I'm not sure you can call Dual a horror movie, it's more sci-fi with some thrills, and comedy, and a little horror mixed in. (Once again, that horror involves the accidental killing of a dog. Why does this countdown include so many dog deaths???)
If you've ever wondered what Nebula may be like should she exist in the real world, Karen Gillan in Dual may provide that answer, as she plays both Nebula and Dual's Sarah much the same way: deadpan, emotionless, and a little confused by it all.
Set in what may be the near future, or just...Canada, the basic plot centers on Sarah, who has just found out she has a Terminal Illness (not defined beyond that) and if she wants, she can create a clone of herself to help her loved ones deal with the loss. She agrees to it but...things don't turn out as planned.
The plot is really similar to the 2021 Apple TV+ movie Swan Song, though that one was a straight up drama, and this one veers into the realm of comedy more than once. They'd both make a great double bill, and you can decide which one is the clone of the other.
Is Evilspeak a shockingly prescient story about the forthcoming dangers of personal computers and the Internet? Or an all male Carrie rip-off with killer pigs instead of pig's blood?
OK just kidding, it's totally a male rip-off of Carrie. The movie even begins with a high school outcast being tormented during a practice game of soccer, and then dealing with even more teasing in the locker room after the game. Clint Howard is the outcast, a dorky orphan named Stanley Coopersmith who attends a military school built on top of an ancient Satanic temple, as those places usually are. He decides to use his computer skills to translate an ancient Satanic text, and all hell breaks loose. Literally! Also breaking lose are some man-eating pigs that happen to live on campus. Those bullies don't have a chance!
For the most part this movie is dumb fun but I'm going to spoil something for you here: that cute puppy named Fred does die, and it's a total bummer of a scene. So, maybe just skip that part when you see it coming.
Finally, the film has one bit of casting I found amusing: Charles Tyner plays some kind of colonel at the military school, and if he looks familiar its because he played a very similar role ten years earlier in Harold and Maude, albeit with one less limb.
What kind of horror movie countdown would this be without at least one found footage horror movie? So how about three!
My intention was to just watch Deadstream, but once I did, I remembered two others I had been meaning to watch for a few years, and I ended up watching Spree and Dashcam (not this one) the same day. And while I don't necessarily recommend doing that, it was fun seeing how all three dealt with the same theme of social media and "living online."
I'll come right out and say Deadstream is the best and most enjoyable of the three. Imagine a (better) Evil Dead sequel as a found footage horror movie, and you've got Deadstream. It was written, produced, and directed by the husband and wife team of Joseph and Vanessa Winter, with Joseph Winter also starring as Shawn Ruddy. Shawn, a YouTuber known for taking on dares and performing pranks, was recently "cancelled," losing all sponsorships, and attempts to make a comeback by spending the night in a supposedly haunted and abandoned house.
Shawn places several motion activated cameras in and around the house, and has several bodycams as well, thus allowing the film to include "editing" while Shawn's livestream (deadstream, livestream, get it??) is taking place, and this is perhaps the film's best conceit, as it allows for a more dynamic multi-camera experience than many found footage horror films.
You probably have to enjoy the character of Shawn to get real enjoyment from Deadstream, but I found Winter's performance hilarious, resulting in one of this year's funniest entries in the countdown.
Neither Spree nor Dashcam end up being nearly as enjoyable because of their central characters. In Spree, Joe Keery (best known for playing Steve on Stranger Things) plays Kurt Kunkle, a young man desperate for online fame who decides to livestream a killing spree as he poisons passengers in his rideshare (which is called "Spree" instead of Uber or Lyft). Kurt is such a pathetic character, with preposterous goals, but the intended satire just never really hits. (I will say, however, that seeing Lala Kent from Vanderpump Rules, and Ariana Grande's brother, Frankie, get murdered is kind of...satisfying. Applause for that casting.)
Dashcam centers on Annie, a singer and songwriter with a channel she streams from her car, where she creates songs live, based on comments from her followers. It's set during the pandemic, and Annie is probably the least likable protagonist of any horror movie in recent years, unless you happen to agree with her anti-vax, conspiracy fueled views, in which case, you may indeed root for her. But when I found out that Annie Hardy is basically playing herself in the movie, it just confused me. We're supposed to be repulsed by her, right? Right??
I really liked director Rob Savage's first found footage horror movie, Host, but this one just fell flat for me, and it suffers from probably the biggest sin of found footage horror: characters who never seem to drop the damn camera, so half of the film is just a shaky cam blur. I found the whole film so annoying (and gross) that I couldn't even begin to tell you if it even makes any sense. Found footage horror can still be fun, (see above!) but Dashcam is definitely not.
I watched Dashcam and Spree on Hulu, and Deadstream on Shudder.
I don't think you can categorize Massacre at Central High as a horror movie, although plenty of people die in it. There's no mystery as to who is doing the killing, and the entire film has a kind of "afterschool special" feel to it, albeit with a lot of gratuitous nudity. I think the movie's ultimate point is to deliver some kind of message about bullying, and fascism, and complacency, but the message gets a little muddy amongst the gratuitous nudity and violence.
That said, it's definitely a unique take on the high school horror story, even if most of the so-called high schoolers look like they've been legally able to drink for a decade or so, (including Robert Carradine who would still be playing a teenager eight years later in Revenge of the Nerds). Maybe that's why, until the very end, there are no "adults" to be found at Central High, or anywhere near it. It would be too hard to tell them all apart!
For me, the most the most entertaining fact about this movie is that the Italian version was called Sexy Jeans and included several edited-in scenes from porno movies. I'm dying to see how THAT worked.
I watched Massacre at Central High on the Criterion Channel.
Influencer was the movie I decided to watch instead when I was having a hard time getting through Eaten Alive, which is funny as they both kind of center on people ruining and/or ending the lives of tourists.
Madison, a social media "influencer" is on vacation in Thailand, alone, because her boyfriend decided to bail at the last minute. She befriends CW, another young woman who seems to know a lot of "secret" spots in the city, thus giving Madison more content for her feed. But then Madison's passport is stolen, and she loses her cell phone...
The credits for the movie don't actually run until about 25 minutes into its running time, which is an interesting choice, though fitting, as the film starts out one way, and then heads in a different direction. It's not a groundbreaking movie by any means, but I enjoyed its female villain, and that it includes plenty of tropical vacation scenery porn is an added bonus.
Maybe I was wrong about the year 1982 and slasher movies, because here's another one that seems to hold a fairly positive reputation, though I am not entirely sure why. Still, I maintain that when the majority of that year's movies have to live in the shadow of E.T., Blade Runner, and The Thing, among several other classics, the majority of those movies are going to be forgotten.
And truthfully I wouldn't have bothered watching The House on Sorority Row if Eileen Davidson wasn't in it since she was a big presence in my life as a teenager when she was on The Young and the Restless, and then later in life when she was on a few seasons of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. (Spoiler alert: she shows her boobs. In the movie, not on Housewives!)
It's a pretty standard slasher, done better many other times, and but it's watchable because of the presence of some actresses, like Davidson, who went on to better things. Like Harley Jane Kozak who was in When Harry Met Sally and Parenthood. And Kate McNeil who was in....Monkey Shines. OK. Maybe Eileen Davidson is the movie's biggest draw. That and a party band called "4 Out of 5 Doctors," which is just a great band name.
When you get right down to it, aren't most stories about the origins of saints kind of....horrible? I mean, I'm no expert, but I think you probably have to at least have some suffering in your life to get to saint status, right? Maybe not "burning at the stake" (but that's definitely one way to go) but definitely not a life of quiet comforts.
So, perhaps the story of Saint Maud isn't so odd. Maybe a modern saint really would need to make some..."sacrifices" to reach sainthood. Or -- and I'm just tossing this out there! -- perhaps a lot of history's saints were, actually, just crazy motherfuckers!
OK, probably not going to reach sainthood with that comment. And I'm not entirely sure the "heroine" in Saint Maud does either, but it's definitely an interesting watch, although it probably fits more into the realm of art film than horror film. An art film with some horrible moments? I wanted a little bit more from it, but I appreciated how it stuck the landing, and it kind of reminded me of a fave, The Rapture, another movie that asks, what if some of the horrible things in the Bible are not metaphors, and actually, literally, true?
No thank you!
I watched Saint Maud on DVD, but it is also available on Prime Video.
It took me a minute to figure out why I decided to put Murder By Phone on my countdown list in the first place, but then I remembered it was because of this little blurb in Trashola, a horror movie zine I used to read way back in the 1980's:
This is a bit of a forgotten movie, lord knows I don't remember ever seeing anything about it, aside from the above, but when I looked it up and saw the cast, I figured why not give it a shot. Richard Chamberlain stars as Nat Bridger, a professor and environmentalist who stumbles upon a possible murder when a former student dies after answering a public phone in a subway. Police rule it a heart attack; Bridger suspects something more. John Houseman (!) also co-stars as a colleague of Bridger's, who makes a big point of separating his trash, which seems pretty progressive for 1982! The movie also has a score by John Barry, and was directed by Michael Anderson, whose Around the World In 80 Days won the Best Picture Oscar in 1957.
All of this makes it strange that Murder By Phone is not available on DVD or Blu-ray, so the only version I was able to watch was on YouTube, and this version was obviously ripped from an old VHS copy. Of course, it's not exactly a great movie, but it's certainly no worse than plenty of 1980's horror flicks that have gotten the Blu-ray treatment, and the phone "murders" are also worthy of something out of Cronenberg.
If you want to give it a look, you can watch it via YouTube, below!
At this point I don't even remember if I ever saw the 2013 remake of The Evil Dead, so if I did, it wasn't memorable. Pretty sure I'll say the same thing about Evil Dead Rise if you were to ask me about it ten years from now.
This sequel totally overlooks what made the first three Evil Dead movies memorable: they were fun; they were funny. And they had Bruce Campbell. This one is has zero laughs, only a teeny, tiny bit of Bruce Campbell (in a voiceover), and just an all around downer feel since the majority of the people in peril are children.
It does have a good opening sequence that ends with a really excellent title reveal, but after that it just gets depressing. The story centers on a single mom and her three kids. They live in a condemned apartment building that's above a vault that contains....an evil book and some old recordings. One of the kids finds it. The rest is easy to predict.
The movie definitely doesn't hold back on the gore or the blood, with an elevator scene to rival The Shining's famous bloody lift. But it's not enough to save an instantly forgettable entry into the Evil Dead franchise.
I've watched a Dario Argento movie the last twoyears of this revamped countdown, and this year's choice was Phenomena, starring a young Jennifer Connelly as a teenager with a psychic connection to insects.
The setting, at a private all girls school in Europe, is a familiar Argento trope, but I won't fault him returning to that well because the setting this time is the Swiss Alps (or the "Transylvania of Switzerland" as more than one character refers to it), and it's absolutely beautiful. The perfect setting for horrible things.
Connelly's American teenager arrives at the school and immediately has an evening full of sleepwalking, which does not endear her to her classmates. Her self-professed love of insects also doesn't help. But luckily, there's a world famous forensic entomologist (Donald Pleasence) just up the road, and he thinks young Jennifer's abilities may be just the thing to help capture a serial killer that has been stalking town.
Yes, of course there's a killer about, this is an Argento movie after all, and the murders are as baroque as ever, this time often accompanied by Iron Maiden or Motorhead songs. (Goblin is also on board again with an original score.) Did I mention there's also a monkey nurse in this? And by that I mean a monkey who is also a nurse, and not a nurse for monkeys. And when I tell you this movie has one of the most insane endings ever, I am not being hyperbolic. I was literally sitting there with my mouth open in disbelief through most of it. Suspiria is still my fave Argento movie, but Phenomena takes a very close second.
I watched Phenomena on Shudder, but it's also available on Kanopy and Tubi.
