The Home Invasion Shorts block for the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival is a mixed bag this year with some gems and some missteps. In either case, there’s some genuine talent and interesting ideas on display for festival goers.
Tag Archives: Foreign
Nightmare Fuel Shorts Block [Brooklyn Horror Film Festival 2023]
This year’s the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival kicks off at the Nitehawk theater, and they premiered one of their trio of short film blocks. “Nightmare Fuel” is one of their absolute best with eight memorable horror entries from all over the world.
Scare Attraction (2019)
It’s not often I see a horror movie with such a paper thin script that it blatantly pads the run time. And even when it pads the run time with filler, it still only amounts to a seventy two minute film. And it’s barely seventy two minutes when you don’t factor in the closing credits, and long opening credits. Filmed on a $150,000 budget, what I imagine happened was director/writer Steven M. Smith wanted to film a movie in the vein of “Saw.” He got a hold of a primo haunted house and decided to build his script around the house. That’s likely why the movie’s entire narrative begins and ends in this haunted house, and nothing ever feels organic.
Pumpkins (2018)
Director Maria Lee Metheringham’s “Pumpkins” is a film that would have worked so much better as a short form segment in an anthology horror film. As a feature length film, it falls painfully flat. Everything that needs to be resolved about the narrative is literally resolved in the first half hour. Everything else is merely filler that transforms what could have been an interesting revenge tale in to another slasher film.
Le espera (The Wait) (2023) [Fantastic Fest 2023]
Lily C.A.T. (1987)
It’s pretty astonishing how “Lily C.A.T.” manages to be such a blatant copy of some classic eighties films, and yet still comes out looking pretty shiny when all is said and done. The 1987 science fiction deep space horror film heavily borrows (or rips off, depending on how kind you are) material from the likes of Ridley Scott’s 1979 horror film “Alien,” as well as John Carpenter’s 1981 masterpiece “The Thing” with even the crew brandishing flame throwers to ward off the monster. It’s a prerequisite for a movie that pretty much has fun with its premise, delivering so much in such a short time.
Creepy Crawly (2023)
During the pandemic, a group of tourists checks into a quarantine hotel in Thailand. Soon, a creature starts attacking and killing them off one by one.