‘Vulcanizadora’
Joel Potrykus’s darkly comic slow-burn buddy movie is streaming on Shudder, but it’s not a conventional horror movie. Most of it is about two friends who spend a walk in the woods talking smack, shooting off bottle rockets and fighting over debts. But once their destination is revealed, the film’s horrors are too, and that’s when this slacker meditation on aging and death squares up and delivers its blows.
The film opens as Marty (Joshua Burge) and his best friend, Derek (Potrykus, who also wrote and edited) traipse through the forest somewhere in Michigan, searching for something Derek seems to have misplaced before they set up a tent for the night. Derek is a goofball who talks a mile a minute and playfully bickers with Marty like they’re still 13. Marty seems like he’s moved on from their friendship, as if his day with Derek is an act of charity. When Marty says it’s time to say goodbye, Derek stalls. But it’s no use, because the plan Marty set in motion has no easy off button.
Burge and Potrykus are exceptional as longtime friends coming face to face with horrifying stakes. Potrykus is my kind of weirdo for using Maria Callas singing “Casta Diva” to sinister ends.
‘Primate’
Johannes Roberts’s action-survival thriller carries on the lineage of “Link,” “Monkey Shines” and other simian-themed horror movies. Set at a cliffside mansion in Hawaii, the film is about Ben, a sweet-faced pet chimpanzee that gets rabies and goes on a blood-soaked tear against his owner and a group of her friends on vacation.
Roberts and Ernest Riera’s script is paper-thin; don’t expect much of a meditation on anything. That’s not a complaint; the film isn’t trying to reinvent the scary monkey subgenre or force emotional investment in its shallow stock characters. It’s only here for jump scares, prolonged cat-and-mouse games and some brutal gore in the slasher tradition. (It’s “‘Cujo’ but chimp,” as one critic put it.) For many horror fans, myself included, that’s plenty.
A big round of applause for the actor Miguel Torres Umba who, with help from Millennium FX’s top-notch practical effects, plays Ben like an enraged but graceful gymnast.
‘Black Eyed Susan’
She’s not real. She’s just a robot. That’s what I kept repeating in my head as I watched the writer-director Scooter McCrae’s sicko sexploitation throwback.
Tired of living out of his car, Derek (Damian Maffei) agrees to take a job programming Susan (Yvonne Emilie Thälker), an A.I.-powered sex doll that doubles as a human punching bag that will cry if you hit her hard enough. They’re artificial tears, though: Susan is being calibrated to withstand punishing physical violence, the kind that leaves her with bruising that gives this transgressive film its name. When Susan starts to react negatively to Derek’s aggression, and he starts to feel ashamed of his behavior, the experiment starts to unravel, and the consequences are sickening.
The film’s sexual politics are hard to discern. Is Derek living a misogynist’s dream or is he helpfully forecasting just how screwed up our A.I. future might be when it comes to sex and deviance? For McCrae it’s both — a mash-up of the art house and the grindhouse, and it works, disturbingly. McCrae and his cinematographer, Anton Zinn, get extra points for photographing on 16 millimeter film, giving the film’s savageness an extra sleazy sheen.
‘Mudborn’
Shieh Meng-ju’s maximalist new film is an eye-exploding mix of Taiwanese folk horror, dark-sided talisman stuff, “Poltergiest” pastiche and A.I.-age techno-terror.
The developer Hsu-chuan (Yo Yang) works at a video game company that uses scans of real world locations to make its hot V.R. games. Unfortunately, one of those locations was home to a little clay statue that is possessed and has its sights set on Hsu-chuan and his pregnant wife, Mu-hua (Cecilia Choi), an artifacts conservator. When the statue’s spirit-force threatens the couple and their unborn baby, they enlist a Taoist priest (Derek Chang) to help get rid of the bloodthirsty entity’s powers.
Shieh seamlessly balances terrors in the real and virtual worlds, and the result is an entertaining film that lands its kitchen sink-scares and supernatural nuttiness without being overwhelming. (The run time could have used a 20 minute trim, though.) Shieh’s tight grip and stellar work from the cinematographer Chen Chi-wen make the trip to the action-packed finale worth the wait.
‘Hive’
“Hell is for children,” Pat Benatar belted in 1980. In the writer-director Felipe Vargas’s hallucinatory thriller, hell is children.
Sasha (Xochitl Gomez) hopes to make enough money for college by babysitting Zaley (Victoria Firsova), a bratty little girl who lives with her emotionally removed mother in an upscale neighborhood. Sasha’s landscaper brother, Marco (Aaron Dominguez), encourages his sister to stay as invisible as possible when she’s at work.
At a park with Zaley, Sasha wonders why there are lots of kids playing but no parents or caregivers. And why do the kids keep staring at her? What’s with the girl with a puss-oozing sore on her face? Most important: Why is the playground moving? I’ll tell you why: The slide is actually a portal to hell, and these little monsters are its gatekeepers.
By centering on working-class Latino protagonists, Vargas uses a kids-gone-wrong story to deliver a timely message about racism and inequality. (“Village of the Damned” meets “Get Out” seems to have been his intended target.) The story gets too nonsensical the more supernatural it gets, but the playground battle scenes are amusingly freaky. The choreographer Samantha Higgins did a fantastic job maneuvering the kid actors into menacing chorus lines.
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