Who is Agatha Black and why is a chef’s dozen of tracks trying to frighten her? As appealingly (albeit a bit stiltedly) played by Bridie Marie Corbett, Agatha is practically a recluse — or “ree-cloose,” as a family member drawls — who barely gets out of the house she shares with her sickly aunt. 

Make that shared, past tense, as Aggy is healing from the horror of a recent break-in that ended with her aunt murdered. To cope, she absorbs herself with a beloved childhood curio: a stack of ghost story LPs her late father gifted her.

As she revisits the stories, which get progressively more grisly and adult, elements from the slabs of vinyl bleed into real life, like a neighboring couple fatally hammered beyond recognition. As they say in Dallas, where this was shot, just what in the Sam Hill is going on here?

13 Tracks to Frighten Agatha Black is a perfect title. I admire not only its rhyming structure, but also how it sounds like the names adorning so many of the spooky albums that entertained kids in the 1960s and ’70s. I should know; I was one of them (for the ’70s half, at least). Before we were allowed to see horror movies or read horror comics, we could listen to horror story records. They were a gateway. As such, I hold reverence for them, even if I never want to hear them with middle-aged ears, preferring to leave that spell unbroken. 

Whatever writer/director Bradley Steele Harding’s relationship is with 33 1/3 rpm novelties, his idea for 13 Tracks is ambitious, but also kinda brilliant! Other first-time filmmakers should be as lucky. Each time the needle drops on another tale, the fuzz on the soundtrack is so, so satisfying.

However, I almost didn’t watch it past the opening credits (narrated by cult legend Udo Kier, incidentally) because the dialogue-free prologue depicting Agatha as a child is off-puttingly overacted with motions befitting a mime’s routine. To be bluntly honest, I abandoned the movie twice across two years’ time before finally ceding my full attention, encouraged by a rave review in David John Koenig’s Lowest Common Denominator review guide. I’m glad I did. 

While not “sure to give you the whim-whams” — a Monster a Go-Go reference, I assume — Harding’s movie bears enough ingenious touches for a rainy afternoon’s entertainment. I’d love to see his idea fleshed out with real financial weight behind it. Additionally, I look forward to his sophomore feature, Occult Canvas, which appears to mine another object of 1970s nostalgia: Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. —Rod Lott

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From director Peter Brophy and co-writer Rod Bishop comes Body Melt, a goofy, goopy Australian body-horror splatter fest that plays like the unholy love child of Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive and David Cronenberg’s Rabid, with some Lynchian weirdness and a throbbing techno score thrown in for good measure.

It follows the citizens of Pebbles Court in Homesville, Melbourne, who all fall victim to an experimental body-enhancing vitamin sent to them in the mail by an unscrupulous pharmaceutical company. The filmmakers are concerned less with character and plot and more worried about grossing the audience out, which they achieve in spades. True to its title, the film is a smorgasbord of nasty death scenes as hilarious as they are disgusting.

There’s not a single protagonist in Body Melt. Rather, the film is comprised of several characters who almost all meet gnarly ends. There’s a detergent-guzzling man whose throat opens to sprout tentacle-like growths. Another resident of the quaint Pebbles Court suffers hallucinations from the drug until his face melts away, leaving only his bloody skull. A family vacationing at the very health spa that produced the vitamin suffers all matter of slimy, mucus-dripping indignities, while one of the spa’s workers — an oversexed muscle man — gets an erection so turgid his penis explodes. But perhaps the most vomit-inducing scene involves a pregnant woman, whose fate is best left for sick viewers to see for themselves.

In addition to all the madness listed above, Body Melt features a clan of possibly inbred service-station workers who torment two teen boys from the court, a clear nod to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. To say that the film is bonkers is an understatement. It can be a bit tricky at first to follow all the seemingly disparate storylines, but then again, the stories aren’t exactly the point. The practical effects are the true star here, and they are every bit as convincing now as they were in 1993.

Body Melt is a perfect midnight movie — just be sure to watch it on an empty stomach. —Christopher Shultz

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Poor Becky. After walking for the length of the entire opening credits to her apartment, hopes for R&R get decimated by a phone call from an unnamed man who wants to tell her some “scary stories” and says she’s in … grave danger!

And also she’s in Jim Haggerty’s Grave Danger, a no-budget, shot-on-video anthology from the New York-based moviemaker whose name adorns the title. Not exactly the cachet of Tyler Perry, but perhaps a PSA of sorts, lest someone thinks they’re renting Quentin Tarantino’s CSI two-parter.

In the first story, paranoid Victor (Jae Mosc) believes he’s being followed by a tuxedoed chap, whom no one else sees. Becky’s reaction to this tale o’ terror? “Yes, it scared me. It was scary. Okay, is that what you want? Yes, it scared me.”

Then, there’s Carol (Kate Webster), who buys a gaudy tribal statuette that entrances her into donning lingerie and seducing deliverymen, only to kill them.

Thirdly and finally, Abe (Bud Stafford, The Putt Putt Syndrome) is a washed-up ventriloquist struggling to afford meds for his ailing wife (Kaye Bramblett, Squeeze Play). When a birthday party gig stiffs him on payment, Phineas extracts the debt in blood. Phineas is his dummy, BTW.

Oh, in between those vignettes, the caller (Jonathan Holtzman, Sweet, Sweet Lonely Girl) convinces Becky (Debbie Kopacz) to undress to nothing. She complies.

Needless to say, none of Grave Danger qualifies as scary, outside of characters’ goombah pronunciations like “PAH-k,” “TAH-k” and “re-TAHD” for, respectively, “park,” “talk” and, well, let’s not get canceled. It needs a fourth story in which Haggerty explains how he convinces all these women — friends? family? apartment complex neighbors? — to take off all their clothes for, what, maybe $20 and free cardboard pizza?

Strangely, the one who doesn’t is top-billed Cathy St. George, erstwhile Playboy Playmate for August 1982, as Dr. Geraldine Masters, which I take as a reference to Don’t Look in the Basement. —Rod Lott

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Monday, Jan. 1, 2024 — a date which will live in infamy — the original version of Mickey Mouse scampered into the public domain. And enterprising filmmaker Simon Phillips was ready, dropping a trailer for the slasher flick Mickey’s Mouse Trap.

Now simply titled The Mouse Trap, it borrows the Star Wars crawl to deliver a disclaimer erring on the side of the caution, lest someone confuse this for actual Walt Disney Company product. With this Mickey teleporting and stabbing, how could they?

At the FunHaven arcade, the manager (Phillips) forces Alex (Sophie McIntosh, The Sacrifice Game) to work late on her 21st birthday for a party that’s rented out the place. Turns out, it’s for Alex — a pretty shitty thing for her “friends” to do, if you ask me. They kick off a night of sex, drugs and Skee-Ball — all spoiled by the Mickey-masked manager, who kills them one by one … and sometimes by two, somehow hiding within a space that isn’t exactly a labyrinth.

Why become such a fun-killer? If Phillips knows, his script doesn’t show it. As far as I could muster, it’s because the manager spills a drink on a frayed cord of a film projector loaded with Mickey’s debut cartoon, Steamboat Willie, thereby transforming him into a homicidal maniac. I suppose that could happen, question mark.

Unlike the similar Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, the movie is watchable, with Deinfluencer director Jamie Bailey giving it more of the rhythms that resemble a “real” film. Also unlike Blood and Honey, in a select few spots, it approaches fun. (One of them: Asked whether she’s ever seen a horror movie, a young woman answers, “No, Marcus, I have a sex life!”)

But very much like Blood and Honey, The Mouse Trap is first and foremost a rushed-out cash grab, existing only to exploit Disney’s copyright loss before anyone else could, quality be damned. Another commonality the two flicks share: just ending without an ending. While I get the curiosity factor, this chunk of cheese isn’t worth taking the bait. —Rod Lott

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From Robert Morgan, the creator of the wonderful animated horror short The Cat with Hands, comes the feature-length debut Stopmotion, a film exploring the unraveling mind à la Videodrome or Possession. The film centers on Ella Blake (Aisling Franciosi, The Nightingale), a stop-motion animator helping her arthritic and overbearing mother, Suzanne (Stella Gonet), finish what will likely be her final film.

Ella’s tumultuous but structured life gets thrown for a loop when Suzanne has a stroke and falls into a coma, leaving Ella to potentially finish the film on her own. The problem is, she struggles to come up with ideas — she’s a brilliant animator, but not much of a storyteller. So when a mysterious little girl begins showing up at Ella’s apartment and dictates a new story about a girl lost in the woods being chased by a grotesque figure called the Ash Man, Ella reluctantly listens, and begins making the young one’s narrative.

The new story is much darker, with figures made of mortician’s wax and spoiled meat, creating visuals that give ’90s-era Tool videos a run for their money. The little girl proves to be just as demanding as Suzanne, and this combined with the disturbing nature of the work begins to effect Ella’s sanity and her already fraught relationship with her boyfriend (Tom York).

Featuring stunning stop-motion animation from director Morgan, appropriately moody cinematography from Léo Hinstin, and a skin-crawling score by experimental sound artist Lola de la Mata, Stopmotion is a masterful slow-burn horror film with genuinely creepy imagery and a thoroughly shocking explosion of violence in its third act. Franciosi delivers yet another psychologically complex performance, proving herself to be one of the most dynamic actors in the horror landscape right now. Fans of Cronenberg, Zulawski and the eerie stop-motion films of Jan Svankmajer will not want to miss this one. —Christopher Shultz

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