Paralysis, Bermuda Island, Nanny, Hatching, Rabid, and A Cat in the Brain
Paralysis, Bermuda Island, Nanny, Hatching, Rabid, and A Cat in the Brain
Weekly Horror Bulletin Newsletter 211
We’ve got our usual lineup of four movies and a short film this week. We’ll start with “Paralysis” and “Bermuda Island,” two new releases from 2023. Then we’ll watch “Nanny” and “Hatching,” a couple of 2022 films.
As a bonus this week, we’ll look at:
• “Rabid” (1977)
• “A Cat in the Brain” 1990
Four years ago this week...
Four YEARS AGO this week, on episode 5, we looked at “The Abominable Dr Phibes” and “Hellraiser: Judgment” (2018). Listen to that old episode here: https://www.horrorguys.com/hg005/.
Sixteenth Issue of Horror Bulletin now available
The newest issue of Horror Bulletin Monthly, our monthly compilation of all our reviews, is out now. This includes all the bonus content and is available as both a print book and an eBook. If you don’t have time to read the website or email, here’s one more option for you!
• Buy from Amazon: Amazon.com
• Buy Direct: https://horrorguysshop.com/
Check out all our books!
The Horror Guys Guide to:
• The Horror Films of Vincent Price
• Universal Studios' Shock! Theater
Creepy Fiction:
• A Sextet of Strange Stagings: Six Surprising Scripts
• Tales to Make You Shiver, Volumes 1 and 2
Here. We. Go!
Rabid (1977)
• Directed by David Cronenberg
• Written by David Cronenberg
• Stars Marilyn Chambers, Franke Moore, Terry Schonblum
• Run Time: 1 Hour, 31 Minutes
• Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
An entertaining and unique take on vampirism and plagues that still holds up pretty well. It was some of Cronenberg’s early work, was well received, and did very well financially. If you like his work, it’s worth checking out.
Synopsis
A young couple ride down the road on their motorcycle. Dr. Keloid talks about innovations in plastic surgery. A family in their van is lost on the road, “We didn’t pass it!” They turn around in the road, and the motorcycle, going way too fast, crashes and explodes with Rose trapped underneath. The plastic surgery place is right there - it’s also a full medical center, so they rush to help. It’s three hours to the nearest hospital, so they take her to the plastic surgery clinic to save her life.
Hart Reed was the guy driving the motorcycle, and he worries that he’s killed Rose. Dr. Keloid tells his staff that in the process of saving her, they’re doing a special kind of skin graft with a genetic treatment.
One month later and Rose is still in a coma, but her grafts are doing well. Hart can’t wait around forever, so he eventually leaves. Murray gives him a ride, and Hart still has his wrecked bike in the trunk.
Eventually, Rose wakes up, screaming. She sits up and embraces the orderly, who doesn’t complain. She hugs him tight and the orderly starts screaming and bleeding. He survives but cannot remember what happened to him. Dr. Keloid thinks the man may have had a stroke and fell or something. Then they find blood all over Rose, who is still asleep. They think maybe the orderly tried to molest her.
That night, Rose wakes up again and goes outside for a walk. She goes into a barn and starts petting a cow. She leans down and puts her arms over the cow to drink some of its blood. She then vomits. A drunken man comes into the barn and starts to rape her, but she hurts him pretty bad while getting the food she needs. She then runs back to the hospital.
Rose runs into Judy in the hospital’s hot tub and attacks her. She calls Hart, who’s in a different state; she wants him to come get her. Elsewhere, the orderly from before leaves the hospital and attacks and kills a cop before they both die in an excessive traffic accident.
Dr. Keloid finds Rose awake, and she says she’s a monster now. He examines the skin grafts and finds a weird hole in her armpit that looks like a mouth. She grabs the doctor and a needle-like thing shoots out of her armpit and stabs the doctor.
The old drunk from the barn goes into a diner, and he’s still bleeding. He then attacks a diner and bites a waitress. Dr. Keloid has a big bandage on his neck, but he says he can do surgery anyway. He starts getting shaky hands halfway through and then cuts off the nurse's finger and eats it.
Hart and Murray drive to the hospital and hear about the diner attack on the radio. They say rabies may be involved. They arrive at the hospital and find lots of police cars, but no Rose. They’re giving rabies shots to the police officers and medical personnel that were bitten. It appears that Dr. Keloid has rabies.
Rose, meanwhile, has hitched a ride with a truck driver. He gives her a sandwich, but she vomits it back up. The police find the driver later, bleeding and sick. That night, the driver starts attacking people as well. They’re calling it super-rabies since it has such a short incubation period. The police figure out that rabies shots don’t help.
Rose goes to stay with her friend Mindy and goes out to a porn movie. A creepy man wants to sit next to her, and we get to see her armpit-needle do the job. The friend experiences an attack in the subway. The government decides that martial law is a good idea. Once a patient becomes violent, there is no treatment. The man from the WHO suggests simply shooting the infected, since they’re going to die anyway.
Hart and Murray get the new vaccine, but that won’t protect them from the crazies. Rose goes to the mall and sees a man go berserk. When the police shoot at the crazy man, they kill the mall’s Santa Claus as well.
The disease is now spreading all over the city, and Hart and Murray watch the military take over the city. Murray goes home to check on the family but is killed by his crazy wife.
Mindy finds Rose sneaking out again, and Rose says she doesn’t want it to be her; she’s hungry again. Mindy insists that Rose stay. Hart comes in and catches her in the act of drinking from Mindy. He realizes that she’s the source of the plague. “You carry the plague! You’ve killed hundreds of people!” She blames him for causing all this in the first place.
Hart and Rose struggle, and he falls down the stairs. She goes to the lobby of the building and finds a new victim. She locks herself in a room with this guy to see what happens. Will he go crazy too? Yes, he does. The crazy man attacks Rose as Hart listens on the phone.
The next morning the dead-body garbage men throw what’s left of Rose into their truck.
Commentary
This was one of the highest-grossing Canadian films of all time. It’s a really unique take on both vampirism and plague movies. For a Cronenberg film, the body horror here is pretty light. There’s a bit of surgery early on, but it’s mostly fake blood after that.
It’s a little slow, and a little dated, but it’s still entertaining.
A Cat in the Brain (1990)
• Directed by Lucio Fulci
• Written by Lucio Fulci, Giovanni Simonelli, Antonio Tentoni
• Stars Lucio Fulci, Brett Halsey, Ria De Simone
• Run Time: 1 Hour, 33 Minutes
• Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This was strange and interesting, with horror director Lucio Fulci playing himself being tormented by memories of horror movies he’s really made in the past causing him, and us, to doubt what’s real or remembered or hallucinated. A lot of the film is clips from his past films spliced into a story with a few new characters linking it all together.
Synopsis
Lucio Fulci plays himself, writing a new movie as he thinks of every possible way to murder a character. We see a cat chewing on his brain, figuratively, I think.
We see a dead woman on a slab with a chunk of flesh removed from her leg. Upstairs, a man cooks a steak that’s about the same size. After he eats, he goes into the basement and cuts the woman to pieces with a chainsaw. After that, he grinds it into hamburger and feeds it to the pigs. “We are gonna eat our mistress,” he tells them and smiles.
Wait- this was all a movie set. Director Lucio Fulci calls for a break and leaves the studio. He goes to a restaurant, and the waiter offers him a filet, then steak tartare, both of which remind him of the scene from the movie he’s working on. He goes home, where he hears a man using a chainsaw. Nightmares ensue.
Fulci walks past Egon Schwarz, a psychiatrist. We cut to the inside, where Egon and his wife argue. Fulci goes inside, and the receptionist, Nurse Lily, hopes he’ll pick her to be in his next movie. Fulci tells the doctor that he’s gained new phobias due to his filming work and talks about the restaurant situation with meat nauseating him. Dr. Schwarz says his mind is breaking down the barriers between what he’s filmed and what is real.
Fulci goes back to the studio and directs a scene where a young Nazi beats up a woman and licks up her blood. “Sadism, Nazism, is there any point anymore?” he wonders. His producer comes in and says some people want to make a documentary about Fulci’s filmmaking process. Fulci starts imagining the film crew as Nazis. He then puts that into his film as a sadistic Nazi orgy. No, that was real- Fulci attacked the film crew in real life and blacked it out.
Next, we get a woman singing while a man slaps her silly. No, this is actually Dr. Schwarz watching Fulci’s movies to understand his patient better. Schwarz hypnotizes Fulci to keep him more grounded in reality. Except Schwarz programs Fulci to think he’s a murderer while the doctor is actually the murderer. Whenever the doctor plays a sound, Fulci will accept further instructions.
A bit later, we see Schwarz murder a prostitute. Actually, he cuts her to pieces with his ax. Fulci’s car breaks down and he witnesses cultists having a ritual in the cemetery. No– that’s another film set, and they started without him. Fulci talks about the dead prostitute and wonders if he could have killed her.
Fulci imagines pushing a girl in a wheelchair down the stairway. Then he imagines zombies in wheelchairs breaking down his door. Everything he does that night reminds him of some terrible scene.
The next morning, Fulci goes for a drive, and we see Schwarz following in a car behind him. We see Schwarz kill a couple making out in a car. Fulci witnesses the murder. Schwarz then kills a woman and two guys in a boathouse.
In the morning, Fulci remembers that he dropped his lighter last night near the crime scene and goes back after it. He runs over a man five or six times but then finds no body or blood– he imagined it.
Dr. Schwarz and his wife argue some more. Fulci hears about all the murders on TV and still wonders if he’s behind all of them. He calls Inspector Gabrielli at the police station, but the inspector is on vacation.
Fulci ends up calling Dr. Schwarz for advice. The doctor tells Fulci to write down everything he’s seen. Privately, the doctor thinks that will eventually qualify as Fulci’s written confession. Fulci goes to the inspector’s house and imagines more murders. He and the inspector have a long talk, and Inspector Gabrielli says that Fulci is simply overworked. Fulci says it feels like there’s a cat eating his brain.
Dr. Schwarz watches a Fulci movie where a man kills his wife. When his own wife comes downstairs, he strangles her with piano wire, eventually sawing her head halfway off. Fulci witnesses yet another murder and faints on the spot.
Inspector Gabriella reveals that they have been tailing Fulci for some time and saw the doctor tailing Fulci. They found Dr. Schwarz and shot him in the middle of one of the murders.
Fulci takes a vacation with Nurse Lily on a small boat. She goes below, and he fires up the chainsaw, and we hear screaming. He comes out and uses her fingers and ears as fishing bait. No, that was a movie shoot as well. This time, he and Lily really sail off into the sunset. Everything’s good!
Commentary
It’s very meta and self-referential as we see many clips from other Fulci films of the past. Actually, most of the gore scenes come from previous films. Fulci directed 61 movies, and most of them were horror movies of the caliber shown as clips here.
The whole concept is that if you direct this kind of thing long enough, there must be something wrong with you. The whole thing is a kind of satire on Fulci himself and horror directors in general.
As a standalone film, the jokes might fall flat, but if you’ve seen a few of Fulci’s actual movies, I think you’ll appreciate this one more.
Paralysis (2022)
• Directed by Levi Austin Morris
• Written by Levi Austin Morris
• Stars Allison Lobel, Levi Austin Morris, Lisagaye Tomlinson
• Run Time: 1 Hour, 48 Minutes
• Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This is a fever dream of memory and hallucination. Or is it more than that? The cast and cinematography are great, and the script is good. It goes on a little too long, but the ending wraps things up nicely.
Synopsis
Haley works in her garden as Nicky watches out the window; he’s acting strangely so she goes inside to check on him. Later, she finds him dead on the basement floor– wait! Nope, that was a dream. Except Haley can’t really wake up since she has sleep paralysis. As she lays there unable to move, something nasty opens the door…
Morning comes, and everything is fine. We see she has a bottle of pills on her nightstand. She has breakfast with Nicky and ignores calls from her mother. She’s not just avoiding her mother, she’s avoiding all her friends as well except for Nicky, whom I immediately suspected isn’t real (Kevin suspected that too!). She mentions she needs to be more consistent in taking her medications, and then has some kind of breakdown, hearing voices. She admits to her mother that she’s stopped going to her therapist and taking her medications. Her mother says, “I lost Nicky the same day you did.” Yep, called it.
Haley takes a pill, and her apartment turns gray, a nice portrayal of the way the medication makes her feel. She sleeps until morning without a problem, but she’s clearly depressed the entire time. She throws the pills in the trash before bed.
Nicky comes by the following day, and he’s all hung over. She takes her brother to his room and puts him to bed. She imagines him in two places at once, but one of them is very dead. She wakes up with sleep paralysis again, but Nicky comes in and talks her through it. She opens her eyes, and there’s a monster there…
The next morning, she digs out the pills and takes one. She then calls the therapist and leaves a message. We flash back to her and Nicky talking about him quitting his job after having sex with his boss. Their father still beats Nicky, even though he’s 30.
Haley calls Anissa, a psychic, and tells her about Nicky, who died eight months ago, and sets up an appointment for tomorrow morning. After hanging up the phone, Anissa pulls out the big book of “Demons” from her shelf.
Haley finds Nicky creeping down in her basement. There is much crying and angst between Haley and Nicky.
Anissa finally comes over and detects some spirit energy in the house. She tells her own life story and explains a legend about an old hag collecting souls, but Haley doesn’t think that’s who is haunting her. They do a kind of seance, and it’s a rough one.
Haley goes to bed, and Anissa sits up, watching over her. Anissa’s outnumbered, and the demons get her. Haley wakes up in the basement and runs into Nicky. It’s not Nicky though, it’s the demon, accusing her of letting Nicky die. Haley accepts that Nicky’s death was not her fault; he was on drugs and overdosed. With her realization of his innocence, all the demons vanish.
Commentary
It’s got great cinematography; it all looks good. The music is also surprisingly good for an indie film. Allison Lobel, as Haley, is perfect in the part. She nails it, as does everyone else in the film. The ending is very creepy.
Around the point where Anissa arrived, the “demons” went from all being in her head to being an actual supernatural force; all the stuff about hallucinations was forgotten.
My only complaint is that it’s so long; it feels like the story could have been told just as effectively in half the time. We probably could have cut back on the first half when it all looks like she has hallucinations. The ending saved it, but it was a long time getting there.
Bermuda Island (2023)
• Directed by Adam Werth
• Written by Michael Mahal, Sonny Mahal, Robert Thompson
• Stars Tom Sizemore, Noel Gugliemi, John Wells, Sarah French
• Run Time: 1 Hour, 25 Minutes
• Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
It’s fast moving and entertaining with a nice-looking island location. It would be a great place to vacation except for some complications that develop. The acting is all decent, the script is good, and the horror effects are well done.
Synopsis
A couple of guys want to talk to Diego about buying guns. Turns out, it’s a police sting, and there's a shootout. A bunch of people get shot, but Diego gets caught. Credits roll.
We get news reports about a hurricane coming. There’s a “Karen” in the airport check-in line, and things are too slow for her limited patience. We get to meet various characters in the airport lobby, staff, and passengers. After weather-related delays, the people board. Diego and a whole bunch of FBI agents also board the plane. The flight is bound for Puerto Rico. Steward Jonas talks to several more people as they board the plane.
Before they get far, Diego has lifted the handcuff key from one of the agents. They hit rough weather during the flight. Diego gets loose and shoots most of the FBI agents before the air marshal shoots him. Jonas also gets shot and killed.
The tower reports no bad weather anywhere near the airplane, which is getting tossed around pretty badly by the hurricane outside. The plane is struck by lightning and goes down in the ocean.
The next morning, many of the passengers make it to an island. Midnight, the ren-fair goth-looking guy, cries that he’s got makeup in his eyes. It’s a beautiful tropical island, and the people go about exploring and figuring out where they are.
They find a crashed sailboat. They have no food, and one guy tries to drink ocean water. One group gets to work building a shelter, and the other starts looking for food. These people clearly aren’t survivalists, and most of them are actually pretty inept.
Midnight goes wandering through the woods. Something growls and kills him. Something big with green claws kills another man. It soon becomes obvious that there’s at least one monster on this island.
A new guy appears and runs the survivors back to the beach. He was hoping they were a rescue party. We soon see a bunch of creatures attack the survivors, and there aren’t nearly as many survivors before long.
Some of the folks decide to follow FBI guy Vic, while the others stick with Bruce, the new guy who’s been there longer.
Carolyn and Damon get naked and go for a swim. They’re attacked by one of the men from the flight, but that goes badly for the attacker.
We find out that a bunch of those creatures live in the caves. Bruce takes Damon and Carolyn to “his place,” and Bruce tells his story. They figure out that Bruce was in the war. That’s World War I, and he’s been marooned there since 1917. When they tell him that happened a hundred years ago, he doesn’t believe it.
The others discuss Bruce’s story and come to the conclusion that it’s due to being in the Bermuda Triangle. There are more attacks that night.
Bruce comes up with a plan to kill the monsters but warns the others that the monsters have an Alpha, the leader of the pack. The monsters attack that night, and Bruce turns against the group, killing Vic and attacking Damian. The rest of the plane people are killed and eaten. “This is my island. I’m the closest thing you will find to the devil here.” Bruce’s eyes go red– he’s the alpha he warned the others about.
Commentary
The island is a nice-looking on-location set. The creatures are well done. The characters are interesting and distinctive, and it doesn’t slow down long enough to get boring.
I love how Tom Sizemore gets top billing and he doesn’t even live long enough to see the plane crash.
The ending is a bit abrupt, and we really didn’t see it coming until the end, but overall, we liked it!
Short Film: The Door (2023)
• Directed by Hetong Zhang
• Written by Hetong Zhang
• Stars Liu Shilin Sang, Jiliang Li, Ping Sang
• Run Time: 12:07
• Watch it:
Synopsis
A man watches a zombie movie. No wait, it’s not fiction, it’s police footage of a zombie outbreak. Officer Liu was the only one who got out alive. He tells his story about when he was called to a disturbance at an apartment complex and things went very wrong…
Commentary
This looks good enough to be a full-length film. It’s told in an interesting way with the flashbacks, and you don’t really know the whole story until the end. It’s made in China, and it’s just foreign enough that you don’t always quite understand the police procedural side of things.
They probably could have done without the Chinese rap music though. Wow.
Nanny (2022)
• Directed by Nikyatu Jusu
• Written by Nikyatu Jusu
• Stars Anna Diop, Michelle Monaghan, Sinqua Walls
• Run Time: 1 Hour, 39 Minutes
• Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
A beautifully filmed story of an African immigrant pursuing the American dream. It’s a precarious situation that she ends up in, working as a nanny, complicated by difficult parents, a child of her own still in Africa, and maybe a ghost or two. The horror is low-key, but it’s pretty good.
Synopsis
Aisha’s Aunt warns her not to lose her new job; “Jobs like this don’t fall from the sky.” Aisha is the new nanny for a family who lives in a high-rise. Amy is the mother, Adam is the father, and Rose is the little girl. Aisha even gets a room of her own for overnights. It’s a very nice place, and it’s clear that Amy is obsessively organized. Aisha later does Facetime with her own son, Lamine, who lives with his aunt in Africa.
Rose is nice, and she and Aisha get along really well. There’s a party tonight as Adam returns home from somewhere, and we see that he's a bit of a jerk– or maybe not.
That night, she goes to bed and dreams that it’s pouring rain in her room, a regular flood. She wakes up, and realizes it was just a dream. She mentions that Lamine is coming to live with her soon.
Aisha’s friend Sallay says maybe Aisha could apologize to her ex-husband and then ask him for money. Adam invites Aisha to go to dinner with them. Aisha tells Adam that Amy hasn’t been paying her as promised. He promises to talk to Amy about that.
That night, Aisha talks to Malik, the building security guy, about Africa and they seem to be friends. Malik’s son Bishop tells Aisha that his dad has a crush on her.
Aisha talks to Kathleen, Malik’s grandmother, a woman who says she lived all over West Africa for many years. They talk about mermaids and magic. Malik takes her out for soul food and cheesecake. They hit it off and go back to his place for the night.
Aisha meets Cynthia and Florence at the park; they’re nannies too. Several times, Aisha starts daydreaming seeing Lamine in various places. Aisha tells Adam again for not being paid enough, and he offers her “an advance.”
She has a dream about swimming in a pool with a mermaid. Not “The Little Mermaid,” but a big scary one. She passes out in the swimming pool and has to be revived. Kathleen talks about Anansi, the trickster-spider. Later, we see Aisha swallow a live spider in her sleep.
Aisha feeds Rose something from home, and Amy freaks out. Turns out, Aisha has been buying all of Rose’s food, since Amy is too busy (or drunk) to be bothered. Aisha confronts Amy about all her unpaid hours. She has dreams of snakes and suffocation that night.
Rose goes missing that night, and Aisha looks all over for her. Aisha hears “Help me!” and grabs a knife. She cuts herself and then tries to drown herself in the tub. At least some of that was her hallucination. Rose says Lamine made her do it; he’s jealous. Anansi told her all this.
Finally, Aisha has the money she needs to bring Lamine and Mariatou over from Senegal. She waits at the airport– but no Lamine. Aisha finds Mariatou, but Lamine isn’t with her. Mari finally confesses that Lamine drowned at the beach several weeks ago, and she couldn’t bear to tell Aisha over the phone.
Aisha jumps off the pier and once again has to be resuscitated. Then we’re told that she’s pregnant.
Commentary
This is why you shouldn’t hire an immigrant nanny. You never know what kind of crazy you’re going to get. Do these things ever not end up in a horror film?
We kinda figured from all the water imagery that it would turn out that she had drowned her own baby and was delusional about him still being alive. That wasn’t the case here, but some of the weirdness happened even before Lamine died (offscreen), so his ghost or whatever couldn’t have been behind that in the film’s early parts.
The acting and cinematography are excellent– it’s nice to look at the visuals here. There’s not really much of a plot, though. It’s just a few sad weeks in Aisha’s life. The ending was pretty abrupt– she found out that she lost Lamine and then we’re told she and Malik simply had another. Easy come, easy go!
There’s creepy imagery and situations here, but anything horrific is strictly in Aisha’s mind.
Hatching (2022)
• Directed by Hannah Bergholm
• Written by Hannah Bergholm
• Stars Siiri Solalinna, Sophia Heikkila, Jani Volanen
• Run Time: 1 Hour, 31 Minutes
• Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
The practical effects are really well done in this one, with lots of body horror. It’s a creepy story of a little thing escalating far out of control. It’s subtitled and worth the read.
Synopsis
Tinja and her family make a happy selfie greeting video. Suddenly, a bird flies in through the door and makes a mess. Tinja catches it with a blanket and her mother breaks its neck. Credits roll.
Reeta and her family just moved in next door, and she’s got a nasty little dog that bites Tinja’s finger. Tinja’s a gymnast, and her mother is a “family blogger” and her videos look like something made by IKEA. Mother’s really pushy about gymnastics.
Tinja hears some screeching outside that night, and when she looks in the garbage, the dead bird is gone. She tracks it down in the foggy old woods, and seeing that it’s still injured, smashes it repeatedly with a rock, but it dies hard. She finds an egg in a nest right next to the now-dead bird and takes it home.
Tinja comes home and finds Mom kissing Tero, who is not her father. Mom’s going away for a couple of days and tells Tinja to keep quiet about her “special friend.” She notices that the egg she found has grown larger.
Reeta joins the gymnastics team, and she’s better than Tinja, which displeases Mother. Mother confides that Tero is the best thing that ever happened to her, and Tinja is not pleased. The egg is now as big as Tinja. She cries on the egg, and the tears soak in.
The egg hatches and a big, clawed hand reaches out. It’s a huge, human-shaped bird. It breaks out the window and leaves. Father boards up the window, but it comes back later. It’s super-ugly, but doesn’t seem dangerous, so she befriends it. It sleeps under her bed, and she sings to it.
Tinja can’t sleep because the little dog next door keeps barking. The creature also notices, and soon the little dog is no more. Reeta asks Tinja to put up posters for her lost dog. Tinja’s little brother Matias digs up the dead dog and blames it all on Tinja. He shoves Tinja, and the bird wakes up; they may be connected somehow. Matias goes snooping and finds the big bird. Meanwhile, Tinja has some kind of seizure.
She buys the thing bird food, but it won’t eat that. Tinja eats it, pukes it up, and the bird eats that. She notices the bird is growing blonde hair, and she names it Alli. Matias sees Alli, who is looking more and more human, and tells Mother that Tinja is a monster, which is all dismissed as him having a nightmare.
Tinja gets jealous of Reeta’s superior gymnastics ability, and that night, Alli follows Reeta home.
Mother takes Tinja to Tero’s old house. Tinja learns that her father knows about Mother and Tero but seems resigned to not being able to do anything about it. Tero has his own baby, and Mother really likes that. Alli arrives that night, she found Tinja somehow.
Tinja goes to visit Reeta in the hospital, and she’s not only all scratched up, but she’s also missing a hand. No more gymnastics for her! Tinja goes back to Tero’s place and lets Alli console her.
By the next morning, Alli has started to look an awful lot like Tinja. Tero realizes that Tinja doesn’t really care about gymnastics; he seems nicer than her mother and more concerned than her father. Tero sees Alli and thinks it is Tinja, which is awkward. Tero is surprisingly forgiving.
Tinja and Mother finally go to the big gymnastics competition, leaving Tero and the baby at home. Tinja suspects they’re doomed but has no say in the matter. Tinja hurts herself in the competition, which distracts Alli from killing the baby with an ax. Tero thinks it was Tinja who attacked the baby and won’t let them back in the house, even though Tinja clearly has an alibi.
Mother and Tero fight, and break up offscreen, which she takes badly, blaming Tinja. They go home to Father and Matias.
Mother finds Alli, thinks she’s Tinja, and starts combing her hair. Until clumps come out. Then Mother sees them both at once and sort of puts things together.
Mother gets a knife and goes after Alli. Tinja jumps in the way and her mother stabs her by mistake. Tinja bleeds all over Alli and dies as Father and Matias come in. Alli finishes her transformation and now looks exactly like a scarred Tinja.
Mother smiles. She still has one daughter…
Commentary
The creature and body horror effects are really good here. It’s fairly predictable, but even so, it’s really well done. The effects and acting are all excellent, and we’re never really quite sure what kind of a creature we’re dealing with, even at the end.
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