In the summer of 1966 in El Paso, Texas, something really magical happened: Manos: The Hands of Fate was made. A movie so hilariously, mind-boggling bad that hardly any words from this universe would make it justice. But I’ll try. Harold P. Warren was a middle-aged man who worked as a fertilizer salesman for a living, but had a certain passion for film and was also a member of the local theatre. But while the passion was there, the talent was not.
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/manos-the-hands-of-fate-1966/
We’re at a hospital in New York at night, where someone is stealing body-parts from the cadavers. One of the doctors is able to catch the body-snatcher as he is about to eat one of the cadaver’s heart, but then quickly commits suicide by jumping out of a window. Well, case closed, then? Well, no, he doesn’t die right away, and says his last word “Kitoh ordered it”, and we soon learn that he was a part of a cannibalistic cult from an obscure island in Asia, also named Kitoh.
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/zombi-holocaust-1980/
Gretel is a young girl who struggles to make ends meet and take care of her little brother in the process. In a job interview she is asked by her prospective employer if her maidenhood is still intact, causing her to not accept the much needed job. When they’re both cast out from home by their own mother, forcing them to fend for themselves, their insane mother tells them to “dig yourselves some pretty little graves, and dig one for your mother too“. Things look rather grim for the two siblings, indeed.
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/gretel-hansel-2020/
We are in a distant future where the world’s population has been completely annihilated by Ro-man’s Death-Ray. Ro-man who? He’s an evil alien in a gorilla suit, face covered with a diving helmet with to antennas attached to it. But there are eight survivors left, a family which Ro-man is able to communicate with through a … bubble machine. And he wants their location so Ro-man can finish his mission. Or else …
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/robot-monster-1953/
Shirin moves to a new house together with her boyfriend Fredrik and his young son, Lucas. Their new home is a vertically divided semi-detached house, where the other side is uninhabited and in a slight state of disrepair. As Fredrik’s job requires a bit of travelling, Shirin must stay at their new home with her stepson, who misses his mother (who died of cancer). When the boy makes a new friend who he claims is living next doors in the uninhabited part of the building, Shirin starts to realize that this isn’t all child’s play.
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/andra-sidan-2020/
Luke is a young man who is struggling with childhood traumas, and when visiting his mentally sick mother he decides to resurrect his childhood imaginary friend, whom he once “trapped” inside a doll house when he was a boy. His imaginary friend’s name is Daniel, a self-confident and manipulative guy who appears to be the opposite of shy, timid Luke. At first, Luke is convinced that bringing Daniel back is a good choice as he appears to help him, but soon it starts to become obvious that Daniel’s intentions are no good.
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/daniel-isnt-real-2019/
How to even start with this movie…Uhm, well… It starts with a random, disturbed guy called “The Metal Fetishist” (played by the director himself) who’s wandering in some decayed urban area, barefoot. He enters a shack hoarded full of metal junk where he stabs himself in the foot, and injects himself with an iron pipe and goes through some kind of a metamorphosis. A glimpse of an everyday life of an extreme metal fetishist where it just went a little too far, I guess.
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/tetsuo-1989/
Six friends want to have some fun during the lockdown, and decide to hire a medium in order to hold a seance via Zoom. At first it’s all fun and giggles, where several of the participants struggle to keep a straight face. However, they soon realize they’ve unleashed something that might take their lives.
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/host-2020/
On an isolated farm in a rural town, an old man is lying in his deathbed. As he is slowly dying, his children (Louise and Michael) visit their homestead to mourn, despite their mother’s warning that they should not have come…a warning that she never really explain and thus it’s bound to go unheeded, of course. When the night comes, their mother starts behaving strangely, and after cutting off her fingers in the kitchen she hangs herself in the barn.
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/the-dark-and-the-wicked-2020/
We’re in the 1980s somewhere in the Norwegian forests, where the young couple Rebecca and Thomas are on a car trip. They run over a dog, and assume that the owner lives in the old victorian-styled hotel not so far away. Rebecca takes on the task to enter the hotel, which seems to be abandoned at first glance. But a horde of zombies suddenly show up, with the transsexual zombie-hotel owner itself Mor Monsen (Mother Monsen).
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/prosjekt-z-2021/
We are in Giza, Egypt, where the archaeologist George finds a stone tablet with mysterious writings which he believes is the answer to an ancient riddle that is linked to the tomb nearby. He enters the tomb with a guide who falls right into one of the traps with spikes, while George is attacked by dark forces that shoot two cheesy neon-laser beams in his eyes, which makes him temporarily blind.
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/manhattan-baby-1982/
Miles Grissom (Clark Freeman) is a man who struggles with an intense fear of dying, ever since he at the age of three watched his father die in a car accident. His anxiety is so severe that he won’t drive a car, will barely leave his apartment, and suffers from night terrors. In a desperate attempt to get rid of his fears, he places an advert in a newspaper, offering 30.000 dollars to whoever can show him evidence that we go on after our deaths.
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/we-go-on-2016/
We’re told that a radioactive slime from the moon has found its way to Earth from a space shuttle that plunges into the sea near the coast of Denmark, and infects humans and turn them into murderous mutants. One of them, with a head that looks like a rotten potato, brutally kills a random couple who are having a picnic by the beach. And after this quick opening, we have basically seen the whole movie in a nutshell which oozes of zero budget and amateur hour all the way.
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/grotesk-2015/
David is a 40 year old single man who has dedicated his life to take care of his mother, who is suffering from dementia. Since we’re in the 90’s, there’s no internet dating services or other easy ways of getting to know someone, so in a desperate attempt to find someone he can share his life with, he signs up on Video Rendezvous, a video dating service (yes, this was a real thing back then).
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/rent-a-pal-2020/
Before Annabelle, there was … Robert! And yes, we’re talking about a real doll that is (allegedly) cursed. We’re going way back to 1906 where a young boy named Robert Eugene Otto was given a cursed doll by an Bahamian servant as a birthday gift. The rumors say that she was treated badly by the Otto family, and hoped that the doll would give them misfortunes. And the story is pretty much a nothing-burger from there on. Robert got married in 1930 in France, and moved back to his childhood home in the United States with his wife where they spent the rest of their lives.
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/robert-2015/
Donald Koch (aka Don) and his pregnant wife Liz has decided to buy a fixer-upper in the suburbs. Believing this will be a perfect place to raise a family, Don takes his dog Cooper with him and starts renovating their new home while Liz stays back in Chicago. As the renovation work brings a few unpleasant surprises, it becomes evident that there’s something not quite right with the house…and when a sexy young woman called Sarah appears on the property, acting all seductive and insistent, Don gets more than a handful of problems to handle.
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/girl-on-the-third-floor-2019/
It’s apparently a regular sunny day in Los Angeles, where the random middle-aged guy Jack DeVries (Chris Mulkey) brutally robs a bank and storms off in a black Ferrari. He drives in full speed like a madman through the famous Echo Park, hits an old geezer in a wheelchair while he headbangs to some hair metal on the radio, and goes pretty much into full GTA-mode. His crazy adventure is quickly going towards an end when the police blocks the road, blows his car to flames, and… the guy walks out of the burning car and gets bullet-stormed by the police. He miraculously survives and…
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/the-hidden-1987/
Elvis Presley (Bruce Campbell) is alive, but far past his glory days, to put it mildly. He has become a bedridden old geezer, who rots away in a small nursery home somewhere in Texas, filled with bitterness, grief, lost identity, and can’t say one sentence without spewing sarcasm. To make it worse he has a cancerous growth on his willie. And how much worse can it get from here? No one thinks he’s the real Elvis. Because, hear this: Once upon a time Elvis had to retire from showbiz and pass the mic to the Elvis impersonator Sebastian Haff (Bruce Campbell again) when his hip went bye-bye. When Sebastian Haff died of an overdose, Elvis never got the chance to reclaim his identity. So here we are. Life is unfair.
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/bubba-ho-tep-2002/
Nathan Gardener and his family moves to his late father’s farm somewhere in rural New England, in the hopes of living a quiet life and escape the hustle and bustle of the city. Just when they start to settle in, a meteorite crashes into their yard which emits an otherworldly color (a color out of space). One of the children (Jack) is traumatized by the event, and seems to be affected in strange ways. He becomes obsessed with the well in the garden and claims he’s got a “friend” there. Strange flowers and plants starts growing, animals suffer grotesque mutations, and the Gardener family’s life transforms into a colorful nightmare.
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/color-out-of-space-2019/
Maya and her friend Dini are working at toll booths, and one night Maya is attacked by one of the drivers who appeared to recognize her: a man who claims he’s from a village called Harjosari, and he’s calling her by another name: Rahayu. Upon attacking her, the man is stopped and killed by the police, but the encounter leaves Maya with a ton of unanswered questions. Since her aunt, who raised her from a very young age, is dead and she’s got no other family to contact, she follows the inscription of an old photo which shows a young Maya with her parents, outside a large house which is supposed by be located somewhere in the Harjosari village.
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/impetigore-2019/
The film starts off at a burial ceremony with an upper-class family who’s lost their mother to a mysterious illness, and sets the eerie tone right off with Islamic chants and the feeling that there’s something wicked in the air. That same night, the family’s son, Tomi, receives an unexpected visit from the dead mother in a ghostly form, who knocks on his window and hypnotizes him to go out in his pajamas, while his sister Rita is witnessing the incident. Tomi goes to a fortune teller (who is wearing some really big sunglasses) who can tell through his tarot cards that Tomi’s life is full of darkness, and that the coffin his mother was buried in is suitable for the whole family, and that they are all in danger – and that he must defend himself with black magic.
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/satans-slave-1982/
Hey, take a look at this: An 80s teen slasher made by the director of Cannibal Holocaust himself. Wow, you don’t say… This has to be something else, right?
Well…
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/body-count-1986/
The third installment of The Conjuring franchise sets the focus on the young man Arne Cheyenne Johnson – a case that is most noteworthy for being the first murder case in US history where the defendant tried to plea not guilty due to being under control of demonic forces. And as soon as the Warrens meets with Arne’s lawyer who believes he has no chance to get a plea deal, Ed delivers his rather thought-provoking phrase “The court accepts the existence of God every time a witness swears to tell the truth. I think it’s about time they accept the existence of the Devil.” This is a real quote from Ed, and possibly the most rational thing he ever said.
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/the-conjuring-the-devil-made-me-do-it-2021/
In Raven’s End, Mortician Montgomery Dark manages an isolated and creepy mortuary all alone. After a recent funeral, that of a young boy, Montgomery gets an unexpected visitor. A young woman named Sam has noticed his “Help Wanted” sign outside of the mortuary, and practically demands an interview right away. He decides to give her a tour of the old, creepy place, and Sam shows an interest in the small coffin that belongs to the boy which Montgomery has just performed the funeral for. He starts telling Sam stories about some of the residents of the town, and the weird and unexpected ways they died.
https://horrorghouls.com/reviews/the-mortuary-collection-2019/
We’ve been working on adding some of our drawings on a Teepublic shop. It’s something we’ve had in mind for at least a couple years, but never got to do anything about it…until now! The designs feature illustrations we’d already created, and some artwork from our comics and game projects.
If you’re interested, you can check it out at: https://www.teepublic.com/user/wildsidecomix
The next episode of Bella Mortis Presents has been in the works for some time now, and it’s a story that will be split into two parts because it’s a rather lengthy one. Here’s a little preview.. and I would also like to show you how Vanja and I work together when it comes to the manuscript. She’s drawing sketched pages (sometimes rough and sometimes more detailed), and I draw from these. Sometimes we make some changes in the layout and text and such during the process. Take a look below 🙂
Die Hard Dracula
Die Hard Dracula. How can it even be possible to go wrong with a title like this?
I can smell a vampire from a mile away, says the most unrealistic Van Helsing ever with an empty blank stare, in which I can interpret as a glimpse of some self-awareness and the painful realization that he won’t be paid one single nickle for being stuck in this rabbit hole of a movie.
We see Dracula’s casket floating over the Transylvanian landscape in front of some schlocky green screen with the tune of “Ride Of The Valkyries”. Fully grown “actors” look straight into the camera and says Die Draculaaah… as if they were in a play in an elementary school. We see a young man, which assumingly is Jonathan Harker, who says while confronting Dracula: I’m an American … And we’re tough! Dracula looks more like Meat Loaf and acts like a mental lunatic who tries his best not to impersonate Emperor Palpatine. This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time, and when you thought The Room was the peak and Holy Grail of bad movies, you come across forgotten masterpieces like this.
Too bad they missed the opportunity to make the sequel DIE HARD DRACULA WITH A VENGEANCE.
C ME DANCE
Daddy … I’m so scared...
During the first half it looks like an amateurish indie drama made for YouTube with an emotional sob-story that no one could care less about. But you will never, ever in a million years imagine what happens next. And I’ll just leave it at that..
THE CONJURING 3
The trailer for The Conjuring 3 was finally released some days ago. A young kid named Arne Johnson is accused for killing a man in Connecticut, and Ed and Lorraine must convince the justice system that he was possessed by the devil in order to give him a fair trial, or something like that. Good luck.
This one is based on the “Devil Made Me Do it” case which, unlike the two first films, is not set in a haunted house scenario, nor directed by James Wan. Instead we have to trust on Michael Chaves who directed The Curse of La Llorona. He has some seriously big shoes to fill and also without the screenwriters from the first two films, there’s some reason to lower the expectations. I don’t hope the image of Lorraine in the thumbnail is a subtle warning. Just kidding.
An overall pretty decent trailer, though, and it at least looks like an entertaining ride with elements of crime, horror, fantasy, satanism and God knows what creature we see a glimpse of in the 1:43 mark.
A new episode of the short horror comic series Bella Mortis Presents has been published today! The title of this episode is The Sphinx, and it’s a (somewhat silly) story about two tourists who are interested in the mysteries of Ancient Egypt, but ends up getting more than they bargained for..
You can read it here: http://www.bellamortispresents.com/comics/thesphinx/
