"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Marshmallow

MARSHMALLOW (2025) is a well made summer camp horror movie that manages the impressive feat of not really seeming like a riff on FRIDAY THE 13TH, SLEEPAWAY CAMP or THE BURNING (or for that matter CHEERLEADER CAMP, MADMAN, STAGE FRIGHT, CUB, or HELL OF A SUMMER). It does this in part by taking the kids, the parents and (to a lesser extent) the counselors seriously as characters and giving them relatable emotions before most of the horror movie stuff kicks in.

Morgan (Kue Lawrence, DEATHCEMBER, SKETCH) is a shy kid cursed with a horrendous bowl cut. In the opening scene he timidly approaches some taller kids who are aggressively passing a basketball around and asks if he can join them. They pretty much tell him to eat shit and run away while laughing at him. Morgan doesn’t notice this, but his grandpa (Corbin Bernsen, THE DENTIST) is sitting across the street witnessing the whole thing. So we feel both the pain of the kid and of the adult who’s gotta be torn up about what he’s seeing but can’t really intervene without humiliating the kid further. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 20th, 2026 | 2 Comments »

Bugonia

BUGONIA is the 2025 movie from director Yorgos Lanthimos, who just did POOR THINGS in 2023 and then KINDS OF KINDNESS in 2024. I can’t even keep up with the guy! This one’s a little different because it’s a remake of the 2003 South Korean film SAVE THE GREEN PLANET!. By all accounts it’s great, but I still haven’t seen it, so calculate that in if you’re trying to figure out how much you’ll like this.

I assumed it was a situation like Spike Lee’s OLDBOY where producers were trying to do the English language version for some reason and found an auteur to do it, but it turns out this would’ve been original director Jang Joon-hwan remaking his own movie if he hadn’t gotten sick and handed the reins (and the script by Will Tracy [THE MENU, former editor in chief of The Onion]) over to Lanthimos. Jang is still an executive producer, along with Ari Aster and others.

Nevertheless it feels very Lanthimos, and reunites him with Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, plus his team of cinematographer Robbie Ryan, editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis, composer Jerskin Fendrix and production designer James Price. I wouldn’t consider it a work-for-hire. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 19th, 2026 | 5 Comments »

Nature Calls

Last month I got interested in the indie writer/director Todd Rohal, and reviewed three of his movies: THE GUATEMALAN HANDSHAKE, THE CATECHISM CATACLYSM, and of course his latest, FUCK MY SON!. Now I watched another one.

Of the Rohal joints I’ve seen so far, NATURE CALLS (2012) is the closest to a normal, mainstream comedy. It stars well known comedians/funny actors, it’s full of many broad, silly jokes, its third act shift into craziness overdrive is tame compared to Rohal’s other films. But not in a bad way. It’s a very funny movie with plenty of the director’s personality evident, which is kind of a relief because jesus christ man look at this DVD cover:


I don’t think Rohal is trying to be subversive with this one, but it kinda does the trick just by looking like disposable crap but having some bluntly accurate social satire and a strange tone that’s pretty much a family movie but with death and boobs and cursing. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 15th, 2026 | 1 Comment »

It Was Just an Accident

IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT is last year’s Palme d’Or winning film by Iranian writer/director Jafar Panahi (THE WHITE BALLOON, OFFSIDE). It’s a wrenching drama about ordinary people who were once political prisoners and suddenly stumble across a chance for some payback.

It does start with an accident, when a man (Ebrahim Azizi) driving with his wife (Afssaneh Najmabadi) and kid (Delnaz Najafi) at night hits one of the many stray dogs that roam the streets, damaging his car. He stops at a garage where one of the mechanics, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri, NO BEARS), perks up at the sound of his squeaking prosthetic leg. He clearly recognizes him.

The next day Vahid follows the guy. Watches him. It’s very tense. He’s circling around in his car. He has a shovel. He hits him with it. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 14th, 2026 | 2 Comments »

Chain Reactions

I think I mentioned this once a long time ago, but Tobe Hooper’s THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE is one of my favorite movies, and one of the great cinematic obsessions of my life. So I’m happy to say that the recent documentary about the movie, CHAIN REACTIONS, is a good one.

It’s not about the making of the movie. For that I recommend Brad Shellady’s THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: A FAMILY PORTRAIT (1988), which is an oral history through interviews with the actors who played the family members. This one is more of a video essay, speaking to five people who had nothing to do with the movie – a comedian, two filmmakers, a critic and a novelist. (Specifically it’s Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King and Karyn Kusama.) I think they have some good insights, but what made this really work for me is the specific ways director Alexandre O. Philippe (MEMORY: THE ORIGINS OF ALIEN, LYNCH/OZ) visually weaves together the interviews with different experiences of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and horror films as a whole, while avoiding pretty much all of the annoying cliches of modern fan documentaries. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 13th, 2026 | 2 Comments »

Fremont

FREMONT (2023) is an odd, dry little indie film I came across. I guess if forced I’d have to classify it as a drama, just so nobody gets mad at me for it not being a laugh riot. But it’s not really heavy, kind of a strange undertone of sad and funny, which is why I liked it.

Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) is an Afghan refugee in Fremont, California. She lives in the same building as some other Afghans, including one (Timur Nusratty) who won’t even acknowledge her. She says it’s because she “worked with the enemy” by being a translator for the U.S. Army. She did that for a visa, for a chance to get the fuck out of there, to get anywhere else. Not necessarily here.

She commutes to San Francisco to work at a small fortune cookie factory. “I thought it would be lovely to see Chinese people sometimes,” she explains. The process of how the cookies are made is also a pretty lovely thing to see in a movie. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 12th, 2026 | 3 Comments »

Johnny Hamlet

Like I said in my review of HAMNET yesterday, I struggle with understanding the Shakespeare works. That movie was historical fiction depicting the play Hamlet as Shakespeare’s weird way of processing the death of his son Hamnet. Although I kinda liked the movie I felt like I didn’t have the background to properly appreciate it, so I am correcting that by watching JOHNNY HAMLET, a 1968 spaghetti western version of the Hamlet story directed by Enzo G. Castellari (THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS) and written by Sergio Corbucci (DJANGO).

We’ve already established that I’m no expert on the subject, but this was way more upfront about being Hamlet than I expected. The Italian title wasn’t even Hamlet related, it was Quella sporca storia nel West (That Dirty Story in the West), but the movie opens with Johnny Hamilton (Andrea Giordana, THE DIRTY OUTLAWS) stained with blood, standing in an eerily foggy cave, slowly approaching a mysterious caped figure, calling him “father.”

(read the rest of this shit…)

January 8th, 2026 | 4 Comments »

Hamnet

Look, I’m not one of those people who brags about their ignorance like it’s some badge of working class authenticity. I’m mostly a smart guy, and would love to be smarter. But I’m honestly admitting here that I’m not all that qualified for the works of William Shakespeare. I’ve enjoyed some of the adaptations, mostly the more stylistically adventurous ones like TITUS or ROMEO + JULIET or even THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH. But the language (beautiful as it may be) is a real obstacle for me. I always struggle with following what anyone is talking about, and you mostly gotta know what they’re talking about to know what’s happening.

Even the ones I can get a grip on I barely retain memory of afterwards. Sometimes I can’t even remember if it’s Macbeth or Hamlet that has the Ghost Dad. I really have to go into my brain and do the following math: oh yeah, in THE NORTHMAN his name is Amleth, so that’s inspired by the same story that Hamlet is inspired by, so Hamlet is the one where his uncle killed his dad. And that was also the one that STRANGE BREW was riffing on and that had the Ghost Dad. Okay, got it. I know all about Hamlet.

(read the rest of this shit…)

January 7th, 2026 | 15 Comments »

“Don’t you know who I am!? I wrote the essay for the UNDER SIEGE 4K from Arrow!”

If you are the type of person who would buy UNDER SIEGE in its fancy new Arrow limited edition 4K or blu-ray I recommend checking out the essay in the booklet. It might be by somebody you know.

I went many years without ever achieving the status of “guy who writes liner notes for home video releases,” but now I have a few notches on my belt. The first was for a region B release of DOBERMANN, then I did NAVY SEALS for Vinegar Syndrome. UNDER SIEGE is the biggest movie I’ve done and also the first time I was the obvious choice. They said they found out about me while researching the movie. I hope they remember me if they do DARK TERRITORY!

I have two other ones coming up from other labels, but they’re not announced yet. One is an unknown no-budget movie I can’t wait to tell everybody about, and the other one I almost won’t believe until I see the disc with my own eyes, and then I’ll be carrying it around like Tom Cruise showing everybody his I.D. in EYES WIDE SHUT. Long after I’m in the ground my skeleton will still be bragging about it. But I have no more deadlines at the moment so I am focused on reviewing the good shit for you here. Happy 2026, despite everything!

January 6th, 2026 | 37 Comments »

Afterburn

AFTERBURN is one of the two post-apocalyptic Dave Bautista vehicles that played theaters in 2025, but it’s the one I missed. I saw IN THE LOST LANDS, which is more of a stylized fantasy movie, while this is more like a straight ahead lower budget action movie done, apparently, on a mid-budget. Huge compared to the DTV stuff I watch (including FINAL SCORE starring Bautista), of course, but in a similar spirit. It’s out on physical media today and I was happy to catch up with it.

It’s set six years after solar flares devastated much of the earth and destroyed the infrastructure so that electricity doesn’t entirely work (but some of it does? I’m unclear). Bautista’s character Jake was a deep sea treasure hunter who now takes jobs going into dangerous territory to find rare objects for warlords like August (Samuel L. Jackson, THE RETURN OF SUPERFLY). He’s good with bombs and puzzles, and in the opening he’s on a mission that involves pretty cool video game style problem solving to get a Stradivarius out of a secret vault. He doesn’t personally care about that type of rich people shit – the rare item he brings home for himself is a Public Enemy record. It’s late Public Enemy (“How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People?,” 2007) and it sounds very tinny on his phonograph, but it speaks well of his tastes. As with IN THE LOST LANDS, I also appreciate knowing a guy has BLADE RUNNER and Basquiat neck tattoos in the future. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 6th, 2026 | 7 Comments »

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