Zach Cregger, the guy from the sketch comedy group The Whitest Kids U’Know who suddenly became a horror auteur with BARBARIAN (2022), is back with his ambitious followup. Cregger has mentioned being inspired by MAGNOLIA when trying to explain what he’s doing here, which might sound kind of ridiculous, but it makes it fitting that it’s New Line Cinema putting a whole lot of faith in a promising new director. Pretty big budget, final cut, advertising based on mystery and “from the director of BARBARIAN,” and they even gave it an IMAX release! But I think their confidence is warranted.
The only thing we really knew about from the somewhat cryptic trailers is a mysterious event explained in the opening by a child narrator (reminded me of SHOGUN ASSASSIN). One night at 2:17 AM in the small town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, seventeen kids get up out of bed, run out their front door into the night and don’t come back. The weirdest part is that they’re all in the same class, taught by Justine Gandy (Julia Garner, WE ARE WHAT WE ARE). So when she comes to school the next day only one kid is there, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher). Since nobody can figure out what the fuck happened some of the parents, especially Archer Graff (Josh Brolin, THRASHIN’), assume Justine had something to do with it. She’s getting harassing phone calls, threatening knocks on the door at night, her car vandalized, and she has no teaching to do. Things are not going great for her. (read the rest of this shit…)
As some of you are aware I am an avowed triple-A (Ari Aster Appreciator). I loved his two hit horror movies (
It took Marvel years to finally get back the movie rights to the team they call their “first family,” and then they had the bad luck to release THE FANTASTIC 4: FIRST STEPS two weeks after James Gunn’s 
The last super hero movie of summer 2005, and maybe the last kids movie too, is Disney’s SKY HIGH. It’s directed by Mike Mitchell (DEUCE BIGALOW: MALE GIGOLO), with a script originated in the ‘90s by Paul Hernandez, later rewritten by Bob Schooley & Mark McCorkle (creators of the cartoon Kim Possible, plus they wrote 7 episodes of the New Kids on the Block cartoon).
It’s a play on comic book super heroes, but not based on any existing ones, so it’s your basic dollar store super heroes with standard abilities, generic names and no real origins, they just genetically inherited powers. It’s the kind of comic book movie where the opening credits have to be in comic book font and there are drawings that do not look worthy of a comic book that dissolve into the live action shots. You know – like a comic book! Have you seen these? A bunch of little squares with stuff drawn in them.
FIGHT OR FLIGHT – which is not called FLIGHT RISK, I keep getting those two titles mixed up in my head – has been advertised as “from the makers of 
July 22, 2005
And it’s got that 16mm grain I love – dust of the gods. Of course Zombie couldn’t resist using a few wipes and giving the credits gnarly freeze frames that look like lobby cards for some ’70s Italian sleaze movie that makes you feel dirty. He recruited cinematographer Phil Parmet because he’d shot handheld as additional d.p. for Barbara Kopple’s documentary HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A. Maybe the most crucial choice is that the soundtrack is all Lynyrd Skynyrd, Allman Brothers Band, Three Dog Night and stuff like that. Guitars that sing instead of crunch. That changes everything. 
July 22, 2005
July 15, 2005
