Shudder Premiere

Dead of Winter

Leave a comment

The Yeti

by Hope Madden

The year is 1947. The location? The Alaska Territory.  A little expedition led by oil tycoon Merriell Sunday (Corbin Bernsen) has gone missing. Sunday’s son (Eric Nelson) mounts a search party, but it wasn’t oil his old man was after. It was something hairier.

The Yeti boasts a cast full of talent, Nelson, Bernsen, Brittany Allen, Jim Cummings, and William Sadler among them. And it’s a period, practical FX creature feature! I didn’t expect Godzilla Minus One, but I was hoping maybe for something as fun and interesting as last year’s Monster Island.

It actually reminded me a little bit more of Roseanne Liang’s 2020 creature feature Shadow in the Cloud for its retro vibe and girl power attitude.

Writers/directors Gene Gallerano and William Pisciotta buoy a soft script with their casting, and they hit a fun, hokey tone by mining the era for a newsreel vibe. The stagey sets, hard-boiled dialog, and practical FX are endearingly compelling.  The filmmakers are clearly going after a 40s B-movie feel without leaning parody, and it mainly works.

A couple of shots are beautifully lit, and every actor pulls their weight and then some.

As Sunday Jr.’s expedition hits some bloody snags and the horror of the story begins to gel, the script’s weaknesses start to really draw attention to themselves: forced backstory sharing, burdensome daddy issues, and plot holes that don’t get filled.

Naturally, like a werewolf movie, a yeti film lives and dies on creature design. Wayne Anderson’s design is solid. On occasion, the filmmakers seem unable to shoot, light, and edit the scenes for maximum impact/minimum “that’s a mask and a suit” disbelief. But the physical presence of the beast gives dimension to scenes. Plus, thank you for going practical instead of ruining the film and its throwback vibe with AI.  

In the end, a script that needed a couple more drafts keeps The Yeti from truly satisfying. It has its moments, though.

Nightmares Film Festival, Outtakes

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road

Leave a comment

Tinsman Road

by Rachel Willis

Writer, director, and star Robbie Banfitch crafts a unique, documentary-style film with his feature, Tinsman Road.

Banfitch plays Robbie Lyle, a documentarian focused on capturing his mother Leslie’s (Leslie Ann Banfitch) belief that her missing daughter is now an angel.

Leslie’s grief is tangible, and as the “documentary” progresses, her hold on reality seems more and more tenuous. Her belief that her daughter is now a visiting angel is met with tender skepticism by her son. When she asks if he believes in psychics, she answers his no with the assurance that while “some are scams,” hers is real.

Leslie Banfitch’s naturalism helps sell the documentary approach. Her ability to fully encompass a woman who believes her missing daughter now haunts her life is not only heartfelt but convincing. Her performance sets the film apart from similar, weaker fare. Robbie’s own grief feels two-fold. Not only does he also mourn the loss of his sister but feels helpless in helping his mom with her grief. It’s a heart wrenching dilemma.

Eerie elements underscore the fact that, while this is a movie about a grieving family, it’s also a horror film. It’s these subtleties from the very beginning that slowly suck you in. The film also pulls artfully from the true crime genre.

The camera work and low-budget quality of the movie both heighten the tension and add to the sorrow surrounding the characters. Though the style has certainly been overused in the horror genre, Banfitch manages to make it feel like a necessary choice.

Certain moments feel unnecessary, but they’re few and far between. The removal of one or two scenes may have helped tighten pacing. But these are small imperfections, easy to overlook.

Tinsman Road‘s slowly building dread gives way to a shattering climax. The intensity of the third act is stomach churning, especially after the quiet meditation on grief that came before it. Banfitch rewards your patience with the finale.

Grief and horror have often gone hand in hand, and Banfitch offers up a worthy contribution.

New In Theaters

Always Be Cookie-ing

Leave a comment

Cookie Queens

by George Wolf

Did you ever look at the girl selling you Thin Mints and think, “she’s going to be a Supreme Court justice some day?”

You might start, once you meet the youngsters of Cookie Queens, a triumphant look at goal setting, upselling and the fleeting years of girlhood.

Writer/director Alysha Nahmias travels to North Carolina, Texas and California to immerse us in the frenzied weeks of cookie season with four budding entrepreneurs. There’s Ara in San Diego, an impossibly cute and precocious 5-year-old who hopes to be strong enough to pull her own wagon of treats. 8-year-old Shannon Elizabeth is in El Paso, practicing karate and trying to make sure her parents don’t have to skip a mortgage payment to pay for unsold cookies. Nikki is a 9-year-old in Chino, who has a family tradition to uphold while she’s chasing enough sales to earn a trip to Europe. And then there’s 12-year-old Olive, the future Supreme who sets sales records, schools her troop on upselling, and already frets about disparities in the relationship between management and labor.

With a week-by-week countdown and some helpful onscreen stats, Nahmias builds a subtle layer of sales tension while letting us glimpse how these girls, their families and friends are navigating life. It’s all endlessly engaging, full of inspiration, frustration and some way-too-early hints about the ways of the world.

We see older teenage sisters pine wistfully for the carefree days of youth, while those younger ones are already wondering about their purpose in life and learning that success can hinge on their appearance.

Yes, some parents can Cookie vicariously, but Cookie Queens never lets the focus stray from these wonderful young ladies. Even with all they are juggling during the height of selling season, their sparks of joy and enthusiasm can’t be denied.

And for us grown-ups, the film might make you sorry about the world we’re leaving these kids. But would I bet against them growing up and changing it?

Not a chance.

New In Theaters

We All Scream

Leave a comment

Ice Cream Man

by Hope Madden

With Ice Cream Man, filmmaker Eli Roth visits the underappreciated horror subgenre focused on hordes of deadly children. Wolf Rilla may have done it first with 1960’s Village of the Damned, but Roth is following more closely in the footsteps of Narciso Ibañez Serrador and his 1976 film Who Can Kill a Child?

Since the Seventies, there’ve been plenty of killer-children flicks, most famously Children of the Corn from Stephen King’s novel. But Roth finds humor in the mayhem, channeling  2015’s Cooties in particular, but with a noticeable difference.

Generally, these films represent an adult nightmare. Our victim-heroes are grown-ups faced with the impossible task of defending themselves, and occasionally a handful of untainted children, from ravenous, murdering swarms of youngsters. It’s a tough spot to be in, hence Serrador’s title.

Roth changes that up. It’s little leaguer Jared (Charlie Zeltzer) and a couple of other kids who managed who find themselves face-to-face with the Ice Cream Man’s minions. His wares change children into frenzied killing machines. Only those lactose intolerant enough not to digest the tainted snack treats remain healthy.

Roth delights in the childish carnage. Early kills are especially nasty, all of it laced with a macabre humor and ghoulish playfulness. A similar tone is one of the reasons his 2023 film Thanksgiving was such an enjoyable return to genre work.

But Ice Cream Man never hits the spot quite as well as Thanksgiving. By removing the adult victim-hero, Roth creates a children-in-peril horror that doesn’t pull on the emotions of similar fare, like It or Devil’s Backbone, because children are also the villains.

The switch also eliminates the vicarious fear and revulsion adults often harbor, sometimes deep down, for children. Cooties read like every middle school teacher’s secret fantasy. It’s also funnier and better paced without foregoing any of the blood or nastiness.

Roth can’t manage to keep the pace moving, often pausing the action when it makes the least sense. The plot, what little there is, feels like a convenient, even cliché afterthought.

Which is not to say that Ice Cream Man is all bad. For bloodthirsty horror fans, it gets nasty. There are also a handful of randomly funny moments, and others that are just offensive. The film’s less irreverent than it thinks it is, though, and that’s its biggest weakness.

Fright Club

Fright Club: Interview with The Withering Actor Gareth Tidball

Leave a comment

Gareth Tidball wowed the two of us a few years back taking on the role of Stephanie in our film Obstacle Corpse. Since then, she’s gone on to star in about a dozen feature films, and even shared a scene with Tom Hardy in Havoc. In this bonus Fright Club, we’re delighted to check in with Gareth about her latest feature, The Withering.

Outtakes

Her Business

Leave a comment

Due West

by Rachel Willis

Director Evan Miller focuses his attention on a desperate Woman in his first feature film, Due West.

Co-writing with Hardy Janson, Miller opens the film by letting the camera rest on a solitary woman standing outside a quiet bar. This unnamed Woman (Adrianne Palicki) smokes, taps her foot nervously against the wall, and waits for a text that tells her she will need $700 by tomorrow.

It’s not much to go on, but it’s clear from the tension that bleeds from every gesture and expression from the Woman that this is a steep sum of money. And money she desperately needs.

It’s hard not to be hooked as we follow her from moment to moment. Even as two bar patrons shoot the shit with a female bartender, our gaze never strays from our protagonist for long. When she re-enters the bar, her anxious body language belies the smile on her face.

Though not explicitly stated, it’s easy to figure out why the Woman needs the money. The sum, the cryptic texts, and the command to text from a burner phone when she reaches her destination speak to a procedure recently made illegal in many states after a certain, damaging Supreme Court ruling.

The film’s dialogue, at times, is stunning. It brings with it snatches of backstory, life lived in a small town in West Texas, where the people know your business whether you want them to or not. Especially when you don’t want them to. Sadly, there are also times when it leaves subtlety behind – to the film’s detriment.

The second half of the film is when it starts to fall apart. Though our sympathy lies with the protagonist, as we learn more of her story, as she makes certain choices, judgment bleeds into the film. It ends up making a statement that there is a “right” type of situation when a certain procedure is justified. Whether intentional or not, it’s a harmful choice for a film to make when women deserve the right to care regardless of the why.

Outtakes

Wait a Minute, Baby

Leave a comment

Son of Sara

by Hope Madden

It’s hard to do something new with the “pregnant with Satan’s baby” formula. There are only so many ways it can go, and you can’t hope to unseat Rosemary’s Baby. But writer/director Houston Bone and a game cast breathe weird life in this oft-told tale.

Sara (Chloe Van Landschoot) is very pregnant. Overdue, huge, and constantly vomiting, she’s ready to be done. Her devoted girlfriend Carol (Tymika Tafari) takes good care of her. Still, Sara’s definitely not entirely OK.

She runs into Troy (Garrett Hnatiuk), the pre-Carol fling and baby daddy, and feels strangely compelled to take him up on his offer of dinner. Back at his house. Out in the middle of nowhere. With his mom (Jane Moffat).

While moments of Act 1 smack of cliché —certainly that package of bloody ground chuck in the refrigerator—Bone’s script and his actors’ talent, plus Sara’s convincing pregnant state, keep you invested.

Bone gives his cast breathing room, never rushing a scene, always lingering just long enough for someone to be intriguing. That could be Hnatiuk’s awkwardly seductive dancing, Tafari’s disdainful glare, Moffat’s contemptuous sneer, or Landschoot’s childlike gesturing. The chemistry between and among the actors is top notch, and the way they inhabit their characters ensures even formulaic scenes feel unusual and fresh.

Son of Sara is not a spendy affair, but it rarely feels trapped by its budget. Bone and crew make great use of what funds they do have, and the filmmaker’s instinct for relationship-driven humor and discomfort overcome nearly every cinematic setback.

Even if a few beats buckle under familiarity, the underlying change in theme quietly upends a status quo expectation in enormously enjoyable ways. Son of Sara has an F-you quality to it that doesn’t draw attention to itself and is all the more satisfying for it. It’s fun, tightly constructed, compellingly performed horror and you’re out in under 90 minutes. What do you have to lose?

New In Theaters

Carnal College

Leave a comment

I Want Your Sex

by George Wolf

Even when a Gregg Araki film does not work for me at all (hello, Kaboom), I’m interested in his next move. Whatever he’s up to, you can make a safe bet it will be audacious, horny and pretty damn fearless.

I Want Your Sex is all that and a bag of charming.

Cooper Hoffman is a damn delight as Elliot, an affable, mop-headed goofball who’s thrilled to get a job working for Neo-pop artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde, fantastically self-absorbed smoke show). Erika deals in frank sexuality, and waits a full week before giving her new assistant a no-nonsense, carnal proposition.

What’s Elliot to do? Yes, the studious Minerva (Charli XCX) is his girlfriend, but to her sex is an uninteresting chore, so….it’s DTF time!

Erika gets a new sexual muse, and Elliot gets to broaden his, ahem, horizons in various kinky ways. Though co-workers Vikktor and Zap (Daveed Diggs and Mason Gooding, respectively letter perfect) consistently roll their eyes at Elliot’s naïveté, he’s pretty okay with Erika’s benefits package.

That is, until there’s blood, a body, and two detectives (Margaret Cho, Johnny Knoxville) wanting answers.

Araki, who also co-writes with Karley Sciortino, crafts much of the film as a mystery told via shifting timelines. But each step in the Elliot/Erika relationship is so engaging you forget there are two cops ready to pop in with more questions. They can wait a hot minute, because Araki and company are having too much fun with this neon-colored tapestry of sexual mores, hipster sweat shops, Harold Robbins novels and penis rugs, all wrapped around frisky exclamations and hilariously droll asides.

Hoffman and Wilde are a down and dirty joy together, and their natural, committed chemistry gives the film a sweet, dare I say even sentimental layer I wasn’t expecting.

I was expecting the sexcapades, and all the usual Araki flourishes. But even while pushing all of these fetish boundaries, I Want Your Sex may be his most accessible film. And most thoroughly enjoyable.

Shudder Premiere

Night, Mommy

Leave a comment

Nightborn

by Hope Madden

Finnish filmmaker Hanna Bergholm (Hatching) once again explores horrific maternal themes with Nightborn. Don’t confuse it with Neil Blomkamp’s soulless AI short film. This is not that.

Bergholm’s film stumbles into a classic Finnish folktale. Saga (Seidi Haarla) and her husband Jon (Rupert Grint) move to her grandmother’s old, long vacant home deep in the forest. Gran was a bit of an eccentric. She kept old junk—tractors, machinery, wire—around the property because the creatures in the woods hated cold iron.

What a nut!

Saga and Jon settle in to reclaim the cabin from the encroaching woods and to start their family. Jon is immediately besotted with little Christian regardless of how hairy he is. Saga can’t seem to bond with him, although she does try to find her place as a mother, first by asserting that his name is Kuura.

Bergholm’s film, co-written with Hatching writing partner Ilja Rautsi, takes us deep into a post-partum nightmare. While the film is far less original than Hatching, examining maternal horror from the mother’s perspective gives the film dimension.

Haarla looks and acts the part perfectly. Bergholm and Haarla work together to bend your expectations and sympathies. There is something wrong with this child and we’re as frustrated as Saga with the way she’s dismissed as being depressed and exhausted. The next minute, we see Saga as a narcissist whose personality disorder is now on display because she can’t find love in her heart for her baby. Then, clearly Saga is just delirious and exhausted and suffering from post-partum, all issues exacerbated by society’s demand that motherhood is precious and perfect.

Nightborn weaves these likelihoods without asking us to turn against anyone. The film empathizes with Saga, even when her behavior does seem too prickly. Likewise, we’re never asked to hate Jon—a good thing because Grint is endlessly sympathetic as a man who wants desperately to be a good dad and husband.

Though Nightborn is not perfect—the creature and baby effects leave a bit to be desired—its exploration is fascinating. Never tidy, never patronizing, but not quickly forgiving, the film embraces what’s monstrous in us. It’s not the complete success of Hatching, but it’s a vivid nightmare worth your time.

Hope Madden and George Wolf … get it?