Synopsis Alice is a French woman who loves to smoke cigarettes. And her husband, Will, is an asshole. When the two get into a big fight at Will’s younger brother Joseph’s birthday bash, Will drunkenly drives full speed into a pedestrian, flipping his vehicle. The car catches fire and Will dies a horrific death. As the family gathers together for the funeral, Alice must face the scariest thing of all…in-laws. But not just any in-laws, but in-laws who are slowly taken over by the forces of Evil who want to burn your flesh off the bone like a candle stick. Review of Evil Dead Burn Evil Dead Burn is a stand alone film, and while it definitely seems to be connecting itself to some events in Evil Dead Rise and Evil Dead (2013), it does so in subtle ways. You don’t really even need to see any previous Evil Dead movie to enjoy this film. If you enjoyed the tone and style of Evil Dead Rise, you will find that exact vibe in Evil Dead Burn. It is incredibly violent from start to finish, with almost no breaks in the gore. The movie starts off horrific, is horrific for 2 hours, and then ends horrifically. I had a really good time with this movie, but I was stressed out the entire time. It can be exhausting to watch people get their head bashed in for the entire runtime, so if you are someone who struggles with the really nasty gore scenes in horror movies, I would probably sit this one out. Its hard to say if this film is more violent than the previous 2 in the franchise, but it certainly isn’t less so. The major difference I noticed in Evil Dead Burn was that a lot of the violence was akin to that of a physically abusive partner (throwing you around, punching you, and hitting you with things). The past films have focused a lot more on ripping and tearing the flesh (which of course we do get in this movie) but I think that the type of violence on display in Evil Dead Burn fits really well with its overall theme of overcoming an abusive partner, as well as breaking the cycle of an abusive family. Score 8/10

Synopsis May is about a young woman named May who grew up in a strict home with an overbearing mother. Since she was a child May has had a lazy eye. Mortified that her daughter might have a physical flaw, May is forced by her mother to wear an eyepatch to elementary school. I’m sure you can see this villain origin story beginning to form. Now and adult, May’s social skills are a bit stunted. She is lonely, with her only friend being a porcelain doll given to her by her mom. The bulk of the movie is about May looking for love and friendship. But maybe May is just too weird for those things. Review of May May (2002) is an odd movie for sure. Every scene feels a little awkward, by design. Every character is just a bit weird, and I think that plays to the movie’s themes well. May of course is the weirdest one, but her downfall is much more about being an absolute psycho than social awkwardness. More than anything I think this movie can be used as evidence towards the point Bryce made on a recent episode that Hollywood ugly and normal person ugly are not the same thing. I find it funny when a movie takes a gorgeous actress and puts her in glasses with messy hair and tries to convince me the woman is not still gorgeous. I think this movie would be really interesting with a gender swap using a fairly ugly man because I think ugly men are one of the things we as a society fear the most sometimes. The entire movie is laced with some pretty erotic imagery that made me feel weird in my tummy at times I probably shouldn’t have felt that way. I think overall the movie is definitely interesting, and has some strong moments. But I wouldn’t say it was great. Just good.

Synopsis After cocktail waitress Frida and her friend Jess meet tech billionaire Slater King, they are invited to join him on his private island. Along with his friends and a few other women they are brought to a beautiful island filled with bottomless drinks, great food, and a party that never seems to end. Although this vacation truly seems like a dream, things are a little…off. This dream soon begins to unravel and what’s revealed is a true nightmare.  Review of Blink Twice I chose Blink Twice to review this week because it’s a film that I sort of stumbled upon the first time I saw it, so I didn’t really know much going in, and I was just so pleasantly surprised.  Now watching it for my 3rd time not only does it hold up but I found it almost more enjoyable due to being able to appreciate a lot of the effort put into the foreshadowing that you don’t catch until you know what happens.  The themes of different power dynamics within our society are explored in a satirical way while also bringing real world intense horror elements that aren’t your typical dark figure in the corner  Kravitz was able to visually capture this well using day and night as a tool as well as some memory devices that help the audience and the characters keep track of time and the different worlds the characters are living The cast is great, it is incredibly well acted and believable and the pacing may be a problem for some viewers but it kept me engaged waiting for the reveal so to say. I like that you know something is going to happen you just aren’t sure how yet or exactly what it is going to look life  Overall it was very fun to watch, it’s beautiful, dark and at times extremely horrifying Score  9/10 

Synopsis Two young men who are either 16 or 25 discover they like kissing. Their parents don’t like them kissing. So they call the gay exorcist, the kind that exorcise the gay out of gays, not the normal type of gay exorcist. The zealous christians who adhere to the Old Testament beliefs about gays use witchcraft (which they seem to be fine with) to curse the two mates with a sex demon. Review of Leviticus I was interested to see how they would handle the deep and complex issues of religious trauma for gays. Unfortunately, they handled these issues as clumsily as a back of the bus handjob between two teenagers. There really didn’t seem to be much depth behind the characters or relationships that would have made this movie really interesting.  Instead we get a repetitive and oppressive reliance on the gimmick of the movie revealed in the trailer. A supernatural entity that appears as the person you lust over to lure you in, so that it can harm/kill you. If you are expecting more, it’s not here.  There are a couple of lines in the movie that act as ciphers for interpreting the message of the film, but they don’t give much depth to the themes. I’m sure that this movie will be meaningful to many people that watch it, and it being released during pride month is obviously intentional, but for me it was a miss. Score 4/10

Synopsis In South Korea there are 7 super-haunted locations, and Gonjiam the abandoned asylum is one of them. This movie follows a team of ghost hunting live streamers as they attempt the biggest stream of their lives. Picking up 3 female volunteers and one bro volunteer, the Horror Time crew breaks into the haunted asylum and begin streaming it to the world. But things do not go as planned for the jaded paranormal investigators, and they are quickly in over their heads as real occurrences present themselves. You could even say they are experiencing some sort of incident in a ghostland. Review of Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum This is my second viewing of Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum. I first heard of this movie from our facebook group a while back and checked it out with zero expectations and was pleasantly surprised. For a movie I had never heard of before, it was actually pretty fun to watch. Coming back to the film about a year later I am able to see some of the flaws a little clearer. Mikayla mentioned that found footage is hard for her because the camera motion makes her feel nauseous. Well that really becomes a problem for this movie as there are like 20 moving cameras switching back and forth. Each character is equipped with a go pro looking directly at their face, a pov cam, and some of the crew even have handheld cameras just to bump that multicam number up. One of the dudes has a wide fisheye camera that is so confusing to look at that you literally can’t even tell what’s going on when they cut to it. It also takes about half the movie’s runtime for anything scary to really happen. With those negatives out of the way, I think this movie provides some seriously scary scenes, creepy atmosphere, and visuals that will stick with me for a long time. I still like this movie, it just isn’t quite as good as I remember it being. If you like found footage style horror and foreign films it’s worth a watch in my opinion.  Score 6/10

Synopsis Picking up 26 years later we see our four original characters Brenda, Cindy, Ray and Shorty reunited but for all the wrong reasons. They are once again being targeted by a masked killer. With the introduction of some new characters and new spoofs, the audience is taken on a journey to find who the killer is before it’s too late.  Review of Scary Movie 6 Scary movie 6 being released after the longest gap in the franchise with the return of the Wayans brothers was promising a lot, I’m not quite sure if we got all that was promised  The movie does deliver with with multiple parodies of more recent popular horror films like the substance, weapons, smile and a lot more but some jokes fell more flat than others  I find it really hard to give a score to a comedy as it is often super subjective and I’m just not into the scary movie franchise all that much, not really my kind of comedy  It wasn’t a miserable experience and just for the nostalgia I’m sure there are plenty of people that liked this film but for me it was a major miss There were plenty of bits/points that I found funny but more that weren’t than were  Score 4/10 

Synopsis A failing furniture store owner and aspiring architect Clarke is trying to work on himself in therapy when he stumbles upon a hidden portal to a labyrinthian series of rooms. These “backrooms” have an uncanny nature about them. They don’t seem to have any logical floor plans, scale, or use case. They are like a memory of a room, and not a room itself. As Clarke explores deeper he is confronted with a danger within that might consume him if he stays too long. Review Backrooms as a concept started as a creepy and tongue in cheek 4chan comment and them was adapted and thrived on youtube as a series of shorts. Now the creator of that series helms a hollywood movie starring oscar nominated actors. It accomplishes a great feat in bringing a very specific flavor of horror to the masses. Liminal horror. the unsettling feeling of the spaces between spaces. whereas most horror would focus on the scary, or horrifying, or dread. The word the exemplifies Backrooms is uncanny. It’s the feeling of something being just off enough to capture your attention. The plot and the characters seem like secondary concerns compared to maintaining the weirdness of the production design, but are just complex enough to give the audience something to latch onto. The personality flaws and trauma of the protagonists seem like a key to unlocking the secrets of the backrooms. But by the end of the movie, it’s just as ambiguous and dreamlike as the beginning. It’s hard to list out what works so well in the movie, but I found it uniquely enjoyable and disturbing. Score 10/10

Synopsis Passenger is a road trip movie about two love birds who leave the city life for a chance at van living. Already sounds horrifying to me, but to each their own. After witnessing a brutal crash in the middle of nowhere, the couple begin to experience paranormal phenomena that keeps them on their tires. See what I did there? Through utilizing their resources of old van ladies, gym parking lots, and gas station info books they may just survive…the PASSENGER. Review of Passenger Coming into this movie right off the back of obsession was a bad look for passenger. I would have loved to judge this movie based on its own merits, but unfortunately I had just watched one of the best horror movies ever made a week prior. But anyways, passenger was truly boring to watch. The stakes of this movie just felt so low. Like, get off the road you two. The monster or demon of the movie just didnt scare me. I think so many horror movies are doing too much with their monsters these days. It is plenty scary to have an old man stare at you in the middle of the night in a parking lot, why are we also making his face look like an ancient demon? Why does he need to have weird glowing eyes and sharp teeth? That to me is just far less scary than a stranger who wont leave you alone. This movie leans heavily on jump scares. This doesnt always have to be a bad thing. I can appreciate a good jump scare. But I just felt like the jumps in this movie were cheap, and undeserved. Yes, a loud noise that comes out of nowhere will startle me, but did I have fun? Not really. There was one single scene that I thought was good, and even that had a needless jump scare shoehorned into it. Anyways, this movie was an hour and a half and it felt like it took up my whole night. I did not enjoy this. Score 3/10

We are Obsessed with Obsessed, Are you? Listen to our latest episode of Horror Movie Talk as we break down the finer points of this indie horror darling. Synopsis Bear is a shy and awkward guy who you could say is “obsessed” with his coworker and long time friend Nikki. Unable to profess his love to her, he looks for a little help from the “one wish willow” which will grant any wish. Upon making his one wish things rapidly change in his relationship with Nikki where the obsession isn’t just one sided. But… he soon realizes that there are unforeseen consequences to having her love, as things take a turn for the worst.  Review or Obsession This movie really had me torn on whether I liked it or not. Multiple times I thought “man I hate this movie”. That did improve during my viewing of the film and after but I did find that I was   trying to convince myself that I liked it when the truth is it just wasn’t all that enjoyable for me  With that said, I did like the concept and respect what they were trying to do, and there were some strong scenes that stood out in a good way  some of the humor lands but overall it’s just an uncomfortable experience that can get repetitive and honestly isn’t scary I do think it is worth a watch, there is some interesting social commentary but as a whole it would be a much better short film and frankly just isn’t worth all the hype.  Score 6/10 

Don’t go anywhere, We’re about to get crackalackin on our review of Misery, one of Stephen Kings most successful and critically acclaimed novel adaptations. Synopsis When world class author Paul Sheldon takes a spill he falls under the care of Annie Wilkes, his Nurse. As Paul regains his strength to learn to walk again, he also finds himself learning to love again. Little does he know that Annie Wilkes is his #1 fan. As Annie becomes his muse for his next novel, Annie tries to remain professional and hide her true feelings. From the Director Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally comes the feel good romantic comedy of the 90’s, which asks, why unrequited love can lead to such… Misery. Review of Misery Misery is a horror movie that proves you don’t need all the bells and whistles of the genre to be truly terrifying. Sometimes all you need is one truly unhinged person and no escape. Kathy Bates performance is truly impressive and well deserving of her academy award win. She is convincingly able to portray a cavalcade of mental health disorders at the flip of a switch. Going from Manic fan girl to menacing anger, to unnerving disassociation. James Caan comparatively has light work being nonplussed at Annie’s theatrics. William Goldman’s adapted screenplay deserves a lot of credit for its tight pacing, the smart addition of a sheriff character, and great dialogue. Rob Reiner had a lot to prove with this film in expanding his credibility as a director outside of comedy. It undeniably is a great thriller, but my one criticism is that it is often visually uninteresting. It might be intentional, but the over reliance on monologue long closeups felt claustrophobic at times. It’s said that Reiner studied the films of Hitchcock before shooting Misery, but I don’t see anything close to that level of visual storytelling. Overall, this is a great movie. The tension never lets up and Kathy Bates performance is required viewing. Score 10/10