The Jester (2023)

"Terrifier at home." "Terrifier from Wish." Yada yada yada, I don't care. Telling the story of two estranged sisters who reunite after the apparent suicide of their father only to find themselves pursued by the same enigmatic jester figure who did away with daddy, "The Jester" lacks originality but makes up for it by being perversely funny and making great use of practical effects and Michael Sheffield's miming skills as the titular villain. Sure it's plagued by the kind of iffy acting you might expect to find in a Tubi Original (here's looking at you, blank-faced extras), but does it really matter when there are cops being decapitated by top hats, cup games resulting in the loss of bodily parts, and a story arc that sees its final girl (Lelia Symington) earn her status in a truly purgative way? This is a fun little film that finds room for both physical and psychological horror without necessarily going for the gross-out effect or being convinced of its own weightiness. It's popcorn horror to put a smile on your face, and I love that for it.

Death Toilet Number 2 (2019)

Still just as short on funds and talent but crucially lacking the laughs that made 2018's "Death Toilet" somewhat tolerable, "Death Toilet Number 2" finds dumpy Vietnam veteran Brett Baxter (Mike Hartsfield) and Father Marcus-D (Isaac Golub) reuniting to once again match wits (and wipes) with a demonically possessed shitter. As in the last film, the actors flub their lines, struggle to contain their own laughter, and repeat half-cocked catchphrases such as "the power of the wipes compels you" while waving crosses at their stationary foe. In between the toilet scenes we get stock Vietnam war footage that's supposed to parallel the life and death struggle the protagonists are having with the toilet but only ever feels like padding in what can very loosely be called a 54-minute"film." I may have laughed once but I can't really remember, this being a movie that feels like an attack on your mental faculties. Anyway, more gross practical effects and less Adobey "special" effects would probably improve this formula a lot.

Unrest (2006)

"The Autopsy of Jane Doe" in the style of a mediocre mid-2000s supernatural slasher, Jason Todd Ipson's "Unrest" sees a cadaver claiming victims from beyond the grave at a morgue where pathology student Alison (Corri English) works. Quickly realising something's amiss with the mutilated body her team is tasked with dissecting, Alison sets about stopping her immobile foe as those around her continue to die. If the use of actual cadavers and morgue setting lend some novelty and impact to some of its scenes, the plot itself is sadly conventional and the characters dull and uninspiring. It helps not that character development is thin across the board; the main protagonists are essentially superstitiously-minded from the start, which is strange for medical students tasked with working on corpses, while the more sceptical people around them remain stubbornly aloof long after students and investigators start showing up as formaldehyde floaters, for no other reason than that the half-baked plot demands. Tacking a lame ending onto it all doesn't help much either. I did enjoy Corri English as Alison, though, even if she's never gonna win any Oscars.

Freddy's Fridays (2023)

You could be forgiven for not expecting much out of a movie riding the coattails of "Five Nights at Freddy's" and produced by the same company behind the recent "Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey". And while "Freddy's Fridays" is plagued by precisely the kind of soap opera level acting and sloppy CGI work you might expect from a derivative low-budget horror, it's not without its own entertainment factor. It helps that it at least has more story than "Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey", said story being that of  homicide detective Lila Jones' (Danielle Scott) investigation of a series of sex worker killings she believes to be the work of creepy Todd Fischer (Jase River), who we learn at the start of the movie is working a kind of contract for a band of demonic slashers led by the floppy-eared Freddy. Since there's really no mystery, the movie depends on how competent Lila and those around her are when it comes to stopping Freddy and company. Fortunately for us, they're pretty bad at this kind of thing and make enough mistakes to keep the body count rising as the movie marches towards an admittedly half-baked conclusion pitting Lila against her bloodthirsty foes. I kind of liked the killer designs here, even if the "demons" are really just guys in costumes, and it's cool that they take turns dispatching their various victims, so you get some sense of their individual personalities. If only the rest of the performances weren't so boringly bad and the movie actually had a proper finale, this might have even been a good bad movie. As is, while it's still more up my alley than "Five Nights at Freddy's", it's not a successful mockbuster.