Down Below (2024) - Horror Film Review

It feels like a long time since I last saw a horror film as weird and indie in feel as the Spyder Dobrofsky written and directed Down Below (who man also stars as the protagonist). Try as I might I did find a lot of this quite hard to follow, that may be down to purposeful direction, but with me currently in the middle of a bout of flu, it could also be down to me feeling feverish. Regardless, I loved much of my time with this trippy horror.

This gets off to a fantastic start with a prologue that features a crazed preacher (David Steen - Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, Django Unchained) gassing his congregation with the assistance of a young helper. Fast forward twenty years and we are introduced to Salem (Dobrofsky), a man whose life is in ruins after he was charged with exposing himself to a young child, something which he states didn't happen as the child described it, and which was all the more suspicious due to a video of the event swiftly being uploaded to the internet by an unknown person. With his wife and friends having cut themselves out of his life, the only 'friend' he has is in the form of a prostitute - Karisma (Alexis Knapp - Project X), someone who feels a strange connection to the man due to strange visions of a massacre she had that seemed linked to Salem. With evidence of the same person who uploaded the original video clip once again messing with the man, Salem sees this as his chance to finally track down the person and get them to admit to their wrongdoing so that he can rebuild his life.

I'm not sure how accurate my plot description is as the film moves around a bit in terms of who the protagonist is. In addition to scenes featuring Salem and scenes featuring Karisma, there is also a third lead, detective Bandini (Christopher Livingston - Grey's Anatomy) who is in charge of Salem's case, and who has his own rabbit hole that he falls down into. Both Karisma and Bandini seemed like appendages of Salem as their storylines seem closely intertwined with his, even when from their perspectives they are not at all. There were a decent amount of strange side characters with some notable names appearing, such as Doug Jones (The Shape of Water), the ever reliable Eric Roberts (Lore, But Deliver Us from Evil) as psychiatrist Dr. Rockeby, and Mai Ling (Crank: High Voltage, The Crow) as Thorn.
Salem was the main character though his story wasn't a straight forward one. There wasn't much action on his part, instead the story of this character is presented via strange flashback sequences and convenient clues planted around his late mother's home that he lives in.

The horror was rarely direct, instead there was a sense of an undercurrent of madness best exemplified with some trippy arthouse style montages of quick images edited together one after the other. I loved these moments and were the highlight of the film. I liked the reoccurring image of a gas mask, something that came up time and again during the ninety five minute run time, from the prologue, all the way up to the end, with each of the main characters encountering this device on their surreal travels. The soundtrack was another delight of this, I enjoyed how the music being played over the prologue was literally being played by a character on screen, and elsewhere it usually delighted. I did think the song that plays over the end credits sounded a bit generic compared to the rest of the film.
As much as the plot confused me, there were parts of it I think that maybe I got. There was a neat late film revelation that draw together disparate threads, linking the film together in a way that was mostly satisfying. That third act was the best part of the film, I guess you could say some of the middle part did get slightly meandering at times.

Did I fully understand the events of Down Below? No, of course not. I did however find myself fully hooked on it from beginning to end, the mystery, and how the film was presented kept me glued to the picture, needing to know where this polyester prison would end. Down Below is being distributed by Gravitas Ventures in the U.S.

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The Last Ones (2017) - Zombie Horror Film Review

When I started this blog over 11 years ago it was dedicated to all things zombie. Over the years that focus shifted to include horror in general. So every time I get an actual zombie film to review I always feel a bit of excitement. It has been quite a while since I last saw one and so went into Andrew Jara's The Last Ones hoping for great things. From a brief bit of research it seems this was originally released in 2010 under the title Last Days, then it was re-released in 2017 in an edited shortened form, and with a switch from colour to black and white.

A deadly virus sweeps the planet that kills the majority of people it infects, some of those infected return back to life as flesh hungry ghouls. During the early days of this apocalypse gruff survivor Michael (Algernon D'Ammassa - The Cellar Door) comes across naive John (Mark Ocegueda) at his family home and they decide to team up. Nine months later and the pair are living a simple, if repetitive life at John's house, convinced they are the last ones left alive. By night Michael patrols outside the property, always on the hunt for the walking dead, by day the pair keep up maintenance of the generator at a local store, and attempt to grow food in their garden. One day while at the store John stumbles across a new survivor, a woman called Karina (Marcelle Bowman - Dark New World) and decides to bring her home. This leads to the last days of the pairs relatively idyllic existence, as she brings with her world changing revelations...

For the simple fact that this is in black and white I couldn't but help think of Night of the Living Dead. There is an almost timeless feel to the location the duo are based at with nothing to suggest a more modern time than that classic, of course that was a good thing. This plays to its indie roots by working very much with what its strengths are. There is a very small cast, and the story is so insular that it is easy to get caught up in this little story. There are no huge scenes of action and mayhem, instead this takes a page out of the original idea for The Walking Dead comic series, by focusing on the survivors and their interactions, rather than the undead hordes. Zombies of course do make an appearance, though the lore within the film means they never show up in great numbers, and like Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend these creatures only seem to come out at night. The undead here are presented as acting as brain dead as they literally are, stumbling around, and almost oblivious to the living.

The Dark Days of Demetrius (2019) - Horror Film Review

Indie exploitation director Dakota Ray (American Antichrist, The Acid Sorcerer) is back with his sixth feature length film, this one titled The Dark Days of Demetrius. With Ray you always know what you are going to get, and that is a delightfully twisted tale that takes place in the dark underbelly of American society. All the usual things you would expect in his films are here, from violence against animals, insects and the homeless, to prostitutes, drugs, senseless murder, and of course Ray in a leading role.

Ray stars as Demetrius, a serial killer who has been given the nickname 'The Live Stream Killer' by the media, due to him putting up videos of his kills on the internet. Being a narcissist and hoping for more attention he contacts corrupt news reporter Clive (Fred Epstein - American Scumbags) to give an interview, but the reporter wants to use this story for his own ends. Meanwhile a copycat killer calling himself Baphomet (Sebastian Oake who also co-produced the film) rises up in order to get his chance to shine.

Normally with these films you get a series of interconnected stories that feature a whole host of miscreants doing their own thing. Dark Days felt like a much more traditional way to tell a story, with Demetrius getting the vast majority of the screen time during this hour long movie. With this character you get a lot of narration of his thoughts and beliefs, there is even a flashback to his childhood to shed some light on how he is the way he is, and some dream sequences whereby he likens himself to God. While the parts featuring Clive and Baphomet are separate they did feel more like subplots, than their own little movies. At first I wasn't sure about Epstein as Clive, his dialogue seemed a bit over the top, but then I soon realised this is very purposeful, he became my favourite character mainly due to the devilishly evil way he would grin at the laptop screen as he writes his sensationalist stories, with his eyes wide with excitement.

Satan's Coming For You (2015) - Short Horror Film Review

Last December I mentioned upcoming short horror My Master Satan which is coming out sometime this spring, and in exciting news is going to be a full length anthology now. That film is actually a sequel to Satan's Coming For You which was released 2015 and so I felt a review of that was in order.

Satan's Coming For You shows a day in the life of two psychos; Bubba (Matt Marshall) and his friend Alister (Dakota Bailey who also wrote and directed this short). Starting off with a visit to a cemetery to dig up Bubba's deceased wife the duo then take some acid and during their trip see Satan and so decide to go out and kill in his name.