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Book review: “Shallow Depths” by Suzi Wieland
You’ve encountered killer weed, but killer weeds? Cat and her husband take residence in a summer cabin on a lake. Various tensions start to flare (her husband’s a real dbag) and Cat finds herself drawn to… something in the water. This story has a kind of “simmering cool” that reminded me of a Steven Soderbergh…
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New blog series: Did they Deserve to Die?
So, just for funsies, I’m kicking off a new series of posts called—as you can see—“Did They Deserve to Die?” Each post will take a horror movie and ask the question about the doomed characters. This is not not to shock or provoke (well, not just), but to dig into the film’s themes and moral…
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Review: Angst
Gather round, young ones, and let me tell you about a mysterious bygone era known as the eighties. This was before all your newfangled internet and AI chatbots. Movies were a trip back then. If you missed them when they played in the theater, you had to wait and hope they showed up at your…
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Review: Companion
AI horror is gonna lure me every time. You might recall my rave review for the critically maligned “evil Alexa” movie “AfrAId” a while back. Stories about the fears of AI just really tickle my philosophical funny bone. As a result, I knew I would eventually see “Companion” (about an intelligent sexbot) when I saw…
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Review: Regression
Many people are probably familiar with the Satanic Panic of the 80s and 90s where at least dozens of people across the country were accused and convicted of committing fantastical crimes – child sacrifices, weird sexual abuse – then shown to be innocent. It’s a fascinating instance of mob mentality gone bad (I guess it…
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Review: The Call
There’s a timeless premise for horror movies: young people do something horrible and are punished for it. It’s the conceit of “I Know What You Did Last Summer”, “Soriority Row”, “Carrie” and even my new novel “The Mirror Man.” (How’s that for subtle advertising?) 2020’s “The Call” follows this path as well. New kid in…
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Review: Lisa Frankenstein
This is an interesting one that prompted a variety of thoughts that are still settling in my brain. There’s certainly nothing horrifying or terrifying about it. It leans into the comedy, but for the first half hour, it’s a kind of Disney channel comedy. That lasts until people start getting killed, including by having their…
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Review: Out of the Past
It just sounds like the title to a great film noir movie, right? It’s weighed down with secrets and betrayals, gunshots, and curls of cigarette smoke. Well, the film lives up to its title. The 1947 Robert Mitchum thriller has got it all: femme fatales, sneering mobsters (the main one deliciously played by Kirk Douglas)…
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Review: The Toolbox Murders (2004)
Everyone knows that director Tobe Hooper was responsible for one of the all-time great horror films “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.“ What is less discussed about the director is that he sort of lost his way over the course of his career, and ended up directing low to middle budget Horror films that didn’t get much…