If you thought that ‘the bosk’ of the title related to a forest dwelling monster, well you’d be wrong; the dictionary definition is a small, wooded area or thicket. And believe me, you’re going to get very familiar with the tiny piece of the Los Angeles outdoors which features heavily in Lujan’s movie.
Kim (Taylor Kilgore – fab surname and like all of the cast Lujan regulars) and her partner Erin (Chris Ivan) are driving in the mountains, far from anywhere, when their car breaks down. Erin volunteers to walk back to a gas station they passed on the way, leaving Kim alone in the car; sadly Erin doesn’t make it to his destination. After finding a doll dressed in indigenous Indian clothes he’s offed by an unseen assailant.
Back at the car, a concerned Kim is attacked, chased and later captured by a woman wearing the same outfit, although life sized. The woman is also a cannibal (Tatum Wesloski – she’s credited as ‘The Cannibal’) who's already chowed down on dead Erin, and is now sizing up Kim as the next course.
And that, my friends, is about it. Around 50 minutes of the movie is spent in the ‘bosk’ of the title before Kim makes a break and finds a cabin in the woods (the exterior being a dodgy CGI setup, the interior a hastily constructed set). There’s no explanation for the cannibal’s appearance in traditional clothing or her dietary choices (apart from something about being confined within old sacred ground) and she only seems to exist because the movie needs someone murderous.
But you know what? I kind of liked The Bosk; it’s a nod to 1980s backwoods cheapies (like Fred Olen Ray’s Scalps from 1983, which this somewhat resembles, or even that movie’s inspiration, 1971’s Blood Shack from Ray Dennis Steckler). “Haven’t you ever seen Wrong Turn?” Kim warns Erin as he’s about to go for help. Well yes I have, but I’d rather watch The Bosk.
The first half an hour of this slender 78 minute movie is spent establishing the characters of the group, which as well as Simon – the kind of guy who wants to keep the camera rolling no matter how much peril his team are in - includes “265 pounds of exorcist” Dalton (Halem Medina), camera person Scooter (er, Scooter Cooper), horny as hell Bri (Lindsay Foster) with an OnlyFans side hustle, and historian Serena (Micah Leonard). But it’s eventually clear that the genie does not actually need to be out of the bottle for Rabisu to possess the gang, one at a time, turning them into demonic killers while messing with the broadcast image; oh and locking all the doors.
There is, predictably, a lot of screaming, much shouting at each other as nerves fray, and some surprisingly effective practical gore as Rabisu works his magic. Rabisu: Curse of the Demon distinguishes itself from similar movies of this ilk by some good performances, creepy effects and a well-developed sense of claustrophobia. It’s all nonsense of course, but quite watchable.
Sort of slacker Brad (Michael Kunicki) has a piece of unexpected good news when a long lost uncle dies and leaves both he and his wife, hairdresser Julia (Nena Martins) a run down house. Excitable Brad can’t wait to start working on the fixer upper, and while Julia is happy to see the back of their poky apartment, the new gaff is a lot.
It’s also got an evil eye daubed on a door, which leads to a secret room containing the statue of an ancient fertility god. The find obsesses Brad until he eventually goes all Jack Torrance on Julia, becomes extremely potty mouthed and starts offing their friends and Julia’s clients.
Yellow Eyes certainly looks the part; there’s that woozy colour palette, some very odd little set pieces and an inventive score by Brett Detar which occasionally pokes its nose in where it’s not necessary. But Korman’s film is a relatively short one with a lot to get through, meaning that narratively it shoehorns stuff in before you’ve had the chance to process – or more accurately question – what went before; basically the whole thing’s a bit of a mess. And the Jack Torrance reference extends to Martins’s Wendy like performance as an uber tolerant wife who takes an age for the ‘oh-my-goodness-hubby’s-a-nut-job’ penny to drop, leading her to shout things like “I need a fucking exorcist!”. Don’t we all dear.
But after nine episodes of the show, in which phenomena such as sasquatch sightings, alien abductions, werewolves and haunted theatres were covered, ably assisted by her sort of boyfriend Cameron (Talen Hutchinson), Roberta became gradually more distracted and unhealthy, claiming that she was being stalked; and at some point vanished.
Ellen is unable to believe that her sister is dead, obsessively rewatching the episodes for clues to Roberta’s disappearance. And it’s the tapes that begin to provide clues; as we watch Roberta grow more distant, we also see signs of shadowy figures in the periphery and in one episode, maybe an actual ghost (genre legend Dee Wallace doing her spooky thing).
Although the denouement gets a little sketchy, for the most part I really liked this ambitious mashup of relationship comedy (Gaines and Hutchinson make a cute couple), send up of old video shows, and excellent reportage from the far-flung corners of Georgia. Rowe’s other 2026 movie, It Wants Nightmares, also shows promise.
Now I’m not a joystick waggler (ahem), so it was news to me that a game had been introduced to the market back in 2022 called ‘The Mortuary Assistant’, a sort of first person thing created by Brian Clarke, in which you are a medical professional balancing the embalming of dead bodies with battling demons.
Clarke also wrote the script for this adaptation, which follows the storyline of the game fairly closely. Rebecca Owens (Willa Holland, who older readers may remember from the TV show The OC) is in the final stages of her training to qualify as an assistant to Raymond Delver (Paul Sparks), owner of the River Fields Mortuary. Rebecca comes across as pretty uptight, explained by the fact that she’s one year clean from a drug habit but in danger of slipping due to the constant memory of a family trauma.
Delver is supportive but odd, and Owens is keen to please, so when she’s contacted by him to operate the night shift at the mortuary (something Delver usually handles) she accepts the job, which is when things go decidedly pear shaped. For demons stalk her workplace; some of them seem real and others remain in her head, but it’s clear that something is dislodging Rebecca’s mind (not that it needs much help) as she’s drawn into an ancient ritual, the details of which Raymond seems to know intimately.
First off, The Mortuary Assistant looks great; a colour palette of blues and greys and some clever lighting make everything look dreamlike. Holland excels as the troubled assistant, her glacial look thinly disguising what’s going on underneath. The problems come with the story itself. In the game the unfolding of events arguably made more sense, but Clarke’s script avoids excess exposition making things rather muddled. Ultimately it doesn’t matter really as the movie can be experienced as a mood piece in itself. I really liked this; the combination of real and imagined terror, combined with the whole horrendous setup of the embalming process, makes it a creepy watch.
A sort of hotchpotch of 1987’s The Curse, a smattering of John Frankenheimer’s Prophecy from 1979 and, more recently, 2019’s Color Out of Space, the brothers Paris’s debut feature has a family heading out deep into the country when heavily pregnant mum Jules (Lilith Mesidor) inherits a house from a distant relative. Husband Matt (Danny Fehsenfeld), a fairly reprehensible corporate shark type, sees it as a flip investment opportunity, but Jules is an organic artist, viewing the place as a chance to establish herself.
Daughter Betsy (Shea Vaughan-Gabor), whose recent MS diagnosis has limited her ability and made her decidedly sharp of tongue, makes up the family; they’re all slightly ill at ease with each other, and that’s about to get a lot worse. For the ground on which their new homes stands is polluted, as a result of nefarious activities by GM company Tomsanco (a flashback shows the devastating effects of Jules’s ancestors eating some of the infected crops); work on the land uncovers remnants of the plant, still carrying its lethal properties, which Jules incorporates into one of her paintings. Let the gloop ensue.
One of the surprising things about Dead Bloom is its infrequent but strong sequences of practical gore, as those in contact with the fruit mutate. We get face melting, decapitations and even a castration; the fluids run fast and furious, even if some rather scrappy editing (cuts?) dilutes impact. Elsewhere the story takes in corporate greed, race and class distinctions and plain old family feuding, narrative strands often going nowhere: and the cast take it pretty seriously even when the F/X team lay it on a bit thick. A bit of a mess then but not unenjoyable and at times rather ick - in a good way.
Sadly that’s all it has going for it. The movie’s rather grand title disguises a decidedly thinner setup; a group of ghost hunters, broadcasting a show called ‘The Otherside’, investigate Lockwood House, a long abandoned place made notorious as the location of the serial killer Lester Morgan. Morgan’s MO was to dress as a clown (how original), abduct and murder young women; Lockwood was also where he was finally tracked down by the police and killed.
Hoping to make contact with Morgan, the ghost hunting team comprise mean Tony (Andrew Thomas), lead hunter Amy (Logan Wallace) and assistants Kate (Cashmere Moniqué) and Brad (Stuart Maxheimer), the latter monitoring things in a nearby van and swearing like the proverbial F-trooper.
There is, as you might expect, a lot of wandering around as the team search in vain for things that go bump in the night, and bring out the usual tools to aid communion with Morgan’s ghost, namely a Ouija board, a spirit box and, er, a polaroid camera. About seven minutes before the end of the movie things hot up a bit and there’s some rubbish gore to wake you up (including a scene where someone’s head gets sawn off in about seven seconds; some kind of record).
This is pretty terrible; I started counting how many times the word ‘fuck’ was uttered (a lot) but even that got tedious. Not good at all.
It’s something that the town’s Mayor Bloomburg (Yevgeny Jack Berner) wants to expand on; Carpenter Falls already has a museum dedicated to Marilyn Lee Miller (Aimee Rolfson) but the Mayor wants to go bigger. There’s also an enduring fascination with Colin Miller, the killer who, as a boy back in 1973 poisoned the family with whom he was living, with only little Logan managing to avoid the rat poison laced chilli that did for the others. Spared by Colin, the killer fled and remained in hiding.
Fast forward to 1997 and a grown up Logan; now a cop but still in Carpenter Falls, he has to endure the town’s fascination with the person who took the lives of his family. Meanwhile the local VHS emporium, Vortex Video, does a brisk trade in renting out his mother’s films, particularly at Halloween. The shop is owned by Sybil (Dee Wallace, who at one point recommends The Howling to an undecided punter – arf) and co-run by her granddaughter Quinn (Spooky Spring). Quinn clearly isn’t a natural joiner iner, and spends her days pining for more than friend Max (Leah Voysey) who skipped town without telling her.
But Max’s return isn’t the only Carpenter Falls homecoming; someone else has also arrived, who starts bumping off the town’s residents. Is it Colin, back to finish his work, or is there someone else with a killer instinct?
Despite its zippy pace, likeable characters and a great sense of the 1990s in its VCR heyday, there’s a sense of a bit of a missed opportunity with The Boy From Below. Its serial killer and domestic drama strands don’t really coalesce, and the movie misses the chance to play whodunit with the identity of the killer. Jones loads his movie with genre talent; as well as Wallace Tommy Lee Wallace turns up as a TV horror host and Felicia Rose is a vocal member of the town. It’s got some neat practical effects (although the Art the Clown like ability to squish heads with one blow is a little far fetched) and the parodies of films showing on TV raises a smile. It’s not meant to be taken that seriously, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to put the directorial effort in.
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