Cinematic candy corn
With Halloween landing on a Wednesday this week, you might have found yourself in a dilemma: You spent the entire Halloweekend gorging yourself on spooks and scares, and now with the actual day fast approaching you have nothing left to watch. This is a deeply disturbing situation. What happens if you go a Halloween night without watching a bunch of horror movies? No one knows. It’s never happened.
Halloween certainly isn’t the time to tempt fate, so let’s make this right. You’ve burnt through the classics and watched the favorites out of your collection. You’re not about to go to the theater on a Wednesday night. You got work in the morning, so you need to stream as many movies as humanly possible as soon as your ass hits the couch and that Red Baron pizza gets crispy in the oven.
And boy are you in luck, because as Flixist’s self-appointed Garbage Goblin, I have a spattering of recently reviewed VOD junkfood ready to fill the void that candy corn can’t quite reach.
If you want gross, you’ve got it in The Night of the Virgin. One young man thinks he’s about to get lucky with an older woman on New Year’s Eve and finally lose his virginity, but his night of magic becomes one of misery. He drinks some menstrual blood (as you do) and unwittingly sets in motion a demonic ritual with some grotesque ramifications. Not one for the squeamish.
Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich
This might be the best Puppet Master movie to watch since the first one. It’s funny, bloody, and moves like a whip. Every puppet gets a cool, grisly kill with some very over-the-top effects. It’s also a great place to jump in if you’ve never seen a film from the series before.
A bit more concept than execution, Blessed Are the Children sees a hateful religious cabal like that of the Westboro Baptists pursuing a young woman who just terminated a pregnancy, and they’ll stop at nothing to make her pay for her sins. Them creepy-ass baby masks are a highlight.
If you ever listened to the Halloween theme and thought, “Yeah, this could definitely use some guitar riffs,” then Johnny Gruesome is for you. This is one for cracking some Buds and breaking in that old Metallica T-shirt with tears and stains in all the right places. Fun and full of metal cheese, it’s worth the hangover.
Nothing says party like pizza, and nothing says Halloween like werewolves, witches, ghosts, and a portal to hell all baked into one buttery crust. A really funny horror comedy of 80’s pastiche full of familiar faces and memorable gags, Slice delivers.
For some reason it’s impossible to talk about this movie without making pizza delivery puns. Help me.
With a title like Apocalypse Rising, you’d expect a generic snore-fest well worth skipping, but holy shit would you be wrong. Do you want to see the birth of the zombie baby Jesus who then leads a zombie army to destroy the world? Yeah, you do. With a bloody nun, a woman who decapitates herself with a broadsword, and an alien race landing on earth and announcing by throwing horns and sticking out their tongues that “It’s time to procreate!” calling this movie just absurd is willfully underselling it. It’s a spectacle. It’s a treat. It’s pure sugar in your veins. It’s the exact sort of zero-nutrition candy that would have ruined your teeth as a kid, but now it can ruin your brain as an adult. Hooray!
I hope these can help you survive yet another Halloween, because the last thing you want to do is go to bed early, wake up on the morning of November 1st, and realize you’re old and lame and all your best years are now behind you. I couldn’t imagine a greater horror in all the world.
