Wolf Man (2025)
WOLF MAN is an event not just because it’s a new wolf man but because it’s the fourth movie directed by Leigh Whannell, the last two being UPGRADE and THE INVISIBLE MAN. As with the latter, he’s working with Blumhouse to do a mid-budget modern take on one of the classic monsters (this time co-writing with his wife Corbett Tuck).
His version takes place in a mountainous part of Oregon where very few people live. In 1995, a hiker disappears there, and the locals claim to have spotted him suffering from some kind of disease. (I like that this turns him into a local legend like the Wild Man of the Navidad or the North Pond hermit.)
Grady Lovell (Sam Jaeger, LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN) is a serious hunter, possibly survivalist, definitely very intense, living off the grid in a little cabin in the woods. He brings his son Blake (Zac Chandler) hunting and is always yelling at him to pay attention to his lessons about how dangerous the world is and shit. They get separated chasing a deer and Blake gets a glimpse of… well, you know. They end up hiding in a deer blind listening to an unseen beast tearing up their deer. That night Blake hears his dad talking to someone on the CB about what he saw. He told his kid it was a bear, but he knows it was something else. Or maybe he’s crazy. That would be fair to assume. (read the rest of this shit…)
Red Rooms
I watched the 2023 Canadian film RED ROOMS (Les chambres rouges) on Shudder, but come to think of it it’s not exactly a horror movie. It’s kind of more harsh than that. It’ an extremely unsettling character drama, maybe a thriller, about the trial of a man accused of horrific child murders live on webcam. We thankfully don’t have to see any of the violence, but the images created in our mind are worse, described with a true crime bluntness rather than genre flair. I would not say this is a fun movie.
It takes its sweet time rolling out what it will be about, or even what form it will take. One of the first scenes is a long unbroken shot of the judge’s introduction and the opening statements from both sides. It goes on long enough that I genuinely started to think the whole movie would be the trial – a new gimmicky format to put alongside mockumentary, found footage and screen time. A story told through testimony.
That’s not actually what it is, and even before it breaks we can see that the focus is on one of the court room observers, Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy, BOOST). The camera rotates around but keeps coming back to her reactions, and what she’s looking at in the room. Later we learn that she sleeps on the street every morning to get a good place in line, like it’s the first showing of THE PHANTOM MENACE, or a Taylor Swift concert. When reporters try to interview her leaving she shoos them away, though another observer, Clémentine (Laurie Babin, THE LITTLE GIRL WHO WAS TOO FOND OF MATCHES) is happy to tell them about all the conspiracies and injustices against poor Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, LAND OF THE DEAD), who has kind eyes, she says. (To me he looks like a creep, but I only know him in the context of wearing an orange jumpsuit behind plexiglass examining his fingernails while people accuse him of atrocities.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Flow
FLOW (Straume) is another one of those animated features I ask for sometimes, the type that respects the medium enough to do something one-of-a-kind instead of just making up some cartoon guys and grafting them onto one of the handful of available formulas. This one is from Latvia but there’s no dubbed vs. subtitled issue because (hey, kinda like ROBOT DREAMS) it has no dialogue. It’s about a cat and some other animals wandering around, they are only anthropomorphized in the sense that they eventually pick up some unlikely talents like controlling the rudder of a boat. They’re 3-D computer animated in realistic settings but their designs are a bit stylized, lo-res almost. A style that looks great on a budget.
It follows a cat who’s out in a forest when he sees a pack of dogs catching, then fighting over, a fish. He makes the short-sighted choice to take the fish and run off, so he gets chased. There is fleeing and hiding, he seems to get away, and then the dogs are charging at him… past him. Oh shit, what are they running from?
Well, it’s a deer stampede. This poor cat almost gets Mufasa’d, it’s terrifying. And what are the deer running from? Turns out to be a tsunami. It’s kind of a disaster movie, I guess – an ensemble of animals getting thrown together in a situation and trying to survive.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Apartment 7A
I checked around, and unless somebody’s lying to me it seems nobody asked for there to be a straight-to-Paramount+ prequel to ROSEMARY’S BABY. But it’s okay – nobody asked for a prequel to THE OMEN, they did one anyway, and it was quite good. Sometimes there is still decency in the world, and sometimes in religious-themed horror late-prequels as well.
APARTMENT 7A is directed by Natalie Erika James (RELIC), screen story by Skylar James, screenplay by Natalie Erika James & Christian White and Skylar James, and it’s technically a Platinum Dunes production because they tried to do a remake in 2008 but honorably bowed out when they couldn’t come up with a good concept. Eventually this new batch came up with the idea of telling the story of Terry Gionoffrio (Julia Garner, SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR), the young neighbor Rosemary talked to in the laundry room. You may remember that Terry later experienced a major, uh… event, portending bad things for Rosemary (and gaining her a new necklace). (read the rest of this shit…)
Better Man
BETTER MAN is a musical biopic of Robbie Williams that came out last week, but according to Slash Film it’s already “the first big box office bomb of 2025,” “a certifiable, massive flop” and “at serious risk of becoming one of the biggest bombs of all time.” There are some theories that it could be because people in North America don’t know who Robbie Williams is, but I would argue that also maybe they don’t know why he’s portrayed in the movie by a realistic CG chimp. Or at least that’s one thing I wonder, and I’ve seen the movie (at a preview screening with friends who are fans and said it might be because he has a song called “Me and My Monkey”?)
I was vaguely aware of the human version of Williams – he’s a British pop singer who in 2000 did the song “Rock DJ,” which I think is a good, catchy song even though I don’t approve of the rapping part, if that’s what it’s supposed to be. I had forgotten this but it had a really good video where he’s performing in a club, and slowly strips off all his clothes, then rips off his skin, then muscle, until he’s a skeleton. He’s throwing bloody chunks of himself-meat into the crowd and women are pretty excited about it. Now that I’ve seen the movie I know he was a guy from a boy band, so I can put together that that must’ve been the point when he goes solo and does something provocative to make us see him in a different light, like when Justin Timberlake did that Francis-Lawrence-directed “Cry Me a River” video where he’s a creeper. (read the rest of this shit…)
Speak No Evil (2024 remake)
The original 2022 Danish film SPEAK NO EVIL is such a merciless wringer of discomfort that late in the movie I still wasn’t sure if it would end up being a horror movie, and it didn’t matter. In fact, it’s almost a relief when things get dangerous because at least it ends the relentless social torture.
It’s about a couple with a young kid who meet another couple with a young kid while on vacation, they have some laughs together and later, back at home, one couple gets a letter from the other inviting them to come visit. They know it’s kinda crazy because they barely know them, but they decide to be spontaneous for once. (read the rest of this shit…)
The Thicket
THE THICKET is a new western that played a few theaters last year and now is on Tubi (who have their name on the credits). I was aware of it because it’s based on a book by Joe R. Lansdale – I don’t know the book, but his name will usually draw my attention. That said, I’m always wary of an indie western in this day and age. Maybe I’m generalizing, but most of them I’ve come across just don’t cut it. I put this one on, though, and I immediately thought oh shit, this is a real movie.
Honestly I was shocked how beautiful this thing looks. It’s a snowy one, shot on location in Calgary, with a real eye for those times when there’s a little sun out, reflecting on skin, bringing a little color, not just white and grey. Or sun beams floating down between tree branches, lightly powdering the frame with white. Credit is due to cinematographer Guillermo Garza, who seems to have gotten really good at his craft on many music videos and at least one Adidas commercial.
Here’s a frame I grabbed. The poor guy’s afraid he’s gonna get shot and I’m marveling at the lighting. But that’s the movies.
Robot Dreams
ROBOT DREAMS is a lovely and lyrical 2023 animated film from Spain. It has no dialogue, but English signage because it’s set in New York City. It’s some time in the ‘80s and there are no humans, only animals living like humans (in apartments, wearing clothes, having jobs). Nothing too deep, just a cartooning conceit we can easily accept, with the occasional joke like when the main character Dog is reading Pet Sematary and we have to wonder what the hell that book is in this world. The animals seem to have achieved all the same things as human civilization: the Twin Towers, pizza delivery, ALF, “September” by Earth, Wind & Fire, you name it.
Dog lives alone in an apartment in the East Village. He’s lonely and bored of playing Pong by himself and sees an ad on late night TV about ordering a robot friend. It arrives in the mail and he builds it and they walk around holding hands and having a great time together all summer. Robot is very friendly and open to learning – he waves back at a baby, flips off back at some punk rockers, does his best to join in. (read the rest of this shit…)
Transformers One
After seeing THE WILD ROBOT I decided to bite the bullet and watch 2024’s other automaton-related animated feature, TRANSFORMERS ONE, the first theatrical Transformers cartoon since 1986’s seminal-ish THE TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE.
It may seem odd that I didn’t want to see this in the theater, because here are the Transformers movies I did bother to see on the big screen, often in 3D and/or IMAX: TRANSFORMERS, TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN, TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON, TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION, TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT, BUMBLEBEE and TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS. That’s right, all seven of the live action ones, even though only the next to last one I consider to be Actually A Good Movie. The rest I mostly just find fascinatingly crazy, but I’ve learned to enjoy watching them. I started as their enemy, but later joined them, like Skyfire. Like so many others of my generation I had the Transformers cartoon and toys imprinted on my brain as a child, and there is some residual lure to the concept in there, even if I don’t hold it sacred. (read the rest of this shit…)
Death Machine
If Stephen Norrington had only ever been a special effects guy he still would’ve made a mark. He worked under Dick Smith, Rick Baker, Stan Winston and Jim Henson. He did the Grand High Witch makeup in THE WITCHES, and designed creatures for Jim Henson’s The Storyteller. He played the Gump in RETURN TO OZ. He helped make the aliens in ALIENS and ALIEN 3, the robot in HARDWARE, the creature in SPLIT SECOND. I only know about him, though, because he later directed four movies, one of which was motherfuckin BLADE.
But the first one was DEATH MACHINE (1994), a low budget killer robot movie I watched once about a quarter of a century ago when I found out it was by the guy who did BLADE. I think I thought it was okay, but I retained no details in my memory, so now I have returned to it via the fancy-ass special edition blu-ray from Kino Lorber. I watched the director’s cut (which is 106 minutes, as opposed to the 100 minute U.S. version or 122 minute foreign version), which may or may not have been why it went over a little better this time. I don’t think it’s a great movie, but it’s an interesting one with a cool robot puppet, a cyberpunk world and a hell of a look for a ‘90s b-movie that went straight to video. Cinematographer John de Borman is the guy who did THE PASSION OF DARKLY NOON and THE FULL MONTY, but from the look of it I’d have assumed he was a music video guy, somebody that would’ve worked with the Scott Brothers or Russell Mulcahy or even David Fincher.
(read the rest of this shit…)
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