The B-Movie Shelf

It's been eight years since the opening night tragedy of Hell House, LLC and still many unanswered questions remain. Thanks to an anonymous tip, investigative journalist Jessica Fox is convinced that key evidence is hidden inside the abandoned Abaddon Hotel - evidence that will shed light on the hotel's mysteries. She assembles a team equally hungry for answers with one goal: break into the hotel and discover the truth. REVIEW: Hell House LLC 2: The Abaddon Hotel was easily one of my most anticipated movies of the year. The first Hell House LLC is one of my favorite found footage horror movies, possibly of all time. The level of fear, unease, and tension that movie portrayed was just unreal, so when I heard a sequel was coming this year it instantly moved to the top of my anticipation list. Well. What a gigantic disappointment Hell House LLC 2: The Abaddon Hotel turned out to be. This is right up there with The Houses October Built 2: Hellbent as one of the mos...

Five years after an unexplained malfunction at a Halloween haunted house attraction causes the death of 15 tour-goers and the staff on opening night, a documentary crew travels back to the scene of the tragedy to find out what really happened.  REVIEW: I know I'm in the minority, but Found Footage is one of my personal favorite sub-genres of horror, and among those Hell House LLC is easily one of my top favorite Found Footage horror movies of the last few years. It's a bit of a slow burn at times, but in this case it uses that slow burn wisely, letting us get to know and like the characters, something that, in my opinion, is very important to a Found Footage movie. Plus that slow burn is not without its moments of fright scattered here and there either. Some of my favorite creepy moments come during those parts of the movie, like the moment with that tall clown mannequin turning its head at the top of the basement stairs, and the whole strobe light test run...

A harmless game of Truth or Dare among friends turns deadly when something supernatural begins to punish those who tell a lie or refuse the dare.  REVIEW: I quite honestly don't have really anything to say on Truth or Dare, the latest teen-aimed horror flick by Blumhouse. This truly is one stupid ass, silly, laughable movie. But god damnit I had fun. It’s nothing I’d recommend to a serious horror fan above the age of 14, and it’s filled to the brim with laughably bad moments, but it held my attention for the entire runtime, and it actually used some legitimately interesting ideas at times, including some moments that will remind any horror fan worth a damn of the Final Destination movies, which is always a fun time for me.  If action movies can have a sub-classification of ‘silly mindless popcorn summer movie’, this is exactly what the horror version of that would be. Despite its rampant stupidity, I enjoyed myself, so sue me.  6/10 rooms in the ...

Shortly after delivering a patient to an understaffed hospital during the graveyard shift, a police officer experiences strange and violent occurrences seemingly linked to a group of mysterious hooded figures REVIEW: The Void is a little horror movie that came to fruition thanks to online crowdfunding campaigns. The creators of this movie, Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski, have worked on many infamous Astron-6 productions in the past ( Manborg , Father's Day, and the Bio Cop faux-trailer), and even though Astron-6 did not make this movie, it still feels very much like they could have (which as far as I'm concerned is a great thing, as I love all of Astron-6's productions thus far). These two guys posted up concept art and a basic sales pitch via Twitter and other social media to interest horror fans and then took to crowdfunding in order to get this movie made, and guess how it turned out? Damn fine. Really damn fine. And I'm not one of these people that...

Two estranged brothers reunite at their missing father's video store to liquidate the property and sell off his assets. As they dig through the store, they find a VCR board game dubbed 'Beyond The Gates' that holds a connection to their father's disappearance and deadly consequences for anyone who plays it.   REVIEW: I was pretty excited when I got to finally sit down and review Beyond The Gates, a recent horror movie I've heard nothing but great things about. Jumanji was one of my favorite movies as a child, I would watch that VHS tape so much I wore it out. With that in mind, it's pretty easy to see why I would get excited to watch, essentially, what is a horror movie version of that idea. A mystical and mysterious VCR board game that can manipulate real life based off your moves in the game? Count me in! To my disappointment, for a horror movie I felt it don't go nearly far enough with that awesome Jumanji-style idea, nor does it even incorp...

A double bill of 1950s-style B-movie shorts from writer/director Christopher R. Mihm, the king of "new old, good bad" movies! In "X: The Fiend from Beyond Space", on a decades-long mission to Alpha Centauri, the crew of the spaceship Endeavor are awakened from LD-sleep to find themselves in orbit around a rogue planet. Finding nothing but a seemingly dead alien on the planet's surface, the Captain decides to bring it aboard for further study. But, the crew quickly realize the creature is not dead... and it's very hungry.  In "The Wall People", following the death of his wife, scientist Barney Collins finds solace in his new role as a single dad to his only son. However, when the boy disappears from his bed under mysterious circumstances, Barney loses his grip on reality and becomes a shut in. Eight years later, he resurfaces with a wild theory: his son has been taken by an otherworldly entity that steals sleeping children through ...

When a new hot starlet's sudden popularity threatens to shove her out of the spotlight, a movie star uses black magic in an attempt to derail her career. REVIEW: The Raaz series out of India has turned into quite the interesting little Bollywood horror franchise. After having enjoyed the first Raaz movie and then absolutely loving Raaz 2: The Mystery Continues , I was beyond excited to check out and review Raaz 3: The Third Dimension, the third entry in this 'anthology' series. I call it an anthology series because, despite being sequels to one another in-name, they are totally separate, unrelated stories, connected only by the same basic idea of characters being haunted in some fashion, and it being related to some deep, dark secret or mystery connected to those characters that said characters have to unravel. They even include a lot of the same actors, just in different roles. For example, while the second movie included all-new actors from the first mo...

A trio of friends go hiking deep in the woods, to an area with a horrible and mysterious history. What should have been a peaceful camping adventure turns to a trip into terror as collective paranoia reaches fever pitch and it becomes clear that there is a much darker force at work in the ancient eerie surroundings. REVIEW: Even at only 82 minutes, A Night in the Woods felt overly long. Actually, the part of this Found Footage movie that moved along the fastest for me was the first chunk, where we're being introduced to our various main characters and having them sight seeing around the English countryside. You know, the 'boring' filler stuff. Once they actually get to their campsite in the woods and hunker down for the evening, that's when I started loosing interest because characters were acting out-of-character to how we were shown them as previously in the movie, and doing things that made no sense whatsoever other than to just move the story along. ...

In pursuit of buried treasure, a group of fortune hunters unearth an ancient demonic summoning stone that holds a terrible curse and awakens a timeless evil, the Krampus. After centuries of slumber, Krampus has awoken with a thirst for blood. REVIEW: Uncork'd Entertainment must have stumbled upon the work I do with my various B-Movie review blogs and decided to send along a few Screeners my way for early review as they mysteriously and randomly showed up in my mailbox recently. Now, Uncork'd is a company I kind of have a love/hate relationship with. I dislike 90% of what they put out, but as all my regular readers know, The Asylum is easily my favorite B-Movie company and Uncork'd reminds me so very much of early-day Asylum, back when they were first starting out, so even though I've disliked most of what Uncork'd puts out, I still kind of have a soft spot for them because of that. They released another Krampus movie around this time last yea...