Morris apologizes for being late to his brother’s baby shower.
Tag Archives: Horror
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FIEND (1980)
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DIRECTED BY: Don Dohler
FEATURING: Don Leifert, Richard Nelson, Elaine White, George Stover, Greg Dohler
PLOT: A “fiend”—an evil spirit that takes possession of a corpse and absorbs the life energy of humans-–moves into the quiet suburb of Kingsville, where a concerned neighbor immediately suspects a connection between the new resident and an unsolved killing spree.
COMMENTS: God bless the Don Dohlers of the world. They don’t have a lot of resources, they don’t have a lot of talent, but by gum they love movies, they’ve got determination, can-do spirit, and just enough cash and friends and family to put together a chiller. You don’t go into a Don Dohler movie with the hope that it will be very good, but it’s a whole lot of fun watching him in there giving it the ol’ college try.
Shot after his debut feature The Alien Factor, Fiend finds Dohler a more experienced filmmaker, but also working with an even thinner budget of a mere $6,000 to continue his bid to become the Roger Corman of Maryland. So he develops a story around an original monster–the title character, a kind of free-floating, body-possessing demonic entity–to sit alongside vampires, zombies, and werewolves. We get an impressively economical introduction to our star villain: after a shapeless red cloud plunges into the grave of a recently deceased man, the reanimated body rises and, within the course of the next 6 minutes, strangles a conveniently located woman in the cemetery, moves into a split-level ranch in the Baltimore suburbs (what was the house closing like?), and chokes another woman while she walks the five miles through the woods from her carpool stop to her home.
This kind of efficiency is typical of Fiend, which does not waste a lot of time with details. In the space of a few months, the monster takes on the name Longfellow, acquires a cat and a lucrative career teaching music, hires an accountant-cum-Renfield to manage his extensive operations, and builds a combination music studio/shrine to Satan in his basement where he keeps an ample supply of professional headshots of his prospective victims. So it’s only fair that the only force powerful enough to stop him will be equally lucky. Gary is a persnickety neighbor who has it in for Longfellow from the start (supposedly because of the noise, but more likely because the newcomer has an even more impressive mustache). But he should play the ponies, because he immediately pegs Longfellow as the local serial strangler through intuition alone, with not a scrap of evidence to back him up—much to the frustration of his unduly patient wife. Fortunately, a visit to Longellow’s subterranean lair provides all the proof he needs, and the battle of wits commences.
The usual hallmarks of bad-moviedom are here. The acting is wooden and mannered, the score-by-Casio is repetitive and intrusive, and the script is driven by incredible coincidence. (Does the cemetery groundskeeper carry copies of the obituary for every corpse in the place?) But you can tell that Dohler is a deeply earnest storyteller. Compelled to shoot his scenes of mayhem in broad daylight, he makes the killer’s audacity add to the overall sense of unease. Recognizing the convention of secondary horror characters whose ignorance does them in, Dohler crafts a pretty decent action scene in which a bystander attempts to come to the aid of a potential victim, complicating the villain’s plans. Most intriguingly, he hands the hero’s mantle to the abrasive Gary. It’s almost charming to watch Gary barrel around, insisting that something suspicious is going on and bitterly rejecting his wife’s insistence that he lighten up. It puts an intriguing twist on the fact that he’s right about everything.
On a side note, here’s a mystery for you: where the hell are Gary and Marsha’s kids? There’s no shortage of children in the film, including Dohler’s own son; one of those youngsters even ends up at the wrong end of Longfellow’s glowing hands. We’re certainly supposed to believe the Kenders have kids, because they talk a lot about their filmmaking project for Scouts (an opportunity for Dohler to drop the name and the address of his real-life bookshop), but we never see them, not once. Is this a scenario borrowed from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It’s truly bizarre.
Fiend is not a good movie. Crucially, it’s not a scary or suspenseful movie. But it benefits strongly from a second viewing, when you can set aside all the film’s ineptitude and appreciate the purity of the effort. Viewed in the right circumstances, it’s a goofy piece of fun, and the world of cinema can always use a goofy piece of fun. That’s a legacy to remember Don Dohler by, long after both he and the Fantasy Kingdom Bookstore at 704 Market Street have left the mortal plane.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Joe. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
![Fiend (Special Collectors Edition) [DVD]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51HixmiYJOL._SL500_.jpg)
FANTASIA 2025: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: BUFFET INFINITY (2025)
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DIRECTED BY: Simon Glassman
FEATURING: Kevin Singh, Claire Theobald, Donovan Workun, Ahmed Ahmed, and the voice of Simon Glassman
PLOT: An all-you-can-eat restaurant competes with neighboring stores at a strip mall as a sinkhole appears, strange noises plague the area, citizens go missing, and an occult presence seeps into the transmission.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: A narrative told through channel-surfing and a combo platter of the ridiculous and the sinister make Buffet Infinity a necessary addition to the Apocrypha menu.
COMMENTS: Westridge County is small, down at the heel, and more than a little boring. The local TV stations showcase a cavalcade of staid businesses: a doggie daycare on the verge of collapse, a pawn shop with a worryingly growing inventory, an insurance broker ready to cover questionable life events, a sandwich shop offering several types of sliced pig along with its signature sauce, a shyster lawyer happy to capitalize on his bitterness, a used car dealership suffering a violent aversion to high prices, and a buffet with suspiciously good deals and no apparent staff. Surfing the area’s TV broadcasts for one-hundred minutes, however, we glean the story of how Westridge County becomes increasingly derelict, dangerous, and decimated.
Simon Glassman is a fellow of who remembers, and, in a way, is nostalgic for a particular broadcast phenomenon which has all but disappeared. His chronicle of Westridge County’s collapse from crummy to cursed cranks true-to-life advertisements and news flashes one further turn on the dial to the absurd. The passive-aggressive war between Buffet Infinity (where something possibly extraterrestrial, and certainly evil, is going on) and Jenny’s Sandwich Shop ratchets up snarkily; though both cheerfully announce the ample parking “in the front”. (The sinkhole growing in the back-lot is the first indication something’s a bit off.) Public service warnings from “The Westridge Society for Religious Freedom” sound typo-ridden alarm bells about an impending supernatural intrusion that will rob the county of its people. But Ahmed Ahmed, the bad-rapping proprietor of the pawn shop, is ready to raise spirits through low prices on goods ranging from sound blockers to personal defense.
Glassman pulls aside the curtains drape by drape, with each surf through the channels unveiling a little more tension and a little more desperation. Glassman remarked during the Q&A session following Buffet Infinity that the film is ultimately just him dumping on a local strip mall. This much is certainly true, but the movie is much more. It dissects quotidian fears and challenges, with a heartier and heartier dose of the surreal, culminating in absurdly large portions of spectacle.
So head on down to Buffet Infinity! Its eighteen-to-twenty staff, each with their own homes and government ID numbers, will serve up platefuls of curious delights in the ever-expanding dining facility.
Just don’t enter the door marked “Prohibited”.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: ALMA & THE WOLF (2025)
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Alma & the Wolf is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.
DIRECTED BY: Michael Patrick Jann
FEATURING: Ethan Embry, Li Jun Li, Lukas Jann, Jeremie Harris, Kevin Allison
PLOT: Ren, a deputy in an out-of-the-way town, investigates a dog-killing wolf at the behest of his old high school crush, Alma.
COMMENTS: A word of advice: don’t go into Alma & the Wolf expecting a standard werewolf movie, or any standard horror movie, for that matter. Focus instead on Ethan Embry’s fine portrayal of Ren, a peaked-in-high-school separated dad struggling with a drinking problem. You’ll be much happier with that approach.
“Nothing good ever comes from here, but lucky for the wider world, nothing ever leaves,” Ren says of the rural town of Spiral Creek. Ren himself is a former high school pitcher whose career ended prematurely with Tommy John surgery and whose life has been in a downward spiral since. Now a failed husband and deputy cop who’s been on this rural beat forever without much hint of promotion, he’s pinned all his hopes on his son, Jack, who’s following in his athletic footsteps and has serious athletic prospects. Ren is also interested in Alma, who seems (at times) to reciprocate his feelings, despite being a hot mess alcoholic herself. (This is a very boozy movie). Rounding out the small-town cast are a newbie cop Ren can bounce backstory off, a comic relief sheriff more interested in promoting Buddhist breathing techniques than hard policing, and a handful of colorful, trashy yokels.
As good as the acting is—Embry, as mentioned, is excellent, and the rest of the cast supply no weak notes—the special effects are noticeably poor: the mangy wolf costume is neither realistic nor frightening, there’s a head-on-fire effect that looks like it might have been made in ChatGPT, and at one point the use of rubber glass to substitute for a shattered windshield is painfully obvious. Given that Alma is more focused on drama and psychology than actual horror, these slip ups aren’t fatal, but they do imbue the film with a sheen of cheepnis that’s out of step with the professionalism of the rest of the production.
The first weird thing that happens in the story occurs when Ren suddenly promises to kill the wolf for Alma, despite his obvious reluctance and his warning that they’re a protected species and it’s a “class C felony” to kill one. Then comes his first encounter with the wolf, followed by recurring hallucinations where he glimpses the lupine taunting him. As the movie continues, the weird stuff intensifies, from the relatively subtle (whispering voices) to the elaborate (a well-staged pagan dream sequence in the woods with Alma and the talking wolf at a pagan bonfire flanked by a pair of goat-people). By the time we reach the one hour mark, confusion reigns, as the narrative seems to be spinning out of control, and occasionally contradicting itself.
Alma & the Wolf‘s twist ending turned off a lot of people. That’s understandable for viewers who didn’t go in bargaining for a weird movie: the final act makes some of the events of the rest of Alma feel arbitrary and irrelevant, and if you get invested in certain red herrings, you could feel cheated. But although the movie doesn’t quite stick its landing—it’s not tightly scripted enough, and it could have used more foreshadowing—it’s far from as abysmal as its 4.6 IMDb rating would suggest. I admire the ambition and certain aspects of the execution—specifically the performances—and although I wouldn’t give it a general recommendation, I wouldn’t advise you to steer away, either. If you’re in the mood for a well-acted, modestly-budgeted, artistically ambitious psychological thriller, you could do worse than hunting down Alma & the Wolf.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
FANTASIA 2025: IT ENDS (2025)
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DIRECTED BY: Alex Ullom
FEATURING: Phinehas Yoon, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth, Mitchell Cole
PLOT: Four friends miss a turn on the road, and it appears their route will now go on forever.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Riffing on The Exterminating Angel, four Gen-Z are trapped in much shabbier circumstances, and doomed to wonder when—or even whether—they end.
COMMENTS: It’s a simple, and pleasingly silly, little game: you choose two options for defense, and the two unchosen options are tasked with taking you out. The options are as follow: one man with a gun, 5 gorillas, 50 hawks, and 10,000 rats. Theoretical nonsense, of course, but not a bad way to spark conversation. James doubts the hawks’ merit, Fish thinks a lone gunman can’t amount to much, Day hasn’t been paying much attention (though later favors gorillas, after teaching them to shoot), and Travis wonders just why the heck he returned to town to catch up with his recently graduated high school buddies.
These friends are pleasant company, which is good: we viewers are trapped with them inside their Jeep for the better part of ninety minutes. Conversation becomes panicky, aggravated from time to time by mysterious forest dwellers, who swarm the vehicle whenever it stops, all of them screaming desperately for help. Inside the Jeep, it is safe. Kind of. Did you ever find yourself stuck in a car ride with someone and it went on a few hours too long? Imagine that extended across untold tens-of-thousands of miles along a generically forested highway, with the threat of violent death waiting just beyond the tree line.
It Ends is a simple movie, with one mobile set, and it runs a gamut of emotions. It goes on and on and on, its protagonists trapped and spurred by fear and boredom and the ever-so-rare flicker of hope. (Is it taking longer for the forest freaks to suss they’ve stopped? Is that another car off the side of the road? And… is it raining for the first time in months?) As with any road trip, particularly infinite ones, I suppose, things get cyclical. James, ever stoic, ever cerebral, and often a bit of a cold-blooded jerk, begins to wonder if that cycle is part of the key. Day, Fish, and Travis might be right, too, in feeling that an eternity of traveling down a highway is all that’s ahead. It Ends sprinkles comedy throughout, too, as the youths’ banter delightfully combines an entering adulthood flippant wit with crumbling coping mechanisms.
The odd premise carried my interest, and if left to just that, perhaps I’d consider this to be some high-quality quirk. However, I’m inclined to pay substantial dues to a movie with a punchline, and this one hits hard, and sudden. Through tension, charm, and ambiguity, It Ends is a treat for film gabbers. Me, I’m choosing 50 hawks and 10,000 rats to watch my back. You?
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: