Touch Me (2026)

Touch Me had its Shudder premiere this week, and I went into it completely blind, which I recommend for anyone who is interested. This is a color-soaked fever dream of a movie, an erotic thriller wrapped in a science fiction plot that doesn’t shy away from turning a titillating moment into one of pure body horror, then following that up with a joke that underlines the tone without undercutting it. It’s fresh, fun, and something decidedly new, although it’s obviously not going to be for everyone. 

The film opens on a therapy session with Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) detailing an experience she had with a charismatic man five years earlier. She ran into him at two separate events wearing an out-of-place track suit, and mockingly (and correctly) dismissed him as an alien. When he revealed that this was true and that he came from another world devastated by climate change to save the earth from falling victim to the same fate, she allowed him to share his psychic touch with her, which had a euphoric effect that effectively combatted her psychological issues. She hasn’t seen him since a sexual encounter between the two of them turned into an assault when he wouldn’t stop despite her asking him to, running straight to the home of her gay best friend Craig (Jordan Gavaris), where she has remained ever since. For reasons that are revealed later, the two are able to live comfortably in Craig’s home, despite neither having a job, but when an unexpected and costly plumbing emergency occurs, Joey starts looking for work. This brings her back into contact with Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci), her alien ex, and she ultimately accepts his invitation for her and Craig to spend some time in his modern mansion in the hills. There’s some friction between the two and Brian’s human assistant Laura (Marlene Forte), but after a few sessions of alien group therapy, things are going well, until they suddenly aren’t. 

One of the barriers that I think some viewers will have with this one will come down to its playful zaniness. Touch Me isn’t trying to be taken at face value and as such calls attention to its filmic and fictional nature constantly. After Joey witnesses video evidence that there’s something more sinister going on than she’s been led to believe, the film shows us the backstory of the person she’s just seen die in a black and white segment; the victim was lured in via hookup app, with the telltale sounds of Grindr notifications going off but those messages appearing on screen like silent picture intertitles. It’s quirky, but not overly so. When Joey considers applying to work at the coffee shop she frequents, the “help wanted” sign on the counter appears and reappears in multiple floating bubbles that frame her face. It’s cartoonish, and the tone of the film supports it, but I can see a lot of the film-going audience growing frustrated with Touch Me because of this visual playfulness in a film that spends much of its time dealing with sexual assault and its psychological impacts. Those scenes are never played for laughs and are treated with appropriate weight, and we’re never subjected to it and only witness the victims recount them in therapeutic sessions, both legitimate and manipulative. That tonal whiplash is part of what makes the film special, however, and I don’t think that I would have it any other way.

Brian turns out to want “cross-species intercourse” with both of his hot young houseguests (and as many others as possible), and the film is very good at capturing what makes him both desirable and uncannily, repulsively inhuman. Pucci is an attractive man who has clearly put a lot of work into maintaining his physique, but he also has very impressive control over his facial muscles in a way that, in combination with his unnatural dark hair, allows him to look eerie and not entirely trustworthy. When characters are aroused by him, either through psychic manipulation or basic human lust, the film communicates this through erotic, almost pornographic close ups of his bouncing pectoral muscles or undulating abs, but then intersplices this with off-putting close-ups that feature his creepy stare and libido-shriveling Gary-Oldman-in-Bram Stoker’s Dracula grooming. It’s very effective at being both arousing and off-putting, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a film that captures that line so well. Both Taylor Dudley and Gavaris are familiar to me as a viewer who soaked up a lot of 2010s Vancouver-based genre television; the former portrayed divisive character Alice in The Magicians and the latter was the universally beloved Felix on Orphan Black. I was delighted to see both of them in this film, and they not only have great chemistry with one another but are also putting in performances that are so distinct that, despite having spent dozens of hours with them as their familiar-to-me characters, I never found myself slipping into thinking about Alice or Felix at all. Joey’s grief is completely different from Alice’s, as is her expression thereof; Craig is easier to differentiate from Felix since he doesn’t share that character’s accent, but Craig also lacks Felix’s motivation, integrity, and unrelenting self-love. When it comes to Gavaris, his dedication to picking up the weights as he aged out of his Orphan Black era twinkiness was a cause of some concern for me; I started following him on social media some years ago when he led a short-lived comedy series called The Lake in which Julia Stiles played his conniving step-sister, and the way that he would post about his workouts and the way he felt about his body was troubling. One hopes that he’s come to terms with that since then, and that Craig’s body dysmorphia here is him taking some agency over Gavaris’s own, since Craig calls himself “fat” and “hideous” despite being neither

Of course, it’s also an equally valid interpretation that Craig doesn’t actually think that he’s either of those things, and that it is instead his way of fishing for compliments from Joey. It’s a sign of their co-dependency; we eventually learn that they were both victims of childhood sexual assault, but that Joey has kept this from Craig, which has allowed for him to weaponize his victimhood against her in a way that she feels she can’t counter without either being forced to relitigate her trauma or risk her living situation. It’s not ideal for either of them, and demonstrates how this betrayal during their vulnerable years has led them to dismiss those traumas flippantly, through dismissive humor, or through total suppression, and this makes them easy prey for Brian. It’s good stuff, and although the film draws attention to its artificiality through overt stylism, it doesn’t feel the need to broadcast that it’s tackling “elevated” horror themes. 

I’ve had mixed feelings about a lot of the horror that’s come out this year. I was personally underwhelmed by Obsession because of the familiarity of its narrative structure, but I was also quite taken with Leviticus despite the fact that it traffics in images and ideas that are not necessarily novel either, just viewed through a new lens. Touch Me is fresh, irreverent, exciting, and sexy, despite also owing major debts in its visual inspiration to Neon Demon, Ex Machina, and Mandy. It won’t be for everyone, but will be thoroughly enjoyed by those for whom it does work. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Scary Movie (2026)

Of all the various legacy sequels that are propping up the Hollywood economy right now, the overwhelming majority have very little reason to exist beyond desperately trying to milk the cow one last time before the entire industry is put out to pasture. The new Scary Movie, to its credit, is the one among them with the most justification to be made in the current moment. After all, the last time that one of these shallow parody films was released was nearly 15 years ago, and the last time that they really had anything to do with parodying horror movies was in 2006. Franchise originators Shawn and Marlon Wayans departed the franchise after Scary Movie 2, all the way back in 2001. In the interim, a half-dozen horror trends have come and gone, so there’s a whole lot of ground to cover. We’ve seen the rise and fall of torture porn in Hostel and the Saw franchise, the glut of mid-aughts remakes that saw (among other things) Jackie Earle Haley take a turn as Freddy Krueger, a resurgence of zombie movies, an abundance of horror legacy sequels like David Gordon Green’s Halloween films and the Radio Silence-produced Scream sequels, MCU-ified horror like The Conjuring, and, of course, the much-vaunted rise of “elevated” horror. For 2026, though, the Scary Movie franchise returns to what it does … well, not “best,” exactly, since—despite the decline in quality over the series’ repeated returns to the well—none of these movies are particularly great, but it’s back to what it does adequately

Scary Movie (2026) bases most of its “plot” around 5cream, although its opening sequence most closely parodies Scream VI and cribs the NYC subway scene from the later sequel as well. The opening features a cameo from Carmen Electra and sees Teyana Taylor reenacting the opening sequence of Scream VI, in which Samara Weaving was lured into an alley in New York City. Here, however, she summons a crew of burly men to assist her in kicking Ghostface’s ass. As part of the movie-within-the-movie series Horror Movie, Teyana’s would-be date/killer calls her directly after a couple of back-and-forth text exchanges, and they break the fourth wall by noting that an audible phone call provides better exposition for the presumed audience than on-screen text messages, citing that most people who would turn out for a Wayans Bros. movie “are probably illiterate.” It’s supposed to be self-aware mockery of the audience but it mostly belittles the filmmakers themselves, demonstrating just how little regard the script has for its audience. Make no mistake; I laughed myself silly during this movie (under the influence of an edible, admittedly), but there’s not a single joke in here that doesn’t wear out its welcome by belaboring the point. One of the best bits arrives near the end when Brenda (Regina Hall) pretends to have been shot so that she doesn’t have to go back into the killer’s house with Cindy (Anna Faris), and we see that she’s faked her injury with ketchup packets. It’s funny stuff, but then Brenda overexplains the joke, and it makes the whole thing less comic than if the film wasn’t (over)narrating itself. There’s a potential cut of Scary Movie that’s twenty minutes shorter, cuts several of the dead-on-arrival “comedy” bits, is less dialogue heavy, and would be twice as funny. 

It’s been some amount of time since the last time Ghostface showed up to harass Brenda, Cindy, Brenda’s closeted partner Ray (Shawn Wayans), and her brother Shorty (Marlon Wayans). In the intervening time, Cindy has had two daughters, Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan) and Tuesday, who essentially play the parts of Sam and Tara Carpenter from the recent Scream sequels — because Jenna Ortega also played Wednesday Addams, get it? Brenda has had two kids of her own, the Chad and Mindy equivalents Brad (Gregg Wayans, who is thirty-seven years old) and non-binary Dei (get it?). With the return of Ghostface and an attack on Tuesday, Sara returns home alongside her clearly-the-killer boyfriend “Jack” to find her mother, who now has Jamie Lee Curtis’s frazzled white hair from the aforementioned Green-helmed Halloween films. This leads to Cindy’s reunion with Brenda, who has turned into a Ma-like figure for the local high school kids, including Shorty, who is in his third decade of attempting to graduate. Ghostface comes back to town, stirs up some interpersonal conflict between Sara and her mother (whose insistence that the return of Ghostface is all about her drives her daughter insane), some people die in wacky ways, and the film frequently finds itself sidetracked into various shallow references to contemporary flash-in-the-pan pop culture. That’s all that these movies have ever been; when they manage to parody something that stood the test of time, like The Matrix, it’s more of an accident than it is an insight into cultural longevity (and, like, everyone was parodying The Matrix). 

Last year’s rebootquel of The Naked Gun proved that there is a place for parody films in the market. It was so much fun that it led me to rewatch the original and its sequels, and I’ve also long been a proponent of Top Secret! and recently rewatched both Hot Shots films. The thing about those ZAZ parodies is that the jokes are so layered and come so quickly that even if one of them lands with a resounding thud, the movie moves along quickly enough that you’re laughing again moments later. In Scary Movie, every bit is 1.5-4 times as long as it should be, which means that even the jokes that do land can wear out their welcome quickly, and when there’s a swing and a miss, one still has to sit there for an interminable amount of time before we move on to the next bit. The first real clunker is when Cindy tries to remind Sara of the good times from her childhood, which is illustrated by taking her to see a mall Santa who’s actually the Terrifier; it goes on just shy of forever and isn’t funny at all. Other particularly unfunny sequences include full recreations of non-horror pop culture as well. After the memorably surreal image of Ghostface taking the place of Catherine Keener across from Shorty as Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out, the film segues into Shorty’s Sunken Place, which he calls a k-hole before Ghostface corrects him that he’s in a K-Pop hole. This leads to a fully animated sequence that sees Shorty hooking up with the three leads of KPop Demon Hunters while spoofing the song “Golden” with a chorus that includes the refrain “Gonna be gonna be smokin’.” It’s peak “Remember this?” style parody, and although that film’s widespread success may mean that this “joke” makes sense in twenty years (we’ll see if the references to Smile and cameo from Kai Cenat do the same), there’s no amount of time that will pass for it to ever be funny. (That having been said, the choice to do a parody of the marketing campaign for Michael with “Tubi original” Jermaine, featuring Kenan Thompson as Jermaine Jackson, was something that I thoroughly enjoyed. But why is it here, in Scary Movie? That’s an orphaned SNL sketch if I’ve ever seen one.)

Ultimately, Scary Movie leaves one with too much time to linger on and ponder the bits that aren’t landing. I was one of a group of five who went to see this movie, and only two of us laughed enough for it to have been worth the price of admission (one of whom was me), one person seemed to enjoy parts of it, and two people utterly hated it. One of the haters was a surprise to me, given that this is a longtime friend with whom I’ve spent no small time over the years chatting about our fondness for the first two Scary Movie films; we recognize that they’re not very good, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a certain nostalgia for movies that were airing virtually every week on Comedy Central during our formative years. He was the person I expected to enjoy this the most, since its comedy is really no different from the earlier Wayans Brothers-produced films. He was actively miserable the entire time, and I think that if you’re trying to decide whether this is worth your time, this is worth considering. It’s exactly as good as Scary Movie and Scary Movie 2, and if you didn’t like those, you probably won’t like this. If you do have positive memories associated with those, it’s still a crapshoot whether or not the humor of this one will land. All I can say is that, if you’re going to see it, you should try to get as high as Shorty beforehand (and for legal reasons, I remind you all to toke responsibly).

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ramekins: Ramekin II (2021)

It was my friend Jeb who recommended we watch the horror comedy Ramekin on Tubi, which he had been reading about recently. He noted that it was a no-budget movie, and that despite this, most of the reviews were positive, although almost all of them mentioned that the viewer had issues with the sound. I ended up loving Ramekin, with my only quibble, as noted in my review, being that I felt that the “all just a dream” ending was an unfortunate addition given that the film had been so strong up to that point. Little did I imagine that this would be far from the last time that these nitpicks would be relevant to this film series. 

Ramekins: Ramekin II opens with our lead from last time, Emily (Jamie Saunders), living in her late grandmother’s apartment with her elderly great-uncle Jared (Bill Weeden). She gets an unexpected phone call from a director named Cody (Cody Clarke, who is the actual director of the film), who saw her headshot in a casting magazine and claims that the idea for his next low-budget movie came to him all at once when he locked eyes with her photograph. That movie is, of course, the original Ramekin. I’m not sure what I was expecting from Ramekins: Ramekin II (Cody reminds us that it’s important to remember the subtitle in the actual text of the film itself), but I certainly didn’t expect the series to go full-on Wes Craven’s New Nightmare straight out of the gate in the first sequel. Emily gets her friend Mark (Chaim Samuels) to audition for the role of Mark, but Cody eventually decides to play the character himself, much to the annoyance of his girlfriend and collaborator Chloe (Chloe Pelletier). Emily’s best frenemy Jane (Piper Verbrick) also auditions for Jane, and gets the part, whose flirtatious relationship with Cody and clear desire to be recast in the lead role gets under Emily’s skin. 

The initial plan is to shoot in Emily and Uncle Jared’s apartment, and Jared uses this opportunity to go on a little vacation, but not before showing Emily that they do, in fact, have a ramekin, just like the one in the script. Cody drops off a box of identical ramekins at the apartment the day before filming is to begin, and when Emily gets up the next morning, she finds that the ramekins have arranged themselves in a way that indicates that whatever malicious entity haunts (or is) the ramekin has spread to the others. Emily’s fainting spell at this revelation leaves the film crew in the hallway for much of the morning, which raises the ire of a Karen-y neighbor, and shooting is moved to Cody and Chloe’s apartment. It isn’t long before the newly evil ramekins start to drive Emily insane again, with murderous results. 

The filming of Ramekins is great stuff. Clarke directly addresses the ending of the first film by saying that people simply didn’t get it, and that when Emily is “taken out” by the ramekin at the end of the film and “wakes up,” it’s not meant to mean that Emily dreamed the whole thing. I missed this detail, but the grandmother who is mentioned by name in the “you were there, and you were there” ending has a different name than the grandmother within the “alternate reality” that Emily has been ejected/taken out of. I don’t know if this is meant to be a joke about people’s reactions to the pat ending or if this is what Clarke actually intended in the original text, but it’s funny stuff, especially when Cody and Chloe talk about not using microphones for dialogue because it’s Cody’s artistic style to overdub everything in post. At the end of this explanation, Cody’s dialogue and his lips are clearly not even saying the same dialogue, and it’s a good bit, especially if you’re a fan of giallo films that used to do this exact thing. We get to see how the ramekin is made to move (with string, which is actually much more logical than my assumption that it was done with magnets), and certain scenes from the original play out in their entirety as the line between reality and fiction start to blur for Emily. 

The cast expansion is also a welcome update, as in addition to Chloe and Cody, we get to meet the effervescent Rachael (Molly Siskin), quiet cutie Jason (Mason Carter), and delightfully eccentric Troy (Jack Gordon). Rachael is given the least to do, but Troy is fantastic from beginning to end, as he’s the first to realize that there may be something happening with the ramekins when one of them goes missing. Rachael gets a fun comedic bit where, after first complaining that the impromptu green room smells like “big black garbage bags” (since Jane is dead and wrapped up in some underneath the bed), Emily puts the ramekin to her ear to convince her that there’s no such smell. Rachael immediately complies and grows more and more frustrated when others claim that the smell is lingering. Jason is perhaps the funniest, however, as he immediately notices the growing romance between Emily and Cody, which he wholeheartedly supports. When he takes on the role of Mark, Emily at first disbelieves that he’s ready to go off-book, but he admits that he has read the script over and over while in the bathroom, leading Emily to spout the ludicrous line that she “hopes they were number twos,” at which I cackled. When Cody and Emily finally confess their feelings for one another, Jason is first excited and then confused when Chloe calls Cody her boyfriend, as he always assumed they were brother and sister, since “Cody and Chloe are, you know, sibling names.” 

Ramekins: Ramekin II doesn’t have quite the same spirit of creepiness that the first one did, at least until the finale, where Uncle Jared returns and reveals that he’s known about the ramekin all along, and things get appropriately eerie. What it does traffic in is a very strong sense of comedic dialogue, which made this longer film pass even more effortlessly and breezily than the first. As of the time of this writing, it’s also available on Tubi, and well worth checking out. I’ll be patiently waiting for Ramekin in the Third Dimension.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round (2026)

There’s a saturation point with overtly derivative horror movies where, if you make enough of them on a similar topic, they stop being treated as knockoffs and start being treated as a legitimate subgenre. Were there any dedicated fans of Bob Clark’s Black Christmas that initially brushed off John Carpenter’s Halloween as a copycat knockoff in 1978? Maybe, but dozens of Fridays the 13th later, they’re now both understood to be historic landmarks in the slasher subgenre, with little need to distinguish which arrived first. I’m sure the first couple body horrors of the 80s gore era were dismissed as shameless knockoffs by Cronenberg devotees, just as the found footage wave was first met with Blair Witchy skepticism and the giant-turtle creature feature Gamera was understood solely as a Godzilla copycat before there were other kaiju to compare it against. Likewise, when the killer-animatronics horrors Willys Wonderland and The Banana Splits Movie were first released a few years ago, they were initially understood to be shameless knockoffs of the popular Five Nights at Freddy’s video game series (albeit more successful movie adaptations of that series than its officially licensed ones). Since then, there have been enough Five Nights-riffing “What if the Chuck E. Cheese band tried to kill you?” variations that the subgenre has been legitimized with its own name: mascot horror. Write it down, commit it to memory; mascot horror is officially a thing.  There will likely be college courses about it at some point, so yes there will be a quiz.

Mere days after Casper Kelly’s “What if Barney was evil?” mascot horror Buddy screened at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, I saw an online advertisement for the straight-to-Screambox “What if Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood was evil?” mascot horror Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round, signaling to me that this newly coined subgenre is having a real moment. If I weren’t aware of Five Nights at Freddy’s or the previously mentioned mascot horrors that beat it to the big screen, I might’ve mistaken Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round as a rushed-to-market mockbuster of Kelly’s Sundance-premiered oddity. They are remarkably similar in narrative structure and production design, framing their mascots-gone-wild horror stories within the rules & rhythms of vintage children’s TV shows. For its part, Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round starts as a direct parody of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, with a kindly, sweatered TV host explaining simple concepts like mailboxes, welcome mats, and memories to the children at home. That last concept proves to be a sticking point for the poor TV host, who discovers that he has lost access to his own memories outisde the pocket universe where he’s stuck hanging out with sock-puppet animals on a fenced-in playground set made entirely out of cardboard. His chipper animal friends needle him about his lost memory in increasingly hostile, passive-aggressive ways until his concept of reality breaks down entirely, and he starts begging the audience through the camera to set him free from his play-pretend prison cell. Instead, his imaginary-friend playground adventure turns into a televised blood bath.

Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round suffers a lot of the same structural issues as Casper Kelly’s Buddy. Both movies are at their most compelling in the earliest stretch when they play as uncanny parodies of vintage children’s TV shows that are just slightly, menacingly off. Once that hyperartificial reality is broken and the ultraviolence starts in earnest, they become much more conventional horror stories, testing the audience’s patience as they meander towards their inevitable, genre-mandated conclusions. Admittedly, the highs are higher in Buddy, while Mr. Monkey‘s lows are much, much lower, which makes for a no-brainer choice if you’re only going to watch one mascot horror this year and skip the other. If there’s anything that makes Mr. Monkey worth a look it’s in the extremity of its ultraviolence, featuring lengthy, torturous scenes of surgical gore as our semi-demented TV host is strapped down to the titular merry-go-round and tormented by the sock-puppet avatars of his own subconscious. Once the mood lighting shifts from bright & bubbly children’s show cartoonery to dingy torture porn grit & grime, the novelty appeal of the picture falls apart, and it starts to resemble the mascot-adjacent slashers of the public-domainsploitation “Poohniverse.” I very much preferred hanging out with the dead-eyed, cheery puppets in their children’s playhouse before it becomes an adult flayhouse, when the scares are centered on odd details like Mr. Monkey‘s dirty human fingernails instead of maniacal screaming & disembowelings, which you can find in pretty much any horror subgenre. The most illuminating thing about the picture overall was how it makes apparent just how ahead of the curve pro wrestler Bray Wyatt’s Firefly Funhouse gimmick was on the current “mascot horror” trend, not to mention the even earlier genre prototype in Wonder Showzen, which predates Five Nights at Freddy’s by a full decade. In that long mascot-horror continuum there isn’t much room for Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round to stand out as anything special in particular, but it’s at least a convenient bite-sized appetizer of what Buddy will offer once it hits theaters later this year.

-Brandon Ledet

I Married a Vampire (1987)

You’re not going to get a lot of butts in seats for a movie in which a woman marries a vampire without titling that film I Married a Vampire, but that reveal would be a little more fun if you were able to go into a screening without that knowledge. Of course, the fact that marriage to a bloodsucker is the inevitable outcome of this story is made clear from the outset, when young Viola (Rachel Golden) picks up her parents from the airport in an unnamed city; they’ve arrived in town after learning secondhand from Viola’s sister that she’s gotten married, and are insistent on meeting her new husband. Of course, before she brings mom and dad home, she’s got to give them the whole story of how she met her undead husband …

Two months earlier, Viola lands in not-New York (the end credits thank the city of Boston, but no notable landmarks of any kind are seen in any of her exploration montages) and is ready to start her life anew, far from Iowa. Unfortunately, she falls victim to all of the various swindles that eighties metropoles had to offer; she ends up in a disgusting apartment after getting swindled by a shady landlord, is robbed and grifted by her supposed poet neighbor Portia, gets stiffed for a heavy retainer by a lawyer who promises to help her get her money back from the landlord, gets pressured into giving up her last bit of savings to the cult of Muhammad Buddha Christ, and can only find work as a night cleaner for a man who sexually assaults her. All of this finally starts to change when her co-worker Olivia introduces Viola to her “brother” Robespiere [sic] (Brendan Hickey). Viola, to her credit, immediately cottons on to the fact that they’re vampires, but she later laughs off her suspicions as the result of too much beer and the lingering effects of a horror movie double feature. When she returns to Robespiere when she’s run out of options, she finds herself a new woman, charged with the confidence she needs to get her savings back from the grifters, and if they put up a fight, her new beau can take them out. 

There are some genuinely wonderful performances and sequences in I Married a Vampire, even if the film gets off to a sluggish start. Viola’s parents, Morris and Doris, are an interesting pair, since they’re both grumps who are blind to their poor parenting in different ways. Morris, for his part, is quite funny, while Doris’s haranguing of her wayward daughter is less fun. The script is pretty sharp from the get-go, and one gets the impression that writer/director Jay Raskin had a vision that he came close to fulfilling here, but was ultimately restrained by the budget provided him as a result of this being a Troma-level production. Once we get the framing device set-up out of the way, the actual narrative gets underway, and we get to meet a fantastic cast of awful characters. First, Viola encounters Mr. Gluttonshire, who tries to pick her up under the impression that she’s a sex worker. Then, she meets Mr. Keeper, the landlord who tells her that she won’t be able to find a place for $300 a month, but sets her up with an infested shoebox studio for $400… plus a finder’s fee and the deposit ($1000 total, or about $3300 in 2026), eating up a third of the money she worked hard to save for her move. When night falls, she learns that her unit abuts a loud rock venue that also fills her entire apartment with flashing lights. 

It’s in this sequence that we meet Portia (Temple Aaron), who all but steals the show. She’s exactly the kind of street-savvy gutter-dweller that you’ve met before, in the movies if nowhere else. She tells Viola that she’s a poet, and that she writes song lyrics for rock bands, and that she can get Viola a great deal on a stereo, only $50! She also explains that the reason they have no water is because they’re connected to the club next door, and they only have water pressure when there’s a good band (when the music is good, no one’s using the bar bathroom, so they’re not competing with the constant flushing for water), which happens every two or three months. Only someone as naive as Viola would be capable of falling for Portia’s obvious bullshit, but it’s charming in its way, and Portia is a tragic figure in her own right. I genuinely believed that she was going to end up on the business end of Robespiere’s fangs once Viola gets her understated revenge later, but she’s the only one who gets off relatively easy, as the vampire merely hypnotizes her to stop lying to and stealing from her friends. 

It’s here, in this circumvention of the expectation of how violent this will be, that this stands out for a Troma release. They’re never classy movies, and this one certainly isn’t that, but it demonstrates restraint in areas that other Troma-branded flicks don’t. It’s notable in the quiet, non-bloody, non-gory story resolution that Portia gets, but also in the understated nature of the revenge Robespiere enacts for Viola. You hear “Troma” and think that you’re going to get some geysers of blood or at least some viscera, but most of the violence occurs offscreen, with no gross-out bits at all. Even more shockingly, although Viola is violated by Mr. Gluttonshire, there’s no titillation factor and the film doesn’t use it as an excuse to force the lead actress’s top off. I’m not saying that the N.O.W. should be giving Jay Raskin an award or anything, but for a flick from the studio that brought you Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator, it’s almost admirable. There’s no real violence, we don’t see any of it, and when it’s over, Viola is still fully clothed; it feels almost modest.

The romance between Viola and Robespiere is dreadfully dull, unfortunately, and the sequences wherein she goes to all of her antagonists and asks for her money back, is laughed at, and then gets her revenge via supernatural husband gets a little repetitive. The film runs out of steam once it stops being about all of the nasty urbanites who prey on naive farm girls and watching Viola tolerate it all like she’s the protagonist of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Normally, the revenge portion of these films is supposed to be where all the fun happens, but I Married a Vampire is a little frontloaded with scuzzballs, which means that it doesn’t quite finish as strongly as it ought to, which is likely why it’s mostly forgotten. It’s still well worth checking out, however; just know you’re likely to get distracted in the back half. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Buddy (2026) & Adult Swimming at Overlook Film Fest

One of the unofficial themes of this year’s Overlook Film Festival was the Adult Swimmification of the modern horror comedy, which has gradually emerged as a trend in the last decade of the genre’s furthest-most surreal outliers. Certainly, there have always been post-Tim and Eric, Adult Swim-style horror comedy oddities scattered throughout Overlook’s diverse programming, from the suburban soccer-mom meltdown Greener Grass to the gross-out Frankenstein riff Dead Lover to last year’s festival-wide spotlight on Kuso director Flying Lotus. This year’s Overlook had an even more pronounced Adult Swim presence than usual, though, not least of all due to the omnipresent ambassadorship of The People’s Joker herself, Vera Drew. Ostensibly flown out to participate in a panel about “Techno Horrors in the 21st Century,” Drew could be seen (and heard, thanks to her iconic Jokerfied laugh) at various movies throughout the weekend, taking just as much advantage of her festival pass as anyone else roaming the French Quarter shopping mall hub. The least surprising place to find her, of course, was a double feature of the two most Adult Swim-coded selections in the program, since her own aggressively surreal editing style has helped guide the rhythms of that particular genre niche in projects like Comedy Bang! Bang!, On Cinema at the Cinema, and the aforementioned People’s Joker. Spotting Vera Drew in line for this year’s absurdist horror comedy selections felt like a pre-emptive stamp of approval that we were in the exact right place, swimming with the adults in the horror-comedy deep end.

If any one title could claim to have earned its Adult Swim bona fides, it was Buddy, the debut feature from director Casper Kelly. Kelly first made a name for himself with 2014’s Adult Swim short Too Many Cooks, followed by more recent Adult Swim experiments in the weirdo-comedy block’s Yule Log series. Like those two previous attention-grabbers, Buddy starts as an eerily accurate parody of a long-dead television format, which Kelly then subverts by underlining its most uncanny qualities. After parodying 90s sitcom intros (in Too Many Cooks) and seasonal yule log screensavers (self-explanatory), his first feature begins as a retro episode of Barney & Friends, swapping out the friendly purple dinosaur for an orange unicorn named Buddy. There’s some incredible attention to detail in the cursed children’s TV show set decor, establishing a Pee-wee’s Playhouse style world where every piece of furniture is alive & costumed with googly eyes. Buddy rules over them all as a fascist tyrant, redirecting all attention & behavior from his various “friends” to focus on him at all times, all in the name of mandatory fun. Unfortunately, Kelly then breaks format while sketching about the basic rules of Buddy’s televised universe, leaving that colorful playhouse set for a much more mundane world outside its invisible barriers. When we’re trapped inside the Barney parody with an abusive dictator unicorn, Buddy easily lands all of its discomforting laughs & scares. When Kelly deviates from that format, it feels like a confession that this project should’ve just been another short, since the idea can’t fully sustain itself at feature length.

Simon Glassman’s own directorial debut Buffet Infinity demonstrates a much more admirably stubborn commitment to its own bit. Buffet Infinity tells a surprisingly legible Lovecraftian horror story through a series of local restaurant commercials for fictional businesses in Alberta, Canada. What starts as petty political attack ads between a local mom & pop sandwich shop and a corporate buffet chain quickly escalates into a town-wide hostile takeover, with an entire community swallowed whole by a single insatiable restaurant franchise. Its individual commercial parodies recall the awkward sub-professional sketch comedy of Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, edited together with the relentless intensity of an Everything is Terrible! mixtape. For all of its high-concept buffoonery, though, it still makes a fairly coherent point about how everything decent in the world is currently being devoured in some soulless corporate acquisition. All of the quaint hometown flavor of your neighborhood sandwich shop’s family-recipe “secret sauce” is being obliterated by grotesquely underpriced, overstuffed fast-food deals for meat-tower monstrosities with names like “The Beyond Comprehension Burger.” Buffet Infinity urges you to shop local, protect your loved ones, and take shelter until this soulless corporate takeover is all over.

I don’t think the full story of what Casper Kelly’s Buddy means in the current moment of post-Adult Swim absurdist comedy will be clear for some time. The film is still seeking a theatrical distributor after its mixed-reviews premiere at Sundance, and its public perception won’t fully solidify until it can be compared to the other upcoming Barney subversion, improbably reported to be written by Ayo Edrbiri and produced by Daniel Kaluuya. Meanwhile, Buffet Infinity is a self-contained, fully realized project with contracted distribution in the works from Yellow Veil, to be enjoyed by freaked-out stoners everywhere by the end of the year. Together, they made for a perfectly overwhelming double feature at this year’s Overlook, likely the strangest pairing I’ve seen at the fest since I watched Greener Grass back-to-back with Peter Strickland’s killer-dress anthology In Fabric in 2019. Praise be to the Overlook programmers for their longtime commitment to keeping the Adult Swim spirit alive at the festival, love & respect to Vera Drew for acting as that spirit’s living mascot at this year’s fest, good luck to Casper Kelly for finding his way out of his current distribution limbo, congratulations to Glassman, hail Satan, and all the rest.

-Brandon Ledet

Forbidden Fruits (2026)

A new contender for this generation’s Heathers has emerged, and it has the strongest claim to that championship belt of any movie that I’ve seen in the two decades since Mean Girls. We love Heathers around here (it claimed the #19 spot on the Swampflix top 100), and I have a fondness for it that is, perhaps, not entirely normal (I went to NYC in 2014 to see the off-Broadway musical adaptation in its original staging at a time when I was vehement that I hated musicals). We also reference it a lot; I used it as a plot reference when writing about 2022’s Do Revenge, Brandon discussed it in conversation with spiritual successor Jawbreaker, and both he and I have nominated a couple of potential options for the crown in recent years, with me throwing my weight behind Sophia Takal’s anthologized New Year, New You and Brandon offering up (the first half of) Spontaneous as a potential candidate. It’s time for all other nominees to pack their bags and go home, though, because Forbidden Fruits is here, and I think it’s here to stay. While we’re at it, we can knock off the search for this generation’s The Craft as well, since Fruits is just as suitable for that designation, too.

Apple (Lili Reinhart) is the most powerful person in all of the Dallas Highland Mall. She’s the highest ranking of the “forbidden fruits,” a trio of gorgeous women who run free eden, an Anthropologie-esque boutique, despite the shop nominally being managed by an unseen (until the epilogue) woman named Sharon. Under Apple’s perfectly manicured thumbs are Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), a beautiful blonde airhead who dresses like Sabrina Carpenter, and Fig (Alexandra Shipp), the more “alternative” one, which means that she’s just as supermodel-hot as the other two but dresses a little more glam-goth. Dallas newcomer Pumpkin (Lola Tung) initially finds herself completely beneath their notice, but Fig takes a liking to her and convinces Heather Chandler—um, I mean Apple—to give Pumpkin a chance. The three Free Eden employees bring her on board and invite her to join them for “Paradise,” which is what they call the coven meetings that they hold in the upstairs changing area of the store. After some light hazing, Pumpkin finds herself part of the inner circle, and from there she begins to work toward the ultimate goal of dethroning Apple for something she did in their past. Unfortunately, despite the new age hippery-dippery of their beliefs and “ceremonies,” there may be some actual magic afoot, as a former member of the Free Eden crew, Pickle, seems to be suffering actual effects from a “hex” that the others placed on her for breaking Apple’s sacred rules. 

Forbidden Fruits wears its pop culture genealogy on its sleeves, just as openly and blatantly as it does its Biblical allegories. Pickle’s pre-breakdown beauty is described by calling her “Gorge-ina George.” During Pumpkin’s induction rite, each of the girls names the plant from which her fruit name grows (branch, vine, bush, etc.) and the season in which it ripens. With the addition of Pumpkin, whose fruit is harvested in autumn, they excitedly note that they now have all four seasons in their quartet, just as the witches of The Craft were delighted that the appearance of Robin Tunney’s Sarah meant that they finally had enough girls to “call the corners.” Although the Heathers influences are the strongest here, it’s not all a one-to-one comparison. Pumpkin is very much the Veronica of the narrative, but her being a member of the group with an ulterior motive to infiltrate and upend it is more like Lindsay Lohan’s Cady from Mean Girls. Apple is both Regina George and Heather Chandler, as the HBIC of the group who’s casually cruel and exerts undue influence over her underlings’ lives, but there’s no real analog to Heather Duke here, as neither of Apple’s flunkies is lying in wait to become the next queen bee should she be dethroned. Cherry is more like Amanda Seyfried’s Karen, although her ditziness is taken to such an extreme that Tara Reid’s Melody in Josie and the Pussycats is another clear, strong influence. 

That almost makes it seem like the character dynamics are more rooted in emulating Mean Girls than Heathers, but we can also pretty closely align them with the characters from The Craft: Apple is the Nancy, the biggest believer and the one with the nastiest traits buried underneath; Pumpkin is the Sarah, as previously mentioned; and Fig is the Rochelle, in that she’s fully capable of having a rich, full, fulfilling life if she just stopped hanging out with these troublemaking white girls. There’s even a little bit of a reverse Wizard of Oz happening here, as the film’s climax takes place in the mall while a tornado tears the building apart, and ironically it’s the wicked witch who survives that particular event (it’s not a spoiler if I don’t mention if anyone else was even around!). I won’t bother you with a complete recapitulation of the film’s use of Genesis-based iconography, as it’s pretty much all there on the surface: the store is Eden, Apple offers temptation, the coven’s enemies are “snakes,” etc., but the film keeps a light touch here as it does in its other homages, so it’s not distracting or heavy-handed.

All of this is to say that when I read that this was based on a play, I wasn’t surprised, as it had all of the telltale density of a story that was originally written for the stage. The play, which has the poetic and unwieldy title of Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die (a slogan which is later emblazoned on a t-shirt that one of the characters wears throughout the third act), was penned by playwright Lily Houghton, who co-wrote the screenplay for Fruits with director Meredith Alloway. Both of them appear to be quite young, and I found the breathless wittiness of it all jubilant and refreshing, even when some of the darker elements start to intrude on this bubblegum world. Cinematographer Karim Hussain is doing great work here as well; a longtime collaborator of Brandon Cronenberg (serving as either D.P. or cinematographer on all three of his features), every shot here is perfectly composed and sumptuously photographed. Some of that energy can also be attributed to editor Hanna Park, who also worked on fellow Heathers descendent Bottoms. When it comes to the cast, everyone is a delight; I’m one of the dozens of people who saw Riverdale through to its conclusion, and although I was charmed enough by Reinhard’s brief appearance in Hustlers, her performance as Betty Cooper really undersold her potential to be the sexiest, scariest woman in her domain. Shipp’s Fig is the character we all wish we could be, the sweetheart in the bitter clique, and she’s warmly inviting and fun to be around. The person having the most fun, though, is Pedretti, who’s mostly developed a reputation as a scream queen following her leading roles in both of Mike Flanagan’s Haunting shows as well as the thriller series You. She really gets to let her hair down here and get into the flow of her character’s naive vapidity, and it’s such a delight that she essentially steals the show. 

This will soon see its streaming premiere on Shudder, but I went and saw it in a theater, and I would recommend that experience over trying to watch it at home by yourself. This was a very responsive audience, the perfect strangers & companions that you want to watch a comedy with because the jokes land on different levels for different people. Failing that, invite your coven over, make up a little chant about pressed juice and cowboy boots, and have a good time. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Death Metal Zombies (1995)

One essential quality I’m always looking for in horror movies during Halloween season is an essence that can only be described as “Slumber Party Appeal.” If you’re reading this blog, I hope that you’ve aged well past the point of attending slumber parties at a friend’s house under loose parental supervision, but you should still know what I mean. A horror movie with good Slumber Party Appeal is one with disgusting gore gags, gratuitous nudity, and an overall jovial atmosphere that keeps the mood light while you chomp on mediocre pizza delivery with your half-asleep buddies. The 1995 SOV horror Death Metal Zombies was made in the peak slumber party movie-watching era: back when video stores democratized film distribution so that micro-budget shock fests shared the same shelf space as major-studio productions. It immediately signals its Slumber Party Appeal in its crosscutting between intros of various metalhead characters as they get ready for the weekend by clocking out at work, headbanging to bedroom stereos and, most importantly, taking a steamy shower. Every time the camera cuts back to the showering babe in this metalhead friend group, she seems to only be concerned with the cleanliness of her breasts at the expense of the rest of her body. She’s shown soaping up her chest so many times in the first few minutes of character intros that it starts to play like a joke, setting a tone for the remarkably silly zombie picture to come. Death Metal Zombies has great Slumber Party Appeal, by which I mean it’s a harmless, cartoonish horror relic that most kids would still need to sneak past their disapproving parents. It’s got such a warm slumber party vibe that its recent screening at The Broad (presented by friend of the podcast Sara Nicole Storm, of Nail Club) wasn’t at all soured or interrupted by the one audience member who loudly snored through its back half; if anything, he added to the authenticity of the full slumber party experience.

You might expect that a backyard metalsploitation relic from the video store era would be overloaded with grotesque D.I.Y. gore gags, but Death Metal Zombies only delivers a few gross-out moments here or there: a severed hand squirting blood, an unsuspecting jogger disemboweled in a pool of blood, a stabbed anus spewing blood, a skeleton discarded in a victim’s bed — gooey with blood, of course. Overall, though, it’s way more interested in delivering quirky character comedy that is in setting up those gory payoffs. Todd Jason Cook wrote, directed, produced, starred, and bloodied up this regional horror picture in suburban Texas with his friends (including then-wife Lisa Cook, now Lisa DeWild) seemingly as an excuse to party. There’s a thin, single-sentence plot involving a radio contest and a cursed cassette tape, but most scenes involve suburban Texas metalheads sitting around in bedrooms, garages, and public parks, doing nothing in particular while the soundtrack blares tunes from then-current signees to Relapse Records. It’s just wall-to-wall metal jams playing over the goofiest line readings this side of Motern Media, foretelling Matt Farley’s career-long project of making creature features that care more about quirky side character’s meaningless conversations than they do about the monsters on the poster. The film’s heavy metal iconography promises a brutal face-melter of nonstop demonic gore, but in practice it’s a “Gee-willikers!,” Leave It to Beaver-style sitcom that just happens to feature metalheads turning into flesh-eating zombies. It’s a shockingly wholesome affair for a movie with a title card that announces “Music by Putrid Stench [et. al].” The current 30th Anniversary re-release even concludes with a blooper reel. In a just world, all Evangelical Christians who believe metalheads to be devil worshipping, child murdering psychopaths would be forced to watch this film in its entirety, so they can see the truth: metalheads are just dorks in black t-shirts.

The metalhead friend group we meet during the opening credits find themselves in supernatural peril after they win a radio contest to own the only copy of an exclusive new single from their favorite death metal band, Living Corpse. When jamming out to that tape in their garage hangout spot, their headbanging choreography is interrupted by the band, who magically materialize and issue commands that they kill, kill, kill anyone in striking distance. The poor metalhead dorks are then “transformed” into ravenous zombies, which mostly manifests in dark circles of eye makeup and a slowed-down gait. Their friends who were lucky enough to not hear the cursed single are then tasked to find a way to play the cassette backwards in order to reverse the zombification process — something that proves difficult with commercial equipment. Meanwhile, a serial killer in a Nixon mask is also on the hunt to kill, kill, kill his fellow Texans in a B-plot that is ambiguously (if at all) connected to the central metalsploitation conceit. Even when the zombie & Nixon-mask violence escalates in the back half, the movie registers as deeply unserious. Every single blow is punctuated with a corresponding stock sound effect: video game foley for punches, squelches for stabs. When characters lob insults at their enemies, they read as more silly than vicious: “Dork,” “Pus-wad,” “The Baby Bunch,” etc. The ultimate heroic goal of the picture is not to destroy the zombie hoard so much as it is to reunite the disbanded friend group so they can rock out to metal tunes together once again. Todd Cook’s camcorder vision of true friendship persevering in an increasingly harsh world is a heartwarming one, even if it is best enjoyed when you’re 13-years-old and sneaking room-temperature beers past your sleeping parents while a buddy from school is spending the night.

-Brandon Ledet

Transylvania 6-5000 (1985)

I recently attended a screening of Elvira: Mistress of the Dark at my local coffeeshop in Austin, Double Trouble (I’m screening Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte and Cherry Falls there on 10/17 and 10/31, and there will be a presentation of Paprika on 10/24 despite my absence; all screenings are at 8 PM, but get there early so you can get drinks and food!), and attached to the beginning of the film was a trailer for another New World Video release, Transylvania 6-5000. I’ve been curious about this one for a long time, since a horror comedy starring Jeff Goldblum and Ed Begley, Jr., with a supporting role for Carol Kane, seemed right up my alley. Unfortunately, this movie is one of the least funny things that I have ever seen. 

Transylvania 6-5000 opens on Jack Harrison (Goldblum) and Gil Turner (Begley) being given instructions by their tabloid editor, who is also Gil’s father, to go to Transylvania and investigate the story behind a homemade videotape of two European men fleeing in terror from an unseen (except from the waist down) “Frankenstein” [‘s monster]. Harrison bristles at this, claiming that he was brought onto the paper to increase their journalistic integrity, to which the editor replies he was brought on to increase their vocabulary. Upon arrival in Transylvania, Gil makes himself the laughingstock of the village by outright asking a local if they have heard of any Frankenstein sightings, and Harrison takes particular umbrage at this because it might reduce his chances of hooking up with an American tourist, Elizabeth (Teresa Ganzel), who is traveling with her young daughter. The two “journalists” find themselves lodged at a creepy castle whose manager also happens to be the town’s mayor (convicted sex offender Jeffrey Jones), who tells them that he plans to turn the place into a kind of Disney park for Transylvanian history. Every member of the staff is obnoxious, from butler Radu (John Byner) who calls everyone “master,” his unrelentingly irritating wife Lipi (Kane), and the film’s worst character by many miles, a bellboy/servant named Fejos (Michael “Kramer” Richards). Also, there’s a vampire lady in the castle, too, played by Geena Davis. 

You can imagine my excitement at reading all of those names in the opening credits (except for the obvious one), which was greatly outmatched by the utter disappointment that followed. After his second scene, every time that Richards appeared on screen, I would groan aloud. His character’s schtick is 50% incomplete pratfalls and the other half is prop comedy, like delivering a telegram to our tabloid boys clutched in a fake hand, so that when they take it, they pull the hand out of his sleeve. It’s shockingly unfunny. I’ve read that a lot of the film was improvised, with the notation that the overlong scene in which Radu and Lupi attempt to prepare a grapefruit having only the script direction “cut and serve fruit,” and that’s apparent in the finished product. Richards’s Fejos character constantly repeats “Come here, I want to show you something” or some variation thereof during virtually every moment that he’s on screen, and it has much the same energy of a child trying to prank their parent before they’ve developed any stage patter. At the end of the film it’s revealed that Radu and Lupi were supposed to be posing as people with hunched backs for the entire film, but when this was mentioned, it came as a complete surprise to everyone watching this in my apartment. One of the better comedic elements in that it manages to land some of the time is the instant conversion of “Dr. Malavaqua” from sincere and gentlemanly to unhinged and diabolical (Jekyll and Hyde style) upon crossing the threshold into his lab. But for every time this resulted in a polite chuckle, there was Fejos slipping on a banana peel or appearing from behind a painting. 

One of the friends who attended this viewing said that a lot of the conversation about the film online is from people who remembered loving the movie as children and returning to it as adults and being greatly disappointed. This was only my first viewing, but I can understand that as their experience. The film’s final act reveals that the mayor and the chief of police have been keeping Dr. Malavaqua sequestered because the coincidental similarities between his patients and classic Hammer Horror icons are ruining their attempts to revamp the town’s image for the purposes of non-monster tourism. The vampiress stalking Gil in the castle is merely a nymphomaniac wearing Halloween fangs because she was convinced that no man could ever love her (hence her getting a nosejob from the good doctor); the wolfman is only a man afflicted with severe hypertrichosis and Malavaqua is giving him electrolysis; and so on and so forth. This is probably the scene that most people remember from their youth, as it’s one of the few in which something interesting is happening. I also infer from the film’s continuous presence on Tubi that it’s been a cheap and easy license for basic cable filler since the mid-nineties, and if you tune in only to the second half, you’d probably have fewer memories of Harrison’s agonizing pursuit of Elizabeth and thus fonder memories overall. 

I cannot in good conscience recommend this one. Goldblum’s character’s smug arrogance and the underbaked concept that his greater journalistic prowess is demonstrated by his repeated skepticism about Gil’s experiences make him unlikable to a degree that Goldblum’s normal, effortless charm is unable to surmount it. Kane has no chemistry with Byner, and her entire character is the same joke over and over again—trying to help uselessly and refusing to get out of the way—and I know you’re telling yourself that it sounds like something that would be well within Kane’s wheelhouse but she is seriously off of her game here. If you have fond memories of this one, save yourself the heartbreak of losing them. If you haven’t seen it, then spare yourself the trouble. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #248: The Hidden (1987) & Parasites

Welcome to Episode #248 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of creature features about body-invading parasites, starting with the sci-fi action horror The Hidden (1987), starring Kyle MacLachlan.

0:00 Spooky season
06:16 The Long Walk (2025)
12:12 Robert Altman
16:46 Queens of Drama (2025)

21:07 The Hidden (1987)
36:20 The Tingler (1959)
52:23 Brain Damage (1988)
1:04:15 PussyCake (2021)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloudSpotifyiTunesTuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew