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The Predator franchise has always been a mixed bag, with the best entries sticking to a relatively simple concept of a single alien hunter facing off against a group of tough humans. However, I do have a soft spot for the underrated Predators film from 2010. After the disappointment of The Predator (2018), the franchise was caught in a rut. Thankfully Director Dan Trachtenberg decided to bring the franchise back to its roots with energy and brutal slayings for both new and old generations to enjoy. Prey is a surprising hit of the summer.
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The latest feature from Rebekah McKendry (All The Creatures Were Stirring, Bring It On: Cheer or Die) lands exclusively on Shudder August 18th, 2022.
When I Consume You marks the third feature for New York-based filmmaker Perry Blackshear following his award-winning psychological horror feature debut They Look Like People and celebrated sophomore effort, the aquatic supernatural horror romance The Siren. All three of his films have been widely embraced and praised both on the festival circuit and upon release, with They Look Like People winning a Jury Honorable Mention at the 2015 Slamdance Film Festival upon its premiere.
 When it comes to a band like Gwar, you’d think they would need no introduction. Any church lady could take one look at anything they have released, and promptly fall into a coma. But wait, any American band willing to dress like this for almost 40 years, has got to be in on a joke. This isn’t Norway. With wild stage names like Oderus Urungus, Beefcake the Mighty, and Balsac the Jaws of Death (among many others that you’ll just have to look up yourself), you can’t help but chuckle at demonic immaturity of intergalactic proportions. And with memorable stage shows, where audiences file in to be drenched with gallons of fake blood and other fluids, all while the band members decapitate dummies of history’s greatest punching bags, you know this is a labor of love. Enough love to warrant This is Gwar, a documentary that chronicles the timeline of the band’s rise, and the many bumps in the road. How deep does this rabbit hole go? Well, I think I came out the other side somewhere in Antarctica and passed a preserved, zombie T-Rex along the way.
 On paper, a horror/western sounds like a weird combo. However, in writer/director Chris Canfield’s Black Wood, it somehow works. The film is a clever and frightening take on the Wendigo legend and a tribute to the South Dakota land he knows well. This is a movie with a heck of a lot of spirit.
 I’m looking forward to a future in which we are still talking about this movie, because we love it, and also because we can’t agree on how to categorize it. (Some of the people who made it have called it a psychological thriller, and the distributor has called it a horror satire. For me, neither of those really capture it.) Like two of its mothers in the horror genre, Rosemary’s Baby and Get Out, Good Madam will be discussed for years to come. In light of that, I’m going to start my campaign now to make it one of those unusual movies that are known by their original, non-English title, like Diabolique, Häxan and Tenebre. The original title for Good Madam is Mlungu Wam, a phrase from isiXhosa, the language in which most of the movie’s dialogue is spoken. Not that Good Madam is a bad title by any means, just that Mlungu Wam is better.
 There’s one simple reason why I wanted to watch writer/director Bobby Canipe Jr.’s short film Intinction. It has cannibalistic nuns. Yes, cannibalistic nuns. As you can probably tell by now, this isn’t a film that takes itself too seriously. It’s gruesome. It’s gory, and most importantly, it’s fun.
The film follows four friends, Mark (Blair Hoyle), Ralph (Ryan Martel), Scott (Hunter Touboulie), and Roxie (Whitney Willetts). The group visits an abandoned house with a haunted history. Sure, we’ve seen this premise several times before. It’s like an old campfire tale, with Mark serving as the storyteller. One brutal winter, nuns resorted to eating each other. Apparently, their hungry spirits still linger. The short does quite a good job balancing the present with the past, establishing its own history surrounding the nuns and that fateful, nasty winter. These flashbacks are especially fleshed out. Spending half my childhood in Northern Michigan, I was told many tales of ghosts, witches, Bigfoot, and many other bizarre entities that live within the densely wooded forests of our cottage. Another bizarre creature that many of the locals talked about was the Dogman, a bipedal creature that varied between 6 and 8 feet tall with the physical attributes of a man and the head of a dog. Being one of the younger kids around the lake where our cottage rested, I was tormented by these tales by the older kids whose parents had cottages around the lake as well.
 Sexuality and gender have been thematically embedded into horror since the Gothic term originated sometime during the eighteenth century. Whether our on-screen heroes (and villains!) are just queer coded or they explicitly display some form of same-sex affection & gender variance, the fear-ridden environments that they live in often blur the lines between fiction and reality. Here is a list of twelve notable LGBTQ+ genre works to check out in this summer.
Balancing both bleakness and optimism, The Black Phone is a solid thriller from longtime scare-master Scott Derrickson (Sinister, Doctor Strange) that doesn’t overstay it’s welcome and handles its sensitive subjects with care. Make no mistake, if you’ve seen the trailers, then you know what the film is about, and it doesn’t shy away from its touchier topics. However, with a degree of dark humor and great acting, this film proves that there is still life to be squeezed out of the masked psychopath genre.
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