Save the Green Planet! (2003) – OHMC 2026 Day 6

6 October, 2026

Save the Green Planet! (Korea, 2003)

Save the Green Planet! has been on my list for over 20 years. I remember hearing so many recommendations when it first came out, but somehow I just never got around to it. When I saw there was a restored version in the Arrow catalogue, I knew its time had come.

I didn’t realise until afterwards that the most recent Yorgos Lanthimos film, Bugonia, is a remake. That was already on my list (my general one, not the OHMC), and I may have to bump it up now. Lanthimos is not stranger to weirdness, and it will be interesting to see how his approach compares with this.

Save the Green Planet is currently streaming on the Arrow Video Channel in the UK.

Synopsis

Lee Byeong-gu is obsessed with aliens. He believes they live among us, in human guise, and are up to no good. Luckily, he is just the man to stop them, ably assisted by his friend Sooni, a former circus performer. We see them in action, kidnapping Chairman Kang, a wealthy businessman who Byeong-gu believes is spearheading an invasion from Andromeda. If his plans can’t be stopped before the upcoming lunar eclipse, Earth is doomed.

Once Byeong-gu and Sooni have Kang safely locked up in their secret lair, they shave his head to stop him using his hair as antennae to send telepathic messages to his space brothers. The kidnappers also wear ludicrous helmets to resist Kang’s psychic powers, and rub menthol in all his sensitive spots to render him powerless. You can’t be too careful with aliens.

Meanwhile, the police are on the trail, in the form of a disgraced but brilliant detective who relaxes by smoking the meth he finds at crime scenes, and an ambitious newbie determined to learn his eccentric ways. They make brilliant deductions and stupid decisions in equal measures.

Kang, of course, denies that he is an alien, so Byeong-gu moves on to torture, using everything from electricity to a steam-powered dildo. He hints that he has done this many times before, feeding the remains of former prisoners to his dog. This time, however, the stakes are higher. But does Byeong-gu have a more personal reason to want to destroy Kang?

General Thoughts

When I was selecting films for this year’s OHMC, I sought out a lot of weirder options. After some 50 years of watching horror films, it takes a lot to make a film stand out, so I am drawn to the unusual. There are a couple of drawbacks to this, however.

One, as we’ve already seen this month, is that a number of my selections are borderline horror at best. Save the Green Planet! is definitely in this camp. Like Why Don’t You Just Die!, it is gory and action-packed, but it never tries to scare us. Is that enough to qualify as horror? For me, the genre has always been about the emotions it evokes. I suppose shock and disgust count to some extent, but where do we draw the line? If sickening violence is enough to make a film horror, we may need to recategorise an awful lot of thrillers and black comedies.

The other drawback, of course, is that when trying to discuss horror films with other people throughout the month, it helps if they actually want to see them. While I am absolutely trying to entertain myself by watching and writing about these films, I also enjoy the social aspect. If you have any strong opinions about this and feel I should try a different approach next year, I’d love to hear from you.

Also, how have I ended up reviewing two films with exclamation marks in their titles during the same week? My grammar checker is going to quit on me.

Verdict

Save the Green Planet! is everything I hoped it would be. It’s energetic, bloody, and unapologetically weird. The tone shifts effortlessly from slapstick to sickening violence, stopping us from becoming complacent. For all its quirkiness, it stops short of being comedy horror, if only because there aren’t really any jokes. It’s still absurd and shocking enough to make you laugh, however.

For a film centred around the mystery of whether Chairman Kang is really an alien or if Byeong-gu is just dangerously delusional, it is more interested in making us care about how far Byeong-gu is willing to go to save the world, and whether he can avoid capture until he does so. His boyish charm and absolute conviction make him an easy protagonist to sympathise with, even as he does the most terrible things. Sometimes, you just want to see a maniac get away with murder.

It’s still nice to see mystery resolved, and Save the Green Planet! does not disappoint on that front. The ending is conclusive and satisfying, although it is the one time the film’s limited budget hurts it. Some better visual effects would have packed more of a punch.

Like most of the films I’ve seen so far this month, I can’t really recommend Save the Green Planet! to anyone looking for Halloween scares. On the other hand, if you’re in the mood for some wildly energetic gore, this may be just the batshit mayhem you need.

The October Horror Movie Challenge

Please do join in and share your own thoughts with us about this or any other films as the month goes on. You can usually find us on BlueSky, Reddit, Discord, or on the other side of the mirror.

If you would like to play along at home, my provisional selections are:

Messiah of Evil (USA, 1974)
Milk & Serial (USA, 2024)
Why Don’t You Just Die! (Russia, 2018)
The Visitor (Italy, 1979)
Lake Michigan Monster (USA, 2018)
Save the Green Planet (Korea, 2003)
Daniel Isn’t Real (USA, 2020)
New Religion (Japan, 2022)
The Driller Killer (USA, 1979)
Saccharine (Australia, 2026)
Evil Cat (Hong Kong, 1987)
Stéphane (France, 2023)
Send Help (USA, 2026)
Vampire Clay (Japan, 2017)
Hokum (Ireland, 2026)
Jack Be Nimble (New Zealand, 1993)
Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman (Japan, 2007)
Undertone (Canada, 2025)
Blind Beast (Japan, 1969)
The Appointment (UK, 1982)
Vampyr (German, 1932)
The Last Horror Film (USA, 1982)
The Fake Ghost Catchers (Hong Kong, 1982)
Fréwaka (Ireland, 2024)
Angst (Germany, 1983)
Full Circle: The Haunting of Julia (Canada, 1978)
The Cycle (USA, 2026)
The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (Italy, 1971)
Meanwhile on Earth (France, 2024)
The Ambulance (USA, 1990)
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (USA, 2026)

A Final Note

If you have been enticed here by these posts, please do look around at some of our other film reviews. We also have a podcast, called The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, which occasionally covers horror films. If this appeals, you might want to check out some of the following episodes.

And if you dig through the archives, you will also find episodes about a wide variety of horror stories and games. Happy nightmares!

Lake Michigan Monster (2018) – OHMC 2026 Day 5

5 October, 2026

Lake Michigan Monster (USA, 2018)

Lake Michigan Monster was another film I hadn’t heard of, but the poster stood out when I was browsing for something weird. Then the synopsis name-dropped Lovecraft, and I knew I had to watch it. By coincidence, I had already put Ryland Brickson Cole Tews’ second feature, Hundreds of Beavers, on my list for this month, but I dropped that in favour of some lake monster antics. I’ve since heard that, despite being on Shudder, it’s even less of a horror film than this one. Even so, I may get to it next year.

Lake Michigan Monster is currently streaming on the Arrow Video Channel in the UK.

Synopsis

Captain Seafield tells the story, in a most theatrical manner, of how his father was killed by a monster in Lake Michigan. He has put together a team to hunt and kill the creature, drawing on the talents of a weapons specialist, a sonar operator and a former naval officer. This band of misfits makes camp on the shores of the lake, tracking the beast from there, making use of such essential equipment as snorkels, swords, and submachine guns, but mainly relying on seduction.

After a weird shared dream in which the monster and sailor become intimate, the team are presented with an egg, representing the fruits of this union. Tensions rise when Seafield insists on machine gunning the egg. Repeatedly. This leads to the first schism, and the team finally falls apart after the monster kills one of their number in revenge.

Now acting alone, Seafield calls upon dark forces and a ferry service in pursuit of his quarry. But is the monster really as evil as he believes? Will the ghost of his former comrade do anything helpful? And how many musical numbers will we sit through before evil is vanquished?

General Thoughts

Every aspect of this production is off-kilter, from the goofy visual effects to the over-the-top acting to all the dialogue being blatantly overdubbed. Its grainy black-and-white aesthetic, using a blend of cheap practical effects and even cheaper digital ones, could almost be from some lost Georges Méliès film. The overall effect is to make Lake Michigan Monster feel like a cartoon that has wished upon a star and become a real film. It really shouldn’t work, but it does somehow.

Once again, I find myself asking whether this is really a horror film, and once again I’ve decided I had too much fun to care. There’s a monster, some weird dreams, and a few violent deaths. That ticks enough boxes. Let’s not fight about this. We’re better than that.

Verdict

For the first fifteen minutes or so, I thought I’d made a terrible mistake with this selection. Until you adjust to it — and I suspect many viewers won’t — Lake Michigan Monster is exhausting. Its fast-paced editing and rapid-fire dialogue, combined with the stilted acting and sheer artificiality of every design element, is overwhelming. The camera movement is frenetic and conversations go off the rails within seconds. For all the limitations of its budget, it uses every cinematic technique it can, like an enthusiastic young chef let loose on a spice rack for the first time. It is as if ADHD were a film.

As the film went on, however, it slowly won me over. By the end, I found myself not only engaged but kind of loving its nonsense. It is relentlessly silly, and its refusal to ever stop throwing gags at the screen means that even if one joke bombs you don’t have to wait long for the next. It desperately wants to be a screwball comedy in the Zucker Brothers mould, and it almost gets there.

Even so, this is another qualified recommendation. I seem to have ended up with a lot of those so far. If you’re looking for something spooky, atmospheric, or remotely sane, Lake Michigan Monster is not the film for you. But if you’re in the mood for something that will leave you dizzy and confused, however, then maybe this is just the thing to brighten your Halloween. Or at least make it weirder.

The October Horror Movie Challenge

Please do join in and share your own thoughts with us about this or any other films as the month goes on. You can usually find us on BlueSky, Reddit, Discord, or on the other side of the mirror.

If you would like to play along at home, my provisional selections are:

Messiah of Evil (USA, 1974)
Milk & Serial (USA, 2024)
Why Don’t You Just Die! (Russia, 2018)
The Visitor (Italy, 1979)
Lake Michigan Monster (USA, 2018)
Save the Green Planet (Korea, 2003)
Daniel Isn’t Real (USA, 2020)
New Religion (Japan, 2022)
The Driller Killer (USA, 1979)
Saccharine (Australia, 2026)
Evil Cat (Hong Kong, 1987)
Stéphane (France, 2023)
Send Help (USA, 2026)
Vampire Clay (Japan, 2017)
Hokum (Ireland, 2026)
Jack Be Nimble (New Zealand, 1993)
Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman (Japan, 2007)
Undertone (Canada, 2025)
Blind Beast (Japan, 1969)
The Appointment (UK, 1982)
Vampyr (German, 1932)
The Last Horror Film (USA, 1982)
The Fake Ghost Catchers (Hong Kong, 1982)
Fréwaka (Ireland, 2024)
Angst (Germany, 1983)
Full Circle: The Haunting of Julia (Canada, 1978)
The Cycle (USA, 2026)
The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (Italy, 1971)
Meanwhile on Earth (France, 2024)
The Ambulance (USA, 1990)
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (USA, 2026)

A Final Note

If you have been enticed here by these posts, please do look around at some of our other film reviews. We also have a podcast, called The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, which occasionally covers horror films. If this appeals, you might want to check out some of the following episodes.

And if you dig through the archives, you will also find episodes about a wide variety of horror stories and games. Happy nightmares!

The Visitor (1979) – OHMC 2026 Day 4

4 October, 2026

The Visitor (Italy, 1979)

While I spent a lot of the eighties watching every crappy horror film I could lay hands on, many still remained tantalising covers on video store shelves. When I was browsing for this year’s selection, the poster for The Visitor tickled my memory, and I realised how many times I’d walked past it, resisting its lurid charms. And what is the October Horror Movie Challenge if not an excuse to catch up with such missed opportunities?

The Visitor is currently streaming on the Arrow Video Channel in the UK.

Synopsis

In a bout of exposition that must have had the Church of Scientology’s lawyers reaching for their pad of writs, Blond Space Jesus tells a room of bald children about how an evil space tyrant came to Earth and spread his seed. We glimpse off-brand Xenu, or Space Satan, in a flashback that is clearly meant to evoke Star Wars but ends up looking like an outtake from Phantasm.

Then, we meet Raymond (Lance Henriksen, looking unhappy to be here), watching a basketball team he owns. This scene goes on for so long that you may wonder if The Visitor is actually a sports movie. Happily, Katy, the tween daughter of Raymond’s girlfriend, Barbara, turns up and uses psychic powers to make the ball explode, so we can move on to what passes for the plot.

Her daughter’s psychic powers are the result of Barbara being a descendent of Space Satan, although she only knows there’s something terrible inside her. Raymond is better informed, having been sent by a generic sinister cabal to impregnate her with a male child for some reason. This is derailed when one of Katy’s birthday presents mysteriously turns into a gun that shoots Barbara, severing her spine, necessitating the hiring of a would-be Mary Poppins with a secret agenda to help out around their concrete bunker of a home.

For the next 90 minutes, we watch Glenn Ford stalk Katy, trying to get past her guardian hawk, while John Huston loiters on top of an office block, signalling to his space brothers. We witness car chases, psychokinetic ice skating, and aliens in football helmets, before a resolution that involves pigeons pecking out evil like so much satanic bird seed. And then we sit quietly, wondering how much of all this we just dreamt.

General Thoughts

I miss the days when weird mid-budget films like this could happen. For all The Visitor‘s many faults, it’s entertainingly deranged, a product of undisciplined imagination. More money or even competence would have ruined it, or at least made it a lot less interesting.

The score is perhaps the most seventies thing about The Visitor — big and bold, rich with strings and horns. They get good mileage out of layering this over utterly mundane scenes, tricking us into thinking stuff is happening.

I can’t shake the feeling that The Visitor is meant to be The Omen for Scientologists. It also seems to want to be Close Encounters of the Third Kind in places, although the budget only allows for dancing spotlights instead of intricate model spacecraft. And Katie’s use of telekinesis to kill people obviously parallels Carrie and The Fury. None of these comparisons do The Visitor any favours.

Katie is a nice departure from the classic creepy kid archetype. She’s a blonde all-American athlete, very much not an outsider or a weirdo. It’s easier to imagine her as one of the kids who bullied Carrie White.

The cast is so much better than the film deserves, with Glenn Ford, Shelley Winters, Sam Peckinpah and John Huston in supporting roles. I can only assume the producers used the Larry Cohen method of courting former Hollywood royalty who needed the money. Either that or they forced them to act at gunpoint, which would explain Lance Henriksen’s performance.

Verdict

I stopped being able to enjoy bad films ironically a long time ago. This may have coincided with my giving up dope. I can’t remember for sure, which may also be the dope. Either way, when I say that I enjoyed The Visitor, there is no irony here. Sure, it’s terrible, but it’s an entertaining, weird kind of terrible. This is a film that probably shouldn’t exist, and I’m glad it does.

Everything about The Visitor is a dizzying mix of polish and incompetence. While it struggles to be coherent, and some scenes are confoundingly edited, the cinematography and direction are generally good. At the same time, the visual effects are perfunctory, barely masked by frenetic editing and wobbly camera work.

The strangest thing is the script. It is a half-developed series of set pieces with almost nothing binding them into an actual narrative. What story we get is largely conveyed through budget-friendly exposition, and we’re left to guess how the pieces fit together. But it feels churlish to argue about the coherence of a seventies Italian horror film. What’s more of a problem, perhaps, is that while stuff happens, it rarely feels like it’s happening, making this a long two hours.

While I’d recommend The Visitor, this is a qualified recommendation. It’s only going to appeal to people who like creaky, silly oddities. You might argue that it’s a cult film, but I suspect its cult is smaller than the one clustered around Space Jesus. Still, if you have a taste for the odd and a high tolerance for nonsense, The Visitor may warrant an invitation to your October viewing schedule.

The October Horror Movie Challenge

Please do join in and share your own thoughts with us about this or any other films as the month goes on. You can usually find us on BlueSky, Reddit, Discord, or on the other side of the mirror.

If you would like to play along at home, my provisional selections are:

Messiah of Evil (USA, 1974)
Milk & Serial (USA, 2024)
Why Don’t You Just Die! (Russia, 2018)
The Visitor (Italy, 1979)
Lake Michigan Monster (USA, 2018)
Save the Green Planet (Korea, 2003)
Daniel Isn’t Real (USA, 2020)
New Religion (Japan, 2022)
The Driller Killer (USA, 1979)
Saccharine (Australia, 2026)
Evil Cat (Hong Kong, 1987)
Stéphane (France, 2023)
Send Help (USA, 2026)
Vampire Clay (Japan, 2017)
Hokum (Ireland, 2026)
Jack Be Nimble (New Zealand, 1993)
Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman (Japan, 2007)
Undertone (Canada, 2025)
Blind Beast (Japan, 1969)
The Appointment (UK, 1982)
Vampyr (German, 1932)
The Last Horror Film (USA, 1982)
The Fake Ghost Catchers (Hong Kong, 1982)
Fréwaka (Ireland, 2024)
Angst (Germany, 1983)
Full Circle: The Haunting of Julia (Canada, 1978)
The Cycle (USA, 2026)
The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (Italy, 1971)
Meanwhile on Earth (France, 2024)
The Ambulance (USA, 1990)
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (USA, 2026)

A Final Note

If you have been enticed here by these posts, please do look around at some of our other film reviews. We also have a podcast, called The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, which occasionally covers horror films. If this appeals, you might want to check out some of the following episodes.

And if you dig through the archives, you will also find episodes about a wide variety of horror stories and games. Happy nightmares!

Why Don’t You Just Die! (2018) – OHMC 2026 Day 3

3 October, 2026

Why Don’t You Just Die! (Russia, 2018)

I decided to broaden my options for cult classics and foreign horror this year by subscribing to the Arrow Video Channel. Unlike, say, Shudder, they don’t just have horror in their catalogue, which does mean that their horror selection is a bit smaller. Even so, this has given me access to films that I’ve been meaning to watch for years alongside others I’d never even heard of. Why Don’t You Just Die! (the exclamation mark is part of the title, much to the dismay of my grammar checker) is one of the latter. I’ve not seen many Russian horror films, so that alone was enough grab my attention.

I only discovered afterwards that the director, Kirill Sokolov, has recently gone on to international success with They Will Kill You, a film that was on my list of candidates this year. Based on how much fun Why Don’t You Just Die! was, I may have to juggle things around to make room for it.

Why Don’t You Just Die! is currently streaming on the Arrow Video Channel in the UK.

Synopsis

A hapless young man named Matvei turns up unannounced at the home of Andrei, a thuggish police detective, clutching a hammer behind his back. Matvei purports to be the boyfriend of Olya, Andrei’s daughter, so Andrei invites him in. It turns out that Olya told Matvei that her father abused her when she was a child, so Matvei is here for bloody revenge. This does not work out well for either of them, as the brief-but-intense fight that follows leaves Matvei a broken mess and smashes a hole in Andrei’s wall, revealing a large stash of banknotes hidden there.

The subdued Matvei is imprisoned in Andrei’s bathroom, where he schemes, tries to escape, and ends up being tortured with an electric drill. This begins a cycle of escalating violence. Just to make things worse, when Andrei calls his daughter to ask about Matvei, she claims not to know who he is. Just who is lying to who?

Tasha, Andrei’s wife, wants to hand Matvei over to the police, but Andrei points out that this will raise awkward questions about the multiple holes that Andrei has drilled in Matvei’s leg. Andrei’s hand is forced, however, when his partner, Evgenich, turns up. We start to learn, through flashbacks, that there is much more to this situation than we realised.

Did Olya really send Matvei to kill her father? Is there anyone in Moscow who Andrei hasn’t screwed over? And just how many times can Matvei die before the film is over?

General Thoughts

I am a sucker for a film that works within limitations. Barring a few flashbacks, all of the action in Why Don’t You Just Die! takes place in a single apartment, with a small cast. This frees up the budget for property damage, makeup effects, and enough fake blood to drown the world.

If you find yourself enjoying Why Don’t You Just Die!, I highly recommend checking out some of Charlie Higson’s novels. While he’s best known for comedy and YA books, Higson has written a handful of thrillers with a very similar tone to this film, drenched in gore and dark humour. Getting Rid of Mister Kitchen is a great place to start.

And speaking of similarities, it’s hard not to compare the direction and cinematography here to the work of Sam Raimi and Edgar Wright. This is a mad, kinetic film that makes its cameras earn their money. It would have been engaging to watch even if the script hadn’t been so inventive.

Verdict

For all the gore and mutilation, Why Don’t You Just Die! is a beautiful film. Its bright colour palette is a treat for the eyes, even as everything gets covered in blood. The mood is further lifted by bouncy music and the ludicrous slapstick of the fight scenes, although this only goes so far once Andrei gets his electric drill out. Without these light touches, this would have been an absolutely harrowing film. Instead, it’s the kind of black comedy that will have you peeking between your fingers even as you laugh.

And that’s the only reason Why Don’t You Just Die! is unlikely to make my top three this year: it’s not really horror. Sure, I suspect it will be one of the most violent films of the month, and there are moments that might reintroduce you to your dinner, but it never tries to scare us. There aren’t really any horror tropes beyond a torture scene or two, so I am puzzled why it is listed as a horror film. Still, it is entertaining enough that I just don’t care.

This is a tight, intense story with some great twists and turns. While you will see many of the reveals coming, this isn’t the kind of film that relies solely on its twists. Mostly, it’s just a bunch of dysfunctional characters in a high-pressure situation, going at each other like rats in a sack. Vitaly Khaev’s performance as Andrei is a particular highlight, offering us a very believable kind of psycho, and I almost rooted for him at times despite all the terrible things he does.

If you’re in the market for some pure, high-octane entertainment and you’re not bothered about whether it’s scary, you should definitely make room for Why Don’t You Just Die! this month. Just remember to lay down some plastic sheeting first.

The October Horror Movie Challenge

Please do join in and share your own thoughts with us about this or any other films as the month goes on. You can usually find us on BlueSky, Reddit, Discord, or on the other side of the mirror.

If you would like to play along at home, my provisional selections are:

Messiah of Evil (USA, 1974)
Milk & Serial (USA, 2024)
Why Don’t You Just Die! (Russia, 2018)
The Visitor (Italy, 1979)
Lake Michigan Monster (USA, 2018)
Save the Green Planet (Korea, 2003)
Daniel Isn’t Real (USA, 2020)
New Religion (Japan, 2022)
The Driller Killer (USA, 1979)
Saccharine (Australia, 2026)
Evil Cat (Hong Kong, 1987)
Stéphane (France, 2023)
Send Help (USA, 2026)
Vampire Clay (Japan, 2017)
Hokum (Ireland, 2026)
Jack Be Nimble (New Zealand, 1993)
Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman (Japan, 2007)
Undertone (Canada, 2025)
Blind Beast (Japan, 1969)
The Appointment (UK, 1982)
Vampyr (German, 1932)
The Last Horror Film (USA, 1982)
The Fake Ghost Catchers (Hong Kong, 1982)
Fréwaka (Ireland, 2024)
Angst (Germany, 1983)
Full Circle: The Haunting of Julia (Canada, 1978)
The Cycle (USA, 2026)
The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (Italy, 1971)
Meanwhile on Earth (France, 2024)
The Ambulance (USA, 1990)
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (USA, 2026)

A Final Note

If you have been enticed here by these posts, please do look around at some of our other film reviews. We also have a podcast, called The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, which occasionally covers horror films. If this appeals, you might want to check out some of the following episodes.

And if you dig through the archives, you will also find episodes about a wide variety of horror stories and games. Happy nightmares!

Milk & Serial (2024) – OHMC 2026 Day 2

2 October, 2026

Milk & Serial (USA, 2024)

I almost saved Curry Barker’s recent feature Obsession for this year’s October Horror Movie Challenge, but I have poor impulse control. While that may end up being my favourite horror film of 2026, who knows what else the month holds? But I did at least save Curry’s first feature, Milk & Serial, for the OHMC. Given the phenomenal success of Obsession, it’s hard not to compare the two films, but I’ll try to review Milk & Serial on its own merits.

Milk & Serial is currently streaming on YouTube in the UK.

Synopsis

Milk and Seven are the co-hosts of the Prank Bros YouTube Channel, where they play often extreme practical jokes on each other. Happily, for a found-footage film, this gives them good reason to record everything they do. When Milk’s birthday comes around, Seven hires an improviser friend to start a fight at the party and apparently shoot their friend Naomi. When this is revealed to be a prank, complete with blanks and blood squibs, Milk is delighted. He had been in danger of ruining the party when he admitted, during a game of Never Have I Ever, to having killed a cat when he was young. Luckily, the shooting proves a great distraction.

Events take a turn when Greg, their sixty-something neighbour, complains about the noise and then starts stalking Seven and Milk. After a few tense and weird incidents, Greg apparently wants to make peace with the friends, inviting them to dinner at his apartment. After some rambling, deranged conversation, however, Greg drugs Seven and Milk and drives them out to the desert. When they wake up, Greg announces that he’s going to kill one of them and the other needs to kill him. And then things get weird.

As the situation unravels, we learn that not everything that’s happening is just a prank, and some of the violence may be sickeningly real. But how much can we really believe when everyone is constantly playing mind games with each other?

General Thoughts

Writer/director Curry Barker and his co-star Cooper Tomlinson have a long-running and successful sketch comedy channel on YouTube called “that’s a bad idea”. They clearly drew on the skills this taught them when making Milk & Serial. While it might seem obvious to use a YouTube channel as the pretext for a found-footage film, having one made by experienced YouTubers makes it all feel so much more real. Some found-footage horror leaves us wondering why the protagonists never stop filming, but there is never any such doubt here. Every limitation of lighting and audio only adds to the verisimilitude, and Barker’s skill as an editor keeps us engaged all the way through.

Even before Milk & Serial, Curry and Tomlinson had both been making short horror films on their channel. This was simply their first feature. But Curry has now fully entered the pipeline of sketch comedians moving into horror cinema. This may not be a new phenomenon in the UK, but more and more of their American counterparts, such as Jordan Peele and Zach Cregger, have taken the same path over the last decade. At this stage, I just assume every comedian would rather be scaring us instead.

I really need to stop telling myself I don’t like found-footage horror. While a lot of the early examples I saw did nothing for me, I’ve enjoyed a lot of more recent uses of the format. It’s still a good mechanism for fledgling filmmakers or those on a minuscule budget, but there have been an increasing number of more polished, professional productions in recent years. Milk & Serial falls somewhere in the middle — skilful, but obviously made on a shoestring. The budget was reportedly $800, which isn’t difficult to believe.

Verdict

While Milk & Serial is a tense, gripping horror film, I can see why Barker’s breakthrough success didn’t come until Obsession. The way it is shot and edited simply makes it feel more at home on YouTube. More importantly, however, it never quite reaches the craft or creativity of Obsession. This is no slight on Milk & Serial, as Obsession is simply exceptional. Most horror films I’ve seen recently would suffer in comparison.

Also, Milk & Serial barely qualifies as a feature, with its one-hour runtime. The short length really works in the film’s favour, however. While there are plenty of twists and reveals, this is the kind of short, intense story that benefits from a sense of urgency. The ending is abrupt but visceral, feeling like the punchline to a sick joke.

For what is a low-budget amateur film, the acting is much stronger than I might have expected, with not a single wooden or unnatural performance. Barker is especially creepy as Milk. While he had a small cameo in Obsession, as the unseen customer service rep for One Wish Willow, I hope we get to see him in front of the camera again soon.

I was also surprised at how dark and violent Milk & Serial is, especially given that it’s on YouTube. The premise could have been played as comedy horror, and there are some moments of black humour, but at its heart this is a grim, nihilistic horror film about terrible people.

All in all, Milk & Serial is definitely worth an hour of your time, especially as it is free to watch. This is a superior found-footage horror with some genuine shocks, and it doesn’t waste a second of its runtime. Just don’t expect another Obsession.

The October Horror Movie Challenge

Please do join in and share your own thoughts with us about this or any other films as the month goes on. You can usually find us on BlueSky, Reddit, Discord, or on the other side of the mirror.

If you would like to play along at home, my provisional selections are:

Messiah of Evil (USA, 1974)
Milk & Serial (USA, 2024)
Why Don’t You Just Die! (Russia, 2018)
The Visitor (Italy, 1979)
Lake Michigan Monster (USA, 2018)
Save the Green Planet (Korea, 2003)
Daniel Isn’t Real (USA, 2020)
New Religion (Japan, 2022)
The Driller Killer (USA, 1979)
Saccharine (Australia, 2026)
Evil Cat (Hong Kong, 1987)
Stéphane (France, 2023)
Send Help (USA, 2026)
Vampire Clay (Japan, 2017)
Hokum (Ireland, 2026)
Jack Be Nimble (New Zealand, 1993)
Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman (Japan, 2007)
Undertone (Canada, 2025)
Blind Beast (Japan, 1969)
The Appointment (UK, 1982)
Vampyr (German, 1932)
The Last Horror Film (USA, 1982)
The Fake Ghost Catchers (Hong Kong, 1982)
Fréwaka (Ireland, 2024)
Angst (Germany, 1983)
Full Circle: The Haunting of Julia (Canada, 1978)
The Cycle (USA, 2026)
The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (Italy, 1971)
Meanwhile on Earth (France, 2024)
The Ambulance (USA, 1990)
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (USA, 2026)

A Final Note

If you have been enticed here by these posts, please do look around at some of our other film reviews. We also have a podcast, called The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, which occasionally covers horror films. If this appeals, you might want to check out some of the following episodes.