By Erik Piepenburg
This month’s picks feature a zombie romance, a drug trial from hell and deathly prehistoric evil.
‘Lisa Frankenstein’
Lisa is a lot like I was in 1989: She lives with her middle-class family in the suburbs, loves staying up late to watch horror movies and has a crush on a cute boy with bangs.
What Lisa (a biting Kathryn Newton) has that I didn’t back then is a boyfriend, played here by Cole Sprouse with dreamy bad-boy appeal. Sure, he’s from the 19th century. Yes he has a too-quick temper and his tears smell “like a hot toilet at a carnival.” But he’s a devoted protector who listens well and never talks, and who wouldn’t want a boy like that, even if he is undead?
That’s the playful setup to Zelda Williams’ big-hearted, “Pretty in Pink”-meets-“Re-Animator” dark comedy. With snark and whimsy, Williams and screenwriter Diablo Cody (“Jennifer’s Body”) put a playfully macabre spin on the Frankenstein legend that doubles as a subversive exploration of the universal desire to be loved and understood. Add in a soundtrack that includes the Violent Femmes and the Chameleons, and this cheerfully twisted film is one heck of a Gen Xer’s dream stream. (Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.)
‘Double Blind’
For his feature debut, Irish director Ian Hunt-Duffy starts with a reliable horror convention: He puts a bunch of strangers in a room, introduces a monstrous premise, turns the stakes up to 11 and lets the devil take over. The result is a tense, 90-minute killer-thriller of David Cronenberg-style body horror and science fiction dystopia.
Claire (Millie Brady) volunteers at an antiseptic, bunkerlike clinic for what appears to be a routine pharmaceutical trial with a group of other young people who look like they’ve put their bodies on the line for money this way before. The pill-popping goes normally until insomnia starts to set in, and the group learns that one of the medicine’s side effects is death. If you fall asleep, you die. As paranoia sets in and the building goes under lockdown, the assembled guinea pigs are left to fend off both sleep and one another. Hunt-Duffy and screenwriter Darach McGarrigle maintain a propulsive pace that did for me what it did not for the characters: keep me wide-awake. (Stream it on Tubi.)
‘Out of Darkness’
This year, I’ve watched horror films that take place in 19th-century America (“Thine Ears Shall Bleed”), 18th-century Austria (“The Devil’s Bath”) and many other eras. But I’ve never been so transported as I was watching Andrew Cumming’s debut feature: It’s set some 45,000 years ago on desolate stretches of the Scottish Highlands. In a curveball that will make language nerds weep in ecstasy, the script is written in a fictional prehistoric language.
The survival story is straight out of “The Hills Have Eyes”: A group of humans, including a leader (Chuku Modu), his young son (Luna Mwezi) and a young woman (Safia Oakley-Green), are menaced by an unseen force that threatens their survival as it dwindles their tribe one by one. Cumming and his cinematographer, Ben Fordesman, are more invested in atmosphere than plot, and it pays off. Vast vistas, shadow-casting flames and wind-whipped faces become the villains we do see. Too bad a twist ends the film on a strangely syrupy note. (Stream it on Paramount+.)
‘Starve Acre’
Grief looks like a wild-eyed hare in this chilling folk horror drama from writer-director Daniel Kokotajlo.
It’s the 1970s, and at their remote farmhouse in the British countryside, Richard (Matt Smith) and his wife, Juliette (Morfydd Clark), mourn the unexpected death of their young son, Owen (Arthur Shaw). Before the boy died, he told his mother he’d been hearing whispers from a demonic entity named Jack.
Richard, an archaeologist, is familiar with the entity too, having heard about it from his father, who was obsessed with local mythologies and the summoning and sacrifice required of them. When a dead rabbit-creature that Richard brings home slowly comes back to life, the couple make peace with it and with other sinister omens in order to speed their path to healing.
Kokotajlo’s stark but tender meditation on death calls to mind “Lamb,” “Lord of Misrule” and other recent folk horror films about parents and grief. But Kokotajlo, backed by his cinematographer, Adam Scarth, is assured in crafting a sense of despair that doesn’t retread familiar terrain. Matthew Herbert’s beautifully dissonant score deserves star billing. (Rent or buy it on major platforms.)
‘Doctor Jekyll’
Fans of Hammer, the British studio known for monster melodramas with Peter Cushing (“The Mummy”) and Christopher Lee (“Dracula”), are in for a treat, perhaps, with Joe Stephenson’s new film. A Hammer production, it has many of the hallmarks that made the studio a camp delight: It’s set at a remote estate where a wealthy, eccentric doctor stalks the halls and freaks out her young, naive new assistant (a perfectly mousy Scott Chambers).
What sets this film apart in the Hammer filmography is that it’s an intentional dark comedy with a queer sensibility. Nina Jekyll, the evil title doctor, is played by comedian Eddie Izzard, who, with a bright red lip and racks of elegant costumes, upends gender in the film’s 1886 source material, Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” (Izzard came out as transgender in 1985.)
The film isn’t all that scary, so if you’re in the mood for a slightly creepy, mildly amusing twist on the Jekyll-and-Hyde story, this is your pick. For Izzard fans, the film is a must: As the story (too slowly) crawls toward its explanation of what drives the monster within, Izzard casts a bewitching spell that keeps the film thrumming. (Rent or buy it on major platforms.)
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