Watching Slash/Backimmediately brought to mind Attack the Block, as it is also a movie about a group of marginalized kids fighting an alien attack, and John Carpenter's The Thing, because it's an alien attack movie set in a snowy area. And also because the characters in the movie talk about The Thing directly. Director Nyla Innuksuk is for sure not hiding that film's influence.
The director is Inuit, and majority of the young cast of amateur actors were found primarily in the Inuit community of Pangnirtung, near where it was filmed. That's the film's greatest strength, and also at times it's biggest weakness. Getting a glimpse into a community that does not get a lot of cinematic representation is a treat. And for the most part, the young cast is pretty good. But there are times where their lack of experience definitely comes across in some line readings and stiffness.
I also really loved how the aliens are depicted wearing what are essentially the skins of its victims. What was probably a pretty cheap effect to pull off ends up being both gross and at times, pretty funny.
At the beginning of this countdown I mentioned that the majority of the movies I would be watching would be selected randomly by setting my Letterboxd Watchlist to shuffle, and the genre to horror, and then watching whatever shows up first (and is currently available to watch in some form). But I think this is the first movie that's a miss, because Five Dolls for an August Moon really isn't a horror film. It's more of a murder mystery, and not truly a giallo mystery either, even though it was directed by Mario Bava.
Loosely based on Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, it also of course brought to mind Glass Onion, though unlike that one, this one does not have a detective on the case, just a murderer, who is picking off the guests on a private island one by one.
Despite some really groovy interiors, costumes, and, on the women, hair, I found this to be a total snooze. I kept hoping it might get garish when the murders started, but those were pretty boring too. Alas.
And maybe if I wasn't wanting and expecting a horror movie, I would have felt different. But I kept waiting for it to turn into the kind of movie I expect from Mario Bava, and it never did. So, the first complete miss on this countdown, in my opinion.
I watched Five Dolls for an August Moon on Kanopy.
Are Samara Weaving movies a genre unto themselves? That genre being a movie where Samara Weaving is fighting for her life through the entire film and eventually ends up covered in blood? Because Azrael definitely fits into that genre.
And sure some of that genre has been good. And I'm usually also a sucker for the other genre this falls into: post-apocalyptic horror. But this one just didn't do it for me. I'll give it credit for originality in one respect though: it is practically dialogue free.
The set up is, the Rapture has taken the majority of humans from Earth. Some of those remaining now live in a cult that believes speech is a sin, and have removed their vocal chords to prevent speaking. Weaving plays a woman who has escaped the cult with her lover - and that cult wants them back.
Oh, and there's also a band of burnt-to-a crisp, flesh-eating demons running around trying to eat these mute cultists, and when they do find them, ooof. It's pretty grisly.
When the movie began, I was kind of digging it. It takes place in some beautiful woods, and the cinematography is gorgeous. But then it just becomes a series of fights and flights, flights and fights, with Weaving ending up covered in blood, as that genre requires. The very, very ending, seems to throw a bit of a twist into the mix, though I'm not sure I really understood it. But also, I didn't really care.
Monster In the Closet is another horror movie partially set in San Francisco, though the majority takes place in a fictional town that is clearly Los Angeles. I will give the movie props for its finale, which does indeed take place on the streets of San Francisco, in and around North Beach and the Transamerica building.
I'll be blunt and tell you that Monster In the Closet is a really stupid movie, but intentionally so. It was distributed by Troma Entertainment, definitely not a company known for hits highbrow taste, and it is literally about a monster (a pretty well designed one, for how cheap the movie is), that hides in closets, attacking and killing people, and somehow its lone existence is enough to set the entire planet into a panic over the end of the world.
But for such a stupid movie, it has an insanely stacked cast full of basically a who's who of 1970's and 1980's character actors, including Henry Gibson, Paul Dooley, Donald Moffat, Claude Atkins, John Carradine, and (a topless!) Stella Stevens.
Horror comedies can be pretty bleak, and Monster In the Closet is no exception. But! I did laugh a handful of times, and the ending is just so silly, I couldn't help but kinda love this dumb movie.
It's streaming free on various platforms, and I'm pretty sure all the copies are crappy VHS transfers. When are we getting a remastered Blu-ray release??
Starve Acre is an intriguing bit of British folk horror that's also a bit of a downer, as it centers on the death of a child, so don't say I didn't warn you.
Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark star as a couple living on the moors in what appears to be the late 1960's or early 1970's. They have a young, asthmatic son who says he has been hearing the voice of someone named Jack Grey when he sleeps. After he's involved in a violent incident at a local fair, his parents take him to a psychiatrist who runs tests, and finds nothing unusual. Then tragedy strikes.
Gradually the husband's work as an archeology professor begins to meld with scary folk tales from his past, and when a mysterious hare makes its way into their home, things get really weird.
I do have a soft spot for folky horror, and liked a lot of this. The hare is both cute and creepy (though I wish they'd made its eyes more realistic), and there are a few surprising developments near the end. But it's also a pretty slow burn, and I did find my mind wandering a few times. So, not a crowd pleaser, but definitely interesting.
I think the only reason I thought Night Schoolmight be worth a watch is because it was the film debut of Rachel Ward, an actress I always liked back in the 1980's, primarily in the miniseries The Thorn Birds, but also in the movies Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, and Against All Odds. And for a first film, she does give a pretty good performance, even if the movie isn't that great. And gosh, just look at her. Is she pretty or what?
Night School is basically a slasher film, though it could be argued it's actually a giallo, especially since one of the film's other stars is Leonard Mann, who appeared in a few Italian giallos (and spaghetti westerns). He plays the detective on the hunt for a black leather-clad, motorcycle-helmeted killer who decapitates victims and then submerges their heads in water, to be discovered later. When it turns out two of the victims were students of the same anthropology professor at a local all girls college, suspicion falls on him. His being a serial philanderer doesn't help his case with the police, or the latest research assistant he's having an affair with (played by Ward).
Having the detective be the center of the story also makes it sound like a giallo, and some of the kills - or at least, discovery of those kills, especially a morbidly hilarious discovery in a restaurant - are lurid. But a sex scene involving red paint in a shower (!) is the most colorful thing in the movie, and the ultimate whodunit reveal is not nearly convoluted enough by giallo standards. So it probably falls more accurately into the realm of mediocre 80's slashers.
Night School is available to rent online, but I watched it on a Blu-ray from my local library.
The latest movie by the Adams family of filmmakers came out earlier this year, but I decided to put off watching it until this countdown because it's been a bit of a tradition to try and include their films each year. (You can see past entries here, here, here, and here.)
Mother of Flies is a bit more of a return to the stories and style of movie they started out making, after last year's period piece Where the Devil Roams, and 2024's bigger budgeted and effects heavy Hell Hole. And I think they really do their best work when they're working on these simpler tales, closer to home, as I like this one a lot more than those last two.
The story, about a teenage girl with terminal cancer (Zelda Adams), who decides to see a witch (Toby Poser), as a last ditch effort at healing, and her skeptical father (John Adams), who does his best to support this plan, also hits close to home, as both Toby Poser and John Adams have dealt with their own cancer diagnoses in the past, and Zelda is dealing with the genetic implications of that.
And while I am not sure I entirely understand how the story ultimately plays out (the ending is a tad confusing), I really thought the cinematography was beautifully shot, and could feel the more personal aspects of the story play out in the dialogue and performances.
I don't always love the movies the Adams family makes, but I will always absolutely love that they continue to make them.
I think I've mentioned before how I wish Letterboxd had some kind of note or tag you could easily add to a film when you add it to your watchlist, because a lot of the time I have no idea why the hell I felt like a movie ever deserved to be added.
So, I really have no idea how or why The Children ended up on my list. But I'm not mad about it! This movie is nuts! A school bus drives through a toxic cloud, turning the kids into zombies with black fingernails. The kids wander around with their arms outstretched, looking for hugs, but lo, pity the fool who falls into their toxic embrace, as they will surely meet their doom.
I think the movie is trying to make some kind of commentary on irresponsible parenting since it's filled with parents getting stoned during the day, smoking while pregnant, or just generally ignoring their kids. Though really, wasn't that just standard parenting in the 1970's??
It's extremely low budget (though it stars Martin Shaker, an actor probably best known for his role as John Travolta's brother the priest in Saturday Night Fever), but was released on Blu-ray in 2018 by Vinegar Syndrome. I assume the print I watched on Prime is that print, but it's weird how some of the scenes look very faded and rough, while other scenes look absolutely pristine.
Infested is a French flick you definitely shouldn't see if you have a thing about spiders. Because if it had me - someone who's not particularly scared of them - cringing, squirming, and occasionally screaming, it just may kill you.
Set primarily in a Paris apartment building, it plays a bit like a virus horror film, with the characters being told not to leave the building, as they desperately try to avoid an infection, although this time the infection is actually an infestation.
There are a lot of scenes of the characters having to traverse dark hallways and enter creepy rooms, as the building quickly fills with webs and giant spiders. So while there's nothing particularly original about that set-up, it's done well, and kept me pretty squirmy the while time.
Infested is available to rent online, and is also streaming on Shudder.
Asylum is the fourth Amicus Productions anthology film I've included in my countdown over the years (you can find the others here, here, and here). Amicus produced seven in total, but of the three I haven't yet included in this countdown, there are only two I haven't already seen (I watched Tales From the Crypt last Christmas). So those final two will definitely find their way onto this countdown eventually.
Like The House That Dripped Blood, Asylum's screenplay was penned by Robert Bloch, based on four of his own stories. The set-up involves a doctor arriving at his new post in an asylum for the "incurably insane." As he meets various patients, they explain what led to their asylum stays, and those stories make up the anthology.
The first, "Frozen Fear," is a fairly typical tale of murder, and revenge from the beyond the grave, but the special effects are kind of unique, so I liked it despite it feeling a tad cliched and ultimately not making a whole lot of sense.
"The Weird Tailor" features Peter Cushing, but the story itself, involving a tailor in dire need of money and a man with very specific tailoring needs, is fairly predictable and ultimately pretty silly.
"Lucy Comes to Stay" is also very predictable, but it stars Charlotte Rampling and Britt Eckland at the height of their beauty, so it's at least visually appealing.
The final story (aside from the story that ties it all together in the end) is "Mannequins of Horror," starring Herbert Lom as a doctor turned patient who is convinced he can bring his handmade dolls to life. This story is so kooky, and the dolls are so endearingly silly looking (they have detailed life-like heads, and robot bodies, and walk around like windup toys), but it seems to be played completely straight, so it had me a bit confused. Ultimately it was probably my favorite despite its silliness. Or maybe because of it! (Also, the maniacal laugh at the end has to be heard to be believed.)
Asylum is available to stream on multiple services. I watched it on Hoopla, to avoid ads.
Lucky is an exceedingly frustrating film, but at least it's a short, exceedingly frustrating film.
Brea Grant, who also wrote the screenplay, stars as May, a self-help book writer who finds herself pursued daily by a masked man who enters her house and tries to kill her. Her live in boyfriend reacts to this scenario nonchalantly, and then disappears, leaving her to deal with the potential killer on her own. Which she does, day after day and night after night. The police are also unhelpful, reacting to her situation without much concern. The expectation seems to be that this is just a situation she'll have to continue to deal with on her own.
I kept waiting for the movie to mean more than what it so very obviously means, but it never does, down to its very heavy handed and on-the-nose ending. It is well directed by Natasha Kermani, and Brea Grant gives a good performance, but I think it's ultimately so disappointing because in the beginning it is genuinely intriguing. But it just never pays off.
Seems I can't get enough of cat-centered horror. This time we have The Shadow of the Cat, a Hammer production about the murder of an elderly rich woman by her husband and two servants, and the cat who witnesses the murder and seeks revenge.
So it's not really a horror movie in the classic sense, and it's not really a murder mystery since there's no mystery about who committed the murder. What it is, is a delight, because every time Tabitha the cat gets her revenge on the bad guys - seen from her POV - it had me gleefully laughing.
Of course there's always a bit of apprehension watching older movies that feature animals in prominent roles because we know there was a lot less attention paid to the animals' safety and comfort back then. For instance, there's an uncomfortable moment when Tabitha is held by her neck scruff that I really did not enjoy watching.
I do think editing did a lot of the heavy lifting, but it's also true that the shoot utilized a lot of cats because so many would just bolt from the scene and never come back. The excellent blog Cinema Cats has a good article about the film shoot and its troubles. So I do recommend the movie, but with the caveat (catveat?) that perhaps the cats didn't have the best time making it.
The Shadow of the Cat is available to rent online. I watched it on a Blu-ray borrowed from my library.
I've included films by French director Quentin Dupieux in this countdown three other times (Deerskin; Mandibles; Rubber), but it's been a few years since he's made the list. I figured he was due back for inclusion, so I watched Smoking Causes Coughing, which once again, like the other Dupieux films featured in this countdown, isn't strictly a horror movie, but definitely includes some pretty horrible moments weaved into his usual absurd and surreal humor.
Essentially, this is a Power Rangers parody meets Tales From the Crypt. The "Power Rangers" are "Tobacco Force," and when they cannot defeat their enemies using brute force, they use the combined toxic elements found in cigarettes to destroy them. Their leader, Chief Didier, a giant rat who is constantly drooling green sludge from his mouth ("It could be detergent. It could be acid. We don't know!"), is also a ladies' man who two of the Rangers are in love with. Oh, and he's played by a puppet.
Didier sends the Tobacco Force on a team-building retreat where they, and other people/things, end up spending most of their time telling each other scary stories, which are then depicted, horror movie anthology style, as stories within the story. If this all sounds exceedingly stupid, you're right. But it also made me laugh, a lot. In all, its combination of extreme gore and absurdity reminded me of both Monty Python and Sam Raimi, which is a pretty strong combination.
As of this writing, Smoking Causes Coughing is available to stream free on Kanopy and Hoopla.
At first glance you may assume, as I did, that the anthology horror film The Uncanny, starring Peter Cushing, is an Amicus production. But while it shares a producer with several of those films, it's actually a Canadian and British production from "The Rank Organisation," perhaps the worst name for a production company ever.
And to be sure, it's not as good as an Amicus production - it's got some terrible effects and egregious dubbing - but it makes up for this in having stories that are all centered on cats. And at times, it's pretty funny.
Cushing plays an author trying to get a book about the evils of cats published. He visits his publisher, played by Ray Milland, and regales him with three "true" stories about evil cats. In the first story, a rich woman intends to will everything to her many cats, and is murdered. In the second, an orphaned girl and her cat are tortured by the bratty cousin she is forced to live with. And in the final story, an actor (Donald Pleasance) and his mistress (Samantha Egger) murder his wife and then have to deal with the dead wife's spooky cat.
In all three, the people are much more evil than the cats, even if the cats do get their revenge. So it's a little odd that the Cushing character is so fixated on the cats and not, you know, the actual villains in these stories. But then again, I've always found people with cat phobias to be pretty irrational.
I saw Until Dawn after seeing the new Resident Evil. Both films are based on video games, but Resident Evil has raised the video game movie bar so high, I couldn't help but make comparisons in my head as I was watching it. And Until Dawn just pales in comparison.
Resident Evil somehow managed to fit so many aspects of game play into the film without it feeling like you were watching a video game. Things like the character talking to himself as he explores new scenarios, or finding a gun in one room, but then having to figure out where the bullets are, or being dumb and tossing aside a tool that will definitely come in handy later.
But the main conceit of Until Dawn is straight up video game play. All of the characters keep dying over and over again until they can figure out how to make it through the night and kill the big bad. And sure, that concept doesn't immediately mean it's going to feel boring and repetitive. But it felt boring and repetitive. It didn't help that none of the characters is very interesting, so I was never invested in their survival.
There was one night in their long series of nights that I did find genuinely surprising and grossly hilarious, and another night that cleverly turns the movie into a found footage film, but the movie just did not have enough of that ingenuity for me to feel fully engaged.
Circus of Horrors is another movie that I watched because it's on my shower curtain. (Previous shower curtain watches can be found here and here.) It's a lurid British film, somewhat along the lines of Peeping Tom, which came out the same year, thought it's not nearly as good as that one.
Describing the plot makes it sound insane: A plastic surgeon botches a surgery and goes on the run, changing his name, but then he performs a successful facial surgery on the disfigured young daughter of the owner of a circus but when that owner is mauled to death by a bear, the surgeon takes over the circus, filling it with formerly disfigured women he is able to turn beautiful, but only if they agree to become performers in his circus, and when they eventually get tired of that life he kills them.
Like I said, pretty insane.
While the film has some good visuals and costumes, I wish it was as entertaining as the plot makes it sound. Alas, I found it to be pretty boring, and it took me two days to finish it because I kept getting distracted by other things, like my phone. Or the sun setting. Or sleep.
I watched it on Tubi, which seems to have two versions, one is a really good print, and one is terrible. Choose wisely. Or choose differently, as it's probably not actually worth watching.
I haven't watched a lot of Larry Fessenden's movies - and to be sure, there are a lot of them - but my dad's a big fan, and recommended Depraved, Fessenden's modern take on the Frankenstein story, so figured I'd dive in for this countdown.
Dr. Frankenstein this time around is Henry (David Call) a war veteran with untreated PTSD who deals with his trauma by creating life in his Brooklyn loft-turned-laboratory. He names his creation Adam (Alex Breaux), and Adam is quick to learn the basics of bodily coordination, though mastering the subtleties of human interactions are harder to instill.
There are a lot of parallels to the two classic Universal films, such as a version of the Pretorious character, called Polidori (played by Josh Leonard of The Blair Witch Project) and Adam's desperate yearning for a bride, which comes to equally disastrous ends.
It's a low budget movie, so it gets creative with some of the special effects, including some groovy "monster vision," as we see though Adam's eyes at times, and it's a pretty psychedelic view.
But the best thing about Depraved is probably Alex Breaux's performance as Adam. Like the best of Frankenstein's monsters, he is both pathetic and scary, and he carries the entire picture on his patched-together shoulders.
Wes Craven's Deadly Blessing is another one of those movies I thought I may have seen before, but also thought, maybe it was just that I remembered the poster, which, to be fair, is pretty memorable:
If I had seen it, I remembered nothing about it, including that fact that a young Sharon Stone has a supporting role, and is maybe the woman on the poster? But with darker hair than she has in the movie?
There are a few things I liked about this movie. I liked that it has so many female characters, including the three leads, Maren Jensen (probably best known for the original Battlestar Galactica series); Susan Buckner (who only made three movies, but did a lot of TV); and the aforementioned Sharon Stone (in only her second movie role).
I liked the weird, made up religious sect led by Ernest Borgnine, the "Hittites," who "make the Amish look like swingers," and how the movie sets them up as the bad guys, but also maybe they're victims too? But also maybe they have a point with all the warnings they keep passing out?
The movie is essentially a slasher, but with possible supernatural overtones, and again, keeps you guessing about what's really going on. But that leads me to what I did not like. The ending just goes off the rails, with two ridiculous revelations, one of which is pretty offensive, and the other that essentially negates the entire movie that preceded it and doesn't make a lot of sense.
This is a Wes Craven movie, so it does have some good scares, looks great, and features some actors and scenarios that he loved to use over and over in multiple movies. It's that ending though. So dumb.
Deadly Blessing is available to rent online, and is streaming free on Hoopla, although the print was pretty bad. So I watched a Blu-ray copy from my library instead.
When I started watching this movie I was convinced I had started to watch the wrong Little Monsters. No, it's not that I was intending to watch the 1989 Little Monsters starring Fred Savage (but perhaps I should?). I was set to watch a zombie movie starring Lupita N'Yongo as a kindergarten teacher protecting children from zombies. But the opening montage featured an Australian couple bickering with each other over increasingly stupid topics. So I double-checked to make sure I was indeed watching the 2019 movie Little Monsters and not some Australian sitcom.
And indeed I was.
I did know going into it that it was a comedy, but I thought the whole film would center on Lupita N'Yongo's character. Instead, she shows up about 20 minutes into the movie, while the first part focuses on Dave (Alexander England), a deadbeat musician who has just broken up with his girlfriend and is living with his sister and nephew, Felix (played excellently by a kid with the best name ever: Diesel La Torraca ).
The duo eventually finds themselves on a field trip to a petting zoo with kindergarten teacher Miss Caroline (N'Yongo) and children's show host Teddy McGiggle (Josh Gad). And this petting zoo is inconveniently located next to a U.S. military testing facility that has just had a breach...
I'll give the movie props for having the balls to turn kids into zombies, albeit not any kids we really care about, and also appreciate that it manages to keep the kids-in-peril-plot pretty low stress. But it doesn't do anything new with the zombie set-up, and just isn't really funny enough for me to fully recommend it. Much of the comedy relies on Josh Gad's character, and whether you enjoy that will have a lot to do with how much Josh Gad you can stand (my tolerance is pretty low).
But I will say I really did enjoy Lupita N'Yongo's performance. She's a great combination of fierce and compassionate in the role, doing her best to protect her class and maintain calm.
It's been a few years since I launched this countdown with a San Francisco-set horror movie, so I thought I'd go back to that tradition for 2026. Too bad the movie I chose was Slaughterhouse Rock which just barely counts as a San Francisco movie (or, really, a movie at all).
About half of the movie is set on Alcatraz, though aside from a few establishing shots that include the San Francisco skyline and the Golden Gate Bridge, it is very clearly not actually Alcatraz. There's also not a lot of "rock" - in either sense of the term - happening in this slaughterhouse despite the story's initial set-up being the death of a heavy metal band as they were visiting Alcatraz.
Plot wise, it begins with a local college student having bad dreams related to that event, so he and seemingly everyone he knows decide the only way to stop the dreams is for all of them to venture to Alcatraz after dark together to break a curse. Or something.
It's there that they run into the only thing that makes this movie even slightly worth watching, and that's Toni Basil as a ghost who's stuck on the island, but knows how to set the other souls stuck there free. And yes, it involves a dance, a clip of which I will include below. She also has several great costume changes that are peak 80's does 1940's and 1950's retro that I'm pretty sure came out of her own closet. And she is also featured, along with Devo, on the soundtrack.
Other than that this movie manages to be a total snooze. Like, I literally fell asleep twice while watching it. You need only watch the film's opening scene, which goes on forever, to know that this is a movie that will streeetttch wherever it can to make its 90-minute running time.
Slaughterhouse Rock is streaming on several platforms. I watched it on Prime, to avoid commercials.
I can hardly believe tomorrow is the first day of October. Where did September go? Where did this summer go? Where did this year go??
But I'm not complaining. October is the official start of my favorite time of year, and I am very excited to once again take part in the blog-based Countdown to Halloween. It's officially the 19th year the Maniacal Movie Countdown has been a part of the Countdown to Halloween! And as has been tradition for the past six years, I will be posting every day about a new-to-me horror movie, 31 (at least!) movies in all.
I am selecting the movies to watch a little differently this year. I have a huge Letterboxd Watchlist, and a huge chunk of them are horror movies. So, for the most part, I am choosing my picks at random, while still trying to strike a balance between newer and older titles. No doubt this will lead to me sitting through some stinkers. But perhaps my doing so will save you from a similar, dreaded fate.
As always, I want to offer a huge thank you for joining me this year,
and in years past. Please also be sure to check out some of the other
blogs and social media profiles that are partaking in this year's Countdown! You can find a full list on right
sidebar of the countdown's official site.
So, please check in tomorrow for what will hopefully be a treat. If it isn't, I welcome any tricks you may want to offer.
