decide.

One thing that’s become…

When the going gets tough, the tough go to Abu Dhabi.

Look, don’t get me wrong — I still like Tobe Hooper, but he’s kinda fallen off the “A-list” of American horror directors, hasn’t he? The guy who gave us such timeless classics as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Poltergeist has hit sort of his a “dry spell” in his career of late, so when some upstart producers from the United Arab Emirates threw some money his way to come and help get a film “scene” going in their country’s capital city, he quite understandably took them up on the offer and packed his bags for sunnier (and drier, and hotter) climes. The end result? 2013’s Djinn, a semi-claustrophobic, semi-atmospheric ghost-story-with-a-twist steeped in local legend and folklore.

Having recently lost their infant son, upwardly-mobile couple Khalid (played by Khalid Laith) and Salama (Razan Jammal) decide to attempt to…

Having been somewhat impressed by the Grave Encounters films (considerably moreso with the first than the second) that were the brainchild of the so-called Vicious Brothers (co-writer Stuart Ortiz and co-writer /director Colin Minihan), I was reasonably stoked to give their latest effort, 2014’s Extraterrestrial, a go when I saw it in the Netflix streaming queue, and while the bog-standard premise of five teens in a remote cabin set upon by evil (or at least amoral and pathologically curious) aliens seemed more than a tad on the unimaginative side, the fact of the matter is that there’s nothing terribly original about the “found footage” paranormal investigation trope, either, and yet our intrepid pair of not-really-siblings had managed to do something pretty good with that. Why not err on the side of optimism, then, when going into this one?

I guess I’ve more or less given away the basic plot…

In 2010, a group of amateur paranormal investigators went to the scene of Richard Speck’s notorious killing spree in an ill-advised attempt to capture footage of his ghost, which purportedly haunts to the place. They never made it out. Now, the victims’  families have finally consented to release the video footage of their loved ones’ final hours to the public.

If this sounds to you like yet another of the cheap-as-shit “found footage” horror movies cobbled together in a few days (and at the cost of a very few dollars) by the shoestring operators of The Asylum, pat yourself on the back for a job well done, because that’s exactly what 2012’s 100 Ghost Street : The Return Of Richard Speck is. And yes, it’s as lousy as any and/or all of the others — and I’m sure you had that much figured out already, as well.

To be perfectly…

Next up on our little field trip trough the wilds of Netflix’s current horror offerings we come to 2014’s Preservation, a movie that I’d heard decidedly mixed things about,  but that I decided to take a flier on anyway simply because I figured “hey, it played the Tribeca film festival, so how bad can it be, right?”

Cue the one answer to that question you can see coming from a mile off : “pretty goddamn bad, as it turns out.”

Filmed just outside Los Angeles on a budget reported to be “low,” writer/director Christopher Denham’s thoroughly predictable “city slickers can’t cut it in the wilderness” non-thriller serves up three immediately unlikable characters in the form of secretly pregnant anesthesiologist Wit (played by Wrenn Schmidt), her workaholic, high-finance hot-shot husband, Mike (Aaron Stanton), and his PTSD-afflicted Afghan war vet older brother, Sean (Pablo Schreiber), who are headed out for a…

If only I’d known something about this flick back when it first came out (on home video — it never screened in theaters as far as I know) in 2012, I’d have been cheerleading for it a lot sooner.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that director Derek Cole’s An American Ghost Story (also released under the title of Revenant) is necessarily all that great, but damn if it isn’t plenty good, and it gets a lot more from its $10,000 budget (yes, you read that right) than most Hollywood “efforts” with ten times, one hundred times, or even one thousand times the money to burn. Any movie that packs a punch this far above its weight class is one worth crowing about, so let me take a few minutes, in the spirit of “better late than never,” to do just that.

Struggling-and-broke writer Paul Anderson (played…

Hey, how about this? Looks like we’ve got two modern-day “creature features” in a row on our humble little review site here, since we’re following up 2014’s fun, blood-soaked monster movie Animal with another flick from the very same year, Dark Was The Night, that treads much the same ground and is also, in keeping with our theme for the month, available for your enjoyment (hopefully, at any rate) in Netflix’s instant streaming queue.

Shot on Long Island. director Jack Keller’s deliberately-paced, cool-blue-tinted opus takes a bit of getting used to from a visual standpoint, but by and large the limited color palette he employs is reasonably effective and communicates a sense of dread and unease throughout without tipping over into “a little too self-consciously stylish for its own good” territory. It comes close a times, mind you, but on the whole it just manages to maintain its balance.

So, like, whatever happened to good, old-fashioned, practical effects-based “creature features,” anyway?

That’s a question I find myself asking (to myself, I admit) every once in awhile, that’s for sure, but I won’t be doing it anymore after last night.

Why is that? Because last night I finally got around to checking out director Brett Simmons’ 2014 indie horror effort Animal on Netflix, and it proved to me that the genre I thought I was missing is, in fact, very much alive and well.

There’s nothing too terribly complicated on offer here, sure, but that’s a good thing — screenwriters Thommy Hutson and Catherine Trillo seem to have a definite checklist they’re working from, and as far as I’m concerned there’s absolutely no shame in that as long as you’re able to get all the boxes ticked off, which they most assuredly do with their story about a big ol’…

As somebody whose college years are well behind them, I’m not quite sure what to make of the conflicting information I hear about the social scene on campus here in the not-so-early-anymore years of the 21st century. On the one hand, I’ve read a number of articles saying that the days of hard partying are pretty much over with thanks to dating apps like tinder that allow kids to hook up in minutes and have therefore pretty much nullified the need for large social gatherings in order to meet people of the opposite (or same) sex. Heck, I’ve even heard that the popularity of all these “instant dating” opportunities has put a fair number of bars out of business. On the other hand, though, there are movies like 2013’s +1 (also known by the alternate title of Shadow Walkers) that would seem to posit that not only is the…

There are good “found-footage” horror movies.

There are bad “found-footage” horror movies.

And then there are Asylum “found-footage” horror movies.

Usually setting their tales at or near the scenes of purportedly “real” paranormal “hot spots” or the stomping grounds of infamous serial killers (although all their flicks are shot in California), the no-budget, straight-to-video “moguls” who run The Asylum follow pretty much the same formula every time : hire an eager kid either right out of film school or looking to get in to direct it, give him or her an HD video camera, hire a bunch of uniformly good-looking guys and gals who are out  to pad their meager acting CVs, get the ladies to take their shirts (at least) off, mix in a bit of dodgy CGI effects work meant to be indicative of “ghostly”  activity ( I really wanted to say “paranormal activity” there, but the name’s…