Marrow (2026)

This was a screener request from Scott Motisko, who you may remember sent us Brute 1976 with its infamous penis drill. This looked like it would probably be penis drill-free, which, depending on your tastes could be a mark in or against its favor. Either way, let's see how it did.

Marrow is about podcaster Jamie Foster (Jessica Dawn Willis), who does a True Crime podcast under the name "Distal Marrow" called "Embracing the Paradox." After years of success describing grizzly serial murders, she's feeling burnout, and does an episode on Bigfoot, which her fans hate, and the person running the podcast company she works for (Danielle Harris)--who also happens to be a close friend of her late mother--says she needs to come up with something big, otherwise her funding will be cut and she'll just being doing it as a hobby (like the rest of us). All hope seems to be lost, until a creepy caller comes to her with info on four other area True Crime podcasters who have gone missing. The content is compelling enough to get her back on top, but is she willing to give up her success to save these other victims?

This was definitely a great Halloween season watch, exploring themes not only around modern content creation, but also touching on our modern economy and what it means to have a job like being a podcaster--and what it could mean to lose it. All of this is spun in a horror movie context, that takes the "True Crime podcaster is embroiled in her own True Crime story" plot, and takes it to these extreme horror movie places where anything is possible. You could've taken this script and grounded it more and made it into a Lifetime thriller that would've been a ton of fun to watch and may have been more my speed, but I also appreciated the fact that doing it in this more horror context gave us something--I don't know if "elevated" is the right word, but at least something more serious horror fans could get behind. From there, we have a great lead in Jessica Dawn Willis, and supporting names we recognize like Danielle Harris, Michael Ironside, and Matthew Tompkins. With a VOD release date of November 3rd, this is a great way to extend your Halloween season a bit, and support indie film while you do it.

I figured we'd start with our lead in Jessica Dawn Willis, because a lot of this hinges on her. When we think of horror movie performances, we usually think of the big moments and how well the actor is able to sell them, but sometimes we don't consider all the smaller moments leading up those bigger ones that build the foundation, and that's where Willis really excels for me here. Things like the affected speech of the Millennial podcaster, where "no" almost sounds like "nyoh," that subtly comes and goes depending on who she's talking to and how much she wants to be "Distal Marrow" versus "Jamie Foster;" or the scenes where she's reacting to text messages and phone calls, if it's too much of this popular concept of the vacuous True Crime podcaster, we don't care what happens to her, so she gives us more of a down-to-earth relatable character so we get invested too. That's the thing people love about horror movies, the anarchy of it, how anyone can go at any time, and the only thing that turns that anarchic excitement into tension is having people we're invested in, and I think Willis did a great job of that at the moments we needed it, while being less sympathetic in the moments we needed that too, all building to the big moments at the end.

Part of the stereotype of the vacuous True Crime podcaster I think comes from a sense of envy that people have that someone has found a way to make money doing something fun and outside the drudgery of the 9-to-5 world. Yes, misogyny is also a part of it, especially with disdain for Millennial women True Crime podcasters, so I don't want to ignore that entirely; but in the current economy, where everything is more expensive while wages haven't grown at the same rate, and where companies can let people go at the drop of a hat, it's hard not to be jealous of someone who pops on a computer and not only makes a living talking about True Crime mysteries, but even becomes rich doing it. On a recent episode of Behind the Bastards that was talking about rage baiters on social media, host Robert Evans cited a study where the majority of people said they wanted to make a living as a content creator, and that's even among older participants. So if a lot of people want to make money as a podcaster, imagine what it's like for the people who are making a living as a podcaster? This is where Marrow makes its money for me, when Willis's character is threatened with being pulled from her podcast network, you can see the thought of having to go back to work with the rest of us schlubs motivating her, especially when the police come and ask for her help in their investigation and that threatens her new content. I'm not saying if the DTVC Podcast took off and I could quit my job that I would hinder a police investigation to keep myself from having to go back to a day job, but I can understand why someone would.

The specific genre of podcast this film focuses on is True Crime, which is one my wife Jen will listen to, but I tend to stay away from. Because I don't listen to them much, I can't say if they treat their victims the way those ID Channel shows do, but that's one of the big reasons I stay away, I don't want to think about people dying in horrible ways, and I know at least those ID Channel shows don't focus enough on who the victims are and what they went through beyond the fact that friends and family say they "would light up the room," it's more about the investigative techniques used to find the killer--which we're taking their word for it that the cops are always right that they found the right person. Anyway, I think this film does a great job dealing with both of those realities. First, that these are grizzly murders Distal Marrow is discussing, and reading the details and seeing the images can take their toll; and second, that she is making her money off of that pain and suffering, which leaves her with a dilemma when push comes to shove and her show is at stake. She thought she had an offramp by shifting her show's focus to talking about Bigfoot, but when her audience rebelled, she had to sign that deal with the devil. It's one thing I like about horror, it can explore these kinds of conversations--like is True Crime exploitative, or a needed voice for the victims or wrongly accused--in an extreme way that can't be done in other genres, and this film does a great job working in that space.

Finally, in what is becoming a regular segment on the site, here's another cellphone screen. We have to start with "can we audio chat?" "Audio chat?" Isn't that just a phone call? I thought about it a bit, because a lot of times we come up with new terms for things because the connotations associated with the old ones have baggage. For example, the LLM generative AI industry uses "hallucination" instead of "error" when their LLMs output wrong results. "Hallucination" sounds better than "the thing fucks up a lot because it has limitation, so you should take the results with a grain of salt." In that sense, as someone who hates talking on the phone, maybe calling it an "audio chat" will make me more amendable to a phone call. The other thing is the first part of that sentence says "if I may ask..." and then just asks the question. What if you may not ask? It's too late, you've already asked it. It would be like me eating a bag of chips, and someone reaching in and grabbing some while saying "may I have some of these?" Unlike the "audio chat" thing though, this "may/can I ask" construction has been in English for a long time, and has no purpose other than I guess making us sound more polite, or maybe getting someone's attention before you come right out with the actual question.

And with that, let's wrap this up. This is coming out on VOD on November 3rd, and I think if you're looking for some new indie horror it's worth a look. And maybe November 3rd is the perfect date, because you can watch all your annual Halloween movies first, then after while you're still in a horror mode, you can catch something new. Also, spoiler alert, this doesn't feature a penis drill.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt34686688/

Fatal Call (2012)

This is another in the group of films Kevin at MTI Video sent me, and was probably the one I was most excited to look at.  It stars DTVC favorite Kevin Sorbo, personal favorite Danielle Harris, and a couple of other familiar faces in main star Jason London and the ubiquitous Lochlyn Munro.  Let's see if it lived up to that excitement.

Fatal Call has London as a guy with a past from rural Illinois who moves to St. Louis to start a new life after a buddy gets him a job at a law firm.  Things are looking even better when he meets Danielle Harris at a bar, and she gives him her number.  Problem is: she has a husband, and he's abusive and controlling.  Now she wants London to help her out, but when he goes to her place to pick her up, he finds her husband dead and he looks like the one who did it.  Will he make it out of this mess alive?



I liked this.  It was a pretty fun Noir-ish suspense flick, with a good cast and a decent story.  My one main complaint was that London's character vacillated between aw-shucks-schmuck and quick-thinking-resourceful-you-picked-the-wrong-guy patsy, which made the plot move unevenly.  For the most part though it hit the spots you'd want in this kind of film.  Harris was great as the Black Widow type; we had fun detectives in Munro and his partner Srikant Chellapa; Sorbo was deviously sinister; and the plot maintained a good balance between tension and action.  In fact, I loved the device of jumping us forward and back in the story, because it kept things from getting too gummed up with the plot exposition.  All in all, it's not a bad deal.

Danielle Harris was a standout for me, and I was disappointed that she wasn't used more in the film.  She seemed to understand what her character was supposed to be about, but unlike some Film Noir greats, like Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon or Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep, where we had this Black Widow character that we knew we couldn't trust, but also knew why our hero would take a chance on her and get himself in trouble, Harris's character, who's in their tradition, is woefully underutilized.  She shows up, sleeps with London, then he's in trouble and she's out.  We needed more intrigue here, with her seducing him and slowly pulling him into her web, and I know from what she did with her limited role, she could've pulled it off.  Either way, it was definitely cool to see her get a non-Scream Queen part and hit it out of the park.



We all love Sorbo here at the DTVC, in particular his two films with Saint James St. James, Poolboy and FDR American Badass, so anytime we can get him back here is a good thing.  He's the baddie, which is a great change of pace for the usual hero he plays.  I've never really thought about it, but he's a pretty big guy, and can be pretty imposing.  He's also the kind of actor that can have a lot of fun as the baddie, so it was good to see him get that chance.  Like Harris, it's good to see him in anything, but also like Harris, it's good to see him try something beyond the norm and excel at it.

With these two paragraphs focusing on Harris and Sorbo, I don't want to take anything away from London as the star, because as an actor, he was good playing both the schmuck and the quick thinker that his character called for, it just felt off for me to be going from one to the other with no real reason for the transition.  To be honest, it felt more fun to see him in the aw shucks role, and I could see myself falling for Harris's character if I were in the same circumstance, what with her batting her eyelashes and quoting Dostoevsky at him.  Unlike his character though, I'd call the cops the moment her husband showed up and assaulted me, and would've avoided all the trouble he got into.



Finally, this is London's work buddy, played by Joel Lewis.  Is this guy not the next veteran character actor Kevin Dunn?  He even plays a part that had Kevin Dunn written all over it.  Dunn has roughly 100 more imdb credits than Lewis, so Lewis has a long way to go, but if he can get to that Dunn level, I gotta say he'll have had a pretty successful career, including work with three Oscar winning directors.  Here's to you Kevin Dunn, you're one of the great ones, and hopefully you'll get there someday too Joel Lewis.

All right, enough of that.  As of this posting, Fatal Call won't be out on DVD in US markets for about a month (July 23rd).  If you see it on Netflix or RedBox, I'd give it a look, especially if you're interested in some of the actors.  A nice little Noirish suspense flick that doesn't overdo the plot, and keeps a good action and tension quotient.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2059193/

Hatchet II (2010)

When I reviewed Hatchet, and was less than impressed, a few people remarked that it was the sequel where it'd make its money back. All the issues I found in the first one were corrected, and it was an all around better film. We'll see what happens.

Hatchet II picks up right where part 1 left off, as our heroine Mary Beth, played now by Danielle Harris, is in the arms of grotesque villain Victor Crowley. She escapes, runs back to Reverend Zombie, played by Tony Todd, and he agrees to round up a posse and take her back into the swamp to kill Crowley and get her father and brother's bodies back. He has ulterior motives though, thinking if he can give Crowley the two surviving grown men who, with Mary Beth's father, killed Crowley decades ago, Crowley can finally rest in peace.



Okay, this was an improvement. The kills were better for the most part, at about the midway point it jumped into a solid forty minute stretch or so, right through to the end, of just great horror action that really worked. What killed me, as it did in the first one-- though not as much-- was a lot of wasted time, a lot of jokes that simply didn't work, and worse, didn't work and didn't know when they weren't working. For example, the first kill is fantastic: guy gets decapitated with his own intestines. Problem is, to get to it, we deal with a tedious conversation filled with a pointless avoidance of plot information just for the sake of saving it for later, which devolves into a guy yelling at Harris to leave, her saying why, and him yelling again, repeated about five times, followed by her leaving and him looking at the Girls Gone Wild guy from the first film's camera, and a joke about the girls he sees on there that also overstays its welcome. If the idea is "horror/comedy", I need enough of both, and the 45 minutes of neither is a waste of my time.

The shot launched back across my bow after this will probably be that I don't get it, which was why I made sure to include that Lloyd Kaufman cameo shot to let people know that, even if I post more action than horror on here by quite a bit, horror is as much a part of my background-- if not more. I know great horror/comedy, and I've reviewed some of them on here. I also know great 80s-style horror, considering a I grew up on it, and while this one did a better job than the first of capturing some of that, it missed enough for me too. It's like for every awesome dude banging his chick from behind after being decapitated scene-- which was awesome-- there were like three or four that were just a pile of unfunny jokes. The cookies thing wasn't funny the first time, but to keep it going? The conversation about the names Cleatus and Chad didn't work either, yet the movie was so sure it did. For the most part, other than the majority of the kills, the only good scenes were the ones with Harris and Todd, which makes sense because they were the only two solid actors, but why then try to inundate us with bad back story and worse conversation with other actors that aren't at that level. Just kill them off and get it over with, we're here for a horror movie for God's Sake!



Danielle Harris was an excellent upgrade in the heroine role. She's hot, a great actress, has a lot of experience-- though isn't that old, not even two years older than me!-- and knows the horror genre well. I don't want to give away the ending, but let's just say she really sells it. It looks like there will be a third Hatchet-- there had to be, right?-- so let's hope she's cast in it. Oh yeah, and she wears a sweet Twisted Sister T in one scene. "What're you gonna do with your liiiiiiiife?"

I did enjoy the Lloyd Kaufman cameo, though I agree with someone who commented on my review of the first film that "horror cameos don't give a film credibility". My buddy and I used to rent up all the Troma flicks we could get at the video store, and another friend of ours, who was married (and still is), hated them, and we always tried to sneak them into his VCR when we had movie nights with him and his wife. I remember one that started with the classic Troma opening, telling us it's a Lloyd Kaufman/Michael Herz production, and the moment it did, that friend freaked out. "Oh, Lloyd Kaufman? It's another one of those stupid Troma films! We're not watching this!" "But dude, it's Sgt. Kabukiman!"



I had to get a pic of the guy rockin' the Newbury Comics lid. Again, record store on Newbury Street in Boston, among other locations around New England, where I spent a lot of money growing up. Knowing that the director, Adam Green, grew up near Boston, closer than I did actually, and he uses local imagery like the Newbury Comics symbol, makes me want to like these Hatchet films that much more, but, I have to call it the way I see it.

And the way I see it is better than the first one, but not quite what I'm supposed be sold here, i.e. a throwback to great 80s horror/comedy/slasherflicks. Maybe for 40 minutes, if that much. Still, if he's getting closer, hopefully a part 3 will get it all the way right, and we'll get something worthy of greats like Bad Taste, Evil Dead, or at the very least Blood Sucking Pharaohs from Pittsburgh.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1270835/