'THEY WILL KILL YOU'......YES, THEY WILL......WITH TERMINAL MONOTONY.....

They Will Kill You (2026)

     Stumbled upon this during a week when HBO offered free movies to lure more subscribers. And we're still regretting the precious 95 minutes of our life that slipped down the drain as we watched it.....

      Designed as a gorehound's Grindhouse delight, it pits kickass, street-toughed young badass Asia Reaves  (Zazie Beetz) against a NYC high rise apartment populated by immortal devil worshippers. These robe clad loonies got more than they bargained for when they took on Asia as the latest in a long line of dearly departed maids. Not a whole lot of job security there, since the maids serve as human sacrifice fodder to Satan himself, who struts around with a giant pig's head. (Maybe he thinks he's President....)

        But Asia's not havin' any of that nonsense, which leads to pitched, ridiculously gory battles between her and the tenants, primarily led by familiar faces like Patricia Arquette, Heather Graham and Tom Felton.  Limbs and heads go flyin' everywhere and the wall paper drips with fresh splatter. 

         But here's what doomed this movie for us. Being immortal, these spunky apartment dwellers can literally assemble themselves back together and have a go at Asia all over again. Some nifty digital effects accomplish this, but the conceit renders all that fast 'n furious bloodletting a complete waste of time.

         It's like an entire reel of nothing but those climactic battles in Marvel superhero movies (only with more body parts strewn about)........since nothing's at stake, why bother to sit through it? By the time Asia does finally get around to going  'Quiet Piggy!' on Satan's ass, you may not even be awake......

          This movie's for people who like to surf YouTube for compilations of the bloodiest fights in Tarantino's filmography......just for shits and giggles.

          The Gore Brigade won't want to miss it. For them, 3 stars (***).  For everyone else.....c'mon, you could find 1000 better horror movies than this on any streamer you picked randomly....(except maybe Hallmark and Nickelodeon....they're scary in different ways....)

          Zeetz and the cast absorb a lot of punishment and commit fully to their carnage......but it seems like way more punishment for us than them.

          Outside of this film's core demographic of Cheetos munchin'  fanboys living in their parents' basements, there's nothing of interest left for the rest of us. 

           Zero stars. (0). 

            

WEEKDAY MADNESS WRAP-UP.......SPECIAL 'WORLD CUP CEREMONY LIKE THE WORLD HAS NEVER SEEN BEFORE!' EDITION......

 This just in......artist rendering of the actual World Cup Winner Presentation.....

'PAINT ME LIKE YOUR DEAD GIRLS'.....A PSYCHO PAINTER LEFT HIS MODELS ART-BROKEN......AND BLOODLESS.....

 Paint Me Like Your Dead Girls by Cynthia Murphy (2026)

     I don't know art but I know what I like......and I like nothing more than an art-inspired YA mystery bloodily decorated with nightmare-inducing paintings and gruesome exsanguination murders. And it just so happens that this book fills that aching need to watch a determined Nancy Drew-ish teen manage to link turn-of-the-century serial killings to a current and all too active psychopath copycat.

     Fliss Keller, to the amazement of her Art Historian father, comes across a long sought after disturbing portrait of an agonized man presumably just before his unknowable, terrible death. The painting to the excitement of the art world, completes a set that includes four equally notorious, haunted faces. They're the faces of four young women who look as if death itself has also come for them.......paintings already on display in the art gallery Fliss's dad oversees.

     Secret papers Fliss discovers in the back of the painting might imply it's the work of a serial killer artist and the accompanying four portraits are those of his victims, modeling for him before they died at his hands. While she's co-housesitting with her best friend Izzy, Fliss's dogged research traces the killer and his prey back to the early 1900's........but someone else has been busy too. Someone who, inspired by the five paintings has taken to murdering women in the same manner as the original demented artist.

     The art world premise intrigued me from the start and author Cynthia Murphy keeps the pacing swift and the pages flying by. And as obvious as it played out, I still thrilled to that banger of a horror movie grand finale, with Fliss facing off, as you knew she eventually would, with the scares of a surprise cuckoo perp who's nuttier than a warehouse full of peanut M & Ms. Great, breathless and very cinematic stuff.

     Creepy good fun, with even a touch of romance thrown in. With an art gallery where you might rather dive out the window than exit through the gift shop.

      4 stars (****).

WEEKEND MADNESS WRAP-UP......SPECIAL "WHO GIVES A **** ABOUT YOUR GROCERY BILL...I WON IN 2020!!" EDITION

 

To BQ visitors:  Great weekend to you all, see you next week!

To MAGA Trumpanzees:  Hopefully, for your sakes, there's a huge stadium reserved in Hell for Trump to hold rallies for his faithful  followers.  Make sure you arrive early to snag the best seats. 

'SPIDER BABY, OR: THE MADDEST STORY EVER TOLD'......SOMETIMES A CULT-Y PLEASURE....SOMETIMES A DREARY DRAG....

 Spider Baby or: the Maddest Story Ever Told (1967)

     If lovers of loony toon cult cinema can summon up a measure of patience, this bonkers, shoestring, made-in-12-days goofball horror movie delivers the guilty pleasures you'd expect from it. 

       A fair warning, though.......some of it's just a dumb slog to get through and even at a brief 80 minutes, it feels a little too long. 

       We're off to visit the reclusive Merrye family, living in an off-the-beaten-track mansion and all of them afflicted with a hereditary family disease.

       From puberty on, the not so merry Merryes begin to suffer mental age regression, brain rot, utter madness and by the time they reach adulthood, they've devolved  into gibbering psychotic cannibals. Not quite the Brady Bunch, these folks....

        But for years they've been tenderly looked after and thankfully kept isolated from the world by their faithful chauffer and all-around caregiver, Bruno (Lon Chaney Jr. in a thoughtful empathetic portrayal. )

         Then, as 1980's and 90's trailers would often declare.....everything was about to change.....

          Distant relatives and their lawyer (suitably named Shlocker) arrive to claim their legal rights to the Merrye house and also decide what's to become of the remaining Merrye children......and it doesn't take long before these poor suckers find out what a horror show they've stumbled into.

          Teen girls Virginia and Elizabeth (Jill Banner and Beverly Washburn, are lethally cuckoo, with Virginia thinking she's a spider and slicing up innocent victims who wander on to the property. Their imbecilic older brother Ralph (Sid Haig) has regressed into a three year old with a healthy adult sex drive and given to slaughtering small animals to serve up for dinner. 

          For more madness, down in the basement live the three remaining adult Merryes, reduced to mutated, wailing cannibals. Naturally they get to feast on whatever's left of the unlucky visitors who come knockin' at the door (including veteran black comic actor of the 1940's Mantan Moreland)

         We can only assume writer-director Jack Hill intended a sick-humor horror movie, along the lines of Roger Corman's 'Bucket of Blood' and 'Little Shop of Horrors'. He mostly succeeds, but halfway through the film, it slows down to a crawl, with a third of its running time devoted to the schlocky Shlocker searching the house for who knows what.

      The cast certainly has a whole lot of fun overplaying to the eye-bulging maximum. (It's Chaney Jr., the film's only beacon of sanity, who comes up with the most logical solution to assure himself and his beloved Merryes a measure of peace.....)

         Dedicated curators and admirers of screwball pulp cinema will want to check this out.  As for everyone else.......well, now you know what you're in for.....so don't say we didn't warn you.....

         2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2).  

          

 

'POSSESSION'......R.I.P. SAM NEILL.....AN ACTOR'S ACTOR DOING FEARLESS WORK IN THE CULT-IEST OF CULT HORRORS.....

 Possession (1981)

        In all of the eulogizing that followed the tragic loss beloved New Zealand actor Sam Neill, naturally the films we all know and cherish were mentioned....'Jurassic Park', 'The Hunt For Red October', 'Event Horizon', 'My Brilliant Career', 'The Piano' , 'Dead Calm' and so many others.

      But hardly a mention at all of this one-of-a-kind entry in his filmography......a disturbing, nightmarish horror-drama from writer-director Andrzej Zulawski.  It's a film that featured Neill and his co-star Isabelle Adjani throwing all caution to the winds, giving astounding over-the-top performances that actors dream about but rarely get the opportunity to realize. 

         Neill plays Mark, some kind of vague secret agent who won't accept the latest mission from his superiors. His marriage to high strung Anna (Adjani) crumbles when she reveals she's seeing another man and they bitterly squabble over who'll keep custody of their little boy Bob (Michael Hogben).

          Anna's barely contained rising hysteria clashes with Mark's ever increasing explosive rage. And in Anna, the demolition of both her marriage and her mind manifests itself as an oozing, tentacled creature (a live practical effect from Carlo Rambaldi, the creator of Spielberg's E.T. and 'Close Encounters' aliens.)

           Adjani's work here defies all rational description as she shrieks, moans, howls at times, crawls about on all fours. Neill, one of the most strikingly charismatic and versatile actors we've ever been gifted with in cinema, matches Adjani's amazing work scene for scene. 

           Together, these two actors bravely perform like high flying trapeze artists without a net, pushing their to talents to the very edge of whatever they're capable of........which in the case of "Possession", is anything. Their Mark and Anna are so bonded in their mutual madness, you can start to believe that together they themselves  must have spawned this gruesome creature that kills whoever stumbles near it..... and whose final evolution becomes one of the film's darkest surprises. 

          You may well ask at this point....yeh, but what's all this craziness about anyway?

         Don't expect the film to answer any of the questions it raises for an audience. It remains now, as it was in 1981, a bleak enigma, a slow trip into hell with no tour guide to point out or explain the horrific sights along the way. Make of it what you will......

           As for Sam Neill, whose decades long career took him from Hollywood blockbusters to the most challenging and artistic of independent films, he never gave less than skilled memorable performances every time he faced the camera .....he embodied that time worn accolade, "an actor's actor". 

          (Though Neill himself thought his screen test to play James Bond didn't go well, we always thought he would've made a perfect kickass Bond, suave, assured and dangerous as hell, with a repressed violent undercurrent lurking beneath the surface....best example: his underplaying the role of  Satan's grown up son in "Omen III")

        For those willing to take the plunge, "Possession" as obtuse and bizarre as it is, offers a chance to view a young Sam Neill in what we think may stand as the most daring work of his career.

          And it goes without saying, no horror buff should miss out on seeing this one....

           4 stars (****).

            For Sam Neill's entire lifetime of roles, 5 stars (*****)