Totally Killer (2023) - Movie Review

While the previous Christopher B. Landon film didn’t really play to his strengths, it really says something about strong those strengths are when two other films came out that within the same ballpark… and yet Landon had nothing to do with them. With how close we are to the end of the year, it’s unlikely that we’ll get to It’s A Wonderful Knife, but we are going to get into this film, which takes the Back To The Future inspiration from the Happy Death Day films and pushes them even further.

Insidious: The Red Door (2023) - Movie Review

Patrick Wilson is one of my favourite actors working today. Whether he’s fighting underwater King Arthur, stuck with late-career Katherine Heigl, or being the face of James Wan’s post-Saw horror catalogue, the man just seems to shine no matter where he goes. As such, the prospect of him making the transition to director has certainly got me intrigued, especially within a franchise that had already launched a major directing talent in Leigh Whannell. But as I look at his debut here, I can’t help but think he would benefit from having a completely different starting point, because this doesn’t really do him any favours.

M3GAN (2023) - Movie Review

After the raw crazy of Malignant back in 2021, you better believe I was hyped for what James Wan and writer Akela Cooper had planned next. And man, it’s been a while since I was completely on-board with a film right from the literal first scene it shows, here in the form of a mocked-up ad for the in-universe Perpetual Pets. Aside from initially tricking me into thinking it was an actual ad, it does a terrific job of setting up the Uncanny tone of the film to follow.

Mr. Harrigan's Phone (2022) - Movie Review

With how badly his last attempt at darker storytelling turned out with the woefully mishandled cop thriller The Little Things, the prospect of writer/director John Lee Hancock taking on a Stephen King adaptation is a worrying one. Films based on King’s books can be very hit or miss, and this year has already featured a particularly big miss with the Firestarter remake. But hey, it’s starring Jaeden Martell, who was a key part of one of my favourite King films with It: Chapter One; maybe this will actually work out. Well… it kinda does?

Dashcam (2022) - Movie Review

 

After how much I got into Host, my favourite film of 2020, my introduction to Shudder’s collection of streamed horror, and something I think will go down as one of the definitive films of the COVID era, I’ve been waiting for the chance to see what Rob Savage would come up with next. I spent quite a bit of 2021 hoping that this film would get a release over here in some capacity, to no avail, but it finally got a digital release in June of this year. It’s another computer-screen horror film, still working off of DIY production values, but it’s also a sharp change-up from what he offered up last time.

The Black Phone (2022) - Movie Review

Ethan Hawke is one of my favourite actors working today. While he certainly has the skill to back up that kind of acclaim, my love for the guy’s work comes mainly out of how insanely eclectic he is. The Northman, Cut Throat City, The Truth, Stockholm, Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets, The Magnificent Seven, Predestination, Boyhood; not only is the man up for pretty much anything a director could possibly throw at him, but he’s also willing to go into unexpected international corners to spread the love around. So when news hit of him being cast as the villain in a horror flick, hell yeah, I was on board for that… but while Hawke certainly delivered, it’s a testament to just how good this film is that he ends up being at the lower end of this film’s positives.

Firestarter (2022) - Movie Review

The 1984 film version of Stephen King’s Firestarter is… okay. It doesn’t reach the oft-underappreciated heights of the better movie adaptations, nor does it succumb to the amazingly goofy lows of those ‘90s TV miniseries. It mainly gets by on the personality of its cast, especially Drew Barrymore and George C. Scott, and while the treatment of its superpower-adjacent thrills was a little bland (especially compared to how bombastic King adaptations regularly get), there was enough on offer to make the whole package watchable. With how much of an upgrade more recent King adaptations have been, the idea of remaking this particular feature seemed understandable enough; there’s a lot left to work with. What I wasn’t expecting, however, was a feature that would feel this much like I’d been licking drywall for an hour and a half.

The Craft: Legacy (2020) - Movie Review

A Blumhouse-produced reboot of an old-school piece of feminist-leaning horror… I feel like we’ve been down this dark road before. Okay, in fairness, I don’t want to imply that either that film or this one is irredeemably bad. It’s just that the pattern goes beyond the studio backing it, and right into finding a similar mixture of intriguing and bizarre ideas in trying to modernise the original story. And quite frankly, it hexes itself more times than not.

The Vigil (2020) - Movie Review

Well, this is a nice surprise: A horror flick released during lockdown that doesn’t make me think literal cabin fever is the better option. Not only that, this is quite a refreshing feature within its sub-genre of supernatural horror. Mainly, because it's one of a rare few that taps into superstition outside of the Christian camp.

Sweetheart (2020) - Movie Review

Female-led survival horror flicks have been steadily making the rounds over the last handful of years. The Shallows, Crawl, both entries in the Metres Down series; I guess the recent resurgence in ‘prestige’ horror cinema combined with the attempts to bring more female lead characters to the screen have resulted in this intersection. But up until this point, these films have thrived (or floundered) based on being short but sweet genre exercises, not rising too far above the benchmark for man vs. nature yarns. And then this film came along, yet another from the industrious (industrial?) Blumhouse production line, which… basically recontextualises this entire trend.

The Hunt (2020) - Movie Review

Well, this film isn’t exactly shifting its place on my radar, and it’s not like there will ever be a good time to discuss it, so what the hell, let’s do a political meme movie. The kind of movie that gets tremendous word-of-mouth on the basis of it being a political statement, only that aspect is taken at face value, resulting in a lot of discussion about it from people who more than likely haven’t even seen it. As we’ll get into, that itself is weirdly in-sync with the film’s contents, but as we’ll also get into, that might be damning with faint praise on my part.

Fantasy Island (2020) - Movie Review

Jeff Wadlow just continues striking out these days. I mean, when trailers for this film first reached cinemas, as soon as I saw this guy’s name attached, my expectations for it nosedived pretty much instantly. I’d say the dude is in the middle of a slump, but to be honest, I question if he even had a high point in the first place. Between True Memoirs Of An International Assassin, Truth Or Dare, and even his earliest feature-length outing with the embarrassingly twee Cry Wolf, he gives the impression of someone desperately trying to find his niche through attempting just about anything he can get his hands on, only for the end result to truly bring out his ‘master of none’ status. And oh boy, does that come to a head with his latest.

Stockholm (2019) - Movie Review

Stockholm Syndrome, much like PSTD, schizophrenia and autism, is a term that has been so consistently overused in the popular consciousness that you’d be forgiven for completely forgetting what its original meaning even was. Hell, it even makes for one of the most under-discussed on the flip-side, both in actual psychiatric academia and in how there are far too many romantic films out there that require that condition to make any bloody sense, yet never get brought up in the narrative proper.

Considering all this, this film about the incident that gave the condition its popular name could serve as a refresher for those who use it too willingly to describe real-world scenarios today. Shame it doesn’t really turn out that way, or turn out much of any way by film’s end.

Black Christmas (2019) - Movie Review

The original Black Christmas is one of the classic slashers, a film that helped mould the genre into what it remains to this day. It even has the prestige of being a slasher that influenced another seminal classic in the genre with Halloween, both operating with the same type of inhumane beast as the killer. Black X-Mas, the 2006 remake, went so far in missing the point of what made the original work that it devolved into a movie about killers who were brother and sister as well as father and daughter. No information right into all kinds of TMI; it really says something when it came out in the midst of the U.S. remakes of Japanese horror movie craze, and it still stands as one of the most misguided remakes of its time.

The Gallows Act II (2019) - Movie Review

In 2015, on a budget of $100,000, The Gallows was made and released to cinemas. It would go on to earn $45 million at the box office worldwide. I would be more aghast at a film that fucking dreadful doing that well, if it weren’t for the fact that the act of me going to see it in cinemas meant ultimately contributing to that final figure. So, yeah, there’s technically a reason why a sequel to that film came out this year, but that still doesn’t make the decision any less baffling. And to the credit of the filmmakers, they switched things up a bit for the follow-up. I still question what good those changes end up doing, though.

Ma (2019) - Movie Review

 

Much like with Welcome To Marwen, we’re dealing with another film that was released theatrically over here, yet I personally see no evidence of it making it to theatres. The fact that there is more than one example of that this year, also from a rather high-profile background and in the midst of Disney's ultimate transformation into Omnicorp, is a bit concerning. At any rate, with its home video release, I can finally check out the latest from The Girl On The Train director Tate Taylor… and man, did I miss out not getting to see this on the big screen.