Horror Film Review: Trap (dir by M. Night Shyamalan)

Posted on October 3, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2024’s Trap, Cooper Abbott (Josh Hartnett) is a Philadelphia fireman taking his teenage daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), to a concert. Riley has been having a difficult time at school after recently falling out with two other girls, so seeing her favorite singer, Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan, daughter of the film’s director), should be just the thing to cheer her up.

However, when Cooper and Riley arrive at the stadium, Cooper is surprised by all the police officers and FBI agents milling around. After some checking, he discovers that the FBI believes a serial killer known as The Butcher will be at the concert. Under the leadership of profiler Josephine Grant (Hayley Mills), the authorities plan to check out every male at the show. As one helpful vendor puts it, “the entire show is a trap.”

Cooper is not happy to hear this because he is The Butcher. In fact, his latest victim is currently tied up in a basement somewhere. (Cooper occasionally uses his phone to check on how he’s doing.) However, Cooper is also a good father and wants to make sure Riley enjoys the concert. Can Cooper find a way to escape the stadium without ruining Riley’s special day?

That’s a pretty good premise for a suspense thriller, and the first hour of Trap works like a charm. Even though Cooper is a serial killer and the viewer knows he’s not someone they should root for, it’s hard not to be impressed with the way he skillfully manipulates everyone at the concert. He manages to steal a vendor badge. He learns the codeword venue employees are supposed to use to identify themselves to the police. He even steals a police radio so he can listen to Dr. Grant give orders to the cops. And he does it all while Riley enjoys the show. He’s just so diabolically clever that it becomes rather fascinating to watch.

Unfortunately, the film suffers a bit during the second hour. That’s when Lady Raven goes from being a figure performing on stage to an important supporting character. (Unfortunately, it turns out Saleka Night Shyamalan is a much better singer than actress.) Both Lady Raven and Cooper end up making some decisions that, in the grand scheme of things, don’t make much sense. The film is still entertaining, but the second half is not as tightly plotted as the first. Considering that M. Night Shyamalan is famous for his twist endings, it’s a bit strange that it ultimately feels like he never really figured out how he wanted Trap to end.

That said, the first hour of Trap is an enjoyably macabre mix of suspense and dark humor. That first hour is strong enough to make up for the weaker second half. Josh Hartnett puts his everyman charm to good use as a friendly family man who just happens to be a deranged serial killer. At its best, Trap is all about people trying to disguise their true nature. Cooper puts on an act of being a loving father while trying to find a way to continue killing. Lady Raven’s mentor (played by Kid Cudi) is friendly to his fans but a spoiled diva backstage. Even Lady Raven spends the second half of the film pretending to know less than she does. Probably the only character in the film who is truly genuine is Riley. She just wants to see her favorite singer.

Trap may not be Shyamalan’s best. It doesn’t hit you emotionally like The Sixth Sense and it’s nowhere near as icky as Old or Split. But it’s still an entertaining little thriller.

Horror On TV: Fear Itself 1.2 “Spooked” (dir by Brad Anderson)

Posted on October 3, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Tonight’s episode of Fear Itself stars the one and only Eric Roberts!

Eric plays Harry Siegel, a cop who is kicked off the force because of his brutal methods. Harry becomes a private investigator but, when one of his cases leads to him staking out a mysterious house, he’s forced to confront his past demons. This episode features Eric Roberts at his most intense.

Spooked originally aired on June 12th, 2008. Director Brad Anderson is best known for Session 9.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

October Hacks: Bikini Guillotine (dir by Jamie Grefe)

Posted on October 3, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

2025’s Bikini Guillotine is a slasher film that features plenty of bikinis but not one guillotine. The motiveless killer is a man who wears a mask that was put together with duct tape. He’s definitely a bad guy, but the true villain of this film is whoever was responsible for recording the dialogue.

The first half of this 65-minute movie is made up of footage of several bikini-clad girls hanging out in a pool. They’re all carrying red Solo cups, which they pretend to drink from despite the fact that they’re obviously empty. Every few minutes, they all hold up their Solo cups and go, “Whoo!” The majority of the dialogue is incoherent. Either you can’t hear a word that they’re saying, or you can hear the sound of their voices but you still can’t make out what they’re actually saying. Occasionally, there’s a strange echo effect that does nothing to make the dialogue any more legible. Strangely, we can hear the Solo cups. One girl taps a finger against her Solo cup and it’s suddenly the loudest thing in the movie. Whenever anyone puts their Solo cup down, the sound of the cup hitting the tile reverberates. The weird soundtrack gives certain moments a dreamlike feel, but for the most part, it just feels incredibly shoddy.

(On a personal note, it was impossible for me to look at all of these Solo cups without thinking about the Flipadelphia episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Flip! Flip! Flipadelphia!)

A coherent, non-muddy soundtrack is something that filmgoers tend to take for granted. It’s not until you watch a film like this that you really appreciate just how important sound actually is. I sat through this entire film, but I couldn’t tell you the names of any of the characters or how they even knew each other. Maybe that was revealed in the dialogue. Maybe it wasn’t. I’m not sure what anyone was actually talking about.

As for the killer, who knows why he was even there or why the word “guillotine” is even in the title. The killer does not carry a guillotine. Instead, he carries what appears to be a chakram with a bunch of rubber worms attached to it. A chakram is a flying disc that is supposed to have sharp edges. Traditionally, one uses a chakram by throwing it. Our killer uses his chakram like a knife. Or at least, I think he does. There are many scenes in which he’s seen plunging the chakram down, but apparently there wasn’t any money in the budget for fake blood, so who knows what he’s actually supposed to be doing with it.

The killer also has the power to hypnotize his victims just by looking at them. As such, every victim simply stops moving as soon as he looks at them. Not only does it rob the victims of their agency, but it also makes for a pretty boring slasher film. It’s just one victim after another, with no personality or variety. That said, at least we can actually understand the dialogue inside the house. “Hello?” “Are you guys here?” Spellbinding stuff, as I’m sure you can tell.

Whatever else one might say about it, this film does offer two important lessons to the aspiring filmmaker. Don’t promise a guillotine if you can’t deliver. Hire someone who knows how to record sound.

SOV Horror: Hollow Gate (dir by Ray Di Zazzo)

Posted on October 3, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

1988’s Hollow Gate begins with a Halloween party that almost goes terribly wrong. When he feels that his son Mark is not properly bobbing for apples, a drunken father (Richard London) shoves Mark’s face into the water and yells at him for embarrassing the family. Mark nearly drowns, and hopefully the family learns an important lesson about being overly competitive.

Ten years later, Mark (Addison Randall) is working at a gas station on Halloween night. An obnoxious man drives up with his girlfriend. The man wants some gas put in his car and he hands Mark his girlfriend’s panties. (I guess that’s how you tip in New Jersey.) Mark proceeds to stuff the panties into the car’s gas tank and then set them on fire. The man laughs as he drives away. However, he’s not laughing when the car blows up.

Two years after that, Mark harasses a woman at a Halloween shop. Everyone in town agrees that Mark has obviously been driven mad by the incident at the Halloween party, but nothing can be done about it because Mark’s wealthy grandmother (Pat Shalsant) owns the entire town. Mark is released to her care.

The next Halloween, four teenagers are invited to a party at Mark’s mansion. They discover that Grandma has been murdered and that Mark wants them all to put on some costumes that he ordered. When they are understandably reluctant to play Mark’s game, Mark decides that he’ll just wear each costume and kill his guests, one by one….

As far as SOV horror films are concerned, Hollow Gate is not a bad one. Director Ray Di Zazzo is able to capture a few memorable images. If none of the performances are exactly convincing, a few of them are so over-the-top that they’re entertaining. The gore is splattery enough to be effective, even if it’s not particularly realistic. The plot is not particularly original, but there are still enough scenes of lawyers and police officers discussing how Mark would be in prison if not for his wealthy family that you can at least argue that the film pretended to have something more on its mind than just cheap kills.

What truly makes this film memorable is the flamboyant killer. Mark not only changes costumes, but his methods are a bit more original than the typical hack-and-slash killer. Yes, he can use a knife and an axe, and he does just that in one scene. But he can also run you over with a thresher while dressed as a cowboy. Or he can dress up like an English gentleman and have two golden retrievers maul you to death. The dog scene is probably the most memorable one in the film, if only because the dogs themselves are very cute and seem to be having great fun as they lick their unfortunate victim to death. They’re the adorable canines of doom!

It’s a cheap movie with a predictable plot, but it also appears to be a film that is truly in love with Halloween and all of the customs that go along with it. The owner of the local costume store is ultimately just as important as the killer. In the true Halloween tradition, the story ends on an ambiguous note. Was that the boogeyman? Perhaps he was.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: Psychomania (dir by Don Sharp)

Posted on October 3, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1973’s Psychomania, Tom Latham (Nicky Henson) is the leader of The Living Dead, a motorcycle gang identified by their skull masks, their bad attitude, and their bizarre love of folk music. Under Tom’s leadership, the members of The Living Dead terrorize the small English town in which they live. They also spend a lot of time hanging out at the cemetery. Tom is death-obsessed. While talking to his girlfriend, Abby (Mary Larkin), Tom suggests that they should kill themselves. “Not that again, Tom,” Abby sighs.

One of the more clever aspects of Psychomania is that, for all of his attempts to be a nihilistic rebel who refuses to conform to the demands of society, Tom is actually a spoiled rich kid who is devoted to his mother (Beryl Reid) and who is still looked after by his butler, Shadwell (George Sanders). Tom’s followers may all be from the lower classes, but Tom most definitely is not. Instead, Tom is very much aware that his mother and Shadwell worship a toad god that can give its followers eternal life, but only if they kill themselves first. After Tom does kill himself, the members of The Living Dead bury him sitting on his motorcycle. He later bursts out of the ground on that same motorcycle and leads his followers on a rampage. Soon, nearly every member of The Living Dead has committed suicide and come back to life as an immortal. The only holdout is Abby.

Psychomania is an enjoyable, chaotic combination of genres. When they first appear, Tom and The Living Dead feel as if they came straight over from one of the many British films about the ’60s rivalry between the rockers and the mods. The Living Dead love their motorcycles and their leather jackets, and they’re not going to let anyone tell them what to do. They’re the type of characters who have appeared in countless biker films. It’s easy to imagine Tom looking at himself in a mirror and trying to imitate Marlon Brando as he says, “What have you got?” However, the film then adds a dash of the witchcraft films popularized by Hammer and Amicus in the late ’60s. Indeed, Tom’s fussy mother and the urbanely sinister Shadwell almost feel like parodies of the type of characters who appeared in those films. (It’s impossible not to smile when the giant toad appears.) The Living Dead then literally become the living dead and prove themselves to be just as relentless as the zombies in the films of George Romero. (That said, the self-amused bikers have more in common with the sanity-deprived characters in Romero’s The Crazies than with the shambling corpses of Night of the Living Dead.) The film ends on a note of sudden reversal, one that brings to mind countless Roger Corman films that featured villains who just didn’t know when to quit.

With all those different genres mashed together, it’s no surprise that Psychomania’s tone is all over the place. Moments of humor and parody are mixed with scenes of the resurrected Living Dead terrorizing their small town and Tom’s mother worrying, along with Shadwell, that perhaps Tom was too immature to be given immortality. Between the suicide montage, the giant toad, and the sight of Tom being buried while sitting on his motorcycle, Psychomania is relentlessly strange and all the more enjoyable for it. Director Don Sharp doesn’t let the action lag, and the film’s mix of bright color, biker imagery, and campy magic combine to make it a truly enjoyable work of pop art.

George Sanders committed suicide shortly after completing this film. He left behind a note that reportedly read, “I’m bored.” He doesn’t have a huge role in Psychomania, but his performance is one of the most memorable things about the film. He imbues Shadwell with a wonderful sense of arch disdain. He may have raised Tom, but that doesn’t mean he has to like him.

Horror Game Review: Crush, Crumble, and Chomp! (1981, Epyx)

Posted on October 3, 2026 by Jedadiah Leland

Crush, Crumble, and Chomp! is a terrifically addictive old-school PC game where you get to play the role of a giant monster and destroy the city of your choice. (Actually, your choices are pretty much limited to New York, San Francisco, and Tokyo.) You can play as a famous movie monster like Godzilla or you can create a monster of your own. As Serpentor the Giant Snake, I terrorized New York. As Swampy the Sea Monster, I terrorized San Francisco. As Tony Roboto, I terrorized Tokyo with mechanical precision.

Now, to be clear, when I say that this is an old-school PC game, I mean it’s very old school. Don’t bother trying to point-and-click. This game is totally keyboard-driven and, since it’s 45 years old, it’s not like there’s a manual lying around with all the commands in a neat list. I had to play the game a few times and push a lot of random buttons to learn just how to make my monster move from one part of the map to the other. But it was all worth it. Once you do learn that M is for move and L is for changing direction and that pushing G allows you to grab people and eat them, the game becomes very easy to learn.

If you create your own monster, you’ll be given a set of points and some powers to buy. Don’t make the mistake of buying every expensive power that you see because you’re also going to need to use whatever points you have left over to set how quickly your monster heals and how tough its hide is. Of the powers, I suggest purchasing the supersonic scream and the power to zap helicopters. The supersonic scream can destroy enemies even if they’re not in the square adjacent to you. As for the helicopters, they appear to be your greatest foe. They’re difficult to grab. Better just to zap them.

Once you get used to it and feel confident with the keyboard (and I do suggest keeping a list of what happens when you push each button), Crush, Crumble, and Chomp! is a monstrous good time. It can be played at the Internet Archive.

Time Walker (1982, directed by Tom Kennedy)

Posted on October 3, 2026 by Jedadiah Leland

While exploring the Egyptian tomb of King Tut, Prof. Douglas McCadden (Ben Murphy) finds a previously undiscovered chamber and a sarcophagus with a mummy inside. He takes the sarcophagus back to the California University of the Sciences, where he discovers that the mummy is covered in a dangerous green fungus. McCadden orders everyone not to touch the mummy. However, one of his students decides to steal the jewels that were buried with the mummy and also gives it a strong dose of X-ray radiation. The mummy, which was actually a hibernating alien, comes back to life and is soon causing havoc on campus. Frat boys and mummies make for a dangerous combination!

Time Walker was released in 1982 and features plenty of scantily clad coeds and green-tinted stalking scenes shot from the mummy’s POV. But the movie itself has more in common with the old Hammer and Amicus films than with the Friday the 13th era. The mummy is a throwback to the kind of monsters that used to haunt horror movies, and its alien origins bring to mind an old Quatermass serial, with Ben Murphy’s prickly American scientist serving as a stand-in for Quatermass himself. The idea of an extraterrestrial crash-landing in ancient Egypt and being buried in a pharaoh’s tomb is an interesting one. It’s just too bad that the film’s half-baked script and Tom Kennedy’s uneven direction don’t really do it justice. This was Tom Kennedy’s only film as a director. He was best-known for being one of Hollywood’s premier advertising men, overseeing the trailers for both the Indiana Jones films and the early Star Trek films.

Time Walker tries to be a little of everything: an homage to the old mummy movies, a slasher, and finally a sci-fi film about how humans should be nicer when greeting visitors from another planet. There are a few dependable character actors in the mix (it’s always good to see James Karen), but Ben Murphy is bland in the lead. The film ends on an overdramatic note and with the promise of “To be continued.”

The story would not be continued, but Time Walker later found new life and a new title when it showed up on Mystery Science Theater 3000 as Being From Another Planet. The joke I always remember from that episode is Joel Hodgson suggesting that the mummy was actually Pete Duel. Even Tom Servo and Crow were shocked.

Lifetime For October: Killing All My Sisters (dir by Haylie Duff)

Posted on October 3, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Killing All My Sisters

Oh no. Should Erin or I be worried?

Fortunately, the sisters in the title of this 2024 Lifetime film are not biological sisters. (Or blood sisters, in tribute to the Halloween season.) They’re sorority sisters. Well—one of them is. Most are just pledges, so they don’t really count yet. Don’t get me wrong: killing sorority sisters is still bad. It is simply not as bad as killing a biological sister. Of course, only one sorority sister actually dies on screen, so “all my sisters” is doing a lot of marketing work. It’s a Lifetime film. It happens.

Emily (Isabella Carlsen) is worried because her roommate, tennis phenom Jenna (Muguet Del Toro), is trying to join the Beta sorority. (“Beta forever!” Is that really a good slogan?) Led by Brittany (Grace Patterson), the house is deeply committed to hazing. Emily refused to join after a trust exercise nearly sent her off the roof of a multi-story building. When Jenna disappears, Emily is convinced Brittany’s ex-boyfriend Spencer (Stephen Gray) abducted her. The police won’t take her seriously because Jenna hasn’t been missing a full 24 hours, so Emily drags her artist mother Allie (Muretta Moss) into the search. Becoming a Beta, it turns out, can be dangerous.

Haylie Duff directed. She has starred in enough Lifetime movies that if this had been made ten years earlier, she probably would have played Emily. I have liked some of her other directing work, but Killing All My Sisters falls curiously flat. Too many scenes meander, as if no one had the nerve to tell Haylie the shot added nothing. In a movie that is supposed to be a race against time and which is supposed to be suspenseful, we get a lot of scenes that don’t actually do anything to tighten the drama. Indeed, the narrative often seems to move at a rather casual pace. We get an entire scene of Emily’s mother flirting with the neighbor. It adds up to nothing. I mean, it’s nice that Mom is still making the effort. Emily’s no longer living at home so why shouldn’t a conversation about landscaping turn into more? The scene itself just sits there.

The mystery is easy to solve. There is a bit where Emily announces she has to look for Jenna and then stands in the middle of campus looking left and right. I have to admit that I laughed out loud before I started narrating: “Is Jenna behind that tree? Maybe she’s coming out of that building?” The bigger problem is that some of the most important events happen off-screen. We had time for Mom hitting on the neighbor. We did not have time to watch a fairly important character wake from a coma and name her attacker.

This movie makes me glad I never joined a sorority. I was invited, same as I was invited to try out for cheerleading in high school. Neither was for me. I like my independence. I like my movie nights.

Horror Book Review: First Blood by David Morrell

Posted on October 3, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

First published in 1972, David Morrell’s First Blood tells the story of two men who go to war in what was then contemporary Kentucky.

Police Chief Wilfred Teasle runs Madison, Kentucky. He’s a Korean War veteran trusted with keeping his town quiet. When he spots a young, long-haired drifter, he harasses him and tries to run him out. When the drifter keeps coming back, Teasle arrests him. What Teasle doesn’t understand is that the young man is Rambo, a Vietnam veteran and former Green Beret still carrying the PTSD from his time as a POW. Triggered by a claustrophobic cell and the deputies putting hands on him, Rambo escapes into the mountains. One deputy dies in the station. Three more die on the first pursuit. Teasle becomes obsessed with taking him down even as his own injuries mount. Rambo knows he could slip the net and keep walking. The fight feels too good to leave. Many more people die before the novel reaches its tragic conclusion.

First Blood the novel is not a novelization of the film it later inspired. Rambo is not the misunderstood victim of the movie. He’s a mentally unstable man who kills numerous deputies and National Guardsmen. Teasle is not the snarling cartoon sheriff of the movie. He’s a stubborn, decorated chief who develops a strange respect for Rambo and feels a kinship because both of them served overseas. The difference is that Teasle was welcomed home. Society treats Rambo as a pariah, the walking symbol of an unpopular war.

Before we get into why this belongs in the horror column, First Blood is a very well-written novel. The chapters cut back and forth between Rambo and Teasle; both men are vividly drawn. The ending is dark and feels earned. Readers who expect the Stallone movie on paper will be surprised, and hopefully pleased.

As for the horror: you can read First Blood as Vietnam brought home. The same way Last House on the Left dragged overseas atrocity onto American porches, Morrell imagines the war fought in Kentucky hills. Rambo uses what the jungle taught him. Teasle becomes the stand-in for generals who cannot understand the enemy they created. The deputies and Guardsmen Rambo kills become the local version of the bodies left in the trees. Rambo is a monster. Like Frankenstein’s creature, he was shaped by the arrogance and carelessness of the people who made him.

No wonder Teasle feels sorry for him in the end.

October True Crime: Suitcase Killer: The Melanie McGuire Story (dir by Nicole L. Thompson)

Posted on October 3, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2004, the body of New Jersey resident Bill McGuire washed up in Virginia. He had been dismembered and his remains had been placed in three different suitcases, all of which someone apparently tried to dispose of by tossing them into the Chesapeake Bay. The subsequent investigation centered on Bill’s wife, Melanie.

The police theorized that Melanie, a nurse at a fertility clinic, was having an affair with a doctor and murdered Bill so that she could end her marriage without losing custody of her kids. Melanie claimed that Bill, a Navy veteran who was a computer programmer at the time of his death, was chronically unfaithful and abusive. She also claimed that he had huge gambling debts and that he had probably been murdered by the mob.

Melanie McGuire went on trial in 2007. At that time, I wasn’t quite the Court TV fiend that I would later become, but I can still remember hearing about the case. The media dubbed Melanie “the Suitcase Killer” and reported on all of the strange things that Melanie had done in the days leading up to Bill’s death. For her part, Melanie had an excuse for every bit of evidence presented against her. For instance, when she was accused of moving Bill’s car, she claimed that it was just a prank that she enjoyed playing on him. When it was pointed out that she had taken a sudden trip to Delaware after the murder, she said she was taking advantage of Delaware’s lack of a sales tax. (That actually makes sense to me. Taxation is theft!)

Did Melanie murder her husband? When it comes to questions like that, it’s always good to remember the wisdom of Occam’s razor. Which possibility makes more sense? Was Bill shot and dismembered by someone who not only had the motive and the opportunity to kill him, but who had also recently traveled to Pennsylvania to buy a gun? Or was Bill murdered by a mysterious gambling syndicate that he had apparently never mentioned to anyone in the past? Personally, I thought Melanie McGuire was obviously guilty. The jury agreed.

In 2022’s Suitcase Killer: The Melanie McGuire Story, Lifetime tells the story of the ill-fated McGuire marriage. Candice King plays Melanie. Michael Roark plays Bill. Wendie Malick appears as the prosecutor who made the case against Melanie. As is typical of Lifetime true-crime films, it attempts to give equal credence to both sides. As such, Roark plays Bill as a temperamental philanderer, while Candice King plays Melanie as someone who is a bit too quick to smile whenever her story is challenged. Of course, by showing both sides, the film actually reminds us that Melanie’s story never made any sense at all.

If you’re a fan of true crime, the film will hold your interest. That said, it’s also a Lifetime film and, as such, some of the more gruesome details are downplayed. We see a hand in one of the suitcases, but that’s about it. We’re left to imagine what else was stuffed in that Kenneth Cole luggage. Myself, I was left to wonder why you would waste not only one but three suitcases on something like this. That’s another reason why I don’t buy Melanie’s excuse that the Mafia did it. The Mafia would have found a much more efficient way of getting rid of the body.

In the end, the main reason to watch this movie is Wendie Malick’s performance as the prosecutor who is determined not only to get a conviction but to have fun doing it. Seriously, Malick deserved her own spin-off.

As for the real Melanie McGuire, she is currently in prison, but she will not be eligible for parole until she is about 101.