New Releases for Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Irrational Fear

Genre: Horror

Directed by: Hunter Johnson

Run time: 98 minutes

Rating: Unrated

Format: Video-on-Demand

The Lowdown: Irrational Fear, the new thriller from director/co-writer Hunter Johnson, plays like a lost gem from the late 1970s or early 1980s.

Watching it feels like unearthing a really ambitious take on Friday the 13th that could have spawned a potential franchise in a different era.

And it features an uproarious turn by Charles Chudabala as the possibly villainous Dr. Sanders, who recruits a ragtag group of patients to retreat to a remote cabin estate to work on conquering their…wait for it…irrational fears.

Irrational Fear is smartly made to boot, finding creative ways to work around its limits and budgetary constraints.

Fans of the slasher genre, in particular, likely will find a lot to enjoy here.

The Stuff You Care About: Hot chicks – Yes

Nudity – No Gore – Yes

Drug use – No

Bad Guys/Killers – Your own imagination

Buy/Rent – Rent it

The Other Lamb (IFC Films, 97 minutes, Unrated, Blu-Ray): Here’s the deal, we love crazy genre films about cults and their enigmatic leaders because everyday life, at some point for all of us, starts to feel like we’re simply following the lead of someone else.

Where that will take us, we don’t know, but for whatever reason, whether we’re all inherently sheep or not, we still follow because there is an undeniable comfort to be found in a world where free will is no longer an option.

Some cult-centric films stand out, whether 2011’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, 2017’s The Endless or 2019’s Midsommar.

Others, like The Other Lamb, can be interesting to a point, but fail to generate the necessary tension to become truly unsettling or horrific.

Regardless of how well a movie is filmed, how breathtaking its cinematography is or how fully invested its cast becomes, cult movies, just like other types of genre thrillers, need to maintain a certain momentum or risk viewers losing interest.

And that’s really the knock on The Other Lamb. It just moves way too slowly early on to captivate and capture viewers, or at least me, which is a shame.

Also Available:

Hawaii Five-O: The Final Season

NCIS: The Seventeenth Season