"Obession" Review

 2026 will probably go down as the year YouTube surpassed film schools for turning out wildly successful new filmmakers. The warning shot came in January with Iron Lung by YouTuber Mark "Markiplier" Fischbach which he directed, wrote, edited, and starred in, self-funding the $3M production and grossing a (then) stunning $51 million.

But the earthquakes came in May as a tag-team of original horror movies completely upended the natural order of things with Backrooms - an adaptation of a series of YouTube shorts helmed by their creator, 20-year-old Kane Parsons, raking in $350M off a $10M budget, making it A24's highest-grossing movie ever - coming two weeks after the word-of-mouth phenomenon Obsession blew Hollywood's collective mind by surpassing its projected opening weekend gross then increasing it's take the following two weekends; the first film since (I think) E.T. - The Extraterrestrial to accomplish this feat and that was by Steven Spielberg, director of Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, not a 27-year-old YouTuber. Produced for a rounding error for Hollyweird $750,000, as of this writing it has grossed $407 million worldwide and turned its star into a early Oscar nomination shoo-in.

How much of a word-of-mouth hit was it? We met up with a friend about a month after it'd opened and almost right off without prompting he asked if we'd seen it, raving that it actually lived up to the hype. We didn't get a chance to see it in the theaters, but now that it's streaming we checked it out and, yep, believe the hype.

 The premise is so simple it could've been inspired by a Treehouse of Horror episode of The Simpsons where they parodied The Monkey's Paw short story. (It was!) Bear (Michael Johnston) has a major crush on his coworker Nikki (Inde Navarrette) at the music store they work with their friends Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) and Sarah (Megan Lawless), the daughter of the owner, Carter (Andy Richter). The movie opens with Bear attempting to rehearse telling Nikki his feelings with the others, but he's such a sweaty dork they advise against it.

Bear's cat dies from eating oxycodone pills that his late grandma, whose house he now lives in, took. (This is the least realistic detail in the movie. Every try to give a cat a pill? Exactly. It should've been a dog; they eat anything.) While talking to Nikki on the phone she mentions dropping her tiger's eye necklace down the drain, so being the simp he is, he goes to a shop to buy her a replacement, but instead buys her a One Wish Willow, a novelty that promises to give the person who breaks it one wish. (Duh.) 

He ends up not giving it to her when he drives her home after the pals hang out. When she confronts him whether he has feelings for her, he chickens out and denies he does, not that she hasn't already clearly friendzoned him so hard it's visible from orbit. Disgusted with himself, he opens the One Wish Willow and wishes that Nikki loved him more than anyone in the world. *SNAP*

Big. Mistake.

She immediately begins to throw herself at him, but it's weird as she seems to snap in and out of being in love with him and seeming confused as to what's going on. Things settle into a comfy couplehood and he gets to enjoy plenty of the benefits of being a friend with benefits, but things begin to veer into somewhat concerning to downright horrifying territory as Nikki's obssessive love for Bear begins to manifest in increasingly harmful ways.

While it'd be easy to be reductive and dumbly claim Obsession is a commentary about toxic men wanting dominion over women's bodies (as many feminists Karens squawked because everything is about being a victim), but it's really just a simple morality tale about unintended consequences. While Bear has entranced Nikki into loving him, he's quickly gnawed at by the understanding that this is wrong and tries to figure out how to free her even when it's supposedly everything he wanted.

Director-writer-editor Curry Barker's script actually fleshes out Ian and Sarah and their relationships with Bear and Nikki so that they're part of this crazy situation especially during a group party scene where a game of Truth or Dare Jenga gets out of hand. They have their own goals and cares, so their fates aren't just superfluous window dressing for the main couple.

The lions share of praise has rightfully gone to Navarrette as she conveys the various states of Nikki's deterioration as her true self tries to break free from the spell the willow has placed on her. She's a very cute actress - she's like a darker, sexier Anna Kendrick - but throws herself fully into the complicated role. After Amy Madigan's Best Supporting Actress win for Weapons, a far less demanding role than Nikki, it appears the Academy is loosening up in its bias against genre movies and Navarrette is already talked up for a Best Actress slot. Considering the success of Obsession rests primarily on her shoulders and ability to make the audience connect with this poor young woman, she'd darn well better get a nom. 

Other than quibbles about the handling of the cat, Obsession is a rare horror movie that elevates the form with a sharp script and performances. If we'd seen it at the show, I would've given it the highest "Pay full price" when to see it rating, but now that it's streaming (it should eventually land on Peacock soon), I give it the score below and my highest recommendation. 

Score: 9/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"They Will Kill You" Review

 For the first 10 minutes or so of They Will Kill You I was wondering what the heck was going on? It opens with a woman, Asia (Zazie Beetz, Joker, Deadpool 2), her younger sister on a stormy night where their father is chasing them, culminating with her shooting him and running away as the cops arrive. Then it's 10 years later on another pouring night as Asia arrives at The Virgil, an exclusive co-op apartment building in NYC.

She's met by Lilith (Patricia Arquette, Roseanna's sister), the Irish superintendent of The Virgil, who wonders why Asia sounds different than she did on the phone when she interviewed her (Asia says she was getting over a cold), but brings her in, introducing her to a few of the residents while taking her to her room on the staff floor where the other maids live.

That night, Asia is attacked by hooded, masked figures who enter her room from the air vent and a hole in the wall behind the refrigerator. She surprises them with impressive fighting skills and weaponry like a large sword and sawed-off shotgun. After a brief, bloody battle where she beheads, dismembers, and generally messes the heck out of the assailants, she runs into the hall where she confronts Lilith, demanding to know the whereabouts of her sister, Maria (Myha'la, Industry), who had come to work at The Virgil as a maid.

This confrontation is interrupted by Asia's attackers emerging from her room, carrying their detached limbs and heads. As Asia watches in shock, they reattach them to their bodies and they're as good as new. Turns out The Virgil is a Satanic Temple and the residents and some of the staff are immortal due to their allegiance to Satan. (Membership has its privileges.)

The rest of the movie is a wild Grand Guignol exercise in cartoonish violence (e.g. watery blood sprays like a sprinkler - think: O-Ren Ishii beheading the guy in Kill Bill Pt. 1) as heads are blown off leaving the bodies crawling around and bumping into walls or a disembodied eyeball rolls along to spy on Asia. The action choreography is good and one sequence involving cultists being killed with a flaming axe, igniting their temporarily inert bodies, standing out.

But it wears thin quickly as the immortality of cult means killing is temporary until Asia finds a way to disable their power. The relationship with her estranged sister and where her allegiances lie is also handled sloppily with a bit of a cheat at the end. The roles played by Tom Felton (Harry Potter series) and Heather Graham (Boogie Nights) could've been played by anyone because they aren't characters but just more immortal cultists, albeit played by recognizable faces.

While there are some enjoyable bonkers moments (most of which are in the trailer below) the overall effect by director/co-writer Kirill Sokolov feels like he watched Evil Dead 2 and Old Boy while blasting Wu-Tang Clan on loop while taking ALL of the drugs. It's all surface with little depth and not really worth the time.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.

"Scream 7" Review

 It's weird to realize that fans of the original 1996 Scream could be grandparents with grandchildren almost old enough to watch these movies. While the series peaked with its subversive meta original outing with it's shocking twist opening scene and characters who knew the rules of horror movies, the sequels, while not as good - I scored the first four movies 7/10, 5/10, 6/10, and 7/10 (theatrical in 2011) or 6/10 (Blu-ray in 2021) - they were adequate entertainments.

Even the fifth-in-series 2022 "requel" (reboot+sequel) - confusingly titled Scream while it's follow-up was Scream VI (because we're doing Roman numerals now) - were both 6/10s, the strain of trying to connect the new stories to the old ones was beginning to get ridiculous as it straddled the generations. 

Series Final Girl Neve Campbell sat out the requels, but after the main stars of them - Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera - left the planned 7th film for reasons like supporting Jewish genocide (Barrera) and deciding not to work with Jewish genocide fans when they had a hit TV series (Ortega) and then the director slated to replace the requels directors also bolted, producers must've backed the money truck up to Campbell's home because she was back for Scream 7. (Oh, were doing Arabic numbers again.)

Adding to the mix was the return of Kevin Williamson, the screenwriter of Scream 1, 2 & 4, not only co-writing but directing for the first time since 1999's critical and box office flop Teaching Mrs. Tingle. Sadly, he delivers the worst installment of the franchise he originated, but perversely it was the highest-grossing installment, raking in $194M, over four times its budget, and ensuring that Scream 8 is inevitable. Yay.

This time around the cold open scene is a young couple visiting the home of Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) which was the setting for the original film's finale and memorialized in the in-universe Stab film series. It's been turned into an Airbnb with taped outlines and fake blood to recreate the scenes from the movie. The superfan man says there's a rumor Stu survived having a TV dropped on his head. (Foreshadowing!) Of course, another Ghostface is there, killing them (spoiler alert!) and setting the house ablaze. 

We then catch up to Sidney Prescott-Evans (Campbell), who is living in Pine Grove, IN, married to the town police chief, Mark (Joel McHale with a weird voice that makes him almost unrecognizable), and the mother of Rebellious Teenage Daughter Tatum (Isabel May) and two(?) younger children who are conveniently visiting Grandma unseen. Sidney runs a coffee shop and life is wonderful until she receives a Facetime call from Stu Macher, face scarred but still alive. He claims he's outside Tatum's school auditorium and going to kill her, but by the time Sidney and the cops arrive, Ghostface has killed two of Tatum's friends including bestie Hannah (Mckenna Grace).

At home, Mark's officers sweep the house but conveniently overlook the attic providing the perfect hiding place for Ghostface who emerges, takes Tatum hostage, stuff happens, he runs out of the house and is promptly run over by Sidney's frenemy Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) and her assistants, twin siblings Chad (Mason Gooding) and Mindy Meeks-Martin (Jasmin Savoy Brown), holdovers from the past two movies. Ghostface is unmasked and identified as a patient from a nearby mental asylum. They team up to find out if Stu is actually still alive. People die. People look like they've been killed, but somehow survive. And another murderer(s) with ridiculously strained connections to Sidney are revealed.

The Scream series has always been verging on self-parody almost immediately with the sequels, but have served as adequate movies for slasher fans despite, but Scream 7 is the first one to pretty much bore me from end to end. The tropes of setting up red herrings and having "Wait, who? What?" villain reveals are so formulaic that it's pointless to even bother trying to guess. May as well just stare at the blankness and wait for it to be over.

That Williamson would type up such a lackluster story for the series he created is baffling. It feels like novice attempting a Scream knock-off. When the scariest thing in the movie is Cox's heavily-Botoxed and fillered face (Campbell is aging naturally), you're failing at horroring. That such a lackluster entry became the most successful really speaks ill of the moviegoing public.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.

"28 Years Later: The Bone Temple" 4K Review

 I've been unimpressed by the 28 Days/Weeks/Years Later series. 2002's 28 Days Later (no written review, but 4/10, Skip it score) is overrated and 2007's 28 Weeks Later (6/10, Catch on cable/streaming), while being comparatively better is unmemorable. Last year's 28 Years Later was a too little, too late franchise relaunch (5/10, Skip it) which ended on scene clearly setting up a sequel that I didn't know had already been made, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple which picks up immediately after the end of its predecessor.

We find young Spike (Alfie Williams) having to fight to the death to be allowed to join the weird gang that had saved him, the Jimmys - who are styled after the notorious child molester/BBC presenter Jimmy Saville. (John Lydon got banned off the Beeb for alluding to Saville's activities which they clearly covered up.) Wearing track suits and blonde wigs, they're led by Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell), who calls them Fingers of a hand dedicated to serving "Old Nick" aka Satan. Spike manages to survive his initiation, while the Jimmy who challenged to fight Spike doesn't. Womp womp. They proceed to go off sadistically torturing and killing survivors they cross paths with.

Meanwhile, Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), proprietor of the massive ossuary fortress of bones - a "bone temple" so to speak - is hanging out with his Alpha zombie friend, Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry, who's a 6'9" former MMA fighter sporting a prosthetic shvantz), whom he can tranquilize instantly with darts and theorizes that perhaps the infected can be treated or cured.

Of course, eventually the Jimmys find Kelson's place and the top Jimmy pays him a visit to see if he's Old Nick (since he's observed with the Alpha "demon") and to make a deal where he can reconsolidate control over his Teletubbie followers after some setbacks.

Director Nia DaCosta, last seen flying the biggest Marvel flop, The Marvels, into the ground bounces back somewhat with a fairly stylish take on the material which eschews the hyperactive visuals of Danny Boyle (who directed the first and third films of the series), but she's held back by a threadbare script by series scribe Alex Garland. There simply isn't enough story here to justify a full movie.

It feels like 30-40 minutes worth of plot lopped of the end of 28 Years Later and that was padded out to 115 minutes and this was really drawn out to make 109 more minutes. A tightly-edited 150-180 minute version would've been so much better because The Bone Temple doesn't stand on its own; if you didn't see the first half you will have zero idea what the actual heck is going on, not that for all it's run time they really do much with it character-wise.

There are a couple of moments which stand out like Kelson's fandom of Duran Duran and big closing Iron Maiden number and the tantalizing glimpse of how the infection could be eradicated before it is lost to events and fans of the original will like the coda which clearly hopes to set up a fifth installment, but overall the series continues to be mediocre, weighed down by Garland's scripts. The guy isn't a hack, per se, but has a maddening inability to get his stories over the finish line intact.

The 4K Dolby Vision presentation starts off promisingly with very bold colors and lighting, but then settles down into more naturalistic tableaus which don't stress the format very much, but the rich colors are solid throughout.

Score: 4/10. Skip it unless you need to see how 28 Years Later wraps up.

"Primate" Review

January is traditionally a dumping ground for movies studios have little faith in and horror programmers. Sometimes you get a gem like M3GAN, more more often it's schlock like Primate which has a lean premise undercut by cheap execution.

Oddly-named Johnny Sequoyah stars as Lucy Pinborough, a young woman returning to her family's home in Hawaii after an indeterminate lengthy time away. She's accompanied by her bestie, Kate (Victoria Wyant), and Hannah (Jessica Alexander), a frenemy of Lucy's who Kate invited along for some reason.

The family home is a gorgeous cliffside spread where live her deaf author father, Adam (Troy Kotsur), younger sister Erin (Gia Hunter), and Ben (Miguel Torres Umba), a chimpanzee that her late linguist mother had trained to communicate with an electronic pad. Unfortunately, Ben has contracted rabies and escaped his enclosure while Adam is away on a book signing. He bites Erin, and the group retreat to the pool because chimps can't swim. But even in the pool, they're not entirely safe and with Erin's injuries, they're going to have to find away up to the house where their phones are charging.

The scenario is novel in that the pool is accessible only via a spiral staircase so they can't see if Ben is lurking on the deck level or in the house and the infinity pool construction overlooks a sheer cliff face so they can't escape that way. But pretty much every kill is predictable as well as who will survive due to plot armor.

There are two major issues which sink Primate from the general "not great, but fun enough" review consensus it enjoys. First, Ben's rabies is graphically illustrated in the cold open meaning we know he's a problem and have to wade through a first act of family drama and teen partying before the Bad Monkey Hour begins as it jumps back 36 hours to show Lucy and friends boarding the plane and to set up a couple of party bros who will show up later to die. (SPOILER ALERT!)

Even more problematic is the execution of Ben with a performer in a monkey costume and an animatronic head. We've had four Planet of the Apes movies in the past 15 years, each pushing the realism of CGI-enhanced performance capture forward with even greater realism, so to present something where Ben looks more primitive than the makeup in the 1968 original is fatally foolhardy. They try to hide Ben with dark lighting, various obstructions between him and the camera, even just putting him way out of focus in the background of a poorly composed shot, indicating they knew it wasn't working out. As mediocre as Tim Burton's 2001 Planet of the Apes was, the makeup was impeachable.

Granted, they didn't have the budget for Weta Digital to create Ben, but with a reported $21-24M budget, there's not only no excuse for such poor quality of THE key character execution, but it raises the question of WHAT they spent that much money on? Reportedly filmed on London soundstages, it's basically the pool and house sets. I don't know anyone in the cast but Kotsur - if there's a deaf guy in a movie these days, he's the one, same as Peter Dinklage gets all the short guy parts - and one of the girls is currently on Ryan Murphy's current weird series, The Beauty, so it's not like they paid Big Star salaries.

While a couple of the kills are respectably gnarly, the overall movie simply isn't worth the brief 90-minute runtime.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.

"Five Nights At Freddy's 2" Review

 Let's get this over with: Five Nights At Freddy's 2 is the sequel to 2023's surprise smash hit Five Nights At Freddy's, which grossed nearly $300M from fans of the videogame series which began in 2014, but as a gamer have never played. I didn't write up a review for the first one, but gave it a 5/10 - catch on cable/streaming score. I vaguely remember it having some interesting elements, but had to look up a synopsis to try and remember what happened and it was so convoluted I stopped caring since I'm not getting paid to write these reviews.

Anyway, that which is rewarded gets repeated so we're back with the original brain trust of director Emma Tammi and screenwriter Scott Cawthon (who is also the creator of the games) guiding returning stars Josh Hutcherson and Piper Rubio as siblings Mike and Abby Schmidt, Elizabeth Lail as local cop and daughter of evil serial killer Vanessa Shelly, and Matthew Lillard as William Afton, her child-killing father and founder of the Freddy Fazbear's Pizza chain whose animatronic mascots were powered by the souls of murdered children and, no, I'm not making that up.

It's some time after the events of the first movie and Abby misses her murderbot pals which may be why she insanely believes she can pull off a hairstyle that's part bob and has bangs, something most women struggle to pull off just one of those. She has an jerk teacher (Wayne Knight) who won't let her participate in the science fair.

Meanwhile, a team of ghost hunters investigate the original Freddy Fazbear's Pizza location and get murdered by the various spirit robots or something, led by the Marionette, a new monster who harbors the soul of a little girl murdered by Afton in the prologue and whose father is played by Skeet Ulrich who seems to be here solely to be able to say the original killers from Scream were together again in a movie though they never meet.

So, anyway some bloodless PG-13 mayhem transpires predictably - one kill sequence I called right before it happened, it was so telegraphed - and it ends up setting up the inevitable sequel which I will not be watching after only having watched this because the missus wanted to see it. (I made her watch Speed later, which is hardly payback since that's good.)

While the first one was no great shakes, the decline in quality across the board while it still grossed over $200M doesn't bode well for the future of horror cinema.

Score: 2/10. Skip it.

"Weapons" 4K Review

While Hollyweird seems mostly interested in rehashing the same old ideas, there have been a few more original sleeper hits this year in the horror genre, first with the OK-but-overrated Sinners and now the weird Weapons. The story of how all but one of a third grade classroom's students disappeared without a trace is the sophomore effort by writer-director-co-scorer Zach Cregger whose previous feature Barbarians (which I didn't see, but the missus did and didn't like) made him a buzzy name in town and sparked a fast and furious bidding war for this script.

Weapons starts simply enough with a child's voiceover setting the stage: Two years before, 17 children in Justine Gandy's (Julia Garner, Ozark) third grade classroom simultaneously got up at 2:17 am and ran out of their homes into the night never to be seen again. Security cameras captured some of their flights, but little more.

After several weeks, it's decided that school needs to continue, but at a meeting between school officials and parents, blame is cast upon Justine with Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), voicing his displeasure at the lack of progress to the school principal, Marcus (Benedict Wong, The Martian), and a police captain (Toby Huss).

With an alluded-to checkered past and passions running high, Marcus puts Justine on leave and she falls into a spiral of drinking, leading to a hook-up with her ex-boyfriend, a cop named Paul (Alden Ehrenreich, Solo), whose wife is none to pleased with that development.

Cregger tells his story through various point-of-view segments following Justine, Archer, Paul, a crackhead lowlife that Paul encounters (Austin Abrams, Euphoria), Marcus, and finally Alex (Cary Christopher, making his major debut), the sole child not to disappear and whose Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan, Field of Dreams) is shaping up to be a popular Halloween costume.

Cregger does a few jump scares and the gore is icky, but fleeting, but overall he succeeds in ratcheting up the tension and keeping us tantalized with the mystery. There's always a risk of when what's going on is revealed and explained that it won't resolve things satisfactorily and if you think about what you're told, you'll be left with several "For why?" questions that could've been better addressed. (e.g. What's the deal with the giant floating AR-15 hovering over the house during a dream?) But those will come after the big payoff bonkers ending which shows Cregger shows he knows sending the audience off entertained papers over any gaps in logic until the drive home.

The performances are solid across the board though the characters are thinly-drawn with Cregger choosing allusion to specificity when erring hair the other way would've helped. The MVP is Madigan whose Gladys is a ballsy creation for an actress to portray, leveraging the truism that people begin to look like their spouses when she's been married 42 years to Ed Harris.

The 4K Dolby Vision presentation doesn't offer much in the way of nit-blasting highlights, but helps keep the many dark, gloomy scenes from dissolving in black crush.

While it could've been deeper, Weapons manages to creep you out then release the tension effectively. Recommended for those not super-picky about plotting.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"Together" Review

While it's tempting to suggest that the body horror genre pretty much begins and ends with the work of David Cronenberg (Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Crash, Crimes of the Future, to name a few) there are other practitioners such as Michael Shanks who makes his directorial debut with Together, which asks the question, how close is too close to be with someone?

Real-life married couple Allison Brie (GLOW, Community) and Dave Franco (Now You See Me, James' little brother) star as Millie and Tim, a young couple leaving New York City for her to start a job at an unnamed upstate elementary school. They've been dating for years, but never married and when she attempts to propose at their going away party in front of their friends, he freezes on answering, causing major embarrassment. He's struggling with having to functionally give up on his music career to follow her to the sticks, but he's going nowhere though accepts a touring guitarist gig with a friend's band.

While trying to get acclimated to the area, they go for a hike, get lost in a rainstorm, and fall into a cavern in the woods. With night falling, they decide to stay and lacking water, Tim drinks from a pool in the cave; a pool we saw a pair of dogs drink from in a prologue and suffer horrific effects. When they wake up, they find their calves stuck together which he attributes to mildew.

Afterwards, he begins to experience weird dreams and an overwhelming attraction to Millie (yes, Brie is attractive but not with the bad bangs hairstyle she's sporting here) and contact between them results in more things sticking together. Soon, she's being drawn to him leading to a scene where they're sleepcrawling towards each other, awaking in time to partially succeed in not getting totally stuck on each other, though a sabre saw is required to, well, you get the idea.

The reason for their fusing and a mysterious New Agey church/cult centered on the cavern, which was the chapel before sinking into the earth isn't really explained and it begs a lot of questions about just how close you really need to be to your partner. The ending - which I unfortunately had spoiled - could be a shark-jumping moment for some, like the horror fan missus who flipped from kinda liking it to "What the hell was that?"-ing it in the end.

I don't think it adds up to much despite grazing on some interesting ideas about relationships. The house they're living in seems waaaaaay too large for a teacher to afford and more space than they need. If feels like Shanks wanted to make a movie about a couple sticking together, literally, then sprinkled some details around it to make it seem more substantive without quite succeeding.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"28 Years Later" 4K Review

In the current trend of sequels arriving waaaaaaaaaaay after they would've been useful comes 28 Years Later, the third installment in the series of Danny Boyle & Alex Garland's series which began with 2002's 28 Days Later and 2007's 28 Weeks Later. While not technically a zombie series - the Rage virus infects and changes its victims into monsters within seconds - it's the source of the abominable fast-running zombie species which populated Zak Snyder's 2004 breakout remake of Dawn of the Dead.

After a prologue that seems utterly superfluous until the last minute, 28 Years Later is the story of Spike (Alfie Williams), a 12-year-old boy living on a small island off the coast of England with his father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Kick-Ass), and mother, Isla (Jodie Comer, Killing Eve). The entirety of England is quarantined and left to fend for themselves while the rest of the world apparently goes on as if animal rights lunatics hadn't unleashed a plague in their countries. The island is connected to the mainland via a causeway which is impassible any time other than low tide which helps in defending the small, but thriving community there.

Jamie decides it's time for Spike to make his first trip to the mainland and hopefully get his first zombie kill, a major rite of passage. The village elder doesn't approve because boys are usually 14 or 15 years-old when they make their first jaunt, but allows it after explaining the rules that anyone who goes out is on their own, no one will come to their rescue if anything happens.

The hunt goes OK until a pack of infected led by a larger, smarter Alpha chases them into the ruin of a house where they're stuck for the night due to the tide being in covering the causeway. From his perch in the attic, Spike sees a quarantine patrol ship & a fire off in the distance. He asks Jamie what it is, but dad demurs. When the house collapses, they barely make it back to their gate as the Alpha gains on them.

The town throws a celebration for Spike popping his zombie hunting cherry, but Jamie keeps exaggerating Spike's bravery & killing skills when he missed most shots and almost got them both killed. Disgusted, he leaves the party and spots dad getting super friendly with a townswoman not his wife. While it's somewhat understandable because Isla is racked by delirium & disorientation, mistaking days, people, referring to Spike as her father, Spike just sees his mother being cheated on.

When he gets home, he tells the family friend watching Isla about the fire and is told it may be the place of Dr. Kelson, a former general practitioner whose abode he'd approached some time after the plague and what he saw scared him from ever returning. But Spike hears "doctor" and believes his mother may be helped, so he bundles this infirm & not-totally-with-it woman up for a road trip farther than he barely survived before.

I've had a major problem with Garland's scripts for almost every movie he's written because he nearly invariably manages to crash a working movie in the third act or finale, but here he outdoes himself by making the plot lose me barely halfway through. The idea that this kid, who barely survived his first trip to the mainland is going to successfully shepherd his mother to find the doctor just didn't work. The sidebar of a military squad getting wiped out by infected is poorly premised. That there are now supersmart Alphas and families of zombies that look like giant waterlogged babies after 28 years is a huh? That there is a pregnant zombie is a double huh?

It all caps off with Spike choosing to stay on the mainland and almost get killed until he's saved by a weird group led by someone the audience probably forgot about and as soon as they're introduced the movie ends. WTF?!? Turns out a sequel, 28 Weeks Later: The Bone Temple, directed by Nia DiCosta (last seen making the all-time biggest box office bomb of the MCU, The Marvels) from a Garland script, is coming in January. Oh, lovely.

Williams is very good as Spike, only annoying because the script writes him that way. He could have a future after this series. Taylor-Johnson and Comer are equally reigned in by the script, but do with it what they can. Fiennes is also good, but his character is just a weird caricature. 

I've never been a huge fan of the 28 Days/Weeks series, especially the first one's third act. Part of the knock on 28 Years Later was that it's not more of the same, and while that could've been a good thing because it's unlikely conditions would be exactly the same after three decades, what Garland comes up with is just dumb. Why didn't the world try to evacuate people from the island? Symptoms manifest within seconds so you just put evacuees into a holding pen for a couple of minutes and everyone who wasn't trying to eat the rest gets to board a boat to safety.

The 4K HDR presentation results in some occasionally brilliant photography with hyperreal colors. The hyped bullet time effect created by using an array of iPhones around the subject is a gimmick that doesn't really land and there are some shots that appear shot on phone which gives a member berry for the low-fi original movie's look.

I'm sure we'll eventually catch the sequel when it hits video, but I'm not expecting much better than what 28 Years Later sets up. 

Score: 5/10. Skip it.

"Final Destination Bloodlines" Review

 Considering Hollyweird is (usually) all about making money and horror films are the most consistently profitable genre because they are typically inexpensive to make due to no big stars, low budgets, and decent box office, it's odd to realize that it's been 14 years since the last Final Destination movie -   Final Destination 5 - which ended the run of five movies between 2000 and 2011 which featured an unstoppable "villain" in the form of Death itself and sometimes absolutely bonkers Rube Goldberg machine death scenes. (No one who's seen Final Destination 2 will ever drive behind a log hauler.) Well, Death is back from holiday with Final Destination Bloodlines, which takes the familiar dog and teaches it a few new tricks.

It opens with the traditional elaborate disaster premonition scene set in 1968 at the opening of the Sky View restaurant atop a tower which is meant to evoke Seattle's Space Needle. We meet young Iris Campbell (Brec Bassinger, Stargirl), who has been brought there by her boyfriend as a surprise and also to propose. No thanks to a bratty kid tossing the unluckiest penny ever off the open air observation deck, a wild chain reaction of events leads to the explosion and collapse of the tower, killing everyone including Iris.

Usually in the series, the person who foresees disaster then intervenes to halt things, but here we jump to Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) as she wakes up screaming in her college math class. Unable to sleep for the past two months as she's constantly tormented by the visions of the Sky View disaster, her grades have suffered to the point she's on academic probation, at risk of losing her scholarship. She believes the visions are related to her grandmother, so goes home to ask her father, Marty (Tinpo Lee), about grandma.

It's a sore point for him because his wife, Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt), Stefani and her brother Charlie's (Teo Briones) mother, had left the family when Stefani was 10 because of how Iris had raised her and Stefani's uncle Howard (Alex Zahara) and he forbids her to seek Grandma out. So she tries Uncle Howard who always waves her off because of how his mother had seemingly gone nuts over this premonition. However her aunt tips her as to where she could locate Iris.

Stefani goes to her place in the woods and finds it's a walled fortress that makes Laurie Strode's place in Halloween (2018, unreviewed, 5/10 - catch on cable/streaming) look like a city park. Old Iris (Gabrielle Rose), has been cheating Death by staying locked in there, never stepping outside, for years. She explains her premonition and we then see the usual prevention of disaster, but explains that Death will not be denied and not only has it been killing all the people who should've died that night, but also their descendants who never would've been born.

She's compiled a book full of scrawled notes and clippings documenting the past six decades of carnage, but Stefani refuses to believe the crazy until Iris, who now has terminal cancer, demonstrates by stepping out of her cabin and is promptly killed in spectacularly gory fashion. NOW Stefani believes! But when she tries to explain the theory to her family - that Death has been systematically reaping the survivors and descendants in order of when they died in the premonition then by order of birth, and that Uncle Howard and his four kids would be next followed by Darlene, Stefani and Charlie (spouses are exempt) - they think she's caught a case of the crazies until Howard is killed in a bizarre gardening accident.

When Darlene rolls into town in her Winnebago, her home now, for her brother's funeral, Stefani is naturally chilly to bad mom, but allows her to join the kids' ersatz Scooby Gang as they try to use Iris's book of clues to find a way to beat Death which leads them to recurring franchise character William Bludworth (Tony Todd, in his last performance before passing in December 2024, less than a year after filming) who is also dying of cancer. He explains that the only way to stop Death is to either kill and take the remaining years of the victim or die and they get revived. Attempts to do the latter go about as well as you'd expect.

I've been a casual fan of the Final Destination series since the beginning, really appreciating the whole Death conceit as an invisible force orchestrating ridiculous accidents as opposed to a Freddie or Jason or Leatherface with metal claws/machete/chainsaw. (No one cosplays as "Death from Final Destination.") But by the third entry, I found the setups too obviously telegraphed, and I think I skipped the 4th installment (The Final Destination). But the fifth film with its epic North Bay Bridge collapse sequence and the closing whammy revealing it was a pseudo-prequel to the first was a winner.

Though I own the other movies on Blu-ray, we didn't rewatch them ahead of Bloodlines, so I'd forgotten about some of the rules (like the kill to steal time one), but it's not important for this soft relaunch of the series. Overall, it's an OK entry in the series with a good amount of "OOOOOH!!!!" kill moments which if we're being honest is why we watch these movies. The unfamiliarity wish most of the cast helps keep the tension up because no one has the plot armor of being the Big Star.

The writers are an eclectic mix with Jon Watts, director of the MCU Spider-Man films, contributing to the story and Guy Busick, who's co-written the Scream series reboots as well as the above-average Ready Or Not (7/10) and Abigail (7/10), but it's not as elevated as those movies. Directorial team Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein step into the Big Leagues here and do well staging the action. Some of the visual effects are a bit obvious, but they're mostly good.

Final Destination Bloodlines grossed $280M on a $50M budget, so it's highly likely a sequel will be forthcoming sooner than 2039. As long as they can keep the quality up - storywise as well as inventive kills - Death is welcome to do his thing.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"Freaky Tales" Review

 For their first movie since 2019's MCU mediocrity Captain Marvel, tag-team filmmakers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are back with Freaky Tales, a period anthology dramedy that manages to be even more mediocre. Consisting of four tangentially related short stories set in the same time frame of June 1987 in Oakland, CA they manage to add up to a overall story less than their parts.

The first segment - "Strength in Numbers: The Gilman Strikes Back" - is set at the infamous punk club which spawned Green Day as Nazi thugs storm the club during an Operation Ivy show, destroying equipment and beating up fans. The next day the punks decide to defend themselves and when the Nazis return for round 2, they're are beaten in a stylized ultraviolent rumble. That's it.

The next segment - "Don't Fight the Feeling" - centers on a pair of female rappers, Entice (Normani from girl group Fifth Harmony) and Barbie (Dominique Thorne, the upcoming Ironheart), who are invited to a club date for local rap icon Too Short (rapper Demario "Symba" Driver) to participate in a rap battle. They win. That's it.

The third segment - "Born to Mack" - is longer and darker in tone as we meet Clint (Pedro Pascal, AGAIN), an underworld enforcer who is seeking to get out of the game as he does "one last job" collecting from a deadbeat at a poker game in the back of a video store. In the one inspired moment of the whole movie, he gets stuck in a discussion of movies with the store's owner, played by the least expected actor. (I shant spoil the surprise in case you still want to watch this.) Tragedy befalls Clint as his pregnant wife is shot to death, but even then his gang won't let him go.

The final segment - "The Legend of Sleepy Floyd" - brings back their Nazis and their leader's father, The Guy (Ben Mendelsohn, a frequent Boden/Fleck collaborator), as he is orchestrating multiple robberies of Golden State Warriors players during a NBA Championship game. Sleepy Floyd (Jay Ellis), an actual Warriors player who was on that year's All-Star Team, has a record-setting night, but because his mother wasn't feeling well and had left the game early with his girlfriend and another, arriving at Sleepy's home and surprising the burglars, who then shoot them, it's not a great evening to remember.

A pair of punks from Gilman Street happened to overhear Clint discuss the crimes at a restaurant and tell Floyd about the connection to the Nazis, so Floyd does what any grieving man would do: Straps up with all sorts of ninja weapons and kills everyone with the power of meditation and kung fu.

There's a charming lo-fi retro vibe to the cinematography - the first segment is shot in 4:3 before going widescreen for the rest - and there are moments where you can tell they're paying homage to Eighties cult movies like Repo Man with a bit of Pulp Fiction thrown in, but the conceit of the stories being interconnect is too tenuous.

The first two segments are so superfluous to the rest it's questionable as to why they're included. It feels like Boden/Fleck had four scraps of ideas they couldn't make into full movies, so tossed them together. As I'm writing this, it occurred to me that if they had intercut the stories together it may've hidden the sparseness of the weaker segments. Frankly, if the first two disappeared and the last two, which are more interrelated, were one story, it'd be best, though not particularly good.

 It also relies too much on Easter eggs like recognizing that The Guy's cop partner is the real Too Short (who also narrates the movie) and that the bearded bald guy who gives a testimonial for Sleepy Floyd's meditation course is Tim Armstrong of Operation Ivy and Rancid. Get it? They were the punk band in the first part! Awesome! Ahem...

 Boden/Fleck have been critic's darlings for two decades with their first movies, Half Nelson (which starred Ryan Gosling) and Sugar, getting lots of flowers. But nothing else they've done has landed commercially except for Captain Marvel which allows Boden to claim the title of First Woman To Direct a Live Action Movie That Grossed $1 Billion as if she didn't have a male co-director and the plum release date a month before Avengers: Endgame with the hype that this was a must-see movie to prep for that. (If you held a rabid badger against the privates of even fairly nerdy MCU fans and demanded they name who directed Captain Marvel, you'd have a lot of sad fans and overfed badgers as "some art house team" wasn't sufficient an answer.)

While there are a few moments in Freaky Tales that almost make it a so-so watch, it really didn't do much for me, barely avoiding a Skip It recommendation. 

Score: 4.5/10. Catch it on streaming/cable.

"Sinners" 4K Review

A sleeper hit earlier this year was Ryan Coogler's (Creed, Black Panther) Sinners, a Depression-era story mashing up of Deep South Jim Crow business, blues music, Hoodoo, and vampires, because why not? Coogler muse Michael B. Jordan stars in a dual role playing Elijah "Smoke" Moore & his twin Elias "Stack" Moore, collectively referred to as the "Smokestack Twins."

It's 1932 in Clarksdale, Mississippi and the Twins are back after several years working up in Chicago for Mafia families. They've returned with a stack of cash stolen from the Mob and looking to open a juke joint for the local black sharecroppers and laborers who aren't permitted to patronize the white folks establishment.

They buy a former sawmill from Hogwood (David Maldonado), who insists they won't have any trouble from the Klan (spoiler: he's the local Grand Dragon), and then split up to prepare for the opening that night. Smoke goes to town to contract food from the Chinese shopkeeper Bo Chow (Yao) and his wife Grace (Li Jun Li) and to have his estranged wife, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku, Loki), a Hoodoo practitioner. Stack takes their cousin Sammie "Preacher Boy" Moore (newcomer Miles Caton), an aspiring blues guitarist (something his preacher father isn't cool with) with him as he looks to round up talent including Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo, Get Shorty), and Pearline (Jayme Lawson), a married singer whom Sammie is sweet on. Stack also runs into his ex-girlfriend Mary (Hallie Steinfeld, Hawkeye), a "passing" black woman.

 Elsewhere, a man whose skin is smoking runs up to a shack and pounds at the door, begging to be left in. This is Remmick (Jack O'Connell), who tells the wary couple - Bert (Peter Dreimanis) and Joan (Lola Kirke) - he is being chased by Indians for some misunderstanding. They let him in and when the group of Lakota show up asking if they'd seen anyone coming through, deny they have. Next thing, they're vampires, too.

The opening night of the juke seems to be going well except the brothers realize early on that due to the amount of company scrip (currency paid to sharecroppers that's only spendable in company stores) they're accepting, they're not making as much real cash as they need to succeed. Problems escalate when three white folk show up asking to be let in, claiming they'd heard the music and just wanted to join in the festivities as they're musicians too. Mary goes to investigate them and at first sympathizes, then decides they need to be kept out. Unfortunately, she doesn't see Remmick take flight behind her as she walks away, Ruh-roh. Long story short, a vampire gets in, the party breaks up, then a whole lot of vampires want to get in at the few remaining humans inside.

I'm somewhat mystified as to the acclaim and success of Sinners because on one hand it's heavily...let's say "influenced" by the 1996 Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez collaboration From Dusk Till Dawn - which started off as a gritty bank robbers on the run crime film before flipping into a bonkers vampires in a Mexican strip club flick - and on the other it's hobbled by a couple of suspense-breaking storytelling choices which kill most of the suspense.

The first mistake is literally the first scene where we see an injured Sammie arrive at his father's church during a service, clutching the broken remains of a guitar neck, clearly suffering injuries, before jumping back 24 hours in a Scriptnotes Stuart Special. As with all movies told in flashback (e.g. Atomic Blonde, Haywire), if they're present before the flashback, it means they survive whatever happens next.

But the more damaging choice was to show Remmick arrive at Bert's shack and reveal what he. Without that sequence, when the trio arrive at the juke and ask to be invited in, the audience would be suspicious because why are these white folk so eager to hang out with the black folk in the 1932 Jim Crow South? Are they trying to entrap the Smokestack Twins and bring in the Klan? Or are they just friendly Irish musicians seeking to jam? Since we KNOW what they are and why they're casually asking to be invited in, it becomes just a waiting game to see who gets turned when they go out and they gets back in.

As if that's not enough, there is a lengthy coda set 50 years later as a mid-credit scene so if you turn it off when it appears the movies over, you'll miss something important.

As lukewarm as I am in general to Sinners, there is one sequence which stands out and that's when the music is playing and a narration that played over the beginning is recalled about how some musicians have an ability to piece the veil between life and death, the present, past, and future and as Sunnie plays, figures ranging from ancient African tribal musicians and dancers appear as well as what appears to be P-Funk guitarist Jimi Hazel and hip-hop DJs and break dancers as the camera swirls around the scene. Good stuff.

Jordan's performance is OK but suffers from both brothers looking the same other than different colored suits and having generally similar personalities. I couldn't remember who was Smoke and who was Stack and it didn't really matter. Part of my difficulty stems from remembering how Tatiana Maslany created over a dozen different clones for Orphan Black, even playing one imitating another so deftly you felt you were watching an imitation, not just the actor switching to the other characterization. (To be fair, though, if you asked me which Winklevoss twin was which as played by Armie Hammer in The Social Network, I couldn't really tell you when they were more differentiated than Coogler's script defines them.)

 Caton is more layered in his performance as the conflicted young bluesman; it will be interesting to see what he does next. Lindo almost steals every scene he's in and it's good to see him again after somehow missing everything he's done the past 20 years. (This scene in Get Shorty when he discusses screenwriting is gold.) I didn't recognize Mosaku because of how different she looked from her TVA Agent role in Loki and it was good to see her doing something more involving.

 The cinematography by Autumn Durald Arkapaw (Wakanda Forever, The Last Showgirl) is rich, but for home viewing the original IMAX scenes (which only a tiny handful of theaters were able to present) is altered from the original 1.43:1 to the 1.78:1 (16:9) ratio of TVs, alternating from the 2.39:1 widescreen of the majority. Sometimes the transitions are abrupt cuts (a la The Dark Knight), though I spotted at least one slow diminishing of the black bars as used in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (when Katniss enters the arena) and Mission: Impossible - Fallout (the HALO jump and another spot that escapes me now). Compared to the widescreen bulk, the clarity and frame size of the IMAX parts made he wish the whole film was done in fullscreen. 

While Sinners has its moments and strengths, particularly in the performances, I was left with too many questions like how in the segregated South did Chinese people had a general store? Perhaps such things happened, but against the backdrop of Jim Crow it's distracting. But as detailed above, the structural choices Coogler made work against whatever points he wanted to make. Clip out the Remmick scene (or use it as a flashback after the vampire twist happens; perhaps have the Indians show up to save the day) and the racial tensions subtext could've worked more allegorically. 

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.

"Ash" Review

Opening with one of the most played-out tropes in movies and videogames - the protagonist waking up in a situation where everyone is dead and they have no memory of what happened or who they are - Ash is a dumb, dull sci-fi-horror flick which makes pulpy throwback B-movies disreputable again.

Eiza González (Three Body Problem) is Amnesia Girl Riya Ortiz who awakes in a structure filled with several dead people who died violently as evidenced by the smashed heads and knives protruding from their bodies. The lights are flickering, a computer voice is announcing system failure, it's basically the aftermath of a Diddy freakout party. (Hiyo!) She wanders out of the structure and finds herself on the surface of an alien world with a kaleidoscopic sky. She begins to choke on the atmosphere and barely manages to make it back to the structure. She doesn't realize you need an space suit to go outside.

She begins to stabilize the base functions and experiences flashback jump scares of the violence that occurred as well as calmer times where she and the box-checkingly diverse crew joked about their mission. Then there's an alert that someone is in the airlock. She lays in wait and when the intruder enters she pounces. This is Brion (Aaron Paul, Breaking Bad) and he claims to be the astronaut who was in orbit and came down when contact was lost.

As Riya tries to piece together what's real and what's not, it becomes a guessing game for the audience as well because it's one thing to have an unreliable narrator, but the movie keeps showing contradictory versions of what happened to the point I stopped caring because it felt as if the script by Jonni Remmler was just making things up as it went along with no consistent narrative logic then director Flying Lotus just slathered John Carpenter stylistic tributes all over the mess. I pretty much figured out the main twists in the first half-hour, leaving another hour for them to play out plus the random spins they attempted.

 If not for the presence of the main stars, if you'd told me this movie was made in the early-1980s I'd almost believe you but for the presence of flat-screen displays. The lighting is mostly lurid reds and blues, reminiscent of Creepshow though that was mimicking EC Comics pulp style.

The production design has that cheap movie look with bizarre set decorations like the freaking upright piano sits in the common area. Wait, what? A PIANO?!? A critical mission with the future of humanity hanging in the balance and they ship hundreds of pounds of wood & metal furniture? Not a lightweight electronic keyboard, but a full piano? We see a character playing a trumpet (silently) in a flashback memory, but never is the piano but decoration. That's the level of dumb Ash is operating at along with the Alien inspired space suits with helmet glass so fragile a single punch from a woman cracks them.

González is OK in her performance considering the role gives her little to do but be confused and sad. Paul is equally adrift with nothing to do. The rest of the cast is just there to appear in flashbacks and die.

As a Shudder title, it will eventually show up on that service, but don't bother. Watch Event Horizon instead.

Score: 2/10. Skip it!

"The Monkey" Review

 Hot on the heels of last year's cult horror fave Longlegs (unreviewed, 5/10 score), writer-director Osgood Perkins (son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins) is back with The Monkey, an adaptation of a Stephen King short story from his Skeleton Crew anthology about a cursed toy monkey that wreaks mayhem.

The tone is set immediately as an airline pilot played by Adam Scott (Severance) rushes into a pawn shop covered in blood seeking to get rid of a large toy monkey which bangs a drum triggering bad consequences as illustrated by the shop owner being killed by weird sequence of events. The pilot then disappears from his family's life.

 Left behind are his wife Lois (Tatiana Maslany, Orphan Black) and their twin sons, Hal and Bill (both played by Christian Convery, Sweet Tooth). Bill is three minutes older, so uses that to mercilessly bully Hal. They find the monkey in a box of their father's stuff and after turning the key, resulting in their babysitter being killed in a freak Japanese hibachi restaurant accident, Hal attempts to use it kill Bill, but instead his mother dies of an aneurysm. He dismembers the monkey and throws it away, but it reappears at the home of the aunt and uncle the twins were sent to. Bill tries to use the monkey to kill Hal, but their uncle dies. They then agree to throw it down a well where it can't harm anyone again.

25 years later, Hal (now played by Theo James, Divergent) is working as a store clerk and is estranged from Bill and his son, Petey (Colin O'Brien, Wonka), whom he only sees once a year to keep safe from the Monkey returning. During his annual visit, his ex-wife tells him her new husband, Ted (Elijah Wood, Sin City), plans on adopting Petey, cutting him completely from Hal's life.

When their aunt dies in a bizarre Final Destination-worthy manner, Bill reaches out to Hal and tells him that he needs to go to her house and check whether the Monkey has returned. The realtor tells Hal that there have been a rash of mysteriously weird deaths every day for the past week. That's right, someone's got the Monkey and is turning the key!

If you're a fan of over-the-top dark comedy-horror in the vein of Evil Dead II and it's sequels, then The Monkey is for you. The kills are so ridiculous that they prompt laughs more than ewwwws, but like Evil Dead movies/shows, not Terrifier movies. Final Destination kills are also a valid comparison.

I didn't really care for James' performance as the twins, but Convery is so good and the difference in appearance was enough that we were genuinely surprised it was one actor. (It probably helped that the Queen of Multiple Roles, Maslany, was his counterpart.)

Though a manageable 98-minutes long, the pacing does slack off noticeably in the last act as Perkins drags things out; trimming 15-20 minutes would've helped. This is a common issue with Perkins as his  Gretel & Hansel (5/10) was also empty and slow despite being visually sumptuous. He needs a co-writer and an editor to break out of his 5-6/10 rut.

 Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"Heart Eyes" Review

 Holiday themed horror movies have been a thing since Halloween. Even Valentine's Day has had Cupid, Valentine, and two versions of My Bloody Valentine. Now entering the chat is 2025's Heart Eyes, an odd mashup of rom-com and slasher flick which brings some levity to the murder movie game.

We open with a couple staging their proposal in a vineyard. It's so choreographed that she's mouthing his proposal along with his saying it. When their photographer hidden in the woods calls to say he didn't get the shot due to lens flares, they redo it. But then a masked killer kills them all and we're off to the races.

After a montage of news reports about the Heart Eyes Killer (named for the mask he wears) who has killed couples the previous two year in Boston and Philadelphia, we then meet Ally (Olivia Holt, Cloak & Dagger) who is waiting for her convoluted coffee order with her bestie, Monica (Gigi Zumbado, Bridge and Tunnel) at a Seattle coffee shop. There she meet cutes Jay (Mason Gooding, Cuba Jr.'s nepo baby, Scream 5 & 6), who drinks the same coffee order and they bump heads literally. Since she's hurting from a breakup, she's not looking for love.

She's also in trouble at work because her grim commercial concept for the Valentine's Day jewelry has caught backlash online, annoying her boss, Crystal Cane (Michaela Watkins, Casual). She's brought in a consultant to come up with new pitches and of course it's Jay. He invites her to dinner to discuss pitches and Monica takes Ally out to shop for clothes in a typical rom-com montage.

Naturally, dinner goes poorly because he's flirting with her and she doesn't believe in love and when they leave they run into her ex-boyfriend and his new girl. She kisses Jay and says they're dating because that's what you do in these movies. Watching them from a distance is Heart Eyes who somehow manages to beat them to her apartment and hide in her closet (spoiler alert!). They escape, but when the cops arrive at a nearby park where they fled, they arrest Jay as the killer.

To go further would spoil the twists and turns - some of which are too twisty turny for their own good - but Heart Eyes falls into the post-ironic territory that the Scream series has lived for three decades with the added element of borderline parodying rom-com tropes. It knows how dumb they are, thus embraces them with references to late-Nineties comedies like Romy & Michele's High School Reunion. Current pop culture also gets checked with a pair of detectives investigating the case named Hobbs and Shaw played by Devon Sawa (Idle Hands, Final Destination) and Jordana Brewster (the Furry Fastness series), prompting Ally to ask, "Like the movie?" and eliciting blank reactions from the cops.

Speaking of which, I know Seattle was big on the whole "Defund the Police" insanity, but a segment of the movie is set in the least-populated, dimmest-lit, large urban area police station ever. If these was Podunksburg, Nowhere, perhaps; but not a major city. And the obligatory bonus reveal scene is just being random while copying a movie or three any general horror movie fan will spot. Two of the writers wrote Freaky, the 2020 body switch horror-comedy where Vince Vaughn's serial killer soul was swapped with a teen girl's, which explains the humorous slant.

Overall, Heart Eyes is an amusing little romp that only bogs down when it's decides to be serious for a moment and while the weirdly small scale of the production at times is distracting, it's not fatal. While I liked the mashup of rom-com parody and slasher flick tropes, the horror fan missus (she's seen all three Terrifier movies) didn't care for it because "It didn't know what it was trying to be." She's wrong, of course, but including for balance.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"Companion" Review

 People complain that there aren't any original movies anymore - everything is a sequel or based on IPs like games - but when something different does come along, they don't seem to go see it. Such was the case with Better Man (which grossed ~$20M on a $110M budget) and now the modestly successful (though poorly marketed) Companion. Considering how generally mediocre movies are these days - especially the dreck being nominated for Oscars - it's nice to be able to recommend a good one for a change, though you should take my word for it and not watch the spoilerific trailer.

 It opens with Iris (Sophie Thatcher, Heretic) at a supermarket musing in voiceover that the two times in her life she was happiest were the day she met Josh (Jack Quaid, The Boys) and the day she killed him. (Well, that's a statement of purpose if there ever was one.) We watch them meet cute in the produce section as he causes an avalanche of oranges from the bin.

Then we see her waking up in their car as they head deep into the woods for a weekend with friends at what one described as a rustic little cabin which as Jack notes is none of those things as it's a modern mansion owned by Sergey (Rupert Friend, Homeland). Also attending are Sergey's mistress, Kat (Megan Suri, Never Have I Ever), Eli (Harvey Guillén, What We Do In The Shadows) and his partner Patrick (Lukas Gage, Fargo). Iris is worried that Kat hates her and Kat does throw shade, but in general everyone has a great time, getting drunk and dancing.

The next morning, Iris goes down to the lake and is joined by Sergey who proceeds to try and force himself on her. Back at the house, the others are waking up and then shocked to see Iris covered in blood, trying to explain what had happened. Jack commands her to go to sleep and her eyes cloud over and she freezes revealing (to those who didn't see the trailer) that she's a robot. Dun dun DUHN!!! Many hijinks ensue.

I'd known about the twist before watching it, so I was spotting all the tells about Iris and the remarks Kat and Sergey made toward her. But I was thankfully unaware of where the story was going and that made for a kicky fun ride. Sure, it's got elements borrowed from and reminiscent of Blade Runner, I, Robot, The Terminator, Her, Ex Machina, The Stepford Wives and the dreadful Subservience, but it mixes and matches the pieces into something fairly fresh if familiar.

Thatcher is a fresh up-and-comer with her roles here and Heretic as well as playing the young version of Juliette Lewis's character in Yellowjackets, whose voice Thatcher's sounds a lot like here while her look is what the missus described as "Goth Zooey Deschanel." (I went with a cross between Thora Birch's and Scarlet Johansson's characters in Ghost World.) Keep an eye on her starting here.

Writer-director Drew Hancock makes a smart feature debut here, investing the story with its own thoughts about the nature of love, control, identity and self-determination. Even when it's being a bit too familiar or tropey, he keeps things on the level. He was the co-creator and sole writer of a great little series that only ran 8 episodes called My Dead Ex (currently streaming on Paramount+) which you should check out.

Long story short, Companion is a tidy little black comedy with some cool twists and turns. Just don't watch the trailer to get maximum surprise value.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"The Gorge" 4K Review

It's been a while since we've had an Apple Original movie, but for Valentine's Day they dropped the unlikely rom-com-slash-sci-fi-horror flick The Gorge about a couple of cute young snipers who fall in love then fall into Hell on Earth.

 We open on Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy, Emma, Furiosa), a Lithuanian sniperette who's been holed up in a blind for 10 days overlooking an airport awaiting her target whom she dispatches with a shot from thousands of meters away. We are then introduced to Levi (Miles Teller, Top Gun: Maverick, Fant4stic) waking up from a nightmare then hanging alone at the beach, writing poetry.

 He is summoned to meet with Bartholomew (Sigourney Weaver, Galaxy Quest), a mysterious woman from what he deduces is a private military outfit who is seeking someone with no personal attachments, that no one would miss if he didn't come back. Haunted by all the killing he's done and alone, he signs up for the one-year-long gig. Meanwhile, Drasa is learning that her father is terminally ill and planning on unaliving himself on Valentine's Day. She was also spotted somehow in the vicinity of the opening hit, so she needs to lay low. (Perhaps for a year?)

 Levi wakes up on a plane after being sedated approaching the drop zone. The plane's crew can't tell him where he is and after he parachutes down, he'll have to travel a couple dozen miles over treacherous terrain to arrive at his post at the titular gorge where he is briefed about things by Basil Exposition J.D. (Sope Dirisu, Slow Horses). The fog-shrouded gorge is home to what previous guards have dubbed The Hollow Men (after a T.S. Eliot poem). It has been guarded since the late-1940s after 2400 soldiers never returned from a mission down there.

It's guarded from two towers, theirs on the west side with the east tower presumably staffed by Soviet/Russian personnel. His job is to patrol his side's gorge rim, checking the auto-turrets and satellite jammers keeping it hidden from Google Earth, replacing the hanging mines, etc. There's a garden patch, plenty of supplies (more on this later), solar power, and there is to be absolutely no contact with the other tower's guard. (Why not? Because reasons.) J.D. then heads off to be picked up and we discover why Bartholomew doesn't want family men for the job.

 Starting in September, Levi begins his vigil, patrolling, reading, checking in once a month via shortwave radio where the voice on the other end doesn't want anything more than to know whether any contact with what's in the gorge had occurred? No? Then talk to you in a month.

He also naturally notices the hottie across the way (wo)manning the East Tower. After quite some time, he looks through his binoculars and sees her holding a sign asking his name. He replies via dry erase board that they're not supposed to have contact to which she replies by shooting his drink off the rail. He reciprocates by shooting her beer bottle and the flirting begins. They play chess by sending the moves by message (yes, stolen from Dawn of the Dead) and even make up ersatz drum kits to bash away. (While this may seem like a meta riff on the stars prior roles in The Queen's Gambit and Whiplash, they claim it was in the script already and they asked for it to be removed.)

The also manage to rile up the creatures of the gorge by blasting Ramones music and while dancing around, almost realizing too late that they were scaling the walls from the abyss. Much shooty-shooty-bang-bang ensues. Then they go back to flirting for months, wondering what the small rockets they observe emerging from the fog are about for a moment, culminating in Levi rigging a zip line across the ravine and scooting over to meet Drasa up close and personally. On his way back, creatures trigger a mine and shrapnel severs the line, sending him plummeting into the unknown. (Luckily he had a parachute on!) Drasa races to grab some gun, gear and her own chute and leaps after him.

Down at the bottom of the gorge, they are surrounded by sickly colored fogs and beset upon by fantastical creatures which seem borne from an orgy between Hieronymus Bosch, Salvador Dali, and the designers of Annihilation and The Mist. As they travel along uncovering the truth of what's going on down there, it's like a nature hike through Dante's Inferno except as written by a grade-school dropout.

 I've seen reviews that cut miles of slack for the issues with the script by Zach Dean (writer of the unremembered Amazon Original flick, The Tomorrow War, whose premise was so fatally flawed by the need to be cool more than smart) and the missus is one of those who really enjoyed The Gorge, but there were too many details demanding they not be thought about on top of the obligatory suspension of disbelief starting with the entire setup of their mission.

 There is this massive area which is so secret that the people charged with securing it aren't told where it is, there's a no-fly zone around it (except for the chopper pilots who fly in at the end), it uses jamming tech to prevent satellites from seeing it, and it's guarded by TWO people who are forbidden to contact each other and check-ins are monthly meaning that if something happens to them, say the monsters get them, it could be 29 days before anyone suspects there's a problem? You're not supposed to warn your counterpart that there are monsters coming up their side where they can't see them coming while your autoturrets fire across the gorge at them?

Who is restocking the towers with ammo, mines, parts for the jammers, etc.? Where did the books and the stereo and the records come from? Why are the sentries required to travel on foot for a day, climbing treacherous mountain passes that they could fall off of instead of just flying them in? If the stuff in the gorge is so dangerous, why is there a piece of tech there for who to use and how did they not find the Basil Exposition film can? If the creatures are just monsters, why are they able to lay traps? Don't know, don't know, don't don't don't know know know. 

We're already expected to buy into the core premise of The Gorge while ignoring all the stupidity surrounding it and it's too big an ask. All I could think was that there should be a lot more people on the site covering shifts, daily contacts if not a zillion security cameras monitored by a base, so many basic things all shoved to the side because we need to have two young(er) attractive people getting horned up by each other to make the plot go. 

Which brings us to our cast. At the time of filming two years ago, Teller and Taylor-Joy were 36 and 26, respectively. He's the right age for a former Marine who went into the mercenary business and is now wracked by guilt, but she is simply too young. How did this kitten get into the long-distance head bullet delivery business and rise to the top tiers?

 It's been a while since we've had a case of Sandra Bullock Syndrome - when we're supposed to believe a perfectly attractive woman can't seem to find a man interested in her (coined by me after Bullock's roles in The Net and While You Were Sleeping) - but no way a hottie like Taylor-Joy doesn't have dudes panting after her. Mind you, they're a cute couple and have good chemistry, but she's simply too young. Someone like Blake Lively (who was 34 when this filmed and has done accents and action drama in The Rhythm Section, where she was much better than the script) would've been better.

 Where The Gorge does excel is in the design of the creatures and environments down there. Everything is creepy and horrifying and director Scott Derrickson (Doctor Strange, The Black Phone) stages the frights well. Bonus kudos to cinematographer Dan Laustsen (John Wick 2-4, Nightmare Alley & four other Guillermo del Toro films) for his moody lens work.

As with all content on Apple TV+ it's in Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos audio. Visually, the colors are rich, but muted, with only a few spots where HDR brightness is present. The Atmos mix has top level activity during storms and helicopter flyovers, but none it is particularly demo material.

While the missus and other less-demanding viewers seemed to have fun with The Gorge, the piling on of unnecessarily dumb decisions just killed it for me. It wouldn't have taken much to fix almost everything wrong, too. Here's how:

• Have Levi flown directly to the gorge via helicopter from an airbase he doesn't know where. The chopper also ferries in a small shipping container filled with supplies, ammo, food, books, movies, whatnot for his stay.
• Convey the info J.D. gives in a briefing video and have check-ins be daily and more than just surly radio voice only wanting to know if there's contact.
• Have both towers be in contact with each other to build rapport and support each other in fighting monsters.
  
• Eliminate Drasa's backstory scenes so we know nothing about her until they start working together. The twist will be that she works for the Evil Company that hired Levi and when he falls in, she was supposed to just call in that they need a new sucker for the West Tower.

Everything else can pretty much remain the same, even having a too-young, inexplicably hot murder chick on the other side. Maybe have the monsters a little more conversational, too?

But as it stands The Gorge is what I call a bimbo movie - looks great, but doesn't have much going on upstairs. Perhaps style and thrill are enough to overcome the lapses for you. Mileage varies.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on Apple TV+. 

"Nosferatu (2024)" 4K Review

 Current art house belle of the ball Robert Eggars (The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman) fulfills his lifelong dream of remaking the movie which inspired him to become a filmmaker with The Nosferatu, a remake of the 1922 German film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror which itself was an unauthorized knockoff of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Who says Hollyweird doesn't have any fresh new ideas?

Lily-Rose Depp stars as Ellen Hutter, a lonely young woman in early-19th Century Germany who in the prologue wishes for a guardian angel to comfort her, somehow making a connection to Nosferatu. How? Don't know. We then jump to "years later" where she is married to Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult, Juror #2), a young real estate agent who seeks to become a partner with the Knock brokerage to provide stable income to support what he hopes will be a family.

Herr Knock (Simon McBurney, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation), charges Thomas with the task of traveling to Transylvania to have the deed to a local ramshackle mansion signed by the buyer, Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård, IT, John Wick: Chapter 4), who anyone who knows anything about vampire lore knows is a vampire. After a fraught journey, Thomas gets Orlock's John Hancock on the deed, but also signs a document the Count presents him written in a foreign language which is just your standard "I now own your wife's soul" boilerplate. Whoops.

Meanwhile, Ellen is staying with their friends, wealthy shipbuilder Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Kick-Ass) and his wife Anna (Emma Corrin, Deadpool & Wolverine) and their two daughters (with another baby on the way), and being a poor house guest due to her horrific nightmares and sleepwalking. She fears for Thomas' life and the monster coming her way.

Thomas barely escapes Orlok's clutches and Ellen's condition stumps Dr. Wilhelm Siever (Ralph Ineson, The Green Knight), so he consults his former teacher, Prof. Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), a somewhat disgraced figure as he began delving into the occult. Von Franz deduces that her condition and the arrival of a ship that crashed into the harbor, unleashing a flood of rats and plague are connected and it's going to take great sacrifice to save the city. Lots of death and sadness ensue.

I'm not a big follower of vampire media. I've seen Francis Ford Coppola's campy Bram Stoker's Dracula, Interview with the Vampire, used to watch The Vampire Diaries but never saw a single Twilight film (because I'm a man, baby!) and despite owning the entire Universal Monsters Blu-ray box set for ages, still haven't seen the original Dracula. But the general outline of Dracula lore and imagery from the original Nosferatu are part of the collective knowledge of anyone with more than a cursory interest in vampire films. So I don't really have an overarching interest in how this went one way or another.

That said, I was left lukewarm by Nosferatu. While very stylish - Eggars' go-to cinematographer Jarin Blaschke is nominated for his lens work - and moody, it didn't feel like anything particularly special or necessary. The amped-up for modern audiences sexuality also seems more icky than erotic probably owing to the controversial choice to make Skarsgård's Orlok historically accurate to what a 16th Century Hungarian noble may look.

Too quote my life accomplice, "Why does he have a porn stache? It's distracting me." Unlike me, she's big on the whole vampire thing while drawing the line at the Twilight books (though she did watch the movies because of course) and has seen a lot of spins on the concepts, but she just couldn't even Orlok here. She also felt Depp's performance was too horny and overwrought. I someone disagree; I think it's was a choice, but I'm not going to the mattresses over.

 Despite oodles of noirish style and game performances, Nosferatu lacks substantive bite. The 4k Doby Vision presentation helps with black levels, but definitely watch it on an OLED in a dark room if you want to see anything. On the audio front, Orlok's voice booms enough to get the subwoofer something to chew on.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"Heretic" Review

One of the more frustrating experiences in movie viewing is when a story has an intriguing setup, but when it comes time to pay it off, it's at best anticlimatic and more likely annoying to infuriating. Such as it is with Heretic, art house darling studio A24's latest horror film which has disappointment in common with releases like Y2K (just viewed a few nights ago) and MaXXXine from last summer.

 Heretic follows Mormon missionaries Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher, Yellowjackets) and Sister Barnes (Chloe East, The Fabelmans) as they struggle to make converts. When not being rebuffed by people walking by, they're being pranked by cruel teenagers. As they approach their last lead, it begins to rain. Answering the door is Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), who invites them in. They initially demur because it's required for a female to be present, but he assures them his wife is home baking blueberry pie. He also asks if they have a problem with there being metal in the walls and ceiling. Ruh-roh.

Initially, Reed seems like a very interested customer as he already has a heavily annotated copy of the Book of Mormon (the Mormon Bible, not the Broadway musical), but as the referenced Mrs. Reed never appears, the girls begin to get more concerned. This concern rises to mild panic as they realize the front door is locked and they have no cell signal due to the Faraday cage construction he mentioned. And the smell of blueberry pie? It was a scented candle. (Not a spoiler; it's in the trailer.)

Venturing further into the house, they find Reed waiting in a large room with a vaguely churchish vibe. Here's where things kick into gear as he challenges the claims of religions to be the "One True Faith" by analogizing various editions of Monopoly & the similarity between The Hollies' "The Air That I Breathe" with Radiohead's "Creep" and Lana Del Rey's "Get Free" with the point being all religions are just ripping off each other. He then tells them they are free to go, but must choose between doors labeled "Belief" and "Disbelief."

What happens when they make their choice comprises the back half of Heretic and it's where things begin to fall apart storywise as co-writers/directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (whose last film was the forgettable Adam Driver vs. dinosaurs sci-fi flick 65) find themselves unable to deliver on the heady premise and it spirals into more far-fetched situations which raise more questions as to what is the One True Religion. (Which everyone who watches The Simpsons knows is a mix of voodoo and Presbyterian.)

The more I thought about the last act, the madder I got to the point where I'd docked a point from its initial 7/10 score before going to bed then knocking off another while eating breakfast. Many movies require some suspension of disbelief, but Heretic requires leaps of faith that Evel Knievel couldn't clear beginning with the entire premise resting on Reed constructing this test of faith & rigged house with timed locks and signal-blocking construction seemingly in preparation for these two girls to arrive. What would've happened if two male Elders knocked on his door? How did he get elements for his scheme without anyone noticing?

That a movie about faith literally ends with a deus ex machina is stock horror movie stuff, but divorced from the premise that drew us in. The final shot is also another one of those "What does it really mean? things which bugged me the other night with Juror #2.

It's too bad because the thesis is interesting and the performances are uniformly solid beginning with Grant's calibrated descent from charming to threatening, but he's undercut by the screenplay's tropes. Anyone really surprised by Grant's later career moves must not have seen him in 2012's Cloud Atlas where he played a half-dozen wildly different characters.

Even while the overall story falters on horror tropes and contrivances, it's too its credit that it doesn't play the Sisters as total naifs as they both call BS on Reed's arguments and never succumb to helpless damseling. However, a detail about Barne's again raises questions about what she's doing in her free time.

In my 65 review linked above, I called into question Beck and Woods' writing skills as their script seemed vastly inferior to their A Quiet Place script which must have been vastly rewritten by director and star John Krasinski and my doubts continue here. While they stage their tale with good visual style, aided by Chung Chung-hoon's shadowy cinematography, the writing lets things down.

While Heretic avoids the Skip It judgement of Y2K and MaXXXine, it's still a letdown which doesn't live up to its premise.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"Y2K" Review

 It's New Year's Eve, so why not watch the new sci-fi/horror/comedy by former SNL alum Kyle Mooney, Y2K, which he directed and co-wrote (with Evan Winter)?

Jaeden Martell (IT) stars as Eli, an awkward high schooler whose only friend is Danny (Julian Dennison, not slimmed down in the least since Deadpool 2). He has a crush on Laura (Rachel Zegler, West Side Story), a beautiful classmate and secret tech nerd, but of course can't tell her how he feels about her and her cool kids clique are disgusted by the "Sticky Boys" (as they call themselves) because of course, this being a teen movie.

They decide to crash a New Year's Eve party being held at Laura's ex-boyfriend Soccer Chris's (Aussie rapper The Kid Laroi) house and it's your usual movie rager party until the clock strikes midnight, ushering in 2000 and the lights flicker out. After a few seconds, they come back on and it appears Y2K was a dud (as it was in reality), but then a toy jeep with other toys combined with it burns a kid's face to death with a makeshift flamethrower and other devices begin attacking and killing the partygoers including Danny.

Eli, Laura and a pair of local rap crew members who bullied Eli and Danny - CJ (Daniel Zolghadri, Eighth Grade) and Ash (Lachlan Watson, Glen/Glenda in the Chucky TV series) - then trek to find Laura's previous ex-boyfriend, an electrical engineering major named Jonas (Mason Gooding, Cuba Jr's son, Love, Victor) to see if he can help with these conglomerations of household electronics. Also in the mix is a stoner video store clerk, Garret, played by Mooney.

The problem with Y2K is that the script is a half-baked mishmash of other familiar movies. The Eli-Danny dynamic is so cribbed from Superbad that I wasn't surprised to see Jonah Hill has a producer here. The swing from teen buddy comedy to full splatter comedy a la Evil Dead II could've worked in the hands of a better director, but Mooney isn't up to the task.

The script feels like a barely hanging together first draft that needed more trips through development with the most cardboard of characters. How did the killer robots assemble themselves so quickly? Don't know. How did the virus spread when hardly anything was connected to the Internet and broadband was a novelty? Don't know. Why does there seem to be nobody else in the world than the immediate characters in the movie and why is everyone's favorite art house movie brand A24 watering down their reputation with such lackluster stuff? /shrug emoji

While the use of clever puppets and robot suits fabricated by Weta Workshop give a tactile lo-fi vibe, the cinematography by Bill Pope (three Edgar Wright, four Sam Raimi, and four Wachowskis movies including The Matrix trilogy) is too good for this project.

Frankly, if it looked worse and starred nobodies (think: Clerks) it's B-movie story would've worked better. When the best thing about your movie is the surprise cameo of a certain red-hatted nu-metal rocker who was huge in 1999 and is willing to take the piss out of himself for the last act of the movie, that's not a ringing endorsement of Mooney's effort. (FWIW, the missus liked it much more.)

Score: 4/10. Skip it.