No longer a high school cheerleader trying to save the world, Hayden Panettiere tries to save just one little girl in the economical thriller Amber Alert. Suspense is as mild as hospital-cafeteria salsa packets, but hey, it’s there!
Jaq (Panettiere, Scream VI) cruises along as a rideshare passenger when the titular notification buzzes her phone. A 5-year-old has been kidnapped … and by someone whose vehicle matches the description of the one right in front of the one Jaq’s in! Turning into a veritable Nancy Drew, Jaq convinces her reluctant driver (Tyler James Williams, TV’s Abbott Elementary) to tail it.
If that setup sounds familiar, you’re not crazy: Kerry Bellessa’s Amber Alert is a remake of Kerry Bellessa’s own 2012 movie of the same name. In ditching the original’s found-footage format, this new version feels more open, even if it follows the same story beats. Again working with co-scripter Joshua Oram, Bellessa appears to relish the glow-up, showing a behind-the-camera competence he didn’t get to demo the first time around. Now, the film is more than a great idea.
The upgrade’s greatest asset? No longer are we stuck in a car with three annoying young people, one of whom existed solely to hold the camera. Panettiere and Williams share an instant likability, which helps Amber Alert get through the plot’s jankier choices. One of those is halting the momentum to prescribe a “why” for the childless Jaq going to such extremes, which is motivation we don’t need.
Call Amber Alert junk, but it’s well-made junk, like a made-for-cable movie that really, really tries. Asleep at the wheel, it is not. —Rod Lott
Apartment life sounds like misery to me. After all, hell is other people. With “seven floors of terror,” Tenants takes this idea to heart.
Its terrific credits sequence introduces us not only to the apartment building serving as the horror anthology’s setting, but a young woman (the appealing Mary O’Neil, 2023’s Malum) who emerges from a sac of goo in its parking garage. With no memory, she roams the halls, stairwells and other common areas in search of her sister; in doing so, encountering renters along the way, she threads the heptet of stories together.
Most of them work, some even quite well. In the realm of body horror, a former child star (Christa Collins, Aileen Wuornos: American Boogeywoman) attempts to get a gnarly rash under control while prepping for the audition of her life. On the darkly comedic side, the warring roommates played by Fayna Sanchez (OJ: The Musical) and Clarke Wolfe (Deathcember) yield as much of a ball as they do blood.
My favorite, from Jonathan Louis Lewis (Black Devil Doll), crawls into creature-feature territory. It depicts a post-miscarriage woman (Tara Erickson, American Satan) finding quite the scary surprise while doing laundry.
In the middle of all these strange occurrences, Blake Reigle offers a welcome respite by unofficially adapting Eddie Murphy’s classic “Too bad we can’t stay!” bit from Delirious. Finally, O’Neil’s amnesiac wraparound earns a wrap-up in her efforts to evade a smoke monster and reach the top floor — more difficult to do when the building’s architect may have been M.C. Escher.
Despite coming from four directors (including Sean Mesler and Psycho Storm Chaser’s Buz Wallick, both of whom wrote the screenplay with O’Neil, aka Mrs. Wallick), Tenants excels in visual and tonal consistency. This holds true even in the pair of segments that don’t properly pay off. It’s a lesson more low-budget horror anthologies — which number (too) many these days — would be wise to follow. —Rod Lott
Now here’s a twist on the true crime genre: the solution to a 525-year-old murder mystery hidden in the art on a deck of cards. That’s what world-champ magician Shawn Farquhar believes, at least. In Lost in the Shuffle, documentarian Jon Ornoy follows Farquhar simultaneously investigating his theory and creating an elaborate card trick based on the crime.
The cold case at hand (as it were) involves the suspicious death of France’s King Charles VIII, perhaps killed by his queen, Anne of Brittany. Farquhar’s quest takes him to Belgium, Britain and beyond, with the occasional and fully intentional tangent into magic theory.
Ornoy and his globetrotting star almost magically transform deep-niche nerd shit into an engaging detective story, with wonderful animated segments subbing for reenactments. Although not as Da Vinci Code-y as initially set up, their symbol-conspiratorial Shuffle holds appeal to history geeks, homicide geeks, game geeks, travel geeks, sleight-of-hand geeks and even just process geeks.
To whichever group(s) among those you belong — and even if you find Farquhar’s ultimate assertion to be a mighty leap of assumption — you’ll probably fall into the movie’s net. —Rod Lott
More often than not, found-footage films are the Twinkies of horror: They might satisfy at first and indulge a surface-level curiosity, but many ultimately feel airy and provide little to meaningfully digest. Plus, if you deal with any motion sickness, watching is bound to make you hurl.
But in mimicking reality, found footage has a chance to resonate with and even haunt us. (And no, not in the same way The Blair Witch Projectand Paranormal Activity managed to fooled many of us with solid guerilla marketing.) Joel Anderson’s Lake Mungo dodges the pitfalls of the genre through intimacy and a surprising normalcy.
“Normal” in the sense that the family at the center of the mockumentary, the Palmers, feel tragically real. During a typical Australian night swim at a local lake, Mathew Palmer (Martin Sharpe) loses track of his sister, Alice (Talia Zucker, HBO’s Winning Time). Hours later, emergency responders recover her bloated corpse.
Her dad, Russell (David Pledger), identifies the body as her mom, June (Rosie Traynor), can’t bring herself to look at Alice’s cadaver. She doesn’t have to wait long to see Alice again, however, as her daughter’s specter starts showing up in random photos taken a few months after her death. This kick-starts an exploration of Alice’s fears, hidden life and premonition itself.
Lake Mungo isn’t completely free of structural hiccups. Though shocking, some of the twists in the third act feel a stretched thin and more inflated than Alice’s washed-up body. However, not fully embracing found footage, save its climax, breaks what might others be a linear and jump-scare-reliant jaunt. It has some abrupt and tense sequences, but thanks to the strength of the narrative and proximity we have to the Palmers’ plight, these otherwise low-reaching moments feel earned. It also helps that Lake Mungo features a corpse that puts The Ring’s Samara to shame.
Some nagging issues aside, Lake Mungo rises above the tide with how it wrestles with the inexplicable. The Palmers’ desperation to have some kind of closure feels palpable and genuine. Although the mystery they unwind may feel a little cruel and confusing, it’s not mean-spirited or needlessly provocative.
For example, Russell explains after identifying Alice’s body, car issues forced he and June to drive back to their home in reverse. It’s not scary, true, but it’s a telling metaphor that speaks to how understandably someone in their shoes just want to turn back the clock. To reject the tragedy that they just endured. And at that same time, to be pulled by unknown force back to a twisted form of Alice’s presence.
Another refreshing element of Lake Mungo is that it’s not a typical ghost story. It toys around with something paranormal, but it rebukes all of the expected explanations. For instance, Alice isn’t literally haunting, proven by mostly compelling evidence. (The film sort of drops on the ball on this with its final frame, though not so outlandishly to completely throw apart the point its making.) Instead, it explores something darker and begs an uncomfortable question: What if the ghosts that haunt us don’t belong to anyone, but emerge solely from our own fears of mortality?
Hailing Lake Mungo as timeless would be too generous, though it has plenty to set it apart from the cinematic cloth its cut from. It’s examination of what we might do when loss become too much feels reasonable, and exceptional editing paired with surprisingly strong sound design keeps it from collecting too much dust. And even the arrangement of its plot is suboptimal, Lake Mungo is a damn good advertisement for life jackets. —Daniel Bokemper
Why spice things up in the bedroom when you can do it in The Black Room?
“HILLTOP MANSION HAS UNIQUE & EXOTIC ROOM” is all the nightly cockblocked husband Larry (Jimmy Stathis, X-Ray) needs to read in the classifieds to color his horny self intrigued. Upon a tour of the Hollywood Hills home, he slaps down $200 a month to secure the place as a secret fuck-pad, even though the ad failed to state “SHITLOAD OF CANDELABRAS.”
Naturally, it — ahem — comes with a catch: raging gonorrhea. The owners/siblings Jason and Bridget (Necromancy’s Stephen Knight and The Amityville Curse’s Cassandra Gava) sneak peeks and snap blackmail-worthy photos via two-way mirror. Then, unbeknownst to Larry, they murder his conquests and bury the bodies in the yard — yes, even the lady Larry balls while they’re covered in glow paint.
Jason puts it best, young man: “This isn’t the YMCA.”
As writer and co-director, Norman Thaddeus Vane (1983’s Frightmare) can’t help but bring a little horror to this tale of property and perversion. But accidental or not, he more helps establish the template for a phenomenon of the following decade: the straight-to-cable/video erotic thriller. Like the best of those, The Black Room has its cake and lays it, too, with Larry not only living his repressed fantasies, but also blessed with a fabulous — and fabulously beautiful — wife at home in Robin (Clara Perryman, who somehow never scored a movie before or after this).
Perryman’s performance is of a higher caliber than Vane could’ve hoped for. Because she gets more than one dimension to play — and does all of them well — he really lucked out with that hire. When Robin discovers Larry’s infidelity, her devotion to her husband collapses … until she decides the best way to save the marriage is to give the room a ride herself. She picks up a young stud in Christopher McDonald (in the same year he greased up Grease 2) and his mighty white-boy ’fro.
McDonald’s not the only cast member to graduate a long career; soon-to-be scream queen Linnea Quigley (Sorority Babes at the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama) appears as Robin and Larry’s babysitter in a late-film turn that makes her one of the least reliable babysitters in cinema history. Laurie Strode, she ain’t. At least her poor decision skills pave the way for an ominous ending not tied up in a pretty bow. —Rod Lott
