Category: Cult and indie horror

Really Awful Movies: Ep 318 – Haunt

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Haunt is a 2019 American slasher film written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the writing duo behind A Quiet Place.

It’s set in one of those haunted house Halloween attractions. And surprisingly, this is one of the better films set on Halloween, along with John Carpenter’s Halloween, House of 1,000 Corpses, Sinister, and Murder Party, which we podcasted not long ago.

The premise: a bunch of college co-eds are out and about in small town Illinois, a bit like the Michael Myers classic. They’re bar-hopping, and after growing weary of it, hop in their vehicle in search of one of those spooky haunted houses.

They drive up to what is not so much a house, but more of a haunted warehouse. And the doorman is a creepy clown, holding out two hands to choose their own adventure inside, in a way.

Haunt is creepy as hell. There are two extraordinarily intense scenes, and it’s quiet, eschewing cheap jump scares.

The performances are dynamite too, and there’s some nice backstory for the lead.

In the podcast, contextualizing the Halloween haunted house experience, Tobe Hooper’s Funhouse, Hell Fest, and Toronto’s Casa Loma Halloween experience.

Really Awful Movies: Ep 314 – Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile

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Let’s just call Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile the Ted Bundy movie, k?

What a mouthful of a title. But unlike other depraved lunatics, for some reason Lady Killer and The Campus Killer never stuck with Terrible Ted the way that similar monikers have to BTK, The Green River Killer, Jack the Ripper, etc.

Any way you slice it (not a pun as that was not his MO) this falls into the sub genre of horror known as “serial killer drama”, into watch falls the likes of David Fincher’s Zodiac, Doctor Sleep, Se7en, and a few dozen others. And that’s excluding fictional serial killers or movies inspired by them (Psycho, for example).

So, what’s this one all about? It stays true to conventional storytelling/narrative, and has a few eyebrow raising scenes, as well as eyebrow raisers in the credits (Jim Parsons of The Big Bang Theory as a prosecuting attorney? James Hetfield from Metallica as a cop?).

On this episode of the Podcast, Ted Bundy, actors taking on challenging roles or going against type, David Fincher, the police and how they handled this case, the Bundy MO, and then at the end, a brief discussion about the Top 25 Horror Movies of All Time and where Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, would fit on that list.

Tune in folks, and don’t forget…Holiday shopping season is here. We have authored two books together, including Death by Umbrella! The 100 Weirdest Horror Movie Weapons but also Mine’s Bigger Than Yours: the 100 Wackiest Action Movies. The latter is coming to stores in November, and the former is available through Amazon. Pick ’em up and support the show!

Really Awful Movies: Ep 311 – Unhinged remake

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A remake of the 1982 video nasty ‘Unhinged,‘ which we podcasted in an earlier episode of the Really Awful Movies Podcast. In this one, four best friends, young women, decide to take the back roads travelling to a wedding in the English countryside, much to their peril. Dah da dum!

The foursome is off to enjoy fun and frivolity, but finds anything but at a local gas station, where a farm hand is giving them the stink eye and behaving in a way that’s all sorts of creepy. When he meets up with them on a deserted “short cut,” (don’t you just hate those?) later, all things go haywire and the girls put up quite the fight.

This is NOT the new Russell Crowe thriller, people.

This is a rebooting/reworking of a regional Pacific Northwest horror film that most people have no clue about. But c’mon, a bride, and shears a la The Burning? What’s not to like! This one is a doozy, dumb, but undeniably well acted for what it is, with a dynamite score to boot. So is Unhinged a revenge thriller a la The Last House on the Left? Is this a barely sober Oliver Reed wandering around a big sprawling creepy mansion in Burnt Offerings? Not quite, to both.

Stay tuned for more fun genre films and subscribe to the podcast!