Category Archives: Film Review

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: Do Not Reply (dir by Daniel Woltosz and Walter Woltosz)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

What a disturbing movie!

2019’s Do Not Reply is about Chelsea (Amanda Arcui, who previously played Lola during the final seasons of Degrassi), a high school student who is super-excited to have found an online boyfriend.  Brad (Jackson Rathbone) seems like he’s funny, handsome, and charming and he’s even got a semi-tragic life story!  Now, it should be mentioned that there are some immediate red flags about Brad.  Brad seems to be just a bit too perfect and the story of his life — being adopted and having parents who won’t even spend the money necessary to get him a new phone — seems to be a little bit too on-the-nose as far as getting Chelsea to feel sorry for him is concerned.

Brad and Chelsea agree to go to the Halloween dance together.  Brad says that he’ll show up as a zombie football player and he requests that Chelsea show up dressed a cheerleader.  (RED FLAG!  RED FLAG!)  To the surprise of no one, Chelsea meets up with Brad at the dance and is promptly kidnapped.

Brad, it turns out, is not a teenager with parents who refuse to buy him a new phone.  Instead, he’s a man in his 20s who lives in a surprisingly nice house.  He’s been meeting and kidnapping teenager girls for a while.  He holds them prisoner in his house, requiring that they wear cheerleader uniforms while cleaning the place.  Brad wants the house to be spotless.  He wants his prisoners to adore him.  He wants them to be very polite and well-mannered whenever they eat the dinners that he prepares for them.  One girl who tried to escape was several beaten by Brad and locked in her room, where she suffers as a warning to the others.  Meagan (Kerri Medders) and Heather (Elisa Luthman) both seem to be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome and they not only go out of their way to keep Brad happy but also to keep Chelsea from trying to escape.

If he’s in a good mood, Brad rewards his prisoners with “outdoor time,” which means that he allows them to wear a VR headset and visit an imaginary park.  Brad spends most of his day wearing his headset, not only searching for new realities but also reliving all of the terrible things he did in the past.  Brad is one sick man, his madness apparently inspired by his incestuous feelings towards his deceased sister who was — wait for it — a cheerleader!

The premise is a disturbing one, precisely because it is based on reality.  There are internet stalkers out there and there have been internet murderers as well.  Most of them aren’t as wealthy or handsome as Brad but they’re still out there, preying on those who are too naive to question their intentions.  While there’s definitely more than a small element of exploitation to the film (with the camera tending to linger over the cheerleader uniforms almost as intensely as Brad does), the film is ultimately on the side of Brad’s prisoners.  As opposed to the hyperarticulate madmen who tend to populate films like this, Brad is a loser from the start and the moment when his victims finally start to get the upper hand on him is a cheer-worthy moment.  Though the film gets off to a rather slow start, Amanda Arcuri, Kerri Medders, and Elisa Luthman all give good performances.  It’s a flawed film but it gets the job done.

 

Storm Warning (2007, directed by Jamie Blanks)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

A lawyer named Rob (Robert Taylor) and his French wife, Pia (Nadia Fares), get lost while on a boating trip and land on an island during the middle of a storm.  French Island is home to a family of rednecks, Poppy (John Brumpton) and his two inbred sons, Jimmy (David Lyons) and Brett (Matthew Wilkinson).  When the rednecks catch Rob and Pia seeking shelter in their home, they sexually harass Pia (which is not cool) and they give Rob a ton of crap for driving a Volvo (justified).  “You’re a frog on French island,” one of the rednecks tells Pia.  After having their wet suits stolen and being forced to kill a wallaby, Pia and Rob remember the end of Straw Dogs and violently turn against the rednecks.

This was a pointless movie.  Don’t go on sailing trips if you don’t know who or what is on any of the islands.  Don’t break into people’s houses, no matter how bad the storm is.  Always make sure to grab the keys before trying to steal a truck.  Never trust a Rottweiler.  These are lessons that are understood by everyone except for characters in dumb movies like this one.

There’s an unrated version of this is you want an extra four minutes of blood and insults.

“Fortunes of Doom” Dir. Julian Bachlow & Denman Hatch, Short Film Review, By Case Wright

Posted on by casewright

Happy Horrorthon! I couldn’t find any photos of the short on IMDB, BUT this is the production company. I am about to watch the film I really hope it’s not terrible! BRB!

It opens with a couple really making out like A LOT! They’re eating Chinese food and damn it looks great, but they’re eating it like grossly! FYI, the actress is a painter and a GOOD ONE. See and support her art here

https://www.instagram.com/montinaart/: “Fortunes of Doom” Dir. Julian Bachlow & Denman Hatch, Short Film Review, By Case Wright

They open their fortune cookies and they read “He Knows” “She Knows”. She stabs her lover with a fork and it’s gross.
She leaves the corpse and …. I’m not spoiling this. It’s chilling. MUST WATCH! This is a gem! 2 minutes and 50 Seconds of some brilliant art. This was chilling, paced well, and had a clear beginning, middle, and end.
Guys, this short got me by the proverbials! Excellent!

So, I Watched Virgin Pockets (2007, dir. by Paul Gorman)

Posted on by Dazzling Erin

Lizzie Monroe (Marie Madison) is a famous pool player who has turned her back on playing tournaments and now hustles clueless men in pool halls.  Because they all think that a blonde can’t possibly play pool, it’s easy for Lizzie to take their money.  Lizzie mentors another young female pool hustler named J.J. (Chexy Grace) but when J.J. goes against Lizzie’s wishes and enters a national tournament, Lizzie enters too.  Teacher and student go against each other for the championship.

This movie looks like it was filmed on someone’s phone and the actors seemed like they were just people some found out at a bus stop.  I’m not much of a pool player but even I could tell that Lizzie and J.J. weren’t really making any of the shots.  This was a film about women dominating their male competition but the movie couldn’t decide if it wanted to be exploitive or empowering.  A lot of obnoxious men lose but the camera lingers on J.J. and Lizzie’s cleavage whenever they lean across the table.  ‘Personally, I didn’t care whether the move was empowering or not.  I just wanted it to make up its mind who it was trying to appeal to.  It probably wasn’t made for pool purists.  Virgin Pockets makes pool look extremely easy and all of the hustles looked like things that anyone could do.  I was surprised J.J. needed someone to teach her how to do most of them.  Maybe I should work on my game and make some money!

What type of title is Virgin Pockets anyway?  When you saw that title, you didn’t think this movie was about pool, did you?

Horror Film Review: Salem’s Lot (dir by Gary Duberman)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The new version of Salem’s Lot, which has finally been released on Max after sitting on the shelf for nearly three years, is not very good.

At the same time, it’s definitely not terrible.  There are a few effective scenes.  The finale, which is a bit different from what happens in the book, is enjoyably berserk.  The film made good use of Gordon Lightfoot’s Sundown and, as a history nerd, I appreciated the fact that the movie used the book’s original 70s setting as opposed to trying to update the whole thing.  When writer Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) wants to investigate the history of the old Marsten House, he has to go to the library.  People looking up stuff on microfiche is always, from a cinematic point of view, more compelling than them pulling up Wikipedia.

Ultimately, the movie is just kind of forgettable.  It’s mediocre in the bland way that so many recent horror films have tended to be.  The movie’s style has far more in common with David Gordon Green’s unfortunate forays into horror than to anything done by Mike Flanagan.  While it may not have originally been meant for a streaming release, streaming is where it begins because it feels like something that would get dumped on Netflix without much fanfare.

It’s a shame because Salem’s Lot really is one of Stephen King’s better novels, written at a time when King was still embracing his pulpy side and without any of the self-important commentary that’s come to mar some of King’s more recent works.  The novel is essentially a small town soap opera, documenting the often sordid lives of the citizens of Jerusalem’s Lot.  King introduces a vampire to the mix and most of the town’s problems are solved by folks dying and then coming back from the dead.  Ben Mears is a typical King protagonist, a writer from Maine who is trying to deal with a childhood trauma and who discovers that ‘Salem’s Lot has a long and apparently cursed history.  In both the book and the movie, Ben teams up with a group of vampire hunters to battle Kurt Barlow (played here by Alexander Ward) and his human servant, Straker (Pilou Asbaek).

The book works because it takes the time to turn Salem’s Lot into a vivid community and, as such, it’s hard not to feel the loss as the town dies off as a result of Barlow’s vampiric invasion.  Clocking in at less than two hours, the movie really doesn’t have time to do that.  The movie’s version of the town just comes across as being another stereotypical New England town, full of flinty characters and mudrooms.  The community never comes to life and, as such, there’s not much emotional resonance as the community dies off.  (It’s not a coincidence that the most successful adaptation of Salem’s Lot was a miniseries.)  Add to that, the 2024 film features some truly unfortunate acting, which again makes it difficult to accept the town as a community with its own traditions and culture.

There are certain character types and themes that seem to appear in all of Stephen King’s novels and the subsequent adaptations.  At its worst, the new Salem’s Lot feels like it’s quickly going through a checklist of all of the expected Stephen King elements.  It’s like, “Main setting — check!  Writer protagonist — check!  Schoolyard bully — check!  Child in danger — check!”  The end result is a film that feels almost like a parody Stephen King, containing all of his familiar tropes without any of the literary flair that made the original book a classic of vampire literature.

The good thing is that the Tobe Hooper adaptation holds up well and it’s also available on Max.  Check it out this weekend.

Horror on the Lens: Plan 9 From Outer Space (dir by Edward D. Wood, Jr.)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Viewing Plan 9 From Outer Space during October is a bit of a tradition around these parts and here at the Shattered Lens, we’re all about tradition.  And since the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ed Wood, Jr. is just a five days away, it just seems appropriate to watch his best-known film.

Speaking of tradition, this 1959 sci-fi/horror flick is traditionally cited as the worst film ever made but I don’t quite agree.  For one thing, the film is way too low-budget to be fairly judged against other big budget fiascoes.  If I have to watch a bad movie, I’ll always go for the low budget, independent feature as opposed to the big studio production.  To attack Ed Wood for making a bad film is to let every other bad filmmaker off the hook.  Ed Wood had his problems but he also had a lot of ambition and a lot of determination and, eventually, a lot of addictions.  One thing that is often forgotten by those who mock Ed Wood is that he drank himself to death and died living in squalor.  The least we can do is cut the tragic figure some slack.

Plan 9 From Outer Space is a ludicrous film but it’s also a surprisingly ambitious one and it’s got an anti-war, anti-military message so all of you folks who have hopped down the progressive rabbit hole over the past few years should have a new appreciation for this film.  I mean, do you want the government to blow up a Solarnite bomb?  DO YOU!?

Also, Gregory Walcott actually did a pretty good job in the lead role.  He was one of the few members of the cast to have a mainstream film career after Plan 9.

Finally, Plan 9 is a tribute to one man’s determination to bring his vision to life.  Ed Wood tried and refused to surrender and made a film with a message that he believed in and, for that, he deserves to be remembered.

Now, sit back, and enjoy a little Halloween tradition.  Take it away, Criswell!

Can you prove it didn’t happen?

WELL, CAN YOU!?

October Positivity: Thy Neighbor (dir by George A. Johnson)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

2017’s Thy Neighbor led me to spend way too much time thinking about neighborhood hot tub etiquette.

Amber Reynolds (Jessica Koloian) is the wife of pastor Zach Reynolds (Nathan Clarkson).  Zach used to be fat.  Zach used to pick fights and carry a gun.  However, Zach lost a ton of weight, wrote a book about how he got thin and conquered his anger issues, and is now something of a celebrity.  He’s been invited to be the new pastor at the local megachurch and, upon moving into their new home, Amber makes it a point to bake cookies for all of her new neighbors.  One of the neighbors (Dave Payton) — who is simply called The Neighbor for the majority of the film — doesn’t care much for church but he sure does like those cookies.  Zach thinks that the Neighbor is creepy and he doesn’t want Amber having anything to do with him.  Amber thinks that the Neighbor needs someone to talk to so she invites him to come relax in the hot tub with her.

Seriously….

My neighbors across the street have a hot tub and I’ve pretty much got an open invitation to use it whenever I want.  Many a night, we’ve all relaxed in the hot tub and talked about whatever we felt like talking about at the time.  But I’m also extremely close to my neighbors.  I have a lot in common with my neighbors, as we all graduated from the same college and we tend to have similar cultural and political outlooks.  They’re friends, along with being neighbors and it also helps that we all look in our swimsuits.  And even so, they still got to know me a little before they said, “Hey, feel free to come use our hot tub whenever you feel like it.”  My point is that I have a hard time buying that anyone, regardless of how nice they are or how much they want to help their husband win points around the neighborhood, would invite a total stranger to strip down and join them in the hot tub.  That’s especially true when you’re the mother of a young son and your husband is away from the house and when the stranger in question is kind of creepy and bizarrely aggressive in the way that he talks to people.

Zach is not amused to return home and find the Neighbor in the hot tub.  After the Neighbor leaves, Amber argues that Zach needs to make an effort to reach out to everyone, even creepy people like The Neighbor.  As for The Neighbor, he starts trying to break up Zach and Amber’s marriage by trying to get Zach to lose his temper and trying to convince Amber that Zach is having an affair with a church secretary….

This is not a typical faith-based film.  It’s a thriller, one that conveys its message with a minimum amount of preaching and which features a trio of strong performances from Koloian, Clarkson, and Payton.  The film argues that everyone should be treated with kindness while, at the same time, acknowledging that some people are very, very annoying.  The Neighbor is a total creep but he’s also someone who appears to have spent a good deal of his life being victimized.  Unusually for a film of this sort, Thy Neighbor ends on a rather dark and melancholy note, again acknowledging that things are not always as easy as the movies would have us believe.  Amber is determined to be kind while Zach cannot let go of his suspicions.  In the end, it’s obvious that it’ll take more than a few hours in the hot tub to fix these broken souls.

 

October Hacks: Splatter University (dir by Richard W. Haines)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

As we started to watch 1984’s Splatter University, Jeff warned me that, “This is not a great movie.”

I laughed.  “Hey,” I said, “I just watched Satan’s Children.  How bad can it be?”

I looked at the screen and was immediately confronted by a poorly animated picture of the New York Skyline.

“Oh crap,” I said.

Four words appeared on screen: “A Troma Team Release”

“Oh, no!” I shouted….

Still, I’m not one to stop watching a film once it starts so I watched the entirety of Splatter University.  Fortunately, it was only 78 minutes long and, regardless of what else one might say about it, it did not waste much time getting to the murders.  Within the opening few minutes, an orderly in a mental hospital got stabbed in the crotch, with the camera zooming in on the blood spurting out from his groin,  The patient who stabbed him took the orderly’s clothes (which, quite frankly, should have been covered in blood so I’m not sure that they would actually be the ideal disguise) and makes his escape.

Three years later, a sociology professor is brutally stabbed to death in her classroom at St. Trinian’s College and again, the camera zooms in on the spurting blood, as if to make sure that no one accuses the film of lying about the “splatter” part.  Her quickly-hired replacement is Julie Parker (Forbes Riley), who soon notices that someone seems to be murdering her students.  Being a good teacher, Julie decides to protect her students by figuring out who the murderer is at St. Trinian’s College.  Fortunately, there aren’t that many suspects, for two reasons.  Number one, the students and faculty die with such frequency that it’s easy to guess who is responsible by process of elimination.  Number two, it appears that the makers of this film could only afford a handful of actors.  St. Trinian’s appears to have about twenty students and most of them appear to be in their early forties.

On the one hand, as I mentioned previously, Splatter University does live up to its name.  It’s obvious that the production didn’t have a huge budget but it appears that the majority of what the filmmakers did have was spent on fake blood and entrails because a lot of blood is spilled and one particularly gruesome scene even involves intestines spilling out of a body.  Agck!  (Seriously, the sight of the large intestine always freaks me out.)  I really can’t fault the film as a slasher flick, even if the killer’s identity is obvious.  That said, this was still a Troma release and, as such, there’s a lot about it that sucks.  Apparently, the original film was too short so Troma added some badly acted, “comedic” scenes of the students acting stupid.  Those scenes pad out the film’s length but they also screw with the pacing and they distract the viewer from what is otherwise a crudely affective, low-budget American giallo film.  But that’s Troma for you!

(And, let’s be honest — how can you not love Lloyd Kaufman?)

The TSL’s Horror Grindhouse: Satan’s Children (dir by Joe Wiezycki)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1974 film, Satan’s Children, tells the story of unfortunate Bobby Douglas (Stephen White).

Bobby is a teenager who lives in a hideous suburban house with his stepfather (Eldon Mecham) and his stepsister (Joyce Molloy), who looks old enough to be Bobby’s mother.  Bobby’s a rebellious kid who doesn’t understand why he should always have to cut the grass while his stepsister hangs out by the pool.  Bobby is sick of the whole scene, man.  When his stepfather yells at Bobby for having a small stash of marijuana in his room, Bobby decides to run away from home.  Seriously, that scene was totally melvin so I don’t blame Bobby.

Bobby goes to a bar, where an old man tries to talk to him until Jake (Bob Barcour) tells the old man to get lost.  Jake tells Bobby that he has to be careful because there are perverts all over the place.  Bobby nods and laughs because Bobby’s not a square.  He knows what’s up.  Jake invites Bobby to come hang out at his place and Bobby is like, “Cool, way too friendly stranger, I’ll get you in your rape van.”  Bobby goes home with Jake and is promptly raped.  With Bobby naked and bound, Jake calls all of his friends over and Bobby is then gang raped.  The scene where Jake and his friends drive the bound Bobby around is pure nightmare fuel and I can only imagine how audiences in 1974 reacted to it.

The next morning, a group of hippies found Bobby lying in a field and they take him back to their commune.  Of course, these folks aren’t just hippies.  They’re also Satanists!  Sherry (Kathleen Marie Archer) wants to let Bobby stay with them while she nurses him back to health.  Joshua (John Edwards), an older member of the group, says that Bobby isn’t welcome because Bobby is probably “queer.”  Simon (Robert C. Ray II), the turtleneck-wearing leader of the group, is also hesitant to allow Bobby to stay and again, it’s because Simon assumes Bobby must be gay.  Simon also makes it clear that he doesn’t want any lesbians in his Satanic cult either.  He just wants people who are prepared to carry out a blood sacrifice….

(I swear, that Satan.  Not only is he the ruler of Hell and the tormenter of souls and the fallen angel responsible for getting Adam and Eve kicked out of the Garden and bringing sin into the world, he’s also apparently a massive homophobe!)

While the Satanists torture Sherry for displeasing Simon, Bobby tries to figure out a way to escape.  Fair warning: the majority of the film’s finale involves Bobby running around in tighty-whities, which get progressively more and more mud-stained as the movie goes on.  Seriously, ew!  On the other hand, not one but two people manage to die as a result of accidentally wandering into quicksand.  If nothing else, it’s a reminder that Bobby isn’t the only incredibly stupid person in the movie.

This is a weird movie.  I imagine it was made to capitalize on the notoriety of the Manson Family but, with its extended opening scenes in the suburbs, it instead becomes an ennui-drenched look at how far people will go to escape conventional society.  Despite all the of the truly terrible things that happen to him, Bobby is not a sympathetic or likable character.  In fact, he comes across as being just the type of idiot who probably would get sucked into a cult.  That said, the film is truly a unique (if rather slow) experience and the brutal ending took me totally by surprise.  Like many grindhouse film, Satan’s Children is an oddity that you truly can’t look away from.

In The Shadow of Guilt (2022, directed by Keven Russell)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

An alcoholic writer is driving drunk when she runs over a little girl.  At first, she gets out to help but when she sees that the girl is dead, she just apologizes and drives off.  Later, she and another writer are at a rustic retreat.  The drunk writer has writer’s block.  The other writer has a secret.  A neighbor tells a story about another little girl who was killed mysteriously.  Eventually, a ghost shows up because the alcoholic has been living in the shadow of guilt.

I liked the idea behind this one but the action moved slowly and the two main actresses were not convincing.  It’s only a 62 minute film but it seemed like an eternity.  The ghost special effects were effective enough, though there were a few times when it looked like the ghost’s mask was about to fall off.  Brian Stewart, as the neighbor, did a good job in his one big scene.  They should have made the entire movie about him.  Main message: Don’t drive drunk and things like this movie won’t happen to you.