Spooky Movie International Horror Film Festiva

THE 11th ANNUAL SPOOKY MOVIE INTERNATIONAL HORROR FILM FESTIVAL  October 5-9, 2016 For ten years, October has belonged to the Spooky Movie International Horror Film Festival. The festival that brought the DC area such films as THE BABADOOK, EXISTS, TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL, A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT, HE NEVER DIED, HOUSEBOUND, and THE FINAL GIRLS–-holds its 11th annual event […]

Originally entitled “The Shower” when I reviewed it at Spooky Movie Festival 2014, this off-kilter outbreak thriller from first-time feature writer/director Alex Drummond comes across with the type of sardonic humor that treads the line between comedy and horror (more often catering to the former). A more than serviceable genre crossover in the vein of “Shaun of the Dead”, […]

A good old-fashioned, creaky stairs, don’t-go-in-the-basement style haunted house flick, the New Zealand-set “Housebound” is exactly the type of genre film that I’ve been sorely missing over the last several years. Recent heavy-hitters like “The Conjuring” and “Oculus” certainly served up more than their share of scares, sure, but there’s something especially menacing about the unvarnished look […]

Though it’s more a low-key psychological drain-circler than horror movie, Australian director Stuart Simpson’s “Chocolate Strawberry Vanilla” is certainly one of the darker, more unusual entries at this year’s Spooky Movie Film Festival (playing tonight at AFI Silver). Glenn Maynard plays the reclusive, socially awkward Warren Thompson, an ice cream vendor who’s so obsessed with his favorite […]

The apparition in “Suburban Gothic” looks like something that David Lynch might have cooked up on the budget of a sock puppet show. Following 2012’s delightfully acidic coming-of-age-cum-horror tale “Excision” with this more deliberately cheeky flick that is several shades lighter than its pitch-black predecessor, director Richard Bates, Jr.’s vision is one part Coscarellian fever dream and one […]

Well, the title kind of says it all. But for all its ambition as a schlocky drive-in exploitation flick/homage to author H.P. Lovecraft, “Call Girl of Cthulhu” only periodically amuses on the level to which it aspires. Feeling protracted even at a reasonable 93 minutes, the story follows virgin Carter (David Phillip Carollo), an artist […]