German Angst is a movie for the “V/H/S,” “Zombieworld,” “The ABCs of Death” crowd in that it is technically a collection of three shorter films — “Final Girl,” “Make a Wish,” and “Alraune,” respectively — full of extreme violence and horrific fun. With “Final Girl” as a quiet, graphic, and personal revenge fantasy, “Make a…
When I reviewed the first “Unfriended” film in 2015, I described it as a time capsule; an inside joke between its creators and anyone familiar with the technology it uniquely and realistically integrated that would only fully pay off if/when, years later, its original audience watched younger, uninitiated viewers try to understand it outside of…
“Are you an angry person?” “Who are you angry at?” “Are you ever inclined to hurt someone?” The First Purge begins on Staten Island, where evaluation teams interview prospective participants in a new experiment organized by the New Founding Fathers of America (NFFA), a political party organized as an alternative to the existing system. On…
A Taste of Phobia never threatens to touch greatness. But, like all horror anthologies, there are inspired moments and passable individual efforts. You just need to filter out the hairs in the soup. Thankfully, I’ve brought my sieve. This is a collection of 14 micro-movies, mostly pertaining to body horror. Each short is named for…
Hereditary begins after a 78-year-old woman, Ellen, dies, leaving her daughter Annie (Toni Collette, “Krampus”), teenage grandchildren Peter (Alex Wolff, “Coming Through the Rye”) and Charlie (Milly Shapiro), and their father Steve (Gabriel Byrne, “The 33”) alone in the house they’d shared at the end of her life. That’s one thing made eloquently and devastatingly…
I know how it looks. Ari Aster’s “Hereditary” is just becoming this year’s classy horror breakout hit, and here’s a lousy, straight-to-VOD knock-off with a conspicuously similar title, right? Well, there are no coincidences in marketing, but it turns out that Inheritance is actually a decent psychological thriller: Atmospheric, well-played and well-made, and dead serious….
“Scribbled, shot and cut by Giorgio Serafini,” read the titles at the end of The Executioners, as Tim Polecat’s jaunty song “Another Word for Hate” bounces on the soundtrack, as if what we just saw was all a bit of tongue-in-cheek fun. But there’s nothing fun about Serafini’s hateful home invasion horror movie. Four twenty-something…
