Warnings about new and emerging technology run amok has been a common theme in movies since damn near day one. From Frankenstein to Wells to the Terminator franchise, we’ve been counseled against the hazards of unchecked science we don’t fully grasp yet. With his debut feature, Appofeniacs, prolific music video director Chris Marrs Piliero uses a post-Pulp Fiction maze of rapid banter and intersecting narratives to raise a cautious eyebrow at the use of AI and deepfakes. What lands, lands solid, especially the frequent and ample violence, but what misses whiffs, and the mixed bag of a film winds up mostly a cautionary tale about aggrieved edgelords with no real problems and too much time on their hands.
Within a span of a couple of months we’ve received remakes of early-1980s cult favorite swords-and-sorcery epics. First out of the gate was M.J. Bassett’s take on Red Sonja, and now we have Psycho Goreman mastermind Steven Kostanski’s version of Deathstalker. While the former knows it’s goofy, it plays things relatively straight. The latter, however, leans into the campiness with a winking, over-the-top glee.
Fumika (Akari Takaishi, Baby Assassins) is your average college student. She has a crappy job, constantly fends off creepy men pestering her, and she’s very clumsy. Seriously, she falls down. A lot. Things change a wee bit, however, when she meets the ghost of a vicious hitman, Kudo (Masanori Mimoto, First Love), who occasionally possesses her and takes control of her body. It’s like Upgrade or even Venom at times as the two consciousnesses occupy the same space. (Or All of Me with fisticuffs?) After some coaxing, she agrees to help him exact revenge against the people who killed him. So goes the plot of Kensuke Sonomura’s new action-oriented ghost story Ghost Killer.
Isaac Ezban’s Parvulos: Hijos del Apocalips is very literal in its title. These are actual children of the apocalypse. Salvador (Farid Escalante Correa), Oliver (Leonardo Cervantes), and Benji (Mateo Ortega Casillas) are three brothers, the oldest, Sal, a young teen, surviving on their own after a virus causes the end of the world. They do all the typical apocalyptic things, scrounge food, do their best to get through every day, and tend to the dark, sinister secret lurking in their basement.
Stop me if you’ve heard this. Five college friends—an alpha male, an outdoorsy type, a tomboy, a hot girl, and a nerd. A spooky, remote cabin in the woods. (Actually, a spooky, remote Dutch villa in an Indonesian jungle, but the idea is the same.) A cemetery. A well. An old caretaker. No cell service. No power. Things get weird and people start dying. That’s customary horror fare. But from this basic framework, The Draft director Yusron Fuadi tweaks the formula in clever, inventive ways and crafts a fun, fresh take on what the movie calls “cheap Indonesian horror films,” and the oft-repeated tropes of the genre across national boundaries.
If you didn’t already think Christopher Lee was cool, one, really? Two, you may very well change your tune after watching The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee, the latest documentary from Jon Spira (Elstree 1976). As one might expect from the title, the film delves deep into the life and times of the iconic actor—don’t call him the King of Horror, he did not appreciate that—exploring every nook and cranny along the way.
“Can we speak ill of the living before it’s too late?” asks Magpie (Emma Appleton) in writer/director Dean Puckett’s The Severed Sun. It’s certainly one of those situations where if people had taken a moment to talk it out, many if not all of the more unfortunate events of the film could have been avoided. But then we wouldn’t have this moody, engaging, occasionally quite gory, if a bit spare entry into the folk horror canon.
The Elderly, from Spanish co-directors Raul Cerezo and Fernando Gonzalez Gomez, taps into a number of primal, deep-seated fears. Ideas of our bodies aging and betraying us touch on body horror; there’s the dread of losing our autonomy, in both a physical and mental capacity. It has something to say about how society values, or more accurately, doesn’t value the aged, attends to the looming specter of Spain’s fascist past, which may not be as far in the rearview as many believe, and even copes with the threat of climate catastrophe.
From the jump, A Wounded Fawn, the latest from director Travis Stevens (Girl on the Third Floor, Jakob’s Wife), flaunts its Italian influences, from the grainy, shot-on-16mm look, striking color palates, woman-in-peril motif, use of masks, prog-rock score, an owl creature lifted from Stage Fright, even the main car. Josh Ruben (Werewolves Within), balancing charm and menace, plays a serial killer who lures a potential victim, played by Sarah Lind (True Justice), to a remote cabin. Nothing good will come from that. For her anyway, it's a damn fine time for viewers.
A title like All Jacked Up and Full of Worms evokes certain images and anarchic feelings. But I’m here to say that Alex Phillips’ movie by that very accurate name involves all that the moniker promises and so, so much more. Sex, drugs, cannibal Juggalos, an erotic love hotel, sex dolls, disemboweling, and, of course, hallucinatory worms. Among much other lunacy. What else can one hope for from a single 72-minute motion picture?
Is there intelligent alien life out there? It’s a question that’s dogged humanity since we first looked up at the stars. And it’s also the central question in the life of Alexandra Baeza (Andrea Trepat), the protagonist and central character of Luis Tinoco’s sci-fi thriller The Antares Paradox. But the film also digs into the personal costs of the protagonist’s singular fixation as she struggles to make an impossible choice between fulfilling her lifelong dream and confronting a brutal familial loss.
