A somewhat forgotten folk horror film from Australia, Alison’s Birthday begins with the titular character (Joanne Samuel) playing with a makeshift Ouija board with her friends at age 16. One of the girls, Chrissie (Margie McCrae), becomes possessed by a spirt claiming to be Alison’s father, who warns his daughter not to go home on her 19th birthday, insinuating that something horrible will happen. Moments later, a strong gust of wind invades the room and tips over a bookcase, crushing poor Chrissie to death. It’s as exciting and audacious opening to a film as you’re likely to find.

Things slow down a bit as we jump ahead about three years. Alison’s 19th birthday is a few days away, and she’s been summoned to the home of her Aunt Jennifer and Uncle Dean (Bunney Brooke and John Bluthal, respectively). Seems old Dean’s health is failing, and all he wants is one last family birthday celebration with Alison, who hasn’t been back to her childhood abode in quite some time. Despite her reservations (remember that deathly warning she got at 16?), Alison agrees, and convinces her boyfriend, Pete (Lou Brown), to accompany her.

From the outset, it’s pretty clear everything isn’t kosher with Alison’s surrogate parents. For one thing, a mysterious structure in their back garden resembles a miniature Stonehenge. For another, occupying the room across the hall is a spooky old woman who wears a strange amulet around her neck and likes to watch the teenager sleep. She’s explained away as Alison’s great-grandmother, but Alison remembers no mention of the woman all throughout her upbringing.

If you’ve seen a lot of horror movies, you probably have a decent idea where this plot is going, and by and large, it does, though it does so through the POV of Pete, who becomes a final boy of sorts as he investigates the creepy goings-on while Alison gets sidelined to her bed, having been drugged and hypnotized by the now obviously villainous Jennifer and Dean and their physician cohort (Vincent Ball).

Without giving too much away, the ending to Alison’s Birthday is just as audacious as its beginning, and well worth the wait. The film overall is a solid watch, an engaging, if somewhat flawed, entry into the folk horror canon that remains criminally underseen and underappreciated. —Christopher Shultz

Get it at Amazon.

As a religious-horror film, Immaculate earned my respect simply for leaning into internet commenters’ clutched-pearls cries of “evil” and “blasphemous” by using those nobodies’ quotes in its ad campaign, then doubling down with a one-day promotion for $6.66 admission. Members of the Neon marketing department, I proclaim you unholy geniuses.

Then, unlike most of the offended, I actually saw Immaculate. It retains my respect, so much so that I grant it a vow of obedience. (Poverty and celibacy, however? Let’s not go overboard.)

In Italy’s Our Lady of Sorrows, the newest nun is Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney, Madame Web), a young American woman. As Cecilia gets a tour of the 17th-century grounds and introduced to her fellow 21st-century sisters in Christ, the flick is so transparent in foreshadowing, it’s naked, e.g., “Be careful of this one. She bites.”

It’s not like things at the convent aren’t already, well, off; Cecilia’s spider-sense tingles from the outset. Then she gets pregnant, despite her iron-clad virginity. Holy calamity, scream insanity.

Some of Immaculate’s horrible happenings come as shocks, while others are so telegraphed, they’re practically stamped with the Western Union logo. And yet, even some of those shock, despite being expected. In the aforementioned tour, Cecilia’s ears perk up at a passing mention of “catacombs.” Ours do, too, knowing full well the story will near its end at this location. Sure enough, it does, but director Michael Mohan presents it like he’s leading viewers through a haunted house. It’s effective as, um, hell.  

Sweeney, a shrewd businesswoman who also produced the film, seems uneasy in the first act. How much of that is her character’s nervousness, her performance limitations or my own inability to divorce my mind from her sexualized persona in past roles and public, I cannot determine. But once the shit hits the fan — or the God seed hits her womb, so to speak — Sweeney sizzles. Particularly excellent in the birthing scene, with the lens scrunched tight on her bloodied face for what seems like unbroken minutes, she’s a raw nerve.

Arguably the movies’ highest-profile example of the nunsploitation subgenre since Ken Russell danced with The Devils in 1971, Immaculate could have wussed out. It doesn’t. I admire its commitment to middle-brow nastiness and trashiness — and more so its refusal to back down, as Mohan (reuniting with Sweeney after their erotic thriller, The Voyeurs) and first-feature scribe Andrew Lobel carry their button-pushing transgression all the way through what its literally Immaculate’s final shot.

Be careful of this one. She bites. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.