Before Screamboat gnaws its way into theaters this coming April, the similarly Steamboat Willie-inspired slasher movie I Heart Willie is making its own way into theaters TONIGHT.

I Heart Willie will play in theaters for one-night-only on Tuesday, February 26, 2025. The cinema event will be distributed in the US and Canada by Rubey Entertainment, LLC.

Check local listings, grab your tickets, and watch a new trailer below.

Directed by Alejandro G. Alegre, “this chilling origin story presents genre fans with a sinister reimagining of one of the most iconic cartoon characters in history, along with one of the most horrifying love stories of the year.”

In the movie, “Popular YouTubers Daniel and Nico are invited to investigate a haunted property drawn by rumors of a malevolent force. The legend centers around a boy born with deformities, resembling a human-mouse hybrid, who inspired Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie.

“Abused and isolated, the boy, now known as Willie, crafts a bodysuit from the skins of trespassers. Over the years, his gruesome legacy fades into folklore—until a series of disappearances sparks renewed interest. As Daniel and Nico set up for a night of thrills, they unknowingly step into a deadly game of survival.”

Produced by longtime collaborators Princeton Holt (2050) and David Vaughn (American Rust), the film was written by Vaughn, who also stars as Willie. I Heart Willie also features performances by Maya Luna, Micho Camacho, Sergio Rogalto, and Daniela Porras.

“We’re thrilled to bring I Heart Willie to audiences everywhere,” says executive producer Princeton Holt. “This film was made with the fans in mind, and we can’t wait for it to be an unforgettable experience—packed with scares, thrills, and a great time for everyone. We are confident I Heart Willie will become a cult classic, leaving fans talking long after the credits roll. By the way, speaking of end credits, don’t leave to early, or you might miss something.”

The post Steamboat Willie Horror Movie ‘I Heart Willie’ Releases in Theaters Nationwide TONIGHT ONLY appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Sometimes a film’s visuals are so visceral that they overpower your eyes entirely, pulling you in and setting your other senses ablaze. The putrid smell of rancid flesh stings your nostrils as you become acquainted with the Sawyer family homestead; your teeth chatter as MacReady and Childs stare each other down in the unforgiving Antarctic snow; the unwelcomed taste of pea soup miraculously appears in your mouth soon after Regan MacNeil spews forth a torrent of the stuff into poor Father Merrin’s face. Some of the horror genre’s best entries are more than just a story that haunts you: they’re a full body experience.

Legendary renegade filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto’s debut feature, Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), shares this quality of sensual transcendence. Stifling waves of heat and humidity radiate from nearly every frame of the picture, and throughout its brisk 77-minute runtime you can’t help but detect the metallic taste of blood on the air. But its ability to intoxicate is just one of the many reasons why the movie is still overwhelming viewers 35 years after its release.

Explaining Tetsuo’s premise to the uninitiated can be a rigorous exercise in keeping a straight face. A salaryman (Tomorô Taguchi) and his girlfriend (Kei Fujiwara) hit and kill a Metal Fetishist (Tsukamoto) with their car. Afterwards, the young office worker goes through a horrific transformation as metal growths and deformations begin to erupt from his body and, well, his penis turns into a massive drill. Things…happen with it. Eventually a final apocalyptic showdown between him and a resurrected Metal Fetishist (who now also has psychic powers) threatens to destroy Tokyo and the world.

Shinya Tsukamoto was born on January 1st, 1960, in Shibuya, a ward in the city of Tokyo. As a child, he had a fascination with monster movies (Gamera [1965] and Godzilla [1958] ranked among his favorites) before catching the acting bug after making his stage debut in an elementary school play. When he was 14 years old, his father came home with an 8mm camera, which quickly caught Shinya’s attention. With his brother Koji by his side, the two began to make short films together. It is here where he developed the philosophy of independent filmmaking that would make his style so economical: use friends and family as your crew, make what you need yourself, and shoot a movie.

After graduating from Nihon university with a focus in oil painting, Tsukamoto landed a job directing commercials for an advertising agency. While the gig allowed him to gain experience with equipment he wouldn’t have had access to otherwise, it didn’t do much to foster his sense of creativity. So, needing an outlet, he founded the Kaiju Theater Company, an underground acting troupe that would perform intense avant-garde productions to audiences in a homemade tent made to look like a massive underwater sea creature.

Two of these shows, The Phantom of Regular Size and The Adventure of Denchu-Kaza, would go on to be adapted into short films by Tsukamoto. Tetsuo: The Iron Man would ultimately be born from a melding together of ideas and images shown in these earlier works. Production would begin on the feature in September of 1987 and it would be 18 months before the movie was completed. During that time, Tsukamoto’s crew (who were all living together in the apartment of Tetsuo co-star Kei Fujiwara) would eventually abandon the project thinking it would never be finished. Undaunted, Shinya plowed on. He and the few who stayed would cover whatever jobs needed to be done, with Tsukamoto’s credits by the end of the project including director, writer, producer, actor, editor, art director, and cinematographer (a title shared with Fujiwara).

All of that hard work and risk (the director had quit his day job by this point) would pay off. After winning the top prize at Italy’s Fantafestival, Tetsuo: The Iron Man would be embraced by critics and audiences alike. It would go on to become a landmark entry in the Cyber-Punk movement and would be significant in the resurrection of Japan’s ailing movie industry on the world stage. “Not only was Tetsuo a film by a director from a new generation, it also brought a new generation of foreign fans to Japanese film,” writes Matt Wes in his essential book Iron Man: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto. “Rather than being built on the remnants of the past, it gave Japanese cinema a future.”

While success is never guaranteed, especially when it comes to experimental filmmaking, the kind Tetsuo continues to experience today is perhaps not all that surprising. The movie itself fits comfortably amongst the ranks of other legendary body horror pictures, feeling like a sort of punk-rock cousin to the early works of David Cronenberg (one of Tsukamoto’s bigger influences). It certainly has the “ick” factor fans of the subgenre expect, featuring gruesome low-fi practical effects and gory set pieces that prove you can gross out even the most hardened splatter fans on any budget.

However, body horror is so much more than just nightmarish transformations and buckets of blood and/or puss. To be truly affecting, the visuals on the screen have to connect with the audience in a way that burrows under their skin and wriggles into their psyche. Tetsuo achieves this beautifully and does so on multiple levels. The most obvious interpretation of its protagonist’s transformation is that it’s a commentary on the dehumanizing effects of technology. This reading has certainly aged well and should hold relevance for years to come as advances in artificial intelligence continue to pose an existential threat to many of the aspects of ourselves that make us feel human.

Another aspect of Tetsuo that lends itself to the Cronenbergian school of body horror is its sexuality. In a 2012 interview with Third Window Films, Tsukamoto talked about his intention to show the eroticism behind the fusing of flesh and steel seen in his feature. One might hear that statement, think of Tetsuo’s infamous penis drill scene, and find themselves thinking “huh, you don’t say?” But that formidable biomechanical member only scratches the surface. There is a blurring of the salaryman’s sexuality that goes hand-in-hand with his physical form’s metamorphosis.

When he and the Metal Fetishist finally throwdown, it’s unclear as to whether they’re going to fight or fuck. As it turns out, it’s a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. In the concluding moments of the film, the two fuse into one grotesque mass of jagged edges and glistening chrome. Reborn, they dream aloud of the possibilities of their union (“Our love can put an end to this fucking world!”) before speeding away into the streets of Tokyo.

In many ways, their declaration represents the defining element of what makes Tetsuo so memorable: it’s a movie that’s fueled by rage. It lurks beneath the faces of nearly every character we meet in it, showcasing, as Jasper Sharp puts it in his video essay An Assault on the Senses, “the repressed violence within us all.” What is that fury being aimed towards? One could argue it’s anything and everything that polite society calls normal. We watch as the salaryman, a placeholder for all things ordinary, is transformed by the anarchy that is the Metal Fetishist. And as the frenzied chaos of the film unfolds, we’re given the opportunity to live through him vicariously.

If you stay to watch the closing credits roll during most of Shinya Tsukamoto’s post-Tetsuo pictures, you’ll see his name once again appear beside an almost inhuman number of titles. The fierce sense of nonconformity and legendary work ethic shown in his first feature was not just a product of a young artist doing what he had to do to bring his dream to life; they are characteristics that define Tsukamoto at his core. He continues to be a force to be reckoned with in the world of independent cinema and will always be kind of filmmaker whose visions have the power to decimate our senses.

Sources:

Wess, Tom. Iron Man: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto. FAB Press, 2005.

Interview with Shinya Tsukamoto. Third Window Films, 2012.

Sharp, Jasper. Assault on the Senses. Arrow Films, 2020.

The post Blood on Rust: The Cyberpunk Body Horror of ‘Tetsuo: The Iron Man’ at 35 appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Since Osgood Perkins’ feature debut with The Blackcoat’s Daughter, the filmmaker quickly developed a reputation for somber, atmospheric horror. Perkins left that variety of horror behind for his fifth outing as director with The Monkey, opting instead to entertain with an absurdist, gory comedy that mines death for all its mordant humor. It’s a move that might seem out of left field at first, until you recall Perkins’ early career start as an actor with comedic roles including the underseen early aughts horror-comedy Dead & Breakfast.

The 2004 zombie comedy from writer/director Matthew Leutwyler follows a group of friends road-tripping in an RV to Galveston, Texas, for a wedding. Because this is a horror-comedy, the group gets lost and winds up at a bed & breakfast in Lovelock. Things are already weird and eccentric in small town Texas, but then group oddball Johnny (Perkins) opens a small wooden box and unleashes “Kuman Thong,” a malevolent spirit that possesses Johnny and turns Lovelock into a bloody battleground for survival. 

Oh, and Dead & Breakfast also happens to be a musical.

Perhaps more accurately, Leutwyler’s horror-comedy features a minstrel in the form of singer-songwriter Zach Selwyn’s Randall Keith Randall, the gas station attendant doubling as Lovelock’s resident musician and narrator. It’s Randall Keith Randall who keeps the viewer appraised of the mounting horror lore while keeping an ever watchful eye on the chaos. Dead & Breakfast smartly never overplays this element of its comedy, keeping the musical numbers reduced mostly to a single scene of singing, line-dancing zombies. It also helps that this scene features the catchiest tune of the movie.

However, it does take a while for Dead & Breakfast to settle into its horror-comedy groove and unleash the zombie fun; Leutwyler spends a bit too much time establishing the group’s dysfunction and baggage first. The good news, of course, is that the cast is stacked on this indie feature.

Kill Bill star David Carradine cameos as the bed & breakfast’s owner, with the actor’s niece, Ever Carradine, in a much more substantial role as the no-nonsense, resourceful group member, Sara. Jeremy Sisto (May), Erik Palladino (Return to House on Haunted Hill), and Bianca Lawson (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) round out the central group members prone to romantic drama, while Gina Phillips plays Melody, the pure-hearted friend all but destined for final girl status. Portia de Rossi also cameos, and “The Walking Dead” star Jeffrey Dean Morgan turns in a charming performance as the plucky town Sheriff.

Then there’s Johnny, the oddball tagalong of the bunch as Sara’s brother. Osgood Perkins’ Johnny is all but earmarked for villain status from the moment he’s introduced as the loner weirdo and most teased member of the group who keeps a roadkill tally while driving the RV. The picked on kid of the bunch then becomes the lead bully when Johnny unleashes Kuman Thong, transforming from seething wallflower into acerbic evil mastermind. This is also the turning point where Perkins’ performance really comes alive, with the actor having a clear blast as the murderous zombie-type who adores wielding decapitated heads as hand puppets. It’s that playful spirit that heightens Dead & Breakfast‘s sense of fun and serves as a precursor to Perkins’ delightfully deranged turn as Chip, Hal’s mutton chop-sporting swinging uncle in The Monkey.

Like the Perkins-directed The Monkey, Leutwyler’s film revels in bloodletting. While nowhere near as impressive with its body count as Perkins’ film, Dead & Breakfast does deliver a respectable amount of gore. Once the mumblecore dynamics are in the rearview, Johnny amasses an undead zombie that lays siege to Lovelock in vibrantly violent ways that leave no one safe from the mayhem. Heads roll, scalps are ripped, and a home invasion siege coats the walls in viscera. The splatstick comes with a heaping helping of witty zingers and self-referential jokes, of course. Look for knowing winks to Perkins’ horror lineage among the meta humor jokes and sight gags. 

Dead & Breakfast was overshadowed by higher profile zombie comedies like Shaun of the Dead, released in the same period, or even 2004’s Dawn of the Dead. It doesn’t shake up the formula, and the first act’s dry humor takes a while to warm up. But like Lovelock itself and its laid back country folk, Leutwyler’s zom-com offers irreverent charm and a tongue-in-cheek commitment to splatstick entertainment. It’s also a fun early aughts time capsule that includes an early look at a contemporary horror stalwart; Dead & Breakfast serves as a showcase for Osgood Perkins’ horror-comedy talents a full two decades before The Monkey. 

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NEON had originally set an April 18 release date for the summer camp slasher throwback Hell of a Summer, but the horror-comedy has received a new release date this afternoon.

Slasher comedy Hell of a Summer will now release in theaters on April 4, 2025. “Stranger Things” star Finn Wolfhard is the co-writer, co-director and star of the upcoming movie.

You can check out a brand new official poster from NEON below. And slash into the previously released RED BAND trailer for Hell of a Summer while you’re at it, which looks to be a modern day tribute to the classic summer camp slasher movies from the 1980s.

We expect a new trailer will be released soon. Stay tuned.

Hell of a Summer follows 24-year-old camp counselor Jason Hochberg (Fred Hechinger), who arrives at Camp Pineway thinking his biggest problem is that he feels out of touch with his teenage co-workers. What he doesn’t know is that a masked killer is lurking on the campgrounds, brutally picking counselors off one by one.

Finn Wolfhard wrote and directed the upcoming movie alongside Billy Bryk (Ghostbusters: Afterlife), with both actors also starring in the film. The cast also includes Fred Hechinger (Fear Street 1994), as well as D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (“Reservation Dogs”), Abby Quinn (“Mad About You”), and Pardis Saremi (“Career Opportunities in Murder and Mayhem”).

The post ‘Hell of a Summer’ Poster – Finn Wolfhard’s Slasher Throwback Gets a New Release Date appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The psychological thriller The Surfer from director Lorcan Finnegan (Vivarium, Nocebo) is headed to theaters this Spring from Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions, and the official trailer has been uncaged this afternoon. Nicolas Cage stars. Watch the trailer below.

The trailer for The Surfer suggests the sort of bonkers freakout that we’ve come to expect from Nicolas Cage genre movies, with Cage playing a man who absolutely loses his mind after a gang of local surfers decide to make his life a living hell. How crazy does this one get? Well, the trailer shows Cage stuffing a rat down somebody’s throat. Yeah. That kind of crazy.

Here’s the official synopsis…

When a man (Nicolas Cage) returns to his beachside hometown in Australia, many years since building a life for himself in the U.S., he is humiliated in front of his teenage son by a local gang of surfers who claim strict ownership over the secluded beach of his childhood.

Wounded, he decides to remain at the beach, declaring war against those in control of the bay. As the conflict escalates, the stakes spin out of control, taking him to the edge of sanity.

Julian McMahon, Nic Cassim, Miranda Tapsell, Alexander Bertrand, Justin Rosniak, Rahel Romahn, Finn Little and Charlotte Maggi star alongside Nicolas Cage.

“Lorcan’s movie is a stunning visual experience with an incredible palette, coupled with Nicolas Cage at his absolute best,” Lionsgate’s Lauren Bixby said in a recent statement.

Thomas Martin wrote the screenplay for The Surfer.

No release date has been provided at this time. Stay tuned.

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