So I feel like I owe Grady an explanation because he popped into, I. Logged on almost immediately after you sent the link. I saw some drama happening. Oh, was it Ozzy drama? It was not. No. It was my wife. So I send the link, I get the headphones in, and I'm in a recording booth. Right. I teach podcasting at a university, so it's a semi legit setup and I'm in the zone. Right. You have a built thing behind you. It's very. Fancy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very fancy.
And I feel like I put my headphones on and everything, and all of a sudden there's a voice right in my ear. I did it. She meant she got Roz to sleep because she's been a little extra fussy and likes to bounce up and then run to one end of the crib going and then running to the other end of the crib. Loose subway, ambulatory babies do. Right? Exactly. That's normal. That's fine. But don't come up right in my ear. Whisper. I did it. So I naturally jump three feet in the air, which I'm like five.
Five. So that's proportionately like Mario. Yeah. Presumably cleaning to the ceiling like a cat. Yes. And I look at her. Like, what the fuck did I do to you? I didn't know who it was. I didn't know what was happening. And she's laughing and she says, you watch all this scary, spooky shit all the time. And I said, yeah, when I'm looking at the tv, the TV's not behind me. That's amazing. You realize the next time we're over at your house, we're absolutely going to do the same thing to you.
And enough time will go by that you'll have forgotten this conversation and it'll be a nice shock. Welcome to Imported Horror. This is the podcast that brings you the very best of homicidal coworkers, arboreal creatures. Stop motion relics and milk from Beyond the Shining Seas, please. I'm Marcus. I'm here with my co-hosts who are both working for the weekend. Melissa and Grady. Let that one pass by. Friday. It's Friday. Friday, we've got to get done on Friday. Stop. Obviously,
there's some really fun covers of that song on YouTube. Incidentally, they take it in a totally different direction. But yeah, we're taking with our schedule. As we're doing our episodes on Friday, that took way too long. Yeah, I didn't get that either. And also, wow. Yeah, working for what other. Working for the weekend, the. Covers of the song. How could it have different. Two different songs? So there's Friday, Friday by Rebecca Black.
Yeah. And then working for the Weekend is that famous eighties song that nobody knows who sang it, but everybody knows all the words because of Chris Farley. Okay. Okay. All right. Oh, poor Rebecca Black. I mean, yeah. No, she did Not Deserve, yeah. Yeah. But there are really cool covers of that song out there. So. There. Are, anyway, this week I've got Australian Creature feature Carnifex on Tubi.
Brady's got the Belco experiment from the US and Colombia on VOD and the Prime evils, which I didn't realize was out. I'm really stoked to talk about that. And quick correction. Belco Experiment is also on Tubi. Oh, sweet. Ooh. I am totally saying that because I had spoilers for my review. No one should pay to watch the Belco experiment.
And Melissa is doing a movie called Milk, and I'm assuming it's not the queer political drama starring Sean Penn, but IMD, imdb and I are both very confused and got nothing. No. I thought it was, and I thought, wow, that's Canadian. And also, wow, that story must be a lot darker than I thought it was, and I already thought it was pretty dark. It is a horror short from my new favorite website, short verse. I'll never get enough of it. That makes considerable more sense. Yes.
And we're still tinkering. We're always tinkering. We're always toying with stuff. So new schedule and maybe new feature that we're trying out for the second episode. So Melissa, you Ken has trivia for us. I Ken has trivia. Okay, so we have a couple here, and I think I'm going to do two of them. And there are reasons why I picked both of them that you'll figure out. But we all know that Night of the Living Dead, the original George Romero got me into horror, one of my favorite movies.
Here's a question for you guys. What are the zombies referred to as in Night of the Living Dead? Oh, I know this. It's not zombie. They don't actually say the Z word. I would make it a trivia question. I would make it a multiple choice, but now I know if I do that, you're going to get it. Oh. Yeah. No, it's right there. And it's not dead eye either. I know that. No. Nope. Walker's was The Walking Dead. Yep. I can hear Joe Bob Briggs saying it and talking about this.
He did Night of the Living Dead. And there's a little follow up to that one. It's not, no. So there's a little follow up to this one, and it's not going to be the second trivia question, but it's kind of just a trivia within this, what George Romero zombie film did they first utter the word zombie? That's probably the one in the mall. Night of the Living Dead two. The search for George. It's the one in the mall. It's one of the dead 1978.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I can tell you that it was shot outside of Pittsburgh. I can tell you that George Romero got his start working on Mr. Rogers neighborhood. I can tell you that. I can tell you that the night of the Living Dead is public domain due to a massive fuck up by their lawyers. And if zombies hadn't been public domain as soon as they'd have been invented, we'd have a very different horror escape than we do now. So that's kind of neat. I'll give you a hint.
Yeah. There is a video game that just had a series released that has to do with that video game. It's a horror video game, I guess you could say. And that particular video game has the same word that they call their monsters. Does it count as a hint if it's more complicated than the original. Questions? No. No follower? No. I don't remember. It's right there, but I'm not going to get it. It starts with a G. The garners? No, the Goonies. No, that doesn't make any sense.
I'm ashamed for even suggesting that I'm ashamed. Yeah, I got nothing. Oh, I knew that. And now do you know the video game that I'm referring to? I actually don't. And now I'm blanking on the name. The nuclear war one fall is Fall fallout. Thank you. Fallout. Okay. Fallout. Yes. They're called ghouls. The people that have been affected by radiation. Yeah, they're basically, they're not like zombies in how we think of zombies in other media.
They just look really gross because their skin's all mutated and otherwise they're normal if kind of Jack Cassie. Yep. But they do refer to them as schools, or I guess the gul, the singular one, but I think that they refer to more of them as GULs. Yeah, no, there are whole species. I'm remembering. Well, not species, but there's significantly more than one of 'em.
Excellent. So yeah. So in the sequel, the Dawn of the Dead, which is where they actually first say zombies, they do that because there's a character from Trinidad, and that is the first person in the movies to refer to the creature of Zombie because based on the stories from his grandfather who was practitioner and knowledge of voodoo zombies.
Yeah, it all has roots in Haitian and Caribbean folklore and some of the old schools not like White Zombie, the whole notion, it's more similar to Frankenstein than Romero ultimately. And the monster has evolved quite a bit. No, I should have known that. That was good. That's a good one. It's a hard one, right? Yep. Alright, so I have another one that I will give you multiple choice. I don't think either of you are going to know this because this trivia is
real like trivia. Not a lot of people have talked about this, but I think it's really cool. So what appliance, or I should say, what object did several cast and crew members demand to be removed from their hotel rooms during the filming of the exorcism of Emily Rose? Coffee, pots, TVs, the Bible, or radios? Well, the Bible's not an appliance, and that's kind of a weird request. Is it? If you're doing something about exorcism. I mean, yeah, you might want one on hand actually. Trying.
I've never actually seen the exorcism of Emily Rose, so I'm trying to think of what I know of that movie through pop culture, osmosis. And what would make sense from that movie that would skive out the cast and crew enough that they wouldn't want to look at one. In a hotel room? Their hotel rooms. In the hotel rooms during. The filming. Okay, so tv, microwave and radio. It was coffee pot, tv, radio or Bible. Okay. The radio doesn't make a lot of sense unless it's filmed somewhere in Eastern
Europe and they just all come with radios. But. I think I'm going to go with Coffee Pot. Okay, great. I'm going to go with TV just as a one in four. Chance shot in the dark. Okay. You are both wrong. It is the radio really. Scott Derickson, the director of Exorcism of Emily Rose, confirmed that the film's lead actor Jennifer Carpenter's radio would inexplicably turn on in the middle of the night while they were filming.
So not only did that happen to Carpenter, but the CoStar, Laura Linney also experienced some paranormal activity. Her radio would turn on three or four times during the night. And so they have removed, they requested the radios be removed because it freaked them out so bad because here they were filming the exorcism of Emily Rose. So this is try to sleep do with a particularly spooky radio related scene in the exorcism.
This was just either an electrical short or a hotel employee fucking with them. Yep. Okay. Oh, you mean like the little alarm clock radio things by the day? Oh, that makes more sense. No, those damn things, every time I travel, they go off. The first night, I was at a conference in Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago and was four 30 in the morning. The damn thing just goes off and there was nothing paranormal about it. It was because that was the previous person in the room had set that alarm and
then just hadn't cleared it. But I'm groggy, just caveman slapping it, trying to make it stop. So apparently to a couple of times when it would come on, it would be in a section of Pearl Jam song Alive where they would just be singing the phrase, I'm alive, I'm still alive, I'm still alive over and over again.
And I have to think that what probably happened with that is that may have been an intro song, a radio station used or whatever, and it went off at the same time every day or every night, but Or somebody missing radios. Yeah, exactly. Jennifer Carpenter and Laura. I would not want to mess with those two women new. They're incredible horror icons, but it would've been really funny. If that's the case, I've got a bunch more, but I'm going to save them because they're all really good.
I hope that those two were kind of fun and. They. Gave you a little insight into two different things about movies. So we got three imported horrors dropping this week, and one that I missed that I want to go back to September, October, are both going to be busy, busy, busy. So buckle up and there are a couple of recurring themes in the ones we're going to talk about today. See if you can spot 'em.
The first, which actually I don't think is part of either of the running themes, dropping on VOD on Friday, September 6th. This is the Well from Italy, a budding art restorer travels to a small Italian village to bring a medieval painting back to its former glory. Little does she know she's placing her life in danger from an evil curse and a monster born of myth and brutal pain. So the art restorer in question is played by Scream Queen extraordinaire, Lauren Lara of Terrifi two fame. This one,
one looks like fun to me. It looked like it didn't take itself too. Seriously. I kind of hope it doesn't because I will admit that. The scary Well painting monster looks a little too much like Golum from Lord of the Rings for me to take it seriously. Once you see that, you cannot see. That's true. I can see that. Yeah. So whether it's good or not, I have to see it because of course, the first comment under the YouTube trailer was somebody going, ah,
another female protagonist in a horror movie. So just for you commenter, I'm going to make sure I watch this so many times. Watch that be the director under an alias that's just trolling you. Yes. I want them to watch it with all the ladies. That sounded so much less creepy in my head than when I said it. Out loud. I wasn't going to say anything, but okay. Okay. And it's Italian, so your heritage, you sort of have to watch it. I do, yeah. It's kind of a necessity.
This kind of interests me too, because one of my side hustles, and I know it's a different skillset completely from restoring old paintings, is I digitally restore old photographs. And I can absolutely see how restoring old paintings or photographs could work as an angle for a horror movie. Kind of like archeology in a weird way. You're unearthing and reconstructing the past and maybe you reconstruct something you shouldn't. Yep, absolutely.
So it's freaky. I remember it being honestly pretty scary. But there's a movie called The Canal There for Ireland where at least part of it is the guy who's working as an old classic film restorer and digitizer because a lot of those old physical films, they weren't meant to last decades and decades. And so they start to degrade. And so he's one of the guys working for a film commission that restores it and then digitizes it. And yeah, he starts to see some stuff.
That's really cool. By the way, Grady, I didn't know you did that. Yeah. Like a super cool talent and yeah, you could make a lot of good money from that, can't you? Especially now, people probably want their photos restored quite often. And. To be clear, what I do mostly just kind amounts to scanning old photographs and touching them up in Photoshop as best I can to make them. Not look faded and old and. Damaged. So it's not, like I said, not.
Quite the same as taking an old painting and doing the same thing physically. Cleaning it, but it's a thing that's. Super cool. I have to send you a TikTok. There is somebody ordered a Temu, a temu blanket or something. Temu is like, wish, you know how they say the wish version of something? It's the same thing. Temu is like you pay tiny, tiny little bit of money and you get something in return. So it's a weird chop. Everybody else will know what I'm talking about.
Emily will know what I'm talking about. Anyway, I have no idea. What you're. All about. Yeah. So she sent in old, it's this old family photo, like an online shop thing, and I know about the human rights abuses, but that's about it. So she sent this family photo that she wanted to be put on a blanket, and it looked good up until you got to the faces, and it looked like somebody just kind of tried to draw in the faces, but they didn't know how to draw. And it turned out terrifying.
And I kind of love it. So I got to send you that TikTok. I'm thinking of that guy that drew a smiley face on the Mona Lisa. That's basically like a budget painting restorer kind of deal. I forget what show, but just it did not go well. No. Oh man. Well, also on the sixth, this time on Shutter, we have the demon disorder from Australia. Tells the story of Graham Jake and Philip Riley and their deceased father, their past pasts collide. Their lives collide. No, that's not the same thing.
Their pasts collide when a family's secret is discovered leading their father's garage to become the site of revenge from beyond the grave. Now, I could go back and edit that, but I'm not going to do that. That's fair. You listen. Our people know who we are. I love that they see us warts and all. Well, I just got an email from a student saying, hello, professor Frank. I'm totally going to call you that from now on. That is the only thing I'm going to call you ever from this day forward.
Professor Frank, now. Amazing. In his, I hesitate to say defense. My phone is Autocorrected funk to Frank before, so that might not have been completely his fault. Oh, okay. Fair enough. Fair. Enough. I am still going to call you Professor Frank from that one. Oh yeah. So this one, I feel like this is the start of the theme, right? So is it like dads are the theme fatherhood. Bad dads? Yes. Bad dads. Okay. So it was funny, I was trying to figure out the theme.
So I watched the first one and then I watched the second one and I'm like, is the theme demons? And then I watched the third one and I'm like, oh, it's daddy issues. I was way off. What'd you think? I thought it was mid two thousands neoconservative hunting accidents that aren't actually accidents also. Yes. Yes. Not sure where the painting restore fit into that, but I was kind of doing some NPO nippo calisthenics there. Dick Cheney would like a word. Oh God.
But yeah, bad dad. Lots of body horror. This has a good reputation. It was mentioned of the Bloody Disgusting podcast recently, and it definitely looks intense. The weld looks like it probably doesn't take itself too seriously. It might even go a little bit far in the opposite direction. This, they would call this elevated horror. Yeah. I could see that. I had a difficult time seeing that. And I kind of realized something about myself watching this trailer.
And I don't know if it's a good thing, but I'm going to hash it out here in this private publicly broadcast podcast with my friends. It is very difficult for me to take anything with an Australian accent seriously. And I'm worried about what that says about me and my attitude towards Australia. And also I was watching these trailers in the same room as my parents who were watching TV and an Outback Steakhouse commercial came on right at the same time that I was watching this trailer,
which did not help. That's incredible. My point is, this whole time I was expecting one of them to threaten to sneak up on that demon and jam a thumb up. Its butthole. Yeah. Yeah. I, and. Maybe that happens. I don't know. That is an old South Park reference for those of you that didn't get it, so that you don't think I'm insane. Speaking of mid two thousands. References. We'll always reference South. Oh, earlier than that. This was like a nineties. This was nineties South Park.
I thought early was old. This. Is. Second season. Oh, I thought it was the Russell. Crow episode. No. Yeah, not. Oh. Okay. Was it first season? I thought it was first season. Maybe it was second season. Shoot. It had to have been when Steve Irwin was still alive because that's what they were. Thinking. So then probably the second season rather, or first season, anyway. I'm going to sneak right up on them and jam my thumb up. Its butthole.
And in fairness, the Australian sense of humor, a lot of them would think that was really funny. I think don't want to speak for an entire nation. But. Anyway, my point is I may have a little bit of a bias when it comes to Australia and that may not be a good thing. Fair. Enough. And so I have a movie for you. Let's bookmark that thought because the movie I did this week, big check mark for everything you just said, and it's fantastic. Okay,
love it. Also, keeping with Bad dads on the sixth on VOD betrayal from the United Kingdom, three brothers returned to the remote woodland where they killed their abusive father only to discover his shower grave. What is wrong with me? I love that. It's like the episode that we really. Choose not to edit it. Well, I mean, I used to listen to Every Minute Grace, the shower grave of Doctor of Professor Frank. I used to listen to every minute of this and I would edit and trim and
everything that it took forever. And at some point I was like, why am I doing this? I'll just bookmark the times when Melissa goes to do full blown Miss Andry, and I'll cut that out. Call a day. Yeah. But usually I can also talk. So. The Shower grave of Professor Frank sounds like an AI generated horror title. Honestly, it sounds like a tub movie that I would watch. I might ask ai, ask to write a script. Let's see what happens. Do. It. Sure. Why. Not?
Three brothers returned to the remote woodland where they killed their abusive father only to discover his shallow grave is now empty, forcing them to question one another's loyalty with devastating consequences as fear and paranoia set in. So this is a good reputation. I mean. Bad dad. Yeah. Bad dad. I am guessing that the dad turns out to be a zombie or revenant of some kind and probably way off, but we will see. Yeah. Yeah. I dunno. The IMDB reviews were pretty wild.
I would assume this will hit streaming somewhere at some point. I thought it was a shutter release. I thought they had the shutter logo in there. But when I went back, when I went back and watched it again, I did not see the shutter logo. So I think I'm wrong. About that Demon disorder. And the other one we're doing both do. So you might have just gotten conflated. Yeah, I think so. So the other one, late August, our friends in the Great White North gave us another wilderness horror.
And this is the other tie into the theme. Adam McDonald, who directed Backcountry and Pie whack is returning for another. Don't go into the Woods Tale called Out Come The Wolves. And the Bloody Disgusting podcast mentioned this one too. They said McDonald considers this part three of a wilderness horror trilogy with those other two. And it stars Missy Pergram, who was also in Backcountry and Backcountry was a very scary movie. That really. Very scary movie.
It was, yeah. No, it was. It really was. It scared the crap out of me. So realistic predatory bear attacks do happen from time to time and just the circumstances and everything, it really shook me. I loved it and also hated it because oh my God. But wolves don't attack people, so I'm a little suspicious of this one. I think something else might be going on. Again, the wolves are a metaphor. YouTube comments. Yeah. Yes. That would be. My. The first comment was friend zoned the movie. I mean.
So was there just a raging misogynist watching all the same trailers as you at the exact same time? Apparently. Okay. But I feel like that's at least a little accurate based on what I thought of the trailer. Well, they definitely set that up. And Backcountry had some elements of that too, where a different version of it could have turned into a slasher instead of a killer pair movie trailer definitely wants you to think that.
But we've also seen some actual Killer Wolf movies before The Gray, or what was that terrible one that we watched with one of the scars guards. And Jeffrey Wright. You remember? No, I'm thinking of Kevin's. It'll come to me. So who wants to go first? Do you want to keep experimenting with Australia, Grady? Because I think you would like Let's do that. Australia. Let's do Australia. Get all the Australia jokes out of our system. Okay, so. Hold the dark.
Thank you. Hold the dark. Yes, yes. I did not enjoy it. I didn't think you did either. No, no. So I watched car effects from Australia on Tuby IMDB summary, an aspiring documentarian and two conservationists venture into the outback to record animals displaced by bush fires. What is a bush fire? Why am I so bad at this? Well, and it's Australia, right? So is it bush fire or brush fire? Oh, Bush fire makes much more sense.
So I didn't misspell it because I was thinking it was brush fire, but then I didn't see an R. Is. Marcus the she of the professor. Be so bad night of the bus fire? I'm a professional. We do professional things, an aspiring documentarian and two conservationists venture into the outback to record animals displaced by bush fires. Why is that one word? Shouldn't that be two different words where they discover a Purifying new species, I think. I mean, yeah, professional,
doing professional things. So anyway, I saw this on a Saturday night. Emily and Roz were asleep. I was tired. I was in that weird neutral zone where I didn't want to get too invested in a movie and I didn't want to watch a good movie, but I also didn't want to waste my time with a dumpster dive and watch a bad movie. And that's a real fine line to walk. So I went to Tubi as one does under such circumstances and Tubi once again, scratch that itch real good.
And I appreciate that this has the heart and soul of a nineties creature feature all the way down to a shameless quote, because of course they quoted that guy. Of course they did. It's beautiful. The fox molder moment where the creature is really cool. It's got a great sense of humor, and the monster is in the words of molder within the realm of extreme possibility. So it's fun. Get some popcorn, get a beer. It's an Australian monster movie. They shot it in the outback,
the scariest parts of the movie. Honestly, there's at one point where the documentarian who's not accustomed to being out in the woods in a tent, conservationists are, and the documentarian is hearing all these animals making these sounds that I'm assuming they were actually making in real life out there on the woods with this just small team filming this movie. And they're legitimately freaky as all get like koalas. They're adorable, right? They're super cute to look at.
They sound like the literal spawn of Satan. It took me a while to realize you were talking about the animals making animals sounds and not the documentarians making the animal sounds in the back while they were filming. Why would anyone ever do that? I don't know. That's why I was confused. No, they had a camera. They had actors in the outback and they had the actors responding to the real life animal sounds, including a koala,
which legitimately sounds terrifying. And you're like, what the hell is that? And is it going to kill me quickly or slowly? And no, it's just a cute, adorable little koala. Insert joke about. Australian wildlife here. So yeah, I mean, yeah, it's that kind of movie. It is a creature feature that it feels very nineties. They shot it out in the outback. The ending could have been a little bit better, but it still worked for me. The reviews really panned it because they said, oh, well,
the monster doesn't look good, and the CGI looks new. It's like, it's a low budget monster movie. What do you expect? That's a completely unfair criticism. And I thought, given presumably this is a low budget movie, I didn't look it up. But given those constraints, the monster I thought was really clever and fun and looked fine. It's not going to win any visual effects awards, but it looks fine. That just seems like a really unfair criticism.
As long as they didn't have a hairless Moby as a werewolf, I'm okay with any other thing that any of these movies wanted to do For a fact. They did not. This was not where, no, this was a better movie all around them where the characters were likable. The Fox Molder moment and the monster were genuinely cool. The subtitles lagged a little bit behind the dialogue, and because they shot it out in the Outback, it was literally dark. Not figuratively dark, but literally dark.
So I wound up having to listen a little more carefully and watch a little more closely than I would've really liked for a monster movie on Tuby. But even so, it's fine. That subtitle thing seems to be a problem with Tuby in general. I ran into the same issue when I watched the Velco experiment. Yeah. There's a couple of movies that I watched that had that issue, and then there are some that it's on point. So I don't know who does captions. I would assume it's not the movie.
I. Think I don't actually know. Yeah, that's something I haven't been meaning to look into for a while, especially for our thing, we have to do subtitles for a lot of stuff that feels like information. We should be a little more conversant then. I'm going to look into that. Yeah, that'd be great. Awesome. Next. Time. It comes up. I'm just curious.
Yeah. Well, and this, they matched and their English, they were speaking English, and even with the accent, you can tell there weren't any translation issues, but they were just delayed, which in the beginning is fun because the beginning is just, you don't see the monster, but it eats something and the thing is getting eaten because you see that. And so the little subtitle with the parentheses monster crunching sounds that pops up after the monster crunching sounds begin.
And it's like reminding you, Hey, these are monster crunching sounds. It's like, yes, tub Me. I know. Thank you. Very good job there. What really annoys me is when subtitles spoil things. There's one movie where, I can't remember, it wasn't a very good movie, but it's one movie a few years ago, but it spoiled the name of the antagonist and that something that a character was dreaming about was a villain. I think it was that video game one. I can't remember what it was called. But anyway.
Oh, I think you're right. The one with Robert England. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know exactly. Yes. And it did. Yes. It totally did. It totally did. That was on Netflix. That's going to drive me up the wall. Well, and so it did that too. There was a couple, and I want to say maybe thanks Killing It did that too, because it had the voice of the killer and it said the character's name blah blah with. I'm like, God damn it. Really? Yeah. Shoes or Die. Oh. Yeah. Totally did that.
But Car Fix was fun. I would say Grady, for your particular predilection of not being able to take Australia seriously, this is a great one because this movie doesn't take itself seriously at all. And it's not slap sticky, it's not outright horror comedy, but it's a fun monster movie. It knows what it is. It's leaning into it. It has fun. I'm not going to say who they quote, but you know who it's, you're going to see the quote coming from a mile away.
You're going to say it with the movie and you're going to love it. And. I need to know. The quote. You know the quote? You absolutely know the quote. It's from the nineties apparently. Yes, very much from the nineties. From the nineties. Awesome. I think I gave it three stars on Letterboxed. I liked it. It's not really scary. Maybe a one, maybe a two, but it's a. Put on the background movie. Good. I don't want to think too much. I'm halfway on my phone,
but I'm watching this type of thing. It was fun. I liked it. Awesome. Grady, did you want to go next or did you want me to go next? Well, I've got two movies that I'm going to talk about, one of which is I enjoyed, but it's not technically eligible for the podcast, but it has some connections to the things we've done that are eligible, that are kind of neat that I'm going to get into. And then I have another movie that I am going to swing out with a golf club for
several minutes. So why don't you go ahead and do. Yours? Do you want to do this? Okay, I can definitely do that. So again, I have been obsessed with short verse, I can't get enough of these short horror movies, and I'm actually, so it's expanding my understanding of what I find horrifying, what I think scares me the most. And this really preyed on the fact that something can feel normal, something can feel every day you can be talking to a person, but that person isn't who you think they are.
And not everything is how it seems. And it's that sitting in uncomfortableness that scares me the most. So this movie's called Milk. It's actually a staff pick from Vimeo. It won a couple awards at South by Southwest. It's 2018, it's by Santiago Menini. And Little Synopsis is one late night, a young teen goes into the kitchen for a glass of milk. Upon encountering his sleepless mother, he quickly realizes things are not as they seem.
So immediately one of the first things you notice about this movie is you have a shot that looks like almost like Alfred Hitchcock's the Birds. There's a bunch of crows on a line and unassuming house, and it just feels incredibly unsettling. You dunno why it's unsettling, but it's unsettling. I loved this because when I went back, I rewatched it with the director and writer's commentary. That's what they were going for.
The Alfred Hitchcock things are just a little bit outside the realm of where they should be and you're not really sure why. And it starts off kind of innocently enough. I mean, the kid goes downstairs, you see the light on upstairs, but you see that all the other lights are off in the house and kid goes downstairs grabs a milk carton. Now this is one of those things where it's very obvious. It was a very obvious, Hey, look at this. But it's also something that you would see all the time.
This is obviously an older time, and so you have the milk carton with the missing on it and two pictures of children. Yes. And why you can't really see the pictures. You're already like, okay, it's centered in the frame enough where it feels uncomfortable. And you kind of see a shadow behind the kid and you don't really know what it is. And then it just kind of starts to get creepier and creepier to where
you have the mom who's talking to the kid. And the first time, the time the mom is talking to the kid, she yells at him, get a damn glass, stop drinking right out of the carton. Very something that Dan would do and everybody would do whatever. And then it just starts, she starts to sound a little weird. And then you see her feet and her feet are dirty. She's been outside. And then from the other side of the house you hear
his mother calling him. And for that, for it being 10 minutes, it felt like the longest time of not knowing who was really the mom who was there for him. Are they both? Maybe this is not, and it just. Why is the Dopel hanger such a stick? It was uncomfortable for using a glass. And there is some kind of body horror in this in terms of faces, and it pulls it off so well. A lot of times I feel like when they do the short films and indie films,
when they do horror makeup, it doesn't look right. It doesn't look great. No, this was done so well and shot so well in the perfect lighting that whoever that was, it terrified me. And the themes here are just not wanting your kid to grow up, wanting to keep them as a child. So the director talked about how he kind of got the idea for this, and he has a big family, and he was there for the holidays and a couple of his cousins couldn't come. And so it was like that longing of missing his cousins.
But he had gone downstairs in the middle of the night and his mother was on the phone with I guess those cousins, and she was whispering because she didn't want to wake up the rest of the house. But that eerie feeling of going downstairs, not knowing somebody's there, and then somebody whispering and your mother whispering, and it just felt so surreal. And that feeling of where we are not going to see our cousins, are they going to grow up? We're not going to see them until next year.
And how much more grown will they be? And the themes in this are interesting. It doesn't necessarily have an ending or even just a beginning. It's more of just that 10 minutes of fear and it's very open to interpretation. Even though they have a solid last line, you can interpret what happened a number of different ways. And I think that makes it scarier. You can go back and rewatch it and kind of build your own backstory as to what's going on.
And it's just that feeling of you're looking at somebody and that person is saying, no, don't go there. That's not who that is. I am your mother. And having that other person saying, no, I'm your mother. It creeped me out. And the shots were perfect, just the unassuming house, the perfect lighting, just creepy as all hell because it felt so normal until you hear the other voice. So terror scale, honestly,
for a short film, it was a two. Because if I was watching this, I don't think I would then go upstairs and get a glass of water or something in the middle of the night, I got to say. And to have so much packed in such a short film. I love when they do that because you can tell so much story in 10 minutes and you're either going to be effective at it or it's not going to work. And this was incredibly effective. And I don't think that it would've worked as a longer movie.
He's got a bunch more that I want to watch that are on short verse because I do like him as a director. I think that the way that he films things are really interesting. And he actually, so the title scene is water floating Right or Water When you're looking at a lake and it's rippling and then it just has the title there. He did that with bathtub, put some dark towels on the bottom of it, his bathtub, and he shot the water.
And then overlaid the and way he talked about how he filmed some of this stuff, you would've thought he actually had a huge budget because it was really good. And no, it was just stupid stuff like that. And that makes it even better. He used what he had on hand and he made it amazing. So I have a feeling, yeah, we're going to see a lot more from him and I hope some feature lengths.
Nice. Well, and that behind the scenes practical effects stuff, you either get really excited about that and it's cool, or it stresses you out like nothing else, and you just want to go to the computer. And I just love the idea of a couple of people sitting around with a camera going, all right, how are we going to do this? And somebody just tosses towels in a bathtub like that kind of DIY really works for me. And I hope when that's a fun, positive experience. It can be really cool,
just like any other working environment. When it's toxic, it's toxic. But this sounds like it was a lot of fun. Well, and I have to say too, listening to him, so I watched him do a whole voiceover and talk about how he directed the movie and everything, and he goes shot by shot and listening to him talk about it, you can see that this was his passion and he was so excited about these different cool things that he was able to do and how they looked. And he is like, oh, does that shot look cool?
And so you could tell it's a passion, and I think that's where you get the most effective horror movies out of somebody who actually has a passion for making it look and feel the way you want it to. Yeah, yeah. Really the most effective, anything for that matter. But yeah, definitely horror. Yeah. So Milk 2018 on short verse, go watch it. Cool. All right. So I did. All Grady, are we going to get the good first or the bad first? I think I know which one is.
First. Wait, I'm going to do the good one first because it's going to be considerably shorter. It is nothing about, it's actually forum per se, so I don't want to spend too much time on it. First one I did is the Primevals, which was released in 2023, despite the fact that the writing and filming initially started in the late
sixties. So the premise, this is from Wikipedia, after a Yeti is killed by a group of Sherpa, a team of university scientists travel to Nepal to find the origins of the creature teaming up with a rugged tracker, the group set out to the Sherpa Village, and after a large avalanche discover, a hidden primeval wind populated by prehistoric creatures, ancient hominids, and an alien reptilian species. I did not realize until I started reading this out loud how spoilery that was, but whatever.
Anyway, so this movie was a passion project of David Allen. He was a prolific stop motion animator, special effects artists, did tons of stuff in the seventies and eighties, the creature designing special effects for Ghostbusters one and two, the stop motion for the Giant Insects And Honey I Shrunk Kids Most relevant to our podcast. He was the effects guy for the first three Subspecies movies. Noise. He's. The man that animated the finger denotes finger.
Demons. Okay, well then he's incredible. That's all I'm. Going to say. Pretty one. Yep. Soon as I found that out, that was my entire justification for talking about the movie on the podcast. Otherwise, I was just going to leave it at Watch The Primevals. It's neat. No, you had to do that. You had to talk about it. It's important. Absolutely. Absolutely. So he started writing this in the late sixties.
It's one of the very first film projects that he started on, and he kind of kept coming back to it off and on for several decades, just getting a studio to fund it, and then losing that funding and just doing some of it on his own and got a bunch of, most of the scenes with actors and stuff were filmed in the mid nineties, so he was able to get a lot of the non effect shots done then.
But ultimately, unfortunately, he died in 1999, and he left the stop motion puppets, the already film sequences, the scripts, storyboards, just everything to one of his colleagues, Chris Kott, who struggled for years to find a way to complete it until he started an Indiegogo campaign in 2018, which is where I had first heard of this. I had heard about this before you told me about it, Marcus. And I remember seeing the Indiegogo campaign thinking, oh, okay, that's neat.
They don't do stop motion anymore. And then I never really thought about it again until you sent me the trailer last week, Marcus. I was like, oh yeah, that thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bloody disgusting. Had an article about it. I didn't realize it was out already, but. Just came out last week, I think, or just came onto demand last week. I know. I think it did some film festival circuits last year in 2023, the release date on it.
But it just came to streaming on video, on demand, and on Amazon a week or two ago as it was recording, I think. Okay. But anyway. Movie Really neat Effects, thought it was worth talking about just due to the connections to Full Moon Studios and the Subspecies Finger demon guy. Oh, yeah.
Writing wise, you can kind of tell that this was pasti of several different drafts over several decades, and it's definitely the kind of movie that would've been an amazing cult classic if it had come up closer to when he first came up with it. But nowadays, it shows its age a little bit. And if you're going into this expecting a more modern grizzly stop motion horror, this won't necessarily scratch that itch.
But if you come into it expecting a good goofy seventies and eighties style adventure movie slash creature feature, this is. A good one. Okay. Well, and I love that backstory too. It reminds me of Mad God on Shutter, which different special effects guy, but sort of a similar story where he just worked on it off and on for decades, and that is terrifying. That is a trippy as hell fever dream that is horrifying. Stop motion, brilliantly done, genuinely scary.
This sounds a lot more digestible, a lot easier. I'll say the zing of the stop motion creatures is on point. The Eddie admittedly looks a little bit Rankin bass for my taste, but the alien creatures and some of the other things that show up in the second half of the movie, those might creep you out if Stop motion's, the kind of thing that creeps you out. Nice. Fair enough. I love that. Makes me want to go back and rewatch stop. Motion. Oh God, I loved that movie.
That was a good one. Yeah. And this one is too, let's get to the. Yeah, had to get to it. I was curious to see if your opinions had changed from when you last watched it. If anything. I like it a little less now, but let's get into it. So my other choice of movie this week was from America and Columbia released in 2016, the Bellco Experiment summary from IMDB In a Twisted Social Experiment, 80 Americans are locked in their high rise corporate office in Bogota, Columbia.
I probably mispronounce that and ordered by an unknown voice coming from the company's intercom system to participate in a deadly game of kill or be killed. So a lot of marketing buzz around this movie at the time. And I remember this because we saw this in theaters. Yeah, we did. Yeah. This was early 2016. Yeah, but before 2016 became 2016, so to. Speak. Yeah, just started June 1st. Oh, no. I. Had just started at one of my many unpleasant corporate jobs over the years, and.
That. Particularly excited me for the premise of this movie in particular. But. Yeah, March 17th, 2017, so later than I thought. Oh, okay. But I definitely remember seeing it with you and one of the twins. Yeah. I don't remember which one. And it was my idea, I was hyped for this movie, and I don't know if I've apologized sufficiently for that over the years, but it wasn't, I mean. I don't know if it was apology worthy, but.
A lot of the marketing buzz surrounding this movie advertised it as a combination of battle royale and office space, which is true only in the most literal, generous sense of the word, and that it's a movie about a killing game that takes place in a corporate office. So that's it. That's the only. Pretty much, it lacks both office spaces, comedic satire and relatability.
And any sense of creativity or flare it flare is, I'm talking about office space, pieces of flare, but it doesn't have any of flare or impressive kills that Metal Royal had. And one of the issues of this movie, and this was another thing that made me Ill advised in my excitement to see it, is the involvement of James Gunn who wrote and produced this movie but didn't
actually direct it. And at the time, James Gunn was just coming off of being the director of Guardians of the Galaxy, which to date is the only Marvel movie that I can enjoy. Yeah. Fair. I can expect that. So he had that going for him. And on a more personal note for me, he had also written the script at the time, recently released greatest video game about a cheerleader killing zombies with a chainsaw of all time, lollipop Chainsaw, the remake for which is releasing.
Next week, by the way. So stay tuned for my thoughts on that. Nice. And so I went into this expecting fun, comedic horror and some. Trivia behind this. James Gunn wrote the script for this back in 2007, and he stepped away from directing it or having anything to do with it because it was his personal life issues at the time. I think he was going through a divorce or death in the family or something. So it was shelved for about a decade, and some studio asked him to revive it.
And John didn't have time to direct the movie himself because at this point, he was one of the Marvel people. He was making more money than God, but he did agree to produce it and extensively maintain full creative control. There's some debates on how much creative control he actually had or more accurately bothered to exercise. And he handed director duties to Greg McLean, whose most famous movie at the time was a horror movie called Wolf Creek, which I'm also is from Australia.
And I'm tentatively thinking of adding it to my repertoire just to see if maybe he did something better than this. I wanted to give him a shot. I love Wolf Creek, but it's brutal. It's brutal. So that leads into some of the discussion that I read over where this movie went wrong, Belco experiment, not Wolf Creek.
So general consensus on TV tropes, which is where I get arguably far too much of my information on fandom reaction to things, is that Cleen made the mistake of playing the script that Gunn wrote as a horror comedy too straight. And I can definitely see the argument for that. This is a very sell premise with a movie that takes itself way too seriously and isn't competent enough to pull it off, which is a problem we run into with a lot of movies on this podcast.
But that's different conversation for a different day. But that theory has some holes in it for me, because for one thing, James Gunn also made Bright Burn. And. While I'd be hard pressed to call that movie the greatest movie of all time, it's also a. Horror movie with a very silly premise that takes itself seriously. And it was so much better than this. Yeah. Rayburn is legitimate. I It's scary. Yeah. Yeah. It is arguably one of the best takes on the what if Superman,
but evil trope. I put it up there with Red Sun. Which I would love to see adapted incidentally. That'd be awesome. But overall. Just my dislike for this movie just mostly comes from the wasted potential.
The characters aren't developed or interesting enough to work from the Office Comedy Angle and the Kills aren't interesting enough for the horror angle, a death game taking place in a corporate office building, I expect, well, okay, there's one guy that gets murdered with a tape dispenser, but other than that, it's mostly just people shooting each other. That's boring. Yeah. That doesn't sound so creative when you have an entire office space to work with.
Yeah. Well, it felt like the office was incidental. Yes. It could have been anywhere. And my recollection is they start trying to, they tell 'em, you have to kill half of the 80 people or something like that. So they start looking. At basically, you have to kill two people, or we'll kill four, and then you have to kill 20 people, or we'll kill four, or no,
it's kill 40 people. Or we'll kill, I don't know. But either way, there's like 20 people left in the climax of the movie, and it turns into a massive battle royale. And if you do that with Dilbert office, Spacey tropes, will you please just send an email scheduling meetings? That could be emails. You could have fun with that while he's beating him with a mouse or something like that. But it just didn't, it took itself too seriously. And it played it to, you felt bad for the characters.
They weren't walking office or coworker tropes. Maybe not the one played by Dr. Cox. He was pretty terrible. But that's the other thing too. John c McGinley is so funny. Dr. Cox was great. He's Stan is Stan versus Stan Against Evil. And that, oh, that deserves so much more than it got season wise. That is, especially the first season or two are funny. It's all Get Out.
And I was expecting so much more from him, and he's doing, McGinley is doing the best he can with the script, but they just got him and everybody to play it too. It felt like it was trying too hard, sort of across the board. They had a premise that needed comedy and they did not put comedy in it. And I know that I'm normally super predisposed toward comedy and me expecting to find comedy and not getting as a problem I have with a bunch of stuff, but I feel like this is one more that's warranted.
Well, that was the entire marketing pitch of the film. Hey, hey, this is by the same guy that wrote that silly movie about the raccoon that made all the money. Want to see him do office space, but with murder. And I still want to see that that's not what we got. So. I take it rewatching it did not change your opinion at all. No, no. It did not.
There are some scenes toward the end where they're picking who lives and does That actually made me a lot more uncomfortable than when I watched it the first. Time, but not really in a good way, just kind of in a, well, why am I watching this kind of way? And it feels like, especially toward the end, that they're trying to make some social commentary. And that could have been poignant and entertaining if they had just done two or three more drafts. But as. It stands.
This movie just did not work for me. Yeah, that's a. Shame. Yeah. Well, it makes sense that the director also did Wolf Creek, because Wolf Creek is completely fastball down the middle. It's brutal. It's torture porn. But you know that going into it. No, it's not throwing you a curve ball at all. It's that intense. This couldn't pick a lane. Yeah. No. So yeah, motion picture to. Scale.
I'm giving it a two because I could see the second half where everything starts unraveling, genuinely freaking out. Someone who isn't into horror and was expecting something a bit sier based on the marketing, but even that's being pretty generous. You kind of have to care for the characters to be scared for them. And this movie does not give you the opportunity to do that. Quality three, nothing wrong with it from a technical standpoint,
but it's just kind of meh and enjoyment. I'm giving it a two. I had a really hard time getting through this. Not to the point that it makes me angry and I try to save ones for movies that genuinely make me angry. But this goes beyond just not being for me, because I honestly have a hard time imagining anybody. Liking this. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. I don't remember a lot of people talking positively out of it as we were walking out of the theater. Apparently.
There were people in the theater besides. Us were there. Maybe that's why I don't remember anybody talking about it. Well, part of that. Is because it came out in the same week as Beauty and the Beast. So there were tons of people there to see that bad live action remake of Beauty of the Beast with Emma Watson. So there were tons of people there to see that before. And we were the only three people seeing the Belco experiment to the point that the ticket person gave us a weird look.
Okay, now is ringing Capel. Yes, he eyeballed us. You're going to see that he looked at him. We, and there were throngs of Disney people that had just gone through in front of us in a whole line. Of, and other guy was an admittedly impressive beast, cosplay that probably looked better than the beast in that movie, I. Remember this and I had to look it up. I was right. This came out around the same time that Mayhem did and another office. And so Mayhem was the one that I loved and I kept
relating mayhem to Belco experiment. And I would see their cover art and I'd be like, oh, is this Belco? And it's like, no, that's Mayhem. It's very similar premises. And it. Has. Steven Win, which is one of my favorite, favorite actors. That's the one with the lawyer that has the disease that Rick your impulse control or something, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Because when I was doing my research, I was also looking for other movies that did office horror better and real debatable on whether I found any that were better. But Mayhem is one of the ones that came up, so yeah, I read about it. Mayhem is better. Okay. Another one I saw was, let me see if I can find it. Oh, is it Office Uprising? Yep. Yep. The zombies in an Office basically. Yep. Well, not really zombies, but like the Rage 28 days later type. Yeah. Rage, whatever it is. Yeah.
I also have this vague recollection of a YouTube video of Jigsaw if he were your coworker, like the Doll. And I remember that being funny as all Get Out. Yes. They did. What if Jigsaw was your roommate? What if Jigsaw was your coworker? It was a whole series and it's hilarious. Yeah, yeah. No, the coworker one is the one that I remember. Scary. All of which were better experiment. Yes. Alrighty. Do we want to spin the wheel or are we feeling good about next week?
I already have one for next week. So I do too. I already have one for next week too, and I still have, if I could do trivia again. I've got so much for trivia. If you guys want me to do it again, but if you would like it, that is totally cool too. Sure. I mean, I've got a few that I need to feel like I need to avenge myself. So Yeah, go ahead. Unless Great, you want to do it? I will find some eventually. That will probably not be next week though, so one. Y'all go Sweet. Fair enough.
Alrighty. Well if you're still listening, give us a shout out on Threads. I deleted our Twitter account. It felt very good. Yay. And the first time I tried to delete it, it said, something's gone wrong. Try again later. And I'm like, nice try. And I just button matched until it let me delete it. But give us a shout out on Friends. Oh, we send our. Viewers, us an email grams. Now, I don't know what X calls retweet, so I'm just going to insist that they're grams. It's a gram. Absolutely.
Follow us on Letterboxed and tell your friends, say, Hey, they're moving to Fridays. Fridays are Friday. Then. They'll say, Friday, Friday, who's moving to Fridays? What the hell are you talking about? Are you possessed? Do you have the brain worms? Then you say, yes, but also these guys imported word. Check them out.