As usual October is passing me by and I feel like I’ve barely started with the horror movies. But also as usual I’m gonna watch them year ‘round anyway so what am I worried about? Stay tuned for many more, but today I’m dipping into two new releases on Shudder.

I wanted to watch HALLOWARRIOR since, as the title implies, it is season. It’s about a young woman who calls herself Pumpkin (Milly Shapiro, Tony winner from Matilda who had a memorable fate in HEREDITARY). She lives in the house she grew up in, all alone now because four years ago a virus killed much of the population and all of the crops.

But somehow she’s still hanging in there, it’s October 31st, she loves Halloween, and she’s damn sure gonna celebrate. She explains this over a radio, begging for someone to come trick or treat, or see the haunted house she made. She found a candy store to loot so she has more than enough to fill a bowl, and she carved jack o’lanterns out of a basketball and a gas can and some other stuff.

But it seems like once again no one will show. And she’s so sick of this loneliness she decides to shoot herself… until she hears something on her radio. She hasn’t seen anybody in years, so she hallucinates them, thinks her dummies are alive, etc., but she’s pretty sure she really sees someone swiping her whole bowl of candy from the porch (a clear violation of the honor system). When she finds two scavengers scrounging through her kitchen she confuses them by asking them “Are you real?”

They are. The woman’s name is Thalia (holy shit that’s Shannyn Sossamon, A KNIGHT’S TALE) and her husband is Royce (A.J. Bowen, THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL). They have a crossbow, but Pumpkin has her suicide gun, so she wins. Thalia tries to make peace and introduces Wendy (Ajani Russell, SKATE KITCHEN), the young woman in the scarecrow mask who stole the candy. Wendy really doesn’t like Pumpkin and wants to leave, though Pumpkin gets her to admit she misses Halloween hayrides from the before times.

When Thalia convinces Pumpkin she should go get her family it’s tense because we’ve seen over one million post apocalypse stories and know that she’s gotta be from some kind of cannibal gang or Teletubby cult or what have you. And this Royce stays behind and he’s such a fucking piece of shit, seems like he’s probly a molester, things get out of control.

So Pumpkin and Wendy decide to be friends and defend the house from Thalia and the guys she comes back with, who by the way are S&M dudes on leashes who act like attack dogs. And one lady in a mask that looks kinda like a DARK CRYSTAL puppet at first glance.

There are some good parts. I like when Royce is scared by a Halloween decoration that makes corny electronic sounds. Also when Wendy says, “Let’s carve some pumpkins” as a badass one-liner. And I like that they put razor blades in chocolate as a weapon. When Pumpkin gets drugged and hallucinates it’s pretty creepy. I really like the look of it (cinematographer: Steven Russell): there’s almost a magic hour feel to the warm colors like Pumpkin’s bright orange hair and the jack o’lanterns on her sweater popping in a washed out, overcast world. Also, there’s something that speaks to me about a person trying to continue the tradition of Halloween in the post-apocalypse. It’s kinda like how some of us still watch fucked up movies in a fucked up world. You might think we wouldn’t, but there’s something comforting about that escape into the unnatural and otherworldly, I guess. So I get what Pumpkin’s about.

But for me this is only an okay movie. It’s only 80 minutes, so it’s not too long, but it still feels like a premise only big enough for a short film (the format writer/director Ben Sottak’s previous experience is in). And it has small things that bugged me like the attempt to explain the title with some thing she said when she was a kid. I don’t buy it, and I don’t need it. Still, might be worth a viewing if you’re binging on Halloween-specific materials.

BLOODY TENNIS is an English-language movie from Greek-German writer/director is Nikias Chryssos (THE BUNKER). The Shudder menu describes is as “CHALLENGERS meets SUSPIRIA.” The CHALLENGERS part just means there’s tennis, but the set up sure is SUSPIRIA: young American woman Sophie (Sandra Guldberg Kampp, Foundation) comes to an elite European tennis academy right after another student (Ambre Olive) supposedly left. None of them know she was actually bashed to death by a tennis ball launcher, or that other students who get eliminated really do get eliminated.

The headmistress or whatever Mary (Elina Löwensohn, SIMPLE MEN, SCHINDLER’S LIST, NADJA, BASQUIAT, DARK WATER, AFTER BLUE, SHE IS CONANN) tries all kinds of psychologically abusive tough love shit. Taunts her about her dead tennis player mother, tells her she’s not good enough, pretends she’s going home and then has the students haze her by hanging her off a bridge wrapped in a tennis net and calling it a cocoon for her to emerge from.

The coach (Zlatko Buric, 2012, TRIANGLE OF SADNESS, SUPERMAN) is almost as bad as Mary, and most of the other students regard her as an enemy. An exception is her roommate Heidi (Helena Zengel, THE LEGEND OF OCHI), and she tells Sophie her nicknames for all the other players. It’s a smart choice because we’re not gonna remember their names or spend that much time with them, so this is a quick way to preview what their personalities are supposed to entail. For example she calls Bana (Tracy Gotoas) “Mystique” because she doesn’t talk much unless you piss her off by breaking her concentration, so she’s mysterious. Sophie is also intrigued by her, for example looking her over in the shower.

Oh yeah, and the school has a weirdo employee named Fred (Vincent Romeo). He seems like such a freak I kinda thought he would have to be a red herring, but pretty quickly there’s a scene where he brings a cat into the basement, cuts out its guts and uses them to make strings for tennis rackets. Later somebody breaks Sophie’s racket, so she has to come here for a replacement. At first she doesn’t want one made out of cat guts, but then it seems to almost turn her on, and empower her bestial side. That and a few other things (being made to swallow a worm, learning how to drink the mysterious red energy drink without puking) brings out some appetites in Sophie.

I suspect RAW was a much bigger influence on this than CHALLENGERS. It has a bit of that thing of depicting a really heightened scenario as if this is how things really are, and it blurs the line between being animalistic and being sensual. Sophie starts to like the taste of blood, the smell and taste of Bana’s sweat, she starts to bite her. The route it goes is to have Sophie become corrupted by her drive to succeed rather than leave her as a person we can root for to overcome this place. That’s a legitimate statement and storytelling choice but the theme of cannibalism as competitiveness feels like a rehash of RAVENOUS and other movies, and they don’t do anything as interesting or upsetting with it as RAW or BONES AND ALL.

As far as the tennis, one reason it’s unfair to compare it to CHALLENGERS is that there’s not even the slightest attempt to match it in cinematically capturing the sport. It’s almost entirely closeups of the players’ intense faces as they swing, very little actual view of what the ball is doing. The matches are important to the plot, but it’s more implied tennis than captured on film. I suppose there might be more tennis than there’s dancing in SUSPIRIA, though.

I like the tone of it – a fairly absurd idea treated very seriously, but not for laughs. At a glance “tennis horror movie” sounds like a joke, but why? Anything that gets competitive can bring out the cruel freaks. The moral is that you have to really be disciplined and sacrifice your happiness to achieve athletic greatness, and also you really shouldn’t want to do that at all, it turns you into a joyless monster.

Guldberg Kampp looks like a young, skinny Scarlett Johansson, and I thought pulled off playing the American even though she’s Danish. I didn’t recognize Heidi as the lead of my beloved LEGEND OF OCHI, but she’s an interesting character, caught between child and adult worlds, the most sweet and childlike of the girls, but dependent on her supplies of three different types of drugs hidden inside her teddy bears. The whole young cast is effective, while Löwensohn really shines as the manipulative scary headmistress, elevating the movie. Also, there are a variety of gruesome occurrences that successfully made me wince.

I wish it ended up in a place I found a little more interesting, but it’s well made and distinct enough to recommend.