PSYCHO KILLER (2026) was written by Andrew Kevin Walker (BRAINSCAN, David Fincher’s THE KILLER), so obviously it was advertised as “FROM THE WRITER OF SE7EN.” But it’s not that type of movie. It reminded me more of HIGHWAYMEN – an odd, mostly quiet, sometimes audacious serial killer thriller, with a determined protagonist chasing a mysterious weirdo across the country. Its tone is grim and serious while its premise invites you to take part in satanic panic, and maybe if I thought it was trying to convince me that was real I would be bothered by it. Like if it came from Angel Studios. But I was not bothered. I had fun with it.
If you’re expecting something like SE7EN, the cool opening titles don’t necessarily dissuade you. I checked and they are not designed by Kyle Cooper/Imaginary Forces, but by Alexei Tylevich (TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2022, BARBARIAN, REBEL MOON – PART ONE: A CHILD OF FIRE, and ALIEN: ROMULUS). Their film scratches and strobes may owe a debt to Cooper’s work, but they’re tinted red to tell us this is the Devil variant. We see pentagrams, pills, bullets, inverted crosses, negative images of newspaper articles with headlines like “WAVE OF HORRIFIC MUTILATION.”
These are a few of the title character’s favorite things. The movie opens inside his noisy car roaring down the highway, close up on his mirrored glasses (we will never see his face). Played by 6’ 6” ex-WWE wrestler James Preston Rogers (OUTLANDER, DEFENDOR, BEVERLY HILLS COP: AXEL F, Hulk Hogan in WEIRD: THE AL YANKOVIC STORY), he’s a big muscle guy with long hair, trenchcoat, boots, sometimes enjoys a custom gas-mask type mask (pretty cool), always has his voice lowered like he’s a whistleblower having his identity protected in a tv interview. That’s even with the mask off – I’m not sure how he does it. (read the rest of this shit…)
The V/H/S brand property franchise has been going for 14 years now. Its previous entries are V/H/S, V/H/S/2, V/H/S: VIRAL, V/H/S/94, V/H/S/99, V/H/S/85, V/H/S/BEYOND, V/H/S/HALLOWEEN, and also a “Snapchat-released miniseries” called V/H/S: VIDEO HORROR SHORTS. But until the new one V/H/S/MIXTAPE I had never seen any of them (unless you count Jason Eisener’s KIDS VS. ALIENS, spun off from a segment in V/H/S/2).
Cindy Sherman is an artist known for her photographic self portraits. A bio on the Museum of Modern Art websight calls her “among the most significant artists of the Picture Generation, who came of age in the 1970s and responded to the mass media landscape surrounding them with both humor and criticism.” Madonna sponsored (whatever that means) MoMA’s 1997 exhibition of Sherman’s most famous series, Untitled Film Stills. It’s comprised of 69 black and white photos shot between 1977 and 1980, in which she’s posed playing various characters in fictional movies from the ‘50s and ’60s. That same year she also made her one actual movie, OFFICE KILLER.
“What the fuck was our daughter doing in a 3,000 year old sarcophagus!?”
Here we go with another October, and another struggle to continue the tradition of Slasher Search in some way. The shadowy corners of the shelves have been excavated, the bottoms of the barrels have been scraped squeaky clean, and I don’t know where else to look for vintage slasher movie gold that’s still obscure. If there’s any of the kind of stuff I was looking for left undiscovered, the boutique blu-ray labels are better at finding it than I am. So I’m not really searching for slashers as much as I’m searching for new approaches to Slasher Search.
I had maybe seen the title before, but didn’t know what it was, so I figured this is what I’ll do this year: all requests. If you suggest a movie that I haven’t heard of or at least seems obscure, and I can find it, I will try to review it. (Please try to make it slasher or slasher adjacent and preferably not well known enough to be released on blu-ray.) CJ Holden has already recommended a few more, and I invite you all to add any others in the comments.
The unanswerable question: is it called READY OR NOT: HERE I COME, or READY OR NOT 2: HERE I COME? Depends if you ask the opening credits or the closing credits. I guess we get to pick.
M.F.A. has a series of murders in it, but it doesn’t have the atmosphere of a horror movie like I would usually review this time of year. I’d say it’s closer to a thriller. It came out in 2017, I’ve been meaning to see it for a while, and unfortunately I was reminded of it by current events. It’s a rape-revenge movie with more parallels to the recent Cornell University case than I expected, but of course it’s not coincidence – it’s a terrible reminder that this is based on things that happen all the time. I have to warn you that although I think this is a respectable movie and not sleazy like 
When BACKROOMS came out in May, I was annoyed by the hype. I kept seeing articles about the rise of “liminal horror” which, as far as I could tell, boiled down to people pretending to be afraid of hallways and empty malls. Like so many annoying things it was born on the internet in Youtube videos and “creepypasta,” which is a word not even good enough to use as a placeholder. I object to its common usage, I resent that I had to repeat it, and I assert my rights as an old person to not have to be totally sure I know its definition. Whatever it is I disagree with it, so I was skeptical of this BACKROOMS, to say the least.
Hey guys, just arrived at the OBSESSION discussion. Got held up by traffic. Is anybody still here? Hello?
FLY AWAY HOME is one of the great PG-rated movies of 1996, and a true family film as opposed to one for kids. It’s for all ages, because it’s about cute animals, but also a 13-year-old girl trying to find herself after life-shattering loss, but also an eccentric adult trying to get his shit together as a parent while staying true to his ideals, and how they do those things together by both caring about the goslings orphaned by developers intruding on their land.
