Author of adventure/thriller and horror fiction

MADS (2024)

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In MadS (2024), a French zombie movie, a young party goer becomes infected with a strange virus. Shot in one continuous take, the film packs a lot of frantic energy and has a lot of unpredictability, but the limitations of the form may have some viewers restless while watching.

The movie begins with a young man scoring coke from his dealer. On the way home, he is forced to pull over, which is when a strange woman jumps into the car and appears to kill herself, splashing him with blood. Frantic, he drives home and is drawn out of the house by a woman he’s dating and their friends for a night out on the town. As the night wears on, he becomes increasingly paranoid, appears to have gas mask-wearing soldiers with rifles chasing him, and finally breaks down and acts erratic.

The film then switches point of view to the woman and then to her friend. Along the way, it’s uncertain if they’re sharing a really horrible drug trip or turning into zombies. This is more or less answered by the end, but the question hung over much of the movie for me.

The movie doesn’t bother too much with character, preferring to lean on the one continuous take to stimulate the viewer. The only trick is this can be fatiguing, and there are very long stretches of the POV character moving from place to place where not much is happening.

By the end, I felt like I’d eaten a chocolate bar for dinner, if you know what I mean.

All in all, though, I had fun with it. The continuous take is always an impressive technical feat. The actors all act naturally, which along with the somewhat grainy aesthetic gives the whole thing a bit of a cinema verite feel. It’s both a zombie movie and not a zombie movie, inspired by them but doing its own thing, showing how a z-poc might start from the infected’s point of view.

BLINK TWICE (2024)

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Directed and co-written by Zoë Kravitz, BLINK TWICE (2024) is a psychological thriller (though at least horror adjacent if not also horror) about a woman invited by a billionaire to his private island, where his guests spend their time in endless partying and self-exploration, only to discover something far more sinister is going on. While its feminist message is paper thin and it takes a while before things get bad, I enjoyed its restless energy, little moments of humor, and oddball characters and cast.

When billionaire tech mogul Slater King (Channing Tatum) hosts an event signaling his return after disappearing for a while following some horrible harassment allegations, server Frida (Naomi Ackie) and her friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) infiltrate the after party so Frida could flirt with him. He invites her to his private island, where he and his friends spend their days enjoying life to the fullest. The only problem is strange memory lapses and other little clues that things aren’t what they seem. When Jess disappears but the other women doesn’t seem to remember her, Frida becomes increasingly aware that something is dreadfully wrong, leading up to a violent final act.

The themes of the rich doing whatever they want without real consequences because they’re rich and exploiting others are present, if not explored much. The story takes a simpler path of seeding the idea that things aren’t what they seem and letting it cook until it explodes. Honestly, the story is fine, not great, not terrible, and it at least feels familiar. Where the movie shines is in the sometimes frantic and always restless energy it has in its pacing, acting, cinematography, and little comedic moments.

Overall, I had a lot of fun with BLINK TWICE, which offers up a simple story creatively told.

OUTSIDE (2024)

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In the Filipino zombie movie OUTSIDE (2024, Netflix), a family faces its dark secrets and inner demons against the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse. Though arguably it could have used more zombies and a bit more action, the movie is a breath of fresh air in a genre whose tropes have been overworked by Hollywood, focusing on the human toll of stress when everything falls apart.

The movie begins with a family traveling into the countryside, where Francis (Sid Lucero) believes they can find refuge with his parents. He brings Iris (Beauty Gonzales) and their boys Josh (Marco Masa) and Lucas (Aiden Patdu). They take over the sugar plantation and attempt to hold out, but Iris is anxious about reaching other survivors and wants to leave, while Francis wants to stay.

There’s a lot of slow burn family drama and psychological horror here, as the characters and what drives them unravels like the proverbial onion. Iris appears cold, but she has her reasons. Francis is insecure and tries too hard to prove himself as a man, but he has his reasons. All of it enhanced and salted by not knowing if anyone else is alive amid civilization’s collapse; instead of putting aside all the old stuff because the world is ending, the movie makes the point that the opposite may be true. The actors do a great job communicating in a layered way, both what they want and what they need.

The zombies are pretty well done, nicely creepy. The only trick is by the third act, they start to fade as a threat until the very end, while the family drama boils over. I was all in for it, as I greatly enjoyed the movie and was happy to go where it took me, but some might not be. The location was interesting too, taking us into the rural Philippines.

Overall, I liked OUTSIDE a lot. I’ve seen a lot of zombie movies, and while this one ain’t perfect, it’s good. Where movies like WORLD WAR Z excelled in action but failed in basic character development and making us care, OUTSIDE goes the other way, not providing nearly as much action but offering richly drawn characters who feel like real people, thrown into a claustrophobic horror of the apocalypse.

RED ROOMS (2024)

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In the French-Canadian film RED ROOMS (2024), a young woman named Kelly-Anne becomes obsessed with a serial killer, leading her down a dark road to track down a missing video depicting the murder of a teen. This movie is a master class in horror, cultivating a morbid sense of revulsion using sound and description instead of shoving it in your face.

The movie begins with the opening statements at a trial. We have the defendant, believed to have murdered three pretty young teens and posted the videos as “red room” snuff videos for profit on the dark web (a new digital take on the old snuff film urban legend of the 1970s). We have the prosecutor laying out the grisly crime in detail, letting our imaginations do the work. And we have Kelly-Anne sitting in the observation area, watching the trial day after day.

Is she a serial killer groupie, a sicko who likes snuff films, or is something else at work? She’s a fascinating character in how she pursues information about the case and probes the dark web herself to plumb the case’s deepest secrets. We find out what she’s been doing all along in a nice twist at the end, though this comes at the expense of never really knowing what drives her, why she does what she does. We’re kept in the dark for a reason, and while it’s a good reason, again, there’s the tradeoff. That one vital piece of storytelling, which is what haunts a character and makes them believe what they believe and need what they need.

That aside, I loved it. I found the story intensely moody, the cinematography and soundtrack great, and the protagonist engaging. I particularly loved the use of sound, spoken description, and human reactions to the torture and murder of the teens, which made the crimes subject to the imagination and therefore all the more grisly and horrific. Overall, I appreciated how RED ROOMS took the tired trope of the serial killer and turned it into something deeply engaging.

THE KING TIDE (2023)

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In THE KING TIDE (2023), a desperate community of island fishermen discover an infant with a magical power of healing, resulting in the community forming a virtual religion around the girl and becoming willing to do anything to protect and ensure their access to her powers. The filmmakers wring a ton of drama from a simple story and modest budget, with a terrific payoff.

Distraught after his wife Grace suffers another miscarriage, Bobby takes a walk and hears a baby crying near the sea. Discovering a lost infant, he and his wife adopt the girl, though she is no normal child. Named Isla, she has the ability to heal almost any ailment and keep people young. Years later, the island has sealed itself off and has formed a virtual cult around her. But Isla has another power, one that is darker than healing, and when the girl grows confused and appears to lose all her power, the community falls into chaos, turning on each other and outsiders.

It’s a simple premise and story, the kind of thing you might find in a Shirley Jackson short story or a play turned into a film, but the filmmakers mine a huge amount of drama and tragedy out of it. As things go wrong, everyone becomes an antagonist, and what makes these characters so great is every one of them has a powerful motivation for what they want and what they’re willing to do for it. The town’s now useless medic, for example, believes the community is exploiting Isla and wants her to have more choice. Her adoptive parents want to protect her, and their mother, cured of a catatonic form of dementia, is willing to do anything to avoid going back into that horrible fog. And on and on, all of it leading up to tragedy with a terrific ending. The real monster, it seems, is simple human nature.

Otherwise, the setting is notably bleak, an isolated community on an island in Nova Scotia where the houses are barely resisting the erosion of time and the harsh elements. The people who live there are ordinary people similarly turned rugged and hard by their environment. The pacing is solid and the dialogue just fine.

Overall, I was impressed by THE KING TIDE and would happily recommend it as a simple horror story about human nature that is well told.

EXHUMA (2024)

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Korean film has a real knack for horror, offering seriously creepy stories populated by terrific characters you care about. The latest I caught was EXHUMA (2024), about a shaman and a geomancer who team up to relieve a family of a curse, only to discover something far more evil buried beneath the earth. I really enjoyed this one.

In this story, Korean shaman Hwa-rim and her protege are hired by a rich businessman to identify the cause of a strange illness affecting both him and his newborn son, which turns out to be a haunting by a vengeful ancestor. In Korea, they team up with a geomancer (specialist in cosmic energy flowing between people and their environments) and his own partner. Together, they must exhume the grave of an ancestor located in a horrible grave site in an area where the very ground appears to be diseased.

That’s when things of course go very wrong, as they contend not only with the vengeful ancestor but a far larger evil.

This movie is great horror, really folklore or religious horror, deeply steeped in realistically portrayed shamanism, geomancy, and Korean and Japanese mythology. The characters are very likeable, even though we don’t get to know them very well, and the shaman is unfortunately a bit underdeveloped; it’s in the spiritualist procedural aspects where this film really shines. Their cosmic battle against evil forces is compelling and different, with its nearest equivalent on this side of the Pacific maybe being THE EXORCIST. Plenty of twists kept me engaged, though some viewers may find it jarring how the story appears to wrap up halfway through the film, only for the real adversary to reveal itself. In its dark tone evoking dread, the movie reminded me a lot of THE WAILING, which had a similar tone. (That movie also had a very dark ending, distinguishing another great thing about Korean horror cinema, which is you really need to check your expectations at the door.) The ending to EXHUMA surprised me in a great way, and I loved how it came in for a landing.

Overall, I loved EXHUMA and look forward to what Korea comes up with next in horror.