STREET FIGHTER (2026) is the new film based on the Street Fighter video game franchise. I have less of an affinity for Street Fighter than Mortal Kombat since it’s not one of the few games I’ve played, but come on. Larger-than-life characters who live to engage in martial arts competitions, sometimes with cartoonish powers? Obviously it piques my interest. Maybe I’m even the prime audience for this movie since I’m Interested In This Sort of Shit (IiTSoS) but with no preconceived notions of how these characters or concepts need to be adapted. And I have evidence to support this theory.
1. I thought STREET FIGHTER: THE LEGEND OF CHUN-LI was kind of fun. It has a 3% on Rotten Tomatoes.
2. I went to see this with a friend who’s a games journalist and he had all kinds of complaints afterwards that I didn’t relate to.
3. When the first trailer came out that showed this version’s cartoonish approach, the buzz on the internet seemed to be “that looks like the absolute worst shit ever shat from a butt,” but when I saw it I thought, “Oh wow, I gotta see that!”
I was also intrigued to read that director/co-writer Kitao Sakurai was one of the main people behind The Eric André Show and also directed André’s very funny movie BAD TRIP. That’s just not who you would expect to do a video game movie, suggesting it could be something interesting. Had I known that Sakurai had, as a child actor, made his debut in BEST OF THE BEST 3: NO TURNING BACK, that would’ve also been a selling point too. (read the rest of this shit…)
As usual October is passing me by and I feel like I’ve barely started with the horror movies. But also as usual I’m gonna watch them year ‘round anyway so what am I worried about? Stay tuned for many more, but today I’m dipping into two new releases on Shudder.
I finally watched Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 film PULSE (Kairo). I don’t think I’ve seen any of this acclaimed director’s 30+ films, but this is the one people seem to mention most. And I get it now. There’s something very distinct about the potency of its forlorn, foreboding mood and the unusual way it combines a ghost story with an early internet thriller that then dissolves into a surreal apocalypse. The overcast skies, small, impersonal apartments and emphasis on staring at chunky turn-of-the-millennium computer monitors is already depressing before it starts to feel like depression may be its primary subject.
PSYCHO KILLER (2026) was written by Andrew Kevin Walker (
The V/H/S brand property franchise has been going for 14 years now. Its previous entries are V/H/S, V/H/S/2, V/H/S: VIRAL, V/H/S/94, V/H/S/99, V/H/S/85, V/H/S/BEYOND, V/H/S/HALLOWEEN, and also a “Snapchat-released miniseries” called V/H/S: VIDEO HORROR SHORTS. But until the new one V/H/S/MIXTAPE I had never seen any of them (unless you count Jason Eisener’s KIDS VS. ALIENS, spun off from a segment in V/H/S/2).
Cindy Sherman is an artist known for her photographic self portraits. A bio on the Museum of Modern Art websight calls her “among the most significant artists of the Picture Generation, who came of age in the 1970s and responded to the mass media landscape surrounding them with both humor and criticism.” Madonna sponsored (whatever that means) MoMA’s 1997 exhibition of Sherman’s most famous series, Untitled Film Stills. It’s comprised of 69 black and white photos shot between 1977 and 1980, in which she’s posed playing various characters in fictional movies from the ‘50s and ’60s. That same year she also made her one actual movie, OFFICE KILLER.
“What the fuck was our daughter doing in a 3,000 year old sarcophagus!?”
Here we go with another October, and another struggle to continue the tradition of Slasher Search in some way. The shadowy corners of the shelves have been excavated, the bottoms of the barrels have been scraped squeaky clean, and I don’t know where else to look for vintage slasher movie gold that’s still obscure. If there’s any of the kind of stuff I was looking for left undiscovered, the boutique blu-ray labels are better at finding it than I am. So I’m not really searching for slashers as much as I’m searching for new approaches to Slasher Search.
I had maybe seen the title before, but didn’t know what it was, so I figured this is what I’ll do this year: all requests. If you suggest a movie that I haven’t heard of or at least seems obscure, and I can find it, I will try to review it. (Please try to make it slasher or slasher adjacent and preferably not well known enough to be released on blu-ray.) CJ Holden has already recommended a few more, and I invite you all to add any others in the comments.
The unanswerable question: is it called READY OR NOT: HERE I COME, or READY OR NOT 2: HERE I COME? Depends if you ask the opening credits or the closing credits. I guess we get to pick.
M.F.A. has a series of murders in it, but it doesn’t have the atmosphere of a horror movie like I would usually review this time of year. I’d say it’s closer to a thriller. It came out in 2017, I’ve been meaning to see it for a while, and unfortunately I was reminded of it by current events. It’s a rape-revenge movie with more parallels to the recent Cornell University case than I expected, but of course it’s not coincidence – it’s a terrible reminder that this is based on things that happen all the time. I have to warn you that although I think this is a respectable movie and not sleazy like 
