Archive for the ‘Horror’ Category
Thursday, October 1st, 2026
Hey guys, just arrived at the OBSESSION discussion. Got held up by traffic. Is anybody still here? Hello?
Yeah, this movie made by some fresh-faced twenty-something Youtube guy named Curry Barker for less than a million dollars made $519 million in theaters alone. Stuck around forever, got great reviews, became one of the go-to talking points for hammering the big budget super and star related franchise movies that had underperformed around the same time. This and another hugely successful low budget horror movie made by a youth from the internet were pointed to as proof that we’re through the looking glass, it’s a generational shift, Hollywood as we know it is dead, buried and desecrated, it’s a whole new ball game, nothing will ever be the same, adults might not even be able to set foot in a movie theater without being attacked and having sixes and sevens carved into their flesh as part of a viral TikTok trend. It’s time to panic because a newish director’s low budget horror movie has never once in history been a surprise hit, unless you count NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, HALLOWEEN, FRIDAY THE 13TH, THE EVIL DEAD, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, SAW, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, TERRIFIER 2, and all the other ones.
Actually now that I think about it it’s pretty much one of the central horror traditions since before I was born for stuff like this to happen. But this time it’s brand new and will change all the rules, I’m sure.
Before all the excitement I saw a trailer for OBSESSION, the one where Bear (Michael Johnston, UNTITLED THE MUMMY RETURNS SEQUEL) calls the number on the package for his “One Wish Willow” and asks an operator (Barker himself) if he can alter his wish. In context it’s a good scene, but seeing it then I thought “Some magical realism shit about making wishes? I can skip that one.” Only after it had been out for a few weeks and the praise was practically unanimous did I decide I needed to see it. Eventually. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andy Richter, Cooper Tomlinson, Curry Barker, Inde Navarrette, Megan Lawless, Michael Johnston
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 30 Comments »
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2026
I come bearing good news: the new RESIDENT EVIL movie is a very fun time, even if you never played one of the games in your life, even if you wouldn’t notice that it “feels like game play,” even if “a more faithful adaptation of the games” does not remotely sound to you like a good alternative to 14 years of trend-chasing Paul W.S. Anderson joints about Milla Jovovich doing flips and stuff. I mean come on. How ya gonna keep e’m down on the farm after they’ve seen Milla flying around doing Matrix shit in 3D? Or at least, how are ya gonna keep me. I wasn’t looking for RESIDENT EVIL without the main thing that RESIDENT EVIL means to me. If not for some theories I’ve heard about auteurs I would not have gone to see this reboot on opening day.
Let’s face it, as a never serious, long retired game player, there is almost no chance I will ever play or see somebody play these games. It’s honestly none of my business what they’re about. Don’t even tell me, I’ll cover my ears. But I respect the games for the movies they’ve inspired. I really got a kick out of four of the six Milla joints (just not the first and last ones), and I thought the unrelated WELCOME TO RACCOON CITY was fun too.
But this is probly the best one. It’s directed by Zach Cregger, in what sounds in interviews like risky nerd dream fulfillment more than a sellout. I honestly thought the brand name would be a deterrent, but it’s his biggest opening to date. It’s simpler and more straight ahead than BARBARIAN or WEAPONS, but it moves, rips, etc., and it’s funny as hell. He told the Hollywood Reporter that “people really liked the movie, but they thought it was too funny. So over the course of my testing, I stripped out as much of the jokes as possible.” I believe it, actually, because this has that rare, perfect EVIL DEAD II tone: so many laughs from the lead character and the absurdity of the situations, but not at the expense of the horror. Not a horror-themed comedy, but legit horror with a great sense of humor. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrea Miltnerova, Austin Abrams, Dariusz Wolski, Johnno Wilson, Kali Reis, Paul Walter Hauser, Sara Paxton, Shay Hatten, video games, Zach Cregger, zombies
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Horror | 22 Comments »
Monday, September 7th, 2026
After spending nearly a decade making the literally gigantic FX extravaganzas GODZILLA VS. KONG and GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE, director Adam Wingard has returned to the territory of YOU’RE NEXT and THE GUEST – horror/action/thriller hybrids where he doesn’t have as much money but can kinda do what he wants. This time he’s armed with that blockbuster experience and a bigger small budget (three times as much as THE GUEST) courtesy of A24, so he and his long time writer Simon Barrett (FRANKENFISH) had a chance to really let ‘er rip. I thought. Maybe next time.
I hope other people will get more out of it than I did. It has many of the elements for a movie I could love. Adria Arjona (TRIPLE FRONTIER, 6 UNDERGROUND, MORBIUS, HIT MAN, but mainly Bix from Andor) is very charismatic as Celeste, a cynical war vet who purposely isolates herself in a desert town, living in and managing a trailer park, her only loves in the world the daughter she has partial custody of and the illegal stockpile of guns in the cabinet. She’s not ready when her more responsible ex (Jacob Scipio, WITHOUT REMORSE) drops off young Daisy (Blake Kennedy) on an unscheduled weekend. She missed the text about it because she was out shooting jack o’lanterns. So compared to everyone else she is pretty ready for the other unexpected guests, the rampaging super soldiers who escape from a nearby secret military site and start killing everybody. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adam Wingard, Adria Arjona, Dan Stevens, Drew Starkey, Eric Wareheim, Jacob Scipio, Michael Biehn, Rebecca Hall, Reginald VelJohnson, Simon Barrett, super soldiers
Posted in Reviews, Action, Horror, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 9 Comments »
Thursday, August 27th, 2026
TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA is the third movie from writer/director Jane Schoenbrun. I haven’t seen WE’RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD’S FAIR (2021), but I did see I SAW THE TV GLOW (2024), which was released by A24 to great acclaim and adulation.
I confess I didn’t get that one. Didn’t even feel qualified to review it. I love its look, and I was impressed by its creation of a ‘90s tv show called The Pink Opaque that its characters are obsessed with. It’s like the show Videodrome would make in response to the popularity of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But I struggled with watching Justice Smith, who was so charismatic on The Get Down, play such a charmless, passive lead. I’ve read that’s because it’s a trans allegory and the character is repressed, and that’s another thing: there is no way on earth that I would know this was a trans allegory without reading about it. It’s interesting to read about, and it’s a movie that means so much to so many (including plenty of cis people I know), but I simply can’t decode it. I can appreciate the vibes, but in that case it wasn’t enough.
CAMP MIASMA is another trans allegory, but it’s more on my frequency. Maybe some of the very specialized things it’s about are also more universal, or maybe it’s just that it’s funnier. But it sure doesn’t hurt that it’s about slasher movies. Up and coming young indie director Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder, Hacks) has been hired to reboot a long-running, now moribund summer camp slasher series called CAMP MIASMA. The opening credits have a very detailed montage of franchise history, with 14 movies that mostly line up with the FRIDAY THE 13TH sequels, except there’s a Christmas one and an ARMY OF DARKNESS one and I think a HALLOWEEN 6 thorn cult reference. The most important inspiration, though, is SLEEPAWAY CAMP, with the killer’s psychosis attributed to being raised as both a boy and a girl. Kris says they hired her, a known lesbian, in a cynical attempt to launder the problematicness out of the i.p. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Dylan Baker, Gillian Anderson, Hannah Einbinder, Jack Haven, Jane Schoenbrun, Jasmin Savoy Brown, meta-slashers
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Horror | 18 Comments »
Friday, August 14th, 2026
I know we’re supposed to be cynical about i.p. and remakes and what not, but I am a child of Freddy, so to my mind franchising has always been one of the elements of horror. It doesn’t have to be the main one, it could be low on the totem pole, like beatboxing in hip hop. But it’s always gonna have some appeal to me when they do it right.
Is FACES OF DEATH even horror, though? I guess it is now. The 2026 film of that title is one of the more inventive brand refreshes, or whatever you want to call it. It’s not exactly a remake of the most notorious title in home video history, because the original purported to be a documentary, a sort of video essay/mondo film by pathologist Francis B. Gröss (actor Michael Carr). He narrates a collection of gruesome videos involving death: an alligator attack, a police shootout, a corpse washed up on a beach, an execution, people eating monkey brains, fun stuff like that.
Like any child in the ‘80s I heard legends of FACES OF DEATH and took everybody’s word for it that it was the real deal. Then in high school I took part in this group, not a debate club, mostly a social activity, but we got together to discuss/argue different topics, for example whether or not executions should be televised. It’s one of those insane questions people used to pretend was important to consider. Would it be a deterrent to criminals? Would it jolt society into rethinking capital punishment? And somebody said well, if we’re going to consider it then we should really understand what it means. So we watched the electric chair scene from FACES OF DEATH. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aaron Holliday, Barbie Ferreira, Charlie XcX, Dacre Montgomery, Daniel Goldhaber, Don Murphy, Isa Mazzei, Jermaine Fowler, Josie Totah, Kurt Yue, meta-slashers, slashers, sort of remakes
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 18 Comments »
Monday, July 13th, 2026
You know me – I Iove Sam Raimi, I love THE EVIL DEAD. Nobody will ever make an EVIL DEAD the same as Raimi did, but as far as horror franchising goes I think he’s got a good set up here. We have his original classic trilogy (1981-1993), which he was able to legacy-sequelize surprisingly well with a decades later tv series (2015-2018). That’s gonna be it for Bruce Campbell’s character Ash, and I think that’s fine. More than enough. Instead Raimi has turned to recruiting younger up-and-coming filmmakers to put their spin on movies in the same universe. They have some sort of Book of the Dead that summons some sort of Deadites, but they aren’t necessarily serialized, they’re mostly different incidents that stand on their own.
It didn’t seem like a popular opinion at the time, but I loved Fede Álvarez’s vicious remake EVIL DEAD (2013), and that has only solidified over the years. Lee Cronin’s EVIL DEAD RISE (2023) didn’t hit me as hard, but it’s a fun time and it’s nice to see somebody capture some of the EVIL DEAD spirit (or even try to define what that is, exactly) while telling a different story in a different setting (an apartment building).
That one having done well, producers Raimi, Campbell and Rob Tapert got the ball rolling for some more, and I’m very impressed by their choice of the French director Sébastien Vaniček. Like them I loved his debut INFESTED (2023), which is about a black market shoe salesman and rare animal enthusiast who causes his housing project to be overrun by deadly fast-growing spiders. It’s both smarter and more serious than that probly sounds, and it’s on Shudder.
Vaniček has reteamed with his INFESTED co-writer Florent Bernard for this one, and according to Fangoria they were given complete freedom. There are a few connections to the last installment, and mentions of things that could be setting up some future storyline, but for the most part this feels like its own standalone story. And thankfully RISES burned all the obvious callbacks, so Vaniček can just get down to business. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Erroll Shand, Florent Bernard, George Pullar, Hunter Doohan, Luciane Buchanan, Sam Raimi, Sebastien Vanicek, Souheila Yacoub, Tand Wright
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 35 Comments »
Tuesday, May 5th, 2026
THE CRAFT: LEGACY is, in my opinion, a remaquel. It technically takes place after the events of the 1996 film, with new characters, but the basic setup is intentionally a repeat, and the sequel part plays like it was meant to be a surprise at the very end. I believe that if they cut that scene and the subtitle then everyone would’ve accepted this as just a remake with some nice twists and changes in details.
Whatever you want to call it, it works best as a companion piece, a compare-and-contrast exercise, and there’s quite a bit that lines up. Once again we have a new girl moving to town with her single parent, she befriends the three outsider girls who are in need of a fourth person for their witch’s circle, they successfully cast some spells on their tormenters, including a mean jock boy who she causes to start following her around being nice to her. A small difference is that it’s not a Catholic school this time, so they get to be straight up goth without taking liberties with the school uniform. A bigger difference is that the newcomer’s family is central to the story. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Blumhouse, Cailee Spaeny, Charles Vandervaart, David Duchovny, Gideon Adlon, legacy sequel, Lovie Simone, Michelle Monaghan, Nicholas Galitzine, remaquel, witches, Zoe-Lister Jones, Zoey Luna
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 4 Comments »
Monday, May 4th, 2026
I saw THE CRAFT when it came out 30 years ago. I’m a little younger than the actors, so I was a little older than the characters, and thought I was above it, going to see it for a laugh. This is what they think teens think is cool, ha ha ha. But I was not as removed from that life as I imagined I was. I was practically the target audience, I just didn’t want to admit it.
Watching it now, of course, there’s an added layer of nostalgia: for when music sounded like that, even though that wasn’t the stuff I was listening to; for when I would definitely have had a crush on Nancy, even though she’s a psycho and Rochelle is way nicer and prettier; for when they made movies like this, which is code for when I was young and the horizon was widening instead of narrowing. The good old days. Obviously.
I know I’ve seen bits of it on cable over the years, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen it in full since the theater. It’s an interesting type of teen horror because it’s not a body count movie, and it doesn’t exactly have an antagonist. It’s timeless teenage girl material like the sisterhood of girls who don’t fit in at school, revenge against bullies and exploitative boys, etc., and then they add the supernatural into that. I guess you could say some of that about CARRIE, though, couldn’t you? So maybe it was nothing new. But in 1996 it felt a little different to not have a Freddy to worry about. We are the Freddys, mister. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrew Fleming, Breckin Meyer, Christine Taylor, Cliff De Young, Fairuza Balk, Helen Shaver, John Kapelos, Neve Campbell, Peter Filardi, Rachel True, Robin Tunney, Skeet Ulrich, witches
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 22 Comments »
Thursday, April 30th, 2026
APEX is a solid made-for-Netflix picture – nice looking, to-the-point, occasionally surprising, and a good showcase for its star, who happens to be one of my favorites. When I revisited ÆON FLUX recently I mentioned how ever since that movie I’ve thought of Charlize Theron as one of those rare actors who’s exactly as serious about the physical performance as the emotional, and excels at both. So, you know, she wins an Oscar for throwing herself into MONSTER and then when she does ATOMIC BLONDE she goes just as hard at fight training and stunt work as she did at portraying the inner life of a serial killer. Here she says you know what? I’m gonna learn how to climb rocks. I’m gonna climb so many rocks in this movie.
Not that that’s the entire topic. Her character Sasha enjoys extreme sports. In the opening she and her husband Tommy (the motherfuckin HULK Eric Bana!) are tandem climbing the Troll Wall in Norway. You know, climbing until they get tired, hanging a tent from the side at night, it’s fucking terrifying, who does that? Sasha and Tommy, that’s who. Though Tommy is getting wary that maybe he’s past his prime. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Australia, Baltasar Kormakur, Charlize Theron, Eric Bana, Jeremy Robbins, Taron Egerton
Posted in Reviews, Action, Horror, Thriller | 13 Comments »
Thursday, April 23rd, 2026
NIGHT PATROL is a movie released by Shudder (first in theaters, now on their service) that has a promising premise. It’s kinda like TRAINING DAY but the corrupt cops are also vampires. In fact, I didn’t catch it until reading the credits but the main character’s name is “Ethan Hawkins.” The tagline is “Defang the police.” That’s good. I like that.
It has a cool, grainy look to it (cinematographer: Benjamin Kitchens) and an ominous, synthy score by Pepijn Caudron (CAMINO). It even has David S. Goyer’s name in the credits as a producer, so there is a distant connection to the greatest vampire movie that ever has been or will be made. So I was ready for this thing to really rip. And then it didn’t really, and I went on with my life, but here’s my review.
Hawkins (Justin Long, still not thought of as a horror guy even though he’s in JEEPERS CREEPERS, DRAG ME TO HELL, TUSK, BARBARIAN and COYOTES) is an LAPD officer who’s about to join the titular gang-like police task force. For the initiation they make him shoot a young Piru Blood named Primo (Zuri Reed, 2 episodes of The Get Down). At the time she’s with a guy named Wazi (RJ Cyler, POWER RANGERS, THE HARDER THEY FALL), who manages to escape. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: C.M. Punk, David S. Goyer, Dermot Mulroney, Flying Lotus, Freddie Gibbs, Jermaine Fowler, Justin Long, Nick Gillie, Nicki Micheaux, RJ Cyler, Shudder, vampires, YG, Zuri Reed
Posted in Reviews, Action, Horror | 4 Comments »
