13 for 13: DeathBed (dir by Danny Draven)

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2002’s DeathBed, Karen (Tanya Dempsey) and Jerry (Brave Matthews) move into a new apartment. Karen is an illustrator of children’s books. Jerry is a professional photographer who occasionally does “nudie stuff.” Their new landlord and building superintendent is Art (Joe Estevez).

At first, the new apartment seems ideal. But then, strange things start happening. Karen starts to have visions of a woman being strangled in the apartment. She struggles to finish her latest illustration project and instead finds that strange and disturbing pictures have been drawn while she was apparently asleep. Jerry gets weird at work, telling models to pose as if they’ve been tied down to a mattress. Jerry and Karen’s sex life gets a bit more adventurous but even that leaves Karen worried. She feels as if she’s losing control.

Could the apartment be haunted?

Or could it have something to do with the creepy bed that Karen and Art previously found in a hidden room and which Karen decided to make the centerpiece of the new apartment?

Karen starts to do research. At first, she can’t find any evidence that a murder was ever committed in the apartment but then she discovers that the name of the street was changed in the 40s and that her new apartment actually has a very long and rather macabre history. Meanwhile, Jerry worries about her sanity. Deadlines are blown. Murders are committed. And the viewer is left asking one question….

Would you rent an apartment from Joe Estevez?

Actually, I’m being way too snarky with that question. DeathBed is surprisingly effective horror film and Joe Estevez gives a likable performance as Art. Personally, I still think Karen was way too quick to explore a previously hidden room with him but, otherwise, Art comes across as being a genuinely nice guy.

DeathBed is actually one of the better films that I’ve seen from Full Moon Pictures. While I wasn’t a huge fan of Danny Draven’s direction of Hell Asylum, he does an excellent job with DeathBed, creating and maintaining an atmosphere of ominous doom and gradual decay. What makes the film so effective is that Karen and Jerry don’t fall apart immediately. Instead, it’s a gradual process. The viewer can see it happening but Karen and Jerry can’t. Brave Matthews and especially Tanya Dempsey are well-cast as the troubled couple. Dempsey gives an especially strong performance, playing a woman who has used her art to create the ideal life that she’s never had.

DeathBed has an interesting story and a few creative twists, even if the film’s actual ending what come as a huge surprise to experienced horror fans. I appreciated that Karen’s visions of the previous murder appeared to carry hints of the infamous Black Dahlia case. It served to remind the viewer that real life can sometimes be just as terrifying and mysterious as the movies.

Would I rent an apartment from Joe Estevez?

Well, probably not. Not after seeing what happened with Karen and Jerry. But I don’t blame Karen and Jerry for wanting the apartment. It’s a nice apartment. It’s just that there are times that hidden rooms should definitely remain hidden.

13 for 13: Hell Asylum (dir by Danny Draven)

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Would you watch a reality show produced by Joe Estevez?

Of course not! Reality TV …. hey, that’s the form of entertainment that is destroying our culture and leaving viewers unable to think for themselves! Reality TV is a pox on our house. Thanks to reality TV, the Kardashians are more famous than they have any right to be. Jennifer Welch has become a political pundit despite having all the charm of a sour lemon. People now feel like they have to live every moment as if there’s a million people watching and as a result, it’s become difficult to connect in any meaningful way…..

Eh. Actually, I like reality TV more than I should and I probably would watch a reality show produced by Joe Estevez.

I mean, why not? The best reality shows are always kind of sleazy and there are few actors who are as talented at playing sleazy characters as Joe Estevez. If Martin Sheen often seems as if he’s auditioning to be the Pope, his brother Joe comes across as if he’s auditioning to be the tabloid reporter who writes a slanderous story about the Pope. The fact that Joe Estevez looks like a drunk version of his brother only serves to make him all the more effective as someone who you wouldn’t necessarily want to be associated with. (Unless, of course, he could make you a lot of money….)

In Hell Asylum, Joe Estevez plays Stan, a network television executive. The movie opens with a show being pitched to him. The pitch, like many of the scenes in Hell Asylum, goes on way too long. Basically, a group of models have been recruited to spend the night in a supposedly haunted asylum while being filmed. The pitch is nothing special but Stan needs a hit.

Of course, it turns out that the asylum really is haunted. It takes a while but eventually, the models and the television crew end up being stalked by a bunch of mysterious hooded figures. (Brinke Stevens is credited as being the “Head Spectre.”) The murders are filmed with a blue tint, which is creepy at first but eventually just hurts your eyes. There’s some gore, but it’s mostly just some red gloop and rope meant to stand-in for spilled intestines. It’s not particularly scary but at least it’s only 72 minutes.

Of course, Joe Estevez thinks that he has his hands on America’s hottest new reality show. At first, I thought the movie was being a bit too cynical but then I thought about all of the real-life deaths that I’ve seen posted to twitter and YouTube and I realized that I was probably being naive. We actually did have a reality show in which each episode ended with someone pretending to “die.” Murder in Small Town X was set up like Survivor, except that no one was voted off the island. Instead, they were voted to meet the killer. Even though no one actually died, I would have to think it would be more infinitely more traumatic to know that a bunch of people voted for you to be pretend-killed instead of pretend-exiled. That said, Murder In Small Town X was actually a lot of fun!

I wonder if Joe Estevez produced it.

13 for 13: Parasite Lady (dir by Chris Alexander)

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

2023’s Parasite Lady is a cinematic poem.

Miranda (Arrielle Edwards) awakens in her coffin. Tall with long red hair, she makes for a haunting figure as she strides across a snowy field and heads to a carnival where she finds her next victim. Though the film is shot on video, director Chris Alexander still manages to make our real world feel like some sort of otherworldly fantasy, a vision that balances on the line between being a dream and being a nightmare. Everything about the carnival feels off-center and off-balance. Even the familiar rides and the posters of 21st century pop cultural icons like Captain Jack Sparrow add to the overall otherworldliness of the location. Dracula and Sparrow, represented at the same carnival? The past is meeting the present.

Miranda takes her victims back to a cheap motel, the type of place where everyone has probably spent at least one night. It’s the type of motel that you see sitting off the side of the road while you’re driving and you think to yourself, “How does that place even stay open?” But, when it’s late at night and your eyelids are feeling heavy, you’re happy to see it. It reminded me a bit of the motel where 11 year-old me lived for a few months with my mom and my sisters. My mom and my two eldest sisters paid for our stay by working as maids. Me, I spent my days exploring the hallways and listening at the doors. Every night, I would look out the window of my room and watch a movie playing at a drive-in that sat on the other side of a nearby creek. I would make up my own stories and dialogue to go along with the images. Who needs sound when you’ve got imagination?

Much like those drive-in movies that I watched, Parasite Lady is a bit of an enigma. There’s very little dialogue. The majority of the 43-minute film features a soundtrack made up of muted music and sound effects. Instead, it’s all about the imagery. Much like the vampire films of Jean Rollin, the film plays out like a cinematic dream. It’s less important to understand why Miranda exists than to just accept that she does. Why do her victims seem to be instantly drawn to her? Well, why is anyone drawn to self-destruction? That’s the world in which we live. That’s also the world in which Miranda lives, though she doesn’t necessarily want to. Parasite Lady is drenched in an atmosphere of ennui.

Earlier, I compared the film to the works of Jean Rollin. I would also compare this film to Jess Franco’s wonderfully atmospheric Female Vampire. The scenes of Miranda walking through the snow and the carnival bring to mind the lengthy shots of Lina Romay walking through the wilderness in Franco’s film. Much like Female Vampire, Parasite Lady leaves one wondering if eternal life is really worth all of the angst and the suffering. Arielle Edwards has a strong physical presence that, much like Lina Romay in Female Vampire, allows her to dominate the screen without having to speak.

Executive produced by Charles Band and released by Full Moon Pictures, Parasite Lady is an unforgettable dream of dark and disturbing things.

13 for 13: Witchouse (dir by David DeCoteau)

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

When I first started writing for Through the Shattered Lens, I wasn’t sure how long my reviews should be. I went over to Rotten Tomatoes and I read their guidelines for reviews and I discovered that a review should be, at minimum, 300 words long.

300 words? I thought, I can do that!

Truth be told, sometimes I can’t. Sometimes, you see a movie where it’s a struggle to even come up with 300 words. When that happens, I resort to filler. I’ll tell you about my weekend. I’ll tell you about a funny thing that happened to me in high school. I’ll give you a long-winded story about my early days as a TSL reviewer. I’ll do whatever I need to do to make sure that I can reach at least 300 words.

The importance of filler was clearly on the mind of David DeCoteau when he directed the 1999 film, Witchouse. (And yes, that’s how the title is spelled.) Typically, a film has to run a minimum of 65 to 70 minutes for it to be considered a feature film. Witchouse features three minutes of opening credits, three minutes of closing credits, and a lot of stock footage from a film called Dark Angel: The Ascent. In fact, the film uses the Dark Angel stock footage not once but twice. The finished film runs 72 minutes so obviously David DeCoteau and Full Moon Pictures got what they needed out of all that filler. Fortunately, the audience gets what it needs as well. Witchouse is a film that announces from the start that it shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

The film takes place at a mansion in Dunwich, Massachusetts on a stormy night. Elizabeth (Ashley McKinney) has gathered together a group of friends for a party. When her friends arrived, I assumed they had all gone to high school together. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the characters were all supposed to still be in high school! Elizabeth wants to hold a seance so that she can contact the spirit of her ancestor, a witch named Lilith (Ariauna Albright). Centuries ago, Lilith was burned at the stake. Elizabeth is hoping to bring Lilith back from the dead and she’s willing to sacrifice her friends to do it. Her friends, for the most part, just want to have sex in a big creepy mansion and who can blame them?

If this plot sounds familiar, it’s probably because the story itself was largely lifted from Night of the Demons, with the horribly burned Lilith even resembling the decaying Angels from Kevin Tenney’s classic shocker. Witchouse is never quite as much fun as Night of the Demons. For instance, there’s nothing in Witchouse that can match the subversive oddness of the lipstick scene from Night of the Demons. At its best, Witchouse is occasionally atmospheric and it features decent performances from Ashley McKinney and Monica Serene Garnich. At its worst, the film is kind of boring.

That said, I will give Witchouse credit for totally frustrating my autocorrect. How does one pronounce Witchouse?

13 From 13: Totem (dir by David DeCoteau)

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

1999’s Totem opens with a young woman named Alma Groves (Marissa Tait) running through the wilderness.

She runs until she reaches an isolated cabin. Entering the cabin, she finds five other people have already arrived. She doesn’t know who they are and they don’t know her. In fact, she doesn’t even know why she suddenly felt the need to stop eating lunch and to run until she found the cabin. She’s not even sure how she found herself in the wilderness to begin with. Everyone else at the cabin has a similar story. They were all going about their day until, suddenly, an image of the cabin entered their mind and they felt compelled to run until they found it.

At first, Paul (Jason Faunt) comes across as being a chivalrous and friendly jock type. Leonard McKinney (Eric W. Edwards) is a cocky womanizer who is upset that he was compelled to leave in the middle of having sex (or so he claims). Robert Cole (Tyler Anderson) is the angry rebel who is reluctant to talk about his past. As for the other women, Roz (Sacha Spencer) is sarcastic while Tina (Alicia Lagano) is a seemingly innocent high school student. Along with Alma, the six of them are trapped in the area by an invisible force field.

While trying to determine where the invisible barriers have been placed, the six of them come across a cemetery and three sinister-looking statues. As the night continues, it becomes clear that, whenever someone dies, one of the statues comes to life. But why are there six people and only three statues? “Three to be killed and three to kill!” Robert says.

Directed by David DeCoteau and produced by Charles Band’s Full Moon Pictures, Totem is about as incoherent as you would probably expect from this production team. However, it’s a cheerful sort of incoherence, one where the confusing story is at least told with some energy and the entire thing has a “make it up as you go along” sort of feel to it. It’s remarkable how the people in the cabin keep figuring out all of the extra rules that determine how the three killer statues work. Myself, I sat through all 68 minutes of this film and I’m still not quite exactly sure what was going on. That said, the confusing nature of the story works to the film’s advantage. At its best, Totem manages to achieve a sort of dream-like intensity. Who hasn’t had that dream about finding yourself in the middle of nowhere with absolutely zero clue how you got there or how to get home?

You know what else works to this film’s advantage? That 68 minute running time. The film essentially feels like an extended episode of an old horror anthology show. Think of it as being a bloody episode of something like Night Gallery or Tales From The Crypt. It’s a piece of gory fun that doesn’t really require too much of the audience. It’s cinematic junk food and that is definitely meant as a compliment.