leebutler Comedy, Horror, Mystery, Review

It’s A Wonderful Knife (2023) – Season’s Stabbings

Released: 1st December
Seen: 18th December

Without a doubt, the best new trend in horror has been slasher movies taking classic comedies with supernatural elements and twisting them into corny fun slasher movies. This trend started when Happy Death Day took on Groundhog Day, then Freaky repeated it with Freaky Friday and Totally Killer used Back to the Future as its main inspiration. It’s a trend that feels like it’s going to go on for a while, upcoming horror films like Time Cut (which also sounds like it’s using Back to the Future as a jumping-off point) show that there is a lot of potential fun to be had with this new trend… enter It’s A Wonderful Knife which is possibly the most basic version of this concept yet which proves that it can work even when being phoned in.

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leebutler Horror, Mystery, Review, Thriller

Five Nights At Freddy’s (2023) – Bearly Enough

Released: 26th October
Seen: 23rd November

In 2014, a man named Scott Cawthon released a game called Five Nights at Freddy’s. The idea of the game was incredibly simplistic, you played a bodyguard who has the job of watching over a defunct pizzeria via a set of monitors rigged up to cameras all around the building. There are only two doors into the room that can open and close and you have to just get through a series of five shifts from midnight to 6am, which is difficult because the animatronics in the restaurant are alive and are coming to get you.

As the nights go on, the game gets harder and harder and if you fail then one of the animatronics leaps at the screen creating a loud jumpscare that ends the game instantly. It’s a simple game that happened to get noticed by a certain segment of gamers who play games while overreacting on camera and soon became an obscenely popular franchise with a new game being churned out seemingly every couple of months. It was such a monster hit that a film adaptation was inevitable, indeed one was greenlit in 2015… it’s languished in production hell for 8 years but now it’s out and you can kind of tell this thing has been rewritten a couple dozen times, but it’s not like my opinion matters on the subject.

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leebutler Action, Horror, Review, Thriller

The Wrath Of Becky (2023) – OH MY GOD!

Released: 16th November
Seen: 23rd November

In 2020 a little film called Becky came out and delivered something that cinema desperately needed, a 14 year old girl who kills a whole assload of Nazi assholes in various wild and wonderful ways. It was an absolute blast of a film, filled with great performances by absolutely everyone involved and created an instantly iconic female character with Becky. It was a film that I enjoyed so much it made the honourable mentions list on my best films list that year and the Kevin James performance was the 11th best performance on my list. When news of a sequel came out you can imagine the genuine excitement that built, more fun time with Becky violently killing a bunch of bastards just sounded like the best thing possible and thank goodness, The Wrath Of Becky absolutely lives up to the standard set by the film that came before it.

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leebutler Horror, Mystery, Review, Thriller

Thanksgiving (2023) – Oh Honey, THANKS-LIVING

Released: 17th November
Seen: 15th November

Thanksgiving Info

In 2007, the film Grindhouse got a sadly small release to the world, a release that flopped because people seemed to just hate fun that year. Those who did see this glorious little event were treated to a pair of wonderful throwbacks to the days of the grindhouse cinema which were split up by a set of hilarious fake trailers for movies like Werewolf Women of the SS and Don’t. Some of these fake trailers would end up being turned into feature films, those being Machete and Hobo With A Shotgun but there was one trailer that people have spent the last 15 years begging to be turned into a movie.

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leebutler Horror, Review

Sister Death (2023) – Scary Habits

Released: 20th October
Seen: 7th November

Sister Death Info

If you’re looking for a scary location to set a film, you can’t really go wrong with a giant convent full of nuns. There’s just something about a building where a bunch of nuns live that has some inherent dread to it, something about the old style of the building combined with a group of people in shapeless outfits that seemingly glide about while occasionally stopping to sing snarky songs about other nuns and what a problem they are, it’s all a bit unnerving. It clearly has to be an easy choice for a lot of creatives because there’s a lot of horror media that use the setup, from the legendary second season of American Horror Story to the surprising hit series The Nun. Hell, there’s an entire subgenre known as Nunsploitation that’s just about doing fucked up stuff with Nuns so it’s clearly something that’s been done for a while, which is why Sister Death might not feel that surprising but it’s still a damn good scary time.

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leebutler Horror, Review

Haunting of the Queen Mary (2023) – Sinking Ship

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 18th August
Seen: 3rd November

Some horror films are incredibly simple, a basic plot and setting that means you just get to sit back and enjoy the terror as it unfolds. Think of things like the first Halloween movie, a film that’s scary almost entirely because of its intense commitment to pure simplicity. You instantly know the characters, the setting and the stakes in a way that allows the scares to actually work considerably well. Some horror films require a little bit of thought to follow, maybe they’re playing with some darker heavier ideas than normal that need to be thought about in order for everything to make sense, like how Get Out works so much better when you understand the racial politics behind it all. Then there’s films so complicated they feel like they require an instruction guide just to understand what the hell is going on, or as I like to call those films “Pretentious as fuck”, which is pretty much the central feeling you get with something like Haunting of the Queen Mary.

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leebutler Horror, Review

Sick (2023) – Siiiick

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 13th Jan
Seen: 2nd November

The slightly depressing reality is that we will probably never stop having to deal with the repercussions of the pandemic, or at least not for an excruciatingly long time. The last 4 years have been an absolute shitshow in terms of physical and mental health, the toll on the system from this one illness is impossible to properly measure and will undoubtedly be a reference point that most of us use for the rest of our lives. It’s also undoubtedly going to be a major part of a ton of art that’s being made for the next decade, how could it not be? It’s a major world event that absolutely everyone in some way has been impacted by, it not only impacted what kinds of art is made and how they make it but also will keep turning up as part of the narrative for a long time. Horror has had a fairly good crack at it with Host using it mostly as a way to justify a certain filming technique but now with Sick we have a film that uses it as an intrinsic portion of the central story and it makes for a surprisingly interesting little film.

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leebutler Horror, Thriller

Night Of The Hunted (2023) – Oh Shoot!

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 20th October
Seen: 30th October

For some strange reason, the idea of a movie diving into politics annoys a certain class of people who seem to think that movies used to be apolitical and only recently got infected. The truth of the matter is that all art, on some level, is political and some films are just more overt about it than others. This goes double for the Horror genre which has always been a great place to play with heavy political ideas (Look at Night of the Dead, Get Out or They Live for some prime examples of this) and recently has had a few films tackle the divide between the right and the left. Films like Tone Deaf or The Hunt tried to find ways to make fun of the divide, showing it to be comical and extreme in ways that maybe made for a half-decent film but was not great about the way it presented its politics. Night of the Hunted also has some problems with how it’s presenting politics, but without as much fun in how it’s trying to present those politics.

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leebutler Horror, Review

When Evil Lurks (2023) – Axe-cellent

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 27th October
Seen: 30th October

Horror is seemingly going through somewhat of a resurgence lately. A lot of people who are huge fans of the genre will agree that 2022 was something of a landmark year for horror, something I would agree with as the majority of my best of 2022 list consisted of entries in the Horror genre. 2023 might not have been up to that level in terms of consistency but when this year releases a great horror movie, it’s an absolute masterpiece. Obvious huge monster hits have been things like Talk To Me, Cocaine Bear, or Evil Dead Rise which have shown that this is an era of some truly amazing horror films and there’s probably a bunch more that are due out any day now that’ll be on any list of great horror films from this year but a recent release may have forced its way to the top of that list through sheer force of will… that film is When Evil Lurks and god damn, it’s an all-timer.

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leebutler Horror, Mystery, Review, Thriller

The Boogeyman (2023) – In The Dark

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 2nd June
Seen: 18th October

In 1973, Stephen King wrote a short story called The Boogeyman. The short story was published in a magazine called Cavalier and eventually was part of the first collection of King’s short stories known as Night Shift, which is also how we got such stories/films as The Mangler, The Lawnmower Man and Children of the Corn. The great thing about this process is that King tends to have some great terrifying ideas that work well in film and a lot of these short stories have fascinating ideas that would work great in a horror film… the downside is that they’re short for a reason and in order to make something feature length any filmmaker has to take what King did and build upon it and that’s usually where things start to falter. 

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