Directed by: Charlie McDowell Starring: Jason Segel, Lily Collins, Jesse Plemons Go Horror Rating: B At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the film is definitely held together by a tight setting and solid cast. Segel seemed a little out of place from his typical acting zone and I wish he brought a little more aggression to the table, especially deeper into the movie. That's not to say he didn't deliver, as I thought he balanced his character's emotions well. Plemons is a satisfying actor to watch and did a great job playing a man who felt he was in control, despite being one of the hostages. Collins was good, too, but for some reason I wasn't overly empathetic for her, or the person she tried to portray. Still, she's likeable enough to earn a few points on the badass scale. The premise of the movie carried well for about an hour, but briskly abandoned itself when trying to web its way through class friction and relationship turmoil. The ending is a bit untidy for my liking. It felt like a quick, cold bolt of lightning that didn't leave any real shock, but injected just enough energy to make it worthwhile.

We're getting another entry in the 'Conversations with a Killer' series from director Joe Berlinger - The John Wayne Gacy Tapes. Netflix drops this 3-episode, limited series on April 20th. 'He dined with the powerful. He preyed on the vulnerable. Beneath a smiling exterior was the horrifying darkness of a sadistic serial killer.' “Serial killer John Wayne Gacy was an aspiring politician, beloved local contractor, and part-time clown-for-hire who murdered 33 young men between 1972 and 1976. The majority of his victims were found buried under his house, in the quiet northwest suburbs of Chicago. Fifty years later, DNA scientists are still trying to identify all of his victims, but thanks to 60 hours of unearthed audio between Gacy and his defense team, we have fresh perspective on the narcissistic mindset of the murderer and a deeper understanding of how he operated for so long with impunity. The second installment in an ongoing series from filmmaker Joe Berlinger (Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes), this three-part documentary also features new interviews with key participants – some of whom have never talked before, including gut-wrenching testimony from one of Gacy’s survivors – all in search of answers to a crucial question: How was a public figure like Gacy able to get away with murder for so long?”

Directed by: Robert Rippberger Starring: Booboo Stewart, Scarlett Sperduto, Nils Allen Stewart Go Horror Rating: C It seems I might be in the minority when I say the movie had me in the first bit, and lost traction closing out. I didn't mind the long-take dialogue and even though the conversation and script felt medium-well as opposed to medium-rare, the characters and small-town charm appealed to me. Max (Stewart) and Avery (Sperduto) had flow and I really liked their interactions. It almost felt like a found-footage movie and even though predictable, I found enjoyment waiting for the 'how' as far as what was coming next. Where the movie starts to crumble is when we get to the 'haunted house' that for some reason still has connected utilities. The rubbish on the walls and general decay of the house didn't increase the scariness of the adventure, it more or less made me feel like they were just at a drug dealer's place. Kudos for trying to create a new monster and a relatively unique idea surrounding it. I can't help but feel, though, that the insertion of Rudy (JonSteele), the tactics and process of the monster, and the awkward as hell way that Avery and her brother just sort of lurk and hang around the house was mundane and weak. We get an end result that suffices so at least the movie climbs back onto it's feet to conclude.

Directed by: Kerry Bellessa Starring: Michael Beach, Summer Bellessa, Anthony Ruivivar Go Horror Rating: C The scariest part of this movie was how infused religion was throughout. I mean, I guess that was the point, but damn did it feel forced. Jonah (Michael Beach) was convincing and played his part well but I had no real attachment to any other character. There were some genuinely unsettling parts to this movie and some of the religious aspects at play didn't fully turn me off, as they made sense for the story. Not sure if that's a compliment or not. I was certainly invested at first and glad I knocked this title off my list. It just sort of devolved into a bargain bin title by the time it wrapped.

There’s one word I haven’t been able to get out of my mind in the week since I finished Kitty Horrorshow’s masterpiece 'ANATOMY' - Betrayal Think about the times in your life where you are the most vulnerable. Maybe it’s when you’re in the shower, when you’re stoned on the couch, when you’re sharing intimate moments with a partner. For some of us it’s easy to let our guard down and allow ourselves to be vulnerable, for others it can be nearly impossible. For all of us, though, there’s a pretty obvious setting in which we are at our absolute peak of vulnerability, and that is asleep in the comfort of our own homes. Anywhere else is foreign, it takes us time to learn a new space and build that key familiarity, but in our own homes we feel like we can know, without a shadow of a doubt, that we can trust the walls around us to keep us safe. What happens when that home we leave our bodies to every night turns malicious? What happens when it betrays that trust? As much as it is a video game, ANATOMY is a vessel for pieces of spoken word recorded to tape, and then played back in this kitchen. True to the name, these tape recordings paint the house as a living organism with biology, systems and, of course, anatomy. You scour this house which is at once totally alien and yet eerily familiar, searching for more pieces to this narrative, and in the meantime this sense of betrayal grows and grows. I know how a house works. Of course I do. I’ve lived in one my whole life, and have visited countless more. I know what a house is, and this isn’t one. This isn’t where the bathroom goes. Garages aren’t supposed to be this big. This kitchen is too deep. It’s dark – painfully dark – and there’s not a single light switch to make it brighter. Who needs this many bedrooms anyways? This isn’t a house, no, this is a space not designed for me. At $2 and only 45 minutes in length, there is no recommendation glowing enough that I could give ANATOMY. It’s terrifying in a way that can only be experienced firsthand, and affecting in a way that’s kept it in the forefront of my mind nearly every waking minute since completing it.

It's always a good day when anything Half-Life related drops, and today is one of those days with a trailer for Half-Life: Alyx's new mod 'Levitation'! A collaboration between FMPONE and Corey Laddo, this VR mod has you exploring a levitating building, with some familiar characters (Russell and G-Man) back in the mix. The mod will be free if you own Half-Life: Alyx and should be available in the latter half of 2022, through Steam Workshop. Have a look at the trailer below!

Directed by: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett Starring: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette Go Horror Rating: B As someone who loves a good helping of cheese or bologna in their horror, I hope to see new Scream movies in theatres every year for the rest of time. In saying that, this release wasn't great, but was certainly delicious. The biggest piss-off was how many characters received upwards of 50,000 stab wounds and blunt force trauma, yet still managed to survive or stumble around long enough to receive mild medical attention. I also have to admit that the name-dropping of other films and using terms like "elevated horror' really drove me nuts. When you try that hard to earn scene points, it should, and does, do the opposite. It was a weird trade off where the script seemed to demand that the new cast emerge as trendy and edgy, rather than the older movies where it felt organic and nerdy. You want to be nerdy, not pompous. Campbell, Cox, and Arquette are all beauties. Back at it and keeping things on track. All noble efforts and they really stabilized the film. I have tons of faith in the new crew taking the reigns and keeping this series stabbin' along, but they surely benefited from having the OGs around. Tara, Mindy, and Sam (Ortega, Brown, Barrera) have bright futures in the franchise, and are likely to become a batch of complete badasses.

As you may or may not be aware, the crew over at Level 99 Games have launched a Kickstarter campaign for 'Dead by Daylight: The Board Game'. As of writing this, they've hit $700,000, more than doubling their initial goal. This is great news for them and horror fans alike because it seems the board game version will hold true to the video game. For those who don't know the drill, you have group of survivors who navigate a map, fixing generators to aid in their escape. You also have a killer who is actively hunting your team down and sabotaging the mission as you progress. It's a terrifying game that provides endless fun for you and your amigos. We can only hope the table-top version will be just as gnarly. The one downside to this release is that there won't be any licensed content. You won't be able to play using any characters from other horror franchises that Dead by Daylight has teamed up with. There's a standard edition and a collector's edition. A few big differences and a bit meatier a price point. Check out the Kickstarter page for all the info and back this game immediately!

I’m the perfect age to remember peak Slenderman hype. When the creepypasta first started getting big I was about 10 years old – the time when your mind first starts being truly susceptible to the darker side of imagination. Hushed whispers at sleepovers, telling stories about The Slenderman that we’d made up on the spot to scare each other, nightmares about a blank-faced predator, I was there for all of it. I remember scouring YouTube for “Top 10 Creepypastas” videos on the family computer, skimming through to find where Slenderman would rank, and listening only to that segment, gleaning whatever information I could. Everything else in that scene was goofy, stupid, but this, this was something special. In a way, when I booted up Slender: The Arrival, I think I was hoping it would rekindle some of that initial spark, or at least remind me why this character and mythos held such an appeal for myself and so many others. Instead, what I got was an experience so shoddy, so lazily constructed, that not only have I wasted my time, but I’ve tarnished those memories irrevocably. Slender: The Arrival is not a scary video game. That’s not a requirement for horror, mind you, some of my all-time favorites in the genre never actively “scare” me. The problem is that this game thinks it’s scary. In fact, I don’t know if I’ve ever played a game that thinks so highly of its own execution, and that so confidently runs itself into a brick wall repeatedly. While moments and ideas here inspire some hope, they just leave me wishing for a completely different game to come sweep me away and rescue me from the tedium of this one. One excellent example of this is the first “main” level: The Eight Pages. An retooling of the first game’s single idea, there’s a lot of potential here for a fun level, and with the randomizing forest locations every time, I thought this would lead to some really tense exploration a-la Blair Witch. The problem is, you very quickly remember that Slenderman is not scary. In fact, after about 5 minutes playing this game, I started to question how we ever managed to find this guy scary to begin with. He’s hardly imposing, standing barely a foot taller than our protagonist, and when you have 7/8 of the required pages to move on, it becomes nothing but infuriating to have him continuously stand in the only paths you haven’t tried. The random generation very quickly turns into a curse, as I found myself repeatedly killing myself intentionally in hopes of getting the pages to spawn in a layout that didn’t take me 20+ minutes to navigate. The next level, Into the Abyss, is a lot more tolerable, and adds another twist that certainly makes the mechanics more interesting, but once again I found myself more frustrated than anything with the way this game loves to use its randomization. It becomes all the more glaring once moved into an indoor environment, and by the end of it I was glad to be done with these segments. From here the game takes a much more linear roller-coaster approach to its story, and while I think the game is worse for it, by that point I was glad that I wasn’t going to have to keep repeating content. It’s here where the game’s writing and storytelling issues come into full light, however. All through the game you’re picking up (and maybe even reading!) notes left by characters whose names I couldn’t be bothered to learn. As supplementary lore, they were fine enough, but when I later realized this was the game’s excuse for a plot, the laughable grammar mistakes, and inhuman “dialogue” became far less excusable. Some of it is so bad that I could almost see it being a commentary on the amateurish nature of the creepypasta it came from, but it’s just too self-serious for me to give that theory much credibility, and the way the game’s “plot” relies on it is just too convoluted to be such a direct parody. I did not enjoy my time playing Slender: The Arrival. I don’t think it’s completely worthless, and there are certainly ideas to be gleaned here and there, but at the end of the day there’s nothing here I would say is worth trudging through the garbage to seek for. I don’t miss the Slenderman craze and, thanks to this game, I’m kinda glad that he’s gone.

A little late with this one but we're excited nonetheless. The fine folks over at Housemarque dropped a free update called Returnal: Ascension on March 22nd. In this update there are 2 new modes: main game co-op, and the Tower of Sisyphus, a new endless mode. From Housemarque: PATCH NOTES: Co-op: Combine forces with a second Selene Tower of Sisyphus: Endless mode, where Selene is drawn to climb the Tower and solve its mysteries, and the player is chasing the highest score Bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements NEW FEATURES: Co-op - Using the Chronosis portal lets you summon a second Selene from another timeline, so now you can combine forces with a friend and face the dangers of Atropos together. You have the choice of joining or hosting a public session, or alternatively hosting a private session. Progression is tied to the host, but the client players who join a session will be able to keep some of the process they make - such as collecting logs and xenoglyphs - and they’re able to level up their Scout Rank based on how many players they help by joining a session. In co-op mode the world of Atropos has been rebalanced, so Returnal remains the treacherous experience you know and love. If you haven't played Returnal yet, get on it! Another great game from a great developer, and this update makes it that much more enjoyable.