The B-Movie Shelf

Fans flock to a festival celebrating the most iconic horror movies, only to discover that the charismatic showman behind the event has a diabolical agenda. As festival attendees start dying off, three teenagers - more schooled in horror-film cliches than practical knowledge about neutralizing psycho killers - must band together and battle through various madmen and monstrosities to survive. REVIEW: Blood Fest is a new horror movie brought to us by Rooster Teeth of Red vs Blue fame, that follows a group of friends that attend a horror convention, only to have the entire thing be a trap set by a madman to kill as many people as possible in as many different horror settings as possible. I mean, yeah, the plot doesn't really make much sense if you give it any real thought, especially the mechanics behind it all, and there's a plot twist in regards to it that you can see coming from a mile away and that makes even less sense than the rest of it. Also, many of the ...

Laurie Strode confronts her long-time foe Michael Myers, the masked figure who has haunted her since she narrowly escaped his killing spree on Halloween night four decades ago. REVIEW: As a huge fan of the Halloween franchise since I first started getting into horror in the late 90s, I was looking forward to this revival movie. Sure, I may find the Nightmare on Elm Street movies and Friday the 13th movies more ' fun' , but Halloween was always my personal favorite horror franchise as a teen. I knew I wasn't going to be overly disappointed because, quite simply, even with a worst-case scenario there was no way it could be as bad as some of the worst entries in the series previously (Halloween: Resurrection and Rob Zombie's Halloween II), and even those ones I managed to find some redeeming qualities. Luckily I loved the hell out of this. No, it's not perfect. I do have a handful of issues with it, although only one is a major issue (and it's a s...

After suspecting that their police officer neighbor is a serial killer, a group of teenage friends spend their summer spying on him and gathering evidence, but as they get closer to discovering the truth, things get dangerous REVIEW: Summer of 84 is the new blast of 80s nostalgia from the creators of Turbo Kid, one of the best movies of 2015 and equally filled with 1980s nostalgia, although done in a much different way. This time around it's a much more grounded thriller, about a group of teen friends in 1984 that think their cop neighbor is responsible for a string of teen murders in town, so they secretly investigate him, in ways that only teens from the 1980s can, to get to the bottom of the mystery. This movie is filled with that exact same Stranger Things/1980s type throwback tone, complete with a synth score. I know a lot of people are taking issue with this movie using so much nostalgia, but that's kind of the entire point of this movie, just like it...

Alexandra reluctantly tags along for Slasher Sleepout, an extreme event that is part camping trip, part haunted house, and part escape room. But when the fun turns deadly, Alex has to play the game if she wants to make it out alive. REVIEW: Ruin Me is the latest Shudder Exclusive to go up on the streaming service, and it's strangely below their usual standards. This one feels more like a SyFy Original or an Uncork'd Entertainment movie. It's more of a 'Horror-Lite' type movie, made for people just starting out in the genre as opposed to hardcore horror veterans that the streaming service is aimed at. The plot is certainly interesting enough, and quite similar to another movie that came out over the last couple years, Fear Inc, where the characters don't know what's actually part of this immersive horror-themed game and what's real (if any of it), and the acting is surprisingly good from most of the actors, considering everything else...

A group of former classmates gather for a pre-party at one of their homes the night before their 10-year high school reunion, and one by one, they are brutally slain by a masked killer in a manner befitting each's senior yearbook superlative.  REVIEW: God, I miss the who-dunnit teen slasher sub-genre. Sure, the market was super over-saturated with them back in the day after Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer made it big in the late 90s, with some being way better than others, but those were the types of horror movies that initially got me into horror movies, and they've been largely absent these last ten to fifteen years. These days it's all ghosts, demons, and zombies. Masked killer teen slasher flicks are very few and far between, so I got really excited when I came across Most Likely to Die on Netflix. The acting in this movie is really, really, bad, there's no sugar coating that, and of course the plot unfolds like every other gene...

REVIEW BY: Cameron Popplestone     When a film student and her two friends go to Kern County to shoot a documentary, they stumble upon a mysterious family and learn why Pandora's box should never have been opened.  REVIEW: Cassidy Way tells the story of three film students who get lost after stumbling across something they shouldn't have as they film a documentary. They end up meeting a family who initially offer to help them find their car, but turn out to have more devious motives than initially realized. This is tied to a corporation who is trying to buy up the land in the town, and this strange family turn out to be the only holdouts, due to an incident that happened between them and some of the employees of the corporation several years prior to the events of the film. Cassidy Way is not a very good movie. It's problems stem from a pretty uninspiring concept that's already been seen many times before, as well as pretty poor acting ove...

Five doctors that are long-time friends go on vacation deep in the Canadian wilderness. After all but one pair of the party's shoes disappear over night, the remaining shoed camper decides to hike out and go look for help. Soon after he leaves, his remaining companions realize that something is very wrong when a decapitated deer head is left just outside their camp. Even though they still don't have their shoes, they decide to follow their friend's trail out of the woods, but their path is blocked by someone who doesn't want to see them leave the forest alive . REVIEW: Rituals, or rather The Creeper as it's called on the various Mill Creek multi-DVD sets (and also the more actuate title, IMO) is a classic stereotypical lost-in-the-wilderness backwoods horror movie in the vein of Deliverance and all the many movies have since borrowed from that, such as the Wrong Turn series among many, many others. What's special about this one however, is that it came befor...

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long Company:  The Collective Runtime: 116 mins Format: BluRay Plot: When a group of misfits is hired by an unknown third party to burglarize a desolate house and acquire a rare VHS tape, they discover more found footage than they bargained for. Review: V/H/S is a horror anthology movie made up of 5 short stories and a bookend wrap-around story, all of which was made in the found footage style of film making. Like with all anthology movies, some entries were great while others...well, not so much. I'll start first with the main wrap-around story. It involves a group of trouble-making hooligans that video tape their crimes and potential attempted rapes and all that, and they get hired by a mystery man to break into this old guy's house and steal a VHS tape. While in there they come across a room filled with VHS tapes and start checking them out, which leads to the various short stories this movie is made of. I really hated this wrap-around story, ...

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long COMPANY: POP Films/MTV RUNTIME: 84 mins FORMAT: MoD DVD PLOT : Having endured the torment of high school, survived the bloodbath at the Rollerdome, and then confronted her serial killer father at the Boneyard - ending his reign of terror once and for all - Skye Rotter is ready to break free of "Psycho Skye" and head to college for a new life. But before Skye can truly escape her dark past, there's still one last party she has to attend - her estranged sister Alex is having her Sweet 16, and someone has made certain the Lord of the Rink's bloody legacy lives on. One way or another, the party will end here. REVIEW: Putting in the disc for My Super Psycho Sweet 16: Part 3 was a bit bittersweet for me; On the one hand, with this comes the end of my one-a-night Super Psycho Sweet 16 marathon which I've been really enjoying and having a lot of fun with. On the other hand, knowing how much I enjoyed My Super Psycho Sweet 16 , and even d...

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long COMPANY: POP Films/MTV RUNTIME: 84 mins FORMAT: MoD DVD PLOT : Skye Rotter is on the run, having fled the Roller Dome massacre from the end of the first movie. With nowhere left to turn, Skye heads to the quiet town of Mill Basin and the mother who abandoned her years ago. There, she meets her younger half-sister, Alex and Alex's manipulative best friend, Zoe. Skye hopes she's finally found safety in her new family, but she's about to learn she can't outrun her past. While her friends Brigg and Derek desperately try to locate her, Charlie Rotter comes to town with one bloody mission: to turn Skye's upcoming birthday into a Sweet 16 she'll never forget, turning a weekend rager into the savage setting for a Rotter family reunion. REVIEW: After last night's viewing of the first My Super Psycho Sweet 16 , I was pretty anxious to get home from work this evening so I could pop in My Super Psycho Sweet 16: Part 2 and watch the c...

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long COMPANY: POP Films/MTV RUNTIME: 87 mins FORMAT: MoD DVD PLOT: Madison Penrose, spoiled throughout her life, convinces her rich parents to re-open a nearby rollerdome for her Sweet 16 birthday party. The rollerdome once closed because a series of brutal murders took place at the locale, and, of course, the killer returns to wreak havoc during her party. REVIEW: I was always interested in checking out this little made-for-TV Super Psycho Sweet 16 horror trilogy, because despite being made by MTV of all channels, I've heard mostly nothing but good things about these movies from the usually-harsh horror community. Of course with my luck, these movies ended up being really hard to get a hold of – they're not available in stores at all, and they're only on Itunes in the U.S. (I live in Canada, so that made me shit out of luck). I'm not ashamed to admit that I even got desperate enough to resort to looking on less-then-legal sites, but still...