Movies
Train (V)
“Burdened with flat characters and lacking any genuine scares, even Train‘s abundant carnage can’t satisfy. It‘s a one-way ticket to ineptitude.”
With an opening credits montage that features a corpse getting disemboweled, skinned, and disassembled like a Thanksgiving turkey, Train is one of those horror movies that isn’t afraid to go for tit on the first date—you know its intentions the moment it shows up on your doorstep. Even though I consider myself a desensitized horror fanatic, I’ll admit that some scenes made me flinch and squirm like a little baby. It’s a gruesome movie, even by post-9/11 horror standards. (And I’m not even talking about the NC-17 version that screened at Screamfest…this is a review of the lowly R-rated DVD release.) But no amount of Hostel-ized evisceration or eyeball extraction can carry a movie this blatantly silly, no matter how realistic the gore might be.
A horribly miscast Thora Birch and her college wrestling team have traveled to Eastern Europe for a competition. After the wrestling tournament, the four friends and an assistant coach (Gideon Emery, an actor you may recognize from his copious videogame voiceover gigs) are lured to a seedy night club that specializes in techno, red gel lighting, and open-air orgies. Their clubbing adventures cause them to miss their early morning train to Odessa, which enrages the coach. After inquiring at the train station, a bug-eyed local woman approaches the coach and tips him off to a special independent train that will happily take the team to Odessa. All they have to do is walk out to the platform, climb aboard, and pay the fare to the skeezy conductor.
Train is so aggressively flawed, it’s almost entertaining. You can sit back on the couch and pick it apart like the plot of an elementary school stage play. So, the college kids leave for the club at 11pm, and it only seems like they’ve been there for about 20 minutes before they’re compelled to leave. So why is it dawn when they exit the club? I guess there must be 6 hours of clubbing footage in a cardboard box out in director Gideon Raff’s garage.
And once they discover that the independent train line only employs grimy, sweaty, wife-beater-clad European men, the students are strangely indifferent. When the leering train attendants demand to hold the students’ passports for the duration of the train ride, they hand over their documents after a couple of half-assed questions and a shrug. And after one of the wrestlers disappears after being dared to run through the train in his jockstrap, his friends decide to simply go to bed and look for him in the morning. It’s this kind of incompetent plotting that renders the movie borderline amusing at times.
As Hostel attempted to explain the motives of its thrill-killing villains, Train tries a similar move in its final third as it postulates why a bunch of creepy Eastern Europeans would choose to run a torture train up and down the countryside. It’s one of several blisteringly serious moments that provokes unintentional laughs. Burdened with flat characters and lacking any genuine scares, even Train‘s abundant carnage can’t satisfy. It‘s a one-way ticket to ineptitude.
The holiday weekend means a light week for new horror releases, but it does bring the return of Dark Castle Entertainment to select theaters. It’s being joined by 6 new horror movies.
Here’s all the new horror releasing June 29, 2026 – July 3, 2026!
For daily reminders about new horror releases, be sure to follow @HorrorCalendar.
You wished for it. The highest-grossing horror movie of the year (so far), Curry Barker’s Obsession, arrived on Digital on June 30.
In Curry Barker’s theatrical debut Obsession, after breaking the mysterious One Wish Willow to win his crush’s heart, a hopeless romantic finds himself getting exactly what he asked for but soon discovers that some desires come at a dark, sinister price.
Michael Johnston (“Teen Wolf”), Inde Navarette (“Superman & Lois”), Cooper Tomlinson (“That’s a Bad Idea,” Milk & Serial), Megan Lawless (The Death That Awaits), and Emmy Award-nominee Andy Richter (“Conan,” Elf) star.
Based on a story by director James Kondelik (Behind The Walls) and a screenplay by Canadian writer Victor Rose, survival thriller Pitfall headed home to Digital on June 30. Family is murder in this Cineverse release.
In Pitfall, a young man becomes separated from his friends in the woods and plunges into a ten-foot pit lined with spikes, impaling his leg and leaving him helpless. As reality sinks in and his situation grows dire, he realizes the fall wasn’t an accident.
The film stars Richard Harmon (Final Destination: Bloodlines), Alexandra Essoe (The Pope’s Exorcist), and UFC champion Randy Couture (The Expendables) as the ruthless killer who stalks his prey in the woods. Marshall Williams (The Ice Road), Jordan Claire Robbins (The Umbrella Academy), and Matt Hamilton (Murder for Sale) also star.
The Amityville IP leans into Jaws with Amityville Shark House, just in time for the Fourth of July holiday too, as it released on Digital June 30.
Will Collazo Jr. (Amityville Thanksgiving) and Shawn C. Phillips (Amityville Karen) co-direct from a script they wrote with Julie Anne Prescott.
In the movie, after discovering an ominous shark idol hidden beneath the decaying floorboards, Richard unknowingly awakens an ancient and savage force. As the entity begins to merge with him, a quiet coastal town descends into blood-soaked chaos.
With each victim claimed, the monstrous predator grows stronger, fueling a cult’s belief that their dark god has been reborn. Now, the race is on to stop the carnage before evil consumes everything in its path.
Phillips and Prescott also star alongside Tasha Tacosa, Maritza Brikisak, Gigi Gustin (The Retaliators), Adam Marino, and Carl Solomon.
Available on Digital, Blu-ray, and DVD as of June 30 is Jacked, directed by John Fucile from a script he co-wrote with Simon Fraser.
The synopsis: “Set in the summer of 1987, JACKED follows two small-town teenagers whose day at the lake turns into a fight for survival after their car breaks down and they encounter a violent stalker.”
Marla Jean Robison, Tom Koch, Anthony Cipriani, Wynn Reichert, Kam Perez and Bella Marie star.
Get ready to work up a killer sweat and maybe spill some blood with Slashercise, a workout meets slasher hybrid that arrived exclusively on Bloodstream on July 1.
Written and directed by Ama Lea (Deathcember), the retro-styled feature follows “a masked killer known only as Meathead as he stalks the fitness clubs of Los Angeles, turning workout sessions into blood-soaked nightmares. As the city’s top trainers are picked off one by one, a group of determined fitness fanatics must fight back before they become the next bodies on the mat.”
Vanessa Decker (Stiletto), John Bloom (The Last Drive-In With Joe Bob Briggs), Spencer Charnas (Ice Nine Kills), Sarah French (Blind), Kelli Maroney (Night of the Comet), Sarah Nicklin (V/H/S/Halloween), Diana Prince (The Last Drive-In With Joe Bob Briggs), Jared Rivet (The Once and Future Smash), Felissa Rose (Sleepaway Camp), Tiffany Shepis (Victor Crowley), and Lisa Wilcox (A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master) star.
After a record-breaking box office run, A24 and director Kane Parsons’ feature debut is heading back to theaters with bonus footage. AMC Theatres is unleashing Backrooms: Everything Must Go Editiontoday, July 3.
In the film written by Will Soodik, the owner of Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire discovers a strange doorway in the basement of the furniture showroom. He sets out to explore the mysterious, liminal space, walking headfirst into a creepypasta nightmare.
Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsvestar.
AMC describes this release as a “theatrically exclusive post-credit” with additional footage from Kane Parsons. Expect 16 minutes of bonus footage, with the new version clocking in at 2 hours and 6 minutes.
The Last Exorcism director Daniel Stamm and Dark Castle Entertainment are back with Lockbox, in select theaters July 3. It adapts Soren Narnia‘s Knifepoint Horror Podcast story “Winthrop” by Emmy-winning playwright Justin Yoffe.
In Lockbox, “Seeking peace after her mother’s death, Ellen retreats to a rural town and takes in her severely traumatized cousin Winthrop. Their fragile domestic balance shatters when an erratic neighbor warns that Winthrop is dangerous. As strange phenomena escalate, Ellen must put everything on the line to defend Winthrop from a dangerous otherworldly entity determined to track him down.”
Lou Taylor Pucci (Touch Me, Evil Dead), Carla Gugino (The Haunting of Hill House, Gerald’s Game, The Fall of the House of Usher) and Katharine Isabelle (Ginger Snaps, Backrooms) star.
This week’s new release roundups are presented by Lockbox.
Be careful who you let in. Carla Gugino and Lou Taylor Pucci star in Lockbox, only in select theaters this Friday. Get tickets.
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