What is a skeleton's Favorite snack? Spare ribs. Get it, get it, get it. Hello and welcome to Imported Horror. This is the podcast that brings you the very best of creepy ninjas, killer sharks and children acting super weird from beyond the shining seas. I'm Marcus. I am flying solo this week and as you can probably tell, I have a monster cold. I'm finally getting over it. You should have heard me on Monday. That's what happens when you have a toddler.
She brings home all sorts of fun new viruses every couple of weeks. Melissa is feeling a little under the weather. Hope she feels better. Brady's got some stuff going on and he was feeling under the weather earlier this week, and so was everyone you know is sick and I cannot wait for spring and that's good because spring break is finally here.
Mercifully finally here, and I figured since I'm flying solo anyway, I begin all my lectures for class, my online podcast, lectures for class with dad jokes, so what the hell, I tried here too. We don't have a lot to talk about this week, so let's get to it coming soon for the coming Soons for this week, we've only got two new or original foreign horrors that are dropping and there's definitely a theme, but there's also a difference in tone and style that I think make a
really interesting comparison. Both are dropping on March 7th, which is the Friday that this comes out. First is on shutter. This is starve acre. I think we talked about this a couple of weeks ago when it hit VOD. Maybe I'm losing my mind. An idyllic rural family life of a couple is thrown into turmoil when their son starts acting out of character. Bravo IMDB. Once again, really understating the full core vibes and just how
out in the middle of nowhere this feels. I don't think it's technically a more, but it's deep English countryside definitely looks spooky. It has that full horror vibe really going for it. The slow music. I might be crazy. The I'm in the middle of nowhere, the why are you digging holes everywhere. Matt Smith and horror fans may know him from last night in Soho and his house. I think he's an underrated scream king, frankly, but he's also in House of the Dragon.
He was one of the doctors and Dr. Who, which is one of those things that by all rights I probably should be interested in and I'm just not, for whatever reason, nothing against it. I just that and Twin Peaks, I should be into it. I'm not. It's also got, and I'm so sorry, I'm probably going to mispronounce this, but morphed Clark, M-O-R-F-Y-D-D, Morphy. I should have looked it up. I didn't, I apologize. But she was maed in Saint Maude, which I haven't seen,
but Melissa tells me very good things. I know it was very highly acclaimed. People talked about it a lot in the same breath as sensor and sensor I have seen and sensor I absolutely loved, and I think it was more that they came out at around the same time than anything else, but there's some definite parallels there. And I want to see St. Maude, I just haven't yet. So serious horror credentials for this and Shutter is a great place for that. Slow, dreary, full core kid is acting strange.
I'm thinking maybe Changeling, maybe something else. The trailer doesn't give it away. The digging makes me think maybe it's going in another direction, but you never know. You never know. The other one also on March 7th also has a kid acting out of character, and this is on VOD and I think limited theaters, but I never know how limited, limited theaters are. I feel like if it only is in LA and New York, that's not limited, that's absent. Frankly.
If it comes to Houston, even just a couple of theaters, then maybe we can say limited, but I don't know. But Bloat follows a mother and two sons vacationing in Japan, their younger son almost drowns in a lake, and soon after the accident, the parents realized that something is wrong with their boy. Now this has much more of a mainstream feel to it. It's from IMDB says France, the United States and Japan.
But it definitely feels more typical horror movie Hollywood mainstream, which is fine and it definitely has a different vibe than the super dark British folk horror star of acre that we were just talking about, but I don't want to say upbeat, but it's a little bit faster paced. What it leaves out is that the dad isn't actually there with them in Japan. He is in uniform. He's behind a NATO desk somewhere and he can't get away.
So he's seeing all of this through phone screens and computer screens and he's trying to figure out what's going on remotely, which would be horrifying. I could completely see that. Most of the time when your family's traveling and there's an emergency, you get up and go, but you can't necessarily do that if you're in the military. And that's a fun angle, and I can't think of a lot of movies that have explored that very much.
Don't watch the trailer because it does go into, I think, too much detail about the thing that it could be, and I smell a twist, but even so the thing will be familiar to listeners of this podcast and Japanese horror in general and also River Monsters, which I maintain is full horror. I haven't quite sold Melissa and Grady on that yet,
but I'm still working on it. But if you have seen all of river monsters like I have with or without a young child sleeping on your chest, which is how I watched most of it when Roz was itty bitty, bitty. But you will smile, you will recognize it and you go, damn, I wish I hadn't watched the trailer. I wish I didn't know what it was. So maybe skip the trailer. What I haven't mentioned yet is that the dad in this is Ben McKinsey, and if you're thinking I know that name, why do I know that name?
If you're of a certain age, the OC is why you know that name. And now that song California with the piano that's stuck in your head, you're welcome. He's also been, I think he was in Gotham. He's been in a lot both in TV and maybe less in film, but he's had a long career fun fact. He's also a really high profile cryptocurrency skeptic. Not what you'd expect me to say. Whatever you thought I was going to say there when I said fun fact,
that probably wasn't it. But New York Times has written about this, I think other media outlets have. He's written a book basically calling crypto a scam. And I'm not a crypto guy. I have a hard enough time keeping up with the George Washingtons, let alone the Benjamins. I don't need fancy crypto rug poles. I don't need any of that in my life, but really interesting, not something you'd expect, which is most artsy guys. You wrote a book about cryptocurrency and finance. That's really cool.
All right, so anyway, the other reason I'm not so hot on Fulco right now has nothing to do with Fulco and just has to do with chasing a toddler around all day and having a demanding job. And my brain is just deep fried more often than not, and I don't have the bandwidth to sit down and watch a serious movie if I fall asleep. I feel like I've let the movie down, and if I can't keep up with it, I feel like I've let myself down and the movie in a way.
But if it's just a garbage monster movie on Tubi, there's no expectation. It's a whole lot easier. Pause it, come back to it later or not a big deal. And I love monster movies and I love Tuby Garbage. And so that's sort of just where I've been stuck for most of 2025, and I'm for the most part comfortable with it.
But I tried to break out last weekend and I was sitting there and I had some popcorn and I had a beer and I thought, all right, I'm going to find a movie, like an actual movie, not like Chupa Cabra, not Water Monster, not the Tank, like an actual movie that I'm going to actually expend a couple of brain cells thinking about and watching. And I scrolled through Shutter, couldn't find anything, nothing spoke to me, and I kept scrolling and I kept going,
and they have a monster category in their movie catalog. And I thought, okay, well sure there's got to be a serious monster movie in here. And I didn't find one, partly because I was distracted by a film called Ninja versus Shark, and I thought, okay, no, come on. No, not this week. Save it. I added it to my list and I said, I'll come back to this later.
And so I went and scrolled through to, and then I went to Hulu and then I went to Netflix, and then I went back to Hulu and I tried to talk myself into, I think it's Lords of Miss Rule because Ralph Anderson's voice just lives rent free in my head and I really want to see that movie, but I just didn't have the bandwidth and that I started to go to Screen Box and I thought, alright, no, who am I kidding? Just screw it.
Go back to Ninja versus Shark. This is from Japan, and I suppose you could have an American movie called Ninja versus Shark just as easily, but this one is filmed in Japan, shot in Japanese, maybe not actual ninjas, but closer than what the American version would be, ninja versus Shark 2023 in the IDO period at the remote village of tsu, the evil cult leader Ro uses Ninjitsu to Inso, enor encor, Wikipedia, E-N-S-O-R-C-E-L-I, sure to enor sharks and forces them to attack local
pearl divers so the cult can steal the pearls from their mangled corpses. So right there, okay, yeah, I'm on board. Don't know what that word means. Learn something new already, right? Desperate for help, the village chief hires Zaki a guard at a nearby temple, but Guro soon finds his path blocked by a lady Ninja Kuma and a gigantic shark. That doesn't seem like something from this world. So already we've got ninja battles, we've got Shark.
The IMDB description doesn't say anything about magical powers or face swapping or zombies or beheaded corpses speaking, but it underscores the zany Power Rangers vibes of the whole film. But honestly, if you give me a shark with a ninja and weird Power Rangers stuff like, sure, what the hell? It's a Friday night, let's do it. I already popped the popcorn,
right? I am on board for all of that, and it was wild and it was weird and it was zany and I expected, I don't know what I expected, but I wasn't expecting magical spells that wasn't on my bingo card, but I couldn't enjoy it. I couldn't get into it. And this wasn't on me this time. This was on the movie because that protagonist, there's a Samurai movie trope and it's a western trope and it's a well worn trope for a reason, but the protagonist has a past and it's kind of a slime ball
and he's not somebody you feel like you should root for. And then he has the redemption arc and you can do that well, and they sort of imply that there are characters that are really concerned about money and means that sort of thing. And you can certainly play around with that.
Shane, the Western comes to mind, which you can look up the final scene in that movie on YouTube, and even if you don't want to watch the whole thing that is cinema history right there and the Samurai blood splatter, I'm all for because just like the old school westerns, bam, I shot you fall over dead. Like no, there's more to it than that. And ditto with samurai swords and that sort of thing always here for
blood splatter. What I'm not here for is weird rape and sexual assault because instead of having the unsympathetic protagonist rob people to set up that he's a bad dude, which would make more sense with the plot, instead he's guarding the temple and they don't pay him. So he gets mad and he rapes the temple owner, I guess the temple owner's wife, and she gets upset and he gets, I mean understandably,
and he gets upset. And so the Samurai or the Guard, the dude with the sword kills the husband and two of his bodyguards and it sets it up as a revenge plot from the woman who's going to get become a ferocious warrior and come back for revenge. And I'm definitely here for that. But then she dies about 10 minutes later and becomes a zombie because of the other ninja and it tonally, it didn't fit. If you're going to have a wacky plot with swords and magical spells and a killer shark, don't make it.
You can't do that. The weird sexual assault stuff was tone deaf and really took me out of it. You can have, if that's your focus, revenge hops into my head, great rape revenge movie that took a lot of the tropes from the old seventies movies and updated them and really ran with them in some really satisfying and graphic ways. We talked about that on the podcast. It's been a while now, now that I think about it. But great movie, you can still find it.
And that sexual assault scene was much more graphic. We didn't actually see anything in Ninja versus Shark. It was just all spoken. It was after the fact, but it still gave me the ick. And I don't want the ick when I'm watching a shark movie. There are so many terrible shark movies out there. Let's know, hard pass. So yeah, I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul. A letterbox review for Ninja versus Shark Half a star,
which is the lowest I could give it. Literally, it won't let you give it no stars. And I did not give it the little heart saying I liked it because I didn't. The real title is Rapist Ninja versus Shark, unfortunately, which ruins the vibe of an otherwise entertaining WTF Power Rangers blood splatter, a cult possession zombie ninja, giant killer shark flick. You had one job, one job, WTF Power Rangers, blood splatter occult possession, zombie ninja,
giant killer shark flick. Give me that. You did give me that. You just also gave me the ick and you didn't need to give me the ick. So as my almost two and a half year old daughter would say, anyway, I am going to give myself a pep talk now that it's spring break and I am going to do whatever I need to do, clear my brain so that I can watch an actual movie this week.
I think I'm going to start with Lords of Miss Rule. I think it's Lords, maybe it's something else, but Misrule from the UK with Ralph Venison. Then go from there. Maybe explore, maybe look around. Spring Break is badly needed, badly, badly needed. Y'all take care. Follow us on threads, follow us on letterbox. Give us a shout out over email. Tell your friends about us. If you two are on spring break, stay safe, but relax. I'm way past. I was never the age that I was going to party hard.
I was always a go home and watch a movie kind of guy. But yeah, if you are of that persuasion, please be safe and hopefully all three of us will talk to you next week.