Tag Archives: Horror

Capsules

CAPSULE: EGG (2005)

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DIRECTED BY: Yukihiko Tsutsumi

FEATURING: Inuko Inuyama, Hye- yeong Jo, Megumi Ujiie

PLOT: A girl finds herself tormented by the image of a hatching egg whenever she closes her eyes.

Still from Egg (2005)

COMMENTS: A violent confrontation while introducing a narrative is a tried and tested way to grab the audience’s attention. This method is applied in Egg, and along with erratic editing, rough cuts, many close-ups and zoom-ins, it creates a certain tension. This will be a wild ride, as the story follows a young girl attempting to come to terms with a highly disturbing situation.

The plot revolves around the daily routine of a seemingly ordinary young woman. She has friends, works a nonsensical futuristic job (as in out of the popular TV show ” Severance”), and tries to live a normal life. However, whenever she closes her eyes, her inner world appears, and inside this world is an egg ready to hatch. Tsutsumi’s experience as a visual artist and music video director comes in handy here as he creates an oppressive, eerie, otherworldly inner landscape, with some truly grotesque monsters later on.

Our protagonist’s situation develops into a double confrontation: on the one hand, with the creature lurking inside the egg, and on the other, with a familial legacy of similar cases. The danger represented by the creature transforms into something concrete and physical, as it becomes apparent it doesn’t exist only in her mind, but inside her lower abdomen, as well. And like any baby, it attempts to get out, albeit in a messier than usual way. Light body horror is part of the deal here, but nothing too gruesome. Instead, the film works mostly as a suspense survival thriller, with rich allegorical undertones.

Underneath the lore and imagery is a commentary on female physiology, the nature of pregnancy, and the acceptance (or not) of this seemingly unavoidable reality. In this context, Egg also works as a coming-of-age tale. Early on, a doctor our heroine consults suggests she is still a child, at least mentally, hinting at an upcoming transformation. The use of body horror to comment on themes of pregnancy and female physiology brings to mind the work of , especially Evolution (2015).

Some light comedic elements are expressed here, mostly through exaggerated acting, but they remain underdeveloped. Ultimately Egg is not a black comedy as much as a deeply and earnestly symbolic J-horror with feminist implications, essential for fans of the art-house and the bizarre.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:  

“…a bizarre tale and quite unlike anything else out there, but nevertheless a rather enjoyable one – Niina Doherty, HorrorNews.Net 

Capsules

CAPSULE: A BLIND BARGAIN (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Paul Bunnell

FEATURING: , , , Lucy Loken, Annalisa Cochrane

PLOT: A Vietnam veteran heroin addict gets hustled into a scheme where his aging ex-actress mother will be a test subject of Dr. Gruder, who promises to reverse aging with some highly unconventional treatments.

Still from A Blind Bargain (2025)

COMMENTS: Dominic Fontaine (Jake Horowitz) is a Vietnam veteran now residing in 1970s southern California, and he’s got a few problems. He’s down on his luck, caring for an aging mother, has a heroin addiction, and owes money to mobsters who regularly deliver a few kicks to his ribs to urge him to speed up his payment plan. That convergence of obstacles drives him through the lobby doors of the Gruder Institute and right into the care of one Dr. Gruder (Crispin Glover), with a stop to meet flirty intake nurse Ellie Bannister (Lucy Loken), who takes Dominic’s blood and signs him up for methadone treatments. Luckily, indie audiences are already familiar with heroin recovery practices thanks to Trainspotting. But A Blind Bargain is a quite different movie, where the drug addiction takes a back seat to the other kinds of weirdness going on. (It is also the second movie I can think of, after Naked Lunch, where bugs and drugs fit into the same plot.)

Turns out that analysis of Dominic’s sample shows that his mother’s blood would be valuable for research—valuable enough that the Gruder Institute offers $500 per pint (in 1980 dollars). Dominic’s mom, Joy (veteran actress Amy Wright), who thinks she’s going for spa treatments, happens to be a has-been actress who yearns for her old silent film days. She’s an easy sell for a treatment that restores her youth. From this set-up, we advance into an unpredictable labyrinth of character interactions and a typically gothic mad scientist story.

I should mention that A Blind Bargain is an attempt at remaking / reclaiming an infamously lost film of the same title, released in 1922 as a silent feature starring . Since I haven’t seen the original (and likely never will without a time machine), I can’t comment to how much of this is faithful to the original script and how much is invented this time around.

For weird movie fans, Glover alone could be enough of a reason to see it; he invests every line and gesture with his unique eccentricity like the master character actor he is. Jake Horowitz is notable as well; infinitely watchable with his steely blue eyes and Zig-Zag-man beard, he plays a convincingly desperate sad-sack without making him a sniveling wimp or a conniving scoundrel. Amy Wright came all the way from Synecdoche, New York to show she can still act circles around the best of them. The early pacing is perfect, with a tempo that takes just enough time with each scene to let us absorb the plot, such that you’re carried right past the odder scenes before you can ask too many questions. The editing, between eccentric old-school screen wipes and music that punctuates the playful quirkiness, hints that we’re in that humor-horror canyon where the movie can make a little fun of itself.

That said, despite a few drug-inspired hallucinations and some impressively off-kilter lines and even dashes of magical realism, the story never ramps up into truly weird territory. I sat waiting for a big shock, an alarming gross-out, a horrifying revelation, but all I got were mildly unexpected moments. The ending is upon us before we’ve quite digested act three, and a great deal is left unexplained,  especially romantic tensions that suddenly pop up between several characters. Mad science and body horror are frequent topics in our archives, with many movies that quaff a bigger shot of madness than this one does. Be that as it may, this film seems to be everything its creators intended. A Blind Bargain is comfort quirkiness for the film festival crowd, lovingly made with a zesty pace and a dedication to freaky medical practitioners everywhere.

A Blind Bargain is in limited release at the time of this review. We’ll let you know when it’s widely available.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Writer/director Paul Bunnell has made a trippy, bonkers and unconventional horror thriller with stylish cinematography, but it’s also tedious and exhausting.”–Avi Offer, “The NYC Movie Guru” (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: MOTHER MARY (2026)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Michaela Coel

PLOT: A pop star seeks out her estranged seamstress to make a new dress for an upcoming performance.

Still from Mother Mary (2026)

COMMENTS: Mother Mary is a pop singer known for her elaborate costumes featuring halo-styled headdresses (a motif she may have recently abandoned). Now, I don’t know modern pop music from Tuvan throat singing (not quite true—I own a Hun Huur Tu album—but you get the point).  But I gather Anne Hathaway’s Mother Mary is supposed to be huge, the type of singer whose trysts with NFL stars get featured on TMZ. The Catholic nomenclature obviously recalls megastar Madonna, while her costuming suggests Taylor Swift by way of Bjork. Critics more familiar with this genre than I am often trot out Lady Gaga as an analogue, along with a number of other names that sound vaguely familiar (vague familiarity being the essential currency of popular music). Jack Antonoff, Charli XCX, and FKA Twigs (who also appears in the film and, coincidentally, also has a Mother Mary role under her belt) supply the generic pop soundtrack.

At any rate, Mother Mary is secretly a wreck. Her last big public performance ended in an embarrassing and concerning platform malfunction, and she’s apparently been in a bit of a slump since. OK, creative crisis, got it. After an unsatisfactory wardrobe session sends her into a crisis of insecurity, she flies off to see her old estranged seamstress, Sam (Coel). What follows is a long sequence of the two women warily circling each other; Sam is not at all happy to see her old friend, but nevertheless passive-aggressively agrees to make her the new dress MM hopes will reignite her creative spark. The film turns into an extended conversation as Sam takes measurements, selects fabrics, and asks her client to do an interpretive dance (without musical accompaniment, because she has sworn a vow to not listen to Mother Mary’s new work). The designer pokes at old resentments, while the idol she helped create desperately (and pathetically) attempts to mend fences. The supernatural twist is divulged about halfway through, but it’s less hauntingly mysterious and more a disappointingly literal metaphor for the women’s shredded relationship. What began as a talky two-hander suddenly turns into In Fabric, but with no humor whatsoever.

It’s no knock on the two principals, who turn in excellent work, but Mother Mary never really finds anything interesting to say about its subject. The best produced parts are the concert clips—which convey a degree of spectacle that suggests why people might actually flock to see the otherwise vapid Mother Mary—and a few ethereal sequences with a flowing red spirit. But the story itself never approaches the profundity of a good Lana Del Rey single. Pop stars are bland, so maybe, by definition, movies about pop stars should be bland—-even when they try to spice things up with bloody symbolism.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“‘Weird’ is a dismissive adjective for things that people don’t readily understand, or for complex work that wears its idiosyncrasies on its bell sleeve. But the writer-director behind The Green Knight and A Ghost Story has taken the most accessible subject imaginable — stratospheric pop stardom — and made something wonderfully, gloriously weird out of it.”–David Fear, Rolling Stone (contemporaneous)

 

Capsules

CAPSULE: EXIT 8 (2025)

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Exit 8 is available to purchase on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: Genki Kawamura

FEATURING: Kazunari Ninomiya, Yamato Kôchi, Naru Asanuma

PLOT: An expectant father finds himself trapped in a seemingly never-ending subway corridor.

Still from Exit 8 (2025)

COMMENTS: In recent years, an increasing number of movies and TV shows have attempted to adapt video games. At the same time, there is a trend inside the indie gaming landscape of making psychological horror adventures set in liminal spaces, transitional places with an unsettling vibe. The 2023 game “Exit 8” by Kotake Create is an iconic short game of this subgenre. 2 years later, collaborating with the original work’s creator, Genki Kawamura translates this piece for the cinematic medium.

The backstory becomes apparent from the beginning, with the setup explaining our main character and his anxieties as an expectant father. The protagonist is then trapped inside a unique one-way subway labyrinth where he needs to spot “anomalies” and then immediately change his direction if he wants to escape. This begins a surreal odyssey not dissimilar from space-bending cinematic tales in the vein of ’s The Incident (2014) or ’s Vivarium (2019).

We can also trace aesthetic influences from video games, and not only from the eponymous game this work is based upon. For starters, there is a segment early on where POV shots recall the first-person perspective of the original game and many other survival horror titles. The “Silent Hill” game franchise is a clear influence. As in that series, the supernatural anomalies our hero encounters are a distorted reflection of his scarred psyche, bringing narrative depth and character development to the table. The original “Exit 8” game had nothing like that.

Another change from the original is the introduction of secondary characters. Our hero encounters other trapped souls inside this endless corridor, each with his or her own identity and backstory. While one person’s journey was enough to sustain the short experience of the original game, more characters are necessary for a meaningful feature-length experience.

From a technical perspective, this work is astonishing. The environments are the perfect recreation of the original game’s virtual spaces, with uncannily vibrant reflected light. There are also great body horror effects that will entertain fans of the weird and grotesque. Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” underlines our protagonist’s inner conflicts and his transformative journey.

In the end, it is better to approach this movie as a stand-alone piece rather than an adaptation. It offers something completely different from the work that inspired it, using its predecessor’s simple formula as a metaphor for insecurities, anxieties, and existential angst, creating a unique narrative in the process.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The film mines tension from the absurdity of the Lost Man’s confinement, and in ways that recall Vincenzo Natali’s Cube, perhaps the granddaddy of escape-room horror. To that end, Kawamura at times pushes the original game’s subtle eeriness into full-on scares, introducing spooky apparitions and a horde of mutated creatures that would feel at home in Silent Hill.”–Mark Hanson, Slant (contemporaneous) 

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: CAT SICK BLUES (2015)

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DIRECTED BY: Dave Jackson

FEATURING: Matthew C. Vaughan, Shian Denovan, Meg Spencer, Jeni Bezuidenhout

PLOT: A former Internet celebrity whose life revolved around her cat’s  viral video performances and a fellow with a fetish for defiling and murdering women while dressed as a cat meet at a pet-loss support group. This is not a love story.

Still from Cat Sick Blues (2015)

COMMENTS: Within the first five minutes, Cat Sick Blues had already checked all my boxes for my favorite kinda horror movie: sick, dark humor on the /Full Moon spectrum (check), faithful adherence to horror movie protocol that the first two characters we meet die in minutes (check), a punk rock/screamo soundtrack that evokes the nihilist spirit of the story about to unfold (check), smirky social satire (check), a roller-coaster pace where you can’t possibly predict the next swerve (check), and a camera shot (pictured) with a head on a table, perfect to add to your decapitation scrapbook alongside Frankenhooker (check-a-roonie). By the time the first victim’s head had bounced gaily down the stairs, the movie had already bounced purring into my lap. Cat Sick Blues takes turns affectionately nuzzling your face and playfully clawing you hard enough to draw blood. Just when you think you can let your guard down, it bites your hand again, lest you get too comfortable. Many will be turned off by it, but for the rest of us horror/sicko freaks, this is our cup of catnip tea.

Claire (Shian Denovan) is the owner of Imelda, a fluffy white cat whose videos have taken on a viral life of their own. Sadly, Imelda’s fandom is a little too fanatic, as one obsessed fan shows up at her door and bluffs his way inside, only to summarily murder her cat and rape her. Broken, Claire ends up at a support group for bereaved pet owners (if you liked Fight Club’s satire of support-group culture, here’s another dose of that). There, she meets Ted (Matthew C. Vaughan), a towering and imposing fellow who’s also shy and antisocial. Ted is going through some things, to put it mildly. He has sought a support group way too late in life, having already converted himself by night into a serial killer in a cat mask. He even enlists the help of a local leather-crafter to fashion a set of sharp-clawed gloves, and a monster-sized strap-on spiked dildo to complete the ensemble. In this costume, he dispatches victims and, more than once, has a very dramatic orgasm while doing so, spasming on the floor in his cat mask and floppy dildo. All of this turns out to have a second purpose for Ted: he is collecting the blood of victims in a bucket in anticipation of re-animating his own dead black cat, Patrick. (Note to A Bucket of Blood: this is what a whole bucket of blood looks like!)

Claire and Ted hook up, after Ted makes a whirlwind cleaning tour of his apartment to hide the serial killer paraphernalia and trophies. So the question becomes, will Claire figure out that she’s dating a killer before Ted fulfills his body count? What happens from here becomes less clear as the story proceeds, until act three, where the director decides to let the story-logic slide into territory, with dream sequences and hallucinations clouding the narrative enough that we can pick our own ending. The one thing that’s clear is that this movie will have no shortage of indelible images right up to the end credits, including some genuine gross-outs.

For a small budget picture, it’s a pleasure seeing such attention to detail. The chaos is sharply filmed, framed, and hemmed in by a tight production all around. The set is filled with familiar cat-themed gift shop kitsch like cat mugs, cat T-shirts, and cat bongs. One scene has Claire sorting through her mail; the pile of envelopes has some custom-printed mailers relevant to the plot, with text you’ll want to freeze-frame so its carefully spread satire may be read and appreciated in full. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene has Ted visiting a rave where teenagers in glowing jewelry wave their phones in the air and the DJ raises a squirt-gun to his lips. Most impressive of all, Cat Sick Blues was released in 2015, and yet has not aged a single day. We’re still a culture obsessed with Internet fame and cats, wallowing in bizarre fetishes and shallow morals. Claire’s fans, adoring the content yet lacking empathy for its creator, flock to ridicule her situation, or steal clicks by posting reaction videos to her plight.

It’s remarkable that this film isn’t better known (or at least didn’t cross our radar sooner), but we can chalk that up to an Australian production by a director who seems to live entirely at film festivals down under. Reading the IMDB reviews, I see commenters practically coughing up hairballs as they remark how upsetting, offensive, and disturbing this movie is. Let the poor little kittens lap their safe milk. For us fans of feral film, Cat Sick Blues is the kitty that roars like a lion.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…sometimes movies just leave you completely confused and unsure of what it is that you just watched. That basically sums up how I felt once I had finished watching the bizarre Australian horror film, Cat Sick Blues.”–Chris Coffel, Bloody Disgusting (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by Bradley, who called it “one odd movie.”. Suggest a weird movie or two of your own here.)

 

 

Cat Sick Blues

Cat Sick Blues

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