‘Mads’
David Moreau’s spectacular single-shot thriller is set at the beginning of the end of the world. It begins as a young woman violently stabs herself in a car driven by Romain (Milton Riche, excellent). It continues as Romain’s girlfriend, Anais (Laurie Pavy, fearless and unhinged), becomes infected with an unexplained affliction that turns her into a feral maniac. And it ends with a despairing scene inside an elevator that — actually, I’ll stop there, because to say more would ruin the perspective-shifting twists that vault this singular French film down its deranged and gruesome path.
As he showed in his assaultive home invasion film “Them,” Moreau is an assured writer and propulsive director. Philip Lozano’s disorienting cinematography, along with pulsing sounds and foreboding voice-overs, together have a grip that doesn’t let up. For fans of the New French Extremity who want to feel like it’s 2000 all over again, this nihilistic film is a must-see.
‘The Birthday’
Eugenio Mira’s nightmarish farce premiered at the Sitges International Film Festival in 2004 but was never shown in theaters after making the festival rounds. It’s now streaming for the first time after building a following when a bootleg copy was uploaded to YouTube. Jordan Peele considers it “a cinematic marvel,” according to the film’s press notes.
I’m including it here not because it’s a horror film in any traditional sense; the blood bath stuff doesn’t arrive until late. What it does have is Corey Feldman giving an all-out, darkly comedic performance that’s one of his best.
The film takes place in real time one night in 1987 at a Baltimore hotel, where a nebbish young man named Norman (Feldman) attends a lavish birthday party for his girlfriend’s father. What Norman doesn’t know is that he’s actually among members of a sect who are awaiting the birth of their lord. Or so says one of the self-appointed vigilantes who tries to stop it.
Being stuck at a party with too-quirky characters and an elliptical script might get tiresome, and quickly, for some viewers. (I admired the film’s gumption more than enjoyed its over-the-top fantasy.) But for fans of whackadoodle comedy and sinister absurdism, and for Corey Feldman completists, “The Birthday” is a party worth crashing.
‘MaXXXine’
With this grisly but strikingly feminist homage to grindhouse, the writer-director Ti West closes the book on his ambitious trilogy about desperate but strong-willed women named Pearl and Maxine, all played by that gut-puncher Mia Goth.
The film is set in Los Angeles in 1985, as the so-called satanic panic rattles pop culture and the bloodthirsty Night Stalker has the city on edge. Goth plays Maxine Minx, a young porn actress who wants to be famous if only her path toward stardom wasn’t being thwarted at every turn by nosy cops and by an assortment of creepy guys on her tail, including a mystery man who wears black gloves, one of the film’s many giallo touches that would make Dario Argento swoon. I found myself cheering Maxine as she clawed her way to the top with blood caked under her fingernails, as if she were a prize fighter.
As West demonstrated in the trilogy’s previous films, “X” and “Pearl,” he is a pastiche wizard, and here he nails the period looks and vibes of ‘80s B-movie horror. That’s what I loved most about this film: It’s a sleazy love letter to horror fandom, to go-for-broke B-movie horror movie actresses and to Gen X video store geeks like me who would have scooped up any VHS tape that boasted having someone named Maxine Minx in a starring role.
‘Don’t Move’
I giggled my way through almost all of this survival thriller about a killer (Finn Wittrock) who injects a woman (Kelsey Asbille) he meets in the wilderness with a relaxant that gives her 20 minutes to run before her body shuts down. I couldn’t help it. The film is just too impossible to swallow — strange, considering that one of its producers is Sam Raimi, whose “Evil Dead” is an impossible-to-ignore horror landmark.
Why recommend it? Because despite a preposterous script by TJ Cimfel and David White, the directors Adam Schindler and Brian Netto kept me hooked with a nifty gimmick and a compelling enough story about a controlling man and the woman whose only recourse she has against him is her blank stare. Asbille’s eyes and Wittrock’s convincing creepiness do wonders as their characters get put through catastrophe after catastrophe, including a house fire, raging waters, hand-to-hand combat and, most cringe-worthy of all, shared heartbreak. This is the right movie to watch when all you want to do is crack open some White Claws and suspend disbelief.
‘Time Cut’
Hannah MacPherson’s time-traveling slasher film is good gateway horror for curious teenagers and for Gen Z-ers who are feeling nostalgia for the 2000s and the “Halloween: Resurrection”-era fare that helped define it.
It’s 2024, and the high schooler Lucy (Madison Bailey) is looking forward to being a NASA intern. She’s an only child, not by her parents’ choice but because her sister, Summer (Antonia Gentry), was killed in 2003, before Lucy was born. When Lucy comes across some kind of time machine — stay with me — she’s transported back to the Hilary Duff days and meets Summer. Can Lucy prevent her sister’s murder? Or will she upend the time-space continuum?
The film shares a sensibility with “Totally Killer,” a recent time-traveling horror comedy that also bounces with bubble gum energy. But “Time Cut” approaches life and death — and, in a surprising twist, pre-marriage-equality queerness — with real earnestness, an approach to horror storytelling that its young target audience will embrace more than I did.
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