Mister Creep (2022)

While making a documentary for a community college project, four students suddenly switch subjects when they learn about a serial killer known as Mister Creep. Possibly an urban legend, he’s said to have slain 200 people in 20 years. He broadcasts unnerving videos starring his victims and a creepy puppet. And he has a clown mask permanently fused to his face. I mean, coulrophobic chillers are so in right now; what enterprising filmmaker wouldn’t pivot?

Living up to its title within minutes, Mister Creepy is twisted enough to make you wonder if a true madman isn’t plucking the strings. It’s only Texas-based Isaac Rodriguez, whose A Town Full of Ghosts earlier this year also impressed with enough menace to make up for deficiencies elsewhere.

Like that movie, Mister Creep falls under found footage, but segmented to move quickly through its 67 minutes. A nighttime sequence inside an “abandoned” police station plays particularly spooky, containing one of the movie’s two alarmingly good shocks; the other, you likely won’t see coming. —Rod Lott

Get it on VOD Dec. 5.

Something in the Dirt (2022)

I get jealous when people talk about their “COVID project,” even if all they did was stream every episode of Columbo. I didn’t get to pursue a COVID project; I had to work, harder than normal, clocking around 97 hours the week that almost killed me.

All this to say, with Something in the Dirt, the acclaimed filmmaking duo of Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson (Synchronic) debut their COVID project, one necessitating them to step in front of the camera as well to star. It puts all other COVID projects to shame, so hopefully you didn’t get to do one, either.

Scrappy, down-on-his-luck bartender Levi (Benson) moves into a depressing dump of an apartment in Laurel Canyon. Fellow struggling tenant John (Moorhead), a wedding photographer mending a broken heart, notes Levi’s unit has been mysteriously vacant for a decade.

While moving some of John’s old furniture into Levi’s pad as loaners, the two witness a paranormal event: the levitation of an ungodly ugly ashtray. With both men in need of purpose, this is all they need to fling themselves into a full-fledged investigation — and documentation on video — of Levi’s closet as a potential gateway to an alien dimension.

Like the conspiracy chase of Darren Aronofsky’s Pi as an indie buddy comedy, Dirt follows the neighbors’ descent into a rabbit hole, the design of which may be partly their own. Without spoiling the movie’s pretzel-knotted twists, Moorhead and Benson inject a vial of meta into the mix — one that already includes autumnal equinox claptrap, X-Files paranoia, Big Brother surveillance and cosmic hoo-ha. No theory is so half-baked, it can’t be microwaved later.

Original and unpredictable, Something in the Dirt somehow is able to feel dangerous while also being dryly funny. It also feels improvised, even though you know Moorhead and Benson plan their pictures to a T, pandemic or no pandemic. I may not be 100% bought in to their conclusion, but it’s tough to complain when your mind is blown along the way. —Rod Lott

Get it Nov. 22 on VOD.

Journey into the Beyond (1975)

Mondo movies are known — and in some circles, beloved — for their aggressive exaggeration of (and/or full disregard for) the truth. Journey into the Beyond, however, is dead-on in one instance: when narrator John Carradine promises in the preface that the following “journey will test your sanity.” Amen.

Its negligible thesis is this: Science and technology, phooey; the paranormal, groovy. Before the film jets around the globe to (attempt to) prove it, Carradine warns the squeamish to listen for an alarm before the gory parts, if they wish to hide their eyes. The contrasting sound is pleasant and near-identical to the Tinkerbell notes on the Walt Disney “Read-Along” records of my childhood, prompting tots when it was time to turn the page.

Beyond features footage of gum surgery (under hypnosis instead of anesthetia), an exorcism (kinda), a tribal fertility ritual (with Nat Geo boobs a-floppin’), psychic surgery (memorably debunked in Arthur Penn’s Penn & Teller Get Killed), telekinesis (magnets, how do they work?) and spiritual healers (Ernest Angley-type bullshit). It says a lot about our changing world that the grossest segment — pus emerging from a cyst like an endless piece of slightly liquified linguini — is now the rationale for the long-running cable show Dr. Pimple Popper.  

Six years later, German director Rolf Olsen would make a bigger splash in mondo’s mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world with Shocking Asia. I haven’t seen it, but Journey into the Beyond is such a trying bore, I don’t feel the need to take another trip with Olsen at the helm. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Late Night Horror: The Corpse Can’t Play (1968)

Lasting all of six episodes, Late Night Horror was Britain’s first TV horror anthology to be broadcast in color. Unfortunately, because the BBC regularly wiped tapes, only one episode survives. Fortunately, that ep, “The Corpse Can’t Play,” is a fantastic example of the modern macabre, where the monsters are human.

Opening with a round of musical chairs, the kid’s birthday party setting belies where the next 25 minutes take you. The birthday boy, Ronnie (Frank Barry, Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors), is a spoiled brat. Arriving late to the celebration — because he wasn’t invited — is class outcast Simon (Michael Newport, The Naked Runner), who’s bespectacled, well-mannered and not accepted.

I need not tell you kids are cruel; Ronnie is especially hateful toward Simon, twisting the knife (so to speak) over the latter’s father’s current place of residence: six feet under. Where prolific BBC director Paddy Russell (Z Cars, The Moonstone, Doctor Who, et al.) goes from there won’t be revealed here. That said, even with Chekov’s drama theory top of mind, the denouement still may surprise you in how much a 50-plus-year-old episode is able to revel in such grisliness. And if not, hopefully the show’s unsettling title sequence wins you over.

“The Corpse Can’t Play” comes as bonus DVD with Colin Cutler and Steve Rogers’ book, Late Night Horror: A Complete Guide to the BBC Horror Series. The paperback features wavering typefaces and point sizes as it delves into what is assuredly the most complete history of the show, both now and in the future. The disc alone justifies a purchase. —Rod Lott

Get it at TV Brain.

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974)

Released under a myriad of titles — Breakfast at the Manchester Morgue, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, Don’t Open the Window and so on — the Spanish-Italian film The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue calls itself a comedy, but in the 44 years of watching subpar movies, I never thought it was a comedy. Boring, maybe … but a comedy? I don’t think so.

As the swinging, swanky theme plays, a buxom lass flashes her wares to no one in particular. I don’t know who that is or what they want, but that’s replaced with chemical runoff, overflowing trash bags and a stiff upper lip. I guess it’s an ecological film now?

After a fender bender with with Edna (Cristina Galbó), George (Ray Lovelock) hitches a ride with her to the English town of Windermere. While asking for roadside directions, some of the local farmers are testing some machinery utilizing sound waves. It wakes the dead and, thank God, one of the character’s heroin habit. Yeah.

Meanwhile, the inspector (Arthur Kennedy) has some serious anger issues that should be dealt with, until he is barely strangled in the finale.

With the exception of a few well-executed zombie designs, this tries to be five or six films and, as we learn, Manchester Morgue can barely get one off the ground. The mixing of ecological themes, zombie dirges, police procedurals, ill-fated drug drama, British sex comedy and some sort of weird ritual to revive the dead via their eyelids, it is too much.

I did like the randy breasts, though. Pip-pip, my good sir! —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

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