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Lucky McKee's films are populated by overbearing, but ultimately absent, mothers. They're populated with young girls struggling to come to with their own sexuality, which is often intrinsically linked to some kind of primal/feral rage viewed as untamable or grotesque by either men or women that seek to reinforce patriarchal norms (here it's 'witchy' in origin, in The Woman it's barbaric, and in May it's sadomasochistic). These are films directed by a straight man that are... borderline fetishistic—recurring motifs/imagery of blood & milk, fixation on the body (look at how thighs/legs are framed and shot in this & May), bruised/cut flesh, sapphic desire (whether fulfilled or unfulfilled), domineering women exerting control/force over often awkward, less sexually experienced girls. And yet, there is so much truth to the films of Lucky McKee that is absent from far more "forward-thinking" and explicitly "feminist" genre cinema. This is the male gaze *for* women—presented by someone with a hackneyed understanding of female desire, but an empathetic understanding of the places it comes from. Lots of beautiful imagery in this. Less ferocious than The Woman, and less intimate than May—but with all the same fixations...

Painful. Only watched this out of morbid curiosity since I know a handful of art dept. people that worked on it and quit halfway through the shoot because of how poorly they were treated on set 🙃

Asinine B-grade podcast humour mixed in with tepid pseudo-slasher that has a character named Jason because... this is a summer camp slasher from the post COVID era, where everyone now has irreparable brain damage.

"Bryk and Wolfhard first met in Toronto's Kensington Market, having a brief conversation about their shared love of the comedy web series Jake and Amir."

Ugh. No thank you.

That one time Lucky McKee captured lightning in a bottle, never to be replicated again (All Cheerleaders Die is an abomination...). Beautiful soundtrack, incredible casting choices (James Duval is used perfectly here) and a potent undercurrent of sadness. Indicative of a very specific era in genre filmmaking. The parallel between sadomasochism and exploitative relationship...

"Multi-year scientific study reveals playing with dolls allows children to develop and practice social skills, regardless of their neurodevelopmental profile."

Emerging from the theater after ~2 hours of watching this felt like being hit in the head with a brick.

Motherfuckers CLAPPED for this? There are about ~40 different characters introduced within the first 30 minutes of this that you barely spend any time with. One scene cuts to the next with no functional purpose. The non-VOCALOID songs are truly the worst things I've ever heard. The 'narrative' thread of depressed Miku wanting to "reach more people" by imbuing more humanity into her songs directly conflicts with the entire concept of this style of music + feels like a flat attempt at trying to address the distance we've created for ourselves between music as self-expression and music as product...by people making a product. The end credits that depict the hundreds of people that worked on this tells you all you need to know.

Absolutely hated this as a former adolescent weeb!

This is no Madoka Magica.

Eh. Not particularly effective thematically—especially since we know the terrain by now, and have bastardized the source material to death. But I'll take this sort of outing when meticulously curated by a woman with a very specific aesthetic fetishization in mind.

There are a lot of beautiful/grotesque textures here—all manner of bodily fluids, and unfortunately as someone who has been struggling with health issues for the last ~6 months due to an intestinal parasite I can't seem to get rid of (that I picked up on a trip to Puerto Vallarta last year), the worm bit was pretty affecting lol. Beautiful color palette and costuming...the nods to obvious filmic influences (Dead Ringers and Cremaster, but there were probably more...) don't feel as eye-winking/self-referential here, which means I don't hate them! 👍

“I moved from home when I was 16 to attend a high school with a drama course. I borrowed films at the library based on which actors were in them, which I then watched them in my little room. That’s when I stumbled over this Nicole Kidman movie: Dogville by Lars von Trier. I was totally spellbound. I thought, ‘If this is cinema, then I want in!’”

Watched on Tuesday May 13, 2025.

You are fuel and refuse, easily discarded and subsumed by your bureaucratic leaders and technologic g*d. "Productivity." Look at the fucking monolitic structure on the VHS cover - enjoy your "future."👋 The office spaces you live and die in. Hits eject on the subserviant AI "woman's" voice in 1985. Long live LOLA. Canadian SOV greatness. Proud owner of this on tape! 👍

"Over the years, text-to-speech systems have been predominantly trained on female voices. Because we have such rich data for female voices, companies are more likely to opt for them when creating voice automated software as it’s the most time and cost-efficient solution."

Will need to revisit for more cohesive thoughts, but immediately found this more engaging and less clinical than Crimes of the Future despite the subject matter - comparisons to Crash are apt, especially in a sexual context, and I think there's a lot here to unpack/appreciate as a late Cronenberg. Also very funny.

[...]

“Complicated grief is associated with distinctive patterns of autobiographical memory that are linked to self-identity.”

[...]

“...[which] suggests that grieving individuals who experience ongoing yearning for their loved one view their self-identity as more closely linked to the deceased [and] are more distressed by memories involving the loss.”

[...]

“Depression and grief can be distinguished clinically, statistically, and even pharmacologically, as antidepressants do not ameliorate grief symptoms. It is notable that there is very little application of these trajectories of adaptation to physiological systems. Sporadic work has compared acute grief (from immediately following the death event to six months after the loss) to later grief."

[...]

“Does Perceived Lack of Control Lead to Conspiracy Theory Beliefs?”

[...]

“Another plausible moderating factor determining the value of conspiracy theories for restoring threatened control, is the availability of alternative means of control.”

[...]

“Consequently, conspiracy theorizing may be a secondary strategy for restoring control, avoided when one has other means of affirming that the world is ordered.”

[...]

“Conspiracy beliefs are remnants of human adaptation to historical trauma.”

[...]

“An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour.”

[...]

“People believing in conspiracy theories tend to view the outgroup as highly agentic and stealing control from the ingroup. People deprived of control often view collective and personal enemies as a sole source of evil.”

Really fucking good. 😳Can't the last time I was this spooked by a film!

Highly recommended to all the Unfriended: Dark Web heads out there (...there are dozens of us...)

While not the most "polished" Isaac Rodriguez is capable of, this is him at his most restrained, weird, lean. Accomplishes in ~60 minutes what most contemporary horror fails to do with an hour 40.

Despite an extremely limited budget, minimal set design, and a dialogue contained between essentially only two characters - he manages to explore relevant topics and extract tension/terror from taken-for-granted topical/stereotypical boring-real-life shit that I haven't seen anyone else doing (this is veryyyy different from something like Horror in the High Desert... apples/oranges, both are wonderful and worth your time)

However, in a similar overarching sense, this also has a profound grasp on the uncanny, both in abstracted digital/virtual contexts, and when grounded in reality - what makes a dimly lit, sterile apartment/condo bedroom look so terrifying in the glow of a laptop screen when viewed through the eyes of <us> a voyeur?

What about the fact that you have no control over how/who decides to fetishize you/your likeless from the data of you that exists online? Not in a revenge porn sense, but the idea that 'anyone' can technically 'access' you from anywhere in the world - change your image, stretch you to fit their narrative, enter into your life.

Why is photographic representation so eerie when destroyed and recalibrated?

The idea that anyone/anything can be tapped into when it shouldn't - forbidden knowledge or things you shouldn't see.

...Sad to see he's taken to using AI in his other, recent work (my friend showed me his Instagram bio, which literally reads "AI Video Artist" before it reads "Director" lol). There's clearly talent and vision here, and I hope he spends a year or two (and some of that Lifetime Channel money) to invest himself into a more cohesive project... I really think he's evolving his craft with even less fixings - strip everything away until all you have is a horrific premise executed perfectly in an ~hour.

Now officially convinced that A24 is a psyop.

Insane. Lots of problems with this, but it looks beautiful 90% of the time, features Cocteau Twins, Catherine Wheel, and Dead Can Dance needle drops, and functions like an American Honey/Thirteen riff on the core material from the first film (while desecrating its most famous iconography) - which I most certainly fuck with.

Lots of wayward 90s teen girl Americana filtered through finding god/losing your best friend/discovering how predatory men can be/realizing the horrors of the world/dropping out of life/dying.

I thought the mask looked cool🤷‍♀️

Watched on Sunday April 27, 2025.

"The children are the only ones who can sense this control..."

OR

"They only love blood."

Did not think this would be a psychotronic (de)sexualized cat fever dream as influenced by Hello Kitty and Astro Boy as it is Pynchon. Crass commercialism, death drive, postal service cults, religion as the basis for speciesism (and resulting 'terrorist' acts), pharmaceuticals that result in anhedonia and sexual dysfunction, the "free market" as a monopoly controlled by the ruling class, and ritualized imagery as subliminal messaging to sell product or lifestyle... repressed homosexual desire as sublimated sadomasochism.

Hated the explanatory monologue that lasts FOREVER (the pacing on this thing is wack), but it's absolutely worth the ride.

FFO: Marshall McLuhan, Mark Fisher, Thomas Pynchon, J.G. Ballard, and...ReBoot.

Watch it here.

My favourite "80s" slasher. The pinnacle of girlie hangout horror.

I don't doubt this film (or perhaps the entirety of Slumber/Sorority House Massacre as a whole) was very influential for Jared Masters.

This is Driller Killer, suffused with pastel hues, teenage hormonal rage, psychic terror invoked by the subconscious, beautiful women and (annoying) men getting murdered, a sexy psychobilly rocker wielding a drill guitar as the ultimate physical representation/manifestation of libido, and... Bangles/Bananarama-esque girl band hijinks.

New York grime is replaced with hazy Venice, LA suburbs. The intersection of "rock," sex, fantasy, and adolescence.

MIMICRY AND THE MIRROR NEURON SYSTEM

"A controversial theory of the neurobiology of ASD, particular with respect to social relating, concerns the mirror neuron system (MNS). “Mirror neurons” are cells that fire during both the execution and observation of motor behavior and were originally discovered via depth electrode recordings in macaque monkeys. An analogous system has since been established in humans and has been extended to show mirroring for tactile sensation, emotion, and pain. From a theoretical perspective, the MNS has been suggested to be involved in simulation of other peoples’ minds, and thus subserving various aspects of social cognition and empathy. Perhaps inevitably, it was subsequently suggested that social impairments in ASD might stem, at least in part, from a failure to adequately develop mirror neurons, or a breakdown in the broader mirror system."

"Contagious depression is a theory proposing that depression can be induced or triggered by our social environment. This theory is based on emotional contagion, the idea that affective states can be transferred during social interaction, since humans can use emotional contagion to communicate feelings and emotions in conscious and unconscious ways."

"Here we will discuss two important aspects of emotional contagion that may be imperative in developing contagious depression, elucidating the mechanisms that seem to be involved in transferring emotions, namely automatic mimicry, and the mirror neuron system (MNS). Additionally, we will explore other aspects that may be involved, such as empathic concern, the direction of contagion, and why this phenomenon has been selected during human evolution. For this purpose, we adopted the following main questions to guide this review: 1, How can affective states interfere in interactions between people?; 2, Can one person’s emotional state “infect” another’s?; 3, What mechanisms are involved in the transmission of emotions?; 4, What determines who is the sender and who is the receiver of emotions?"

[...]

RACE AND MODERN ARCHITECTURE

"The destabilizing effect of the power of photography to simultaneously expose and construct truth and falsehood reverberates deeply into both the American psyche and the built environment."

“architecture is a way of imagining, building, and validating a world. It is bricks and mortar; the interior arrangements of culture in the positioning of thresholds, openings and objects; and the accumulation of these built forms and practices into social forms of association and dis-association.”

"The modern Western episteme [is] deeply racialized, a product of Europe's deployment of ethnographic, aesthetic, scientific, and philosophical concepts of human difference to universalize its ideologies and practices while ignoring and destroying other ways of knowing and being."

All the actual songs in this that don't feel like sensory assault totally remind me of my favorite Tumblr discovery of 2013, Butterclock. Which honestly wouldn't even be off brand for Jared Masters, seemingly?

This one resonated a lot less than Deadly Punkettes—sad to report.

I think that film felt more like soothing adolescent SOV brain balm—basically everything I *wished* I felt when I watched Scott Pilgrim vs. the World at 15. In, uh, sharp contrast—this is straight up unchecked neurotica that made my brain feel like it was malfunctioning. Fumbled lines, stilted dialogue, giallo murder sequence...and it only becomes more incomprehensible from there.

There's a dude in this that looks like if Ariel Pink (derogatory) got really into Cold Cave instead of right-wing politics 😭

"Something strange has happened, and I'm really disturbed."

OR

"I don't think I can take much more. But I do LOVE it."

Every time Andy Dick was on-screen ... 🫣
Every time Dawna Lee Heising was on-screen ... 👏💯
Every time Bouvier (Darlene Bowie) was on-screen ... 👂🔊

I thought your profile picture looked very inappropriate. And I thought I should tell you, you should change it."

The killer being a TA obsessed with Napoleon. 🤣

"[...] Even many parts of European history are meaningless."

My idea of a perfect movie.

Love that most of this feels like the girl group hangout moments in Slumber Party Massacre II stretched out to feature length. Instead of Bananarama, this is just channeling late 90s Fat Wreck Chord stuff. The two ethereal Rollin moments somehow don't feel out of place at all. Impeccable dialogue rivalled only by Doug Campbell.

Better than Dinner in America. 👍

Immediately texted my friends to start a Vivian Girls rip-off band.

Marital problems wrapped up in financial insecurity, parental guilt, and latent alcoholism - the stiff scarecrow as a signifier of sublimated libidinal desire. Wealthy landlords & property owners ready to foreclose on broke, struggling local farmers without any remorse...loved 70% of this and hated the rest, but that's the 2009 DTV horror gambit for you. I've never watched The Walking Dead, so I failed to realize Norman Reedus sounds like Conor Oberst. Occasional beautiful landscape shots?

Shame about all the negative reviews for this one on here. This is some deranged psychosexual Wilhelm Reich-tinged dregs of 60s exploitation... somewhat reminiscent of the Something Weird catalog, Doris Wishman, and the Paul Morrissey/Joe Dallesandro stuff. Ends in a punctuated burst of sadism and violence, further exemplified by the *extremely* grainy B&W VHS rip I watched.

Recommended to all my freak mutuals that love Andy Milligan, Doris Wishman, and Roberta Findlay...

Shot by Arthur D. Marks (Breeders, Necropolis, Scorpio '70)

“Sadistic brutality and mystical feeling go always hand in hand when the normal capacity for orgastic experience is lacking."

"Orgastic potency is the capacity to surrender to the flow of biological energy, free of any inhibition; the capacity to discharge completely the damned-up sexual excitation through involuntary, pleasurable convulsions of the body."

"[...] neuroses appear in a fundamentally different light than they did in psychoanalysis. They are not solely the results of unresolved psychic conflicts and infantile fixations. These fixations and psychic conflicts cause fundamental disturbances in the regulation of bioelectric energy and, in this way, become somatically anchored."

Agonizingly mid. Mason Gooding is good looking sure, but is absolutely *not* scream king (in any sense of the phrase) material. Mojave 3 and...CHVRCHES... on the same soundtrack 🥱. Ob(noxious) sense of humour, and while I would usually appreciate how straight-faced the rom com elements are played up, here it came across as too at odds with the fairly slick/brutal set pieces to gel together. The AD picking Promising Young Woman as one of her favourite films in that Letterboxd Four Favourites vid 🤣 ...will hereby reaffirm my love for Founder's Day and Thanksgiving.

Watched on Thursday April 17, 2025.

Watched on Thursday April 17, 2025.

Watched on Thursday April 17, 2025.

Not the salacious catgirl softcore one would expect from the title... which, as a fellow catgirl enthusiast, was rather disappointing. 😞 As a Troma title, you could likely do a lot worse. This is a rather cute if not completely inconsequential film about an Egyptian cat goddess commandeering a suicide death cult of cats, only for them to be reborn as pretty women that seduce and kill men - again, not as exciting as that premise suggests. LOVE Gary Graves as the Ernest character.

So disappointing. Mike Flanagan-core that opens with a C.S. Lewis quote about grief, lol

Not because I'm a Hell House LLC Head™ or because I care in any capacity about the Shudderslop™ being funneled out to the eager Bloody Disgusting™ readers...but because Stephen Cognetti clearly has *some* knack for creating arresting imagery and building suspense out of the most basic components. And that's hard to knock, girl.

But ugh - it's another downbeat horror film about Trauma™ where the manifestation of mental illness™ and depression™ (resulting from a death in the family, who would have guessed?) manifest as a spooky crazy ugly old HAG that makes DEMONIC NOISES so you know it's not actually the character's mother - but IS IN FACT the crazy ugly old HAG that's gonna pop out and do the lil jump scare bit. Why did they have to make her look like the WAVE witch from Witch's Feast? lmao - again, despite bearing no relation to the crimes committed, the reason behind the initial murders, or the subsequent town suicides, we must make the central entity look like a decrepit old woman because that's so scary, right?

It's hard enough to get excited about something like this when I can barely differentiate it from something like Woman in the Yard (except for the fact that film prolly has way better lighting and tonal control), but then when it's revealed that the 'origin' of the suicides that occur across town relate to incessant BULLYING that resulted in suicide, I checked out entirely...

Ugh, they could have really played up the Ligottian angle of this so much more.

Also, recounting central plot details through explanatory dialogue is some true rookie shit. This is an hour and 42 minutes, but only because the same story is told from three 'different' perspectives that add nothing to the narrative other than to provide a different set-up for a specific set piece.

As soon as I saw Samantha Robinson, I knew I recognized her from Love Witch. If there was ever someone I *wished* I looked like, it's her - holy shit, dude... she's absolutely gorgeous. Immediately lost any capacity to focus on anything whenever she was in a scene. Outside the two lead performances, she also comes across as the most authentic - wry but clearly perturbed 🕵️

But, yeah, this film - yikes. The most demented Doug Campbell?

There's so much going on here, this one might be the most deserving of a rewatch to suss out how I feel about it. Peter Strauss is the perfect lead for this shit, in the same way Eric Roberts IS Dr. Beck. Doug Campbell excels at depicting ludicrous, horny freaks that are on a total downward spiral. The limo driver/security guard that keeps scoffing at Kara, you can tell he holds so much disgust and resentment toward her in a single glance...

Dougie does the deepfake. INSANE third act reveal that spirals into eventual murder and imprisonment. 🤗

Most of the Doug Campbell films I've watched thus far have been from the 10s (or at least feel located outside any specific context), so it's nice to see him fixate on something that feels so contemporary (and have it be the entire central conceit).

Mena Suvari is giving absolutely nothing 😭

Feel like this is desecrating the idea of appeasing your parents by following their life path versus carving out your own - and doing so because you have no other focus as an approval-obsessed teenager seeking reassurance will only lead to a dead-end. Also, lowkey all these Doug Campbell films are completely fixated on damaged adults fucking up the lives of teenagers because of their own trauma. I find that WAY more emotionally resonant than the way trauma is handled in basically any studio horror film from the last 5 years, lol.

Crazy that the language around social media already feels dated (NEGATIVE PUBLICITY GETS THOSE TIKTOK LIKES, BABY). Love that her entire circle of friends basically all plot her eventual demise as a collective, *just* because she's given precedent by her mom on a fucking high-school cheer squad.

The journey cuntinues...

And back to our regularly scheduled programming!

This one was pretty gnarly. Not quite as manic as Stalked By My Doctor, and not quite as emotionally resonant (srs) as Stalked By My Mother, but certainly playing with a lot more questionable/thorny material.

We've got: revenge porn (of a minor), a <pseudo> nun having sex with an underage catholic high-school student who has a DUI, emotionally manipulating said high-school student with the threat of suicide, killing a nun to usurp her position at a catholic high-school and steal her identity, and a nun being choked out with a rosary. Plus, the murder of a teenage girl in a fairly blunt/perfunctory shower sequence that made me wince. There's...a lot to unpack here.

Not sure what exactly this is getting at in of the sexual power dynamic between Jason and Laura - it seems like until she starts to turn the screws on him and talk about "moving to Paris" (lol) he fantasizes about her and is portrayed as indecisive about the sexual relationship NOT because she's an adult, and committing statutory rape, but because "[she's] a nun." Then, she threatens HIM with posting 'revenge' porn online, which is SUCH a wild dynamic shift? But, I dunno - he is clearly shown as going through some sort of disassociative state immediately after they have sex for the first time, so I'm not sure what angle Doug is trying to play up here.

It's hilarious to me that MaXXXine had a whole spiel inserted into that <awful> film about Evangelical Christianity and sex, yet here (almost a decade earlier) we have a Lifetime TV movie that depicts a nun having sex with a teenage boy and killing his high-school gf lol

"After all the horrible things you said, I almost thought about really killing myself."

Can be watched here.

he just like me fr

Truly miss this era of "mysterious guy" hardcore...lol

As someone that 'got into' hardcore through metal (esp. black metal, doom, and death metal) I was *never* attracted to the shit that was popular at the time - Bane, Expire, Have Heart, etc. BORING.

Instead, bands like Raw Nerve, SQRM, Cult Ritual, Total Abuse, Sex/Vid, Crazy Spirit, Hoax, etc. offered a reprieve from what felt like an insular jock community filled with a bunch of rapists and dorks.

I loved bands like G.I.S.M, Discharge, Tragedy...but this was a different beast entirely - frantic and grinding, but more self-deprecating and neurotic. Not exactly powerviolence, grind, or crust. "Blackened punk" and "mysterious guy hardcore" were thrown around a lot at the time, the same way grindy scene bands like Heavy Heavy Low Low got labelled "white belt grind."

I don't doubt this community was just as shitty as any other punk/metal 'scene' from the 2010s (heard plenty of stories of dudes from these bands stealing money/gear to fund their addiction, destroying homes/apartments, etc.) - just look at the cesspool that is the Youth Attack! message boards (lol).

But... at least the music felt like it was coming from an authentic place - there was no pretense that these people weren't degenerate freaks. There was no redemption until all these dicks got office jobs.

These bands heavily shaped my taste and changed my perspective on music as a 14 year old that was exclusively listening to shit like Morbid Angel and Cryptopsy at the time. And for that I am grateful 🙏

Watched on Thursday April 10, 2025.

I feel like I might be overselling these Doug Campbell films, but this is basically all the sexual/interpersonal subtext of a Joe Swanberg film - with the meandering and staid pace stripped away and replaced with Lifetime TV neurotica.

The pink fedora 😭

"You're a writer, you know exactly what you mean to say."

Annnnnnnnnd, I'm officially a Doug Campbell head.

All my Tubi trash-loving freaks need to check this one out ASAP - no Dr. Beck, but an equally insane premise that more than makes up for it. Lots of genuine parental fear as the undercurrent pushing this thing forward (that I unfortunately related to as the child of a helicopter parent that had c-PTSD).

Megan Gallagher channeling Gale Weathers BIG TIME.

Holy fuck, y'all.

I was worried this wouldn't live up to the other entries, but as soon as Dr. Beck started reading up on the Wikipedia entry for 'sexsomnia' while relaying the information to his new patient verbatim as if he was recounting it himself ... I knew we were in for another winner!!

"It's obvious this is your subconscious trying to get you pregnant again."

Again, this is basically an exploitation film, especially with the sleep angle (portrayed in this as a trauma response) played up as a means to sexually exploit (and assault) women. Usually, it's Dr. Beck at the helm... but in this case, before we can even get to him taking advantage of his new position at a New Mexico sleep clinic (because of course) we hear multiple stories of men (partners, their roommates) who have taken advantage of Katie and Michelle.

This film, also perhaps more than the other entries (or at least on par with the first) tackles something I wish more horror/exploitation films approached - how easily the patient/physician relationship can be exploited and also presents as a power dynamic. These women relay sensitive personal information to Dr. Beck, under the guise of a professional, that he then later uses to exploit them.

"There's an almost age appropriate female asleep upstairs, what's wrong with her?"

Watched on Tuesday April 8, 2025.

Watching these after ~recently~ watching Companion is insane, lol.

I'm glad there are men out there writing shit this completely manic and trashy - but with a genuine empathy (maybe a reach?) for the women at the center of its delirious medical malpractice... the step-father dynamic is played up to insane heights, and it almost sorta functions as a contemporary reworking of the '87 film (at least better than the 2009 remake) until... it goes off the rails completely, as Dr. Beck is wont to do. 🤪🤪🤪

I watched this back-to-back with the third entry, and I think I dug the rape revenge vibe of that one a lot more (wished they followed through on the dick mutilation scene) - plus the initial high of discovering this for the first time has worn off, but still! Simple pleasures!

Can't wait for the Dr. Beck vs. Dr. Giggles film coming in 2028 (produced by Shudder)

Quite frankly, a revelation ...

Unironically the best thing I've watched in at least 8 months. Insane line reads. Dr. Beck is truly On Some Shit. 🤨

Girl when I say I was ENTHRALLED... A couple other reviews have pointed out that this is basically a contemporary exploitation film with a 'Lifetime' glaze, and that's bang on - but that's not at all to its detriment. There's actually <more> authenticity to the fears depicted here than in what's peddled to plenty of boutique Blu-ray fetishists (not a drag, I'm one of them too)... but when Sophie's mom expresses concern over Dr. Beck crossing physical boundaries, the dad brushes it off and fears for "jeopardizing [his] career." Her mother's fears all come from a very real place - and yet her dad is equally quick to brush them aside.

At the same time, Dr. Beck swings from comionate to unhinged in .2 seconds - daydreaming about brutally murdering women during dinner dates when things aren't going his way... It's like all the women 'his age' can detect the freak (derogatory) wafting off of him - before he can even reveal how absolutely cracked he is, they kill any potential chance of a romantic relationship - and yet he asks why no one will love him while Sophie is strapped to a bed, ready to be a Terrifier 2 set piece.

Ultimately, big Intruder vibes (iykyk)

Multiple Ti West jump scares ... imagine running an independent video store and having The Roost (!) proudly displayed amongst the shelves. 😭

Shockingly charming concept that feels heavily indebted to SOV shit like Video Violence and mid-aughts slashers (esp Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon), albeit ~everyone is actually in on it~ as the conceit revolves around a family selling and profiting off snuff tapes marketed as slasher films.

"Roger Bladecut" (ugh) channeling Bill Murray in Groundhog Day with Hatchet/~Victor Crowley~ ass make-up

In the end, I had fun 😳

Needed a palette cleanser after The Monkey, so I decided to watch one of my favourites - not to drag Perkins, because I still love Blackcoat's Daughter - but there's an artistry here that feels a lot more authentic - this is a film that could have *only* ever been made by Rob Zombie.

And also, IMO, better balances poor taste kitsch (that rockabilly scene...), corny shit (the Sherri Moon performance in this still feels so ~off~ to me as much as I love her and the kid/mother dream sequence stuff is a bit reductionist), and grappling with trauma ("so I just have to wait until my brain heals...?"), but STILL manages to display genuinely upsetting violence - without ever feeling like it's compromising on tone.

I watched this during its original thetrical run as an annoying 14 year old that was already very invested in horror (reading every Tanith Lee, Clive Barker, Stephen King, Richard Laymon, and Kathe Koja book I could find) but this still rocked my shit at the time - it has somehow never lost its potency, even though I've seen it about a dozen times since. Every rewatch, I'm still shattered by the sequence with Annie. Even the first kill on Octavia Spencer during the dream sequence makes my skin crawl - which is impressive after watching Hisayasu Satō...

There's been a lot of 'reappraisal' of this film since it was first released (I being ruthlessly MOCKED by my friends that were into horror at the time for thinking this was the best slasher I had ever seen). Almost all of the writing on this film that I've read is by people more intelligent than I - but the emotional core of this (trauma - which has now become the *text* rather than *subtext* of practically any major studio horror film) feels so much more suffocatingly real. The curse of family and trauma you can't escape from.

Real ones get it 👋

Bleh. Formally this is fine, but Perkins is less interesting to me when he's hamming it up vs. exercising extreme restraint over a much more meditative film...

Anything this has to <say> about the spectre of <death> isn't particularly interesting to me. Continuing to work through his own father's death (perhaps ineffectually considering his dad died in '92) is def more my bag and there's sooooome of that here (in poor taste), but certainly not enough to latch onto.

Everything else feels like a vehicle solely designed to propel bad gore and sick-o-mode full body explosions, damn that's crazy moments forward without any heft to them. The gore also looks like shit, some real Tubi-tier hijinks :/

Another review already mentioned it - but this really is Final Destination with all the genuine pleasure and sincerity sucked right out of it. I truly did not find anything about this even remotely funny or pleasurable! Even seeing Elijah Wood - who I usually love - felt like a sour and artificial cameo experience embedded into the film for Bloody Disgusting readers...sad!

Watched on Sunday March 30, 2025.

Watched on Sunday March 30, 2025.

Watched on Sunday March 30, 2025.

As soon as I heard MADBALL on the soundtrack, I knew this anti-landlord, pro-roach screed was a winner. It's steadily become a personal favorite, and one that I'll make a tradition out of watching every time I move into a new overpriced shithole, lol

"Joe's Apartment Theme Written by Kevin Weist & John Payson Performed by Mel Tormé & the Roach Chorus"

Watched on Saturday March 29, 2025.

Truly an anomaly. Over 40 years later, and this still barely s as coherent, no matter which way it's cut - I can't imagine how it was perceived in '82. Telekinetic landlord guru. Kalassu. John Wintergate - writer, director, actor extraordinaire. This whole thing feels ready to collapse in on itself at any moment - no shot is safe from the dissolve. Part haunted house film, part sorority slasher, part giallo, part Playmate of the Year compilation. Bless this mess.

Watched on Saturday March 29, 2025.

Cute and harmless; don't know if the luke-warm message on AI that everyone is interpretting as 'a statement against...' serves any real purpose other than to reaffirm certain choices to use AI for shitty over-priced remastered Shout Factory DVDs ("We've always tried not to be too black and white about it because we do employ technology..."), but whatever man, god bless. So fucking British.

• As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
• River of Fundament
• Cremaster 1
• Cremaster 2
• Cremaster 3
• Cremaster 4
• Cremaster 5
• Wild Palms
• Hotel Room
• Fatal Images

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Can't find these anywhere as of yet - also willing to buy physical copies on Blu / DVD / VHS. I know a couple of these got VHS releases thru Saturn's Core, for example, but they seem long OOP.

Noticed a lot of mutuals creating these sorts of lists, and I would love to help share cool shit w/ anyone when possible as well!

• Kannibal Komix oder Das Haus in Weiß
• Za Sekkan
• The New Moon
• Crimson Heather
• St. Michael Academy: Hyoryu-ki
• Curvaceous Corpses
• Lisa Cook's Deadly Workout
• We Need Earth Women!
• The Demons in My Head
• Creaturealm: From the Dead

...plus 23 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Turtle Vision
• The Eye's Dream
• Meet Me in the Dream: Wonderland
• In a Thicket
• Soft Skin
• Muscle
• The Bedroom
• Brain Sex
• Splatter: Naked Blood
• Night of Body's Model

...plus 22 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Fatal Frame
• Bilocation
• Twilight Syndrome: Deadly Theme Park
• Ju-On: Black Ghost
• The Boy from Hell
• Cellular Girlfriend
• Under Your Bed
• Ring of Curse
• Samurai Chicks

• Noroi: The Curse
• Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! Final Chapter
• Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! The Most Terrifying Movie in History
• Occult
• Senritsu Kaiki World Kowasugi!
• Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! File 04: The Truth! Hanako-san in the Toilet
• Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! File 03: Legend of a Human-Eating Kappa
• Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! File 02: Shivering Ghost
• Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! Preface: True Story of the Ghost of Yotsuya
• Grotesque

...plus 27 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

gay 'merican jess franco that's embodied the essence of USA Up All Night - Beef cake men skulking around decrepit manions, castles // pretty women wandering the beach // vampires, psycho-sexual subtext, dolls/puppets, witchcraft - cheap & prolific worksman

GayVN 2008 Hall of Famer!!

• Dreamaniac
• 1313: Cougar Cult
• 3 Wicked Witches
• The Brotherhood
• Leeches!
• Witchouse
• Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama
• Dr. Alien
• Creepozoids
• Nightmare Sisters

...plus 28 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Vampire's Embrace
• Deep Night
• Vampire Trailer Park
• Club Vampire
• Silent Number
• Evil Black Magic
• Diary of a Serial Killer
• Skin Striperess
• Lunatic Love
• Bloody Beast

...plus 70 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Sorority House Massacre II
• Not of This Earth
• 976-EVIL II
• Chopping Mall
• Hard to Die
• The Wasp Woman
• Munchie
• The Return of Swamp Thing
• The Haunting of Morella
• Munchie Strikes Back

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

confusing director in how he's often teetered so close to capturing genuinely gripping/authentic relationship dissolution (nights and weekends, silver bullets, uncle kent) and - on the other hand - mostly worthless fetishistic crap (autoerotic, kissing on the mouth). god bless.

• Nights and Weekends
• All the Light in the Sky
• Silver Bullets
• Uncle Kent
• LOL
• Uncle Kent 2
• Alexander the Last
• 24 Exposures
• The Zone
• Marriage Material

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Haunting Fear
• Demented Death Farm Massacre
• Dinosaur Island
• Star Slammer
• Cyclone
• Voodoo Dollz
• Fugitive Mind
• Witch Academy
• Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers
• Scalps

...plus 26 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Vermilion Eyes
• Squareworld
• Toolbox Murders
• Halloween II
• The Night of the Hunted
• Woman in a Box 2
• Choose Me
• Lisa, Lisa
• The Mummy Theme Park
• Vampire

...plus 102 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.