Pure Scum Is a Relentless Descent Into Privilege, Panic, and Self-Destruction

From the moment Pure Scum begins, it wraps you in a cloud of dread. There is an immediate sense of discomfort and uncertainty hanging over every scene, as though something terrible is always waiting just around the corner. That feeling never really lets up. Instead, writer-director Gideon Aroni's debut feature keeps tightening the screws, building constant rising action that leaves you wondering not if things will get worse, but how much worse they possibly can.

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High Body Count, Low Ambition: The Boy from Below

Horror fans of a certain age will immediately understand what The Boy from Below is trying to do. Set largely on Halloween night in 1997, the film follows video store clerk Quinn Curtis as a masked killer begins turning slasher movies into reality. Director Tory Jones has described the project as a tribute to the video store era and the classic slashers that shaped his love of filmmaking, and that passion is evident from the opening frame.

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Ghostkeeper: The Coziest Nightmare in the Canadian Rockies

There are plenty of horror films that survive on atmosphere alone, but few wear it as comfortably as Ghostkeeper. Restored in 4K and recently screened at FrightFest, Jim Makichuk's 1981 cult oddity remains a fascinating relic of Canadian horror, a film whose shortcomings somehow become part of its appeal. Set during a New Year's snowmobiling trip through the Rockies, Ghostkeeper follows three friends who become stranded in a blizzard and seek refuge in an isolated mountain lodge inhabited by a deeply unsettling older woman and her even more unsettling sons.

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I Voted: A Political Thriller That Cuts Uncomfortably Close to Home

Few films capture the simmering tension of modern America quite like I Voted. Directed by Tyler Mann and co-written by Mann and Rachel DeRouen, this politically charged thriller takes place almost entirely inside a polling location that suddenly goes into lockdown during a contentious presidential election. What begins as an uncomfortable gathering of strangers quickly evolves into a pressure cooker of competing ideologies, personal grievances, and escalating hostility that feels less like fiction and more like a plausible headline waiting to happen.

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Terrifier Junior: Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man Is a Sugar-Fueled Bloodbath

For over twenty years, Eli Roth has apparently been trying to get Ice Cream Man made. After watching it, that's easy to believe. This is the kind of movie that sounds too insane for a studio to greenlight: an idyllic small town, a mysterious ice cream vendor, and an army of children driven into a homicidal frenzy after enjoying a frozen treat.

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I Want Your Sex Is a Neon-Drenched Celebration of Desire and Bad Decisions

After more than a decade away from features, Gregg Araki returns with I Want Your Sex, a neon-soaked psychosexual comedy-thriller that feels like a filmmaker completely uninterested in playing it safe. Following Elliot, a drifting twenty-something who lands a job working for provocative artist Erika Tracy, the film dives headfirst into questions of desire, power, self-discovery, and the increasingly complicated ways young people relate to intimacy in the digital age. The result is a big, wonderful, horny cartoon.

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Attack on Paradise May Be Fantasia's Ultimate Crowd-Pleaser

There was a certain kind of action movie that seemed larger than life when you were a kid. You'd walk through the living room for thirty seconds while your dad, your uncles, or their friends were watching some late-night action classic, catch a glimpse of a gunfight or a fistfight, and spend years imagining the rest of the movie in your head. It was probably louder, bloodier, and more dangerous in your imagination than anything that was actually on screen.

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Pinocchio Unstrung: The Twisted Childhood Universe Finally Finds Its Heart

I'll admit it: Disney's original Pinocchio scared me as a kid. Maybe that's why I was so excited for Pinocchio Unstrung. As someone who caught Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey and Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare in theaters, I was curious to see where Rhys Frake-Waterfield's twisted childhood universe would go next.

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