Okay, so I’ve got a pile of horror movies to get through. Some of them are from Joe-Bob, many of them are not, but I’m going to put them all into one entry because I’m lazy and don’t feel like writing that much.

Death Game (on Joe-Bob) is this movie where two young women show up (lost in a pre-GPS world, in the rain at night) at a dude’s house while his wife is out of town. He invites them in to call their friends for pickup. Things escalate quickly into flirtiness and beyond, and then escalate more as the women take over and destroy his life, including murdering a cat. Which I mention because it sets up the most absurd final scene ever: They walk away from his house scot-free, moving on to their next life-destroying adventure, and then completely randomly are hit by an SPCA truck that’s speeding down the road. It violates every rule of screenwriting, and you have to respect that.

So Sweet… So Perverse is the non-hosted paired movie that Shudder followed up with. It’s not quite clear why at first, as this is a French Italian movie where a dude is in an unhappy marriage and openly having an affair (as Europeans apparently do). But then a woman moves in upstairs, and he has a new affair with her. Things get complicated, with twists and betrayals a-plenty, and okay the paired theme is the male-screenwriter misogynistic horror that women you have sex with might destroy your life. The movie is fine, but not more than that. It’s really one of those movies you watch to enjoy the trashy Euro-vibe.

Cemetery Man (on Joe-Bob) is a very weird movie. The plot is super-trippy and does not make sense in any conventional way; it’s one of those dorm-room “but what does it mean” things that’s heavy on interpretability over literality. It starts off with cool scenes where Rupert Everett is a caretaker at a cemetery where bodies routinely rise from their graves as zombies, and he’s totally blase about just shooting them in the head as he encounters them. But it rapidly escalates into weirder places, and Everett starts doing inexplicable things (and becomes a very unlikable protagonist) as it leaves realism behind. Is it fully successful? No. Is it interesting? Yes.

Abigail is a modern movie that’s very frustrating, because the setup is that a team of professional criminals kidnap a little rich girl and then take her to a giant old mansion while they ransom her for cash. It quickly becomes clear that something isn’t entirely on the level about this crime, though exactly what the deal is won’t be clear until nearly an hour into the movie. Unless, that is, you read the little blurb on Peacock for the movie, which also pops up unavoidably every time you pause the screen, which completely spoils this development and leaves you watching that first hour just waiting for them to get to it. I’d say the movie was fine but unexceptional, but suspect it would have hit a lot better without that upfront spoiler.

The Slumber Party Massacre (on Joe-Bob) is a very classic slasher, and it’s basically fine. It fits the bill for its genre, with neither anything particularly original or interesting nor anything particularly bad (though all the characters are kinda stupid and end up doing things for reasons that feel a little plot-driven). What’s really interesting is that it was written by a woman, and produced and directed by a woman… and you’d never know any of that from what’s on-screen, which is every bit as tits-out prurient as anything in the genre.

When Evil Lurks (on Joe-Bob) is a modern horror movie that’s dark as fuck. Like, not only does the dog die, but it dies after it viciously murders a small child under demonic possession. It’s an Argentinian movie set in a kind of post-apocalyptic world where demonic possession is just a thing that happens sometimes, and it’s important to get the “cleaners” to take care of it before it gets too irresistible… but there’s a possession that’s progressed to a too-late stage, and welp. The movie is from 2023, and one of the big themes in it is that possession is contagious — the contagion can stick to items and follow people around, even — and it doesn’t take too much imagination to read it as a very post-Covid horror film. Good stuff, but not what you want if you just want some light horror fun, for sure.

Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell (on Joe-Bob) is an extremely low-budget Japanese movie — shot on video, mostly in 1995, but it took the director many years to get it filmed and edited, and it wasn’t released until 2012. It’s explicitly billed as an homage to/ripoff of Evil Dead, and it definitely has that kind of energy, albeit with a Japanese ghost flavor to it. The special effects are good, considering, and its clearly amateur nature mostly serves to engender a sense of goodwill that makes up for its various failings. It’s a brisk one-hour movie, and even at that almost overstays its welcome (there are like two too many “there, that took care of the bad guy… oh wait” fakeouts), but is an easy recommend for a low-effort watch. This came on at 2 AM on a Joe-Bob all-night marathon, and it’s extremely a 2 AM kinda movie.

Strip Nude For Your Killer is a movie that we watched because a) it was on The Criterion Channel so you know it’s a classy arthouse movie, but b) with that title? Turns out it is not a classy movie, surprise. Wikipedia says it “has been described as a formulaic giallo thriller,” and tbh that’s about right. It’s a little sleazier than some (though not at the sleaziest end of the genre). The plot — about a series of murders at a modeling agency that, one might surmise (correctly), are related to a botched abortion that kills a woman at the beginning of the movie — is hard to follow, not least because the characters look too similar for me to reliably tell them apart. I’m torn between thinking this is on Criterion just because they wanted to pad out a giallo selection with some cheap licenses, and thinking that they’re trying to recontextualize it as a feminist-rage social commentary (which, okay, fair enough if so, but it’s still not great).

In a Violent Nature is an interestingly experimental slasher, the premise of which is that it’s filmed from the killer’s point of view, rather than the people who are getting killed. There’s a kind of funny element to this, which is that it mostly means watching the killer trudge across empty forest landscapes to go from location to location, so that he can be present to menace the characters as they move around and try to figure out what’s going on. This can make the movie feel a little slow (my wife was disappointed in it for this reason), but I am always here for a slow movie that’s doing something interesting, and I thought it worked. The thing that was surprising to me was how much this felt like a videogame: There’s a lot of shots from behind the killer, whose stiff walk makes him look like a third-person RPG protagonist; and then the plot is done in overheard dialogue, which has the kind of staged-setpiece feel that you get from stumbling on NPCs in an open-world game. I think this movie will be somewhat divisive (and I didn’t love the ending), but is worth watching for slasher fans who are open to something a little unconventional.

Infinity Pool is a “fucked up rich people” movie by Brandon Cronenberg. The premise is that our protagonists are at a fancy resort in a poor, authoritarian country where you’re not supposed to leave the compound. But… they do, and shit gets dark very quickly. Shit also gets weird very quickly, with a kind of science-fictional conceit that’s horrifying and yet also sexually addictive for the protagonist (apparently Brandon is very much David’s son). Ultimately, this is one of those movies where rich people spiral into madness, and it becomes unclear what reality even is, and it makes me want to rewatch Eyes Wide Shut.