We’ve got another week of five-and-five, with five features and five shorts, and they’re all good this time around. We’ll open up with the acclaimed “Bring Her Back” which just hit streaming, and the brand-new “Hotspring Shark Attack” which just released as well. We’ll watch a couple of older films, “Border” (2018) and “Cure” (2017), and then go way back to watch Bela Lugosi monkey around in “The Ape Man” from 1943.

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Mainstream Films:

2025 Bring Her Back

* Directed by: Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou

* Written by: Danny Philippou, Bill Hinzman

* Stars: Billy Barratt, Sally Hawkins, Mischa Heywood

* Run Time: 1 Hour, 44 Minutes

* Trailer:

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

After a disturbing opening, this takes a while to get to the horror, building nicely as things get stranger and more unsettling. It takes some time to figure out what’s really going on. The casting is spot on, the direction and effects are excellent. It’s a strange one, and we liked it.

Spoilery Synopsis

We watch some people doing strange things for the camera, which sees things that we do not. Credits roll.

We cut to Piper and Andy, step siblings, and she’s got weird eyes. She tries to make friends with some girls at the bus stop, but they make fun of her face. She’s mostly blind. The two go home to find their father dead in the shower. He’d just finished chemo, and something went wrong.

The two get split up for foster care. Piper is going with Laura, but Laura’s had problems with troubled kids in the past, so she doesn’t want Andy. They beg to stay together, so they’ll allow it on a trial basis. He’s very protective of his younger sister.

They arrive at Laura’s house, and she’s very friendly and nice, although it’s clear that she’s more interested in Piper than Andy. Laura had a blind daughter, but she’s dead now. They go outside and meet a very strange little boy, Ollie, who’s mute and has a birthmark on his face. He’s another of the foster children. Andy and Laura get off on the wrong footing right away.

Later that night, Laura watches videos of the cult that we saw in the pre credit sequence.

We also see that Andy has been traumatized by finding his dead father. The next day, they go to their father’s funeral. Laura cuts off a bit of the dead man’s hair and puts it in her pocket. After the funeral, they all play a drinking game. They all, even young Piper, get incredibly drunk.

Meanwhile, at home, Ollie breaks out of the house and walks around the yard all bloody, trying to get into a locked shed. He watches the others partying from outside the house. Andy talks about the way his father used to abuse him when he was little, but he never touched Piper. Late that night, Laura pours her own pee all over Andy while he sleeps to make him think he did it himself.

Ollie sits in his room and eats bugs. Andy washes himself outside because he’s afraid of the shower. At breakfast, Ollie tries to eat a huge knife, cutting his mouth up, and Andy tries to take him to the hospital. Once they get outside, they cross the white circle on the ground, and Ollie goes into convulsions. “Help me!” he says, speaking for the first time.

Laura returns and is surprised that Ollie can talk now. She drags him back inside the circle and indoors, and there’s no more talking from him. We watch one of the old cultists videos. This has happened before, and it’s not pretty. Laura feeds the hair from Andy’s father to Ollie. We see from above that the house and much of the yard is surrounded by a big white circle.

Andy has a terrifying vision of his father, who tells him, “She’ll die in the rain.” Andy slips and knocks himself out, waking up at the hospital, in the rain. He tells Laura about this, and she says she killed their father. Then again, he’s got a concussion, so maybe he imagined that.

Laura dresses Piper up in dead-Cathy’s clothes and does her hair to look like her dead daughter. Laura wants Piper to stay when Andy turns 18, but Piper plans to go away with Andy when he leaves. We see that Laura still has Cathy’s dead body in her freezer.

Andy gets released from the hospital, and Laura’s not happy about it; could he be dangerous? On the old videotape, we see that there’s cannibalism and soul-transference going on. Laura hits Piper in her sleep and frames it so it looks like Andy did it. Laura’s got a whole story made up to turn Piper against Andy. It all gets very confrontational, and Piper ends up taking Laura’s side.

Andy goes to see Wendy, the social worker who placed them with Laura. He sees a “Missing Child” poster with Ollie’s face on it. When he sees Wendy, he’s very intense, and she won’t put up with him. Eventually, Andy talks Wendy into going to the house for a visit.

At home, Ollie destroys the kitchen and attacks Laura, taking a big bite out of her. He then takes a bite out of the wooden counter-top, losing most of his teeth in the process. The skin on his own arm starts to look pretty tasty after that. He crawls into the freezer with dead-Cathy…

Wendy shows up at Laura’s house as Andy breaks the lock on the backyard shed. He sees Ollie and frozen-Cathy out there. “We can bring her back,” Laura says to Wendy. Andy shows Wendy what he’s found, and they both run for the car, where Laura runs over them with her SUV. Wendy is killed, but Andy’s only heavily injured. Laura finishes him off by drowning him in a deep puddle.

Laura goes to pick up Piper from her game and they drive home. Of course, Piper can’t see how beat-up the car is. In the house, Piper hears Andy’s voice, but we see that it’s really Ollie, and he’s looking pretty horrifying now.

Piper locks herself in the bathroom, where she finds Andy’s body. Laura explains that she put an angel inside Ollie’s body, and now it’s going to put Cathy into Piper. Piper tries to run, but hits her head and passes out.

Laura drags Piper out the swimming pool as Ollie watches and joins in the fun. As Laura pushes Piper underwater, she wakes up and tries to fight back. Meanwhile, something comes out of Ollie. Halfway through the drowning, Laura has second thoughts and lets Piper go.

Piper runs to the road and gets picked up by a car. Laura looks at Cathy’s half-eaten frozen corpse and drags it outside, where Ollie writhes outside the circle.

Later that night, the police find Ollie, who can speak and tells them who he really is. They also find Laura and Cathy in the pool.

Brian’s Commentary

It takes about 45 minutes before we get to anything truly unusual or horrific, but it does eventually get there. It’s very slow paced as we see more and more weirdness that just keeps on building up as the film progresses.

The acting here is good all around, and the film is very visual, with lots of cool shots and interesting ways of filming things. For a long time, I thought it was going to be one of those “The monster was grief all along” films, but no, that’s only part of it.

It was good!

Kevin’s Commentary

This was really impressive. The cast, visuals, and story. Maybe Laura was going just a little too far for love. We could see how things were spiraling out of her control as she started getting in deeper. I give it a big thumbs up.

2025 Hotspring Shark Attack

* AKA “Onsen Shaku”

* Directed by: Morihito Inoue

* Written by: Morihito Inoue

* Stars: Daniel Aguilar, Shoichiro Akaboshi, Takuya Fujimura

* Run Time: 1 Hour, 10 Minutes

* Trailer:

1943 The Ape Man

* Directed by: William Beaudine

* Written by: Karl Brown, Barney A. Sarecky

* Stars: Bela Lugosi, Louise Currie, Wallace Ford

* Run Time: 1 Hour, 4 Minutes

* Watch it:

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

A mad scientist falls victim to his own devices and gets stuck somewhere between gorilla and human. They’ve got a real ape in the lab, desperate plans involving murder, and police on the trail. How will these hijinx work out? We would say you should see it to find out, but you’d probably be okay if you don’t.

Spoilery Synopsis

A group of reporters talks about how tough their jobs are. The newspaper reports that Dr. James Brewster has gone missing, and it seems suspicious. Dr. Randall is there at the docks to pick up Agatha, the missing doctor’s sister. Carter, one of the reporters, thinks there might be a story in it.

Dr. Randall knows exactly where Brewster is, and he tells Agatha that he’d be better off dead due to their recent discovery. Brewster experimented on himself, and it was so successful that they haven’t been able to reverse it.

The pair drive to the place where Brewster has been hiding, in a secret room in a country house. In a cage is a big ape and also Brewster, Bela Lugosi, who has hair on his face like a gorilla. He’s an ape-man now! He can still talk, but he walks and roars like an ape.

Outside, a weirdo peeks through the window as the altered doctor tells his story. Carter’s photographer friend goes off to the war, and Billie Mason, a young woman, is his replacement.

Back at the lab, Agatha watches as Brewster injects himself with a new serum that doesn’t work. He tells Agatha that there is a serum that would work, but Randall won’t allow it. Randall explains that he’d have to commit cold-blooded murder to get the spinal fluid that Brewster needs.

Billie and Carter arrive at the Brewster house, and they hear ape sounds even f