Mandibles is a profoundly audacious film, moronic and masterful in equal measure. Perhaps the most unbefitting title to arrive in the middle of a global pandemic, Quentin Dupieux’s Mandibles defies the current for two reasons. That its titular appendage serves a wholly positive function —…
First Date endows its stock premise with a zany amateurism that is simultaneously cool and cringeworthy. First Date, the debut feature of directorial duo Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp, has a gonzo sensibility that threatens, on occasion, to undermine its claims to baseline competency. The…
The Evil Next Door forgoes character development and clever plotting in an effort to manufacture cheap scares. Is there anything more boring than a competent, middle-of-the-road horror movie? Tord Danielsson and Oskar Mellander’s The Evil Next Door follows the haunted house playbook to a…
Rarely has horror felt as inert as it does in the tedious Censor. The opening credits to the new horror film Censor feature a montage of gory and violent scenes courtesy of what the British once referred to as “video nasties,” low-budget horror and…
Riders of Justice finds director Jensen hedging between the dank feels of his early scriptwork and the weirdo vibes of his later directorial output, to mixed effect. Riders of Justice bears a tone that will be familiar to those fluent in the collaborative work of…
Held manages to best Cluff and Lofing’s The Gallows, but it still an abysmal, problematic, and tension-free failure. The new marriage-in-peril thriller Held comes courtesy of directing duo Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing, the two dudes responsible for 2015’s found-footage horror flick The Gallows,…
Despite the formidable presence of Angela Bettis, 12 Hour Shift is a half-assed and visionless throwaway. 2002 was a breakout year for actress Angela Bettis, as she portrayed the title roles in two distinctly original films about murderous introverts — Lucky McKee’s magnificent May and the…
You would be forgiven for thinking that director Michael Beach Nichols’ Wrinkles the Clown is yet another horror film capitalizing on the current coulrophobia craze, following the gargantuan box office returns of 2017’s It adaptation. But whereas Pennywise is a fictional character stemming from…
It’s amusing to think that the V/H/S horror franchise has gone from bigger, to smaller, to smallest in the span of three films. Last year’s V/H/S 2 cut the first picture’s punishing two-hour running time down by about half an hour, resulting in a…
The scenario behind Leigh Janiak’s debut feature Honeymoon is one of the most common in the horror genre: A newlywed couple spends their honeymoon at a cabin in the woods and everything goes horribly wrong. But while it never goes so far as to…
