BRING HER BACK is this year’s release from Danny and Michael Philippou, the Australian twins “known for their horror comedy YouTube videos” according to Wikipedia, but I know them for the 2023 ghost movie TALK TO ME, which I enjoyed. The brothers both direct while Danny writes with Bill Hinzman (no, not the cemetery zombie from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD – I looked it up, and he died in 2012). This is another impressive Philippou Brothers joint, more serious than the last, not much humor this time, but just the right level of bleakness for me.
It’s about a half brother and sister who are having a rough go of it. Piper (newcomer Sora Wong) is blind, but tries to go without her cane to fit in at school, which doesn’t work. Andy (Billy Barratt, “Street urchin,” MARY POPPINS RETURNS) is older, seems to have been a mess since the death of their mother, but he’s very loving and protective of Piper. Then they come home and find their dad dead in the shower. This may be a dumb thing to note but I think it’s important that he’s just laying there with his junk visible, because for all our lives most movies have lived in a world designed to avoid the sight of dicks. Seeing one here adds a blunt reality that makes the death more matter of fact, and more shocking. (read the rest of this shit…)
A couple years ago, you may remember, I was kind of giving up on my Slasher Search tradition, because the pickings were getting really slim when it came to the type of undiscovered ‘80s slasher I was looking for. Some of you talked me into broadening or adjusting the criteria, so I’ve been experimenting with the mostly more modern horror obscurities that can be found scrolling through the horror sections on Tubi and similar free streaming services. That’s been going okay so far, so I’ll try dipping in a little again this year and see what happens.
For today’s special programming I tried out two movies that stretch the definition of “slasher,” but they seem at least tangentially related to supernatural slashers like Freddy and Candyman. Or at least one of them has Tony Todd in it. Okay, these are not really slashers, they’re action horror. Instead of a final girl running from a killer they have a martial artist who falls into monster troubles and has to fight.
This year I celebrated Halloween by taking the day off of work and watching a witch-themed triple feature. This is not something I ever thought I’d do, because I’ve always had that issue with historical witch movies where it kinda bothers me to pretend there’s a such thing as witches, since that’s the superstitious bullshit that real life tyrants used as an excuse to torture and murder many innocent people in this country and elsewhere. But there were a couple witch-related movies I’d been thinking I’d like to rewatch, and at the same time I’d been thinking about my late mother, who loved to dress as a witch every Halloween. She painted her face green and glued on a warty latex nose with spirit gum. Some of the younger kids in the neighborhood were terrified of her, but she got a kick out of it. So I dedicate this witch-a-thon to her.
