Predator: Killer of Killers, on Hulu

Vikings were mean and unruly. Samurai were the greatest swordsmen. And nobody could outfly U.S. Naval aviators. Unfortunately, the Predators aliens believe that to be the best, they must hunt the best. That means they will stalk all the aforementioned throughout human history in Dan Trachtenberg’s animated anthology, Predator: Killer of Killers, “co-directed” by Joshua Wassung, which premieres today on Hulu.

As viewers know from Trachtenberg’s Prey, Predators have been coming to Earth for a long time. They have an advantage in each of the Earthbound historical stories, because the Vikings, Samurai, and WWII fighter pilots are busy fighting each other, while the Predators watch and wait.

Arguably, the opening Samurai story is the weakest of the three, but the brutality of Ursa’s combat, both against her Viking enemies and the Predator, are impressive by any standard. Lindsay LaVanchy also sounds appropriately fierce as the Viking clan leader. Nevertheless, this somewhat revisits the themes and beats of Prey.

Visually, the Samurai story might be the most dynamic. Trachtenberg and Wassung also create some incredible animated martial arts and swordplay. The battle between brothers turned sworn-rivals resonates on archetypal level. Yet, the way they combine forces against the Predator holds great importance later. Although Louis Ozawa is credited as both samurai voices, this is a quiet, largely non-verbal segment, which suits its stealthy ninja vibe and elegant Jidaigeki setting.

Doc Fortnight ’25: Seen Unseen

Admittedly, Vance is a blowhard, but he is entirely justified when criticizing our Western European allies’ increasing hostility towards freedom of speech. However, those same countries still maintain some semblance of freedom of expression compared to Turkey, our NATO ally. Under the Erdogan regime, filmmaker Cigdem Mater is currently serving a long prison sentence for a documentary that she never actually made. This is Turkey’s nightmarish present, but could it also be Europe’s future? The “Seen Unseen Collective” contemplates government censorship and the resulting self-censorship in its anthology documentary Seen Unseen: An Anthology of [Auto]Censorship, which screens today as part of the 2025 Documentary Fortnight atMoMA.

Mater intended to produce a documentary on the protests in Gezi Square, which the police crushed, with almost Tiananmen-like severity. Firat Yucel directly addresses Gezi in the opening Doubt, in which a group of filmmakers connected online review footage for a prospective Gezi documentary of their own. However, at each step they worry about the potential repercussions, both for themselves and for the identifiable demonstrators in their footage. Ominously, but rather logically, Doubt eventually takes on the tone and tension of a “Screenlife” thriller.

The Walls interludes, in which security cameras capture prisoners writing resistance graffiti on the walls of the tiny interior prison courtyard exercise room (literally the Turkish word for “resistance”) do not have the same urgency and tension, but the related segment, in which the prisoners’ attorney recreates his courtroom demonstration which showed the materials available to them could not have produced the alleged lasting damage is quite an effective (and absurdist) indictment of the Turkish criminal justice system. (Not very shocking spoiler: they were convicted anyway.)

Missing Documentaries is a not very nostalgic throwback to Covid Zoom documentaries, but the subject is important. Culled from dozens of interviews, Sibil Cekmen presents the thoughts of filmmakers who still have unfinished documentaries languishing in limbo, mostly due to various forms of government interference.

Serra Akcan’s Dear F might be the most personal and subjective contribution, but it might also be the one the Erdogan regime would most likely censor. It considers the Armenian genocide through the lens of her family history. Chillingly, she recalls how one of her (presumably regime-friendly) cousins demanded an apology and retraction when she pointed out their family’s Armenian heritage.

V/H/S Beyond, on Shudder

Thanks to the collector market, they are making small-batch limited-runs of new VHS tapes again. That is good news for this franchise. In addition to the new appreciation of analog formats, there are also plenty of weird moldy old tapes to uncover out there. The really disturbing ones fuel the creation of urban legends and the Cadillac of found footage franchises. Aliens get into the act a little bit more this time, but all the V/H/S hallmarks remain present in V/H/S Beyond, which premieres this Friday on Shudder.

In a bit of a departure, the wrap-around segments, Jay Cheel’s “Abduction/Adduction” are a mockumentary, supposedly investigating alien encounters at a notorious California mansion. Some of the segments are so well done, it is disappointing to break away to a full chapter. Fittingly, Whitley Strieber gets a lot of deserved credit for establishing and popularizing (or whatever terms might be more fitting) the now familiar alien abduction tropes. Frankly, it would be fascinating to see Cheel (who helmed Shudder’s Cursed Films series) expand this into a full film.

By far, the scariest constituent film (or tape) is Jordan Downey’s “Stork,” intriguingly “based on artwork by Oleg Vdovenko.” The premise is simple, but lethally effective. An elite anti-crime police squad raids the squat house of a cult suspected of kidnapping infants. What they find is a horror show. This is the kind of found footage that is truly terrifying. The crack-house-style design makes viewers crave a tetanus booster and the camera work keeps you on high alert. Like many of Beyond’s instalments, “Stork” is not unlike several previous V/H/S contributions, but it sure works.

That is also true of Virat Pal’s “Dream Girl,” but to a lesser extent. Tara is a Bollywood idol, who shares a kinship with Hannah Fierman’s Lily the Demon from the original V/H/S (and a spin-off), as a group of paparazzi learn the hard way. In this case, the Bollywood setting helps distinguish it from its predecessors.

‘Live and Let Dive,” directed by Justin Martinez (the only returning V/H/S alumnus, from when he was part of the Radio Silence collaborative group) probably earns the honor of the film’s second best segment. In this case, a reluctant skydiver celebrates his birthday with his hard-partying friends, just as the aliens swope down from the skies to attack. The horrors start in the air and finish on the ground. Martinez fully capitalizes on the found footage genre’s potential for what-the-heckness, staging some wild alien attacks, that actually look great, thanks to the subgenres built-in low resolution requirements.

“Fur Babies” directed by Christian Long & Justin Long (the Apple commercial guy and his brother) is probably Beyond’s grossest, most disturbing component film. It also delivers the most satiric “bite,” skewering an annoying band of left-wing animal rights activists, plotting an undercover sting operation against home-based kennel. However, their hubris leads to horrific comeuppance. “Fur Babies” is rough, but it is the one fans will be talking about for years to come.

Lore, an Anthology “Hosted” by Richard Brake

A truly memorable anthology needs a good host. It is impossible to overstate what Rod Serling and the Crypt Keeper brought to The Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt. For this film, Richard Brake is quite inhospitable, but in the right way. It would be a really bad idea to go camping with him, but people do it anyway in James Bushe & Patrick Ryder’s Lore (with an installment from Greig Johnson), which releases today on the Icon Film Channel in the UK.

At the start of the wrap-around segments, “The Campfire” written by Patrick Ryder & Christine Barber-Ryder and directed by Ryder & James Bushe, four not especially bright friends meet-up for Darwin’s immersive horror outing. Everything about that screams “bad idea,” right? There they are regardless, so on the first night, he challenges them to throw a totem in the fire and tell a story that is not merely scary, but profoundly disturbing to them.

The cocky guy starts with “Shadows” written and directed by Bushe. Frankly, it is strange that this yarn, in which gangsters chase a two-bit hood into an empty warehouse, only to find a possibly greater monster inside, would make such impression on the teller. This is the weakest constituent tale, but the execution is still tautly effective.

“The Hidden Woman” written by Ryder & Barber-Ryder, but solely helmed by Ryder is also somewhat familiar in terms of themes and premise, but it is very creepy. A single mother and her young son have inherited a house that is almost certainly haunted. The apparition in question has a strong attachment to an antique phonograph, which is nifty horror prop.

The ringer in the bunch, “Cross Your Heart” comes from screenwriter-director Greig Johnson, but he is probably the most successful evoking ironic Tales from the Crypt vibes (both in the spirit of the comic, but particularly the TV series). Poor long-suffering and sometimes abused Cath has reluctantly agreed to humor her cad husband Steve, by participating in a swinger-swap. However, he is too horny and drug-addled to see the seductive Donna has some much nastier (and largely deserved) in store for him.

Katie Sheridan, Rufus Hound, and Alana Wallace are all terrific in the three featured roles. It is all mordantly funny, but then later disturbing to think you of the potential implication of what viewers most likely cheered on.

Vampus Horror Tales

In anthology movies, the host is the most important part. In this case, Vampus is less macabre-looking than Tales from the Crypt’s Crypt Keeper (just barely), but the grave digger does similar work. Unlike most anthology framers, Vampus also ranks up a significant body-count of his own in Vampus Horror Tales, which releases Tuesday on VOD.

Vampus hates it when people call him Mr. Fettes, maybe because it is weird to be named after James Bond’s boarding school. Regardless, those like the obnoxious YouTuber touring his cemetery usually wind up dead. Vampus’s segments are the best parts of his film—by far—whereas the constituent tales are a rather mixed bag (but they all share consistently stylish black-and-white cinematography).

It starts with a pretty good one, “La Boda,” directed by Manuel Martinez Velasco, in which a bride and one of the groomsmen find themselves stuck in a nightmarish time-loop. It is still a horror story, rather than science fiction, as you can tell from the blood on their clothes.

Perhaps the best self-contained tale is Erika Elizalde’s “Cumpleanos,” essentially a mini slasher film evocatively set in a carnival funhouse, whose various attractions pay homage to classic horror films. Montse Pla and Dunia Rodriguez are surprisingly fierce as the two women on the not-so romantic ride.

“Segunda Cita” starts as a promising riff on Wait Until Dark, wherein the blind Margot realizes her new boyfriend is a psycho, who isn’t wearing pants. Unwisely, she agreed to join him for a weekend at his remote summer house, where he intends to kill her. Director Isaac Berrocal sets it up nicely, but turns out disappointingly conventional.

Scare Package II: Rad Chad’s Revenge, on Shudder

Even if you don’t love horror movies, you have to respect the economics of the genre. A lot of trashy slashers that weren’t exactly massive hits still got sequels, because they were profitable. Arguably, the team behind the slightly-meta-anthology Scare Package stay true to their love for VHS horror by giving us a sequel. Of course, the main character, “Rad” Chad Buckley died at the end of the first film, but there are always ways around that. Regardless, the Jessie Kapowski, the final girl of the first film, must now survive Scare Package II: Rad Chad’s Revenge, which premieres tomorrow on Shudder.

In the first film, the constituent stories played out on the monitors of the Video Emporium, Rad Chad’s horror specialty video store, but the framing device eventually morphed into the final story. Buckley found himself trapped with Kapowski and a notorious serial killer in an underground research institution. She escaped with her life, but he was killed—or was he?

Everyone certainly assumes he is dead when they arrive for his funeral in the opening scene. True to form, he addresses his own funeral via videotape, much like Randy Meeks in Scream 3. Then all heck breaks loose and Kapowski finds herself in a Saw-inspired survival game, along with Rad’s Chad’s friends and her mom (played by Night of the Comet’s Kelli Maroney, who brings some terrific attitude and comedic timing in a key scene). In between challenges, their Jigsaw-esque tormentor shows them VHS movies that we serve as the anthologized stories. Supposedly, these now represent the 1990s, but viewers will be forgiven if they can’t always tell the difference.

That shift to the nineties is important for Alexandra Barreto’s “Welcome to the 90s,” in which a serial killer starts killing the coeds residing in the “Final Girl” house instead of the hard-partying sorority sisters of the “Sure To Die [STD]” House next door. The premise is clever, but the hit-you-over-the-head execution is not as funny as you would hope, which is a frequent complaint with Rad Chad’s Revenge.

The next installment, Anthony Cousins’ “The Night He Came Back Again Part VI: The Night She Came Back” is itself a sequel to the previous Scare Package’s “The Night He Came Back Again Part IV: The Final Kill.”  It is probably the goriest segment of the film, gleefully leaning into the escalating illogical chaos of slasher sequels. The notion of a sequel within a sequel is quite sly, but slasher send-ups like this are starting to all look the same.

Jed Shepherd’s “Special Edition” holds early promise, fusing the tactile eeriness of analog media with persistent urban legends regarding the supposed ghost of Three Men in a Baby, but the payoff does not live up to the promise of the set-up.

Sinphony: A Clubhouse Horror Anthology

According to this anthology, Tiktok is evil (which is definitely true), but Clubhouse is good. The evidence for the latter is inconsistent, based on the following tales, conceived and directed by community-members using the audio app. However, the song linking most of the stories together is rather catching, in a sinister kind of way. The “Fortress” theme repeatedly pops-up in Sinphony, which is now playing in theaters and on-demand, following its premiere at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.

Things start with a merciful brief birth gone-very-wrong that introduces the “Fortress” song and a rather malevolent healthcare worker, before the first proper constituent tale starts. Wisely, Sinphony starts with the best of the lot (but that also means it is all downhill from here). Fittingly, Jason Ragosta’s “Mother Love” features a coven of witches using a Clubhouse like app. Unfortunately, one of them must protect her young son from a serial killer preying on her witchy kind, while her sisters listen in. It is a tight and tense combination of home invasion and witchcraft horror that puts fresh spins on both.

Steven Keller’s “Ear Worm” offers up some standard body horror, but the set-up is pretty good. The anthology rebounds with Haley Bishop’s “Forever Young,” which is probably the most zeitgeisty story in Sinphony. Not thrilled to be turning thirty, a not-as-cool-as-she-used-to-be woman tries to prove her hipness with the latest Tiktok like dance video app. The ironic results are horrifying. They also reflect the fears that are now pervasive in society of the way social media and big tech censors, silences, corrupts, and manipulates us.

Unfortunately, “Forever Young” represents Sinphony’s second and final notable peak. Kimberly Elizabeth’s “Do Us Part” is a somewhat successful depiction of a dead wife haunting her mourning husband, but it plays more like a darkly comic sketch. There is a lot of potentially interesting stuff in Mark Pritchard’s “Limited Edition,” but it does not have sufficient time to establish and explain its supernatural elements (including a mysterious text that reappears in later episodes). Frustratingly, it leaves the audience wondering: “huh, wha?” (Still, there is something intriguing about this installment that cries out for fuller feature-length treatment.)

Wes Driver’s “The Keeper” is anchored by such a nice performance from Ronnie Meek as the Innkeeper in question, it keeps viewers hooked, even though we can guess the secret the new family that checked-in is hiding. In contrast, there is not much suspense to Jason Wilkinson’s grim “Tabitha” chronicling a woman’s final moments after she was shot fleeing a crime, while she faces her real and metaphorical ghosts.

Brooklyn Horror ‘22/Shudder: V/H/S/99

VHS won its format war in 1980 and it remained the dominant media until DVDs finally started outselling tapes in 2002. Frankly, it probably had a better run than DVDs, which have already become an old fogey medium. That means people were definitely still using VHS in 1999, right around the time of Y2K. It is a fitting time for horror, but the found footage is a bit spotty this time around in V/H/S/99, which premieres tomorrow on Shudder, after screening at the 2022 Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.

Sometimes the punk rock attitude is its own worst enemy, as is true for the awful teen garage band, in “Shredding,” written and directed by Maggie Levin. They hatch a scheme to jam and essentially desecrate the site where a promising punk band (sort of like the Go-Go’s before they went pop) was trampled to death by their own fans. This is a bad idea for the characters and nothing new in terms of film.

Johannes Roberts’ “Suicide Bid” is a vast improvement. The title refers to freshmen who only apply to a single Greek house. In this case, the sisters of a particularly nasty sorority haze poor Lily by forcing her to spend the night sealed in a coffin. You would think they had learned their lesson, since there is a creepy campus legend about the vengeful spirit of a pledge the sisters hazed to death several years ago. Regardless, Roberts quite cleverly combines the confined-space horror of Buried with good old fashioned supernatural horror.

Sadly, it is followed by the nearly unwatchable “Ozzy’s Dungeon,” from Flying Lotus, who previously helmed visual assault that was Kuso. This mean-spirited segment drags on interminably, even turning sympathetic characters into creepy psychopaths. Weirdly (and unintentionally) the sleazy host of a rigged Nickelodeon-style game show for kids becomes the most interesting character, as the “victim” of the deranged mother, whose daughter was permanently disfigured while appearing on the show. This is just a complete misfire.

Given how bad “Dungeon” is, Tyler McIntyre’s “The Gawkers” inevitably represents a big step up in quality. It is a fairly straightforward yarn wherein voyeurism is violently punished. It is very similar in tone to the “Amateur Night” segment in the original V/H/S, but the girl the teen boys lust after is never fleshed out to any extent, unlike “Lily the Demon,” who got her own movie, SiREN.

By far, Vanessa & Joseph Winter’s “To Hell and Back” is the best of the ’99 edition. The Millennium is about to turn, which makes it the perfect time for a satanic cult to summon its patron demon. Nate and Troy are there to record it for reality TV, because that kind of thing seemed like a good idea in 1999. However, when a minor demon crashes the party, they are both inadvertently swept up in its banishment back to Hell.

This might just be the most convincing depiction of Hell (or whatever) since Jigoku. Yet, the Winters also milk the situation for [pitch-black] humor. Archelaus Crisanto and Joseph Winter are terrific bickering and freaking out as the reality TV sad sacks. Plus, Melanie Stone is a showstopper as the demon Mabel.

Fessenden at MoMA: ABCs of Death 2

A little curation can sometimes be helpful. According to press materials, the participating filmmakers were given a completely free hand to do whatever they wanted in their contributions to the ABC’s of Death anthology films, as long as they tied everything into their assigned letter. It turns out a lot of them could have used some constructive feedback. The second anthology film is even rockier than the first, but it had a contribution from Larry Fessenden, which now screens without the other 25 letters as part of MoMA’s retrospective dedicated to Fessenden and his Glass Eye Pix production company. However, Fessenden’s “N is for Nexus” might look comparatively better when considered in the company of the entire ABC’s of Death 2, which is available for streaming.

Again, the titles are revealed at the end, to serve as a punchline for the horrors that came before. While the first ABC’s of Death was highly uneven, #2 is a little too even, meaning the majority of its letters are a disappointment. Here’s the quick rundown:

“A is for Amateur” directed E.L. Katz, makes us initial think the A is for “action,” starting like a Miami Vice homage but turning into a cautionary tale about air duct dangers. At least #2 starts strong, because this is one of the best letters.

“B is for Badger” from Julian Barratt is a very droll skewering of prima donna environmental TV personality, with Barratt himself getting big laughs as the insufferable Peter Toland, who gets what he has coming.

“C is for Capital Punishment,” by Julian Gilbey starts with a good set-up for an ironic community vigilantism thriller but the payoff is missing.

“D is for Deloused,” from Robert Morgan impressive stop-motion animation, but punishingly grotesque.

“E is for Equilibrium,” from Alejandro Brugues presents some dumb castaway comedy that turns into murder and back again.

“F is for Falling” from Aharon Keshales & Navot Papushado is another highlight, offering darkly ironic tale of an Israeli paratrooper facing a real-life horror.

“G is for Grandad” perpetrated by Jim Hosking is a Greasy Strangler-esque family shocker. If you don’t know that film, chances are you will be appalled by his letter G (but you’re probably lucky not to).

“H is for Head Games” animated by Bill Plympton is a surreal trifle that trippily turns romance into warfare.

V/H/S/94, on Shudder

Never take collectors lightly, because they know how to get what they want. That is especially true of old school VHS collectors. Indeed, the framing device truly puts the “cult” in cult film fanatics when the V/H/S franchise returns with V/H/S/94, which premieres today on Shudder.

In Jennifer Reeder’s wrap-arounds, “Holy Hell,” a SWAT team thinks they are executing a search warrant on a drug den, but the industrial warehouse actually houses what appears to be the video-head equivalent of the Heaven’s Gate cult. There are lots of dead bodies seated in front of video monitors, where naturally, we will watch the constituent stories unfold.

Chloe Okuno’s “Storm Drain” consists of the footage shot by Holly Marciano, a local Ohio TV reporter, and her cameraman, when they ventured down into the titular sewer in search of a weird rat creature. It is pretty straightforward, but nicely executed and it ends on an amusing kicker. Also, Anna Hopkins probably delivers the film’s most memorable performance as the shallow, soon-to-be freaked out Marciano.

Arguably, Simon Barrett’s “The Empty Wake” is the most effective and economical installment, in which, per a grieving family’s odd request, a mortuary worker must record an overnight wake, even though nobody comes to mourn—almost no one. It really is creepy, because it is so grounded in the lonely, late-night setting.

If you have the opportunity to see V/H/S/94 on a big-screen with audience, “The Subject” (directed by Timo Tjahjanto, one half of the Mo Brothers), might turn out to be the highlight instead, because it is so deliriously gory and unhinged. In this case an Indonesian SWAT (this is not a great film to elite squad cop in) raid a mad scientist’s lair in search of a kidnapped woman. What they find is a bit disturbing. Tjahjanto does his thing, but it plays better in a group. On your own, you might notice the thinness of the story, but the over-the-top splatter effects do their best to compensate.

The Year of the Everlasting Storm, from Jafar Panahi and Others

Good news Jafar Panahi’s pet iguana Iggy is still living happily in his Tehran flat. We last saw Iggy in Panahi’s This is Not a Film, the banned Iranian filmmaker’s secretly produced film documenting his life under house arrest. Since then, Panahi’s digital minimalist approach to filmmaking became a model for filmmakers stuck inside during Covid lock-downs, so he was naturally recruited as an executive producer and a contributor to the quarantine-themed anthology, The Year of the Everlasting Storm, which opens today in New York.

To a large extent, Panahi’s “Life” effectively functions as a sequel to This is Not a Film, since it shares the same setting and straight-forward documentary approach. Arguably, it is the lightest-weight of Panahi’s films, but the appealing personalities of the Panahi family make it a pleasant viewing experience. More than anything, it is about the family’s efforts to keep in touch during the CCP pandemic. He also rather remarkably ends it on an upbeat note, which radically distinguishes it from the rest of the anthology’s constituent films.

In contrast, Singaporean filmmaker Anthony Chen’s “The Break Away” dramatizes the tensions and frictions that develop when families are confined with each other. Zhou Dongyu and Zhang Yu portray parents locked-down in Tongzhou, China, who are quickly beset by financial pressures and regular couples’ issues. By now, it represents a familiar looking pandemic drama, but it is well played and executed.

Malik Vittal’s “Little Measures” is essentially an extended news report documenting a family separated during the Covid era, for non-Covid reasons, dressed up with some hip graphics. It is well-intentioned, but not very substantial.

For better or worse, Laura Poitras’s “Terror Contagion” certainly sticks out from the rest of the film, like a sore-thumb. The helmer of Citizenfour spent a good deal of her lockdown trying to dig up dirt on the Israeli spyware firm NSO, with her colleagues in the muckraking collective, Forensic Architecture.

They claim to trace NSO’s fingerprints over all sorts of hacking and surveillance, but strictly speaking, they do not present any proof. Perhaps most notably, they claim NSO is complicit in the Saudi assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. If that is true, think about the implications: Saudi government elements working in concert with an Israeli company. Maybe there’s hope for peace in the Middle East after all.

Yet, Poitras and her colleagues make some points a lot of viewers might not want to hear. They discovered NSO has repurposed their software and pitched it to local governments for the purpose of contact tracing. The truth is the pandemic’s potential to erode civil liberties is truly terrifying. Perversely, the ACLU just endorsed vaccine mandates, as “a justifiable intrusion on autonomy and bodily integrity.” At this point, how likely are they to object if state and local government starts contracting NSO’s contact-tracing services? Hopefully, Poitras and company would, which makes “Terror Contagion” valuable just for raising such issues. They just should have made a real case, instead of assuming viewers would take their word for it.

Phobias, Executive Produced by Radio Silence

Hoplophobia is an irrational fear of guns that afflicts far too many politicians. Ephebiphobia is the fear of teenagers, which is hard to ever dismiss as irrational. A good case of ephebiphobia ought to be enough to overcome anyone’s hoplophobia, but the sinister conspiracy in this braided anthology film is not seeking to cure anybody’s fears. Instead, they seek to weaponize fear in Phobias, executive produced by the Radio Silence filmmaking team, which releases tomorrow in theaters and on VOD.

Poor Johnny is the sole support of his ailing father in Joe Sill’s “Robophobia” (the fear of robots), but the bigoted lowlifes of his skid row neighborhood still pick on him mercilessly. Then one day, he is “befriended” by a rogue AI that downloads itself into his ear and starts to fight back for him. Unfortunately, it doesn’t know when to stop.

We next see Johnny after he has been whisked away to some kind of black-site research facility in Jess Varley’s interstitial “Outpost 37” segments. There he will meet some very damaged people, who have done some terrible things out of fear (and some whose fears were well justified).

Sami is one of them. She should have been more frightened of driving, before she committed vehicular violence in Maritte Lee Go’s “Vehophobia.” Granted, it is sort of quick riff on Christine, but it is creepy, thanks to some clever use of music and sound. Hana Mae Lee (of the Pitch Perfect franchise) is also terrific as the EC Comics-style protag.

Chris von Hoffman’s student-teacher home invasion horror story, “Ephebiphobia” is probably the darkest and tensest of the fearful tales. Yet, in some ways, it really doesn’t fit with the rest. The unfortunate teacher has made some mistakes in her life, but she is victim, not the aggressor. She deserves to wind up in Outpost 37 even less than woeful Johnny.

The single-mother cop in Camille Belle’s “Hoplophobia” is not wholly unsympathetic either, but her guilt and paranoia have terrible consequences, especially for her. Frankly, there is nothing entertaining about this fearful tale. It is just sort of sad.

Asylum: Twisted Horror and Fantasy Tales

You have to give Nicolas Onetti (one half of the Onetti Brothers) and his producing partners credit for being good delegators (somewhat unusually in genre cinema). As they did with A Night of Horror: Nightmare Radio, they took another batch of short films that already had festival cred and shoehorned them into an anthology. There is no real theme encompassing their latest feature collection either, which is why the subtitle is even broader. However, you can still be assured there will be plenty of nightmarish mayhem in Asylum: Twisted Horror and Fantasy Tales, which releases today on VOD.

Brandon will be our evil clown stand-up-comic-from-Hell master of ceremonies for this evening’s entertainment, from an asylum where the inmates are apparently in charge and putting on a show. Supposedly, each tale relates somehow to his slowly revealed backstory, but do not beat yourself up if you can’t see the connections.

It is a bit ironic the “tales” kick off with Damien LeVeck’s The Cleansing Hour, since it has already been fixed-up to a full feature in its own right. Regardless, even though the concept of a phony exorcism web-series that suddenly finds itself dealing with a genuine demonic possession might not be so original anymore, LeVeck’s execution is tight and brisk, while his game cast keeps things snappy and sharp. It is followed by Kheireddine El-Helou’s slasher short, Drudge, which is certainly intense, but never offers any new twists or spins on the familiar material.

Mat Johns’ Father’s Day is a somewhat revisionist and sometimes poignant zombie story that would probably pay-off on a deeper level, if we witnessed the characters during the “before times.” Still, the implied suggestion these zombies still have a glimmer of their memories and feelings could easily support further exploration.

Without a doubt, Caye Casas & Alberto Albert Pinto’s RIP is definitely the high point of Asylum. The macabre tale of a nebbish sad sack miraculously resurrected just before his funeral recalls vintage Nacho Vigalondo, even more so for its subversive humor than the fact it is a Spanish language production. The practical effects are just a delightful bloody mess.

Ale Damiani’s dystopian anti-Trump screed M.A.M.O.N. just seems hopelessly dated now, unless you secretly believe the current Prez’s election challenges might have merit (you don’t, do you?). At least its short.

The second highpoint comes with the charmingly dark animated fable, The Death, Dad and Son, directed by Walgenwitz & Winschluss (a.k.a. Denis Walgenwitz and Persepolis co-director Vincent Paronnaud). The titular Grim Reaping personification of death happens to have a bratty son at home, who creates all kinds of supernatural havoc when he intervenes with the natural order of things. Their animation is wonderfully twisted, as is their idea of a happy, lessons-learned ending. Good stuff.

Tales from the Hood 3, on Syfy

Can a horror anthology series maintain its identity without its iconic host? Is it still Tales from the Crypt without the Cryptkeeper? Is it still Creepshow without the Creep? Frankly, most fans probably do not have the same level of nostalgia for Mr. Simms, the creepy undertaker who spun the yarns in the prior two installments in the Tales from the Hood franchise. The 1995 original, starring Clarence Williams III has a strong cult following, but the 2018 sequel, with Keith David assuming the mantle of Mr. Simms, mostly underwhelmed fans and critics. Instead of Mr. Simms, this time we get the great Tony Todd providing the framing, but it is the little girl with him who will tell the tales of terror (we hope) in alternating writer-directors Rusty Cundieff & Darin Scott’s Tales from the Hood 3 (with Spike Lee still on-board as an executive producer), which premieres this Saturday on Syfy.

If you are not deeply invested in Mr. Simms, Cundieff’s “The Mouths of Babes and Demons,” the connective sequences featuring Todd, are indeed quite eerie. He plays a grandfatherly figure, who is desperately fleeing a pack of hooded ghouls with six-year-old-ish Brooklyn. However, as he listens to her sinister stories, we get a sense that there could be any even darker dynamic at play. Frankly, these are the only bits most viewers will want to re-watch, because they build up to a real “huh-what” climax and they are driven by vintage Tony Todd.

The first Tale from the Hood is also sturdily serviceable, following squarely in the EC Comics tradition. Scott’s “Ruby Gates” takes its name from the apartment building David Burr hopes to renovate and gentrify. He stands to make a small fortune is he can convince the last tenants holding out to vacate. Logically, he hires his go-to arsonist to start a small grease fire in their kitchen, because what could go wrong? It all proceeds in an orderly, by-the-numbers horror movie fashion but Scott’s execution is tight and effective.

Without question, Cundieff’s “The Bunker” is the low point of the film and maybe the last ten years of anthology films. It isn’t really even horror, but rather an attempt at an ironic Outer Limits-style tale with a twist, focusing on a ranting and raving racist survivalist. Unfortunately, it is really more of an exercise in projection that sacrifices narrative and character development to ideological point-scoring. It is also marred by some really gross sexual references.

The sequel rebounds somewhat with Scott’s “Operatic,” starring Lynn Whitfield (the second most recognizable name attached to Tales 3) as Marie Benoit, a Norma Desmond-ish opera diva, who hires Chela Simpson, an aspiring R&B vocalist to be her companion. Inevitably, Simpson and her lover start conspiring to murder the rich and demanding Benoit. Right, good luck with that. Again, we’ve seen these elements many times before (for instance, there are a number of similarities with Twilight Zone’s “Queen of the Nile” episode), but Scott cranks up the sexuality and the creepy imagery, so it is still fun to watch.

Shudder: The Mortuary Collection

The overwhelming majority of anthology films must be horror movies. Yet, they rarely get many scares out of their framing sequences—even though those are the parts we most remember. Let’s put it this way, when you hear the title Tales from the Crypt, do you think of a particular story or the ghoulish Cryptkeeper host? In this case, we have a worthy storyteller. His name is Montgomery Dark, a mortician by training, who tells a young woman about how some of the most interesting bodies came to his funeral parlor in Ryan Spindell’s The Mortuary Collection, which premieres tomorrow on Shudder.

Dark looks like he could be related to Angus Scrimm, but his wardrobe and the mortuary’s décor are wonderfully old world, in the style of the great Amicus horror anthologies of the 1960s and 1970s. Sam is a bratty snooper, who is obviously up to no good, but when she inquires about the help wanted sign, Dark is only too willing to interview her. It seems like the Raven’s End Mortuary doesn’t get a lot of applicants. Yet, as their discussion progresses, Sam convinces him to tell her about some of the most unusual bodies he worked on.

Essentially, Dark starts with a Lovecraftian warm-up joke. It is very funny, but lightweight, which she calls him out for. She much more approves of his following yarn, wherein a sexually irresponsible frat boy gets an unlikely taste of his own medicine. It features some wicked body horror, but it tries too hard to be woke (but yes, Sam appreciates that).

The third (or second proper) tale is surprisingly poignant. Wendell Owens is a decent fellow, who still earnestly loves his wife, but the burden of caring for her in her locked-in catatonic state has left him exhausted and desperate. He finally resorts to euthanasia, but his attempt takes a strange, fateful twist. This is a shockingly poignant story, with Barak Hardley’s heartfelt performance inspiring pathos and sympathy rather than scares.

By far, the strongest constituent story is the final one, which Sam tells herself—but the wrap-around narrative, which does indeed build towards something, is the best part of the film. Her anecdote starts off as a stylish homage to Halloween and the entire babysitter-slasher sub-genre, but it takes a mordantly ironic twist. It is a wild ride that directly leads into the sinister conclusion of her interview with Mr. Dark.

Twice-Told Tales, Starring Vincent Price

Hawthorne and Poe were both born in Massachusetts, but the former was widely seen as an upright New Englander of letters, while Poe was the disreputable Southerner, who dropped out of UVA and drunk himself to death in Baltimore. Yet, Poe inspired all the good horror movies, even though Hawthorne penned plenty of Gothic tales ripe with Puritanical hypocrisy. While Vincent Price was starring in Roger Corman’s classic Poe films, he also helped give Hawthorne similar treatment in Sidney Salkow’s under-appreciated anthology, Twice Told Tales, which airs this Friday on TCM.

Yes, these are stories of the macabre, but they are directly address the power of love, both to save and to destroy. For the opener, “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” it will definitely be the latter case. The elderly scientist is enjoying a bittersweet birthday dinner with his old friend Alex Medbourne. Decades have passed since Heidegger’s fiancée Sylvia Ward tragically died on their wedding day, leaving him so heartbroken, he never loved again. In contrast, Medbourne romanced every woman he could—of course he would be the one played by Price (who appears in all three stories).

Heidegger expects to soon reunite with his beloved in death, but fate seems to present a tantalizing alternative. A freak storm releases a mysterious stream of water that apparently offers the power to restore youth and even renew life itself. Naturally, Heidegger duly revives Ward’s desiccated body, after rejuvenating himself and Medbourne, but the darkly O.Henry-esque reunion is not what he expects.

The “Heidegger” twist is very much akin to what you might expect from a Twilight Zone episode, but the anguished emotion is quite surprising. Both Price and Sebastian Cabot (in the sub-titular role) are genuinely heart-breaking, offering proof that you really can find excellent dramatic work in these great old films that never got the critical love they deserve.

“Rappaccini’s Daughter” is a weirdly sunny story, largely taking place in a Padua garden, but what a garden it is. Giovanni Guasconti falls in love with the beautiful Beatrice Rappaccini from his garret window, but her mad scientist father Giacomo has taken extreme measures to protect her from the advances of adventurers. Yes, that would be Price again. Brett Halsey is a bit too shallow and bow-dried for the Old World setting, but Abraham Sofaer sounds convincingly wise and humanistic as Guasconti’s mentor, Prof. Baglioni.

Somewhat ironically, the concluding adaptation of Hawthorne’s novel, The House of the Seven Gables could be considered more faithful than the previous feature-length take, which also starred Price, if you disregard the way producer-screenwriter Robert E. Kent pumped-up and augmented the supernatural elements. Regardless, the original Pycheon patriarch definitely did wrong by Matthew Maulle, well-earning the curse the condemned man allegedly leveled on him. Generations later, the Pyncheon’s are still haunted by the curse, as well as the legend that old man Maulle secretly stashed a great fortune in the grand house he was gallingly commissioned to build for his enemies.

Immortal: Tales Where They Don’t Die at the End

For Larry Talbott (a.k.a. The Wolfman), immortality was a source of unending horror rather than a gift. Some of these characters might very well agree. It turns out there are people out there who just will not die. In most cases, they have the Wolverinish healing powers to go with an unending life-span. They also tend to learn of their rare status at the darnedest times in the shared world/concept anthology Immortal, written by Jon Dabach, which releases today on VOD.

People are hunting people yet again—the cinematic epidemic continues (following The Hunt, Bacurau, The Prey, etc., etc.)—in the first storyline, “Chelsea,” directed by Rob Margolies. However, the stakes are higher this time around, because the prey is a high school track star and the hunter is consciously immortal. In truth, it is rather clever, but viewers would probably appreciate it more if it came at the end of the film rather than the start.

“Garry & Vanessa” directed by Danny Isaacs also builds towards a “hey there, immortality” twist ending, but this time we’re already expecting it from the start. The titular Garry plans to do something extreme to provide for his pregnant titular wife. Presumably, it will not work out exactly as planned. As a modest bonus, we get to see an incredibly tired looking Mario Van Peebles playing a cable guy.

Things unexpectedly get a little preachy in “Ted & Mary,” directed by Tom Colley, wherein our focal couple give a final interview before he administers her assisted suicide. The good part is Tony Todd pays Ted (quite poignantly). The bad part is the third revelation of immortality is extraordinarily depressing.

Shudder: Scare Package

It is getting to the point where a lot of horror viewers will not have any personal memories of video stores. Sadly, the Upper Eastside holdout, the Video Room, closed last year and Vulcan Video, the store thanked in this film’s’ credits was shuttered because of the CCP-Virus shutdown (thanks again, Xi). Yet, the archetype of the horror movie nerd-video-store clerk persists. At least it does in the horror-comedy anthology-mash-up Scare Package, which premieres today on Shudder.

Package sets the ironic-meta tone early and often in Emily Hagins’ “Cold Open,” where we meet a struggling actor, coincidentally named Mike Myers, who is desperate to stay in his next film past the prologue set-up. Of course, it does not work out as he hoped. This segment segues into Aaron B. Koontz’s “Rad Chad’s Horror Emporium,” which sort of acts as a framing device for the other constituent stories that will be introduced as films-within-the-film, playing on the store’s monitors.

Weirdly, Chris McInroy’s “One Time in the Woods” and frequent genre thesp Noah Segan’s directorial debut “M.I.S.T.E.R.” would probably be funnier if they were in separate anthology films, because they both start out pretending to be about one sort of monster, before revealing the more pressing horror is something else entirely. Still, the ensembles for both (including Segan portraying a frustrated husband) are impressively energetic (even manic, in the case of “Woods”).

Perhaps the funniest segment is Anthony Cousins’ “The Night He Came Back Again! Part IV: The Final Kill,” where we see the Fourth of July Killer’s favorite victim try to turn the tables on her tormentor, yet again. Thematically, this is a lot like Shant Hamassian’s short film, Night of the Slasher, but Cousins and co-screenwriter John Karsko take it to much gorier and more absurdist extremes.

Courtney & Hillary Andujar’s “Girls’ Night Out of Body” has an appealing retro vibe, but they do not have a chance to fully develop their concept before the abrupt O.Henry-ish ending. Baron Vaughn’s “So Much to Do” also earns considerable style points, but the tale of shadowy figures and a struggle for control over an earthly body does not make a lot of sense.

Glenn Danzig’s Verotika

There have been a few films based on Glenn Danzig’s ultra-mature horror comic, Verotik, including the adults-only Grub Girl. That would be the higher quality, more socially redeeming movie. This is the other one. Danzig himself helms an anthology of three “greatest hits” stories and does quite a job of it with the already notorious Verotika, which is now available on VOD.

At least the explicit naughty bits in Grub presumably served the purpose for which they were intended. Just what Danzig was going for is beyond mortal understanding. The sleazy bafflement starts with “The Albino Spider of Dajette.” Poor Dajette is a fetish model with eyeballs on her breasts, who develops a nightmarish psychic connection with a pale spider monster.  Supposedly, it is set in Paris, but the city never looked so cheap and dingy. Honestly, you will hear better fake French accents in a Le Pain Quotidien in Paramus, New Jersey.

The worst part of “Albino Spider” is it is probably the best story of Verotika, but it won’t feel that way at the time, because it comes first. Next, Danzig uncorks “Change of Face,” his ambitious but smarmy homage to Georges Franju’s Eyes without a Face. A serial killer stalks beautiful women to physically steal their faces. Naturally, she is a stripper, so Danzig can incorporate stripteases into the film, but if that is what you are looking for, an average episode of The Sopranos would be sexier.

For the third and mercifully final installment, Danzig rips off the Elizabeth Bathory legend with “Drukija Countess of Blood,” who does indeed bathe in the blood of virgins to retain her youthful appearance. Considering Danzig and his design team cannot realize a convincing strip club locale, it should come as no surprise the period setting is well beyond their grasp. Yet, “Drukija’s” greatest problem in on the printed pages of the script. Danzig doesn’t even give us a structured narrative here. He just forces us to watch endless examples of the Countess’s brutality.

To Hong Kong with Love: Ten Years

In Hong Kong, the future may already be here, five years ahead of schedule. Tragically, it is a future of eroding freedoms and intrusive police state tactics envisioned by the filmmakers speculating on what HK life might be like in a decade’s time. Their 2015 anthology film won best film at the Hong Kong Film Awards, despite the condemnation of the Mainland state media. The eerie prescience of Ten Years is undeniable when it screens as part of the Metrograph’s film series, To Hong Kong with Love.

Kwok Zune’s “Extras” is certainly stylish and maybe not as paranoid as it might have seemed five years ago, but the ironic kicker remains obvious right from the start. Two low level triads have been recruited to stage a phony assassination attempt to drum up public support for a draconian “public security” proposal. From the vantage point of 2020, the parallels with the extradition bill are almost spooky. Mike Mak’s stark black-and-white cinematography well serves the darkly cynical morality tale, but it does not land with the same emotional force as some of the later stories.

By far, the weakest constituent film is Wong Fei-pang’s “Season of the End,” in which a duo of cultural anthropologists collect specimens from razed working class neighborhoods in a rather absurdist, Beckett-ish fashion. It is far too reserved and mannered to make any appreciable impact with general audiences.

Fortunately, Jevons Au’s “Ðialect” represents a dramatic improvement. Screenwriters Chung Chui-yi, Ho Fung-lun, and Lulu Yang tell the deceptively simple but heartfelt story of a Cantonese-speaking cab-driver facing the potential loss of his livelihood, because of legal mandates requiring Mandarin fluency. Leung Kin-ping’s terrific performance as the driver is subtle and dignified, but still quite poignant. It is a quiet human story, but it also has direct relevancy for Hong Kong’s Localist movement.

“Dialect” alone would be enough to justify recommending Ten Years, but the courageousness of director-screenwriter Chow Kwuh-wai’s “Self-Immolator” demands to be seen to be believed (and marveled at). Unfolding in pseudo-documentary-style, the POV camera crew tries to undercover the identity of a protestor who indeed self-immolated, apparently in response to the death in prison of hunger-striking independence activist Au-yeung Kin-fung.

Chow explicitly refers to the notorious Falun Gong self-immolations as most likely propaganda operations faked by the CCP and its secret police, while consciously echoing Jan Palach’s self-immolation in Communist Czechoslovakia. It is an amazingly bold work of cinema, but it is also an enormously gripping and suspenseful short film.