The Artifice Girl, Stopmotion, The Blood on the Devil’s Claw, The Taking of Deborah Logan, Warm Bodies

- The Artifice Girl [2022] - 79
2022’s The Artifice Girl is an excellent indie scifi that just ever-so-slightly reaches for more than it can grasp. Telling the story of Gareth and Cherry as they work to entrap and bring to justice pedophiles, The Artifice Girl tackles huge subjects with a tiny cast and a very succinct runtime. I would have liked it even more as a short, but at feature-length it does a great job of demonstrating Franklin Ritch [who also plays the lead role] as a powerfully insightful talent coming up in the world of science fiction storytelling.

- Stopmotion [2023] - 74
An inaugural and near-inaugural film for director Robert Morgan and writer Robin King respectively, Stopmotion is an interesting-if-flawed jump into the pool of psychological horror. I suspect it will be too ambiguous for most folk [myself included] and too intentionally paced for others, but these peculiarities within the film are easily offset by its excellent use of impressive stop motion horror and heart, if nothing else. I look forward to what these filmmakers do next and, if you like slightly fringe horror, this is an easy recommendation from me.

- The Blood on the Devil’s Claw [1971] - 51
Horror from this time period tends to have two flavors: “Hardboiled Classics” [Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist] and… “Everything Else” [everything else]. The Blood on the Devil’s Claw definitely falls well into the “Everything Else” category. It’s wacky, its story makes next to no sense and is poorly told, and its characters and setting exist purely through a thinly veiled set of props and sets-pieces that mostly evoke laughter more than surprise or fear. It is, of course, difficult to judge a film that’s 50-years old… but I’d be surprised if this one shook make boots even when it was new.

- The Taking of Deborah Logan [2014] - 64
The Taking of Deborah Logan is the 2014 reincarnation of The Blair Witch Project, and mostly handles that approach better [and in a significantly less irritating way]. Is it great? No, not really. It’s a little goofy at times and the dialogue is stilted and forced like many of these “found footage” type of movies, but the screaming into the mic is kept to a minimum and the jumps are generally genuinely fun. There’s not a ton to say about this, it’s just a pretty standard “group takes a camera to document a thing and ends up documenting a different and spookier thing” horror, but it does its job well enough for fans of the genre.

- Warm Bodies [2012] - 43
Like 2018’s Love, Simon, Warm Bodies is a beloved teen classic in Hot Topics the world over. I’d remembered having a sort of neutral experience with the film, so I took a little trip to revisit it… As you can surmise from my stellar rating of “43” it uh… it was really bad. The story is incredibly stupid and excrutiatingly boring, characters are unengaging, and the villain is just about the only person who does anything reasonable in the entire film. It almost commits itself to being self-aware and silly like Little Monsters or Shau of the Dead, but it never quite pulls the trigger on anything and ends up sticking to this extremely mediocre middle lane of nothingness. I guess as an alt-teen romcom it’s probably ok… but “ok” is the furthest this corpse should ever be allowed to shamble.