A young couple (Dave Franco & Allison Brie) already together for several years move to a rural town in the hope of mending a few understandable cracks in their relationship and maybe grow closer to one another. They do. 

This is a horror sub-genre called “body horror,” characterized by disturbing, sometimes grotesque physical changes in the human body. (I had to look it up, too.) Like in, say, Ridley Scott’s 1979  Alien, David Cronenberg’s 1986 The Fly, John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing, or Coralie Fargeat’s more recent The Substance. Or for that matter, you could go as far back as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. 

Things start getting icky when the pair fall into an abandoned and buried fringe church and encounter a unnatural force. Clearly in love, they begin to find themselves even more attracted to each other, and not in a good way. 

The posters for this unsettlingly cringe-comic crowd-screamer are spoilers enough. And while it wouldn’t be on the top of my recommendations list, it has a nice future in the midnight-movie circuit. Freshman director Michael Shanks gets points for eschewing conventional shock tactics and limiting the gore in favor of old-school, non-CGI revulsion and pure, gleeful dread. 

PS: the fact that the two leads are real-life spouses gives the film its unexpected warmth and depth. (112 min)