The top four corporeal monsters are vampires, werewolves, man-made creatures and zombies. But reanimated mummified corpses do have a longtime place in the classic-monsters pantheon. They’re kin to zombies in that overall they’re seriously lacking in sex appeal but rank high on the tragedy scale. The poor things are haunted and hunted just because the world won’t let them sleep or move on to Sekhet-A’Aru — the afterlife Field of Reeds a.k.a Field of Rushes. So, of course, if you wake them, they will come — at you, hard. And while H.P. Lovecraft was almost certainly not thinking of reanimated mummies when he wrote the eerie couplet “That is not dead which can eternal lie / And with strange aeons even death may die,” he may as well have been since that’s the underlying concept that drives all mummy movies. Which makes it ironic that while that quote would indeed apply to Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, this is a mummy movie in name only, with the physical mummy being only on the periphery of a demonic-possession story more like The Exorcist (1973) than like anything starring Boris Karloff or Lon Chaney Jr.

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Based on a Japanese video game inspired by the tangled maze of Tokyo subway tunnels — and which apparently also took some influence from both the Finnish horror game series I'm on Observation and an actual Finnish commando unit dubbed Observation Squad — Exit 8 takes a situation familiar to anyone who regularly rides underground public transportation and transforms it into an existential nightmare.

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Set in the American rural South of the 1930s, this offbeat vampire film from 1973 — sometimes billed as The Legendary Curse of Lemora — opens with the murder of an adulterous couple by the woman’s husband, notorious gangster Alvin Lee (William Whitton). Lee’s adolescent daughter, Lila (Cheryl Smith), has been raised a ward of the Baptist church under the watchful eye of a strict but dangerously repressed man of the cloth known simply as The Reverend (writer-director Richard Blackburn). She’s achieved regional fame as “the singing angel” by virtue of her tremulous voice and radiant demeanor. The Reverend, meanwhile, is famous for his fiery sermons, in which Lila’s purity, obedience and dedication to God serve as vivid illustration of faith’s ability to overcome a person’s background. But Lila hasn’t forgotten her father, so when she receives a disturbing letter from a woman named Lemora (Lesley Gilb) who says she’s been nursing Lila’s gravely ill dad and that he desperately wants to see his daughter before he dies, Lila can’t ignore the request.

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They Will Kill You unfolds largely within the confines of The Virgil, a fictitious, high-end apartment building — think NYC’s The Dakota, whose exterior was made famous by Rosemary’s Baby. (Me, naturally, I also think of the ballet academy in Dario Argento’s Suspiria because just look at it in the image below.) It’s a spacious, vintage prewar place built for wealthy people who wanted both all mod cons and top-of-the-line construction. They Will Kill You’s Virgil offers mansion-quality apartment living: Oodles of space, high ceilings, hardwood floors, on-site staff. The itty-bitty detail not included in listings but hinted at in its name, that of Dante’s infernal guide: The Virgil has a history and let’s just say … goddamn!

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The seven-years-later sequel to 2019’s Ready or Not — directed by Matt Bettilini-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who returned for Ready or Not 2: Here I Come — is a snarky take on the theme of ‘the rich are different’ and not just because they have more money. And it picks up right where the first film left off, following a sequence designed to get newcomers up to speed.

The gist: Two kids — young brothers — in a scary old house, where their wounded father is hiding not only don’t help but instead alert his pursuers, who murder him. “I’m so proud of you,” says their mother. Because that’s how filthy-rich LeDomas family rolls—their ancestors literally sold their souls for wealth and power back in the 19^th century and the current generation is just fine with the deal. Their fortune comes from sales of a series of board games whose names — Family Ritual, Secret Council, Le Bail’s Gambit, Sunrise, and Abracadabra — hint less than slyly at the family’s inclinations. Their immortal souls? Whatever... they probably figure that the angels take bribes at the pearly gates and if not, well, heaven for the weather and hell for the company, as the cynical old saying goes.

In any event, estranged sisters Grace (Samara Weaving) and Faith (Kathryn Newton) — charming names to bestow on girls born into a family of soulless monsters — are reunited when Faith visits her sister in the hospital where Grace is recovering from her run-in with the in-laws from the previous film. Faith doesn’t believe Grace’s account of what happened — and fair enough, it does sound pretty preposterous.

Kathryn Newton (l.) and Samara Weaving as Faith and Grace MacCaullay in Ready or Not 2: Here I Come

Except that next thing you know, they’re both waking up bound and gagged in an isolated mansion — the Le Domas family seat. Now that the senior Le Domases are dead, the council that oversees the Satanic community — there’s bureaucracy everywhere — needs to put someone new in the prosaically-named High Seat. And how better to select that person than to handcuff the two bothersome girls together, set them loose on the vast Le Domas estate and bestow leadership upon the candidate — there are five, two women and three men — who hunts down and kills them before dawn? It’s as good a strategy as any, it’ll be fun and it ought to put a wicked smirk on the face of Mr. LeBail ... yes, that’s an anagram of Belial. The Prince of Darkness has a sense of humor. Let the games begin again!

Written by Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy. the same team as the original film, Ready or Not 2 is briskly entertaining, very bloody — one might even say explosively so — and features Elijah Wood as Mr. LeBail’s lawyer. Because of course the Devil’s human representative is a lawyer. Though when you think about it, being the Prince of Darkness is a full-time job and somebody needs to look after his interests.

Elijah Wood as The Lawyer in Ready or Not 2: Here I Come

Weaving and Newton have convincing sibling chemistry and there’s a cameo appearance by David Cronenberg, both in person and in the form of a very large portrait — definitely a little treat for old-school horror fans. And the movie’s vicious depiction of the wealthy and sadistic is a welcome riposte to the celebrity culture that celebrates affluence, consumerism and lifestyles of the rich, shallow and famous.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come opens in theaters Friday

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​I really wanted to love the thriller The Gates because the plot sounded like an old-school grindhouse movie: A bunch of young, dumb guys stumble into a small community of which they are not a part and things do not go well for them. I’ve seen that movie oh, so very, very many times since the mid-1970s, when I discovered the joys of grindhouse pictures on 42^nd Street. And those movies were always a blast.

The Gates opens with a three young Black friends in North Texas — bougie aspiring lawyer Derek (Mason Gooding); collegiate footballer Tyon (Keith Powers), who’s been benched with injury and on thin ice regarding his scholarship; and Kevin (Algee Smith), a loose cannon who nonetheless holds down a decent job at a car dealership — on a nighttime road trip trying to conjure up the old magic despite the busy lives that have led them in different directions. We see their differences early on when a local cop pulls them over on a DWB — Driving While Black. Kevin, at the wheel, gets defensive, but it’s all OK: Respectable Derek, who comes from an upscale family, knows the officer and smooths things over. When Derek admonishes Kevin afterward about needing to talk the right language in such sitches, the three friends’ class distinctions come into stark relief. Didactic relief, even. Overly didactic, perhaps But at least, hey, the lines they are drawn.

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I confess I wish I’d loved Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, but for me it’s a thing of rags and patches — yes, just like Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s haunted, self-educated creature, assembled from mismatched body parts and trapped in a world he never made (thank you, A.E. Housman for that trope, unleashed in 1922 in the form of “I, a stranger and afraid / In a world I never made”) because he’s an offense to the natural order of things and / or whatever deity you think holds dominion over us all. Yet the movie’s individual parts in and of themselves each exude a sublime passion that can be intoxicating in the moment, even if washed away in the hangover of narrative logic.

So let’s get to it, then: In 1930s Chicago, Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) is a renowned scientist who has enjoyed published success in revivifying small animals. At the doorstep of her palatial townhouse / laboratory arrives Frankenstein’s fabled creature (Christian Bale). Humbly, a thing of all courtly manners and eyes that may as well have come from a puppy dog’s corpse, he beseeches her to create a mate to help end his more than one hundred years of solitude. After some oh-no-no-no-ing, this leads to that leads to this and the two find themselves in a potter's field unearthing the body of a murdered party girl, Ida (Jessie Buckley, who is astonishing; more on that later). The good doctor revives her for Frank, as he’s now called, and as usual this defies the laws and conventions of life and death, which doesn’t work out well for anyone, because it never, ever does.… Except that here — for a brief, raucous, ecstatic, Bonnie-and-Clyde bit of time — it does.

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First and foremost, I have to say that I saw Scream when it opened in 1996 with no serious hype, and it was an ass-kicker in the best possible sense of the term. Directed by Wes Craven and written by Kevin Williamson — the soon-to-be creator of TV’s teen drama Dawson’s Creek — it was the perfect mix of clever and brutal. The body count was high, but its young victims had genuine personalities: They weren’t just pretty and vaguely annoying puppets present for the sole purpose of being murdered ... though they were gorily and imaginatively murdered nonetheless.

Fast forward to the present: Early Scream 7 reviews are already in and, wow, are they nasty. To which I can only say, what exactly did you expect / want from the seventh installment in a 30-year-old franchise? Ghostface terrorizing the International Space Station and facing an interstellar posse of human and aliens? That would have been a serious “let’s shake things up” change of pace but what are the odds it would have been good?

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Scream 7 final trailer:

And don’t forget: If you’re in the New York City / Long Island area this weekend, join me at the Long Island Convention of Horror this weekend, where I will be on panels and have copies of Broken Mirrors / Broken Minds, Movie Lust and The Fifty Most Erotic Films of All Time for sale and signing. And my husband, Newsday journalist Frank Lovece, will be interviewing Troma legend Lloyd Kaufman, comics legend Larry Hama and character-actor legend William Forsythe.

Other guests include actors Jon Abrahams (Terrifier 3), Terry Alexander (Day of the Dead), Rochelle Davis (The Crow), Allison Pittel (Screamboat), Charles Edwin Powell (Screamboat, Stream) Alex Vincent (Andy Barclay in the Child’s Play / Chucky franchise), Damian Maffei (Black Eyed Susan), Oscar nominee Mary Badham (To Kill a Mockingbird) and a host of authors, filmmakers and more.

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In the grand tradition of damaged protagonists who must pull themselves together and deal with some very bad thing, police officer Jane Archer (Georgina Campbell) lost her husband — a fellow officer — on the job and is still dealing with the trauma. Which is no surprise: She was there on the scene, saw him dragged halfway into a car window during a traffic stop on a lonely stretch of road and then shoved back out a corpse as the car streaked off into the distance.

That’s a bad one: She’s a state trooper. She had a gun and can’t escape the haunting conviction she should have been able to do better, but didn’t. Unable to let go of the guilt and to all appearances lacking the kind of support system that might help her begin to forgive herself, Jane is hauling some serious baggage.

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… and so that review will go up Friday, rather than the usual Thursday.

Scream 7 opens next Friday. And, yes, we’re already RSVP’d for that one.

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Perhaps the fact I remember the actual 1970s is the key to why I didn’t immediately connect with Honey Bunch, the second feature collaboration between co-writer-directors Madeleine Sims-Fewers and Dusty Mancinelli. The farther that decade recedes into the past, the tougher it is for today’s filmmakers to get past the cliches. But to Mancinelli and Sims-Fewers’ credit, Honey Bunch’s wildly disturbing premise and solid characters carry the show in this ’70s-set psychological horror. And that’s before the story gradually coalesces (should you choose to see Honey Bunch, that verb will never sound quite the same to you) into a bizarro examination of FUBAR male notions of what constitutes an ideal woman and the toll they take on actual women.

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Opening in theaters fewer than six months after The Strangers - Chapter 2 in September, The Strangers - Chapter 3 begins with a three-years-ago flashback set to “The Sounds of Silence.” A young woman in the by-now infamous room 24 of a roadside motel near isolated Venus, Oregon, opens her door to, yes, a stranger looking for someone named Tamara. That’s the strategy the three masked and murderous “strangers” have habitually used to gain entrance after they’ve identified and stalked their target. And as we’ve seen from the first two chapters of this reboot of the pretty good 2008 original, they’re not there to sell Girl Scout cookies.

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Sorry about the delay. Studio embargos … whaddya gonna do? So by way of apology, here’s the trailer and a clip from another film opening Friday that might have slipped under your radar: Whistle, written by Owen Egerton (Mercy Black) and directed by Corin Hardy (The Nun).

Per IFC Entertainment Group: A misfit group of unwitting high school students stumble upon a cursed object, an ancient Aztec Death Whistle. They discover that blowing the whistle and the terrifying sound it emits will summon their future deaths to hunt them down. As the body count rises, the friends investigate the origins of the deadly artifact in a desperate effort to stop the horrifying chain of events that they have set in motion.

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So many horror subgenres, so little time! This week it’s survival horror, with a film directed and co-produced by genre superstar Sam Raimi. And while there are many variations on the theme — with Send Help expertly stripping it down to to a brutally entertaining pas de deux — the basic recipe is as follows:

Take a group of disparate individuals: workmates, vacationers, conventioneers, folks on a spiritual retreat, fraternity / sorority guys or girls ... doesn’t matter what exactly they are, just that they aren’t brought together by friendship but rather by some shared purpose or identification. Some of them invariably have a bigger stake in that than others. Then trap them somewhere, cut them off from any readily accessible way out, and then sit back and watch them devolve under pressure. Make sure their cellphones are either dead / unuseable or just plain gone. Workplace relationships are especially tricky since there are hierarchies but also nuances that require the ability to recognize unspoken rules, parse unstated alliances and factor in the personal quirks and inclinations that drive your sundry colleagues, supervisors and top-of-the-food chain bosses.

And here at the center of Send Help is poor Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams). She just wasn’t made for office protocols like brushing off quotidian workplace slights and hypocrisies or, especially, navigating the politics of people with varying ambitions, skills and moral compasses. It’s not her nature and she never prioritized cultivating a practical façade behind which she could live comfortably from nine to five. I suppose you could call it admirable — she’s true to herself — but it’s not the way to get ahead in business … or even to fly under the mean girls / guys radar and just be left alone. But managing office dynamics that range from everyday-petty to batshit-crazy is just part of the deal — the unwritten clause Linda ignores at her peril.

Dylan O’Brien as Bradley Preston in Send Help

As one of those valuable if not always appreciated workhorses every office relies upon, she finds herself on a private plane to Bangkok with her arrogantly abusive boss, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) — a handsome, smirking bro who has just inherited his late father’s business-consulting corporation — because she’s the only one with the numbers head to fix a problematic proposal. Preston and his pack of golfing-bud betas barely acknowledge that she’s there, except to have a laugh about her online video pitch to be picked for the TV series Survivor. It’s something for which Linda has been preparing for who-knows-how-long — and a good thing, too, since the plane goes into a death-spiral and crashes into the water surrounding a small and to all appearances uninhabited island somewhere in the vast Southeast Asian waters.

Linda makes it to shore essentially unharmed and discovers only one other survivor: Preston, unconscious and with a severe gash on his leg. Linda is just too decent to leave him to die, and proceeds to demonstrate a remarkable grasp of Deserted Island Survival 101: assemble a shelter, make fire, collect water from rainfall, forage for fruit — hey, weave a hat from palm fronds! Preston, nursed back to health, at first tries to pull rank. Where things go from there … well, nowhere you’d expect. Hell, nowhere I expected, and I’ve visited every island from the one of Lost Souls to the Isle of the Dead.

Rachel McAdams as Linda Liddle in Send Help

Written by the team of Damian Shannon and Mark Swift (2003’s Freddy vs. Jason, 2009’s Friday the 13th and, um, 2017’s Baywatch — how’d that get there?), Send Help nonetheless belongs to Raimi, whose multi-role resume is all over the map and who has almost half a century of filmmaking under his belt. Some of his familiar flourishes abound — that point-of-view camera hurtling forward through the woods or jungle — but he adds some new visual flair in the service of story that’s both a social-class satire and a truly harrowing horror film that’s as bloody as any slasher movie. I mean, sometimes its rat blood and boar blood, but it’s the red stuff and plenty of it. Fittingly, Raimi’s economical storytelling is, as corporations like to declare of themselves, lean and mean — but also with twists that would do a pretzel proud. The studio didn’t screen the 3D version, but from what I saw in 2D, Raimi clearly was having fun with the notion. And the noses.

As someone who spent decades working in offices with complicated dynamics and surviving the complete spectrum of bosses and co-workers — from supportive to prickly but dealable-with to straight-up nightmares whom I occasionally wished would be flattened by a truck — I spent much of this movie wanting to reach out and give Linda a good shake. It’s not just about how good you are at the thing you’ve been hired to do: You’ve got to read the room. Not everyone is naturally good at it, but it’s a march-or-die skill.

A gulf near the ocean

If you enjoy Send Help then I highly recommend watching Lina Wertmuller’s 1974 Swept Away (not the 2002 remake starring Madonna). The power / class dynamics are reversed, with a rich bitch (Mariangela Melato) and a put-upon crew-member of her yacht (Giancarlo Giannini), but the general set-up and complications are similar, if filtered through very Italian sensibilities. The two movies would make a terrific double bill, and the post-screening Q&A almost guaranteed to be a fractious delight.

Send Help opens in theaters Friday

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Worldbreaker opens with dystopian headlines like: Extra! Extra! World Going to Hell in Handbasket! Read all about it!

OK, they don’t quite say it in those exact words, but that’s the gist. Roll out the panic ledes — filmmaking shorthand designed to bring viewers up to date without throwing too much money at the screen: GLOBAL WARMING. “BREAKER” MENACE. THE STITCH. The Stitch? Yes, the world has been truly transformed by “The Stitch,” which is the exact opposite of what that word usually describes., a suturing of some sort or another. The Stitch is a massive rift, a crack in the globe, and wouldn’t you just know that it unleashed a bunch of insectoid monsters from the Earth’s core.

They’re dubbed “Breakers,” whose inflicted wounds turn unfortunate humans into berserkers called “Hybrids” by the human resistance that developed as city after city fell. As for that resistance, well, it seems the future is female, since only men are susceptible to the infection — and those who didn’t get infected overestimated their ability to tackle the Breakers full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes. This has left women as most of the world’s remaining population.

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First, foremost and evocative title notwithstanding, Mother of Flies is in no way connected to Dario Argento’s Three Mothers trilogy; the Mother of Flies is not kin to the Mother of Tears, the Mother of Sighs or the all-obliterating Mother of Darkness. Secondly, it’s an Adams Family movie and not an Addams Family movie: The one-d Adams Family comprises parents Toby Poser and John Adams and their daughters Lulu and Zelda. Through their Catskills-based Wonder Wheel Productions they’re all immersed in filmmaking, whether in front of the camera or behind. You folks here probably saw my take on their adept and effective Hell Hole.

Mother of Flies opens with one of those pseudo-portentous voiceovers about the cold hand of death being embraced until it grows warm, spoken over a sequence of a woman rolling around nude in the woods; the credits run over an icky image of squirming maggots accompanied by thorns, dead mice, some manner of ritual, the hum of flies and then a vaguely androgynous girl plunking a few keys on a piano. So, yes, forewarned — there will be weird goings on.

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Almost a quarter-century ago, 2002’s 28 Days Later, directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland, shook up the cinematic world of zombie mythology. Before that, shambling and shuffling reanimated corpses were the norm, even with filmmakers who tossed aside the traditional voodoo-hoodoo explanation, most notably George Romero via Night of the Living Dead (1968). And while Garland, like many, used the bad-science-experiment justification, the plague of zombie infected in 28 Years Later (2025) and this new sequel filmed back-to-back has evolved to a point where they can reproduce, making them some kind of natural phenomenon — inexplicable, perhaps, but Mother Nature’s sons and daughters nonetheless.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, written by Garland and directed by Nia DaCosta, picks up shortly after 28 Years Later, the end of which saw young Spike (Alfie Williams) jumping from the frying pan of zombies into the fire of post-apocalyptic cult-leader Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) and his blond-bewigged teenaged acolytes, the Jimmies. It might not be coincidental that O’Connell’s performance recalls the way Malcolm McDowell’s Alex in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) likewise led his sycophantic Droogies. Yet even sociopathic Alex didn’t fancy himself the actual son of Old Nick, i.e. Satan himself. The graphic, skin-stripping torture Jimmy and his well-honed warriors inflict on an innocent farm family as a hapless Spike can only watch and vomit in horror is even more brutal than the cannibalistic violence of the zombie infected, since it’s consciously sadistic — justified as bestowing religious “charity” on the heathens.

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