Immaculate (2024)

Following young American nun Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) as she starts her new life in a remote Italian convent, only to discover that her new hosts have far more sinister plans for her, "Immaculate" distinguishes itself from non-"Exorcist" religious horror movies by managing to combine exposition and entertainment in equal measure, resulting in a movie that leaves you satisfied despite its overall lack of depth. It helps that the lead, Sydney Sweeney, revels in her role as an initially helpless young nun who must learn to fight and think when she finds herself ensnared in an unbelievable plot far from home. She screams her head off, kicks ass, and gets soaked in blood -- and it's just great to watch. What's maybe not so great is the general lack of character development and fairly basic plot trajectory, but Sweeney and director Michael Mohan just about overcome those issues. This is not a great movie by any means, but in a world where the quality of movies like "The Conjuring" are blown all out of proportion, its simple pleasures make it a comparatively worthwhile watch.

Gacy: Serial Killer Next Door (2024)

"He might have a penchant for young men, but it's not illegal!"

A movie as plausible as it is sensitive, "Gacy: Serial Killer Next Door" imagines the final days of John Wayne Gacy's serial killing career as a brush with death for a family of three, who get wise to the evil contractor/clown in their midst and incompetently attempt to bring him down over the course of the movie. Think of it like a low-rent, bland version of "Disturbia" or "Summer of '84" without any kind of pay-off. Although it has a few fleeting resemblances to the real-life story of Gacy, this is an almost totally fictional account that will either grossly offend or bore you, depending on your disposition. The plot is predictable, the characters are indecisive dullards, and the overall tone of the movie is just flat and weird.

As Gacy, Mike Korich is almost comically evil not only when he's donning clown make-up to torment his victims (something Gacy didn't actually do) but even in scenes where his evilness should probably be downplayed. As Bobby, the teen boy who discovers Gacy's killing ways and thus puts himself and his parents in harm's way, Mason McNulty resembles a bland(er) Trevor Morgan regen and acts accordingly. As for Caia Coley as Bobby's mother Darlene: I'll do her a solid and not say anything.

This is a terrible movie borne of a terrible idea that might have worked just a little better were it not tied to real-life murders that warrant a more sensitive treatment. And while I'm not one to clutch pearls over such things, I do at least expect some semblance of quality in the trade-off. Alas, what few things I enjoy about this movie I do so ironically. It really is a turd.

Malum (2023)

A remake of 2014's "Last Shift" that takes a rookie cop's night shift hell in a more elaborate and gory direction than the original, "Malum" improves on that film's effects and production values but underlines the problem of excess in service of a one-note story. As with the original, there's no real mystery to protagonist Jessica's (Jessica Sula) encounter with the cult linked to her father's death and led by an appropriately sinister leader. We know it's going to turn out that the leader was onto something and we know the wool's gonna be pulled over Jessica's eyes more than a few times during a night of supernatural mindfucking. And because we've seen "Last Shift", we also more-or-less know how it's all going to end. The difference is in the new gags director Anthony DiBlasi staples onto his re-used idea, and the result is a tonal mess with moments of relief brought by explosive violence and a couple of memorable lines of dialogue ("Well I'm right here cunt, come and get me!"). Sadly, the movie isn't scary, just confusing, and the performances don't quite sell it either. Good creature design and gore, of course, but it's not enough to save it.

Mary Had a Little Lamb (2023)

If "Lamb" were directed by a British film crew with a shoot now, ask questions later kind of approach who can't get "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" out of their heads, it might have turned out something like "Mary Had a Little Lamb" -- a low-budget horror that takes its name from the nursery rhyme but is really just bog-standard budget fare that just so happens to have a sheep-headed killer in it. Following podcaster Carla (May Kelly) and her crew as they head out into rural England in search of a true crime story that might save their podcast, the movie sends them into the home of hag-like Mary (Christine Ann Nyland), where they soon discover that she and her deformed son have a passion for killing and consuming visitors. There's potential for a good time in this plot (and for a while that looks to be on the cards), but Jason Arber's first feature film is ultimately defeated by its issues. The lighting is bad, the plot fizzles out and the kills are not nearly as graphic and gory as they need to be in this kind of off-the-beaten-path horror. It's not nearly as bad as you'd expect it to be, but it's not quite good, either. May Kelly is great as final girl Carla, though, and I'd like to see her in a higher tier of horror movie in the future.

Terror Trips (2021)

"Terror Trips" opens with a group of friends and horror movie fans starting a business providing guided tours of the shooting locations of various horror movies, with the kicker being that it'll eventually lead them to experience some very real horror. Sounds promising on paper, until you realize that the best thing these filmmakers can cook up is a version of "Hostel" where the profit's in human body parts and the cast and crew don't quite have the talent to overcome budgetary constraints. This is watchable, sure, and the fractured relationships between the cadre of organ-harvesting baddies account for the movie's most interesting moments, but the acting is uniformly mid and there's just so many scarier, more novel directions "Terror Trips" could have gone in. This isn't even aggressively bad, either, which just makes it even more boring.

Ouija Shark (2020)

These days there's an endless supply of independent horror movies made with but a dollar and a dream, yet when it comes to the many shark movies floating about, it's less "dream" than title that takes precedence. Enter "Ouija Shark", in which director Brett Kelly and a ragtag band of no-name actors loosely improvise a story around a title they never had any realistic hope of living up to. I won't bore you with the irrelevant details of what could debatably be called the movie's plot, but it's something about a ouija board linked to animal spirits conjuring up what looks to be a super-imposed hand puppet of a shark, which kills a bunch of people off before the movie lazily ambles into an ending featuring an impression of Donald Trump that lives up to the standards of everything preceding it. Like "Cocaine Shark", it's never entertaining, even in a so-bad-it's-good way.