Unlike a majority of the horror community, I hold absolutely no love for Chucky and the Child’s Play franchise, finding the whole thing rather dumb. So when I heard they were going to remake it, I could only react with a drawn-out yawn, so much so that I only recently viewed it on a random streaming channel.

And, you know, if I’m being honest, I kind of liked it.

Whereas the 1988 original film cast Brad Dourif as a serial killer who, using the dark power of Satan, transfers his murderous soul into the plastic body of the My Buddy-like doll Chucky — it was the ’80s and, I suppose, that’s the best we could do — this reboot, revamp and retelling instead turns Chucky into a deviously programmed doll with seriously damaged AI.

When a Vietnamese tech enters some bad codes in the doll’s internal computer out of spite, the now-monikered Buddi toy heads to America, a walking and talking app designed to help every aspect of your life for the rest of your life. When single mom Karen (a miscast Aubrey Plaza) brings home a defective Buddi toy for her deaf kid, Alex (Gabriel Bateman), everything from dead housecats to self-driving vehicular manslaughter occurs.

I’m pretty sure we all know by now the doll does it, right?

Voicing this incarnation of Chucky is Mark Hamill, who does a credible job, getting rid of Dourif’s smart-ass psycho sneer and, instead, giving Chucky an aura of murderous sympathy, with Chucky just doing as he was programmed (or not programmed) to do. It’s a plot point I’m sure pissed off many murder-loving misanthropes, but I dug it.

And while this Child’s Play was largely forgotten a couple of weeks after release — and apparently there’s a new television series featuring Chucky 1.0 on the horizon — this take was an honestly brave attempt to retell a story that has long desperately needed a new storyteller. —Louis Fowler

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The damned thing is that Masters of Horror: The Damned Thing has the nerve to call itself an adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s classic short story. In that 1894 tale, a group of men in a cabin hear a chilling account of the death of a man by an unseen force in the forest that ripped him to shreds. In this hourlong film … well, at least someone gets ripped to shreds. Similarities, you end there.

This Thing opens 24 years ago, when – shortly after black goo drips from the ceiling – a dad goes nuts, shoots his wife dead and almost kills his son, too, but he gets eviscerated and does whirly-loops as his guts spill out on the ground.

Surviving Kid grows up to be a small-town sheriff with a permanent limp, played by Sean Patrick Flanery (TV’s The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles), and his obsession with events of the past have driven off his button-cute wife (Marisa Coughlan of Freddy Got Fingered) and their only child. At least he has a right to be, because with the anniversary of That Night coming up, the people around town are starting to act crazy.

How crazy? Oh, like kill-yourself-with-repeated-blows-of-a-hammer crazy.

With a script by Richard Christian Matheson (Nightmare Cinema), The Damned Thing errs in many ways, including trying to find a credible explanation for the monster. Bierce’s was ingenious, revealing only that it exists in a plane of color human eyes cannot see, but this show leaves nothing to the imagination, giving us a Sandman-style petroleum-based beast.

Director Tobe Hooper — responsible for two certifiable scare classics (Poltergeist and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, of course) and flicks on the other end of the quality spectrum – is not at the top his game here, although production values are strong. His camera forever swirls about, scenes go on too long and – worst of all – it isn’t the least bit frightening. He gets off a couple of good gross-outs – the aforementioned toolbox murder and an encounter with a car-crash victim – but that’s about it.

Bierce’s story would be challenging for anyone to adapt without going into it knowing it’s all in the suggestion. But the Masters of Horror team has made so many alterations, the title no longer fits. Even if it weren’t based on a pre-existing piece of literature, the Thing has little life to it. —Rod Lott

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Many times in many horror films, whenever an Indigenous person is introduced, it’s typically because they can offer the always-white leads some sort of supernatural hokum to help defeat whatever spiritual evil is onscreen, typically leading to their mostly unceremonious and largely forgotten deaths.

The made-for-Shudder flick Blood Quantum, however, sends those tired stereotypes straight to hell with a Native-made and Native-cast zombie flick that, for once, actually puts Indigenous people in the heroic roles and Caucasians in their real-life historical contexts as colonial terrorists and cowardly opportunists.

Sometime in the early 1980s on the Red Crow Reservation in Quebec, a fisherman’s catch of the day just won’t die, the constant flopping around the beginnings of an undead outbreak that, months later, has become a nationwide epidemic that, thank God, can’t kill Natives due to their strong Indigenous blood — at least that’s what’s implied.

As more and more whites come to the reservation for their protection, so do their freshly bitten. With even their best efforts to maintain some semblance of control, a mass infection eventually runs — or, rather, shuffles — rampant on the rez, with fresh Caucasian zombies wreaking havoc as Red Crow warriors armed with shotguns, machetes and even a chainsaw do their best to contain it.

They fail. I can’t be the only person to see the historical parallels, can I?

Though there are a few moments when the movie is slightly hampered by an obviously low budget, Blood Quantum still makes for an effective chiller, in large part to the casting of Michael Greyeyes, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Forrest Goodluck, as well as Indigenous director Jeff Barnaby for having the absolute resilience and terrifying skill to finally make a Native horror flick and get it fucking right.

(As for the title, in case you’re not Native, it’s the percentage the white government uses to measure and determine the amount of one’s Indigenous ancestry and heritage.) —Louis Fowler

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When is Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” not Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat”? When it’s Luigi Cozzi’s The Black Cat, of course. Nary a soul should be startled by that, given the director’s history with others’ intellectual property. (This is where you Google “cozzilla.”) However, with Poe’s bibliography residing whole-hog in the public domain, anyone can make a Poe adaptation or — as Cozzi has done here, following in AIP’s financially viable footsteps — just slap Poe’s name on a movie simply for salability’s sake.

Hey, at least Cozzi includes a black cat!

Filmmaker Marc Ravenna (Urbano Barberini of Lamberto Bava’s Demons) has written a sequel to Dario Argento’s Suspiria centering on the witch Levana. And who better to play the goop-drooling, pustule-faced “mother of madness” than his own actress wife, Anne (Florence Guerin of Jess Franco’s Faceless)?

Almost immediately, Anne starts encountering visions of Levana, starting with that butt-ugly witch — whose bumpy-lumpy face looks like a sweeps-week stunt for Dr. Pimple Popper — leaping through a mirror. Frightening as that brush with delusion may be, Anne returns to that deep dark truthful mirror night after night. More creepy crap happens around her, from a refrigerator’s produce sparking with electric jolts to a professor’s stomach exploding.

Being set in the world of making movies, The Black Cat is a movie that makes references to other movies. The most overt is when Marc’s screenwriting partner (the Gene Siskel-esque Maurizio Fardo of Enzo G. Castellari’s Escape from the Bronx) name-checks Suspiria, to which Anne replies, “That title rings a bell” as Goblin’s spooky, bell-ridden theme gets needle-dropped on the soundtrack.

Cozzi goes crazy with the saturated color gels of Argento and Mario Bava, but if there’s one director he’s ripped off more, it’s himself! It appears he’s recycled the box of Christmas-ornament spacescapes from his Hercules twofer and/or Starcrash, not to mention the latter’s leading lady (Caroline Munro, sexy as ever) and, finally, Contamination’s alien eggs for Levana’s Oxy 10-ready, pox-a-poppin’ skin. Mind you, these are all welcome elements of cut-rate creativity; and with The Black Cat and Paganini Horror arriving the same year, Cozzi clearly was on a roll — hopefully garlic-buttered. —Rod Lott

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When I was 13, a friend gave me Stephen King’s Cycle of the Werewolf for my birthday. Though I was overjoyed, my mom wasn’t too thrilled with Bernie Wrightson’s illustrations of disembodied pig heads and werewolf sex. Yet a year later, she had no problem dropping me off at Northpark Cinema 4 to see the book’s R-rated adaptation, Silver Bullet.

Not exactly a novel, Cycle depicts a tense year in the town of Tarker’s Mills as its residents are terrorized by the unexplained arrival of a lycanthrope, with each short chapter representing a month. For the most part, the chapters aren’t even related, and with their sheer brevity, they come off like tone poems rather than pieces of an overall linear tale.

That’s not a criticism of Cycle, and King transplanted a majority of those 12 stories into his own screenplay for Silver Bullet. We get the attack on the lonely fat woman, the mauling of the cop in his car, the kid flying the kite for the very last time. But a series of thinly related sketches wouldn’t work as a film, so King chose to center his narrative on Marty, the disabled kid who escapes death by shooting the werewolf’s eye with a bottle rocket.

A tween Corey Haim (The Lost Boys) stars as Marty, a casting decision that immediately dates the film. While every other townsperson falls victim to the werewolf despite having two working legs, the kid in the wheelchair outlasts them all. He gets help from his homely sister (Megan Follows, The Nutcracker Prince) and their crazy drunk uncle, “played” by Gary Busey (Surviving the Game).

Busey is incredible in this flick, and by that I mean semi-lucid — and this was a few years before the motorcycle accident that caused his head injury and what we now know as the acronym-spouting “Gary Busey.” At the end is an amazing reaction shot where the werewolf bursts through the wall, and Busey’s looking right into the camera and going through half a dozen amazing facial contortions in the span of half a second. Hilarious.

Twin Peaks’ Everett McGill plays the town reverend, who pleads with his congregation not to kill the beast. (Semi-related side note: King’s decision to greatly compress time for the film was smart, because I never believed the rev could go unnoticed for three months as he does in the book.) Terry O’Quinn (1987’s The Stepfather) has a small role as the sheriff, and Reservoir Dogs’ Lawrence Tierney is, appropriately, a bartender.

As a whole, the film is fairly cheesy, but what does one expect from a mid-’80s effort from King Kong ’76 producer Dino De Laurentiis? I’d argue that it’s comfortably cheesy — enjoyable for all of its 95 minutes, and with its share of solid horror moments well-timed by first-time feature director Daniel Attias (who went directly to series TV and never looked back). Plus, in these days of CGI overkill, it’s actually quite nice to see a werewolf that’s just a guy in a suit.

Today’s audiences likely would laugh at Carlo Rambaldi’s work on the monster — as well as the entire film — but I have to admit a soft spot for this one. I appreciate it more today than the several times I saw it several decades ago. Cycle of the Werewolf is kind of an interesting one-off experiment – the calendar as novella — but Silver Bullet brings its ideas to life. –Rod Lott

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