Bring Her Back
BRING HER BACK is this year’s release from Danny and Michael Philippou, the Australian twins “known for their horror comedy YouTube videos” according to Wikipedia, but I know them for the 2023 ghost movie TALK TO ME, which I enjoyed. The brothers both direct while Danny writes with Bill Hinzman (no, not the cemetery zombie from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD – I looked it up, and he died in 2012). This is another impressive Philippou Brothers joint, more serious than the last, not much humor this time, but just the right level of bleakness for me.
It’s about a half brother and sister who are having a rough go of it. Piper (newcomer Sora Wong) is blind, but tries to go without her cane to fit in at school, which doesn’t work. Andy (Billy Barratt, “Street urchin,” MARY POPPINS RETURNS) is older, seems to have been a mess since the death of their mother, but he’s very loving and protective of Piper. Then they come home and find their dad dead in the shower. This may be a dumb thing to note but I think it’s important that he’s just laying there with his junk visible, because for all our lives most movies have lived in a world designed to avoid the sight of dicks. Seeing one here adds a blunt reality that makes the death more matter of fact, and more shocking. (read the rest of this shit…)
Black Phone 2
BLACK PHONE 2 is an interesting sequel, and not just because they dropped the ‘THE’ and streamlined the title, FAST & FURIOUS style. It’s also because it follows the somewhat forgotten slasher sequel tradition of having to invent some new mythology to continue a story that seemed pretty damn wrapped up last time. The first movie (based on a short story by Joe Hill) used the supernatural elements of ghosts and psychic dreams, but its villain was just a plain old mortal human who kidnaps kids in a particular suburb of Denver. And then he got killed. Can’t really redo that, so what they came up with feels fresh.
The protagonist of the first one was Finney (Mason Thames, HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON live action version), who gets abducted and locked in a basement by the Grabber (Ethan Hawke, EXPLORERS), and the titular telecommunications device allows him to speak to the ghosts of previous victims, so they pool what they know about the place their in and the Grabber’s activities, and together conceive an escape plan. Meanwhile his younger sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw, AMERICAN SNIPER) is at home surviving their abusive alcoholic father (Jeremy Davies, DARK HARVEST) and having psychic dreams with clues that help her locate Finney.
For the sequel Finney is back, older and tougher, having taken over for the bullies who used to beat the shit out of him at school, and also partaking in quite a bit of weed. Thames has grown into such an authentic 1982 rocker dude face that I was a little thrown off by him wearing a Peter Gabriel t-shirt, but that’s okay. Finney avoids categorization. (read the rest of this shit…)
The Hitcher (2007)
THE HITCHER (2007) is a Platinum Dunes remake I had no interest in at the time. Robert Harmon’s 1986 cult classic obviously didn’t require a remake, and I didn’t trust those guys to do one. Also almost everybody said it was terrible. I do know of an exception – Jordan Crucchiola and Sam Wineman used to rave about it on their podcast Aughtsterion, and they got it to #1 on the “’00 Slashers” episode of Screen Drafts. They’re younger and much more attached to that era of horror than me, but their enthusiasm made me curious.
And I think they’re right! There’s a good chance I wouldn’t have liked it back then, when I had a grudge against Michael Bay productions and the original was more fresh on my mind. It’s certainly not a replacement, and some of it might’ve been lessened if I remembered the original better. But viewed on its own, as 2007 studio horror, it’s pretty impressive – a vicious 84 minute head on collision of a movie. (read the rest of this shit…)
I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)
I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER (2025) is pretty much what I was hoping for: a traditional/formulaic slasher movie, sometimes slightly more clever than expected, sometimes dumb enough to get some laughs. It has a solid cast of fresh faces, just the right amount of “legacy sequel” characters (more than cameos, less than leads), and a couple fun surprises that I guess people didn’t care enough about to spoil for me even though I missed this in theaters. Thank you! I had a good time watching it at home with friends and a box of Jason Voorhees sponsored cider.
Like HALLOWEEN and SCREAM and almost TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE before it this is not a remake but a sequel that inexplicably has the same title as the original. It does feature a new group of young people who do a new cover up of a new car accident, but when they receive a note saying “I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER” and start getting killed by somebody dressed as a fisherman holding a hook they recognize this as something that happened before and they go to original main characters Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt, CAN’T HARDLY WAIT) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr., WING COMMANDER) for advice.
In the trailer this seemed like a ridiculous concept – what advice could they really give? (Unless it’s “Turn yourself in.”) There’s definitely a certain amount of DIE HARD 2 “How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?” knowing absurdity at play. But the idea is that the fishing town of Southport, North Carolina has been gentrified and turned into a highly profitable resort town, and in the process information about the 1997 murders was scrubbed from the internet to protect their reputation. So trying to learn more about the crimes is the group’s only lead for figuring out who would by copying them now. Okay, I’ll go with it. (read the rest of this shit…)
One Battle After Another
(there will be spoilers)
I was pretty sure I’d like Paul Thomas Anderson’s ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, but I was surprised to walk out feeling it was the movie of the year. That’s not only because it speaks so deeply to our exact moment of political insanity, but because it’s such an exhilarating viewing experience – confident, masterful filmmaking, very effective as a thriller, but also extremely funny, absurd and original. It’s possibly Anderson’s most traditionally entertaining movie but it doesn’t feel in any way watered down or compromised.
I saw it in bona fide IMAX, where its Vista Vision format fills the entire screen, so the anxiety-inducing score by Johnny Greenwood rumbles in your jaw as you stare at a scraggly, sweaty, 37-foot-tall Leonardo DiCaprio face fretting and scowling. Then sometimes it switches to a taller version of a Sergio-Leone-type-shot where two tiny characters stand apart on opposite sides of the screen. That’s the full range of cinema right there.
The credits say this was inspired by (not adapted from) the book Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. I was surprised when I learned that character names like Perfidia Beverly Hills, Virgil Throckmorton and Junglepussy didn’t come from the book. These little heightened details spike a mostly naturalistic feeling world with exaggeration and draw attention to the authentic ridiculousness of our world. Sometimes that feels more real than if it was realistic. (read the rest of this shit…)
Significant Other
When I was writing about VILLAINS the other day I looked up its writing/directing team of Dan Berk & Robert Olsen, and realized I’d already seen 3/5 of their filmography (including BODY and STAKE LAND II). I’ve been meaning to get to their latest, NOVOCAINE, but I’m in horror mode this month, so I went for the other one remaining: SIGNIFICANT OTHER (2022). This one went straight to Paramount+ which, like so many parts of our society today, is now owned by a fascist billionaire currently buying up and destroying our institutions to try to make life shittier for everybody. So I understand if you want nothing to do with that service. But as far as the movie itself this is a good one, I think my favorite by this team.
It’s another one about a young couple, the lady once again played by Maika Monroe (INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE), but it’s more like her usual downbeat characters, and it’s a much more serious movie. She plays Ruth, whose boyfriend Harry (Jake Lacy, CAROL, BEING THE RICARDOS) has convinced her to go on a hiking trip through a forest somewhere in Oregon. He doesn’t seem like a horrible monster or anything, but tends to dance around the line between charming and condescending, and he doesn’t seem very sensitive about how nervous she is. She’s a surfer girl, she didn’t grow up camping like he did, and she suffers from panic attacks. She intellectually understands that yes, going way out into nature with him should be safe, but that doesn’t mean she’s gonna be all relaxed about it. You gotta give her some leeway and understanding, dude. Jesus. (read the rest of this shit…)
Villains
VILLAINS is a 2019 indie movie I’ve wondered about for a while. It uses the reliable formula “somebody tries to rob a house and discovers a horrific thing going on there.” Other ones that come to mind are THE COLLECTOR, LIVID and DON’T BREATHE. This is a much jokier take on the format than any of those, more of a dark comedy than anything, but I’d say it’s at least horror adjacent. There are maniacs doing something crazy, it takes death seriously, it stars two perhaps underrecognized greats of contemporary horror… yeah, I’ll count it as horror.
It’s about a couple of addled deadbeats named Mickey (Pennywise/Orlok/The Crow himself Bill Skarsgård) and Jules (Maika Monroe, THE GUEST, IT FOLLOWS, WATCHER, LONGLEGS) who clumsily rob their last gas station, intending to use the money to move to Florida and start a new life selling seashells. Trouble is they run out of gas on a remote, wooded road. They are not criminal masterminds.
On foot they find a large, isolated house where no one seems to be home. They break in, hoping to steal the car in the garage or come up with some other escape plan. But they face a moral dilemma when they find a young silent girl (Blake Baumgartner, MADELINE’S MADELINE) chained up in the dark basement. (read the rest of this shit…)
The Smashing Machine (2025)
THE SMASHING MACHINE (2025) is one of those movies that comes along every once in a while that’s so geared toward my niche interests that it seems like a prank. How the fuck is there a movie where
1) The Rock finally does what I’ve been saying he should do for years and chooses a movie based on the director, artistic merit and acting challenge rather than its potential to be the highest grossing, most universally seen and least memorable generic middlebrow cinematic porridge ever squirted out of a tube
that happens to be
2) a remake of an obscure and now impossible to find sports documentary I watched and became obsessed with because it was from the director of the greatest DTV movie of all time?
If I was stupid and dumb instead of savvy and wise this would be one of those “this proves life is a simulation” moments for me. The new version is written and directed by Benny Safdie (actor from HAPPY GILMORE 2 who directed GOOD TIME and UNCUT GEMS) and released as a hip art movie by A24. Original director John Hyams is credited as a consulting producer, and man I hope he got paid because this is entirely built on his movie. (read the rest of this shit…)
Hell of a Summer / Clown in a Cornfield
HELL OF A SUMMER (2023) is a horror comedy playing off of the format of FRIDAY THE 13TH and other summer camp slashers. It’s not like a Jason movie, it’s based on the whodunit slasher model that was popular in the late ’90s, but that puts it in line with the first FRIDAY THE 13TH and SLEEPAWAY CAMP movies, so I’ll allow it. Anyway I have an interest in the topic, so I decided to see it even though it’s written and directed by two of the kids from GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE. Nothing against Billy Bryk and Finn Wolfhard, but there were already two SCREAM movies before they were born, so the chances that their commentary on the genre was gonna offend my old school slasher sensibilities seemed high. I had to turn off THE FINAL GIRLS for horror nerd reasons and that’s a well regarded movie. I’m sensitive.
But I’m okay with this one. It’s pretty funny.
Like many of the FRIDAYs it’s about the counselors gathering and getting into some shit before any kids get there. We know from a fireside prologue that the owners of Camp Pineway, John (Adam Pally, ASSASSINATION OF A HIGH SCHOOL PRESIDENT) and Kathy (Rosebud Baker, TURNABOUT) will be permanently absent thanks to some psycho in a cheap devil mask. I like this intro because the couple have a really natural chemistry, making fun of and laughing with each other, really humanizing them in the brief time before they’re slasher fodder. Good adults in a slasher movie. It immediately gave me more faith in the youths behind the camera. (read the rest of this shit…)
Play Dirty
Man, this new straight-to-Amazon-Prime movie PLAY DIRTY is some kind of monkey’s paw shit for me. It’s the great Shane Black (THE NICE GUYS) writing and directing for the first time in seven years, returning to crime movies for the first time in nine years, and it’s based on my favorite crime series ever, Richard Stark’s Parker books. The catch is that most of what I want from a Shane Black movie (such as the quippy dialogue) I definitely do not want in a Parker adaptation, and they originally had Robert Downey, Jr. cast in the role, which seemed like a problem. Could he really seem intimidating enough to be Parker, and more importantly would he even know how to shut the fuck up with his little smart ass comments? I didn’t think he would.
But I wish I could’ve found out, because Downey got replaced with Mark Wahlberg (PLANET OF THE APES), also a poor fit but in a less intriguing way. Downey is a totally different type than the character, while Wahlberg sorta aspires to being the right type, he just doesn’t have enough of it. I know people dislike him now due to past crimes, dumbass interviews and lowered quality standards, but I’m too old to entirely let go – I haven’t forgotten that exciting alchemy of the most uncool pop rapper of the ‘90s winning us over with a great performance in BOOGIE NIGHTS, nor have I forsaken THE BIG HIT, THREE KINGS, I HEART HUCKABEES, THE DEPARTED, THE OTHER GUYS, THE FIGHTER, etc. So it’s not Marky Markophobia when I say he doesn’t seem believably cunning enough, or intimidating enough. The other characters have to treat him as if he is, but I don’t quite buy it. I don’t feel it. I don’t feel the vibrations. (read the rest of this shit…)
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