Jim Haggerty’s Grave Danger (2009)

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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The Mouse Trap (2024)

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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Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)

When you’re jawing about the Old West and its history, the first thing that should be dealt with is all the horrid victimization of the Indigenous people assaulted and murdered by “good” white people, something that still happens to this very day.

 So, sorry, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Kevin Costner.

That being realized, the second thing most people remember about the Western frontier is the brat-ish fiction and scrubbed nonfiction of the outlaw of outlaws, Billy the Kid. Popularized by mass-media pop culture from the 1930s in movies like The Outlaw to modern-day fare like Young Guns, he has stayed on the hay-baling radar for well over a century.

But leave it to hard-drinking, pill-popping and well-regarded director Sam Peckinpah to have his say about the rough-and-tumble legend-crasher with Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Although less bloody and violent than Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch or Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, this caustically serene 1973 film has a brutally lackadaisical form that makes it his most misunderstood — and endlessly watchable — picture. Hot damn.

Aided by Bob Dylan’s soul-stirring, beautifully written soundtrack, we meet uneasy friends Pat Garrett (tough son of a bitch James Coburn) and William Bonney aka Billy the Kid (baby-faced son of a bitch Kris Kristofferson), as lawman Pat gives Billy six days to leave the country or he’ll take him in, by hook or crook.

After the initial shootout, Billy is jailed. But, being a total badass, he escapes and guns down the law, making a break for some Mexican freedom, only to find Pat and his peacemakers wanting retribution and reprisals.

Knockin’ on heaven’s door, so the song goes …

And really, that’s the whole story: a barren world of post-apocalyptic lawmen who carry phony badges and the demonic crooks who will, in theory, blow the outhouse hinges off the whole place, while everything just peters out with both sides taking the loss. It’s hell on earth — or just plain hell.

Making a case for the well-meaning travelogue on a consistent tour of the underworld, both Coburn and Kristofferson are well-timed to the hellfire rolls of Garrett and the Kid. The Sweetwater flies surrounding Peckinpah’s production include R.G. Armstrong, L.Q. Jones, Slim Pickens, Jason Robards and Harry Dean Stanton — a real murderers’ row of outlaws, banditos and horse thieves.

But what truly makes this sauntering joyride all more the incomparable is Dylan’s casting as the enigmatic Alias, a no-name seer who has no joy and no pain in the Western setting, singing mournful hymns as the dust settles in the blazing distance. Though his theatrical roles have always been very hit (Masked and Anonymous) and very miss (Hearts of Fire), he always plays the soulful conductor of a soulless orchestra, which always makes him so interesting, and that all fictionally started here. His tunefully rustic soundtrack ruefully ranks up there with his other aural masterpieces.

In the end, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is the meaty type of transcendent Western that is criminally thoughtful, beautifully violent and, like most of Peckinpah’s films, tragically raw to the bone. It’s all there in the bleeding marrow, taking it all out of cinematic purgatory and into pure filmic heaven. —Louis Fowler

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Stopmotion (2023)

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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Trap House (2023)

Meth makers of America, c’mon: If you’re so paranoid that you’ve rigged your drug den with, say, a door tied to trigger a shotgun, maybe make sure the head it blows off doesn’t belong to the brother of a short-fused cop?

That’s advice from Flick Attack. First one’s free, kid.

Because if you don’t, here’s what happens: Trap House, motherfucker! Police detective Grant Pierce (Jaime M. Callica, 2021’s Hypnotic) is that cop — so fierce, he has the mystery of his dead sibling solved by minute 7. It’s the doing of the gas-masked man Lethan (Bruce Crawford, Alter), who cooks up crank in an abandoned slaughterhouse.

To dissuade authorities, thieves and basic lookie-loos, Lethan and his foxy partner (Gigi Saul Guerrero, V/H/S/85) have fashioned the place into a veritable Temple of Doom! Consider such booby-trapped built-in features as:
• a glue floor
• a room full of broken glass
• swinging cinder blocks
• spiked ceilings
• bear traps in the hallway
• mousetraps in the air ducts
• jets of scalding steam
• an invisible fence
• and more!

Aiding Pierce in his penetration of Lethan’s lair are a teenage dealer named Dibs (Peter Bundic, Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), a terrifying skinhead (a bonkers Michael Eklund, 2014’s Poker Night) and a couple other tweakers who exist for the sole purpose of allowing director Nicholas Humphries (2014’s Death Do Us Part) to demonstrate the aforementioned amenities.

Let’s not pretend that anyone watches Trap House for any other reason than to see the house do some trapping. It certainly was mine. (It sure wasn’t for crackerjack background dialogue like “Oh, man, I’m high.”) Blood and gore aside, it plays like series television, but for a testosterone-laced slice of Sawsploitation, one can do much worse.

Hell, for a “Tubi original,” one can do much, much worse. Humphries keeps this one watchable and, perhaps inadvertently, closed-captioning readable; as Pierce is pursued by addicts moving en masse like cannibal zombies, “[junkies grumbling]” appears as a subtitle — my new favorite subtitle, that is. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

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