Movies

31 Days of Horror: Return to Silent Hill

/ Michael Curtis / Leave a comment

Confession time: I’ve never played a single minute of any of the Silent Hill video games. I have, however, now seen all the movies based on that franchise. I’m captivated by everything going on in the background of these films: the monster design, the world-building, the lore, etc. The plots, for better or for worse, are just noise while I’m looking around at the rest of Silent Hill. With that in mind, let’s look at the most recent entry in the series.

Return to Silent Hill is based on the video game of the same name and, from what I understand, largely keeps the same plot. A man receives a letter from his deceased girlfriend and goes to Silent Hill to investigate. Once there, he finds himself being drawn into the hellish environment of the city—and possibly his own mind.

Keeping in mind what I stated above, Return to Silent Hill is a return to form for the movies franchise. The first film, while not perfect, did an excellent job of setting up the horror of Silent Hill and the curse that afflicts it. The second one, despite the presence of both Sean Bean and Kit Harington, was underwhelming to the point I couldn’t recount the plot if a gun was put to my head. This one felt more like the first and was unencumbered by any baggage the first two films might have imposed upon it had it not been based on the video game of the same name. Free from the constraints of the events in the first two movies, Return was free to explore the weird city and its monstrous inhabitants, some of which are damn-near Bosch-ian in their unearthliness. No film since Silence of the Lambs has done more to make a moth unnerving, I can tell you that.

The cast is largely unknown which works in this case. No overly familiar faces to jolt us out of the weirdness and horror of Silent Hill. These events could be happening to anyone—including us if we’re not careful. The film also does a good job of blurring the lines between what is real and what might just be in our protagonist’s head. There’s a Jacob’s Ladder level of reality twisting, even if it doesn’t do quite as good a job as that older film.

Fans of the video game will likely have their own opinions about the film’s quality, but as someone who’s just along for the horror and weirdness ride, I wasn’t disappointed.

Rating: I’m going to skip rating this one since I looked upon it more as an exercise in world-building and monster design than a piece of narrative entertainment. I enjoyed it enough to consider breaking my self-imposed moratorium and actually play one of these games for the first time. My only fear is that the games would have to compete with my internal head canon and that never goes well.

31 Days of Horror: Zoltan, Hound of Dracula

/ Michael Curtis / Leave a comment


When I was a kid, the New York City area featured the WNEW Channel 5 Drive-In Movie. Every Saturday afternoon, you could tune in to such great fare as Horror of Frankenstein, Satan’s Cheerleaders, and The Five Deadly Venoms. There were also some not-so-great films. I recall one advertisement for Dracula’s Dog, which, even as a young boy, sounded terrible. I didn’t bother to tune in that week. However, the title remained with me until the year 2026 when, while looking for another movie I’d never watched for this year’s marathon, I came across Zoltan, Hound of Dracula. There couldn’t possibly be TWO Dracula’s dog movies and a little sleuthing around IMDB confirmed that Dracula’s Dog and Zoltan, Hound of Dracula are indeed the same film (based on the novel The Hounds of Dracula.) It looks like it was time to reconnect with my childhood and see if I had missed an overlooked gem some four decades ago.

Zoltan, Hound of Dracula opens with the Soviet Army dynamiting its way through Romania when they come across “a Dracula tomb.” A soldier is left behind to guard it overnight, but an earthquake causes one of the coffins to slide from its niche. Investigating, the soldier finds a shroud-wrapped corpse inside—with a stake through its heart. Having clearly never seen a vampire film in Soviet Russia, the soldier removes the stake and unleashes (heheh) Zoltan, Hound of Dracula! Once freed, Zoltan and his handler travel to California in search of the last of the Draculas so they can serve their new master. Hot on their trail is a Soviet inspector (played by Jose Ferrer). Can he reach Dracula’s descendant before Zoltan does?


But you’re not interested in all that. I know what you’re really thinking. It’s “Does Zoltan, Dracula’s dog, have oversized canine teeth like a vampire? I mean, more oversized than dogs usually do?” My friends, I’m happy to report the answer is “yes.” And, unlike his two-legged owner, Zoltan doesn’t go around biting people and turning them into vampires. He bites dogs, making more vampire dogs!

Look, we all know there’s no way this was going to be anything but a B-movie for the drive-in crowd. Up until halfway through it, I was still debating with myself whether this was a TV movie or not. It is perhaps one of the goofiest entries in the vampire film catalog, making that really the only reason to sit down and watch it. There is plenty of animal violence, some done by animals and some done to animals, so sensitive viewers might want to skip this one for reasons above and beyond mere quality. I’m just hoping Jose Ferrer was able to buy himself something nice with the paycheck he picked up on this one.

Rating: The Tomb from earlier this month is still worse than Zoltan, Hound of Dracula, meaning that this dog of a film can “sit, stay, and roll-over” on a comfortable score of 2 skulls out of 5.

31 Days of Horror: The Tunnel

/ Michael Curtis / Leave a comment

When you binge on 31 movies, all of which must be new to you, eventually you’ll hit a found footage horror flick. It looks like this morning was my time.

The Tunnel concerns a news crew descending into the tunnels under Sydney, Australia to discover if government plans to develop a water-recycling program will impact the already at-risk lives of a homeless population living down there. They discover the homeless have a much bigger problem and, when their soundman goes missing and the news team gets lost, so do they.

Horror films are by nature a mixed bag, subject to everything from poor writing to low budgets to fans’ expectations when trying to deliver the scary goods. Throw in the found footage element and you’ve got even higher barriers to overcome. The Tunnel does one of the better jobs at handling the found footage genre, largely because they use a documentary style framing story. We’re watching a professionally produced documentary covering the events of the film, so it’s not 90 minutes of jerky camera work in the dark. There is that, but we do get a dose of pseudo-Werner Herzog to help it all go down smoother.

The premise isn’t a new one: Something is eating folks underneath the city. It could be C.H.U.D., it could be alligators (crocodiles more likely since its Sydney), it could be cannibals, but we don’t know. So how does The Tunnel handle this? That all depends on how much ambiguity you like in your spooky movies. The Tunnel never explains what’s down there and, because we see the events in low light conditions and via night vision, we’re left to guess for ourselves. Did that work for me? Not really. The real world is ambiguous enough so if you’re going to entertain me, I ask for a little effort. Anything would have sufficed, really, but apparently that was too big an ask for The Tunnel.

This isn’t the worst found footage film I’ve ever seen, but it suffers from the usual flaws despite the documentary frame. Shaky cameras, no illumination, people screaming other people’s names in the dark, and, worst of all, continuing the trend begun in The Blair Witch Project of having the only woman in the cast be responsible (or rather, irresponsible) for the mess that ends up with folks being murdered in the dark.

Rating: The documentary frame elevates The Tunnel slightly, earning it 2-and-a-half skulls out of 5. Had they actually gotten Werner Herzog, it would have been a solid 4 out of 5.

31 Days of Horror: Abraham’s Boys

/ Michael Curtis / Leave a comment

Continuing the Dracula theme, I picked this one out of a hat more or less. I expected something along the lines of the TV series Supernatural, figuring this would be about Van Helsing training a new generation of vampire hunters. Was I right? Let’s see.

Abraham’s Boys takes place in 1915 California. Abraham Van Helsing and his wife, Mina, have relocated to the Central Valley with their two boys. The family’s search for peace is threatened, however, as the railroad expands near their isolated farm. But does the railroad bring more than new settlers to the region? Abraham suspects a vampire has hunted them down.

Putting the “Van Helsing’s wife, Mina” elephant in the room aside, the premise of the movie isn’t a bad one. Abraham is played by Titus Welliver, who is no slouch when it comes to acting (Exhibit A: Deadwood). Moving the action from the gothic setting of Victorian England to the dry but beautiful Central Valley immediately informs us we’re not looking at Dracula: Part 2. The film’s focus is mostly on Abraham’s two boys, Max and Rudy, and their relationship with their sometimes-overbearing father. Their mother is still dealing with PTSD from her encounter with Dracula and has become a nervous wreck, a vast difference from the woman who largely ensured the Circle of Light triumphed over the Count.

Abraham’s Boys further moves away from Stoker’s story by suggesting that Van Helsing might not be entirely sane, making his motivations highly suspect. Was he truly hunting down the undead or was he murdering the innocent due to an undiagnosed madness? It’s here where the film really becomes interesting. Once that question begins hanging around the edge of the plot, we know were not in for a typical vampire film.

Based on the novel by Joe Hill, Abraham’s Boys took a beating in the reviews and I can understand why. People, much like myself, assumed they were in for some vampire ass-kicking and were instead confronted with a film similar to the greatly overlooked Frailty. Once I saw what the movie was up to, I changed my expectations accordingly and found this one to be better than IMDB’s rating suggested.

Rating: While not a contender for best film of this year’s marathon, I enjoyed it, earning it a solid 3 skulls out of 5. Audiences familiar with Hill’s novel might feel otherwise, but being unfamiliar with the book, I can’t judge it as an adaptation.

31 Days of Horror: Dracula (2025)

/ Michael Curtis / Leave a comment

Last night I got current on my Dracula adaptations with Luc Besson’s Dracula (formerly known as Dracula: A Love Story.) How does it compare with those which have preceded it? Let’s take a look.

A Carpathian prince loses the love of his life, denounces God, then spends 400 years looking for his lost love’s reincarnation. Shenanigans ensue.

I heard things about this one so I went into it not expecting much. Which turned out to be the right attitude towards the film. Dracula is ripe for adaptation and new interpretation, so I didn’t slight Besson for moving many of the characters to France and setting the events during the 100-year anniversary of Bastille Day. I’ve seen poorer choices and the French setting didn’t have much of an impact on the story overall. What I do hold against Besson is lifting so much from Francis Ford Coppola. In fact, this film could have been called Luc Besson’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula. When ancient-looking Dracula answers the door of his castle looking like he’s been holding Gary Oldman’s hairdresser and customer prisoner, my eyes did roll and I uttered an audible, “Really?”

I didn’t expect much of a horror film given the movie’s original title. It is, at its un-staked heart, a love story, after all. Leaning towards this genre rather than horror is likely the reason we get an awful subplot where Dracula spends centuries making the most alluring perfume on Earth. No, really. He uses the scent to entrance the female population of Europe in hopes his lost love will be attracted to him. Despite having telekinetic and pyrokinetic powers, I guess vampiric hypnosis was a bridge to far for Besson and a more mundane, yet outlandish, workaround was needed. Oh, and the perfume ends up having nothing to do with his eventual finding of his lost princess, so you be the judge if that part of the movie’s running time was well-spent.

The film is not devoid of pleasure. An inspired scene uses Dracula’s increasing treasury as a means to shorthand the passage of time and—spoilers—when Dracula finally perishes, having all the flames and fires in his castle go out was a nice touch. Christoph Waltz (playing “Priest”) delivers his usual greatness, but I fear he’s in danger of being typecast as the unconventional mentor figure. I had hoped for some excellent costuming and set design given what I assume was the film’s decent budget, and there are, but not enough by far. Oh, and Besson joins the parade of filmmakers guilty of Quincy Morris erasure. Goddamn it! Is it so hard to fit a cowboy into a vampire movie?!

Rating: It’s all been done better by others, meaning Dracula (2025) goes back to the grave with only 2-and-a-half skulls out of 5.

31 Days of Horror: Pale Blood

/ Michael Curtis / Leave a comment


The late 80s and early 90s saw a boom in low-budget vampire movies featuring lovelorn vampires and the women attracted to them. Films such as To Sleep with a Vampire, Dance of the Damned, Tale of a Vampire, and, my personal favorite, To Die For. Day 6’s film (yes, I’m woefully behind right now) is part of that group—or perhaps, should I say, coven—of films.

Pale Blood is the tale of lonely vampire, Michael Fury (played by George Chakiris of West Side Story and the best “Mayan’s discovered Texas” film ever made, Kings of the Sun), who arrives in Los Angeles following news reports of a string of vampire murders in the city. Having recruited the assistance of private investigator, Lori (Pamela Ludwig), the search for the killer takes them into the orbit of video artist, Van (Wings Hauser) and his models who may be tied into the murders. Will Michael meet another vampire or become the victim of one?

If you’ve seen any of the vampire flicks I mentioned above, your enjoyment of Pale Blood will be dependent on whether you liked any of those. Pale Blood is cut from the same cloth, complete with nighttime L.A., neon lights, late 80s club scenes, and Wings Hauser. The most innovative idea is Michael’s portable coffin, a canvas suitcase that unfolds and is assembled like a tent (I’m going to steal that for a future vampire game!). Chakiris is game, but the role mostly has him being remote form the humans around him, including vampire fan Lori, who is clearly smitten with her employer. Scarily so. I’d have ended business with her on Night #2 if she was working for me. Nevertheless, I enjoyed Ludwig in the role, and I am a little sad she didn’t have more of a career.

There’s not much to see here, but as someone who lived in L.A. in the early 90s, the shots between scenes which are mostly Los Angeles during the day with radio station DJs’ commentary to fill the silence, were a trip down memory lane. And it gets bonus points for an appearance of the punk band Agent Orange as the house band at “Drac’s,” the nightclub featured in the film.

Ratings: Not great, but it has its charms if you lived through this era of low rent vampire romance films. I give it 2-and-a-half skulls out of 5, but deduc7 a ½ skull if you prefer more blood and less saxophones in your vampire films.

31 Days of Horror: Blood Red Sky

/ Michael Curtis / Leave a comment

While I try to watch a movie each night, real life does gets in the way. I tend to get caught up on weekends, and the goal is to get through 31 by the end of Halloween, so do not worry if a day or three passes without a new movie review. With that said, let’s look at last night’s film.

Blood Red Sky has an interesting and potentially fun premise: a woman suffering from a baffling blood disorder is on a transatlantic flight to America with her young son when their plane is hijacked. But the hijackers picked the wrong flight to commandeer. It’s with little surprise that we discover the woman is actually a vampire trying to hold onto her humanity for her son’s sake. But you can only push a vampire so far…

Blood Red Sky is a German production with an international cast. I’m unfamiliar with the work of Peri Baumeister who plays Nina, our vampire protagonist, but she does a wonderful job slowly becoming more and more animalistic as all her good intentions about holding on to her human nature start to slip once her son’s in danger. Alexander Scheer portrays our main antagonist, channeling Crispin Glover’s maniacal energy and sharing a not-dissimilar appearance. Dominic Purcell of Prison Break and Legends of Tomorrow fame has a supporting role as one of the hijackers, but feels underused. And speaking of underused, Graham McTavish has a glorified walk-on role that left me wanting more.

The film is more action than horror for most of its run time, but once Nina’s infection begins to spread throughout the passengers on the flight, we start veering into the airline sequence from World War Z, and the balance shifts towards gore and the horrific. By the end of the movie, one feels like this could be the prequel to The Strain.

The film’s biggest flaw is its 2-hour running time. Had it been shaved down to a tense 90 minutes, I feel it would have been a more effective story. Pacing was certainly an issue, but if you’re looking for an action/horror mix with some good physicality in its lead and a plot you could steal for a Night’s Black Agents campaign, you could do a lot worse.

Rating: With no major flaws, but also limited bits of true creativity, Blood Red Sky earns a middle-of-the-road 3 skulls out of 5.

31 Days of Horror: The Tomb

/ Michael Curtis / Leave a comment

I’m not student of filmmaking. I’ve worked in Hollywood and I’ve seen a lot of movies, many of them bad, but I’ve never taken a course or read a book about the technical aspects of making motion pictures. So when the opening title card on a movie makes me immediately think, “Oh, this is going to be a stinker,” you know it’s bad.

The Tomb (aka La Tomba, if you want to use the original Italian title. Yes folks, this is an Italian cheapie) takes The Mummy and From Dusk Till Dawn and mashes them up with a $1.95 budget. The film concerns a group of American (mostly) archeology students and their professor who head south of the border to embark on a field trip cataloging Mayan sites. When their tour guide goes missing, they’re forced to rely on the local healer to guide them into the jungle. She leads them to a previously undiscovered temple where she secretly hopes to finish a ritual of immortality interrupted centuries ago.

Friends, as I say, I’m not student of move making, but even I know not to use footage from better movies in your stink bomb. Luckily for The Tomb, Italian IP laws being somewhat lax, the films gleefully steals footage from Army of Darkness, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Tomb, plus several more I couldn’t immediately identify but, judging from the competency of how they were shot, were pilfered from superior productions.

The script is no better. We have an honest-to-goodness “Help, I’ve fallen into quicksand!” moment, a “I’ve fallen and dropped my glasses, and I hope nobody steps on them as I flail around looking for them” scene that would make Velma from Scooby Do ashamed, and a trap where if you break the light a sharp implement impales you (minus Alfred Molina).

31 Days of Horror is always about quantity, not quality, but this one was BAD. I’m hoping I’ve hit the nadir early and everything else this month is Citizen Kane in comparison.

Rating: I’m torn. This one really deserves half-a-skull at best, but since I got my laundry done while I watched this one and didn’t entirely waste 97 minutes, I’ll give it a 1 skull out of 5.

31 Days of Horror: The Curse of La Llorona

/ Michael Curtis / Leave a comment

After two films that weren’t quite traditional spooky movies, I decided to watch something I was certain would fall into that category. And who doesn’t love a good vengeful ghost story, right? That brings us to Day 3’s film, The Curse of La Llorona.

A CPS case worker in 1973 Los Angeles finds herself and her two children in grave peril when she inadvertently draws the attention of “La Llorona,” the Weeping Woman of Mexican folklore. Can she defeat the spirit before her children pay the final price?

The Curse of Lal Llorona started really strong, immediately showing the audience the events that led to the creation of La Llorona, before leaping forward to the 20th century. We meet our protagonist, Anna (Lind Cardellini), a dedicated Child and Protective Services case worker raising her two children alone after the death of her husband. Anna, trying to be compassionate, unfortunately sets events in motion that lead to the deaths of two of her case’s sons and puts her own family in the sights of La Lorona. Can she undo the curse before it’s too late?

The movie relies heavily on all the haunted house/ghost tropes and cliches you’d expect. Despite this, some still remain effective and a few good jump scares happen early on. Unfortunately, after about 30 minutes, the movie becomes a cookie cutter ghost film, indistinguishable from any other made in the last 20 years.

Of course, with La Llorona as our villain, a spirit who drowns children, there’s no shortage of water throughout the film, be it bathtubs, the Los Angeles River, swimming pools, even puddles. I couldn’t help but think of Lisa Simpson’s critique of the TV show “Kightboat”: “There is always an inlet, canal or fjord!” I couldn’t help but ponder that maybe the way to break La Llorona’s curse is to move to the desert and just take showers from now on.

Given the movies now put their credits at the end of the film, I was halfway through this one before I discovered it was part of the larger “Wan-O-Verse,” movies directed or produced by James Wan, including The Conjuring films, Annabelle, and The Nun, that share a connected setting. Had I known that, I might have gone in with my expectations a little lower.

Rating: Despite a strong beginning, the movie quickly peters out. Not terrible, but not good enough to earn The Curse of La Llorona 2 skulls out of 5.

31 Days of Horror: Mayhem

/ Michael Curtis / Leave a comment

I go into every movie during 31 Days of Horror with as little foreknowledge of the film as I can manage. This keeps the surprises coming, but sometimes leads to me choosing a movie that doesn’t 100% meet the criteria of a horror flick. Tonight’s film is an example of one. It’s got plenty of violence, some gore, a decent amount of humor, but is short on scares. It’s not a standard horror film, but it sure is fun.

Day 2’s movie was Mayhem, a 2017 film starring Steven Yeun of The Walking Dead fame and Samara Weaving. When a viral outbreak that destroys the infected’s moral inhibitions runs amok in a corporate office building, an unlikely due fights their way to the CEO’s office to address wrong-doings. Mayhem, predictably, ensues.

I was expecting a 31 Days Later type scenario, but the film put a great twist on that premise. The virus is known by the public at large and even led to a precedent-setting court case when a man wasn’t charged for a brutal murder he committed while infected by the contagion. This legal loophole means that if our two heroes (who do engage in some unheroic violence throughout the film) get to the building’s corporate suite on the 8th floor, they have free rein to perpetrate some bloody mayhem on those who did them wrong. With the quarantine set to be lifted after 8 hours—the duration of the infection—the need to enact their vengeance before they lose their proverbial “Get out of Jail Free” card.

Mayhem isn’t going to appeal to your die-hard zombie outbreak fans, but it is incredibly cathartic for anyone who has ever worked in a corporate environment. I could have used this virus back in 2000 when I was working an office in Manhattan.

The film includes some great dialogue (“You think I like the taste of kale? Come on! I’m fucking dead inside.”) and a tremendous amount of violence via office supplies. And from a filmmaking standpoint, a nice bit of cinematic shorthand quickly sums up Derek Cho’s rise up the corporate ladder from his first day until the day of the events of the film.

Rating: While not 100% horror, Mayhem was still fun enough to earn 3 skulls out of 5. Add another half-skull if you’re stuck in corporate hell.