Horror hasn’t needed a hand for the past decade. Thanks to the likes of It Follows, The Babadook, Hereditary and too many more to reasonably list, the genre has been recognized lately for what it’s always been: clever metaphors that speak to our experience. It’s just a little less exploitative now. And, by extension, a lot harder to get a foot in the door.

Fortunately, Talk to Me from Danny and Michael Philippou (aka YouTubers RackaRacka) has pretty much nothing to do with feet. Still, despite exceptional acting and a refreshing take on possession, the film’s premise is spread too thin to be an instant classic.

As Mia (Sophie Wilde) grieves the death of her mother, her best friend, Jade (Alexandra Jensen), invites her to a party with their friendly neighborhood drug dealers. Naturally, this means Jade’s little brother (Joe Bird) tags along. Tragically, the gathering isn’t just a bunch of harmless Aussie teens doing whippets. Their drug of choice is instead an amputated, embalmed hand that lets a ghost possess anyone who holds it. The catch? Exposure to the hand for more than 90 seconds risks long-term possession.

Talk to Me shines in its possession sequences. The film showcases menace, perversion and everything else fucked-up from the great beyond in its first act. Powerful and involved performances ground this otherwise hokey jaunt through the backlog of vengeful spirits. Bird and Otis Dhanji stand out, the former becoming some kind of prophetic passenger from hell who’s eerily similar to Harvey Scrimshaw in The Witch.

Mia’s desperation and compulsion for the hand realistically carry the plot. Unfortunately, the film lets the rules of the hand overshadow an otherwise tragic and emotionally jarring arc. It doesn’t seem to realize its power comes from of its compelling cast of characters. Instead, Talk to Me backpedals into conventional approaches as soon as it loses anything more to say about addiction. To put it bluntly, it feels like the filmmakers understand addiction — maybe they even watched Requiem for a Dream — but they weren’t confident enough that it could sustain a full movie.

Instead, the Philippous lean hard into the franchise paint. Which mostly makes sense. It would be almost a shame not to explore the iconic hand in some other way, but that’s the beauty of a cursed object: You can move it into any number of situations and chances are, its presence alone is enough to justify what transpires. Instead, the protagonists can focus more on their very real, compelling problems, rather than how the thing — be it a monkey’s paw or a demonic puzzle box — connects to some ancient power.

Talk to Me is solid and its already announced sequel should be, too. Hopefully, the filmmakers will be more hands-off when it comes to the human drama already baked into the story. —Daniel Bokemper

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What do you think about when you hear the word “blood”? Are you obsessed with death and dying? Have you ever wanted to kill someone? Please answer carefully; you could win the right to beget the son of a serial killer!

With a mansion and a mullet, charismatic photographer Jack T. Rippington (Blake Bahner, Caged Fury) is new to the town of Prairieville. Minutes after a Baptist couple stops by to invite Jack to a church supper, he’s convinced them to model for a magazine shoot he’s doing on methods of murder. The husband (one-timer Gary Wise) sees no issue with being locked in a guillotine. Meanwhile, the homely wife (Holly Hunter soundalike Renée Cline, who appeared in four David A. Prior joints the next year) dons kinky lingerie so she can be tethered like a Thanksgiving turkey, then injected with an acid that turns her neck into a piping-hot pepperoni pizza.

See, Jack likes to kill. He also likes, as he breaks the fourth wall à la Ferris Bueller to share, to drink his victims’ blood. “You see, it’s blood that keeps a man potent. Sexually potent, that is,” he says, with the relaxed folksiness of Wilford Brimley shilling Quaker Oats.

After a daytime dump of their bodies in the cemetery, Jack and his wheelbarrow meet Erica (Ena O’Rourke, Molly and the Ghost). Because she looks just like his great granny — and correctly answers all three aforementioned test questions — Erica gets laid, not slayed. Their meet-cute immediately leaps to her agreeing to help Jack acquire bikini models from the big city. What she doesn’t know is he intends to, oh, give them live electrical cables to hold onto.

Only after getting pregnant does Erica start to suspect something’s up besides Baby Daddy Jack’s super-potent penis. That intuition puts her way ahead of Prairieville’s sheriff (Marc Griggs, also one and done), who earlier takes a big swig of blood from Jack’s Thermos and thinks nothing of it, because Mr. Rippington says it’s a Bloody Mary.

An amazing slice of shot-on-video sleaze shot entirely in Alabama, Fatal Exposure is hardly the only horror film about a homicidal shutterbug. I can say with certainty, however, it’s the only one:
• directed by the cinematographer of Faces of Death sequels, Peter B. Good (is he, though?)
• featuring a huge jug marked “CHLOROFORM” in handwritten lettering
• where the photographer is the great-grandson of Jack the Ripper. Oh, shit, did I spoil that for you?

Bearing a Herschell Gordon Lewis-does-Skinemax quality, which I say with love, the purposely gory, accidentally goofy Fatal Exposure deserves a wider reputation among SOV enthusiasts. As the nutso Rippington, Bahner comes off like a fifth-rate John Stamos, which is to say hardly a threatening descendant of the Whitechapel Murderer. Meanwhile, O’Rourke, née Henderson, exudes competence and confidence no one else in the cast dares match. Not that they try.

And not that Good asked! His stale direction seems focused on persuading O’Rourke and other genuinely attractive women to bare their bodies. That he gets Julie Austin (1989’s Elves) to undergo a super-handsy foreplay sesh in the woods has to count as something of a cinematic feat, considering payment couldn’t have been worth much more than a 2-for-1 coupon redeemable at your local participating Shoney’s. —Rod Lott

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After the success of 1996’s Scream, we were flooded with knockoffs. Now that the franchise has been resurrected with legacy sequels, respectable box-office earners themselves, another (smaller) wave of imitators has hit — few more brazen than That’s a Wrap.

In the movie, piggish director Mason Maestro (The Sex Files veteran Robert Donavan) and his wife (erotic-thriller royalty Monique Parent, Busted) gather his cast members — no plus-1s, no phones — to a premiere party for their new slasher film’s teaser trailer. That’s right: just the teaser trailer.

Maestro’s actors include the Black one, the gay one, the weird one, the stoned one, the prude one, etc. — all treated at surface level because they’re just here to be murdered, anyway, between discussions of the casting couch, going full-frontal and dying off-camera. Both in the Maestros’ masterwork of mayhem and then at the shindig, they’re stalked by the bewigged psychopath of the movie they just made.

If the meta-on-meta setup reminds you of Scream 3, congratulations! The difference being, That’s a Wrap is the one where a character jokes, “Girl, by the end of the night, I bet you’ll be getting nailed on a side stage,” and you know instantly and exactly where that’s going.

Among the large cast of partiers, only the always welcome Sarah French (Bermuda Island) is memorable. The others get lost in exchanges of truly moronic dialogue:

Girl: “Get your D-O-N-G hard.”
Guy: “Prepare your T-W-A-T.”
Girl: “It’s already marinating.”

That’s a Wrap is at its most entertaining in the prologue, in which the radiant Cerina Vincent (2002’s Cabin Fever) vamps her way through the Drew Barrymore role. Meanwhile, Dave Sheridan, perhaps best known for the Scream spoof Scary Movie, self-reflexively cameos as the studio’s night-shift security guard.

This sequence whips up a decent chill or two as Blood Feast remake director Marcel Walz tries his best to give this show some stylish suspense. Then he abandons the tone — but not the light gels, oversaturating each setup in a crutch of primary colors. From here, the movie sweats an overt campiness that feels one international cut away from becoming pornographic.

If it’s gore you’re after, Walz will do you proud, staging kill scenes so graphic and suggestive, Carol J. Clover might be rushing to her word processor to crank out yet another updated edition of Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. It’s often difficult to determine whether we’re supposed to interpret these acts as hellish or humorous. When one of those examples is a guy throwing his own disembodied dick at the killer, off whose head it bounces in slow motion, that’s a problem, That’s a Wrap. —Rod Lott

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Word of Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu remake whets most of our appetites. But before we get a taste of Bill Skarsgård’s bug-eyed Count Orlok, André Øvredal (The Autopsy of Jane Doe) seeks to drench us with his unintentional appetizer, The Last Voyage of the Demeter.

Though pitting it against Eggers’ upcoming flick isn’t exactly fair — Demeter spent two decades in development hell. Plus, the film isn’t even a complete Dracula adaptation. It’s almost obnoxious in how often it reminds us that this feature-length film emerges from just one of the novel’s chapters, “The Captain’s Log.” Unfortunately, this bloodthirsty commitment to adhere to the source material also leaves it writhing in the sun.

Case in point: the movie’s opening sequence. After a constable finds the captain’s journal in the wreckage of the Demeter, Øvredal deploys a voiceover narration pulled almost line for line from Bram Stoker’s book. On one hand, you could argue this solidifies its connection to Dracula. But in execution, it’s script filler. It doesn’t enhance what we see, nor weave its way into what transpires in any imaginative manner. It’s as if Capt. Elliot (Liam Cunningham, TV’s Game of Thrones) has a once-every-15-minutes obligation to remind us that Demeter is indeed, derived from Dracula. (Check out the episode “This Extraordinary Being” from Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen for a great example of how classic prose can be woven into timely, modern storytelling.)

This seemingly small issue detracts from an otherwise compelling tale. Demeter primarily follows Clemens (Corey Hawkins, Straight Outta Compton), a Cambridge-educated doctor who can’t find steady work on account of 19th-century racism. The Demeter’s first mate (David Dastmalchian, The Suicide Squad) reluctantly brings Clemens aboard after the doctor saves the captain’s grandson (Woody Norman, Cobweb).

The ship then sets sail against the warnings of damn-near everyone in Bulgaria. Less than a day in, Clemens discovers Anna (Aisling Franciosi, 2018’s The Nightingale), a stowaway who would make for a far more interesting main character despite Hawkins’ strong performance. From there, it’s basically Alien on a boat.

Demeter oddly takes liberties with Stoker’s text, especially in the conclusion. But the film’s unwillingness to take those same risks where it matters sucks the blood out of a plot that otherwise would be powerful and fresh. Instead, they relegate the most fascinating details into one of Anna’s many exposition-heavy monologues. We frankly have enough stories about Belmonts, Helsings and countless other dudes trying to snuff out Dracula. Why not give a few more women a shot?

That being said, The Last Voyage of the Demeter still manages to do a lot with the coffin it nails itself into. Dracula (Javier Botet, Slender Man) is genuinely creepy with his anglerfish teeth, bright white eyes and towering presence. Like Evil Dead Rise, Demeter doesn’t waste any time establishing that in modern horror, them kids ain’t safe. It also avoids the trap that made the Demeter’s segment in previous adaptations so easy to gloss over. Instead of Dracula just picking off the crew members one by one, he infests them physically and psychologically. It packs in enough Dracula to justify him as more than a regular ol’ vampire without leaning on too many tired conventions.

2023 hasn’t been great to the Count. Demeter doesn’t do too much to correct the course, either. It has its suspenseful moments, but overall, it’s in desperate need of a narrative transfusion. —Daniel Bokemper

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Following the funeral for their friend who died in an auto accident they survived, pals Tilly, Monica and Peter (Anna Bullard, Annie Hamilton and Rory Alexander) escape to a farmhouse owned by Monica’s grandparents. Quaint, cozy and desolate/rural, the place offers much-needed solitude.

But, hey, who invited the masked killer? I’m no psychologist, but I do know this: The way to process trauma is not to throw more gasoline on the fire.

From awkward passes to alcoholic tendencies, the three friends of Dark Windows speak realistically and act realistically, which is to say they also react realistically. These characters are depicted as just all-around normal people. That’s refreshing for a horror film, particularly for a slasher, which tends to treat its players as stereotypes.

Their pain is real — not just physical, but emotional, adding all the difference. Conceivably, this one could happen. I’d call it a mature slasher if that didn’t sound like such a preachy fun-sapper. So I’ll do the Hollywood pitch thing and say it’s … oh, I Know What You Did Last Summer meets The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Sound good? Dark Windows is great, actually.

Economically staged without sacrificing quality on any level, it’s a gem from Norway, although in English. Aside from Hamilton (The Wolf of Snow Hollow), the young actors were unknown to me, all to Windows’ favor — unlike, say, its moniker, straight from the Spooker GeneroTitle-a-Tron (patent pending).

Norwegian-born helmer Alex Harron (Leave) impresses with an outsider approach to an all-American subgenre. He casts a pallid mood and remains in control of it throughout. He also offers an excellent jump cut; you’ll know it when you see it. And please do see it. —Rod Lott

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