‘The Hole in the Fence’
In Joaquín del Paso’s new gut punch of a morality tale, a group of teenagers master machismo at an exclusive summer camp in the Mexican countryside. The true-believer counselors are devoted to training the boys to become Christian tough guys, and if that means looking the other way as the kids bully the possibly gay kid, so be it.
Not that the men aren’t watching the teens carefully because they are — through binoculars as they roughhouse shirtless. When the campers find a hole in a fence that divides them from the impoverished town outside, and one of the boys goes missing, it sets in motion a sinister force — of human, not supernatural, origin — with “Lord of the Flies”-style consequences.
Emotionally gripping and formally icy, this is horror of the uncomfortable kind, thanks to a script by del Paso and Lucy Pawlak, that’s an exercise in brutality. Take the scene in which two of the teens sense an attraction brewing, and for seconds the camp’s demented lessons in manhood disappear and tenderness takes their place. Their bliss doesn’t last long, because that would get in the way of this skin-crawling film’s expedition to excoriate toxic masculinity, religious radicalism and class and racial entitlements.
Animated horror films intended for adults don’t come around often these days, so I’m stoked to shout hallelujah for this very funny, stupidly gory horror-comedy from the “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” co-creator Matthew Maiellaro.
The story is set in a “pastademic” world where gluten is banned. After being disqualified at the Global Pasta Championship for using bootleg gluten, the billionaire pasta maker Alfredo Manicotti (Dana Snyder) tracks down a hidden gluten reserve. But when he and a security guard, Al Dente Bob (William Sanderson), accidentally fall into a toxic vat of the stuff, it turns them into pasta monsters and gives Alfredo the ability to summon bow-tie demons. Drunk on power and blind to the needs of his spoiled daughter, Emma (Lauren Holt), Alfred sets out to install a “newdle world order” where gluten reigns.
That paragraph barely scratches the surface of the cuckoo course this witty, boisterously animated (and free!) film takes. Snyder and Sanderson have stellar comic timing, and their performances elevate the potty-punny humor to whip-smart levels. Sorry, but not sorry: This movie will mac you smile.
‘The Hopewell Haunting’
Newt (Timothy Morton) and his wife, Ollie (Audra Todd), show up one day at a small church in 1930s Kentucky to ask James (Ted Ferguson), the cranky old pastor, to bless the house they just moved into, claiming it’s inhabited by a dark spirit. James begrudgingly agrees, but on his first attempt all he finds is a ramshackle house and a dead raccoon. But when James returns, he faces an evil entity that makes him question who, exactly, is the real monster in the house.
If it’s haunted house mayhem you want, see “The Boogeyman”; this film walks in the opposite direction. The writer-director Dane Sears delivers a tender but chilling parable about the consequences of unexamined grief and loss; he’s as confident keeping his camera still for long stretches to let darkness do its thing, even if his actors are often too pitched or muted, as he is racing it around. Some horror fans may find the film too spare to be scary, but I savored its austere unfussiness. The real star is the landscape of rural Bourbon County, Ky., where Sears was raised and where he shot parts of his film.
‘Malum’
Jessica (Jessica Sula), a rookie second-generation police officer, asks to be assigned to work the night shift at the station where, one year before, her father killed several colleagues and himself after he helped rescue three cult members in the grip of a Manson-like leader named John Malum (Chaney Morrow). As Jessica wanders the darkened hallways and keeps an eye on the deranged man she locked up in a holding cell, she discovers she’s not alone in a place that may itself be under Malum’s sinister supernatural spell.
According to its production notes, Anthony DiBlasi’s movie is an “expanded reimagining” of “Last Shift” (2014), his smaller and scrappier (and to me, superior) film. This version is a similar and equally intense fever dream that reminded me of the terrifying where-are-we mysteries of “The Void.” It’s good-looking too, thanks to Sean McDaniel’s menacing cinematography and Russell FX’s extra-gory makeup effects. Hats off to DiBlasi and his co-writer, Scott Poiley, for being so ambitious with genre; they serve cultism, occultism, a monster, a ghost, comedy, sci-fi and family drama. By the end of the film I was stuffed, but horror fans with more maximalist tastes will be satiated.
‘Creepypasta’
Creepypasta, for those unfamiliar with the term, describes online horror stories that depict uncanny nightmare realms; some go viral, like Momo and Slender Man.
This entertaining anthology compiles 10 creepypasta fictions from eight directors folded into a framing device about a man who finds a mysterious thumb drive in a house of horrors. The films vary in polish, fright and budget, but they’re generally eerie and all short, in some cases just a few minutes long — a nice departure from some of the bloatedness in the “V/H/S” franchise.
My favorite is Tony Morales’s “BEC,” a macabre meditation on mortality. Filmed in blue-tinted black and white (and told in Spanish), it’s about an older woman who wanders her home with her mouth covered in a filthy CPAP mask as a record player plays a warped rendition of “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” You don’t need me to tell you that a wolf isn’t what she should be afraid of.
