Horror Fight!: Between Rounds

Hello again, Fright Fans, and welcome back to Horror Fight!: Between Rounds. Your mid-fight breather where the Spooky Bois regroup, swap cinematic blows, and gear you up for the next main event. I’m MeZ, your loyal corner man in the Horror Fight arena, taping your gloves, icing your cuts and loading up your watchlist with deadly precision.

In this super sized issue of the newsletter, The Spooky Bois along with some friends of the show, will be looking back at some of our favorite watches from this past year. Daddy John, Dr. Daddy Armando and (introducing) Captain Joe, will share their favorite horror of 2025 with us, while the Spooky Bois are gonna share some on brand favs.

Quick note: We use neon borders to help differentiate which spooky boi is talking. Pink=MeZ. Green=Corey. Blue=Pat. Purple=Daddy John. Yellow=Dr. Daddy Armando. Orange=Captain Joe.

They say that in troubling times, art flourishes. People channel anxiety and pain into their craft — music, painting, filmmaking. Horror especially thrives this way, letting generations confront real-world demons through monsters and maniacs. It was true in the ’80s and it’s true today. Forget which side of the ‘aisle’ you sit on; there’s no denying the news is more batshit than anything the great Frank Henenlotter could ever dream up.

Yet somehow, amid all this chaos, we’ve gotten some of the best horror movies to hit our screens in DECADES bitch! I daresay we find ourselves in a new golden era of horror and we fucking deserve it!!  While there were tons of great releases this year, I’ll keep it brief and give you wonderful Horror Fight! listeners Daddy John’s Top 5 of the year (in no particular order).

First, I want to get WEAPONS and SINNERS out of the way. Both would absolutely be on my list, but since I expect overlap with the other daddies, I’m leaving them off. They were fresh, undeniable, and pushed witchcraft and vampire horror to new heights.

I am, however, talking about BRING HER BACK. Danny and Michael Philippou are officially two for two after 2022’s TALK TO ME. This sophomore feature is a brutal, emotionally devastating exploration of grief, family, and desperation. The performances are all dynamite, one scene made me physically wince, and the ending left me hollowed out and wrecked. I loved it and can’t wait to see what these guys do next.

Another standout was Guillermo del Toro’s FRANKENSTEIN. Behind Michael Myers, the Frankenstein monster is one of my all-time favorite horror icons, and del Toro delivers a gorgeous, haunting adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic. The gush worthy Jacob Elordi is shockingly perfect as the monster, Oscar Isaac makes Victor Frankenstein deeply loathsome, and Mia Goth, controversies aside, remains endlessly compelling. If this doesn’t win awards for cinematography or costume design, the Academy can kiss my ass.

THE LONG WALK hit exactly as hard as I hoped it would — and might even be better than the book. Cooper Hoffman and David Johnson shine in this bleak, timely Stephen King adaptation that feels destined to endure.

We were light on slashers this year (much to my dismay), but HEART EYES helped fill the void. It’s funny, gory, and finally gives us a new Valentine’s Day slasher for the rotation. Mason Gooding earns bonus points for making my bussy twitch. Minor deduction for no nudity — bring nudity back to slashers, PLEASE!

My final pick is QUEENS OF THE DEAD, which should shock no one after the queer horror episode. Directed by Tina Romero, daughter of George Romero, this zombie flick is set in Bushwick- one of the GAYborhoods in Brooklyn, New York. It centers queer chosen family amid an outbreak caused by tainted drugs and bites. It’s funny, heartfelt, culturally specific, and socially aware in true Romero fashion. It delivers solid gore, practical effects, and meaningful commentary while still being accessible to everyone. Highly recommended.

So yeah — those are my top picks of the year. There were plenty more worth mentioning, like TOGETHER, THE UGLY STEPSISTER, and 28 YEARS LATER. I also enjoyed I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER and M3GAN 2.0 — sue me. I expected way more from CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD, and TRUST sucked ass and is officially my least favorite of the year.

HAPPY 2026 EVERYONE!

As, perhaps, the more voracious of the Spooky Bois for classic cinema, I have been tasked this month to go back through the annals of 2025 and select a few of my favorite first time "classic cinema" watches of the year. I have watched a lot and I’ve enjoyed almost all of them from Hammer’s yuletide set heist film CASH ON DEMAND to Vicente Minnelli’s heartfelt wartime romance THE CLOCK, there’s just something about a black and white movie that does it for me. I love the cadence of the dialogue, I love how graceful the cinematography can be and I even love how weird and dated some of them can feel.  I know how attention spans have been devoured by the internet and social media, so there’s just something I appreciate about luxuriating for a few hours in the past. So, here are my three favorite first time watches of the year.

Okay, so right out of the gate I’m cheating because WRITTEN ON THE WIND is not a black and white film, quite the opposite in fact. Few filmmakers mastered the art of technicolor quite like Sirk, who shot his melodramas in such a striking way that they all fell like daydreams. WRITTEN ON THE WIND is a simple story of two friends falling in love with the same woman played by Lauren Bacall. What Sirk does with the material is ratchet it up to the pulpiest echelons of melodrama and he manages to achieve the highest order of camp classic. Robert Stack (yes, the UNSOLVED MYSTERIES guy) plays the rich, alcoholic part of the duo with such unabashed hamminess that you can’t help but feel for him as poor, handsome Rock Hudson works to unravel the man’s life AND HE’S THE GOOD GUY! The film, however, belongs to Dorothy Malone who plays Stack’s amorous sister all while chewing every inch of scenery and rendering every moment she has as the wildest in an already wild movie. It’s kind of a proto- Nic Cage performance, if I’m being honest. This may sound like a dreary drama, but it’s actually kind of insane. The groundwork for something like TWILIGHT.

CLUNY BROWN is a sensationally funny comedy about a woman who knows exactly who she wants to be, even if so many of the people around her try to insist otherwise. One of the films that most perfectly encapsulates what classic film fans describe as “The Lubitsch Touch,” which is the director’s ability to make weave heavy themes into films that feel light as a feather, all while allowing the audience to read between the lines. Cluny Brown wants to be a plumber, but this is the 40’s and women didn’t do that kind of work, so her Uncle sends her away to work as a servant at a Country Estate. While there, she meets a man (OF COURSE!) whose hiding from the government as he’s a fierce critic of the emerging Nazi party. Now, if that doesn’t sound like a laugh riot, adjust your barometer because there are scenes in this film that had me doubled over. Charles Boyer and Jennifer Jones have crackling chemistry and Cluny is one of the great cinematic creations of the era. There are more famous Lubitsch films, but CLUNY BROWN may just be my favorite. 

From the sparkling effervescence of Ernst Lubitsch to the pitch, black city streets of Fritz Lang (these German directors really made an impact on me this year). THE BIG HEAT is one of the nastiest, meanest noir films I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying a lot. The plot isn’t super important - a cop is found dead by an apparent suicide and our hero, Glen Ford (an actor I’ve never completely warmed up to, but who is pretty great here), a detective himself, decides to get to the bottom of it and it leads into some very dark places. Lee Marvin is stellar as one of the shitheeliest shitheels in cinema. If a rogue cop taking on a bunch of bad as fuck gangsters doesn’t do it for you, may I offer Gloria Graham dancing around with a pitcher of martinis as back up. THE BIG HEAT is right up there with some of my favorite noir films and one I look forward to revisiting when the weather turns cold in November.

Reflecting on the horror films of 2025 that stuck with me, I noticed that humanity is a common theme. These were the films I was most eager to discuss. The ones that made me consider the depths of human emotion.

From the bowels of these emotions comes SCARED SHITLESS. Going into this film, I expected nothing more than poopoo and fart jokes. While not short on the expected puns, the movie was a tale of grief, anxiety, community, and gentrification. It seems near impossible for a movie with this title to be heartfelt, but perhaps not as impossible as making an audience have sympathy for an abuser.

Sally Hawkins’ performance in BRING HER BACK is my favorite of the year. Though Corey views this as a happy ending family film, it is a gutting portrayal of unprocessed grief and the vulnerability of children in the system. Perhaps a stellar performance in a work of fiction makes it safe to for a viewer to humanize a child abuser. A fictional character makes it easier to see the connection between an adult’s unprocessed pain and then enacting egregious pain towards children.

PREDATORS eviscerates the safety of fiction. David Osit’s documentary on the phenomena that was TO CATCH A PREDATOR pulls off the Hawkinsian task of making the villains of the story real life humans in the face of a story that dehumanizes them. It is the film that made me consider humanity most deeply this year.

Returning to the safety of fictional humanization brings me to IT ENDS, a film about a group of friends stuck on a never ending road. In this never changing routine some characters accept their fate, others try to make sense of it all, and others scream and dance along the way - all such real reactions to reflecting on our own lives, experiences, and 2025.

I'm a classy guy.  I read Cahiers du Cinéma, my collection of Criterion discs takes up more space than anything else, and I even watched CITIZEN KANE once when I was in high school.  Let's talk Godard, Fellini, Agnes Varda, all that high falutin' stuff.

Having said that, I contain multitudes, and when I'm not studying shot composition, or arguing with friends about which German expressionist film has the best use of Dutch Angles, I have been known to enjoy a REAL PIECE OF SHIT.  Before we dive into some of my favorite pieces of shit, it is important to define what a piece of shit is.  When it comes to people, there is no such thing as a good piece of shit.  The guy who cuts you off in traffic, the old lady in front of you at the deli counter ordering a quarter pound of everything while yelling at the guy to "make sure its thin, but not TOO THIN," these people are pieces of shit and there is no enjoyment to be taken from them. 

When it comes to movies, there are two kinds of pieces of shit. Take Christopher Nolan's TENET as an example.  It is a piece of shit. It's nonsensical, pretentious, interminably long, and mixed so poorly that you can't hear what any of the actors are saying (not that it matters, the plot is incoherent at best, and totally absent at worst.)  Tenet is a real bad piece of shit, and if you like it then you're also a piece of shit, like the lady at the deli counter. 

But we're not here to talk about those kinds of pieces of shit.  We're here to talk about the glorious pieces of shit, the beautifully inept, poorly made, barely written, often offensive or exploitative, beautifully perfect and endlessly entertaining pieces of shit.  We've talked about more than a few on the podcast; Dario Argento's TRAUMA,  the queer horror masterpiece DEATH DROP GORGEOUS, or everyone's favorite killer robot movie, R.O.T.O.R.  If you're a fan of pieces of shit, here's three of my favorites.  

We'll start overseas, in Italy, with Lamberto Bava, who is no stranger to pieces of shit.  His 1987 classic, DELIRIUM (Le foto di Gioia, 'Photos of Gioia') stands out, even in the genre of giallo, which is littered with countless wonderful pieces of shit.  I'm not going to bury the lede with this one: there are a lot of boobs in this movie.  You almost get the feel that they started with boobs, and worked their way backwards from that. DELIRIUM is the story of Gloria (or Gioia if you're listening to the Italian dub.) Gloria is a former boob model who now runs a very successful boob magazine who spends her days overseeing photoshoots of boobs.  A friend of Gloria's is murdered outside her house one night, this is of course witnessed by Gloria's paraplegic neighbor who spends his days looking out of his window at Gloria's pool, where there are often boobs. The murders keep happening, we get a pitchfork, a swarm of bees, an escalator, and a guy gets shot in the dick.  It's a Giallo folks, so you know we are ending up with a weird sex reason for the murders. Recommended for fans of Italian CInema and boobs.

Next, visionary auteur Glen Danzig's sophomore directorial effort, DEATH RIDER IN THE HOUSE OF VAMPIRES.  This is objectively the worst movie I have ever seen.  It truly must be seen to be believed.  It has a pretty stacked cast; Devin Sawa as the titular Death Rider, Danzig himself as the hilariously named character, "Bad Bathory," and Julian Sands, Danny Trejo and Lee Ving to name a few others.  It doesn't matter what the plot is, because it doesn't really have one.  There are endless zooms, a crowded saloon that is completely silent, and not a soundtrack or score to speak of.  All you hear is footsteps and doors closing.  Scenes just go on and on forever.  Getting through this movie takes some fortitude, it is best enjoyed with friends, or people that you hate.  

We'll finish with 1990's THE SUCKLING directed by someone named Francis Teri who has only one directorial credit to their name.  The plot synopsis tells you pretty much everything you need to know about this movie.  A woman goes to have an abortion at "Big Mamma's" which is a brothel that doubles as an abortion clinic, or an abortion clinic that doubles as a brothel.  The fetus is flushed down the toilet, as ya do, it encounters toxic waste down there and returns as a big monster to kill all the people in the abortion clinic/brothel.  It's essentially a riff on NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.  There is some genuinely terrible earnestly bad acting in this movie.  The creature effects are decent enough.  Recommended for fans of Frank Henenlotter or Troma.

Happy New Year!

In the last issue of the newsletter, we introduced Sleighing and Slaying, a feature where we pair a cozy holiday movie with a holiday horror flick. The idea actually started on my old podcast, The Car JoeMeZ Show. My best bud Captain Joe famously hates horror movies, so I was constantly trying to sneak them onto the show.

Now that Car JoeMeZ is retired, Joe technically never has to watch another horror movie again… except he did. Thanks to Horror Fight! — and more specifically, Corey — Joe finally gave one a shot. Here’s Captain Joe to tell you all about it.

I hate horror movies. That sounds like a good introduction to my friend’s podcast audience. But I do and I hope you’ll respect that I’m honest about it. So it was with great surprise that I was suddenly interested in watching a horror flick after an early episode of Horror Fight!

I genuinely could not get over the enthusiasm Corey had for a film called THE GREASY STRANGLER and, despite knowing nothing about this movie, I felt I HAD to see it. I didn’t rush to watch it, but, after a while, I finally decided that, like John Cena, the time was now and I buckled in to watch what I was sure to be a classic.

It’s not. In fact, it sucks.

But it doesn’t suck in a way that makes it unwatchable. It an entertaining suck. You can know a movie is bad and still find enjoyment in it and that’s where I was with THE GREASY STRANGLER. I’m no bullshit artist, if this is your genre and you like a bunch of these “classics” that Gomez has made me watch over the years that truly do suck and have no redeeming value (BASKET CASE, SOCIETY, HELLRAISER, etc.) then spend some time and watch this which is still bad, but fun bad.

Rating: Triple Main Man

That’s Captain Joe everyone! I plan to have him around more this year to give us his takes on some of the biggest horror movies of the year. Maybe even an episode where we try to convert him with some Gateway horror movies? Let’s see what 2026 brings…

And now for the final Spooky Boi, Me! I’ll be going through some of my movie watching stats and favorite films from 2025

579 movies. God damn, pal — that’s a lot. In fact, it’s the most I’ve ever watched in a single calendar year. I really hit a groove toward the end, knocking out at least two a day, sometimes three or four if a work movie snuck into the mix.

I started strong, slowed down over the summer (busy season at work, so that tracks), then kicked it back into high gear with Halloween (Six Weeks of Horror) and the final end-of-year push.

Pretty consistent with my weekly viewing habits. Saturday being the highest makes sense since I’m usually up late Friday night into early Saturday morning. No let’s take a look at my most watched actors and directors.

We did a Franchise Fight! earlier last year on the Saw series, so it’s no surprise to see Tobin Bell, Shawnee Smith, and Costas Mandylor near the top. Donald Pleasence and Jamie Lee Curtis are there thanks to the Halloween Franchise Fight!— though Donald has a habit of showing up regardless, since he also appeared in four non-Halloween films.

Every year, I make it a point to watch at least 5 directors’ filmographies. It’s a great opportunity for me to rewatch some favorites for the first time in a while and fill in any gaps. Last year, I watched the films of Steven Spielberg, Park Chan-Wook, the Coen Brothers, Wes Craven, and David Cronenberg. Five wildly different voices that made for one hell of a movie year.

Now let’s go through some on brand favorite watches. We got Public Domain movies, shark movies, tubi movies and then some favorite first time watches.

Public Domain horror had a big year in 2025 with two major characters entering the arena: Steamboat Willie and Popeye the Sailor Man. I watched four Mickey Mouse movies and three Popeye movies — six of them rank among the worst films I’ve ever seen.

SCREAMBOAT was easily the best of the Mickey bunch, mostly because it actually had fun with the idea. It’s a tiny evil mouse killing people, not some boring dude in a Mickey mask. The Popeye movies, on the other hand, are all terrible — but SHIVER ME TIMBERS at least earns points for having Popeye rip someone’s head off and then shits down the hole. So yeah… four stars.

PETER PAN’S NEVERLAND NIGHTMARE was an interesting take on a Pete Pan story.

BEAST OF WAR… bro. Look at that poster! Look at that shark! That’s how the shark looks in the movie. It’s a practical shark!! Go watch this movie everyone! DANGEROUS ANIMALS is a blast. Elevated by Jai Courtney having the absolute time of his life. And HOT SPRING SHARK ATTACK is very silly fun time.

You know I love my Tubi. It’s genuinely the best streaming service out there. Yeah, sitting through commercials suck, but in return you get a library unlike anything else. Movies people talked about for years, stuff that was impossible to find, just randomly popping up. It rules.

Over the past couple of years, Tubi’s gotten into distribution, and for a while seeing “Tubi Original” was basically a warning label to brace for impact. But lately? That’s changing.

BYSTANDERS and TAKEOUT don’t reinvent the wheel — they’re pretty formulaic. Takeout in particular has a mystery reveal no one on Earth will be surprised by. Still, both are solid, competently made movies that actually work.

MATCH, on the other hand… oh baby. A glorious piece of shit — the best kind. The kind where you just sit there afterward, staring at the screen, completely gobsmacked by what you just witnessed.

Before I became Tubi Mike, I was Mubi Mike. And as insane as it sounds, this goofy movie about staging Hamlet inside the world of Grand Theft Auto ended up being one of my favorite watches of the year. (definitely better than snoozefest HAMNET)

And finally, I want to shout out the short film BUM. I caught it during an online marathon and haven’t stopped thinking about it since. It’s a found-footage film about a news reporter chasing a scoop and getting way more than she bargained for. The editing is top notch, and the gore and effects are unreal for a film this small. I’ve seen people claim it’s on YouTube, but I haven’t tracked it down yet. The second I do, I’ll let everyone know where to watch it. I cannot wait for Corey to see this one.