It Eats Your Fears

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

We all scream for ice cream, among other things.

JULIE DARLING (1982)

Speaking of twisted childhoods, writer/director Paul Nicholas and co-writers Maurice Smith and James Gordon White crafted an all-timer for the lead character in their thriller Julie Darling, with Isabelle Mejias turning in an incredible, deeply troubling performance as Julie.

Julie is a teenage girl who has developed an unhealthy obsession with her father Harold (Anthony Franciosa). She regularly butts heads with her mother (Cindy Girling), who hates her pet snake and wants to send her away to boarding school so she and Harold might have a chance at focusing on fixing their failing marriage. Harold goes very easy on Julie and makes sure she won’t have to follow some of her mom’s stricter rules, so Julie just grows more obsessed with the guy day by day. Even when she’s informed that a classmate has a crush on her, she has no interest. She’s not going to waste her time meeting up with a boy at a roller rink if she can spend the day out in the wilderness, hunting with the man of her dreams. Daddy.

Julie has so little use for her mom at this point that when she witnesses her mother being assaulted by a grocery deliver boy, she just stands by and watches, even though she has her hunting rifle in hand. When the assault ends with her mother being accidentally killed, her head bashed on the floor, this is the ideal outcome as far as Julie is concerned. Now she’ll have daddy all to herself.

But that’s not how it works out. Harold’s marriage was so deep in the dumps, it doesn’t take him any time to go public with his relationship with another woman, Sybil Danning as Susan. And while his marriage had been chaste for the last three years, he and Susan like to engage in noisy sex. A sex scene not only allows Nicholas to get some Sybil Danning nudity into his movie, but it also gives Julie the opportunity to fantasize that she’s having sex with Harold in Susan’s place – and the fact that Nicholas actually shot Franciosa and Mejias making out and pretending to have sex for a few seconds comes off as fairly sleazy. Then, Julie snaps out of her fantasy, appalled and heartbroken that her dad has a new woman in his life. She’s going to have to do something about this.

From that point on, Julie is dedicated to destroying Harold and Susan’s relationship, no matter what it takes. Will she have to kill Susan’s young son? Will she have to kill Susan herself? And will that violent sex pest delivery boy ever circle back into their lives? (Yes, he will, and in a very messed-up way.)

It’s a shame that it took me more than forty years after the film’s release to learn about the existence of Julie Darling, because this is a movie that deserves to receive a lot more attention than it has over the decades. It’s a very twisted, discomforting thriller that should be seen by any fan of ‘80s thrillers... as long as they think they can handle the psychological disturbances the story provides. 

PINOCCHIO UNSTRUNG (2026)

I have little to no interest in the modern trend of taking public domain children’s story characters and building horror stories around them. I have yet to feel compelled to watch any of the movies about homicidal versions of Mickey Mouse, Popeye, Winnie-the-Pooh, etc. That said, the idea of making horror movies based on fairy tales is nothing new. I watched Pinocchio’s Revenge years ago, and now I have sat through writer/director Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s own fractured fairy tale, Pinnochio Unstrung... and I have to admit, it was better than I expected it to be.

The story centers on a teen boy named James (Cameron Bell), who has been going through a rough time recently. Not only did his parents die in a car accident, but his best friend Zach has also passed away from cancer. All of that loss has inspired James’ grandfather and caretaker Gepetto (Richard Brake) to build his grandson a friend who will never leave him. Thus the creation of Pinocchio, a sentient wooden puppet who soon comes to wish he was a real boy... and whose nose grows any time he tells a lie.

There’s something creepy going on here, though, as Gepetto’s basement – where Pinocchio lives – also happens to be inhabited by a sinister wooden creature called the Wood Mother (Emma Tate), who convinces Pinocchio that he needs human organs to become real, and by an evil talking cricket (voiced by genre icon Robert Englund) who encourages Pinocchio to murder anyone who puts James in danger. Following the advice of the Wood Mother and the cricket, Pinocchio – who, on his own, is a rather likeable, naïve character – to set out on a gory killing spree. Anyone who does James wrong, from a drunk driver who nearly kills the kid in an automobile collision to the bullies who pick on him at school, becomes a target for Pinocchio.

There are also a couple of accidental deaths along the way. In fact, my favorite moment in the movie comes early on, when the shocking sight of Pinocchio causes two people to die in a gym accident. Pinocchio’s reaction of “Jesus” when he sees their bloody, mangled bodies was hilarious to me.

Even with an 82-minute running time, Pinocchio Unstrung did start to wear out its welcome for me before it reached the end credits, but did find it to be entertaining overall.

This is an installment in a cinematic universe called the Twisted Childhood Universe, which Frake-Waterfield is building with producer Scott Chambers. Other entries in this franchise include the Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey films, Bambi: The Reckoning, and Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare, with more to come. We’ll see if I ever get around watching those other movies, but I had a decent time with Pinocchio Unstrung.

FALL II: DEADPOINT (2026)

Back in 2022, writer/director Scott Mann and co-writer Jonathan Frank delivered a surprisingly effective, engaging thriller called Fall, which starred Virginia Gardner as Shiloh, a young woman who shot daredevil videos for likes and followers on social media, and Grace Caroline Currey as her friend Becky, and showed us the insane events that occurred when Shiloh and Becky found themselves stranded on a rickety old 2000 foot tall tower. Fall did so well when it reached streaming, two sequels were greenlit – and now the first sequel has arrived to remind us that sometimes it’s enough to have just one good thing. When attempts are made to follow up a good thing, sometimes it’s difficult to recapture the magic. Fall itself wasn’t even all that magical, but the sequel Fall II: Deadpoint still manages to fall short.

Directed by Michael and Peter Spierig from a script by Mann and Frank, this one stars Harriet Slater as Shiloh’s sister Jax, who is approached by a friend of her sister’s named Luce (Arsema Thomas) and convinced to honor Shiloh’s memory by going on a plank walk on Mount Kwan in Thailand. It takes 20 minutes of film’s 97 minute running time for the women to reach the mountain, and that 20 minutes feels like it takes a long time.

They’re warned that the mountain has been permanently closed because of earthquakes, rock slides, and heavy rain, but they continue on... and wouldn’t you know it, the plank walk is quickly disrupted by a rock slide that destroys much of the planks and leaves them stranded on the side of the mountain. So we have two women stuck at a great height all over again, but Fall II never manages to be as thrilling as its predecessor – not even with some added twists and a drug-running subplot.

It’s an okay movie once the planks are destroyed, but it’s very underwhelming compared to the first Fall.

Virginia Gardner and Grace Caroline Currey reprise their roles in flashbacks, and Currey is also there for the set-up for Fall 3, which will hopefully be a step up from this sequel.

ICE CREAM MAN (2026)

Director Eli Roth had been planning to go into production on a sequel to his slasher movie Thanksgiving in 2025 – but when those plans fell through for, apparently, scheduling reasons, he quickly pivoted to an idea that he had in mind for twenty years: the story of a mysterious, silent ice cream man who rolls into the town of Bayleen Bay and serves the youths a batch of treats that turns them into homicidal maniacs.

Scripted by Roth and Noah Belson, Ice Cream Man really feels like a back-up plan that came together quickly, because it’s very goofy, irreverent, and slapdash, moving through its gore-streaked 86 minutes in the breeziest way possible.

Lactose-intolerant Jared Mayfair (Charlie Zeltzer) is our hero who’s witness to all sorts of bloody horrors alongside his classmates Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly) and Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman), who have also not eaten the treats... well, Mia ate the ice cream, but then she threw up, and the movie has a shockingly flippant line about Mia vomiting.

While the ice cream turns young kids into killers, it just puts teenagers out of commission, which gives Sarah Abbott – as Jared’s teen sister Lizzie – the chance to do some fun physical comedy when she wakes up from an ice-cream-induced sleep to finds that her arms aren’t functioning correctly. Lizzie, along with her ex-boyfriend Chris (Dylan Hawco) tries to help Jared and his cohorts get through the situation as youngsters massacre adults all over town.

Eventually, we’re given a standard horror movie explanation for what’s going on, but this movie doesn’t take anything seriously, so don’t expect much in the way of a resolution.

Ice Cream Man is a highly inappropriate movie and isn't particularly good, but it has some moments when it comes across as a fun goof.