‘Sharp Corner’
Rent or buy it on major platforms.
The writer-director Jason Buxton begins his warped psychological thriller like any other horror movie about a family that moves into a new house only to find that evil lurks within. But here the home isn’t haunted by an angry ghost — it’s cursed by a deadly curve.
On the night that Josh (Ben Foster), Rachel (Cobie Smulders) and their son (William Kosovic) move into their house, a car crashes into a tree near their front door, killing its teen driver. Alcohol was involved, but the real culprit was a treacherous, razor-sharp bend in the road. When more such accidents keep happening and Josh watches strangers repeatedly perish on his lawn, he develops an obsessive savior complex that distances him from his family and his sanity, with darkly absurd consequences.
Foster is exceptional as a beta dad whose sensible mustache hides a sinister side — he’s as much Ned Flanders as Norman Bates — that sharpens as his paranoia grows. The film pulses with soft dread from beginning to macabre, tragic end, and it will burrow under your skin. It’s my favorite indie horror movie so far this year.
‘Frewaka’
This creepy folk horror thriller is the second feature from the Irish writer-director Aislinn Clarke, whose previous film, “The Devil’s Doorway” (2018), was a ghost story with an ominous portal behind which evil lurked. Here, a locked room is the infernal space around which Clarke and her composer Die Hexen — whose score sounds like Satan’s playlist — set a blackhearted mood.
Following the death of her estranged mother, Siobhan (Clare Monnelly), who goes by Shoo, takes a job in a small Irish town as a caretaker to Peig (Brid Ni Neachtain), an elderly woman who lives in a cottage stuffed with talismans and Catholic statuary. Locals tell the strong-willed Shoo to ditch the job, but she doesn’t listen, nor does she seem particularly troubled to have left behind her fiancée, Mila (Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya).
Visits from a devilish neighbor boy are among the harbingers that cause Shoo to believe Peig may not be unhinged, but rather under a supernatural threat. (It’s no spoiler to say she’s right.) The women form an emotional bond forged from their own memories of punishing religious abuse, in hopes of defeating the demon in their midst.
‘Cutter’s Club’
The prolific B-movie director Charles Band recently discovered the negative for this film he directed in 2005 that stars Tony Todd, who vividly played the title entity in “Candyman” (1992), and who died last year at 69. Newly edited, Band’s film is now free to stream — cause for celebration for Todd completists and for fans of creature-feature weirdness.
Todd plays a schizophrenic doctor who enlists young people in a “Cutter’s Club,” a group that believes in using medicine to make monsters, like a Mickey Mouse Club for surgery fetishists. Todd’s acting is over-the-top, all growls and whispers, but it works in a movie with deliberately half-baked charm. (The creature design and thrift store-looking costumes — capes! medallions! — are delightfully busted.) I enjoyed watching the actors barely keeping a straight face as they did battle with a two-headed drooling monster that looked like a “Re-Animator” reject.
Band did a bang-up job salvaging the footage he had; fans of cheese-ball horror will forgive the abrupt ending.
‘The Moogai’
Rent or buy it on major platforms.
The writer-director Jon Bell begins his folk horror fable with a title card and a harrowing fact: Between 1910 and the 1970s, the Australian government ordered Aboriginal children to be forcibly removed from their communities and “integrated” into white foster homes in order to “breed the color” out of the population.
That horrific history underscores a story about Sarah (Shari Sebbens) and Fergus (Meyne Wyatt), a young Aboriginal couple who, after giving birth to their second baby, have their lives upended once Sarah starts seeing a malevolent being she’s convinced is after her baby. It’s not until the film’s final stretch that the menace of the moogai — a term for a boogeyman child-snatcher figure — sends Sarah and her birth mother, Ruth (Tessa Rose), into supernatural battle.
Unsubtle metaphors aside, Bell’s film thoughtfully explores racism and colonialism through Indigenous perspectives that are underrepresented in contemporary horror. The story borrows too blandly from other motherhood-is-monstrous horror movies; how many times does mom need to see things that aren’t there for us to know malevolence is afoot? But it’s still compelling and, thanks to the artful cinematographer Sean Ryan, a visually chilling slow burn.
‘Fear Street: Prom Queen’
I’m not a fan of Netflix’s “Fear Street” series of pastiche horror films. The latest entry, directed by Matt Palmer and set in 1988, is no exception. Scary stuff aside, as someone who was in high school in 1988, the movie gets a lot wrong, from the benign (no girl I knew had hair that wasn’t teased to heaven) to the ahistoric (no small town school would have been so nonchalant about a lesbian couple at prom).
The reason I recommend this movie is because Gen-Xers will have fun experiencing it with the teenagers in their lives who love not-that-scary slasher horror. Parents can half-watch it and jump in to explain why the song “White Wedding” was popular. (They may not be able to figure out what the great Lili Taylor is doing in this movie.) Teens will get a kick out of watching high school students shriek through a silly-scary story about a madman butchering his way through the student body. A cool parent would make it a double-feature night with the actually scary “Prom Night.”
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