Stanford‘s Hometown News Site

HAZBIN HOTEL: SEASON 2 isn’t a continuation—it’s a relapse. A gorgeous, glittering, gloriously depraved relapse. Vivienne Medrano’s chaotic, bloodstained Broadway in Hell returns with sharper claws, higher heels, and more show-stopping numbers than Heaven could ever forgive. After Charlie Morningstar’s little “oops, I accidentally won a war against Heaven” moment, the Hotel is booming. Demons are checking in like it’s a cruise ship for the damned—but most of them aren’t looking for redemption. They’re looking for clout, chaos, and free room service.

DEADMAN’S BARSTOOL is a queer-tinged cocktail of noir, satire, and charisma—served straight up with a splash of sleaze. Written and directed by Dean Dempsey, co-written with Greg Mania, the film was made in 2018 but now finds new life through Anchor Bay’s Blu-ray reissue. It’s a murder-mystery that plays like a warped sermon about lust, power, and the hypocrisy of modern faith, filtered through a lens that reveres John Waters, early Todd Haynes, and the chaotic, anything-goes spirit of downtown New York’s underground art scene. For all its rough edges and microbudget limitations, there’s something magnetic about the film’s boldness—it’s the kind of noir that feels too alive, too sly to moralize, and too aware of its own absurdity to take itself too seriously.

DAN CURTIS’ CLASSIC MONSTERS arrives like a midnight séance—summoning the very foundation of horror storytelling into the comforting glow of the TV. The set puts three of the most ambitious TV horror productions of their time: DRACULA (1974), FRANKENSTEIN (1973), and THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE (1968). Produced or directed by Dan Curtis, the man responsible for DARK SHADOWS (so maybe I have a soft spot), these films represent a remarkable collision between the gothic grandeur of Universal’s golden age and the intimacy of 70s television. What Kino Lorber presents here under its Kino Cult banner is not merely a nostalgia trip—it’s a reclamation of television horror as art, which thrives within constraints rather than collapsing under them.

LESBIAN SPACE PRINCESS is the kind of movie that doesn’t just wink at its audience—it throws glitter in their face and asks them to sing along. Directed and written by Leela Varghese and Emma Hough Hobbs, the animated feature is a sugar rush of queer pandemonium that manages to balance its campiness with genuine heart. Beneath its chaotic, candy-colored surface lies something surprisingly heartfelt: a story about anxiety, self-worth, and learning to love yourself even when your brain insists you shouldn’t.

FAMILIAR TOUCH begins the way memory does — halfway through a thought, in motion before you realize where you’re headed. Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant) moves through her house performing small, almost automatic tasks: slicing fruit, turning on a burner, checking a pan that’s already empty. The gestures make sense only because they’ve been repeated for decades. Yet writer/director Sarah Friedland uses these simple actions to pull us into something far less ordinary — a portrait of a woman whose body still remembers a life her mind has started to lose.

STITCH HEAD aims straight for the spot where spooky meets sweet: a PG “horror” that plays with the Frankenstein myth from the kids’ table without talking down to them. High above a little town, a mad professor keeps churning out monsters and promptly forgets about them, leaving his first, smallest creation to hold the whole place together. A traveling showman shows up promising love and limelight, and our stitched-together caretaker is tempted to chase the attention instead of the community he’s already built. That arc—validation versus belonging—gives the film its pulse. It’s more of a comedy adventure with cobweb trim, closer in spirit to a storybook campfire tale than anything actually frightening.

There are horror films that aim to frighten, disturb, or repulse — and then there’s MARTYRS. Pascal Laugier’s 2008 film doesn’t just cross the line; it redraws it entirely. Newly restored in 4K by Eureka Entertainment’s Masters of Cinema series, the film remains as devastating and divisive as it was at release. It’s the kind of experience that doesn’t feel like watching a movie so much as enduring one. But in that endurance lies its genius. Laugier created something few filmmakers attempt: a story where violence is not spectacle, but a form of spiritual confrontation. It’s horror as philosophy, and philosophy as punishment.

When horror uses reality as its foundation, the results can be devastatingly effective. LANDLORD leans on that principle—weaponizing the all-too-familiar power imbalance between tenant and property owner—and gives it literal teeth. Set in a sweltering, rundown apartment complex that feels like it's decaying in real time, the story centers on a bounty hunter who arrives to collect a stolen briefcase, only to find herself entangled in a far darker kind of transaction. Her unexpected ally is a young boy named Alex, orphaned when his mother falls victim to an attack from a “landlord”. A premise that practically bleeds irony, fusing folklore with financial predation.

RUNNING FOR THE MOUNTAINS begins with an image most Americans would recognize—a rolling Appalachian horizon that feels both eternal and endangered. The documentary quickly upends that serenity, revealing a region defined less by its natural beauty than by the industries exploiting it. Directed by Julie Eisenberg and Babette Hogan, the film is an unflinching look at how fossil fuel extraction and deregulation have turned West Virginia into a cautionary case study in environmental sacrifice and political rot.

Abel Ferrara’s MS. 45 wastes no time showing what kind of story it wants to tell. The film drops us into a version of New York that feels dangerous even in the daylight—crowded, indifferent, and predatory. Within hours, Thana, a garment-district seamstress, is assaulted twice. What follows isn’t just another revenge narrative; it’s a stripped-down character study about how trauma hardens into purpose. Ferrara and Zoë Lund, who was only seventeen during filming, created something raw and unnerving from material that could have felt exploitative in lesser hands. Nuns, guns, and exploitation, but with surprising depth!

John Carpenter lays out a story about an insurance investigator chasing a missing horror author—and then Carpenter turns the narrative into a diagnosis. What begins as a story about corporate calculus and a publicity headache mutates into a portrait of a contagion that influences the audience, illustrating how ideas crawl under the skin and the terrifying possibility that authorship is less about who writes and more about who believes. If the earlier entries in Carpenter’s ‘Apocalypse Trilogy’ (THE THING and PRINCE OF DARKNESS) toy with impending doom, this one grins, hands you a paperback, and dares you to read it aloud.

Caiden (Caleb Alexander Smith) wants to get away, start fresh, be someone better (or at least someone). The city is Los Angeles, full of promise and rough edges. What he doesn’t expect is that the very thing that could elevate him to the next level — his face (and physique) — will drag him into a quagmire of fraud, danger, and identity erosion.

After nearly a decade of hauntings, possessions, and theories about the infamous Abaddon Hotel, Stephen Cognetti’s HELL HOUSE LLC: LINEAGE arrives with the heavy task of tying it all together. What should have been a dark, satisfying sendoff to one of the more inventive found-footage franchises instead ends up as a muddled, exposition-heavy finale that leaves you asking the same question as its characters—why are we still here?

There’s a familiar chill to THE RITUAL HOUSE, one that stems not from originality but from the unease of watching people unravel inside a home that clearly doesn’t want them there. Directed by Crystal J. Huang, the film walks a narrow line between ghost story and low-budget supernatural mystery, managing to deliver a few eerie moments even when its script can’t quite sustain the weight of its own ideas. While not the disaster, it’s a rough, uneven entry into indie horror — the kind of film that works best late at night with the lights off and expectations low.

QUEENS OF THE DEAD is a battle staged on a dance floor, where identity, community, and performance are all turned up to eleven. Tina Romero positions the film inside a Brooklyn warehouse party, then detonates it with a zombie surge that scrambles drag rivalries, backstage politics, and romantic hang-ups into a makeshift survival crew. That hook alone would be enough to carry a standard horror-comedy, but the surprise is how much sincerity lives under the glitter. Even when jokes land wide and the gore is a bit laughable, the movie keeps circling back to what matters: chosen family and the work it takes to remain one when everything outside is trying to split you apart.