‘The passenger’
Rent it or buy it on Vudu
Blasco (Ramiro Blas), a former bullfighter, drives a van that transports people across Spain. He’s a boor who doesn’t like feminists, and his three passengers don’t like it one fateful day: Mariela (Cecilia Suárez), a nun with cancer, and Lidia (Cristina Alcázar), who takes her grumpy teenage daughter, Marta (Paula Gallego), living with Lidia’s ex-husband.
But Blasco’s macho drivel is the least of the group’s worries. As night falls, they encounter a gurgling organism that spits a small worm into Marta’s finger, and shortly after, Blasco rams his van into a disfigured woman standing in the road. As he rushes her to the hospital, she spits out a translucent goo that turns Mariela into a snarling killer ghoul. From there, it’s a fight between humans and evil.
This dark horror-comedy, from Spanish director duo Raúl Cerezo and Fernando González Gómez, is more than a stomach-churning infection flick. It’s also a surprisingly touching look at how people, especially parents and their children, forgive each other when trauma is a parasite with sticky fingers. I don’t know how much the sloppy makeup effects cost, but the directors got what they paid for.
I admired, more than enjoyed, this folk horror fable set in the lush rural landscapes of 19th-century Macedonia, where the supernatural and the ordinary share an uneasy coexistence.
At the age of 16, a mute girl named Nevena (Sara Klimoska) is taken from her mother by a demon resembling Freddy Krueger (Anamaria Marinca) known to locals as Old Maid Maria. With unflinching cruelty, Maria teaches her new child the ways of a shapeshifter, a life that forces Nevena to slaughter the humans she wishes to become, including a young village girl (Noomi Rapace).
Macabre and visually arresting, the film traffics in a folk horror style that’s just that pretentious side. Yet writer-director Goran Stolevski and cinematographer Matthew Chuang have collaborated to make a film about a young woman’s quest for self-discovery that includes beautiful passages of sensuality and joy but also acts of brutality. shocking. There is also a subversive strangeness: when Nevena becomes a handsome young man, she explores the male body and the expectations that come with it.
Clayton Witmer’s film is an intensely brooding and moving character drama masquerading as an old-school creature feature.
Ethan (Drew Matthews) is an introverted locksmith who lives alone in an American suburb near his brother (Ryan Davenport) and his family. While driving one night, Ethan comes across a deer carcass and inside he finds a small, twisty creature, a cross between a spider and a lobster. He brings him home, where the little guy breaks free from his cage, eventually growing to monstrous size. When a neighbor is found dead one morning, Ethan has a hunch about the identity of the killer.
At just under two hours, the film is too long to sustain its chilling ambitions. But he is a weaver of spells. I was particularly drawn to how Witmer takes a monster metaphor in unexpected directions as he explores what it means to grow up and never leave a small town. Ayinde Anderson’s beautiful cinematography gives the North Carolina suburb, where the film was set, a humble and sinister air.
‘Moloch’
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This Nico van den Brink feature is a conventional supernatural folk horror drama that nonetheless delivers a good night of scares and a doozy ending.
Set in the Netherlands, the film opens as Jonas (Alexandre Willaume) and his team of researchers work near a bog where Betriek (Sallie Harmsen) lives with his young daughter. They make a bizarre discovery: the long-dead body of a woman whose throat has been slit vertically. Meanwhile, Betriek’s father sets up a sensor in the yard after a deranged man shouts “They’re making me do this!” as he attacks the family.
As Betriek and Jonas strike up a romance, she tells him the chilling events might have something to do with a family curse that followed her grandmother’s unsolved murder. She’s right, and the curse has its claws on her and her daughter.
I don’t quite understand the demonic myth that fuels “Moloch”; it has biblical roots and has something to do with a hungry female spirit. But that’s okay, since van den Brink’s film vibrates with suspense and scares, like a strange scene in which Betriek encounters a possessed child in an elevator. The bizarre final scene is chilling.
“3 Demons”
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Though it borrows from “Ju-On: The Grudge,” “The Vigil,” and other horror films, DM Cunningham’s gripping low-budget ghost story is still scary on its own terms.
The film opens with a stormy night in a cell, as James (Peter Tell) recounts the harrowing events of a terrible day to his prison counselor (Sherryl Despres). Turning around, James explains that he was a police deputy who once had to protect a corpse found near a cabin in the woods. He began to see red poppies and a woman in a red dress – clues, he says, to why he was there, who the victim was and what a fellow officer (Haley Heslip) had to do with it. all of this. As he recalls the gory terrors that followed, we learn that James harbored terrible secrets that a leaf could never hide.
From pacing to chronology, this film is offbeat; dream states and reality share space in scenes that do not flow from one to the other. But Tell’s darkly comedic performance and Cunningham’s adventurous direction make it work. That is, until the film’s many twists and turns — from zombie comedy to sci-fi thriller to Hallmark romance — race to a confusing ending.