Three Films Make A Post: A Tasty Horror Film!

The Meateater (1979): This tale of a family reopening an abandoned cinema and having to cope with the mild carnage the crazy person who dwells there like the Phantom of the Cinema causes, is an at times dreary affair, the sort of low budget business where actors barely seem to be able to remember their lines, much less deliver them well, and where things stop and start randomly. From time to time, David Burton Morris’s film drifts into more interesting directions, when (the man was a film student, after all) the Phantom of the Opera gets quoted pretty directly, expressionism rears its shadowy head, or a shot really hits the right mood of desolation and the decay of something (or someone) beloved. These moments don’t make up much of the movie, alas, so it needs a certain person in a certain mood to fight through the dreary rest of the film.

Nightbooks (2021): Whereas this Netflix family horror production directed by David Yarovesky is professionally made and acted throughout. It’s a nice enough film, if a bit too desperate to make its moral very very clear (because American filmmakers do tend to think all children are stupid, I assume). There are some creative and fun moments, the production design does find the point of child friendly gothic unreality very well indeed. There is, in short, very little to complain about here, if the grown-up viewer doesn’t go into the film expecting their world view to be realigned by watching it. Plus, the kid actors aren’t bad, and Krysten Ritter seems to have a very good time doing her evil witch with interesting fashion sense bit.

Chompy & The Girls (2021): My highlight of this post is this slightly less family friendly horror comedy by Skye Braband, in which a very late father-daughter first meeting soon turns into a joint fight against a gentleman with a very large mouth, a propensity to eat little girls, and eventually the voice of Udo Kier. Braband manages nicely to balance the increasing weirdness of their plot with some traditional US indie style family business, and various jokes that actually happen to be funny. The latter is of course not always a given in indie horror comedies. Add to this how well Steve Marvel and Christy St. John turn their flawed newly-found father-daughter duo likeable and fun to simply see interact, and enjoy yourselves thoroughly.