I almost tripped over a severed arm as I made my way over to Waldo, my compatriot in the striped red and white shirt. He was clutching his gut as red started to bleed into the white stripes of his shirt. 

“I’m dying, man,” Waldo said as he looked up at me with glazed eyes. I had my problems with Waldo, but I didn’t want him to get a visit from the Grim Reaper. Not that night and not by any other hand, but mine. I took off my shoe and removed one of my sweat socks. 

“Press this against your wound,” I said. “We’ve got to stop the blood.”

— To be continued. 

Tonight’s movie is 2022’s Talk to Me from directors Danny and Michael Phillippou. This movie features the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen in a movie. There’s a scene of a dying kangaroo by the side of the road. I don’t care if you want to show suffering puppies or kittens or goldfish, but leave the kangaroos out of it.

Fair warning. This movie may be in English, but it’s an Australian movie so while everyone is speaking English it ain’t like no kind of English I’ve ever heard. Put the captions on. You’ll thank me later. The movie begins with a bunch of raucous teens at a party and everyone has their phones out recording a guy named Cole attacking his brother before stabbing himself in the eye with a beer bottle. We’re then introduced to a young woman named Mia (Sophie Wilde) who is still grieving over the death of her mother, Rhea, who “accidentally” died when she took too many sleeping pills.

Mia decides to go to a party with her best friend, Jade (Alexandra Jensen), Jade’s boyfriend, Daniel (Otis Dhanji), and Jade’s young brother, Riley (Joe Bird). So what do a bunch of bored Australian teenagers do for fun? Well, they decide to mess around with a cursed object, severed hand cast in ceramic with Satanic writing all over it. That’s great. What better thing to do on a school night than try to summon Nyarlathotep. And be sure to have your smart phones out so you can record every grisly minute of it for your clout chasing.

It seems when you touch this hand, you see dead people. Disgusting, bloated, rotting dead people. If you say, “Talk to me,” the ghost will talk to you. If you say, “I let you in,” you allow the spirit to possess you. Apparently, you should only let the ghost possess you for a maximum of 90 seconds or bad things will happen. To sever the link, someone has to remove the ceramic hand from your grasp. That’s harder than it sounds as the ghosts really don’t want to return to the void. Mia decides to let herself get possessed, but the dopy teens can’t get the hand off her and she goes over the 90-second mark.

Things go from bad to worse as these little shits are treating spirit possession like huffing whippets. Eventually, little Daniel gets abused by violent spirits seeing if they can crack his head open in front of everyone. Mia’s dead mother reaches out to her to guide her through this new world of terror, but can this ghost be trusted? Kids, leave the Satanic objects alone and maybe play a good old-fashioned game of Monopoly.

 Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.