On paper, Lucky Bastard sounds like it could be a fun meta stab at the found footage horror genre. When you say “found footage porn horror,” you’d think you would at least have a little bit of fun watching it. I went in with literally zero background on the movie and it starts up with a pre-credit stating that for the sake of the movie, Lucky Bastard is a porno website where one watcher, the titular “lucky bastard,” is chosen to sleep with a porn star. This time around, the chosen viewer isn’t exactly all there. That is it. That is the entire premise of this movie.

Betsy Rue (My Bloody Valentine) plays Ashley Saint, a top tier porn star who has done every series under the website banner except for the Lucky Bastard portion. Her jackass boss Mike (played by movie everyman Don McManus) finally talks her into it and they end up selecting Dave G. After meeting Dave, it’s heavily hinted at that he’s not playing with a full deck of cards and has some strange sensitivity issues. When he can’t perform under pressure, they fire him and he snaps, exacting revenge on the crew.

This viewer greeted news of NBC’s decision to bring Dr. Hannibal Lecter to television with equal parts scorn and skepticism. The notorious serial killer on network television? And, with Manhunter, The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, Red Dragon, and Hannibal Rising, wasn’t it time to retire the character for at least a couple decades? Even accounting for a shift from feature films to episodic television, it seemed like an example of going to the well once too often. Not to mention NBC is not exactly thriving when it comes to quality television.

Having seen the first five episodes of the series, which begins airing the first season’s 13 episodes on Thursday, April 4th, the scorn and skepticism have almost entirely dissipated. The stab at classy horror mostly succeeds due to excellent performances from the leads, genuine suspense and surprises, well-constructed short and long-term mysteries, and an appropriately disconcerting mood that permeates the action right from the start. Like Fox’s The Following, it is also shockingly gory at times. Horror fans should be pleased. 

Looking back on most of the slasher movies of the early ‘80s, it’s hard to reconcile their once-infamous reputations with how tame they seem now. At the time the slasher fad was in full swing and movies like Friday the 13th, He Knows You’re Alone and Prom Night were in theaters, critics, women’s groups, religious leaders and various other self-appointed moral watchdogs couldn’t denounce loudly enough what they perceived to be a disturbing new trend in cinema. Slasher movies were considered by many to be sick films that depicted the killing of women with pornographic glee but as infamous as the slasher trend once was, those films look largely innocuous today. 

The last time that I checked, The Ward was a total suckfest of a movie so, marketing your next horror release by associating yourself with a failure isn’t exactly a high selling point for audiences. The psychological horror Dark Feed comes from the screenwriters behind the John Carpenter flop, giving horror fans a body of work that feels more like an extended episode of Masters of Horror rather than a legitimately terrifying film. 

Dark Feed follows a film crew as they experience weird occurrences on location at a closed-down mental hospital. Eventually, the evil that lurks inside the walls begins to feed off of the individuals and take over, causing people to behave strangely. Sound familiar? That’s because the scenario has been done before in films like Grave Encounters and Session 9, and done with better results.

Jessie (Mischa Barton), a school psychologist tries to help Eli (Jonathan Michael Trautmann) who believes his dead brother is coming back from the grave to avenge his death. Naturally, bedlam ensues. 

Devon Sawa has continued to work in genre fare, somewhat regularly, since his breakout roles in Idle Hands and Final Destination. He was a familiar and welcome face in A Resurrection. Sawa turned in a good performance, as Travis. And Mischa Barton successfully broke the mold of the roles we’ve seen her play time and again. The late Michael Clark Duncan was excellent as the high school principal. The entire cast actually turned in above average and authentic performances. I was surprised that first time director Matt Orlando was able to round up such great talent for his directorial debut. The cast helped turn what could have been a run of the mill, low budget horror film in to something more than that.

Curandero: Dawn of the Demon is an odd duck. A Spanish language film based in Mexico rich in Mexican culture, tradition and folklore, yet, filled with gallons of blood and crazy acid-trip type imagery. 

The screenplay adapted by Robert Rodriguez (Planet Terror, Machete) and Eduardo Rordriguez, no relation to Robert, it has moments of brilliance with gritty action and above-average gore effects but the storyline drags and never really establishes a foothold of where it wants to go. 

A curandero is a sort of white magic practitioner that deals with cleansing areas that have become cursed or deep in black magic. Carlos is the son of a famous curandero and is called into action by the Mexican City police department and Mexican federales when a major drug crime lord begins using black magic to take out his rivals and generally make a bloody mess of Mexico City.