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REVIEW: Horror-Comedy Collection ‘Hellarious’ is Frightfully Funny

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Hellarious

There’s a brand new feature-length collection of horror-comedy shorts coming to Blu-Ray this month. It’s called Hellarious, and it’s perfect for fans who like a little hilarity mixed in with their carnage.

Curated by Jason Tostevin, co-founder of Nightmares Film Festival, and distributed by Chris Ethridge (Haven’s End) at Film Spawn this collection has something for everyone, especially those whose sense of humor run to the dark and twisty.

Hellarious

The Hellarious official artwork was designed by Marc Schoenbach

Take for instance, Killer Kart. Directed by James Feeney, the film finds a small crew of employees shutting down a grocery store for the evening when they suddenly find themselves in a gory life-and-death struggle for survival against a very angry feral shopping cart.

The premise is completely, farcically ridiculous, but Killer Kart works because Feeney and his cast understood that the best way to play farce is to do it completely seriously. There are no winks to the audience here. The campy dialogue is delivered like discount Shakespeare and I was there for every hilarious and bloody minute of it.

Then there’s Horrific from Rob Boocheck–whose work you might recognize from ABCs of Death 2–in which a goat rancher in Texas finds himself in a face-off against the legendary chupacabra. Boocheck’s creature is one step shy of terrifying and his protagonist played by Mike C. Nelson gives a fearless performance fighting off the infamous creature with all the bravado of The Three Stooges.

Tostevin’s own ‘Til Death finds four very unhappily married friends who decide the best way to deal with their wives is to get rid of their wives. Unfortunately for them, they make the mistake of burying them in cursed ground and they wake to find their wives “alive” the next morning and quite impossible to re-kill.

Watching these guys, who deftly manage to not learn their lesson in the least, slowly lose it over the course of the short is comedic gold. As a bonus, the make-up and effects are bloody brilliant, displaying exactly how each wife was killed without having to show the deaths themselves.

Death Metal has never been so deadly!

Chris McInroy’s Death Metal finds a musician who wants to be great, but he just doesn’t have what it takes. That is, until his dad gives him a badass guitar created by Satan himself.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t listen to the rules of using the instrument and well, let’s just say there’s a reason they call a guitar an axe. McInroy’s effects are fantastic, and there’s something brilliantly funny and wide-eyed about his protagonist.

Clarissa Jacobson’s Lunch Ladies will take you on a gore-laden trip back to your school days where we find Seretta and LouAnne, fraternal twins who have entered a contest to become personal chefs for Johnny Depp. These ladies love Johnny. The problem is their dead-end job in the cafeteria doesn’t allow them to be creative.

Hellarious Lunch Ladies

Sometimes you just have to get creative according to the Lunch Ladies.

When some, shall we say, fresh ingredients present themselves, however, Johnny is right there to inspire them with one of their favorite movies.

Donna Pieroni and Mary Manofsky are absolutely perfect in the roles of Seretta and LouAnne, respectively. Their comedic timing is on point, even in the most harrowing of circumstances, and they bring a palpable earnestness to the short that sells it completely.

Bitten, a film by Sarah K. Reimers which will also be screening at the iHorror Film Festival this October, might just be one of the best horror-comedy shorts I’ve seen in years, and it all starts when a dog find himself on the wrong end of a werewolf’s bite.

Hilariously funny, Reimers blends suspense and possibility beautifully and Michael Curran gives an unforgettable performance that you have to see to believe.

Michael Curran is brilliant in Bitten from Sarah K. Reimers

The collection rounds out with a second entry from Tostevin, co-written by Randall Greenland, titled Born Again, which concerns a group of ill-prepared Satanist attempting to summon up some serious evil.

Unfortunately for them, they seriously messed up this particular ritual and well, someone totally unexpected shows up instead. This short is excellently paced with excellent practical effects.

What’s so brilliant about Hellarious is that it is shining a spotlight on films that would often find themselves lost after their time on the festival circuit. By packaging them together in this collection, it promises these shorts a longer life, but also gives an opportunity for those who don’t regularly get to attend festivals a taste of what they’ve missed.

This can be especially true with horror-comedies, which aren’t easy to pull off to begin with. It takes a skilled hand to combine laughter with the horrific and the filmmakers included in Hellarious prove that they are more than up to the task.

You can pre-order a copy of the collection on Blu-Ray for $20 plus shipping by clicking here. The disc comes with a bonus short from Clarissa Jacobson title A Very Important Film which parodies some of the self-important festival film tropes recognizable to anyone who has ever attended one.

Blu-Rays of Hellarious ship on around September 17, 2019! Check out the trailer below.

Hellarious – Official Trailer from Hands Off Productions on Vimeo.

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Another Creepy Spider Movie Hits Shudder This Month

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Good spider films are a theme this year. First, we had Sting and then there was Infested. The former is still in theaters and the latter is coming to Shudder starting April 26.

Infested has been getting some good reviews. People are saying that it’s not only a great creature feature but also a social commentary on racism in France.

According to IMDb: Writer/director Sébastien Vanicek was looking for ideas around the discrimination faced by black and Arab-looking people in France, and that led him to spiders, which are rarely welcome in homes; whenever they’re spotted, they’re swatted. As everyone in the story (people and spiders) is treated like vermin by society, the title came to him naturally.

Shudder has become the gold standard for streaming horror content. Since 2016, the service has been offering fans an expansive library of genre movies. in 2017, they began to stream exclusive content.

Since then Shudder has become a powerhouse in the film festival circuit, buying distribution rights to movies, or just producing some of their own. Just like Netflix, they give a film a short theatrical run before adding it to their library exclusively for subscribers.

Late Night With the Devil is a great example. It was released theatrically on March 22 and will begin streaming on the platform starting April 19.

While not getting the same buzz as Late Night, Infested is a festival favorite and many have said if you suffer from arachnophobia, you might want to take heed before watching it.

Infested

According to the synopsis, our main character, Kalib is turning 30 and dealing with some family issues. “He’s fighting with his sister over an inheritance and has cut ties with his best friend. Fascinated by exotic animals, he finds a venomous spider in a shop and brings it back to his apartment. It only takes a moment for the spider to escape and reproduce, turning the whole building into a dreadful web trap. The only option for Kaleb and his friends is to find a way out and survive.”

The film will be available to watch on Shudder starting April 26.

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Part Concert, Part Horror Movie M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘Trap’ Trailer Released

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In true Shyamalan form, he sets his film Trap inside a social situation where we aren’t sure what is going on. Hopefully, there is a twist at the end. Furthermore, we hope it’s better than the one in his divisive 2021 movie Old.

The trailer seemingly gives away a lot, but, as in the past, you can’t rely on his trailers because they are often red herrings and you are being gaslit to think a certain way. For instance, his movie Knock at the Cabin was completely different than what the trailer implied and if you hadn’t read the book on which the film is based it was still like going in blind.

The plot for Trap is being dubbed an “experience” and we aren’t quite sure what that means. If we were to guess based on the trailer, it’s a concert movie wrapped around a horror mystery. There are original songs performed by Saleka, who plays Lady Raven, a kind of Taylor Swift/Lady Gaga hybrid. They have even set up a Lady Raven website to further the illusion.

Here is the fresh trailer:

According to the synopsis, a father takes his daughter to one of Lady Raven’s jam-packed concerts, “where they realize they’re at the center of a dark and sinister event.”

Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, Trap stars Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Shyamalan, Hayley Mills and Allison Pill. The film is produced by Ashwin Rajan, Marc Bienstock and M. Night Shyamalan. The executive producer is Steven Schneider.

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Woman Brings Corpse Into Bank To Sign Loan Papers

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Warning: This is a disturbing story.

You have to be pretty desperate for money to do what this Brazilian woman did at the bank to get a loan. She wheeled in a fresh corpse to endorse the contract and she seemingly thought the bank employees wouldn’t notice. They did.

This weird and disturbing story comes via ScreenGeek an entertainment digital publication. They write that a woman identified as Erika de Souza Vieira Nunes pushed a man she identified as her uncle into the bank pleading with him to sign loan papers for $3,400. 

If you’re squeamish or easily triggered, be aware that the video captured of the situation is disturbing. 

Latin America’s largest commercial network, TV Globo, reported on the crime, and according to ScreenGeek this is what Nunes says in Portuguese during the attempted transaction. 

“Uncle, are you paying attention? You must sign [the loan contract]. If you don’t sign, there’s no way, as I cannot sign on your behalf!”

She then adds: “Sign so you can spare me further headaches; I can’t bear it any longer.” 

At first we thought this might be a hoax, but according to Brazilian police, the uncle, 68-year-old Paulo Roberto Braga had passed away earlier that day.

 “She attempted to feign his signature for the loan. He entered the bank already deceased,” Police Chief Fábio Luiz said in an interview with TV Globo. “Our priority is to continue investigating to identify other family members and gather more information regarding this loan.”

If convicted Nunes could be facing jail time on charges of fraud, embezzlement, and desecration of a corpse.

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