Slay (2024)

Now Streaming Exclusively on Tubi.

If you’ve seen the trailer or read about “Slay,” then yes, it is exactly the movie that you think it is. If you took “Priscilla Queen of the Dessert” and mixed it with “From Dusk Til Dawn” then you have what is essentially “Slay.” No more, no less. The thing about “Slay” though is that it is a siege horror comedy with vampires and drag queens it at least takes time to make up some of its own rules for vampire. This is a creative move despite the fact it’s also a trick use to cover up the movie’s obviously low budget. And I can’t complain, because the movie makes lemonade out of lemons.

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Hide Your Crazy (2023)

Director Austin Kase’s short horror romance is a premise teeming with feature potential. I could have literally watched two hours of this back and forth between the two characters stuck in this tragic romance. “Hide Your Crazy” is a film very much in the vein of “My Demon Lover” channeling a lot of that late 1980’s camp and genre mixing amounting to some top tier entertainment all around.

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In a Violent Nature (2024)

Exclusively In Theaters on May 31st from IFC Films. 

When you’re a slasher movie buff as I have been for thirty years, you become convinced that you’ve seen it all. Every new kind of effect or aesthetic has been approached, all with varying degrees of success. So when a movie like “In a Violent Nature” comes around and changes your mind, it’s quite a special occasion. Chris Nash sets out to not only re-think the slasher movie, but deconstruct it, and succeeds with flying colors. He the best horror movie of the year, a nihilistic, gory, viciously mean slasher movie that’s also incredibly creepy, and downright haunting in its commentary about the unpredictability of nature.

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Hanky Panky (2023)

Now Available to stream on VOD.

It takes a special kind of balls to make a film so utterly abstract and bizarre and not pay the cast. But the press release insists that “nobody got paid” therefore they must have had a lot of faith in this project. Lindsay Haun and Nick Roth’s horror comedy is a weird cabin in the woods sitcom that pits a bunch of new age yuppies against a weird evil force. This force involves a sentient talking handkerchief, a supernatural fedora and a main protagonist who has an encyclopedic knowledge of finer materials and clothing fabrics.

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The Spider (2023)

Andy Chen’s “The Spider” could be appreciated as a multiverse interpretation where the story of Spider-Man is not about a superhero but a body horror tragedy. “The Spider” is basically “Spider-Man” as told by David Cronenberg and takes all the basics of Peter Parker’s tale and transforms it in to a gruesome genre hybrid. With the excellent prosthetics and make up from Alen Stubbs, he and Chandler Riggs help to realize a slick and entertaining take on Spider-Man that is pitch black in tone.

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The Strangers Chapter 1 (2024)

2008’s “The Strangers” was simple. It (and its painfully underrated sequel) was effective because it was simple. It relied on psychological torment where the strangers felt like perversely intrusive predators preying on a couple already in turmoil. When they arrive there’s the collective “What else can happen to us?” that we feel emanate through Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman’s characters. With “The Strangers: Chapter 1” all of that nihilism, that sheer sense of pure evil preying on the vulnerable is lost in favor of what is pretty much just a lazy remake of Bryan Bertino’s original film.

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