Poché Pictures

If cinematic franchises were house pets, Shake, Rattle & Roll would be that ancient, half-blind dog who keeps bumping into furniture but refuses to stop wandering around. After a nine-year hiatus, Shake, Rattle & Roll Extreme stumbles back into theaters like a relative who wasn’t invited to the reunion but shows up anyway, clutching a … Read More “Shake, Rattle & Roll Extreme (2023) Sixteen Films Later, the Franchise Still Refuses to Die — Like a Zombie That Forgot Its Own Motivation” »

By the tenth film in the Saw franchise, you’d think we’d run out of people willing to wake up in a dimly lit warehouse with a bucket over their head and a cassette tape calling them out for not recycling. But no — Saw X arrives determined to prove that even the Grim Reaper can … Read More “Saw X (2023) Jigsaw’s Revenge Tour Continues — and Somehow Feels Like a TED Talk With Power Tools” »

If Pet Sematary (2019) was a lukewarm reheating of Stephen King’s original nightmare casserole, Pet Sematary: Bloodlines is the congealed leftovers someone microwaves at 3 a.m. because they’re too tired to care and too hungry to stop. It’s a prequel that tries to answer the question, “But where did the creepy cemetery come from?” — … Read More “Pet Sematary: Bloodlines (2023) A prequel nobody asked for, built from the bones of a franchise that should’ve stayed buried” »

Mr. Crocket is what happens when you take a perfectly good nightmare premise—“What if Mister Rogers was a demonic kidnapper?”—and then smother it in exposition, therapy monologues, and a third-act lore dump so dense you start rooting for the Devil just to simplify things. Brandon Espy expands his 6-minute Hulu “Bite Size Halloween” short into … Read More “Mr. Crocket” »

If you’ve ever wanted to experience an all-night bender, a zombie outbreak, and a full nervous breakdown without leaving your couch, Mads is pretty much the deluxe sampler platter. David Moreau’s single-take French horror thriller is part drug trip, part urban panic, part “why are my friends like this,” and it somehow keeps getting tenser … Read More “Mads” »

The Last Breath is the kind of shark movie that proves you don’t actually need a great white to feel attacked — 96 minutes of this script will do just fine. Billed as a survival horror thriller about old college friends diving a newly discovered WWII wreck and discovering they’re “not alone down there,” it … Read More “The Last Breath” »

Violent Art Film or Nature Walk With Occasional Dismemberment? In a Violent Nature has been hailed as a bold “ambient slasher,” a reinvention of the genre, and one of the year’s best horror movies according to more than a few critics.Personally, it felt less like a movie and more like watching a murderous NPC slowly … Read More “In a Violent Nature When your slasher movie accidentally turns into a hiking meditation app” »

If you’ve ever stared at a child’s teddy bear and thought, “I wish this thing would drag my soul into a PG-13 hellscape of mediocre jump scares,” Imaginary is technically the answer to your prayer. Unfortunately, like most cursed objects, it sounds way cooler than it actually is. Jeff Wadlow’s latest Blumhouse outing takes a … Read More “Imaginary” »

Haunted by Potential Somewhere inside Hauntology there’s a fantastic movie clawing at the coffin lid. Unfortunately, what actually staggers out is a well-meaning, queer, road-trip horror anthology that’s so in love with its own concept it forgets to be, you know, consistently good. Parker Brennon’s feature debut sells itself as a “queer horror road trip” … Read More “Hauntology (2024) Great concept, spooky vibes, and a runtime that feels like your soul got stuck buffering.” »

If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to get locked overnight inside a very long, very self-serious religious studies thesis, Grave Torture (Siksa Kubur) has you covered. It’s like someone looked at Indonesian horror’s hot streak and thought, “What if we did all the themes at once and then buried them alive?” Joko … Read More “Grave Torture (Siksa Kubur)” »