The Horror of Wil Forbis

Month: August 2025

  • Review: The House by Paul Carro

    The setup here is pretty straightforward: a large house suddenly appears in a rural section of a northeaster US town. Trapped in the house is a group of people, all of whom have secrets the house seems to know about. I liked a lot of this. The mysterious nature of the house was compelling. The…

  • Review: The Thirteenth Floor

    My recent viewing of “The Thirteenth Floor” was actually a rewatch for me; I first saw it when it came out back in 1999. The film, about a virtual reality populated by sentient AI (that’s not the terminology used, but what would you call it today) was somewhat overshadowed at the time. “The Matrix”, the…

  • Review: Persona

    How did people digest movies like “Persona” before the Internet? Before the time when you could open up Google, type, “What the hell did I just watch?“ and get some answers. I suppose they had to get together with other people, chain-smoke cigarettes, down espressos, and discuss the film. It doesn’t sound so bad, really.…

  • The Dead Don’t Die (2019) Review – Jarmusch’s Zombie Comedy

    The dead don’t die, they say. But you might while waiting for this film to end. HAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAW!!! I’m kidding. It wasn’t that bad. Part of the issue is I’ve never gelled with the work of the director, Jim Jarmusch. Back in the 90s, when I lived in Seattle, he was the dark darling of the…

  • Wittgenstein & Wordplay: How Mitch Hedberg & George Carlin Used Language Games

    Mitch Hedberg is probably my favorite comedian. He’s dead now (he died young from a drug overdose combined with a pre-existing heart condition) but had an active career in the 90s to the 2000s. He was famous for acerbic, single-line gags like, “Rice is great if you’re really hungry and want to eat 2000 of…

  • Review: Watcher

    This is a good one. I came to watch “Watcher” by way of another movie. I happened across the serial killer short “Slut” on youtube and was impressed with its tense riff on the Red Riding Hood story set in what I took to be 1980s Texas. So impressed was I that I looked for…

  • Book review: Three-Fingered Willy by Neal McLaughlin

    More comedy than horror, Three Fingered Willy draws inspiration from classic ’80s campground slashers—Friday the 13th, Sleepaway Camp, etc.—while adding its own comic twists.If you like your horror bloody, you’ll be pleased that amid the campy dialogue and teen soap opera angst are some genuinely brutal kills. The author clearly did some deep thinking about…

  • Review: Sputnik

    Have you ever psychoanalyzed an alien? That’s the premise behind the Russian film “Sputnik” which was released in 2020. How does this situation come about? Two Russian cosmonauts are floating in space in the 1980s when their ship encounters… something. It’s never really clear what, and not really necessary to understand. Later, when they crash…