Meg 2: The Trench (2023) - Movie Review

Y’know, I questioned the point of making a big-budget B-movie like this back when the first Meg came out, but with the industry still recovering from the COVID shuffle, I especially question it now. Doubly so because of the director for this one: Ben Wheatley. While he has a storied history with out-there horror material (also helping to produce just plain weird shit like Aaaaaaah! and The Greasy Strangler), and he’s done a bit of pop work in the past like directing two episodes of Capaldi-era Doctor Who, I’m… still trying to figure out where this fits in his larger catalogue. And bear in mind that I managed to find something about his Rebecca remake that made sense, so it says something when I’m struggling with this one. Then again, there’s a lot about this film that I’m struggling with.

In The Earth (2021) - Movie Review

There is more than one way to dramatise the… interesting situation we’ve been living in over the past two years. Sure, a filmmaker could go the literal route, have a story set during the actual COVID-19 pandemic as a means to connect the fiction to our own reality, but there’s also the less obvious way. Something that can use the veneer of fiction to brush against the thought processes and emotions indicative of this time, but without being as direct about it. And with the latest from writer/director/editor Ben Wheatley, a creative I’ve come to rely on when it comes to interesting material to write reviews for, we have a story that definitely has its cultural specificities, but is aiming for something more cerebral than the likes of Locked Down or Host.

Rebecca (2020) - Movie Review

After reviewing Ben Wheatley’s last film in an official capacity earlier this year with Happy New Year, Colin Burstead (or, under its superior working title, Colin You Anus), I was looking forward to seeing what he’d come up with next. I’m always thankful for movies that give me juicy details to write about, and quite frankly, domestic black comedy retellings of Shakespearean war stories don’t exactly fall out of the sky. So it comes as a heavy disappointment that this film underperforms as badly as it does, to the point where it’s an open question as to why he even made it to begin with. Well, while I can think of at least one reason why he did so, it’s far from enough to explain its worth on its own.