Welcome to Clophill, Population: Regret There’s a special place in cinematic purgatory reserved for found-footage horror films that confuse “slow burn” with “please make it stop.” The Paranormal Diaries: Clophill doesn’t just flirt with that line—it marries it, moves into a haunted cottage with it, and then spends 98 minutes filming absolutely nothing happening in … Read More “The Paranormal Diaries: Clophill — Where Ghosts Fear to Tread (and So Should You)” »
Til Death (and Terrible Writing) Do Us Part If you’ve ever attended a wedding so disastrously awkward that you wished an axe murderer would crash it just to liven things up, Death Do Us Part is the movie for you. Unfortunately, even the killer can’t save this one. Directed by Nicholas Humphries and written by … Read More “Death Do Us Part (2014): A Wedding So Bad It Should’ve Stayed Uninvited” »
Paws, Claws, and Pure Nonsense If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if someone remade a classic 1970s Mexican horror film by replacing atmosphere with fog machines, subtlety with jump scares, and the ghostly cat with a poorly animated furball that looks like it escaped from a PlayStation 2 game—well, congratulations, you’ve just imagined Darker … Read More “Darker Than Night (2014): A Catastrophic Remake — Literally and Metaphorically” »
When Lunch Turns into a Biohazard Let’s face it: if you’ve ever eaten a school cafeteria chicken nugget, you’ve probably already made peace with death. Cooties takes that shared trauma and runs with it—straight into absurd, gory, and gleefully deranged territory. Directed by Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion, and written by Glee co-creator Ian Brennan … Read More “Cooties (2014): The Best Zombie Movie Ever Made About the Dangers of Chicken Nuggets and Childhood” »
When the Title Is Also a Threat If you’ve ever wondered what it would look like if The Sixth Sense, Pet Sematary, and a Lifetime infidelity drama were tossed into a blender and poured onto a VHS tape from 1999, Come Back to Me is your answer. Paul Leyden’s 2014 psychological horror film has a … Read More “Come Back to Me (2014): The Movie That Dies, Resurrects, and Still Manages to Be a Corpse” »
The Birth of a Monster (and Also a Baby) Cloning has been a favorite moral minefield of science fiction for decades, but Billy Senese’s Closer to God dares to ask the real question: what if Dr. Frankenstein wore a lab coat, lived in the suburbs, and forgot how to smile? This 2014 sci-fi horror gem, … Read More “Closer to God (2014): Playing God, Parenting Nightmares, and the Worst Take-Your-Kid-to-Work Day Ever” »
Haunted House, Haunted Husband If you’ve ever suspected your spouse of cheating, The Canal is here to reassure you that things could always be worse. You could, for example, discover that your home was the scene of a century-old murder, find a reel of haunted film stock, and slowly descend into a paranoid spiral where … Read More “The Canal (2014): Marriage Counseling by Way of Madness, Murder, and Home Renovation Horror” »
A Cabin, a Deadline, and a Whole Lot of Deadlines Every horror writer dreams of escaping to a secluded cabin for inspiration. Few of them imagine that inspiration will arrive via a series of grisly murders. But that’s exactly the gleefully twisted premise behind The Cabining, a 2014 horror comedy from Steve Kopera that asks, … Read More “The Cabining (2014): Murder, Writer’s Block, and the Best Horror Movie About Bad Ideas Ever Written” »
A Slasher Salad Nobody Ordered There are bad horror movies, and then there’s The Butchers — a cinematic crime scene where good taste was butchered long before the fake blood started flying. Directed by Steven Judd (a man who apparently thought “what if Night at the Museum but with serial killers and zero sense?” was … Read More “The Butchers (2014): When Serial Killers, Satan, and a Bus Ride Collide in One Giant Dumpster Fire of Horror” »
Hop Into Hell, Y’all There are movies you watch, and then there are movies you survive. Bunnyman 2 (also known as The Bunnyman Resurrection or The Bunnyman Massacre, depending on how generous your DVD label feels) is that rare cinematic beast that exists in the sweet spot between absolute lunacy and low-budget brilliance. It’s a … Read More “Bunnyman 2 (2014): Chainsaws, Carrots, and Carnage—A Bloody Good Time” »