Tag: psycho

Huntress

  By

★½
“Ze German WW2 Chainsaw Massacre”

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was fairly notorious in Britain in the eighties and nineties, being famously banned on video. Naturally, this meant I had to see it, and… I was initially underwhelmed. However, I’ve gradually come to appreciate its raw intensity over the years. If I ever doubted its merits, watching this largely shameless knockoff should act as a reminder. Because it shows how flat and uninteresting the premise can be, when executed poorly. This relocate things from seventies Texas to Germany in the last days of World War II. A medevac team is trying to get injured and grumpy officer, Colonel Franklin (Christian) to a hospital before his leg falls off from sepsis.

Along for the ride are nurses Ellie (McDowell) and Annie (Sarah Hawthorne), a pacifist medic, Will (Sohns), and a couple of GIs to provide protection. It’s not long before they run into trouble and out of fuel. Fortunately – or so it seems initially – they encounter friendly, and attractive local, Helga (Savage) who gives them her homemade sausages and says she has plenty of gasoline at her house, just over this way a bit. If you have read the opening paragraph, you’ll be able to work out where the rest of the film is going. Let’s just say, the moral of the story is: do not accept smoked meats of unknown provenance, from strange women in the middle of woods. Truly, words to live by.

Yeah, turns out she is the acceptable face of a family of psychos, along with sister Greta and mother Ursula. Or maybe it’s the other way round, I forget. Naturally, the convoy members enter the house in easily disposed of ones and twos, with an utter disregard for military protocol. For example, another moral might be, don’t drop your guard in order to slow-dance with mysterious veiled women, in the middle of large, spooky houses during wartime. Only bad things can come of it. The consequences are, a great deal of slowly creeping about corridors, which the makers mistakenly think generates tension. It actually generates tedium. I mean, Colonel Franklin has an excuse, having been shot in the leg. Everyone else? Not so much.

It’s not a terrible idea, and the performances are largely serviceable. However, the parallels to Texas become more blatantly apparent, the deeper we get, all the way until a final shot which is utterly a gender reversed clone of that in TCM. But rarely does this come anywhere close to capturing the same sense of unfettered insanity. If you’re going to try and ape a stone-cold horror classic, you have to bring your A-game, because otherwise, the comparisons will do you absolutely no favours. Instead, I was more left wondering how people go from running along a corridor in one shot, to being chased through the woods in the next. This one is a nightmare, alright. Just in all the wrong ways.

Dir: Matthew M. Howe, J. Christian Ingvordsen
Star: John Christian, Braxton Sohns, Maggie McDowell, Violet Savage

Abigail (2023)

  By

★★★½
“Heathers: the seventies remix.”

This is now the third film with the same title to be reviewed on the site: no vampires or Russian sorceresses to be found here. This does get an extra half star for genuinely surprising me. In the early stages, I had a strong feeling I knew exactly where this was going to end up going. Men bad, white people bad – and white men? Well, they’re the worst of all. Call it a spoiler perhaps – we’ll get to those – but that is definitely not how this unfolds. It takes place in 1976 Alabama, where teenager Abigail Cole (Cantrell) and her mother Eve (Lynch) have just moved from California. It’s clear this was to get away from “something”.  Exactly what is unclear, but it seems to have had something to do with Abigail’s father.

She makes friends with Lucas (Reed-Brown), who lives next door and is the victim of bullies at school. Initially, Abigail’s behaviour is positively heroic, defending Lucas from his tormentors. Though the film never makes mention of it, Lucas is black. You feel this might have been an issue in seventies Alabama, but the insults hurled at Lucas are entirely of the f-word rather than the n-word, an interesting choice. Anyway, Abigail proves more than capable of taking care of both of them, wielding a baseball-bat, fire extinguisher and axe-handle to good effect.

[Spoilers] However, things are entirely upended when further incidents make it abundantly clear that Abigail is not a heroic vigilante, defender of the oppressed, so much as a psychopath who revels in the opportunity to use violence against others. I did not see that coming. From this point on, just about everything is reversed, because the character for whom you’ve been rooting the entire time, is now the villainess. Conversely, the local cop, who seemed the epitome of racist law-enforcement, turns out to be sympathetic to Lucas and his apparent plight. However, things only cascade further into darkness as we continue on. The truth about Abigail’s missing father comes out, and the body count continues to increase, as efforts are made to clear up the previous corpses. [End spoilers]

There are some plot-holes here: given Abigail and Lucas were hauled into the principal’s office for an incident involving one bully, they would (Lucas particularly, even if Abigail was discounted through seventies sexism) surely be prime suspects in his subsequent disappearance. However, I am prepared to cut it some slack, due to the glorious one-eighty pulled off in the middle, which can only be applauded. Credit in particular to Cantrell’s performance: I’m sure if you go back and watch it again, you would be able to spot the clues to her personality in the earlier scenes. However, I’ve a feeling the impact would likely be less on subsequent viewings, where you know what’s coming. This is likely to be a “one and done” for me, which is why it doesn’t get a seal of approval. Albeit a highly satisfactory “one”.

Dir: Melissa Vitello
Star: Ava Cantrell, Tren Reed-Brown, Hermione Lynch, Gene Farber

In the Eyes of the Prey

  By

★★½
“The eyes have it.”

New rule. If ever I become an evil, kidnapping overlord, I shall be sure not to leave potentially lethal power-tools left lying easily accessible, around the place where the abductee is being kept. This is just one of the many mistakes made by the criminals here, in what could be an instructional guide on how NOT to execute a kidnapping. Admittedly, they weren’t aware that their victim suffers from multiple personality disorder. The alternate version is more than happy to wield the aforementioned power-tool – specifically, a nail gun – with extreme prejudice. It helps that these grown men and hardened criminals make it remarkably easy, for a 110-lb woman to overpower them in various ways.

Let’s rewind though, because it takes a while to get to the nail gun carnage, the reason why we’re here. Laura (Calamassi) is the victim, having been kidnapped by a gang led by Santiago (Massaria). These are the usual mix of tropes from this kind of movie. There’s the nice one, Benedetto (Badea); the pervy one, Lupo (Potenza); the fiery hot-head, and so on. Meanwhile, we get far too much back story about Laura’s mental health history. This includes an assault on an art teacher, sessions of therapy, and childhood trauma where she saw her mother gunned down in front of her. Exactly how this triggers the splitting off of PsychoLaura is unclear. I suspect the film is equally reliable in the fields of aberrant psychology, and as a “how to kidnap” manual.

If the script is flimsy and not very interesting, the film does rebound somewhat in the performances. Calamassi delivers good work when going Full Gollum, tussling with her internal demons, and if the supporting cast aren’t given much to work with, they do what they can. Things liven up when PsychoLaura takes full control, but here the limited budget (only fifteen thousand Euros) comes into play. That’s why we only get told one of her victims suffered 90-100 stab wounds and has a saw sticking out of his forehead. Or when someone else is decapitated with wire… it’s nowhere near as cool on screen as it sounds. Pro tip: if you can’t afford to show it, don’t include it in your script. 

Conversely, the sole female member of the gang is included to no real purpose. She’s initially set up as another victim, yet once the truth is revealed, nothing much happens. The scenery is very nice. Wherever it was filmed, seems like a lovely place to visit – whether or not you happen to be hiding out with a mentally deranged teenage girl you have kidnapped. So when the story doesn’t manage to retain your interest, you can admire the setting. Well, during the second half, when both the film and Laura escape the confines of the house. Everything ends in an uncertain manner. I’d probably have been disappointed in it, if I had felt any more than marginally invested in the final outcome. 

Dir: Leonardo Barone
Star: Laura Calamassi, Gabriel Dorigo Badea, Paolo Massaria, Jerry Potenza
This review originally appeared on Film Blitz.

Roadkill

  By

★½
“As appetizing as its title.”

To be one hundred percent clear, the best thing about this is the rather arresting poster. A far better film than what we have here, would struggle to live up to it. Instead, we have a classic example of vanity cinema, where one man decides to write, direct and play a major part in his own movie. The over-ambition here is palpable, to an often accidentally amusing degree. Perhaps most obviously, a pair of “car chases” – and I use the quotes deliberately – which unfold at a stately 15-20 mph, involving a muscle car on which the production clearly could not afford a single scratch on the paint. They’d have been better off not bothering. 

The story concerns an unnamed young woman, referred to in the credits only as The Driver (Carmichael). She picks up a vagabond, similarly called just The Hitchhiker (Knudson), as she is on her way to… Well, that’s left largely vague until late, though not as much as why she picks him up in the first place. The reason provided at the time, doesn’t make much sense in the light of subsequent events. Also operating in the area is a serial killer called the Highway Hunter, who is being sought by all the resources law enforcement can bring to bear. Which in this film would be a grand total of two (2) officers: Sheriff John Teagan (Fast, the director deciding to give the character he plays an actual name) and his deputy Corey Vernon (Hudson).

It isn’t particularly a whodunit, in the sense that the identity of the Highway Hunter is no great secret. It feels a little like Fast is trying to capture the spirit of The Hitcher. There’s an innocent, who is trapped by association on the road with a complete psycho, the police blaming them for a string of brutal murders. However, not a single element is anywhere in the same league, most obviously the gulf separating this from Rutger Hauer. Carmichael is rarely close to convincing, while Knudson looks like the makers ordered Keanu Reeves on Temu. Not helping matters: the faux film effects like scratches applied to the print. Fortunately, Fast seems to forget about this pointless affectation after the first few minutes of prologue.

There are times when it feels this might be intended as a bone-dry spoof, rolling out idiocy with a deadpan face. Witness the way The Driver manages to strangle someone when a) they are lying on top of her back, and b) her hands are handcuffed behind her. I suggest you get a partner and role-play that out, if you need convincing of its implausibility. Things escalate from there, by which I mean they become both dumber and less interesting. I was genuinely surprised to learn Fast has a previous feature, because almost every aspect of this screams “No experience”. Let’s hope he learns from this. Ideally, learns not to bother making any further films.

Dir: Warren Fast
Star: Caitlin Carmichael, Ryan Knudson, Warren Fast, Trenton Hudson

 

Peggy

  By

★½
“Amateur hour and ten minutes.”

An early contender for widest gap between synopsis and reality in 2024. On the one hand, we have “After years of torment, Peggy finally gets revenge on all those who wronged her in the past.” On the other? A dumb, microbudget not-a-horror, not anything really. It’s probably most notable for the unexpected appearance of Tom Lehrer on the soundtrack. I guess the basic concept is there. Peggy (Van Dorn) is almost thirty, but still lives at home with her doting dad (Williams). Her main hobby is abducting and torturing those who “wronged her” – though quite what they did to deserve such punishment is never made clear, which makes it kinda hard to feel empathy for her.

Possibly even more irritating are… well, everyone else, to be honest, but I suspect the local cops are top of the list. Even when Peggy carries out a mass poisoning at the bar where she works, when a customer makes an off-colour remark (have the makers ever been in a bar?), they do basically nothing. Mind you, Dustin (Guiles) is picking up evidence at a murder scene with his bare hands, so there’s that. The victims, including former high school Queen Bee Rachel (Osoki), are slightly noxious. But again: nothing to merit death, unless you consider dropping the C-bomb a capital crime, as Rachel does on a couple of occasions. [If so, I’m in trouble: being Scottish, it’s locked in to my sweary vocabulary].

There’s no particular sense of escalation, development or anything much. Spoiler, I guess, but it ends with Peggy simply announcing she has decided to go on a road-trip. The end. Well, if you discount ten minutes of the world’s slowest end-credits, which live up to the term “title crawl”, despite including an alternate ending that adds nothing of note or interest to proceedings. Including this, it still barely reaches an hour and ten. But, you know what? I’m not even mad about it. Indeed, half a star is probably for the film appreciating the line from Hamlet: “Brevity is the soul of wit.” Though given the lack of wit here, the saying needs to be reworked as, brevity is the soul of brevity. 

Performances range from the acceptable (Van Dorn) to the “actor no-showed, but there’s a homeless guy hanging around outside the 7-11” level. There aren’t even any decent exploitation elements which might have provoked some interest, with no nudity and gore limited to the occasional squirt of red-tinged corn syrup. To be fair, I get that making movies is hard. Making good ones is more difficult still. Yet when I sacrifice part of my hard-earned day off to this low-grade nonsense, I feel I have earned the right to be moderately aggrieved by the waste of my time. I never did figure out about the “years of torment” allegedly suffered by Peggy. I sincerely doubt it was significantly worse than the hour of torment this inflicted on me.

Dir: Brandon Guiles
Star: Tiffani Van Dorn, Brandon Guiles, Brian Williams, Katie Ososki

Scorned

  By

★★★½
“Hell hath no fury, like…”

RIP James Caan. I mention his passing, because by coincidence I watched this the same day, and there are a couple of nods to Misery, one of Caan’s most famous works. There’s a character called Mrs. Wilkes, and we also get an explicitly acknowledged re-enactment of that scene. You know the one. That aside, I’d be hard pushed to call this a good film, yet I can’t deny I largely enjoyed it. It feels like an influence on Knock Knock, and if perhaps not quite coming up to that mark, it’s only marginal below, and I’m still a sucker for a full on, scenery chewing psycho bitch. In Sadie (McCord), we certainly get one.

She and boyfriend Kevin (Zane) are starting a romantic getaway in a remote cabin. Well, that’s his plan. Sadie’s is rather different, having found incriminating text messages on his phone – worse still, to her best friend, Jennifer (Bianca). Not helping matter: Sadie recently discovered she was pregnant, and out of concern for her unborn child, stopped taking her lithium and anti-psychotic meds. Kevin wakes to find himself tied to a chair, with some very awkward explaining to do, and Jennifer is being lured to the cabin with a not-so-genuine text message saying Kevin had split up from Sadie. Adding to the mix, a scary looking convict (Drucker) has just escaped from the prison just down the road, and is headed in their direction.

There’s one scene where I fell… well, I won’t say in love with the movie, but I’d not mind a one-night stand with it. It’s when Sadie has Jennifer and Kevin tied to the bed. She drags a microwave in there too, slaps Sadie’s pet in there and demands Kevin go down on his other woman, “or I will start this microwave, and her little doggie will cook from the inside out.” No, seriously. It’s clear that this film is not to be taken seriously, and the three performances at the core are perfect for that, with Zane and Bianca dead-panning their way through the carnage, playing the straight man and woman to good effect, in contrast to McCord’s over the top, dramatic excesses. For she is going to make Kevin and Jennifer pay for their betrayal. PAY, I tell ya!

Turns out she was brought up in a mental facility and given electroshock therapy, after an incident when she was 12. She is, in essence, the poster child for “Don’t stick your dick in crazy.” Which makes it all more fun to watch her tormenting the errant couple for their sin. It all builds, inevitably, to a climax which is just as gloriously silly. I mean, who keeps a loaded spear-gun on their sideboard? Kevin, meanwhile, is moving with the agility of a gazelle, considering what happened to his ankle previously. All that said, I genuinely didn’t know who would survive at the end. I’ll say it again: I enjoyed this considerably more than I would necessarily recommend it, and the rating above reflects the former.

Dir: Mark Jones
Star: AnnaLynne McCord, Billy Zane, Viva Bianca, Doug Drucker 

Evangeline: Memoir of a Teenage Serial Killer, by KC Franks

  By

Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

When I see “Reader discretion is advised,” on an Amazon page, I tend to take it with a grain of salt. I’ve been enjoying media at the outer edges for longer than most readers here have been alive, and so am not easily shocked, disturbed or offended, to put it mildly. I’m ussure this quite managed to do any of those, but I will definitely say this: yes, reader discretion is advised. This is a rough, nasty and often unpleasant read. But it’s dealing with rough, nasty and often unpleasant topics, so the approach is entirely in keeping with the subject matter and not inappropriate.

The “heroine” – and I use quotes advisedly – is Angeline Gottschalk, a teenage girl who lives in rural Nebraska and has a truly unfortunate life. Her mother is mentally ill, she’s bullied at high school (in part due to having a stutter), and her stepfather, a local deputy sheriff, has bee abusing Angeline in the most vile ways imaginable since she was aged eleven. Eventually, Angeline’s psyche snapped, and split off an alternate personality as a way of handling the abuse – basically, acting as her psychological stunt double. Evangeline, as the other part of Angeline is named, calls herself “Defender of the weak. Champion of the abused. Bold. Fearless. And extremely pissed-off.” But the title of the book is arguably more accurate: serial killer. 

Oh, her targets are more than a little Dexter-like, to be sure – beginning with the stepfather, who will not be abusing anyone, ever again. But Evangeline then decides to target the deserving, in her mind, sex offenders who live in the local area. Rather than just being a stand-in for Angeline in the darkest hours, she begins to act independently, setting up a conflict between the two personas, which only one can win. For Angeline wants nothing more than to be left alone – ideally with her crush, Caleb Quinn. Except, Caleb’s brother, Billy is one of her biggest tormentors, and he has friends whose intentions and actions a) are even worse, and b) make them prime targets for Evangeline’s brutal methods of summary justice.

As you can perhaps guess, it’s all going to get very messy, both in the emotional and blood-spattered senses. The writing style feels a little rough and ready, almost bordering on the literary version of torture porn in some scenes. Franks tears into the violence with much the same glee that Evangeline tears into her victims: male readers may find themselves crossing their legs uncomfortably from time to time. There’s a near-total lack of empathetic characters in this: even Angeline is little more than a human piñata for life’s torments. Still, it’s sometimes good to peer over the edge into the abyss of humanity’s darkest depths, and this book certainly delivers on that. A stand-alone novel is fine. Any concept of a series here would not be something of interest.

Author: KC Franks
Publisher: Seven Crows Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Stand-alone novel.

Grotesque

  By

★★
“Plastic surgery disaster.”

Mildred Moyer (Chamberlain) has a problem, and it’s as plain as the nose on her face. Actually, it is the nose on her face, which would not look out of place – as one callous workmate points out – on a certain wooden boy of fairy-tale renown. Needless to say, her life has been made unpleasant by cruel comments from strangers and acquaintances. Finally, she has had enough and goes to a shady plastic surgeon to get it fixed. Unsurprisingly, this goes wrong – the fact her appointment is at 11 pm in the basement of a strip-club might have been a clue – and she is left horribly disfigured as a result. This drives her over the edge, and she vows savage revenge on all those who had wronged her.

There’s a really weird tone to this. You would think, given the subject matter, that it would be a dark movie, but Rhiness seems to be aiming more for humour as the over-arching atmosphere. Now, there’s obviously an overlap for horror and comedy, but it’s a cross-pollination of genres which is hard to pull off. The likes of Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson and Stuart Gordon can do it. Rhiness… not so much. Indeed, if you told me you didn’t find this either horrific or funny, that would feel like fair comment. Occasional moments do briefly achieve a solid foot in either camp, in my opinion. But not for long, and none manage to combine them effectively.

It is clear that the director is going for parodic excess in many elements: Mildred’s nose is so extreme as to be a clear indicator of that, and a lot of the performances go down similarly broad lines. Her ultimate nemesis, Blanche (Whelan), could not be a more broad depiction of a “mean girl” if she tried, and I strongly suspect she was, indeed, trying for that. But I felt the switch in Mildred from meek and milquetoast to mass-murdering psychopath felt sudden and forced. Perhaps it was having watched Joker the previous night, which took its time to bring the audience along on that transition, rather than just going “Hey, it’s time for her to go berserk.”

The killings are a mixed bag, and that’s being kind. Even allowing for the low-budget some of the effects are simply not good enough. Again, the deaths don’t generate much of anything on the viewer, only occasionally going sufficiently over the top to be amusing. However, Rhiness and team do deserve credit for keeping things simple: the goals here are not exactly lofty, and the lack of ambition and pretension is likely for the best. Chamberlain also helps to keep the project’s head above water, and even when the story isn’t doing enough to sustain your attention, her performance is quirky and engaging. But I can’t help thinking the whole project would have been better off deciding to be either a horror film or a comedy, and sticking with one or the other.

Dir: Brandon Rhiness
Star: Elizabeth Chamberlain, Julie Whelan, Hudsynn Grace Kennedy, Jaime Hill

Orphan: First Kill

  By

★★★
“This sister is still doing it for herself.”

I’ve not seen the original Orphan. I suspect this does not matter very much, since what we have here is a prequel. I will admit to having been lured in by the barking mad central idea. It does justice to the lunacy, though can’t sustain itself entirely, and at least somewhat collapses under its own weight. We begin in Estonia, where Leena (Fuhrman) is a very, very angry 31-year-old. Not without justification, being trapped in a 9-year-old’s body due to a hormonal condition. Previous violence has got her committed to a secure facility, but Leena breaks out and decides to adopt the identity of Esther Albright, an American child who went missing years previously. 

This plan works surprisingly well, with few questions being asked and no pesky DNA tests. There is some precedent: the documentary The Imposter chronicles the story of a con artist who convinced a Texas family he was their long-lost son. There is also a good reason why Mom Tricia (Stiles) and brother Gunnar (Finlan) don’t want to rock the boat. Quite why Dad Allen (Sutherland) doesn’t do his due diligence is less clear. So the film can happen, I guess. It’s all very awkward, especially when “Esther” starts having most undaughterly feelings towards her not-father. Yeah, the whole thing is creepy on a variety of levels, and gets increasingly so, the more we learn about the Albright family and their assorted dysfunctions. 

I have to say, the makers did a startling job with Fuhrman, who in reality is now thirteen years older than she was at the time she starred in Orphan. They use a combination of makeup, forced perspective shots and child stand-ins to have her play a nine-year-old, and you truly cannot see the joins. Just a pity the same level of effort and craftsmanship was not applied to the story elements. Having read a synopsis of the original movie, if not exactly an everyday story of normal folk, it seems it might not require the same helping of what Chris calls “I’m so sure…” This likely goes to a solid 11 in that department. 

Not that it matters, providing you are fine with a pot-boiler of lurid elements, that exist largely to make the viewer feel uncomfortable. Which is, I guess, I point of most horror, admittedly. The tension between mother and “daughter” escalate like a pressure cooker, leading to a final confrontation, pitting them against each other in a burning building which is… Well, I’d say it is undeniably in line with what has got us to that point. In other words, it’s ludicrous and overblown, yet I’d be lying if I said I was not entertained. I do wish they had gone full-throttle into the possibilities of the scenario, for example sending Esther off to school to interact with actual nine-year-olds. The implications of the scenario are, overall, probably more horrific than the way it plays out on the screen. 

Dir: William Brent Bell
Star: Isabelle Fuhrman, Julia Stiles, Rossif Sutherland, Matthew Finlan

Mercy Falls

  By

★★★
“Come to beautiful Scotland! And die!”

Even though I haven’t lived there since the eighties, I remain a sucker for a Scottish film. This delivers, with no shortage of rugged mountain landscapes, beautiful lochs, a ceilidh band and trees. So. Many. Trees. The foliage is understandable, because most of it takes places in the woods, where Rhona (Lyle) and her friends are looking for a cabin, deep in the wilds, which belonged to her late father. To help find it, they enlist the help of local Carla (McKeown), whom they meet down the pub when they have a pre-trip planning get-together. She initially seems fun to be with. But once they’re away from civilization, a shocking incident proves she… has issues, shall we say. And might not be the only one in the party.

The “trip into the woods goes wrong” subgenre of horror has been a staple of the industry for decades – not least because, it’s cheap to do. Why bother with expensive sets, when you can just run around a forest for the bulk of your running time? [Though from previous conversations with Scottish film-makers, the dreaded blood-sucking local insects know as midges, might make that choice of location a decision to regret!] There’s not a lot new in this incarnation of it. Having the threat come from inside the party is a moderate twist, as is having both leads being women. But horror, generally, isn’t something which requires innovation. It’s considerably more about the execution. Or, perhaps, the executionS.

There, this film is a bit of a mixed bag. If the supporting characters aren’t much more than stock characters: the slut, the jackass, the nerd (that would be the guy reading Homer in the woods!), they serve their purpose, which is mostly to die at the hands of Carla. The effects are limited, but I’d say, respectable enough. One extended impalement is likely the highlight, helped by the victim’s enthusiastic selling of their injury. The script is perhaps the weakest element, with a few moments which had us rolling our eyes, in particular the “we might be going to die, so let’s go ahead and have sex” scene. At 103 minutes, trimming might be warranted, as this stretches the material a bit thin. On the other hand: did I mention the lovely scenery?

It all builds as you’d expect, to a somewhat decent face-off between the heroine and villainess. It is somewhat problematic, in that the latter’s background should give her such an edge, as to be able to wipe the floor with Rhona inside ten seconds. Something like handicapping Carla with an injury could have helped make the playing field feel less one-sided. However, we were still reasonably invested in things by this point, and McKeown definitely makes for a convincing nemesis, capable from flicking an internal switch and going from friendly into “you are all going to die” mode in a moment. Nobody could accuse this of ambition, yet it does what it does well enough to entertain us.

Dir: Ryan Hendrick
Star: Lauren Lyle, Nicolette McKeown, James Watterson, Layla Kirk
Mercy Falls is available now on Tubi.