Who Invited Them | Halloween 2022

Shudder usually has a lot of original movies this time of year. Some are good, some are not so good. Today, I’m going to take a look at Who Invited Them to see if we should invite them.

Adam (Ryan Hansen) and Margo (Melissa Tang) have bought a new house in the Hollywood Hills. Of course, they throw a lavish housewarming party, inviting all of their friends and coworkers and bosses. As the party simmers down for the night, one couple sticks around much longer than the other guests. Realizing that neither of them invited the mysterious couple, Adam and Margo try to get them to leave. But when it turns out that Tom (Timothy Granaderos) and Sasha (Perry Mattfeld) are the neighbors, the homeowners decide to get to know them better and spend the evening drinking and laughing and talking and snorting coke. When the evening starts getting really weird, Adam and Margo begin to suspect that their neighbors aren’t who they say they are. If only they knew the truth behind the “couple.”

Who Invited Them is a weird movie. For a majority of the runtime, nothing happens. I kept waiting for a jump scare or one of the couples to break and kill the other. However, all we get is a lot of talking. Sure, the movie is pretty suspenseful but it takes a very long time to get to the pay off.

My other issue is that there are a lot of questions at the end of the movie. They aren’t good questions like “Did they get away with it” or “What happens next?” Instead, they are questions like “What was the point of this character” and “What happened to everyone else?” There just isn’t a lot of resolution to be had here. Maybe the original plan was to make the movie longer or maybe they plan on having a sequel. As a movie on it’s own, though? It isn’t satisfying enough to justify watching it, which makes me sad because I enjoyed the suspense. But you can’t have a movie that is all suspense and no payoff.

Unless you literally have nothing else to watch, I would recommend staying away from Who Invited Them. All it is going to do is make you long for a better movie.

Flux Gourmet | Halloween 2022

I have no idea what I just watched. How the hell am I going to review this……

Flux Gourmet is the story of a culinary sonic art collective during their recent residency. The trio consists of the leader: Elle (Fatima Mohamed), and the two technical performers: Lamina (Ariane Labed) and Billy (Asa Butterfield). Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie) runs the residency program and tries to help the group improve their performance. The whole thing is being documented by journalist Stones (Makis Papadimitriou), who is having a problem with flatulence.

So, despite being listed as a horror movie, I definitely would not classify it as horror. There were a few scenes that were a little on the gross side but there isn’t anything that happens that would make it horror. Occasionally, the group is attacked by a competing group that lost out on the residency. But they don’t really attack any of the people until the very end. It’s only equipment that is attacked.

To be completely honest, I did not understand the point of the film at all. Neither did my husband. I was waiting for some sort of twist where maybe Jan was actually murdering the people she picked for the residency or Elle was going to cook one of the audience members or something. I kept waiting for something, anything, to happen and nothing did. All that happened was a man had a lot of intestinal distress and talked a lot about wanting to fart but not wanting anyone to hear his farts. Yes, the movie focuses on farts way too much.

Should you watch Flux Gourmet? Well, it’s currently available on Shudder. I don’t know that I can say not to watch it because I’m sure some of you will be curious about this weird thing after my mess of a review. However, I will say - if you decide to watch Flux Gourmet, try to go in with an open mind. Oh, and if you figure out the point of the movie, can you please tell me? I’d really like to know what the goal was.

Horror Noire | 2021 Halloween Movies

Anthology series, especially horror anthology series, vary a lot. There are way too many terrible horror anthologies out there. Thankfully, the few black horror anthology series I have seen have been amazing. Let’s look at the latest one.

Horror Noire is a six-story anthology show on Shudder. “The Lake” stars Lucifer’s Leslie-Ann Brandt as a woman who moves into a lakeside house. She is told not to swim in the lake but she doesn’t listen. “Brand of Evil” gives us Brandon Mychal Smith as an artist commissioned to draw some mystical brand artwork for a mysterious client. “Bride Before You” is the story of a new bride (Lenora Crichlow) tasked with giving her husband a son. When she has difficulties conceiving, she turns to a magical old woman. “Fugue State” has Malcolm Barrett becoming a victim of a cult. “Daddy” turns a insecure father (Luke James) against himself. “Sundown” twists racist sundown towns into the supernatural.

These are all amazing stories. I don’t think there was one that I didn’t enjoy. My favorites were “Sundown,” “Brand of Evil,” and “Bride Before You.” I love that all of these stories took stereotypical black issues and twisted them into something new. Yes, for the most part, they all still held onto their racist core but they took that history and gave it a supernatural life.

I absolutely recommend watching Horror Noire. The show definitely needs more eyes on it. And since each story is only about 20 minutes long, if you don’t like one particular story, another will be starting soon!

The Medium | 2021 Halloween Movies

Shudder hasn’t had a lot of new releases this year. The first one was V/H/S/94. This time, they have given us the Thai film The Medium. Let’s see if Shudder handles foreign films better than Netflix.

Nim (Sawanee Utoomma) is a shaman in the Isan region of Thailand. When she attends her brother-in-law’s funeral, she finds her niece, Mink (Narilya Gulmongkolpech), acting strangely. Even though Mink’s mother/Nim’s sister, Noi (Sirani Yankittikan), doesn’t want anything to do with shamans, she needs Nim’s help to cure Mink. Is it really the goddess Ba Yan calling Mink to the shaman life or is it something more sinister?

When I make lists of movies I’m going to review, I try to do as little reading on the movie itself as possible. I look up when it is coming out and where I can watch it. So when The Medium started and it looked a lot like an actual documentary, I thought I messed up. (Not that I am averse to documentaries, I watch a lot of them. It’s just not the Halloween vibe I’m going for with these reviews.) But, no, this isn’t a documentary. It is a really, really good documentary-style. Totally had me fooled.

Thanks to the pseudo-documentary style, I was completely pulled into the movie at the beginning. I cared a lot about Nim and I thought the movie was going to center around her. It doesn’t. Not at all. Nim is, at best, a third tier character. Don’t get me wrong, Nim is very important and moves a lot of the story along. But The Medium, at it’s core, is about Mink, Noi, and Noi’s relationship to religion. Everything and everyone else is secondary to those themes.

The Medium was such a good movie. I did think the ending was a little weak but I’m going to chalk that up to societal differences. I know that, in very broad and general terms, Asian media prefers to have more open endings where Western media likes to tie all of the plotlines up in a nice little bow. With that said, The Medium is definitely left enough open for a sequel or a Paranormal Activity-type of series of movies. I would love to see another movie that takes place in this universe.

There is no need to ask me if you should watch this. Yes, the answer is yes. Go watch it tonight.

V/H/S/94 | 2021 Halloween Movies

Shudder, the horror movie channel, has entered the Halloween fray with V/H/S/94. This is the fourth installment in the series. I haven’t watched the other three so I’m not sure if I’ll get lost in a storyline or whatnot.

V/H/S/94 is a “found footage” anthology series. There are four separate stories strung together with an overarching story about a SWAT team raiding a warehouse for drugs. The four stories consist of “Storm Drain,” a story about a rat-man living in the sewers of a small town; “The Empty Wake,” where a woman has to host a late night viewing at a funeral home by herself; “The Subject,” which is the story of a mad scientist kidnapping people to turn them into creatures; and “Terror,” a weirdly political vampire tale.

Like any anthology movie, there are good stories and there are not-as-good stories. I didn’t think “Storm Drain” was particularly entertaining. The story didn’t make a lot of sense and the acting was cheesy. Sometimes cheesy is good. But you need a good story to make up for the cheesiness.

“The Empty Wake” was a little bit better but it took a very long time to get to the action. There’s a lot of…well, empty time where the woman (Kyal Legend) is just sitting there. The end was interesting. It just took too long to get there.

My favorite story out of all of them was “The Subject.” We barely see the creatures. Actually, most of the movie is from the female creature’s point of view. So what we see is everyone’s reactions to the creatures. It is pretty terrifying. I think I would like to a full length movie with this premise.

As for “Terror,” I’m not sure how I feel about it. It starts out with domestic terrorism and ends up with vampires. I see what the writer wanted to do with the story, I’m just not sure it worked out well. This is another instance where I think the story needed more time to develop the characters and really bring everything together. I probably would watch a full length movie about this if it was done right. Terrorism can be a tricky subject though.

Finally, that overarching story they called “Holy Hell.” I wanted to like these parts so bad. But the camerawork is terrible. I understand that it’s supposed to be a found footage documentary type thing but the camera swings all over the place, not giving you a chance to really see what is going on. Especially since the warehouse setting isn’t lit very well. At least the good stories trapped inside “Holy Hell” made watching the movie worthwhile.

With all that said, do I think you should watch this… If you are a fan of found footage type movies, you might get a kick out of it. But if you are looking for some actual Halloween thrills, you aren’t likely to find them there. I spent more time thinking “Oh, that is interesting” or “I wonder how they did that effect” instead of being pulled into the stories. I think the people who would enjoy this film the most are the ones that love cheesy C-list horror movies. If you are into Goblin, or Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, or maybe even Sharknado, this may be for you.