Dear Watchers,Welcome to another Genre Movie Wednesday, a chance to take a bit of a sinister escape to the woods. Our expert in horror, Erik Piepenburg, recommends an over-the-top erotic thriller set at a lake house and a family-made movie about a reclusive witch. Both films mix creativity with a bit of lunacy to darkly entertaining effect. Read Erik’s take on each below, then head here to check out more of his off-kilter picks. Happy Watching. ‘Bone Lake’
Where to watch: Stream “Bone Lake” on Netflix. Drugs, alcohol, sex toys, beefcake, physical seduction, emotional manipulation, taboo attractions and an arrow shot through a pair of testicles. Those are just some of the sinister pleasures in this nutty, darkly funny and very entertaining erotic thriller from the director Mercedes Bryce Morgan and the writer Joshua Friedlander. Sage (Maddie Hasson) and her partner, Diego (Marco Pigossi), face a “Barbarian”-like conundrum: They’re booked at the same lakeside estate as Will (Alex Roe) and Cin (Andra Nechita), an equally attractive 30-something couple. They all agree to share the space, but I’m not giving anything away when I point out that one couple knows far more about its unexpected housemates than the other does — intel that fuels their descent into utter madness. The film’s attempts at misdirection are see-through, but who cares when you have actors, especially the nimble Hasson, who make the obvious seem anything but. There’s a message here about surveillance and technology, and about how elites are “trying to make us not trust each other,” as Sage puts it. That’s fine, but the real joy is in watching beautiful people sow and battle betrayal in nasty and gruesome ways. ‘Mother of Flies’
Where to watch: Stream “Mother of Flies” on Shudder. From their home in the Catskills, the Adamses make singular horror movies about worlds and bodies gone mad, in a style that looks like an Iron Maiden album cover mixed with a psychopath’s Polaroids. Their latest supernatural drama, directed by Toby Poser; her husband, John Adams; and their daughter Zelda Adams, is perhaps their most opaque and personal film. Horror fans looking for a propulsive story might want to steer clear, but those interested in a tender but unsettling exploration of anguish should check this one out. Poser plays Solveig, a reclusive witch who gets a visit from Jake and his college-age daughter, Mickey, in hopes that Solveig knows the right kind of witchcraft to cure Mickey’s terminal cancer. (Father and daughter are played by John and Zelda Adams.) But what’s with the talking corpse in the woods near Solveig’s home? And what does she mean when she mournfully tells Mickey, “Your curse is my gift?” The story is sometimes frustratingly opaque, but overall the film is folk horror gold — a tragic tale of motherhood punctuated with stomach-churning viscera, ominous greenery and stillness. As they say about that other Addams Family, this family inhabits a world that’s mysterious and spooky and all together ooky. I’m all in.
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