After spending nearly a decade making the literally gigantic FX extravaganzas GODZILLA VS. KONG and GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE, director Adam Wingard has returned to the territory of YOU’RE NEXT and THE GUEST – horror/action/thriller hybrids where he doesn’t have as much money but can kinda do what he wants. This time he’s armed with that blockbuster experience and a bigger small budget (three times as much as THE GUEST) courtesy of A24, so he and his long time writer Simon Barrett (FRANKENFISH) had a chance to really let ‘er rip. I thought. Maybe next time.
I hope other people will get more out of it than I did. It has many of the elements for a movie I could love. Adria Arjona (TRIPLE FRONTIER, 6 UNDERGROUND, MORBIUS, HIT MAN, but mainly Bix from Andor) is very charismatic as Celeste, a cynical war vet who purposely isolates herself in a desert town, living in and managing a trailer park, her only loves in the world the daughter she has partial custody of and the illegal stockpile of guns in the cabinet. She’s not ready when her more responsible ex (Jacob Scipio, WITHOUT REMORSE) drops off young Daisy (Blake Kennedy) on an unscheduled weekend. She missed the text about it because she was out shooting jack o’lanterns. So compared to everyone else she is pretty ready for the other unexpected guests, the rampaging super soldiers who escape from a nearby secret military site and start killing everybody. (read the rest of this shit…)
Maybe it’s weird to watch a post-apocalypse movie right before this particular election, but I’d wanted to see AZRAEL and then I saw that it was on Shudder. I knew it was a low or no dialogue movie starring Samara Weaving (
First I gotta give you that dreaded warning that more than the usual amount of fun in this one comes from not knowing what type of movie it’s gonna be. Not like it’s some crazy rollercoaster or mindblowing, rug-pulling shocker of a twist or anything, but it mixes up genres a little bit and I’m glad I didn’t know where it was going. So you might want to do what I did and just know it’s from the director and writer of 
