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After the rapidly diminishing returns of the Fear Street Decades (centuries?) entries, I won’t say I was chomping at the bit for Prom Queen to drop. I’m a devout lover of Goosebumps and Fear Street, of R.L. Stine’s whole body of work, really, but I’m also a realist and value my time. I was excited and eager for it, sure, but more for the fact that a new slasher movie was coming out as opposed to a new entry in the Fear Street Saga, if that makes sense. I don’t know if the Fear Street tag keeping my expectations in check helped, or if it’s just that enough time has ed for the bitter taste of 1666 to leave my mouth, but I was pleasantly surprised by this. Which, given my post-watch feelings of the previous installments, is a level of praise reserved for award season dramas. 

Joking aside, a 1.9 average rating on this site is pure bullshit. Just absolute wild work that doesn’t even sort of make sense. Is this the next great slasher? Not by a mile, not by many miles. Not by as many miles as The Long Walk. But is it a 1.9? Not a fuckin’ chance. We just got some bitter people on this site that live and breathe hyperbole. So if anyone is on the fence about this and allows the ratings of the esteemed Letterboxd app to influence their viewing choices, go ahead and ignore that egregiously low rating. 

On to the film itself. The plot here is as straightforward as its YA roots warrant. There’s a prom at Shadyside high. There’s a buncha girls opting to be queen. The four popular girls, the weirdo loner with the sordid family history, and some random girl that makes even less sense being involved than the weird loner girl. Someone has an axe to grind, along with a paper cutter and a butcher knife and a buzz saw and etc etc etc, with the prom queen wannabes. And we’re off the races with some copiously bloody slicing and dicing. 

It’s pretty straightforward and to the point. When compared to the complicated and convoluted mythology of the previous Fear Street films, it’s about as basic as a silent film from the 20s. A breath of fresh air for some, myself included, but I could see how some would not gel with the emaciated nature of the plot here. I don’t think horror flicks need to break their backs trying to be the Da Vinci Code of hacking and slashing, but that’s me. So I was totally fine with a breezy 87-minute stalk and stab through the hallowed, and Netflix-polished, halls of this generic high school. But, while important, the plot of a slasher film is really one of the less important aspects that make them memorable. It helps to be unique, but let's face it, we’re here for the killer and the kills. Which is where Prom Queen really shows itself as the mixed bag we were all really expecting. 

The killer here is not going to be making any headlines. There is no aspect of the Prom Queen killer that I would call memorable or noteworthy. Bland may even be too polite. It’s a six-foot or so version of the little red jacket from Don’t Look Now. It’s a mask that looks kinda-sorta like the face gracing the cover of the Oddity DVD. It’s just a red shadow with a nondescript and seldom fully shown mask that doesn’t so much elicit a scream of terror at its appearance so much as an “ehh, there he is” reaction. Not great for a slasher flick in a burgeoning, and more than likely continuing, franchise. Where’s the cool get-up? Where’s the iconic mask? The killers of the Golden Age through the 90s are all memorable because of their look, their costume, or their mask, or even their weapon of choice. Matt Palmer’s Prom Queen killer is lacking in those key areas, which is a hard hill to climb if you’re trying to make an entry in slasherdom that will have any kind of lasting impact on the genre. 

Perhaps the strength of the Fear Street Brand, or the Stine name, is enough to warrant overlooking this essential aspect of slasher flicks. I don’t think so, but I don’t get paid millions to make these crucial decisions. Luckily, there is another aspect of slasher movies that keeps them relevant. The slaughtering. Each of the three previous Fear Street movies have a ton of kills in them, but I’d hesitate to say they were all that memorable. I’d say each flick had one or two that really stood out, and several that were forgettable the moment the scene ended. I was really pleased with the creative and/or brutal nature of the kills in this movie. Morbid, sure, but it’s a horror flick, so what’re we doin here if not looking for some carnage? There’s a darkly comedic escape attempt sans hands that had me gleefully chuckling. A jump scare buzzsaw to the face was glorious, as was a butcher knife stuck in a skull. A head flying decapitation is also always a very welcome sight in slasher flicks. This movie may lack in several areas, but the blood flowed freely, and for that, I am most thankful. 

The characters and acting are all what I’d expected from this movie and from the platform it’s released on. India Fowler did just fine as our virginal final girl with her white prom dress. The real standout for me was 100% Fina Strazza as head honcho mean girl Tiffany. She was clearly havin a great time being the biggest bitch she could and I was there for every moment of it. I wouldn’t say the acting is a real focal point of any of these movies, and most of the characters are there for murderous fodder, so it’s always great to see a character or two really stand out and shine for a bit, and Strazza owned every scene she was in.

In all honesty, I feel the weakest aspect of this film is Matt Palmer and Donald McLeary’s screenplay. It has all the elements necessary for a successful and competent slasher flick, but there’s just something so clearly missing from it all. Clunky dialogue and forced interactions between the characters clutter most of the connective scenes between chases and kills. A confusingly inept backstory for our lead character and her family doesn’t help generate care or connection for the audience. The friendship between the two outcasts doesn’t make much sense because no care or focus is shown on why they’re friends. Tiffany and her family are quirky and funny in a homage-to-the-eighties kinda way (and it was fun to see Chris “Oz” Klein back in a high school-themed movie after American Pie made him), but it seemed most of the characters and their personalities were after thoughts and that shown through each time they floundered to make a scene flow or a relationship feel believable and true. The reporter chick was funny and very Gale Weathers, the hangers-on of Tiffany and her friend were funny and true to form for kids like that in high school, but all of those were little flashes in a pan instead of forming a cohesive cast of characters. 

The story was straightforward, and that's welcome. Palmer and McLeary nail the basics of slasher flicks and bring that home. But the plot begins to crumble quickly in the final twenty minutes or so. The motivations of the killer don’t make a lotta sense. The final confrontation is a bit baffling. The complete omission of several key characters for the end of this flick is a head scratcher for sure, like where the fuck is Lori Granger’s mother? You know, the fucking cop? I mean, they barely managed to include a chase scene in a slasher flick, so I’m less willing to forgive these other blatant oversights. A more polished and pulled-together screenplay, with some tighter and more era-specific conversations and interactions, really would have done wonders to elevate this movie from its inevitably mid-tier ranking to something far more enjoyable. And memorable. 

Netflix overpolishes everything it puts out, so it should be absolutely no surprise that this film looks far too clean and sanitized for what it is. The random cuts to the recordings by the reporter character looked better, and I kinda wish the whole film looked like that. At least it would “feel” more 80s that way instead of looking like every other Netflix movie ever. Thankfully, The Newton Brothers understood the assignment and proliferated the soundtrack with some solid eighties classics and bangers, without falling into the obsessive needle drop nonsense of the other entries. 

I can’t in good conscience give this flick an inflated rating, because that would be just as dishonest and misleading as the 1.9 it has now. I would have felt comfortable with a 3 star, but the “motherfucking dance off” scene was so brutally awful it had me curled up like Leto at the end of Requiem begging for the pain to stop, so I gotta shave a half star for that. But I will truthfully say it’s more fun than I was expecting, maybe even more fun than it truly had a right to be, given its incredibly basic structure and plot. But hell, I’ll take fun any day of the week when it comes to my horror and my slashers.

I’ll be keeping an eye out for the next entry in this saga, whatever it may be. There’s a ton of possibilities and avenues these flicks can take, and Stine’s bibliography is extensive, so there’ll be no dearth of options to choose from. Even the original trilogy has a lot of open-ended plot threads and a whole history book of killers to branch off from. So I am optimistic there will be more Fear Street movies, though I won’t go so far as to say I’m as confident about them all being fun or worthwhile. Netflix is the street-meat of horror movies, especially slashers. They are tantalizing to hear about, and they pull you in with the desire of instant fulfillment due to easy access, so cheap and “right there” that you’re willing to throw all caution to the wind despite knowing the potential for disaster. You have a few good ones, and suddenly, the 11 times you’ve indulged and been thoroughly ravaged for the choice don’t matter. I’d say Fear Street Prom Queen is just good enough, just fun and bloody enough, to forgive the last couple missteps. It’s generated enough goodwill from me that I’m sure I’ll come back for more when the time comes. But, much like street-meat, I’ll be doing so at my own risk. 

If you’re still with me this far, please indulge me for just a moment longer while I shamelessly plug myself. I have two horror books of my own out for anyone who’s interested. My first book, If These Walls Could Weep, is a psychological horror drama. My second, Vendetta of the Bambini Morti, is a darkly comedic, splattery action-horror mashup. Both are now available on Amazon. They’re novellas, meaning they’re shorter than some of my reviews. The links are in my bio on my profile. Any is greatly and humbly appreciated. You might not love ‘em, but they probably won’t push you to openly and willingly participate in anything resembling the aforementioned Motherfucking Dance Off.

Watched on Friday March 14, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday February 25, 2025.

Watched on Friday January 31, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday January 14, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday December 18, 2024.

Watched on Wednesday November 6, 2024.

Watched on Wednesday October 16, 2024.

One of my best friends, who I have known for over 27 years, ed away recently. There is no good way to start things like this, just like there is no good way or time to ever receive such news. I am finding it equally impossible to process and put into words everything I am feeling and the profound pain this loss has inflicted on me. I’m not even sure it’s possible.

I haven’t seen Kevin in years, and yet that has not changed how I feel about him or our friendship one bit. Maybe it’s the storyteller in me, but I always figured there would be time. We would have time to reconnect, time to see each other, time to catch up. Time time time. But there’s never enough time. While that phrase is well known, what isn’t known is when the time runs out. When the day comes when all the memories and stories you have with a person cease, and you are left with all that you have without the option of ever adding more, no matter how badly you wanted to or how deeply you intended to. Nothing drives that home with more brutality than loss. Especially a loss such as this.

There is something so special about the friends and friendships a person has when they’re growing up. They carve themselves into your mind and heart, and you never realize just how deeply they’ve impressed themselves upon you and your life until they are gone. Until you are faced with acknowledging that when they , they take a part of you with them, and you have to find a way to live life with a chunk of yourself gouged out that can never be replaced or refilled. When they die, a part of you dies too. A part of yourself so intrinsically tied to that person that you feel their ing as a literal loss of yourself, a portion of who you are that is gone and only leaves behind a void that is a physical pain. Those kinds of friendships, best friends, become a part of you. Continued in comments
They are a part of your very essence, even if you aren’t immediately aware of it. They scar you with their power and their importance. Not a scar of injury or pain, but more like the scarification of a tattoo. A tattoo that wonderfully, magically never dulls or fades with time but only grows more vibrant and beautiful. And Kevin left an impression on me that can never be replicated.

All of us have core memories about our youth and our teen years. Things that have forever impacted how you view life, how you approach the day-to-day. Memories and instances, experiences and adventures, that have gradually and incrementally made us who we are. I am certain that roughly 90%, at least, of my core memories involve Kevin in some way. We were completely inseparable. If he was going somewhere, I was tagging along. If I was going somewhere, he was tagging along, and those were just the facts. All of the key moments of growing up, from the small to the big, adventures that seemed so grand when your whole life is still ahead of you because you are infused with the immortality of youth, Kevin was there. All the happiest moments that seem never-ending because 24 hours is an eternity when you’re young, and all the saddest moments that you brave together because the bad times dim and die with the sun. Each as important as the next, interchangeable in their power to shape you. All of those memories that clue you into all the things you love about being alive, the things you unknowingly chase forever, Kev was there. From the most monumental highs and lows all the way to the most mundane, that prove to be the most important. Like grabbing a Rita’s water ice and a slice while browsing what horror movies to beg our parents to rent on a Friday night. Everything that shapes you and builds you into who you are and who you will be. For instance, I wrote my first several stories either for Kev or with Kev, and it was always in an effort to write one as well as he did. We were each other's shadows, and just like shadows grow and distort and morph something ordinary into something far greater and more inexplicable, Kevin made every aspect of my life so much more exuberant and memorable.

That may all sound hyperbolic and exaggerated, but what isn't when it comes to your youth? When memory plays all kinds of tricks on you, and the only thing that remains constant is the person or people you share them with? What is more extreme and almost supernatural in its scope and power than the friends of your youth and the moments you share together? The things that seem like they’ll never end, and then you blink, and you’re an adult, and suddenly all you want is one more afternoon to have an epic adventure with your best friend and plot a future that never came to be?

I am so fortunate to have grown up with Kevin. I am so lucky to have lived out my youth in an era that is all but gone, spending all day and night out with my best friend, riding our bikes to wherever we wanted to go because there was no end to the adventure; there was no quantifying the possibilities of what we might find around the next block, no telling what kinda trouble we’d find at the end of the tracks. I am so truly thankful for Kevin and the impact he had on me and my life. I would not be the man that I am today if not for the impact Kevin had on who I was. I can only wish that someone, anyone, reading this knows what I’m talking about.

To paraphrase this movie we both liked (by an author we both loved): “Although I hadn’t seen him in years, I know I’ll miss him forever. I never had any friends like the one I had when I was twelve…Jesus, does anyone?”

I love you, Kevin. I hope you are at peace, and I hope that you never once forgot how special you are and how much you mean to me. I can only hope that there is something more after all this living so that we can get a chance to catch up on the other side. Until then, brother, I love you.

We’ve reached a point where when I hear about a new adaptation of a Stephen King work for the big (or small) screen I no longer find myself excited or full to bursting with anticipation. Instead, I have to stifle a groan and actively stop myself from guesstimating how badly it will be butchered or how scaled-down and mutilated the final product will be. You’d think that with hundreds of tales to choose from, between his novels and countless short stories, there would be ample room for excitement and endless possibilities for new and terrifying films or shows. And yet, that is sadly not the case. This newest toothless, and decidedly bloodless, take on The King’s 1975 seminal vampire epic only further seals the deal of guaranteed disappointment. And furthers the notion that perhaps the majority of King’s works, especially the longer and most popular of them, are unadaptable as films.

This isn’t the first time someone’s taken a crack at Salem’s Lot, though it is the first straightforward “movie” unless you count Larry Cohen’s 1987 A Return to Salem’s Lot, which I don’t think anyone does if they even it. We had Tobe Hooper’s classic miniseries in 1979, and in 2004, the less enthusiastically received miniseries from Mikael Salomon. While both of them had their pros and cons, and both made their own alterations to the source material (especially the ‘04 version), they both also did a solid job of retaining what made the book so special to begin with. They took the time to establish Salem’s Lot as a town, a dark town with a sordid history, and they made the effort to populate that town with characters that seemed real and relatable. We cared about what happened to everyone in those versions, we believed them as people just as much as we believed Salem’s Lot was a real place being plagued by a real vampiric menace. Maybe that had to do with the runtime of each of those (over three hours apiece) or maybe it started at the screenwriting stage; I’m not sure. But what I do know is that they made a solid go of adapting this tale as it should be. What we have here is a poor facsimile of what Salem’s Lot is and an ugly shadow of a somewhat decent film buried, very deeply, underneath a brutalized truncation of what was clearly supposed to be a much longer enterprise.

I can’t say I’m terribly surprised, as shitty as that sounds. When I saw Gary Dauberman’s name tacked onto this, I already knew, deep down and no matter how much I tried to ignore it, exactly what to expect. Especially with this being only the second film the man’s directed. Dauberman has made his bones in the moviemaking industry, and in the horror world, on layups. His career started on the SyFy channel, penning such timeless classics as Blood Monkey and Swamp Devil. Movies like that had a built-in audience of late-night teenagers and young adults, either making their own MSTK with their friends or enjoying brainless horror fodder to end their days. I’d know, as I am part of both camps and always will be. Dauberman moved from that to basically just The Conjuring universe (props to anyone that can name his other two writing credits outside of Stephen King movies and Conjuring movies, prayers for those that have actually watched them). The Conjuring films, for all their money and box office returns, are truly just a small skip and jump from those early days SyFy channel originals the man cut his teeth on. They are template movies, horror flicks designed to follow a certain rhythm and rhyme and hardly ever deviate from that tried and true formula. They serve their purpose, rigidly following the bank-robber mentality of “get in, get out, no muss,no fuss”, and little else. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se, but there’s also nothing particularly noteworthy or memorable about them either.

Which is sadly exactly what we’re saddled with here, an utterly unremarkable and completely forgettable adaptation of one of the most popular and beloved vampire novels of all time. As I mentioned, it may be time to embrace the notion that King’s works are not readily adaptable for a movie. His novels are so complex, so sprawling, and so full of introspection and inner action that it’s incredibly difficult to par all the ingredients of a King novel down into movie length. It’s successfully been done before, Misery for example, but the track record for hits and misses has grown wildly skewed toward failure. Especially when the adaptation is of one of King’s books that exceeds 400-500 pages. They just seem more suited to long-format miniseries than they do films. Though it hardly matters when the finished product is roughly 55% source material and 45% what the fuck is this.

There’s a point in this film, right around the halfway mark, where all semblance of similarity to Salem’s Lot (the novel or any adaptation) goes right out the fucking window. While I appreciate and dig some of the ideas evident here (a final battle at a drive-in movie theater is an inspired and nostalgia-infused notion if it had been handled and executed better, whereas what they did to Straker is a fucking crime), but it is, and always will be, baffling to me when an adaptation tries so goddamn hard to be nothing like the source. I understand putting one's own spin on things, but that only goes so far. Too many alterations, too many wildly different decisions, and it stops being an adaption. To me, it becomes a form of theft and creative deceit. It’s leaping onto an established audience, a crafted fan base, and doing whatever you want without any of the work or effort to build said fan base. It’s dishonest, and more times than not, it falls completely fucking flat. To those who say things like “If you want the book, then read it” or “Who cares, let someone put their spins on already created worlds,” I say get bent, rigorously, and that you’ve missed my point entirely.

This film was clearly meant to be something else. It is obvious it was supposed to be longer. The entire cast is devoid of a single inkling of a main character. There are plot lines and characters introduced and almost immediately forgotten (we’re lookin at you, Tibbits). There are set pieces that go on for what seem like ages, and they are held together with the most disparate filaments of a multitude of lost narratives. Lewis Pullman as Ben Mears is a void in this film darker and more horrific than the vampire plague itself. No aspect of him is believable, and his entire character arc and purpose is kneecapped and set on fire within 35 minutes. Makenzie Leigh as Susan Norton is somehow even less engaging. Alfre Woodard plays Alfre Woodard in a doctor coat, and Jordan Preston Carter plays a Mark Petrie who commits murder with such ease while also expressing exactly no emotions about the death of loved ones that I could believe his character is more evil than King could have ever made Barlow and Randall Flagg combined. None of these characters make an impression beyond Pilou Asbaek being wasted, nor do they come across as believable to me in any way that matters. They each act as if they have no idea what’s going on and not in the way that would make that a compliment. Bill Camp is the saving grace of the film, a small sliver of actual screen presence and control of character. Watching him puff on his pipe and brainstorm was more engaging than any of the makeup they piled on Alexander Ward as the Nosferatu-inspired Kurt Barlow.

Could these character issues have been resolved with a longer piece? If this were a miniseries? Maybe, maybe not. They certainly would have had room to breathe and exist, and the story would have been able to expand and explode the way it should have. We’d have had more time to settle into Salem’s Lot, to learn about it and live in it. As it stands, there are simply too many elements and aspects of King’s novel crammed into a sub-two-hour film that doesn’t have the first idea of how to make them a cohesive whole. Peyton’s Place meets Dracula this is not.

As I said, the drive-in finale was a nice, and well foreshadowed, climax, even if it was a little disappointingly carried out. The abduction of Ralphie Glick playing out like a shadow puppet play was a fantastic scene. But for each scene that was effectively and impressively shot, there were just as many that held promise but fell flat. Like Mark being stuck in a tree house surrounded by all the children of Salem’s Lot, which eventually amounted to nothing. The music and vibe of the 70’s fit well enough, but after a while, it stopped seeming like a well-crafted set and soundtrack and began to feel like what it was: shoehorning and cramming it in our faces at every possible opportunity. It stopped seeming real and believable and began to feel, look, and sound like a movie trying desperately to fit in. Once a film begins to feel forced, the rest of the cracks begin to show, and the illusion is all but ruined.

I know what I was hoping for with this film, but I am not sure what I was expecting. I am sure that I shouldn’t be surprised that I’m as disappointed as I am, that the only impression this film left on me is that it left no impression at all. After all, IT is my favorite novel of all time, and Dauberman got TWO chances (screenplay-wise) with that one and fucked 'em both up.

King’s the King, and that’s unlikely to change. People clamoring to adapt or create films and series based on the still forthcoming works of Stephen King is also unlikely to ever change, though the sincerity and genuineness of their intentions may always be questioned. I just deeply hope that the next twelve dozen adaptations take more care to truly capture the essence of King’s novels. Yes, they’re scary and unnerving. Yes, they are full of monsters and killers. But above all of that, they are full of heart and soul. They are, in their own special way, living things populated with hope and despair, love and hate. They have such an abundance of feeling that they leave indelible impressions on those who consume them. They leave you wanting more in the best possible way. This movie has no life to it, has no feeling, has no soul, and it left me wanting so much more in the worst way before we even hit the halfway point.

If you’re still with me this far, please indulge me for just a moment longer while I shamelessly plug myself. I have two horror books of my own out for anyone that’s interested. My first book, If These Walls Could Weep, was published last fall (a horror story) and my second, Vendetta of the Bambini Morti just released a couple weeks ago. Both are now available on Amazon. They’re novellas, meaning they’re shorter than some of my reviews, and they both hail from different subgenres of the expansive horror mold. The links are in my bio on my profile. Any is greatly and humbly appreciated. You might not love ‘em, but they probably won’t send you clamoring to make an utterly unrecognizable mockery of a film adaptation, either.

Watched on Thursday August 29, 2024.

It’s probably not a good thing that I tossed this movie on with the hopes that it would help me fall asleep. Battling insomnia and discomfort so late into the night that a new Netflix movie releases before I catch even so much as a glimpse of dreamland is already bad enough, but being in those dark, pre-dawn hours when movies are dumped onto streaming sites is a special kind of purgatory. I figured The Union, originally titled Our Man From Jersey, would be an excellent way to knock me right the fuck out. The fact it didn’t is a headscratcher. It either stands to reason that the movie was better than it had a right to be, though it could also simply attest to my exhausted delirium and the movie hitting just the right notes for me to veg out and enjoy without being fully immersed in any of its antics. I may never have a real answer for that, since I will probably never watch this movie again.

The Union is about as standard a Netflix action-adventure-comedy movie as there ever was. A predictably and reliably ridiculous setup that paves the way for all kinds of international hijinks, double-crosses, foot chases, and rapidly edited fist fights and shootouts. Mike, played by Mark Wahlberg, is a lazy construction worker (an oxymoron already) who runs into an ex-girlfriend from over 20 years ago who just so happens to be an international spy. Naturally, she has never met anyone in all her years of espionage who could help her with her current mission, finding out who wiped out her entire team of special operatives in the hunt for intel that threatens the lives of all such operatives in the Western world. Theoretically, in the universe of this film, it should make sense because The Union hires blue-collar workers for wet work cuz' those guys get it done. But since nothing is done with this, ittedly cool and unique, plot device it ends up just being as ridiculous as it sounds that such a task could only be completed with the help of Mike, said construction worker who still lives at home with his mother, sleeps with his teachers from middle school, and spends every night drinking and shooting the shit with his buddies. But hey, he used to be a great athlete, could boost cars with screwdrivers, and never let her down when they were teenagers looking for janitor closets to screw around in. And wouldn’t you know it, after a couple weeks of training condensed down to a 3 minute montage, Mike turns out to be the absolute best spy to ever possibly exist in possibly every single way. Which sends us off to the races in yet another Netflix original that undoubtedly cost well over a quarter of a billion dollars and followed almost the exact same plot template as every single other Netflix original action flick that came before it.

I know all of that sounds very harsh, and that may just be my exhaustion speaking, but it is what it is. There is a flip side to the coin of everything I just mentioned, and that’s the fact that sometimes simple and seen-before works just fine. I mean, we got like 30 James Bond movies that are all, when you get right down to it, the same thing over and over again. Am I saying this is a James Bond movie? HAHA, no. Not even close. It’s more like a prepaid plan of any variety; cheaper and you know basically exactly what you’re getting the moment you sign up for it, or in this case press play.

Julian Farino helms this flick, and he is probably best, and only, known for direction like two dozen episodes of Entourage. That’s Wahlberg’s semi-autobiographical HBO show for those of us who weren’t around in the era before streaming. He also directed almost the same number of episodes of Ballers for those who do think HBO has always been a streaming wasteland. The episode looks and feels similar to those shows, with how flashy and bright and loud it is, but there is at least more action and set pieces. It isn’t as funny as either of those shows though it does try. Farino is a weird choice of director for a movie like this, and I’m not really sure what went into that decision beyond an established relationship with the star. I couldn’t tell you a single other movie that man directed without looking it up, and even after I looked it up, I recognized none of them. I’d be interested in understanding how someone with virtually no experience directing such a large-scale action flick got this gig, though I think it probably boils down to Netflix just casually handing people hundreds of millions of dollars and saying, “go apeshit” in the same way my parents would hand my sugar-overdosed child-ass five dollars of quarters at an arcade and say the same thing. Which Netflix, if that’s the case, I have bills, rent, student loans, and a couple book and movie ideas that could use some cash. I don’t know if I could make a better action flick, but since I have as much experience making them as Julian Farino does I’d wager a guess I couldn’t do any worse.

Speaking of the action, it is exactly what you’d expect from a movie like this. Which, again, could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the mindset you have going in. You have a couple of lengthy chase scenes, a few fistfights and shootouts, a long and comedic car chase, the expected standoff finale. It’s all in there, exactly where you’d expect it to be. I won’t lie or be disingenuous; some of them were solid and enjoyable. I especially liked the long chase, shootouts, car chase finale in some Italian-looking country. Wahlberg’s first, bungled mission was also a pretty fun chase, fight combo. There are things to enjoy here, I just wish a little more effort had been put into them is all. Maybe some more intense or interestingly staged fight scenes or some chases that were a little more inventive in structure and direction. The Gray Man is a wildly similar flick that I enjoyed so much more, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact it had far more interesting, engaging, and intense action scenes. While also probably has a lot to do with the fact that it was directed by a duo that almost exclusively make action flicks, whoda thunk it.

The cast of The Union is wildly stacked and just as wildly wasted. Halle Berry brings it as she has consistently been doing for years now. Mark Wahlberg is very believable as a construction worker in completely over his head who can’t seem to bond with anyone around him, though I’m not entirely sure how much of that was acting. Love the dude, but holy Christ, look alive, bud. J.K. Simmons, Mike Colter, Lorraine Bracco, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Jackie Earle Haley are all featured heavily in certain sections of the movie and are all supremely wasted in almost every regard. J.K. Simmons has the most screen time of the bunch, and about halfway through, you can see him mentally calculating if he really needs this paycheck that badly. All the others are randomly and abruptly cut from the movie at certain points and are not seen or mentioned again, which is fucking insane to me. I thought Bracco, as Mike’s mom, would be a recurring comedy interlude, but she vanishes from the movie before we even crest the halfway point. Adewale is the combat specialist, so naturally, I think his big ass would get a solid fight scene or two; absolutely not. As a matter of fact, he gets none whatsoever and disappears from the film with an hour or so left in its runtime. And on it goes. You’d think if you had an ensemble action flick, you’d want to utilize the ensemble, but apparently, I’m an idiot. If you have a team in a flick like this, I would expect the team to be used. Especially when everyone in the cast is as talented and fun to watch as those I’ve listed.

There is also a discrepancy with the runtime listed. The movie I watched was a little under 2 hours long, whereas it is listed in some places as being a decent chunk over 2 hours. As I watched it I did get the impression that it was cut. There’s the above mentioned vanishings of 80% of the cast, but there are a lot of action scenes that are horrifically butchered. Fight scenes and shooting scenes that clearly stop before the action is completed. This is a PG-13 movie, and I wonder if it was always supposed to be that way. Would I want to watch an extended or uncut version of the movie? That’s a tough call. Do I think it would make it better? Doubtful. But do I think some more polished and engaging action, some blood, and follow through on the violence, would at least make it more fun/enjoyable/memorable? Absolutely. But that’s just me.

As I said, there’s a reason movies like this exist and why this template is very clearly not going anywhere. It’s fun to see the scenery and the gorgeous locations. The standard fish-out-of-water action-adventure scenario is about as old as movies are. They’ve lasted this long for a reason. But very much like my beloved horror genre, creatives have seemed to become overly complacent with doing the bare minimum with said templates and scenarios. Can I blame them if they’re handed 100+ million dollars to just throw some shit together? Not really, but I can be disappointed. There was plenty of potential here for a solid movie that made much more of an impression beyond, “damn, they almost had a good one.” But it just coasted by doing its thing in the same way most of these Netflix originals do these days. It kept me entertained enough to not fall into the sleep I so desperately craved, but I don’t know how much props it should get for that. The Union is very much an “it is what it is” kinda movie. You know what you’re getting into, and I think that’s going to for a lot of people’s enjoyment here. It’s better than Trigger Warning, but I didn’t find it as fun as The Gray Man. And it’s not Extraction by any means. If those titles mean nothing to you, the movie is just standard action fare. Light, a tad overlong, and easily digestible without making much of an impact at all on you one way or the other. It’s good enough, a right down the middle kinda flick, but man, it coulda been a helluva lot better.

If you’re still with me this far, please indulge me for just a moment longer while I shamelessly plug myself. My first book, If These Walls Could Weep, was published last fall (a horror story) and is now available on Amazon. It’s a novella, meaning it’s shorter than some of my reviews, and it has a little existential dread to start your day with a bit of cosmic and body horror to end your nights. The link is in my bio on my profile. Any is greatly and humbly appreciated. You might not love it, but it probably won’t make you want to completely abandon your friends and family without warning to a covert spy organization where you could die at the drop of a hat, either.

Watched on Thursday August 8, 2024.

About as visually stimulating as talk radio, Yoshihiro Nakamura’s psychological horror flick The Booth plays out with the predictability of a commercial break. And with about as much enjoyment.

The story here, also written by Nakamura, leaves distressingly little to the imagination. It leaves even less for horror enthusiasts to enjoy. Ryuta Sato plays some dickhead radio DJ host who runs a show about love and how to handle it, or maybe it's about rejection and how to handle that, who the fuck knows. His name could be Shogo, as stated on this website and the back of the DVD I own. It could be Shinto, as it's spelled in the subtitles. Or it could be Shinjo, as it seems to be pronounced. If the name of your main character is spelled wrong in either the print on the box or in the subtitles of your own movie, I’d say we’re headed in entirely the wrong direction, but that’s just me. Regardless, Shointojo starts getting weird phone calls, gets called a liar a few times, has some flashbacks, gets paranoid, and we repeat the process, ad nauseam, until the end credits blissfully arrive after the longest 74 minutes I’ve sat through in recent memory.

This is a chamber pot film that primarily takes place inside the DJ booth of this radio station. We have a few scenes taking place outside these drab and soul-sucking walls, but only a few. A parking garage, a primary school, a seaside cliff, all shown in flashbacks and mostly in very quick scenes. They are all welcome breaks from the monotony of the film's inevitable, and tedious, unfolding, but serve very little else beyond that. This movie unfolds like a play, yes. But it also reminded me of a COVID-era, low-budget film made 15 years before the pandemic. The one setting doesn’t bother me, it’s the fact that nothing remotely interesting happens within the confines of that one setting. We HEAR things more than we ever SEE things, so we really are just sitting in this booth with OldBoy the ShitHead and have nothing even minutely interesting to look at while we do.

Ryuta Sato gives a commendable performance, I’ll certainly afford that truth. He does a solid job swinging between zealously, animatedly cringe-inducingly jovial to paranoid to stone-faced to dickhead to scared and back again, multiple times all of the above within a single scene. It really is a solid performance worthy of some praise. He makes our multi-named main character a real person, someone believable and relatable, even if that relatability is not a good thing. It’s a shame such a performance was wasted in a film like this, and such a nuanced portrayal was given to such a nothing burger of a character. We learn precious little about our DJ host that isn’t readily available just by the context of the film itself, of the genre you’re watching. None of it was interesting, none of it was surprising. Oh, he’s a prick? No shit. Oh, these calls are associated with his past behaviors? No shit. But we never get any other side to him. We never learn very much about him at all beyond these snippety, vignette flashbacks. Yes, I’m aware we learn plenty based on that behavior, but we learn nothing of substance. Also, if the most action-oriented and active thing your lead character does in the present and immediate timeline is piss himself…do better.

It says “sins will be atoned for” in the description of this movie. Some of the “sins” we learn about are undoubtedly worthy of atonement. Others? Like saying someone’s breath stinks? Or making fun of a coworker's looks and personality? These are, of course, crass, and they are shallow; they’re shitty things to say about anyone. They speak to the man’s immaturity and his selfishness, his callousness and his shit sense of humor. Are they punishable by death? If you said yes, grow up. What about the others ing him in those conversations? Where was their atonement? The flashback with the girl by the cliff, where is her atonement? Not only for attacking him but also for being part of the affair since it takes two to tango, as they say. We don't ever actually learn if our main character did what he was being accused of. Yes, I'm aware we can infer it, but despite the popular way of handling things these days, I think someone should actually be proven guilty. We get no clarity there, no conclusion, no nothing. This is a "horror" movie where anything is possible, so I think we could have spared another minute or two on top of the taut 70-odd minutes to actually confirm Sota's character did what he was being called out about. I mean everything else was shown to us, why not that? That entire flashback, and God help us what came after it, was just ridiculous in every possible way.

Speaking of that flashback, I could not even begin to fathom what the fuck happened there or where the fuck this movie went after that scene. There’s a part, about 50ish minutes in, when a character shows up, smashed to shit and back again, and the movie just….continues. I spent the remaining 23 minutes trying to figure out what the fuck I was watching. When they tossed a bandaid on the person and just kept on keeping on, I was so flustered and irritated at this movie that I could barely laugh. What was that? He clearly isn’t hallucinating since everyone is interacting with this non-ghost ghost. What little interest I had in the unavoidable and inevitable end to this flick evaporated more and more every second after that character’s reappearance.

The movie has a solid, if ultimately pedestrian and unpolished, anti-bullying message. I stand by that fully. There are plenty of things in my past, in all levels of schooling and early adulthood, that I look back on and cringe at. That I feel remorseful or shameful about. Plenty of people do. Fuck, we ALL do to some extent. As Tim Robinson so eloquently stated: “I USED to be a piece of shit.” We have been pieces of shit before, in one way or another. Part of growing up is recognizing that, confronting and facing that part of yourself. Making peace where you can, and accepting that sometimes you can’t or won’t be able to, for all kinds of reasons. But growing up is making sure you work on becoming a better person, making sure you aren’t a piece of shit anymore, and doing your best to influence those entering those parts of their lives not to be pieces of shit. To not be bullies or assholes or mean. The world is a mean place, and it seems to just be getting meaner (hell, my review here is probably meaner than it needs to be, and yes, I know, longer, too), but it doesn’t HAVE to be. Be good people is a solid message; bullying sucks and affects everyone around you is a truthful and impactful message. I get that, and I that aspect of this film. But that and a decently engaging lead performance, unfortunately, aren’t going to amount to much from me this time around.

This is a prime example of me just absolutely, one-hundred percent not getting what everyone else was experiencing with this one. I saw that 3.3 rating on here and got excited, thought I’d found another Tartan release gem. But I just was not picking up what everyone else was putting down and I made it about halfway through this flick before I ed the cardinal truth of Letterboxd as a whole; a large contingent of the s of this site will STAN just about fuckin anything for no good goddamn reason at all.

If you’re still with me this far, please indulge me for just a moment longer while I shamelessly plug myself. My first book, If These Walls Could Weep, was published last fall (a horror story) and is now available on Amazon. It’s a novella, meaning it’s shorter than some of my reviews, and it has a little existential dread to start your day with a bit of cosmic and body horror to end your nights. The link is in my bio on my profile. Any is greatly and humbly appreciated. You might not love it, but it probably won’t make you want to hang yourself in front of your co-workers, either.

Out of all the horror I watch, all the varied and disparate genres and subgenres, Nunsploitation might be at the very bottom of whatever breakdown exists. Hell, it may be in dead last since I can only think of a select handful of movies that really fit the bill for such an exploitation classification. I don’t usually go for religious-themed horror flicks; those have always done preposterously little for me both in ways of scares and enjoyment, and I think I always just lump Nunsploitation in with the broader context of Religious horror, and therefore, it falls by the wayside. What I’m saying is that I don’t have a whole lot to compare this film to within the genre. I’m not even entirely sure what compelled me to pick this one up. A distressing and depressing lack of physical media options at the Walmart down the street from my house most assuredly played a hefty part in it. But so did the pretty solid-sounding reviews I’d read and a tantalizingly (and later proven to be slightly exaggerated) brutal-sounding parents guide on IMDb, coupled with a cheapo price tag. Being completely honest, Sydney Sweeney certainly didn’t hurt, either.

Regardless, I went into this with relatively low (if not completely nonexistent) expectations and the loosest of loose grasp of the general plot. I can say I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t without its fair share of disappointments.

The plot, from what I’ve gathered, is eerily similar to The First Omen. I can’t attest to how accurate that claim is since now none of you will be shocked to learn I have not seen The First Omen. Boiling down Immaculate’s plot is a fairly straightforward endeavor though; Sweeney is a young nun fresh from her schooling and whisked away to a convent in Italy that caters to dying nuns. Shortly after her arrival, everyone, with the exception of the viewing audience given the title of the film, is shocked to learn their baby-faced nun is miraculously with child. At this point our mother-to-be’s already mostly unpleasant stay becomes an all-out nightmare, in ways equally expected and unique.

As mentioned, I can’t speak for the ebb and flow of Nunsploitation movies, but I can speak pretty confidently on exploitation flicks in general. I can speak even more assuredly about horror movies as a whole. Immaculate checks a hefty number of boxes for each of those categories, but it also just as fervently leaves a lot to be desired.

I wouldn’t say the pacing is a problem. The movie is a bloody and breezy 88 minutes long, almost 80 exactly when you chop the credits out of the picture, and it doesn’t take all that long for the shit to start hitting the fan. It strikes me as more of a two-pronged (or double-horned, if you’d prefer) problem. Andrew Lobel’s screenplay seems wildly uncertain of what kind of thrills and chills should be the focus, and by extension, director Michael Mohan is left equally bewildered about which direction to steer the film as a whole.

There are aspects of all kinds of horror flicks sprinkled throughout Lobel’s screenplay: all alone in a “strange land”, psychological thrillers, science fiction, medical thrillers, homages to the classic European horrors of the 70’s, sex thrillers, exploitation/nunsploitation, religious horror, slashers, etc etc etc. There are so many little nods and side-quests in the overall themes and genres of this film at the screenplay level that it never really truly secures itself in any. There’s *just* enough of each to give a little taste of what this film could have been if it had buckled down and picked a consistent lane, but not nearly enough to save it from weaving around like a drunkard stumbling for a place to piss. The benefit of this is that when it’s focusing on a motif or genre that feels weak in the overall film, I was glad when it casually strolled over to a new area of focus with the indifference of someone meandering through an art gallery hoping for something to catch their eye. The con, of course, is that when it settled into a groove that had my full attention, I was bummed or annoyed when that focus was fleeting.

The same stands true for Mohan’s direction. He is at the mercy of the aforementioned screenplay, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he has to play it as safe as he does for the majority of the movie’s runtime. He confidently guides the movie from one set piece to the next, inspired scenes bookended by predictable scenes of genre convention box-checking, but he rarely does so with any kind of apparent gusto or enthusiasm. It’s as if he, and everyone else involved in this movie, know where this is going (obviously, they made it), and they’re just overeager and impatient to get there. After a while, so was I.

Luckily, when the shit does officially pop off, it does so in fairly glorious and gory fashion. It cuts loose with demonic abandon and really heaves itself headfirst into some pretty bonkers shit. The science fiction/Jurassic Park-lite elements of it all, of which there are a few, are more than a bit preposterous but I’m comfortable leaning into them and embracing them as part of the exploitative charm. The chase bits are intense, and the gore was pleasantly unexpected and suitably cringeworthy. The climactic scramble for survival through the labyrinthine tombs under the convent (filmed in the actual catacombs in Rome) is a notable set piece. There is also some solid roasting of human beings, bodily dismemberment, throat slashing, and a truly gnarly head smashing via crucifix that all deserve some attention from devout gore hounds such as myself. The ending bloodbath reminded me a bit of Darren Lynn Boseman’s St. Agatha, one of the few other nun-focused horror jams I’ve checked out within the last few years. Actually, a lot of this film kinda reminds me of that movie (which means I guess First Omen will, too whenever I get around to it), and seeing as I think I liked Immaculate better, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or bad thing. Simply an observation for others to check out for themselves if they wish.

The film takes place mainly within the walls of the convent so cinematographer Elisha Christain (what a name for this film, ha) doesn’t really dazzle us with any memorable scenery for much of the runtime. There are a few well-shot creepy-religion-type bits, a dark Mass or two, and there are a couple of chases that take place in the gorgeous Italian countryside to spice things up a bit, but if you’re going into this hoping to see a lot of memorable scenery or beautiful vistas of Italy, I’d get your hopes in check. It’s mostly just old churches and convents for this flick.

The performances are also just solid enough not to earn any truly heated scorn, but I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone else had just as hard a time ing a single character or performer without looking them up, just like I’m currently doing. Benedetta Porcaroli is noteworthy for being the “comic relief” nun, the young, rebellious one who probably shouldn’t be there in the first place. Giulia Heathfield Di Renzi gets her digs in as the ever-present and endlessly cunty Sister Isabelle. Alvaro Morte and Dora Romano round it out as the Father and Mother Superior of the convent, but the only person anyone is going to is Sydney Sweeney. I found her to be a solid enough lead, and she really evokes a lot of different and intense emotions through the last chunk of this flick, but I’m nowhere near ready to dub her a “Scream Queen” as so many others seem to be. Sweeney excels in the scenes involving horror. In scenes where there is some kind of turmoil or action or barbaric act taking place to her or around her. She invokes plenty of terror and fear, the right amount of naive hope and intense desperation. The final five minutes of the movie play out in complete silence, and we rely solely on Sweeney’s facial expressions and screams to tell us everything we need to know, to show us everything that we are not seeing, and she does an absolutely fantastic job during that entire set piece, truly commendable and memorable work. But, as I said, this movie takes its time to get up and running, and in that build-up there are plenty of quiet moments where we are left with Sweeney, who seems to share that impatience to get to the good stuff. She seems lost, not in a way befitting of her fish-out-of-water character but just genuinely disinterested in being there, as if she wandered onto the wrong set somehow and was just winging it. She seems vacant, not her character being whisked along in a current of foreign languages and arcane rituals, but just generally and genuinely vacuous while she waits for one scene to end and the next to start. It’s hard for me to stay focused and engrossed in her character or the unraveling plot in front of me while the leading actress, who also produced the film, seems so wildly disenchanted with everything and anything happening that doesn’t involve screaming, running, stabbing, dying, or any other intense and horror-centric activity.

All that being said, I can’t lie and say I didn’t enjoy myself. Sure, I was bored here and there, but as I said, religious-themed horror doesn’t do much for me on a good day. I never found myself reaching for my phone or fast-forwarding through the more slog-heavy bits. I was in it, and I was, more or less, contentedly along for the ride. I think for true, die-hard fans of Nunsploitation flicks, this one has a lot to offer. The same can be said for any of those Religious horror nuts out there. Other horror hounds, I certainly wouldn’t scoff at the suggestion of checking this one out. It has more to offer in the pros department than the cons, but I do think it could have used a lot more ironing out and a more solid focus on what kind of exploitation/horror movie it truly wanted to be. Focusing on a very topical and touchy current issue will certainly sway some viewers in one direction or another, for better or for worse, but hinging the whole movie on that sentiment doesn’t make it a home run in my book, nor does it make it a genuinely noteworthy or memorable horror flick. The excellent final third of this movie is where that comes in, the full-tilt sci-fi gorefest this was sluggishly and haphazardly building itself up to be the entire time.

I’d check this out again, sure. It did instill in me a desire to check out some more Nunspolitation flicks and maybe be a little less dismissive of religious horror in general, though at this stage of the game, I highly doubt I’ll be reassessing my stance much just hopefully gleaning some more enjoyment from the subgenre. And I think the fact this film had that effect on me, on top of it holding my attention and delivering some solid gory, horror goods in the homestretch warrant tossing another half star on this unholy bastard and calling it a day.

If you’re still with me this far, please indulge me for just a moment longer while I shamelessly plug myself. My first book, If These Walls Could Weep, was published last fall (a horror story) and is now available on Amazon. It’s a novella, meaning it’s shorter than some of my reviews, and it has a little existential dread to start your day with a bit of cosmic and body horror to end your nights. The link is in my bio on my profile. Any is greatly and humbly appreciated. You might not love it, but you also probably won’t want to club it to death with a rock, either.

What could have, and rightfully SHOULD HAVE, been an epic summer blockbuster is instead left stranded in the swelling wake of far better aquatic-themed horror jams. Under Paris opens with a frenzied promise of sharp-toothed shark carnage before gradually, agonizingly, transforming into the washed-up and bloated corpse of minced meat it should never have been.

Under Paris is a shark thriller masquerading as an eco-thriller whilst simultaneously being an eco-thriller pretending to be a shark thriller, if that makes sense. If not, then you still get the gist of Under Paris. If that still fails to make sense, it also tosses in some disaster thriller aspects as well for good measure.

What the movie boils down to is a massive, and somehow mutated, Mako shark named Lilith finds its way from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch into the River Seine. Marine researcher Sophia (Berenice Bejo) finds herself teaming up with a squad of river police divers led by Adil (Nassim Lyes) to try and stop the toothy menace. She, naturally, has a personal vendetta against Lilith as the big bitch ate her husband, along with her entire team, three years ago in the aforementioned garbage patch. The shark also dragged Sophia to the goddamn bottom of the ocean before the researcher managed to escape the clutches of death and resurface with nary a problem beyond a ruptured eardrum that is never again mentioned. Tossed into the mix, solely in order to prevent it from ever being the streamlined narrative it warrants, is a group of “eco-terrorists” that want to “free” the already free-roaming shark and release her back into the ocean. All of this occurring, again naturally, just in time for the massive French Triathlon that is set to take place within a few days, annnnnd the river squad dealing with undisposed ordnance from WWII, as if we all don’t know where that’s going.

There are a few different components here that all have the potential to be solid summer blockbuster entertainment. All those different components tossed into a blender and dumped into an overcrowded river as chum? I’m not so sure about. It’s possible, but none really jump to mind right off the top of my head. As a general rule of thumb, any summer blockbuster or horror movie should be pretty simple, so if the general description or genre breakdown requires a slew of hyphens or slashes, you’re probably going about it the wrong way.

I went into this unaware of all the extra baggage the movie had weighing it down. I watched the trailer, I read the plot synopsis, I saw Xavier Gens was helming it, and I it the high early praise blinded me. At this point in my life and my movie watching endeavors, that’s on me to take all that shit at face value. The fact it’s a Netflix “Original” probably should have been my first, and probably only necessary, clue that this flick was gunna be bogged down and drowning in one way or another. Netflix churns out more movies in a week than I take breaths in a fucking year, so it really is a smidge disconcerting that their successes ratio, for horror movies anyway, is about 1 for every 77. Silly, stupid, idiot me to think a purported shark based summer shocker was gunna be that lucky one.

I won’t sit here and say that it had nothing going for it; that would be a blatant lie. Gens knows his way around a horror set piece and can effectively ratchet up the tension. The problem here is that there is just so precious little of either of those elements. I’m not sure if that’s a director problem or an issue birthed in the screenplay stage, but sadly Gens is still to blame there. Gens, and three other fucking people?!?! This movie had four screenwriters, and at no point did one of them go, “Good God group, we’ve gone about 43 pages without so much as a fin on the screen.” I’m not sure how almost an entire basketball team worth of people didn’t latch onto that mishap and fix it up, but I can’t even say I’m all that shocked. That’s just the nature of the beast these days it seems.

However, when they DO to put the shark on the screen, there is plenty of bloody carnage to keep you entertained. A massacre in the catacombs involving a couple sharks and a mob of protesters and cops was a fun jolt of frenetic energy and horror, even if it took over an hour to get there. The inevitable feeding frenzy of the triathlon provided similar thrills. I was also a solid 50/50 split on whether I enjoyed or was let down by the way the sharks dispatched our group of scuba-cops. The first few times, it was fun to see a dozen sharks pounce on a wetsuit-clad, impossible-to-identify character, each mouth desperate for some chunk of flesh. But after a few times, I found myself more confused by how so many large sharks were finding purchase on the body instead of just enjoying the mayhem. Some of that could very well be that I was running out of patience with the movie by the end, and the end is where most of the action/horror/shark attacks take place.

The sharks looked suitably terrifying, and I was happy to see they had at least some models and animatronics built. Yes, most of the sharks are CGI rendered, and their sizes fluctuate with each puff of their gills, but the few practical sharks and fins we see looked cool and terrifying. Nicolas Massart did his best cinematography-wise with what he was given. He managed to provide a few memorable scenes of noteworthy shark horror and plenty of muddy-watered suspense, even if that got old a bit quickly. And there are some decent kills, even if the one that’s jumping to mind right now is a ripoff of every rip-off ever done of the Deep Blue Sea flooding ladder room scene.

I will happily toss an extra half-star on this flick, though, no question. The way this film flipped entirely on its ear in the last ten minutes is something to behold. I don’t know how many, how much, what kinds of drugs the half-a-baseball-team of writers were scarfing down, but goddamn. This movie took a turn, doubled back, and took a more egregious turn at the end. And I was kinda there for it. I was laughing at the insanity and lunacy of it all, and for that final chunk of runtime, with scuba cops getting fucking shredded, swimmers getting yeeted through water, explosions, shark swarms, fucking tsunamis!!!!?????!!!!!???? Where the fuck was all that excitement and B-Movie beauty the rest of the film? It’s not enough to elevate or salvage the whole film, no. And I don’t know if the effect would be as significant if you don’t slog your way through the first hour and a half of buildup, not sure if it’ll feel as freeing and earned without that. But damn, I loved the end. And Xavier Gens does love his bleak and downbeat endings (Frontiers and especially The Divide come to mind), and boy does this one have a doozy.

I have an everlasting soft spot for shark-based horror movies. I love them and they are a particular subgenre of nature attacks horror that I will probably always give the time of day. They speak of summer for me, and every year, I inevitably watch at least a dozen shark-themed horror flicks (I’m at 4 shark movies and 2 other aquatic-themed horror flicks so far this summer). I was really hoping that Under Paris would be a returning flick next year, that it would make it into my collection of favorite shark horror movies, and that I would be enraged that Netflix won’t release it on DVD or Blu-ray. Sadly, it’s not going to be any of those things. It’s a decent enough shark thriller, a terribly bland and ineffectual eco-thriller. It has its moments, and there are some pretty cool shots and kills, but the vast majority of them are in the back half of this incredibly bloated and waterlogged 100+ minute movie. It’s a shame cuz this one had some serious potential to be a cult classic monster romp. Hopefully we’ll get some more aquatic, sea animals gone nuts movies soon. Ones that understand the assignment better than this one and that don’t self-neuter themselves like those goddamn Meg movies. I’m still looking forward to hunting down and checking out Xavier Gens martial arts fuck-em-up flick Mayhem!, also starring Nassim Lyes, whenever the hell that’s supposed to come out in the US. So, I mean, I guess that’s a good sign that this film didn’t turn me off the dude's movies completely. It’s the little things in life, really.

If you’re still with me this far down, please indulge me for just a moment longer while I shamelessly plug myself. My first book, If These Walls Could Weep, was published last fall (a horror story) and is now available on Amazon. It’s a novella, meaning it's shorter than some of my reviews, and it has a little existential dread for your mornings with a little cosmic and body horror for your evenings. The link is in my bio on my profile. Any is greatly and humbly appreciated. You might not love it, but you probably won’t hate it. Hey, just like Under Paris!

Watched on Tuesday June 18, 2024.

Watched on Friday May 31, 2024.

Watched on Friday May 10, 2024.

Watched on Wednesday May 8, 2024.

Watched on Saturday May 4, 2024.

Watched on Wednesday April 10, 2024.

Watched on Wednesday December 13, 2023.

Watched on Monday October 23, 2023.

Watched on Wednesday October 11, 2023.

Watched on Wednesday October 4, 2023.

Watched on Friday September 22, 2023.

Watched on Tuesday August 22, 2023.

Watched on Thursday July 27, 2023.

Jeepers Creepers: Stillborn.

At what point during this colossal shitshow do we think someone stopped and said, innocently, “Hey, ready to watch that back? See how it turned out?” and was then laughed at and peppered with stones and spit? I mean, hoooolllllyyyy shit. The fuck is this? HOW is this? How, in all the universes, is this the sequel that I found myself waiting eagerly for after barely managing to survive the dual hernia that was Jeepers Creepers 3? Made me miss Silva. Just a big old YIKES, all the way around.

There’s a plot here if we’re feeling generous to a level on par with Christ and the fishes. A few people, each indistinguishable beyond their individual level of annoyingness, attend the world’s craziest, wildest, most bonkers-cray-cray horror/cosplay festival. So when that crowd of 9 people milling around in variations of the same 3 costumes came on the screen gyrating weakly and sipping what I can only assume, based on budget, are empty solo cups while some form of Gestapo ceremony leader has an aneurysm on stage….I shoulda turned it off. Simple as that. If I’d have just turned the movie off or set my television on fire I could have at least pretended it didn’t get any worse. But I, along with the gluttonously unhealthy 15 thousand(!) other masochists that watched this, don’t love myself. In fact, I actually rewound certain scenes to make sure what I’d seen was real and not some kind of severe allergic reaction to fuckery.

I mean, I truly don’t know where to begin with this. Much like I don’t know how they began to make this. The opening alone was a headscratcher of prolific proportions. The fact they “remade” the opening of Jeepers Creepers 1 in Jeepers Creepers:Abortion as a movie in a movie? What? The fact Justin Long and Gina Philips are apparently in their mid-70s for said film-in-film? What’s happening? What is happening here? I’m just reiterating my own self-flagellation, but I mean that’s honestly all this, and every other review of this “flick”, boils down to. I ravaged myself for 88 excruciating minutes and I couldn’t possibly provide a reason as to why. I love horror? Cool story. I liked the first couple entries? Sick dope, but I also saw the third one and shoulda known. We’re talking brutality here people, and that’s that.

The movie can be boiled down to either discussing the CGI background in just about every single scene in the film which is so egregious is borders on comedy…until it keeps going and becomes an assault on both patience and sanity. We could discuss Jarreau Benjamin replacing Jonathan Breck as The Creeper, I guess. Apparently, Breck had more common sense than any of us and knew when to cut and run. Benjamin has essentially none of the presence of Breck, to put it mildly. Instead of coming across as an intimidating, flesh-eating monster he instead keeps popping up with his coat open and weird abs on display which instead es The Creeper off as one of the forgotten-about of Magic Mike who has finally been overcome by syphilis and bronzer. If neither of those topics hold your interest we could discuss the new theme song. Gone is Where’d You Get Those Peepers or whatever the fuck it was called and instead we have a new tune, an old 50s crooner style that’s the audio equivalent of shit slicked across a gas station mirror. A tune written by the new “director” no less. Timo Vuorensola coming in scorching hot, bombing as a director and then charring his corpse to dust in his failure as a musician as well. What a feat. If that still bores you, I can only assume the laughably absurd fighting, literal fist fighting, between Creeper and humans will hold no sway. I guess that leaves us with Peter Brooke’s stupid beard. It’s magnificent in its balance between Amish carpenter and homeless drug addict.

It’s a Jeepers Creepers movie, I get it. No one was expecting high art here, myself included. But I wasn’t expecting this, that’s for fucking sure. I dug the first two and did genuinely think a solid horror franchise with a unique monster/villain was on the come-up. How dare I. How dare any of us. The third movie was a swift and hellacious donkey kick to the nuts, but this entry is akin to having an entire stampede of stallions learn the fucking macarena on my fucking soul. Shitty set up, ridiculous story, CGI that should actually be prosecuted as a war crime, horrible characters (besides Brooke’s beard and left hook), boring and sometimes physically impossible deaths. There’s just so very little here worth a singular flake of fish shit, but it’d been a while since I wrote a review and this one was a nice easy blast to get out of the system. Unfortunately, the only blast to get this outta my brain would be a Cobain-style one, and I seem to have misplaced Courtney’s number.

Avoid for your own sake. Or don’t and me in the misery. It makes no difference, the movie EXISTS. They made it. Theoretically, some people actually got paid for this. I fucking BOUGHT this, and wathced it, and therefore gotta give it at least the one full star which is about two and half stars too many. So the damage is done. God help us.

Watched on Monday January 2, 2023.

Watched on Thursday May 11, 2023.

Watched on Tuesday May 30, 2023.

I wonder if Sam Raimi, Bruce “The Chin” Campbell, and crew would have ever thought their indie splatterflick would gradually morph into what it is today. The Evil Dead started as one thing, became another, switched it up for the third outing, made a hard pivot for the reboot, got a pretty substantial makeover for the (entirely too soon canceled) tv show. I mean, pick a fuckin’ lane amiright? Well, fret not my fellow Deadites. The schizophrenic insanity of tone and story continues in rampaging force in this newest entry. As does my trend of writing to my heart's content, so feel free to skip around or do absolutely anything BESIDES making an intensely boring joke or comment about the word count here. K? Thanks. On to the breakdown.

Evil Dead Rise knows what it is in the sense of the overarching franchise. It seems like it completely understands its place in the hierarchy and what its intention is in propelling the franchise forward. But it truly seems at a complete loss of what it wants, and needs, to be as its standalone entry in this beloved, and undying, franchise. It’s cobbled together with plenty of disparate, interesting, and dark ideas but there is very little cohesion holding all these leaking and ravaged limbs together.

Lee Cronin (who? exactly) directs his own screenplay with a steady hand and an eye for creepy scenery, but that same dedication evaded him when he was writing. I understand he was “handpicked” by Raimi and Campbell, but it seems they didn’t have the time or compulsion to follow up on that choice. Maybe give the script a once over? Point out some of the dangling and frayed tendons of story that are left to twitch and rot instead of connecting to the overall story?

Unfortunately, a script that’s as cheese-grated as a non- groupie’s leg is a tough thing to overcome and overlook when so much of the movie is a balancing act. Great ideas, solid scenes, creative homages all struggle to keep the film afloat while confusing plot devices, underused locations, and shameless homages do their damndest to drag it all down.

I enjoyed their attempt to branch out and do something new with the setting. I think that’s a solid idea and it had already been dabbled with in both Army of Darkness and Ash Vs. Evil Dead. It wasn’t this gasp-and-mutter move to take it out of the cabin in the woods and shake it up. It’s just… I wish they’d actually fucking done that? Yeah, it “takes place” in a large apartment complex in LA. What they really mean to say is that it takes place in a single apartment on a single floor in the aforementioned apartment complex. They, essentially, took the film from a small cabin in the woods and put it in….a small apartment in the city? Where’s the difference, the change? Why not explore that location? Like a gym or a pool or something. The underground bank vaults, fucking maybe? Sure, they use the elevator; the final battle is in the parking garage. If you use that to the idea they capitalized on the locale change, and you can say it with a straight face, I’ll have to kindly ask you to go fuck off into a wood chipper. Maybe one conveniently and not at all convolutedly located in the parking garage of a dilapidated tenement in the middle of a fucking city.

Aesthetically the apartments kinda peeved me off too, but I wouldn’t say it’s that big of a deal. The apartment, and one hallway we were blessed to spend some time in, looked like they belong in a Rob Zombie flick or a SAW movie. Why so dark and dirty? Why so early 2000s direct-to-DVD color scale? I get it, it’s a horror flick. It fits the tone and the theme of the movie. Understood, thumbs up, got it. But, in my mind, wouldn’t it have been better, visually and storywise, to have it look a least somewhat liveable and nice? So that it could, you know, change? Get filthy and decrepit? Cuz when you start with the place already being an absolute goddamn shithole, a little (lot) of blood on the floors and walls really isn’t gunna knock that asking price down very much if you know what I mean.

I enjoyed the attempts here at expanding the mythology and the lore, I just wish they’d done a little more with it. A new book, new backstory, new chants. All that stuff is awesome and it was fun to see the world of Evil Dead continue to expand and evolve, but nothing really came from any of it. We get a big final monster, ala The Thing, and that was cool and creepy, but that’s in the eleventh hour. I hope they dive into it more in future installments, of which I am sure there will be, but I’m not going to get my hopes up since this movie seemed content throwing shit out there and then almost immediately forgetting all about it.

There are subplots galore here and almost all of them go exactly nowhere. I’m not sure why half of them were even included. Each, at one point in time, seemed like it would matter only for me to them after the movie was over and go “Oh yeah, what the fuck?” I mean, the pregnancy stuff. Need I even say more? No, I don’t think so.

That’s a recurring theme in all aspects of this film. A lot of ideas and no clear idea of what to do with them or where to go. Big ideas that I have no doubt would yield some awesome results if they could just stay focused on them for longer than a scene. There’s flashes of brilliance but they are rapidly overshadowed by the lack of focus in the mad dash to the next gore scene.

If any of you are hoping some of these aspects will be broken up by the doses of humor so prevalent in the franchise, give up hope. This is easily the most straightforward horror flick in the whole franchise. There are very few jokes in this flick, very few scenes of brevity and humor, dark or otherwise. It’s a somber tone the whole way through and it commits fully to the horror of the original and the 2013 remake. I’m cool with that, I love my horror flicks to be horror flicks, but I do realize that’s an aspect of the franchise that a lot of people adore and I was surprised how incredibly bleak the entire film was.

That being said, I wouldn’t claim this movie is “scary”. I would, happily, call it creepy. Every aspect of the movie seemed more designed to creep under your skin and unsettle you than to make you jump out of your seat. It makes you want to cover your eyes or look away because everything oozes menace and the threat of mutilation. For the most part, they succeed in this regard far more frequently than they fall flat. There’s plenty to be uncomfortable about, the setting (even if it starts in squalor and ends in squalor) is effectively disturbing. The lighting and music, it's tuned in on the right frequency here and cinematographer Dave Garbett makes the most out of what he’s given. Though most of the creepiness and chills factor is hefted on the back of Alyssa Sutherland’s committedly disturbed performance.

Sutherland is a powerhouse as the main Deadite foe. Everything about her appearance serves itself perfectly to being a demonically possessed killer and lunatic. Her tall and lanky frame makes all the Deadite contortions more disturbing somehow, more realistic looking? I’m not sure, but I know her long ass arms and legs snapping and bending looked as wild as they did because she isn’t a short woman. The same with her face. The features of her face start off beautiful and captivating and then the same things encoming that beauty, her sharp cheekbones and wide smile and big eyes etc, all become horrific and disturbing to look at. The makeup department really knocked it out of the park with Sutherland’s Deadite look, but I do think a lot of it was pretty easy to come up with. Like I said, everything about her physicality lends itself pretty seamlessly to horror, and to me, that’s pretty gorgeous. I just wish the screenplay gave her more to do and more to say.

The thing about the Deadites is that they don’t shut up. Deadites talk more shit than you’d hear at a pickup game of basketball in the heart of Brooklyn between two rival gangs with dueling loudspeakers blasting drill rap and every political debate of the last ten years. Deadites have no chill whatsoever and they just let fly insult after insult as they dump the tea on your secrets to everyone around you. That’s not really very present in this newest outing and that’s kind of a bummer. They play it a little safe with the insults and the shit-talking this time out and I don’t really understand why. Sutherland has some solid lines, and her delivery is fantastic, but the words just don’t pack much punch or sting. I mean, she’s their mother. Mom’s can say some heinous shit, they got all the info, especially for the younger kids. But we don’t get much of that. We get a lot of “mom’s not here” or “let me in” or the word groupie being used as the most catastrophic insult of all time for some reason. Really wish they’d have leaned into the Deadite verbal toxicity a bit more, a lot more actually, but at least Alyssa Sutherland looked stupendous as the main threat.

The rest of the characters don’t really have that benefit though. Sure, some other people turn Deadite and fuck shit up in the latter portion of the movie, but they don’t have nearly as much to do and aren’t around for nearly as long. The performances were all fine, all believable enough I guess, but I didn’t particularly care for any of them. None of them struck me as particularly good people, or people that I’d want to hang out with or talk to. The characters themselves also kinda fit into that early 2000s horror, grimy and nasty and redeemable only in the sense that they’re young and some people might feel shitty wishing to see those youngsters torn to pieces. Not I. I couldn’t wait for the carnage.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked the acting. I found the performances lived in and relatable to some extent here or there. Nell Fisher as the youngest child is adorable and she’s a champ the whole way through, which is good cuz’ I knew pretty early this movie wanted us to THINK it had the guts to go full dark while never ever coming close to it. Morgan Davies as the brother, same deal. Good acting knee-capped by a weak script and an almost euphoric commitment to making idiotic decisions, acknowledging making said idiotic decisions, proceeding to make additional idiotic decisions. Gabrielle Echols as the older sister, more of the same. They all did a solid job, it’s just there isn’t much here for them to work with from the jump street. So they can play convincing teens that are scared very well, can play the under-the-surface annoyance experienced by anyone with siblings well. But the purpose they serve is to do dumb shit so bad things can happen, and as far as that goes they hit their marks well enough.

The new Ash, the new Mia, is played by Lily Sullivan. She works on guitars and is NOT a groupie, though she also isn’t much of a sister or an aunt. That’s about the extent of her character development. It’s not like we need a lot more, this is an Evil Dead movie after all, but I would have liked to have cared about her a little. Or at least found her compelling or badass or strong. Anything really. We all miss Ash, and we probably always will. Mia also grew on me and showed depth and strength and badassery, felt like a real character. Lily Sullivan plays the role with enough reserved manic energy that when she finally snaps at the end it feels organic, earned, built up. But I was never really grabbed by her performance or her character. I didn’t feel like she was a badass or much of a person as far as I’m concerned. Her plotline and character motivations don’t make the most sense to me and as far as leads and Deadite slayers in this franchise she definitely strikes me as the weakest. Her physical presence is strong on the screen, and she handles herself well in the action scenes, but as far as a fully fleshed character goes she’s pretty lacking. Oh yeah, and she’s pregnant. A fact that matters as much in this review as it did in the movie.

Let’s be honest here though, none of us really go to watch these movies for the above reasons. Not truly. We go for the gore, we go for the horror action and to bask in whatever wildly outlandish bloodletting the filmmakers can come up with. And in that regard, there is far less to be upset about, but there’s equally not as much as you’d expect after hearing countless takes that this is the bloodiest and grossest entry in the franchise. It is not. Not by a long shot.

The gore is strong, yes. Every single character in this film is put through the fuckin’ ringer. Most of them more than once. Faces are cut up, glass is chewed and swallowed, and destroys necks from the inside out. Eyeballs are bitten out, scalps are torn off, limbs are shotgunned to mist. And yes, a leg is cheese grated. There’s plenty of bloody mayhem and I was all about it. The only times I laughed in this film were during those scenes, that kind of head-shaking soft laughter while muttering “god damn”. And that’s how it should be for Evil Dead. These movies, except maybe Army of Darkness, are bloodbaths and gorefests. The 2013 entry and the amazing television program leaned into that full force and I cherished it. Luckily, Lee Cronin and crew knew that shouldn’t be fucked with in this new entry, thank Christ. It’s bloody, but it’s not the bloodiest. It’s gory, but when the shock wears off you do realize you’ve seen a lot of this before.

Some of the violence are homages to the other films, and I did think those were handled well. This iteration of the attacking vines was really solid and creative and fit the setting and story. There’s a way they incorporated the blood rain, and that worked well. And yes, there’s shotgun slaughter and chainsaw carnage, the latter of which I loved. So, yes, it’s a bloody flick. For those unaccustomed to movies like this I’m sure it’d be a lot. But for seasoned gorehounds and veterans of this franchise, it is exactly what we want and expect but not much more. And the bullshit proclamations of “We used 2,000 gallons of blood!”, shut the fuck up forever. I’d say over 75% of that was in one scene and it was one of the shameless and cliched homages I mentioned much earlier. They live in an apartment complex. It has elevators. You put the rest together and you can see how around 1,500 gallons are just in that scene alone.

That, to me at least, doesn’t make a film “bloody” or “gory”. Maybe I’m alone in that thought process, but to me, a gory and bloody movie is when shit happens to the characters. Wounds and dismemberments etc. Not just blood being around. Blood raining or seeping from faucets or filling tubs or spilling from elevators. That’s not what I consider when I categorize a film as a gorefest. Luckily, there’s plenty of gnarly shit happening to people in this film that fits my classification of bloodbath, but I felt that distinction needed to be made.

When the action start’s up there’s very few lulls, but when they appear you do tend to feel it. The violence is so intense and fast-paced, hard-hitting, but when it’s not happening there’s very little going on to keep the momentum going and you can’t help but realize you’re growing impatient. It’s only 97 minutes long, and they fit a lot of carnage into that runtime, but there it takes a hot minute to really get going, and I found myself growing antsy. Partially because of that building dread and the understanding that shits about to go nuts. But deeper into the film my antsy-ness was harder to place. I wasn’t bored, not at any point in the film, but I was wanting it to pick up the pace a bit and get back to the bone of what the movie is about and trying to achieve.

I know it sounds like I’m slamming the film left and right, but that’s not the case. There was a lot here that I did enjoy. One of the best aspects was that cold open. This movie has one of the best cold opens for a horror flick that I’ve seen in recent memory. I think it definitely has the best opening of the franchise as a whole. It’s a little ridiculous, a little confusing, but overall just fucking awesome. It’s creepy and bloody and intense and set just the right kind of tone I wanted and needed for the movie. The rest of the movie tries, and periodically succeeds, to match the energy and vibe from that opening. When it nails it, boy oh boy does it fuckin’ nail it. When it fails, I was left wondering how that was possible and struggled to avoid thinking about how much I’d rather be with the young people dying horribly at that lake house. And that title screen reveal? That MUST become a poster.

What it all boils down to is whether I would watch this again or another entry in the franchise? The answer to both is a strong yes. I’d do both without hesitation. I just feel the underwhelmed frustration of this outing a little more than I expected to. I feel comfortable hitting this with a 3. I don’t think I’d go lower, not with how much I loved that opening and how the successful scenes of gore and horror clicked well for me. But I think I’d have to be convinced and cajoled to hit it much higher.

The Evil Dead is a franchise that’s been around for decades and it's not going anywhere and I find a lot of peace in that fact. It’s a franchise that I was introduced to early on in my horror-loving life and it’s been a staple of my collection ever since. It’s tapped into what I love, and even aspects of what I don’t like, in horror cinema. And it started from absolutely nothing, just an indie flick that blew up and created something incredible and timeless and I fucking dig that. Suffice to say, I love this franchise and I had really high hopes after waiting for ten years since the last entry.

Maybe I’m being too harsh on it, and another watch or two may confirm that, but I can’t shake the underlying disappointment I’m feeling about this outing. Despite everything that worked for me and the fact that it checked a lot of the boxes needed for an Evil Dead flick, it felt like it was missing something. Maybe a lot of little something’s, I’m not entirely sure, but I know there was something it needed.

I hope it does well and I hope we get another entry sometime before 2033. I love these movies, and the show and I’m all about the big swings they seem to be committed to taking. New lore, new myths, new books, new settings, and all the boundless potential that unlocks for this franchise? I love the sound of all that. I hope they tighten up the focus moving forward and get some firmer footing in the new stories of demonic insanity and carnage they’re coming up with. But even if they don’t I will be there for every one they do, cuz’ that’s we Deadites do. All Hail the King, Baby.

Groovy.

Watched on Tuesday April 11, 2023.

Watched on Saturday December 3, 2022.

Watched on Thursday December 1, 2022.

Terrifier took me so off guard when I first watched it that I still haven’t stopped singing its praises, to those that would listen and those that couldn’t give less of a fuck. It is still one of the hands-down best slashers I have seen in the last 5 or 6 years, maybe even the last decade. And for it to be a true-blooded indie film, with no studio trying to tug-job its way into oblivion at that, just makes so much more special to me. It has stuck with me, a lingering presence in the back of my brain every time I check out another new stalk-n-stab, and it has directly affected my expectations and desires in a sub-genre that I think most have written off. A new slasher villain, a new icon for the horror universe, that has carved his way, lovingly brutally, into my heart. These days, if the slasher flick isn’t a remake, redo, retcon, presecontinmakequel of a character first encountered between 26 and fucking 50 years ago then they are rarely given a second glance let alone a second stab. But not the homie Art. Oh no, that muck-mouthed loon isn’t fuckin’ going anywhere. And this second entry (third overall) solidly seals the deal on that fact.

Terrifier 2 picks up almost immediately after the first one ended. I know the plot description says “a sinister entity” brings our buddy Art back to life, but you might as well just ignore all of that. I don’t know why it says that or what it means by that, because nothing like that really happens? Anyway, Art’s back and is immediately back to tip-top slasher shape, caving in heads, ripping out eyes and brains, stabbing brooms in skulls, and playing patty-cakes with ghosts while doing his laundry. The man’s an icon. He’s on the prowl, with a more streamlined focus, sort of, in Miles County. Sienna Shaw takes center stage over Tori Hayes (our insane, deformed protagonist from the first film) and she has no idea the amount of blood and guts she, and her brother and friends, will be wading through by the end of this fateful Halloween Night.

There are a few other ingredients that writer/director Damien Leone has tossed into the pot this time around, but I’m not entirely sure what to make of them other than the extreme importance they are confusingly infused with. Sienna’s deceased, ARTist father, was apparently having premonitions about Pennywise’s demented and merciless cousin, and he had a whole scrapbook of drawings dedicated to the painted menace. He also designed a sword, a literal fucking sword, for his daughter, to go with the very risque outfit he designed (again, for his…daughter?) that both seem to be pivotal to something that only Damien Leone truly knows or understands.

But that’s all good. I’m not here for that shit, not really. If we’re all being honest with ourselves, none of us are and none of us should be. Damien Leone is creating, piecemeal by piecemeal, a sprawling universe for his diabolical villain and I’m here for it. I’m down with the vision and the creation, but they are not the true driving force behind my desire to have this franchise continue. That falls solely on the ever-leaning shoulders of David Howard Thornton and his portrayal of Art the Clown.

Art took the horror world by storm when that first entry hit. For those that hadn’t seen, or were unaware of, his original appearance in All Hallow’s Eve they had no idea what to fucking expect. He was a comically terrifying, mugging and gesticulating, presence of sheer brutality. He was so completely captivating that no matter how desperately you wanted to look away from the atrocities he was committing on screen you couldn’t. Any fears that people have that some of that screen presence or unyielding pull have faded can all be dispensed immediately. David Howard Thornton has so fully embodied the character, so perfectly brought him to life, that he might even be more compelling this time around. None of that shock and awe has worn off, at least not for me, and every time he was on the screen I was glued to his every movement and face. Whereas the first entry may have run the risk of making Art a simple concept, a slasher villain that will gradually lose its sharpness and definition and become nothing more than a gruesome boardwalk caricature, this entry solidifies him as the newest member of the coveted Horror Hall of Fame.

Art the Clown works as a concept most strongly, but that’s only because the character is still being fleshed out. He has more than enough screen presence and magnitude to own this budding franchise. He is the embodiment of extreme excess and the films really lean into that absurdity. Damien Leone might have the whole franchise mapped out if you listen to him talk about it, but I don’t buy that shit for a second. We are watching the evolution and creation of the newest slasher icon in real-time, in an entry-by-entry basis, and it’s pretty amazing to watch unfold. We don’t really know what motivates him. We don’t know where he comes from or why he does what he does for any reason beyond the fact he seems to be having the time of his life. But we’re learning, for better or for worse, in little morsels here and there. Will too much backstory eventually topple this growing monolith of extreme slasher craziness? Possibly, maybe even probably, but it won’t right now. Not even close. We get just enough to wet our whistle and still crave more.

The more you learn about any slasher villain the more the risk runs that it’ll ruin all the work that came before it. Look at every single entry in the main slasher entries. Every single one of those characters has been buried, screaming and slashing, under entirely too much backstory and alterations. All of them, without fail or exception. My hope is that Leone sees that, understands that, and is smart enough and creative enough to avoid that seemingly inevitable pitfall. As it stands Art the Clown is still coming into his own, he’s still being created. Clearly, there are a lot of elements to Art that Leone wants to establish and include, and some of those are bound to be ridiculous if not flat-out stupid, but that’s the risk horror fans take with growing franchises. And that is exactly what this is, a growing franchise.

Art the Clown isn’t just a concept, he’s slasher horror in all its grand and gory glory. And he’s clearly just getting started.

Much like this franchise. Terrifier 2 takes every single aspect of the first entry and doubles, if not triples, down on them. It is an epic horror movie, in more ways than one. But in every way Damien Leone has taken the humble beginnings of these films and expanded them, expounding on them in ways that are truly gratifying to see.

The set pieces are better, more well thought out and put together, and really makes you feel like you have a least a basic understanding of Miles County. From Halloween stores to parties to neighborhoods to massive abandoned amusement parks this movie is stuffed with different places for Art to make his art. Whereas the first entry took place in, essentially, two locations this film does its best to encom an entire town. And each and every location has something to , some bloody set piece to revisit and recall as you talk this flick up to fellow horror hounds.

The gore is also upped to the millionth degree. Each and every death set piece is a grueling experience of endurance, both for the victim and the audience, and it’s a goddamn blast to watch. The first film had a number of gruesome kills but I feel like we can all agree that we only really the one. That infamous hacksaw scene. This film has quite a few kills that I’ll be giddily describing to my friends for weeks to come. Despite what some may have you believe there really aren’t that many kills in this movie. Take out one massacre dream scene (don’t worry that is not a spoiler) there are 8 kills in Terrifier 2 and two of them are offscreen. But Damien Leone makes the absolute fucking most of each and every kill he puts on screen. Heads have never been so mutilated, chests have never been so explosively ready for death, bodies never so prepared for utter destruction. There are a couple deaths in here that go on for a while, starting off gross then hedging into absurd comedy and then settling back into gross again. There’s one that goes on so far past the point of human possibility and good taste that’s more than likely going to be the new hacksaw scene. It’s a dance of death, this movie, and you can tell how much work went into each kill. It’s clearly the pride and joy of Damien Leone to craft these scenes, and as a gore lover, it’s an honor to watch this new master at work.

The new characters help to make Art, and the savage slayings, more impactful. Everyone does a great job, Elliot Fullam and Sarah Voigt giving good and comical (intentional and otherwise) performances as Sienna’s brother and mother. Catherine Corcoran and Charlie McElveen also turning in noticeably memorable performances as friends and inevitable victims. They all seem more fully realized, more expertly crafted and written as opposed to the first entry. Each character served a purpose, but they all felt much more like real people and that made their gruesome dismemberments far more impactful then the string of, more or less, faceless victims in the first one.

But by far the best new addition is Sienna Shaw, played by Lauren LaVera. She’s the hero of the movie and as Leone himself said she’s the “heart and soul” of the franchise. LaVera is completely captivating in an opposite way to Art. She is comionate and thoughtful, gorgeous and intensely human. She plays Sienna perfectly and believably, fully encapsulating what Leone is suggesting with her character so that when she dons her outfit you believe she’s a badass warrior. The fact she looks like the love child of the Archangel Michael and Xena: Warrior Princess is a bit comical at first, then sexy, then hardcore horror heroine. It’s a great, memorable performance and I can easily see LaVera as the heroine of the franchise and as a new addition to the lists of fan favorite Final Girls.

Whereas I can’t a single song from the first movie, I loved the soundtrack this time around. Yes, there was one brain tumor of a song, clown cafe, that I could have lived without, but the rest of the music was on point for what this movie is and what it homages. Paul Wiley was in charge of music here and he filled the flick with loads of dark-wave lo-fi synth beats and it perfectly meshed with the movie unfolding on screen. A nice, subtle shout-out to the 80s slashers that clearly inspired this but still uniquely its own thing. Much like Terrifier itself.

The runtime is going to be the big focal point of complaint with this film and I can easily see why. This thing is well over two hours long and even I can it that is outlandish. It’s what most people prolly think about the read-time of my reviews. But having watched it, I can also say I have never had 2 hours and 20 minutes fly by so fucking fast in my life. There is only one scene in the entire movie that I easily could have lived without, and that is the aforementioned dream sequence. Didn’t need it, didn’t like it, and it felt like it went on for at least ten minutes too long. I understand that scene was full of donators to the film, but I truthfully don’t care about that. It’s the only weak scene in an otherwise flawlessly paced horror film. Besides that scene I can’t think of another scene I’d take out.

Whereas the first movie was about 80 minutes long and the kills were right on top of each other, this film spaces them out nicely. Yeah, there are only 8 kills in the movie, but such a well-spaced amount of time es between each that you feel the impact of each kill. Each gory set piece is allowed to settle in your brain, and in the guts of those with weaker stomachs, and then another is allowed to unfold. I really didn’t think I’d be sitting here saying the run time didn’t faze me at all and that I actually appreciated the pacing of this epic-lengthed slasher film, but here we are. It’s Spooky season and weirder shit has happened.

I will say that the end of the movie did start to lose the thread a little bit and that's maybe the only reason I don't feel comfortable hitting this with a 5 star. It’s clear, as I said, that Leone is still working this thing out in his head whether he wants to it it or not. There’s the Pale Girl, mini Art, that only he can see…..but also other people. There’s magical swords and weird underground playgrounds that were in dreams but now aren’t. There’s people giving birth to heads and glowing eyes and just a whole slew of what the fuck shit piled into the end. I wasn’t expecting to be confused by a Terrifier movie but I was. I’m not entirely sure what Leone was going for, what he’s setting up or alluding to, and it shows in the film that he might not be either. This thing pivoted into surrealism outta nowhere and then jumped back and forth between that and regular slasher fare with almost gleeful abandon. It was a bit much and me, my friends, and my brothers, were all a little baffled by what the entire home stretch of this movie was even doing. Luckily, I’m completely sold on these films and look forward to finding out more, while undoubtedly adding more questions, in the inevitable Terrifier 3.

The fact that this film has already quadrupled its budget in just four days is amazing to me. It makes me so fucking happy to see and hear that. The fact Leone blew off studios and refused to give ground on his vision is refreshing and should be emulated by more creators of any craft. The fact he said “fuck it, we’ll go big” about his gore and his run time speaks to me deeply and I find it inspiring. This is horror at its finest and most sadistically pure. It doesn’t pull any punches and it truly doesn’t give a fuck what people think or feel about slashers that look at an R rating and spit in its face. I can’t think of a film in the horror genre to do so well with practically no marketing whatsoever, an unrated tag on it, and without the backing of any major studio. Saw? The Blair Witch Project? Halloween ‘79? I don’t know, because I think all of those had more people backing them and pitching them than just Leone screaming obscenities and slaughter scenes into the void. I fucking love it and it gives me a boon of hope for the future of horror, especially indies and slashers.

Terrifier 2 is everything I wanted and quite a bit more. It’s everything you want from Art the Clown and from the Terrifier franchise. I love that we are seeing the creation of a new horror icon and slasher villain, that’s so fun for me as a horror fan to be a part of. I think that’s something to be celebrated and talked about and ed. My joy about that, and my giddiness and inspiration about Art the Clown and Leone's approach to his craft warrants an extra half star from me.

It’s an extreme film in every regard, have no doubt about that, but it’s also a damn good movie. I cannot wait to see what Leone comes up with next and how Thornton brings it to terrifying, hilarious, gruesome life.

This is the first film I’ve seen in theaters in over three years. Ironically enough? The last flick I saw at the movies was Joker. Go figure.

This is easily the fastest I have picked, and comfortably settled on, a flick on Netflix in recent memory. Unless it’s a new release I’ve been keeping an eye out for I’m usually on that goddamn thing scrolling and scrolling and scrolling for about three times the length of an average horror movie. Not this time. This was a knee-jerk and instant reaction that I truly wish more movies on that site, or the seventeen thousand six hundred and ninety-two similar sites and apps, would illicit from me more often.

I saw this ittedly ridiculous title and figured it was one of two things: A comedy that was perhaps a little too on the nose or a pretentious documentary produced by a studio that would probably start with the letter before b and end with the number after 23. What I wasn’t expecting was, essentially, a zombie movie where all the infected are just geriatrics. And I am powerless to resist such a plotline.

The story, what there is of one anyway, is a family gathering for a wedding at a cabin by the ocean. There’s the mom and her kids, her ex-husband and his new girl, her sister the bride. Plus, of course, the grandfather. This seems to be a small German town, the coast not far off and the town a short drive through the woods, the entire population invited to this wedding. Everything seems far away and yet literally right there, so maybe the town isn’t small so much as the scope of the setting was never really properly established. There’s also a substantial retirement home that may very well be the most poorly staffed and horrendously maintained establishment of its kind, so I’m sure you see where this is going. The wedding thins out and our skeleton crew of family and Old People fodder remain as the shit begins to hit the fan. After that it’s part zombie attack film, part siege/home invasion film, and it works far better than I was expecting. And that the Letterboxd ratings led me to believe.

As far as why all of this is happening? You got me there. There are a few lines scattered throughout the film that pertain to the wrath of the elderly and how they will seek vengeance against the youth around them. I’m not sure if this is an actual legend or real folklore, German or otherwise, or if it was invented for the purpose of this film alone. In the long run, it doesn’t matter much, but I was pretty confused about why this was happening, and why it was happening so suddenly, before I just kind of settled in for the ride. There isn’t much build-up to this outbreak, it sort of just starts, abruptly and with very little indication it's coming. In some ways that works, befitting of the story being told and the nature of the movie itself, but in others, I can see that being a distraction or a constantly nagging question. Sometimes in horror it’s best if you just settle in a ride with whatever’s happening, this is most assuredly one of those times.

The same can be said for the characters. I know it’s sacrilegious to say, especially in the current trends of horror flicks, but simply put none of these motherfuckers matter. This is a horror flick about rampaging grandparents, I couldn’t give a shit about who is trying to survive. They aren’t the point of the movie. Yes, we want to care about the characters and we do get just the smallest amount of backstory and character depth to be surprised by some of the actions taken and kills that transpire. But there’s really not a lot of legwork dedicated to the characters and their individual personalities. They are maybe a shade or two above being the most generic stock characters of all time. Luckily, the cast all does a solid job acting. With they're given anyway. They make the characters seem, at least minimally, like real people. Melika Foroutan as Ella, the mother and the ex and the daughter and the sister since those are the main focuses of her narrative, turns in a pretty riveting performance that deserved a lot more from what was clearly a pretty minimalist script and easily stood above the rest of the cast. I wouldn’t say there were any weak links in the performance department. Some of the characters, like Otto Emil Koch’s Noah, didn’t have much to do besides stand around and pant, but they did so convincingly. The failings come more from the script itself than any of the actors/actresses.

Andy Fetscher pulled double duty as the writer and director here and I feel like a second set of eyes might have helped him out. Not in the directing department, but with a couple go-overs with the script. The cast of potential victims is pretty small and most of the deaths occur in the latter third of the film. There is a pretty noticeable lull in the middle section here that really slowed the momentum that had been building nicely in the opening. We know most of the deaths are going to be happening at the end, just by nature of who the characters are and what their relationships to each other were, so I could really have used a couple of throwaway people for some kills or even a trip into town to see how that all went to shit. There just wasn’t enough suspense to warrant the almost half-hour of walking around, talking, yelling, and staring out windows. We know the Oldie Goldies are on the way, we know they’re outside, we know shits going to pop off, but knowing doesn’t produce action or excitement. There’s a lull in suspense that was really the only time my attention wandered from the film. If Fetscher had infused a little more intensity or suspense into that segment this flick would have been gangbusters. Or a couple other characters that weren’t so obviously going to be around for the long haul. Maybe follow the little German version Leon Kennedy lookin’ kid who left the party after seeming like he’d be a main character, follow him and show some of his plight. Just something, my mind will always look for more horror or action or kills but truthfully just something to help spice up that middle section.

None of this is to say I didn’t like the movie. I really did, to a degree that surprised me. A Netflix original from that’s in the zombie genre? I have such profoundly little faith in Netflix, I don’t watch nearly enough German flicks to have an opinion, and the zombie genre is littered with more shit flicks than it is corpses. So I was genuinely shocked at how into this movie I was. Especially the last forty minutes or so.

When this flick kicks its ass into overdrive there is no letting up for the better part of an hour. It is intense and borderline relentless and I loved that. The tension and shocks are pretty steady and the action has an air of desperation to it that I really liked. It’s a zombie attack and a home invasion rolled into one and I was genuinely on the edge of my seat watching it all transpire. It’s what people watch movies like this for and Fetscher nailed it. The seemingly endless horde of sagging flesh and bloody dentures definitely seemed more like a wave of running and rampaging monsters than older people and in that regard, Old People really flourishes.

The action is brutal, bloody, and believable. There aren’t a ton of kills and this isn’t a zombie flick in the sense that these hospice hostages are eating younger people. No, they are beating them and stabbing them, and strangling them. It’s more like the Rage virus of 28 Days/Weeks Later than it is Romero. Which, to me, makes it scarier. Makes it more intense, more real. Once it really gets going it doesn’t let up, and though it follows all the beats you’d expect it to it still managed to surprise me a couple of times. Some of the deaths, and some of the survivors, really caught me off guard and that was equally shocking and refreshing. In the horror genre that counts for a lot.

The title might be ridiculous, and Fetscher does kinda change the rules of the film a bit as he goes along, but it’s fitting for a movie like this. Almost too blunt, too straightforward, but content to be just that. The lull almost killed it but the flurry of violence and death at the back end more than made up for it. A short, silly title for a film that pretty much gets right to the point. Yes, there’s a dead spot in it, but the movie starts off letting you know exactly what it is and then keeps that thread all the way through. If you’re coming to a movie called Old People, about old people killing those younger out of what appears to be nothing more than psychotic jealousy, and you’re looking for anything BUT that, then you’re doin’ it wrong.

Some other takeaways I had: must have a life expectancy of at least 97 because the older population seems to outnumber young people like 10 to 1. Also, there appears to be a prolific amount of broken glass in the German countryside because these Greatest Generation hangers-on seem to be growing shards of glass out of their palms here. And. I hope to Christ I’m that fucking spry when I’m in my twilight years and chasing my goddamn great-grandchildren through underground tunnels, my god.

I liked this one a lot, certainly more than I anticipated, and I highly recommend it to zombie fans or those looking for a solid rage/invasion-type flick. Andy Fetscher crafted a solid one here and I hope he’s got some more films in the pipeline to go along with the one other movie he’s got out. Hell, I’d even be down for a sequel to this one. Solid, bare-bones horror at its almost finest. Certainly not going to be a cult classic or anything like that, but I’m comfortable labeling it a hidden gem. And that Letterboxd score? Absolute gibberish bullshit. If that’s holding you back, ignore it like these Forefathers ignored their arthritis.

Watched on Wednesday October 5, 2022.

Watched on Thursday September 15, 2022.

Watched on Thursday March 3, 2022.

Watched on Saturday February 26, 2022.

Here we go again. Another legendary horror film, a staple and godfather of the genre, brought back to life for the woke age. Another monolithic entity that redefined the very rules and motifs of the horror world to come limping and groaning into the new age, fighting valiantly but futilely to remind us how it cemented its legacy in the first place. A titan of terror dragging himself through tides of computer generated blood to loom over us and beg to be appreciated again while the film, script, and characters around him do their damndest to render the effort pointless. 

I’m hard pressed to think of a slasher series with a timeline as butchered and flayed as TCM. I’d say it was impressive if I didn’t find it so exhaustingly unnecessary. Thomas Jedidiah Bubba Brown Sawyer Hewitt, aka Leatherface, has had more do-overs and facelifts and retcons and alterations and contradictory timelines and confounding familial relations that he’s about one tv series away from being a Kardashian. It’s utterly impossible, pretty much downright pointless, to bother making sense of it. Halloween 2018 kicked this whole shit show off in earnest with fucking around with the timelines and stories and it seems unlikely Hollywood will give up the ghost on this approach to making “new” horror movies. Especially not when it warrants them the liberty to make nonsense. To ignore what they wish and alter what they embrace. Why stop when they make millions besmirching and shitting on the films they are trying to emulate and reinvigorate through sheer power of established fan bases? Why create new material, new stories, new killers and mythologies, when they can plunder and pillage from better minds, more creative and interesting writers and directors? Why earn an audience, generate a fan base warranted on new terrors, show horror fans anything resembling original thought, when there’s so much out there just sitting around waiting to be fucking annihilated by the unoriginal and greedy paws of studios? 

Texas Chainsaw Massacre, not the original one but this one that has the same exact title because, as I stated, simply who has the time to come up with a title these days, is another victim of its own influence. Another tragedy smeared across the Texas dirt by the force of its own legacy. 

The story here, and by god what a fable it is, surrounds two characters opening a town. I don’t really know how else to put it. One, Melody (played by Sarah Yarkin) is an idealistic young woman looking for an escape for all those 20 something’s that are tired of living in the big, violent, mean city. Gosh, what a life that’d be? Being able to afford city living in any kind of comfortable capacity, let alone comfortable enough to be okay heading 7ish hours to the middle of absolutely goddamned nowhere to create….a mini city. But I digress. I do not know what Melody’s job is or what her purpose is as a whole. I am not sure any other character has those answers either. Her partner in gentrification (or gentri-fucking as it’s put) is Dante (played by Jacob Latimore). He’s a chef, not a cook, and from the insta post it appears he’s a food truck chef. I repeat, what a life. Food truck chef and potential driver, or perhaps co-chef? Media consultant?, have enough money to buy a town and auction the buildings. I’ll say, if that’s what people are comin up with these days no fuckin wonder they keep stealing material. Anyways, after an unfortunate paperwork fuck up leads to the heart attack of a woman we are supposed to believe must be around 138 years old based on the continuation timeline, ol Leatherface shows up. He’s already there mind you, just hanging out and in absolutely no way hiding at all, but he activates, I guess you’d say, and brings his brand of bloody backwoods justice to those interlopers and their goddamn TikTok-ing and canceling. 

I could easily continue the review just by expounding on how idiotic the story is, but I don’t respect it enough to do so. Besides, in all honesty, I don’t think many people give that much of a fuck about it. They could, maybe in some ways they should, but they don’t. And I think it’s only marginally because of how nonsensical it is. If some effort was put into making the narrative cohesive people would care. If whatever point was being made was ever actually made, people would care. At the very least they’d pay it some attention, give it some credence. The filmmakers were obviously trying to say something, I just have no idea what it was. Something about the young people these days. The old vs new, classic and contemporary, old school and new school. TikTok vs rural America. Big city vs no internet and hard living. Cancel culture and it’s inconsistent nature. Horror and its place in a world that wants so much to curate and censor everything. I don’t know, points could be made for all of the above and more, but no aspect of Chris Devlin’s script spends any time fleshing out any of these concepts or ideas. Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues may have had more in their original story treatment, but we’ll never know. Which is fine I guess cuz, like I said, these days it doesn’t seem to matter. 

Neither does Legacy it seems. This new trend with resurrection of legacy characters and their need to avenge the horrors they endured however many decades ago seems to be picking up a lotta steam. But you can shovel as much coal in the engine as you want, go as full steam as you dare, but if the bridge and tracks aren’t finished the whole things gunna crash and burn no matter how much love there is for the franchise. No survivors. This movie is getting a lot of comparisons made to Halloween 2018 and of Sally to Laurie, and that’s abundantly clear and well deserved. Anyone who doesn’t see that or disagrees is willfully blind. As much as I detest Laurie Strode’s character arc in the Green/McBride shitshows, I feel more strongly opposed to Sally Hardesty’s. And that’s exclusively because of how motherfucking stupid it is. 

Marilyn Burns turned in a performance for the ages. It was a searing portrayal made all the more realistic because of the hellacious filming conditions. But her character now just doesn’t make sense. She’s a loner, a ranger living in a house that looks oddly similar to the one she battled to escape in the same exact township her family and friends died in. Why? Why is she doing that? What had she been doing? Why is she in this film and the relegated to, essentially, a bit part? What’s the purpose there? What’s the message?

Could it be Alvarez and crew looked to the Strode template and found it notably lacking? Is it a stance that this whole trend of bringing back the legacy for another go around is a bad idea, is garbage in fact? One could see that being the take away considering Sally is, quite literally, tossed in the trash. But on the other hand I feel like that might be giving too much credit to a film that gives no indication of nuance or subtlety. Instead it seems punch drunk on blundered contrivances and overt violence in the wake of an empty and hollow core suffused with missed opportunity and blown potential. 

If we’re here just for the sake of savagery, then I do suppose on that front it delivers. In buckets. There is a ton of carnage crammed into this films brisk 83 minute run time and I am pleased with that. Leatherface is as brutal and unforgiving as always, maybe even more so, and moves through the cast like the unstoppable man he is. But even the endless barrage of crunched limbs and spraying blood is dulled, not quite muted but certainly tamed, by an unforgivable overindulgence of CGI. If they set out to make a movie devoid of plot, sacrificing story and plot propulsion for scenes of slaughter and bloody set pieces, then I’d have expected a lot more practical effects. Demand is too strong a word, but insist seems adequate. If this is nothing more than a showcase of creative kills and vicious dismemberment, of which there are a solid few, then some care and consideration of the effects would have been nice to see. As it stands the gore effects are about as lackluster, inconsistent, and muddled as the rest of the film. Yes, there’s a shit load of killing, and yes some of the kills are a notch above savage, but none of that matters much to me if it’s all rendered with a variance of subpar to ably acceptable CGI. 

If the characters getting shorn limb from limb mattered, or even managed to make the tiniest of impression on me, that may have forgiven some of the blunders taking place here. As it stands, I barely recall any of them and I just finished watching it a little while ago. Yarkin turns in what is probably the best performance of the movie despite her character being only slightly above insufferable. Elsie Fisher on the other hand was several notches past that and I wanted nothing more than her character to bite the saw nice and early. No such luck. It was such a dead and lifeless performance, with such an unneeded and ultimately pointless backstory of trigger-warning nonsense, that I’m not entirely convinced she wasn’t also just CGI’d in. She looked like an Arya Stark knockoff if Arya’s stylist was a half gassed and mostly functional weedwhacker, and her acting was similar to what I’d imagine a mannequin might be like if it could speak. Though mannequins have elicited far more emotion in other films, so perhaps that’s an insult to them. She’s the co-lead and yet she is substantially less compelling to watch than Moe Dunford as town mechanic and handyman Richter who has a nice toe-to-toe with Leatherface, but she is more compelling than Nell Hudson as one of the core friends and early victim whom I do not believe they ever bothered to name anywhere but the credits. 

Olwen Fouere does what she can as Sally Hardesty but they gave her nothing to work with. She has barely any lines yet manages to bring enough depth and emotion to such a troubled character that I’d have a rough time arguing against her casting. The scene where she realizes Leatherface has no fuckin clue who she is was probably the best acting in the film. A brief shot that conveyed a lot of sadness and grief and anger. Unfortunately it’s overshadowed by how simplistically stupid her character is in this movie. She’s a ranger, for 40 years, in the same vicinity as a mass murderer, but she has never managed to find him?!?!? One idiot, the man who coined the term gentri-fuckers, suggests it is because Leatherface wore a mask and therefore it’s hard to find someone who wears masks. A solid point if you’re talking about roughly anyone BUT Leatherface. He’s 6’5, mute, mildly if not completely brain deficient, and walks with a limp because of his chainsaw wound to the leg. He also lives about a 30 minute drive from Hardesty’s house. So I must infer that she has gone down in the annals of Texas Rangers as perhaps the single worst investigator since the invention of the magnifying glass or notebooks. It’s laughable. When you add that onto the literal garbage dumping of her character it’s a travesty. To say it’s a disservice to the legacy of the character is an understatement. 

Luckily Mark Burnham does an irable job as the menacing force of Leatherface. I kinda dig his performance and portrayal. Some of that deranged innocence of Gunnar Hansens iconic role is back here. His childlike nature and the fact he’s lashing out in the most egregiously violent temper tantrum of all time is evident. The fact he’s killing to protect his home and family, as misplaced and unfocused as that is, is clear. I liked the limping and slouched posture and the essence of defeat and exhaustion evident in his movements. He seemed like a character, beyond all the mayhem and killing machine machinations of the plot, and I liked that. The mask, fresh flesh that seems to sag and decay as the movie progresses, added an element of forlorn acceptance to the role. I dug it and I liked watching Burnham in action. Luckily, thankfully, that did manage to recapture Leatherface in a way that honored the original nicely. When most of the rest of the film made we wanna try flossing with a chainsaw, that says quite a bit I suppose. 

Ricardo Diaz’s cinematography had a few, a blessed few, moments to shine, and I gobbled those up. The stormy sky as Leatherface stalks home, the corpse in the field of dead sunflowers, hippie culture call back extreme, was haunting and creepy. Leatherface marching into the bus, drenched and tired and furious. That final shot of him holding a severed head high amidst the dead town and slaughtered legacy. That final FINAL shot of the infamous house. I liked them. That didn’t save the film, but they at least gave me something noteworthy to look at and provided images that I’ll at least hold onto from an otherwise forgettable and frustrating film. 

Colin Stetson’s score also provided some nice musical cues, but I’m not one that holds a soundtrack above most other aspects of a film. I liked it, but other than a few scenes where it was allowed to breathe and swell and scream it was mostly drowned out but the cacophony of the film itself. 

Some of the little callbacks stuff were nice as well. The population of Harlow being 1974, with 4 bullet holes (maybe for the 4 original entries, maybe for the 4 timelines, maybe for my 4,000 word dissertation here, take your pick) was subtle. The flower child corpse as mentioned above. The brief shot of a girl on the bus, drenched in blood and screaming, harkening back to the iconic final shot of the original. I like all this, but I can’t help but let it fall by the wayside when I take into the egregious blunders. Most notably, 90 seconds in they list the victims of the original massacre….and they get a name wrong. His name was Kirk not Kurtis. This is unforgivable and acted as a bad omen of what followed after. If you can’t even be bothered to get the OG characters names correct then I can’t be bothered to cut you much fuckin slack, if any. 

I liked this more than Halloween Kills. I love it more than “elevated” horror. But neither of those two facts counts for very much. I came here to see people get chased around and chopped up, and yes I got that, but I still have standards. I wish I could just kick back and chill and watch it for what it is, but I can’t. I love horror, wanna write horror, wanna make horror, and I probably take it too seriously as evidenced by my writing here. But fuck all that. I am who I am, I like what I like, and I get annoyed easily when it comes to things I love. And I’ll take as many fuckin words as needed to vent that. 

I’m all about this resurgence of slashers, I just wish they were of a higher quality and caliber. I wish some thought and love went into them and they didn’t come across as the money hungry, cash grabbing, thought devoid, creatively void, social-hot-button-triggering drivel they are. This may be the new “golden age” of slashers, but no part of me sees people revisiting them over and over again, nor do I see people 30-40-50 years from now wanting to bring them back to the forefront. Movies like this make it tough for me to blame em’. 

Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a staple of horror. It’s one of the greatest horror films ever made (despite Hooper’s insistence it was a black comedy and then went out of his way trying to prove it in part 2). Leatherface is one of the best slasher villains ever concocted. That film will live forever as one of the greatest of all time, one of the greatest titles of all time, both film and villain. This movie will not live on as anything other than another toppled icon and blown opportunity to bring some classics back to the top of the food chain. 

TCM 22 is a film that was probably doomed from the start. It was dead on arrival, the tumultuous production and gut bustingly bad test screenings only having so much to do with it. It was a film destined to wither in the shadow of its genesis. A film that was never going to create a legacy of its own because nothing about it warrants that consideration. It has me scared for future installments of franchises I love, a few more of which will be out this year, but I will still cling to hope, no matter how savagely beaten and mutilated that hope is becoming. My love for the genre won’t let me do anything less. It won’t let go higher than 2 stars here without seeming completely disingenuous, but it’ll let me keep hoping and watching. 

As Leatherface would probably grunt while smilingly following the current trend of stealing ideas from other franchises, “the things we do for love.”

Is this what it’s come too? What we’ve, as the horror community, been reduced too? Just any ol’ fuckin’ thing’ll do? Good Christ, no wonder it’s practically impossible to get some love for any new ideas these days. We just need to unleash the bastardized cousin of a beloved icon of horror history, beat em’ to within an inch of death, lobotomize the story and driving force of just about anything that once made them so beloved, and VIOLA! We have a mediocre, if not flat out insultingly banal, pseudo-facsimile of what got us into the genre in the first place. And people these days just eat the shit up like it doesn’t actually lack anything, everything, that led to its creation in the first place.

This sequel to the 2018 Halloween by David Gordon Green and Danny McBride (hahahaha, goddamn it people, what’re we doing.) has Michael Meyers, and another guy, walking around stirring shit up and killing people. There may or may not be some more of a story in there somewhere, but it really doesn’t matter. It certainly didn’t to the people making the flick, that’s for sure. As a matter of fact, there’s even a part in this film where it’s pretty much laid out for us, just spit out and left to bleed out on the floor, that the story here in fact does not matter. Not at all. That it, in fact, has not mattered at all this entire time. So, I mean, if that’s the play then why should I give a fuck right? Why should any of us?

I think that’s pretty much what sums this movie up best for me. Why should I give a fuck, and why should anyone else? Cuz’ Mike’s on screen and hacking his way through the most intensely irritating group of characters horror has quite possibly ever seen? No, no that certainly isn’t enough for me to care. Is it cuz’ Jamie Lee Curtis is in it, because that’s a debatable point. Not the fact she appears on screen, but the fact that she did anything or served any purpose whatsoever. Expect, of course, to be told she did not matter, had never mattered and had been wasting her life. That her arc, her entire character, was about as pointless as the return of so many classic characters that did nothing but give fans an unsatisfying, and awkward, reach around. There’s just no purpose here. There’s no drive, no momentum, no fucking point.

I understand this is a “bridge” movie, but I hardly think that exonerates it from being so dull and lifeless. So completely meaningless. They knew they were doing a trio of films, so I’d have expected them to have enough material for, I don’t know, three complete movies? What’s the justification for this film? I can’t think of another film, off the top of my head, that is so much filler. That clearly exists simply to the first and third entires with absolutely no merit for its own place in the saga. 

It doesn’t even try to be scary for fuck’s sake. Doesn’t even try to jolt some life into a story that is a meandering path leading to nowhere but a “to be continued” sign. Where’s the stalking and hunting, the hiding and explosive attacking? There’s nothing like that here. There’s some lurking, sure. A couple jump scares and Mikey lunges from a doorway or two, but where is my terror? Where’s the fear and scary atmosphere? Where’s the tension and the suspense, the cloying feeling of being watched and knowing something is absolutely gunna go wrong here, but not knowing when right down to the music cues and beats. The whole thing is telegraphed, it’s phoned in and we can’t let the shit go to voicemail.

Halloween Kills is a pitiful example of what horror is these days, of what it's become. Empty. A shallow and decrepit wading pool of what made the genre so stalwart to begin with. Where’s the effort? Where’s the story? Where’s the propulsion or the motivations? Where’s the scares? Where’s the cleverness and ingenuity, whether appreciated at the time or later revisited and finally bestowed its worth, that once permeated this genre and gave it such a lasting impact on fans and moviemakers? It has somehow inexplicably become okay to eradicate all of that from these films, these throwbacks and remakes and reboots that have become a dominant presence over original ideas and villains. If one does not want to choke to death on the suffocating and cloying deathstench of the pretentious soul void that is an A24-type “horror” twitter-insta-trend movie thinkpiece experiment, then you gotta sit through shit like this. Like Halloween Kills. The movie that is, essentially, a man walking down the street for two hours stabbing random people while a buncha angry loons head his way from a few blocks over while forcing other random people to commit suicide. Riveting stuff.

If there was a single performance I could hang my hat on, maybe it’d be easier for me to get on board with some of the choices made in this film. Shock of shocks, there wasn’t one. To bring back Kyle Richards and Nancy Stephens does not somehow automatically mean that’s awesome. That thought process has never made sense to me. Cool, you got em’ to come back, great to see them in action, now what? What are you going to do with them? Nothing? Absolutely fucking nothing!? Brilliant!!!!! Lonnie Elam’s character, played by Robert Longstreet, was practically a moot point of drunken nothingness. He was not so much Lonnie Elam as a character we understood and appreciated from the original as he was a Danny McBride/Gordon Green holdover from Eastbound or Principles that happened to be named Lonnie Elam. Ironically enough two of the best characters in the movie, the pointlessly and unfunnily named Big John and Little John, played by Scott MacArthur and Michael McDonald, may have been the hands down best part of the movie, from characters all the way to death scenes, and they were absolutely nothing more than Danny McBride’s one good contribution to the script.

There was a lotta love out there for Anthony Michael Hall as the vengeful Tommy Doyle and I really wish I could see that. I wish that shone through for me. But there was just something that was way too hokey for me to get on board with, way too melodramatic and needlessly unhinged to the point of rampant stupidity. It did nothing for me beyond that sense of mild disappointment over a failed opportunity for Michael Hall that was very quickly overshadowed by how unbelievably annoying Tommy Doyle became.

Jamie Lee was, of course, the star of the show and oh how loudly people like to scream her praises. Why? Again, because she’s in the film? Again, that means nothing if she does nothing, and this time around she was given absolutely nothing to do. She had one well acted scene with the impossibly alive, and therefore irritatingly underused, Will Patton and besides that what? She did some grunting. Did a little crying. Did quite a bit of yelling. Did some hamming and some reclining. All of it amounting to absolutely nothing. Nothing besides being told Michael never cared about her, was never coming after her, didn’t give a fly’s shit about her actually, and therefore erased Jamie Lee Curtis and subsequently Laurie Strode from any level of importance from the entire franchise. Well done. Her character doesn’t matter, her story doesn’t matter, her life didn’t matter, none of it mattered. She’s just a fuckin’ lunatic paranoid person that now, thanks to some mind meltingly moronic writing, has a nice pigeonholed reason to continue seeking Michael. Leave the fuckin’ guy alone. Leave Laurie alone. Leave the franchise alone while there’s still a chance. You’ve done enough damage with your mangled time lines and retconning-cum-ruining. Just stop. Strode’s storyline was the heart and soul of these films and now she’s just, what, a prop? Enough is enough with the bullshit already.

All those people fawning over these films, I just don’t get it. The scene in the hospital let me know that Gordon Green doesn’t get it either, but he’s okay with it because he knows we’ll flock to these movies anyway. Everyone knows who Mike Myers is. Fucking children and teenagers are loading up weaponry to hunt someone who’s haunted their town and ruined their lives from a killing spree that happened when they were fucking -23 years old. That’s negative their age with a few more years shaved off for good measure. They all know Mike. They have all seen his mugshot, tell the same fucking stories for 40 years, know the legend. Tommy Doyle prolly has his face tattooed somewhere on his body. They also know Myers is a big dude. And yet they spend a solid chunk, a disgustingly large chunk, of the film chasing someone that looks like Danny Devito’s goddamn stunt double from Batman Returns. Are you joking me? No, of course not. Mob mentality, scathing hatred, bloodlust and murder and the unending crush of mania from those that want nothing more than to see Mike Myers and destroy him. I’m sure there’s plenty of different ways to take that scene, but for me that crowd of rampaging morons and brain dead alkies chanting Evil Dies Tonight, that was a mockery of the fanbase of the franchise, of Halloween and Mike Myers and the masked slashers that came before and after him. It’s just shitting on the people that made the franchise so durable, that kept wanting, practically needing, more. The people that gave Gordon Green the money and opportunity to mock them that he clearly thinks are too stupid to pick up on it. No I didn’t find the scene difficult to watch or heart breaking or mean spirited, none of that shit. I found it stupid and insulting and so wildly ill concieved and laughable as to assure me of the fact that if this wasn’t a film connected to one of the biggest horror franchises of all time there wouldn’t be another entry.

I’ll also say this. Whoever decided to film the massacre of the evil dies tonight crowd in a series of still shots and baseball card cutouts, I want to physically hurt you. That was such a heinously lame series of shots that I would have laughed if I wasn’t so enraged. I’d been hearing about the firemen scene for ages and was left pretty nonplussed by that. I’d been hearing about the mob slaughter for just as long. I expected brutality and quick action. I did not expect slow motion. I did not expect still shots. I did not expect lazy slashings and cgi blood spray. I did not expect white lights and black background that made me think of the end shots of the 90’s batman movies. I did expect the scene where Myers killing a group of the most hatefully stupid and annoying characters I’d seen in a while would be my most hated scene in the film, or the scene that pushed this movie in the irredeemable category.

Yes, there were some things I liked. The John character’s I mentioned earlier, I liked them. Their set piece was solid, and fun/funny, had some Halloween atmosphere to it. And the kill was solid. Those were really the only parts I did like, which is less and less surprising the more I think about it. That first murder of the neighbors, the kills in the park, the John’s murders. These were the standout scenes for me. A mere ten minutes, maybe fifteen, of a two hours film. They showed tension and promise. They had great music cues, on point humorous elements, some solid and gnarly gore. But beyond those few scenes and Carpenter’s new spin on his own iconic score, there was very little for me to give a shit about in this film.

Even Michael was barely a presence that I felt in the film. Yes he still cuts a striking image, he’s still terrifying to consider and look at, but there was just something about this film that made him seem less than. I didn’t feel anything about what was happening in the movie and Michael seemed lackadaisical at best. It was a shitty movie that just happened to have a few, maybe 4 total, vignettes of Michael Myers in it until the climactic abomination I’ve already described. It was a nothing movie. A movie about nothing and with nothing inside of it. There’s no emotional depth to anything here, no rage or malice or fear. It’s all just pointless shit happening to connect dots. And I get it, that’s what horror is a lot of the time, but seldom is it so boring and misguided, so disted and uninteresting. So fucking annoying.

I really wish I could get on board with this. I mean that. I wanted to love it. I wanted to at least like it. I love slashers. Mikey has never been my favorite (sorry, that will always be my boy Jason), but I had adored this franchise since I was a little kid. I wanna be able to just kick back and watch the mindlessness of it all and just enjoy it, but I just got so incredibly little from this movie. The only chords it struck were ones of regret and disappointment. The only enjoyment I got from it was rage-bashing more and more scenes the longer it went on. There’s fun to be had in those kinds of viewings, absolutely. But I just never associated a viewing like that with an entry in a franchise I love so much.

I never thought I’d look back on 2018’s entry and think I needed to give it another viewing, that maybe I needed to up the score. I also never thought I would be so unenthusiastic and disinterested in a new entry to such a beloved series of slashers, but Halloween Ends is absolutely nowhere on my rader.

I’m glad I have the others to return to whenever I want. I can revisit them any day and watch them in any order and follow any storyline I want, and that’s a fuckin’ blessing. Even the ones I’d never cared for before still give me infinitely more joy and happiness than this entry did.

I love my slashers and I’m going to continue watching them. I won’t ever shitty drivel like this just cuz’ it’s got a villain I like or some characters I’ve rooted for in the past. But I will watch, I will buy, I will keep the franchises alive for as long as possible. But this film did prove one thing to me that I feel more and more strongly with each ing horror flick I watch.

I think I’m ready for some new villains. Some new slasher icons and storylines to follow and enjoy. David Gordon Green, Danny McBride, and Halloween Kills showed me that I might be ready to say goodbye to new entries from some of these heavy hitters from the Golden Age and open up some floorspace for some new killers and crazies. I won’t write them off completely, especially cuz I need my new Jason movie with a quickness, but I’m getting more and more comfortable with the idea. Which is a crazy and melancholy thought I wasn’t expecting to have, but what can I say. Evil didn’t die with this movie, but a whole lotta hope did.

Watched on Sunday February 13, 2022.

Watched on Thursday January 13, 2022.

Watched on Wednesday January 12, 2022.

Watched on Wednesday January 5, 2022.

Watched on Wednesday October 6, 2021.

My backlog of reviews is outlandish. And I find it impossible to keep track of how many things I watch since I don’t consistently update my movie diary/ log thing or write reviews with any regularity. This list will help remedy that.

January- 26,  2 seasons of shows, 3 rewatches

February- 28, 4 seasons of shows, 1 rewatch

March- 14, 2 seasons of shows, 3 rewatches 

April- 16, 3 seasons of shows, 1 miniseries, 6 rewatches

May-

• Don't Move
• The Frozen Ground
• The Soul Eater
• Raw Deal
• Alien: Romulus
• Till Death
• Strange Darling
• The Heretics
• Hatchet III
• Ludo

...plus 103 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Humans being terrified and picked off by altered, alien, mutated, or any other kind of transmogrified creature/beast. Ya know, the good shit.

• The Thing
• The Monster
• Zoombies
• Krampus
• Bite
• Harbinger Down
• Stung
• The Pyramid
• Clown
• Zombeavers

...plus 630 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

An assortment of movies where the environment, the multitude of animals lurking therein , or the weather lets us humans know who's really boss.

• Jaws
• Jaws 2
• Jaws 3-D
• Jaws: The Revenge
• Ice Sharks
• Dam Sharks!
• Zoombies
• Freshwater
• The Shallows
• Bite

...plus 218 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The slasher subgenre is one of the most prolific in horror history. It's been around for almost as long as movies themselves have, and it's not going anywhere. For good reason. It's also one of my most beloved kind of horror movies, and manages to deftly blend itself with any number of other horror subgenres.

This is a list of all the Slashers I have seen and/or own. Most definitely an ever changing and evolving list and I constantly fluctuate on my own decided upon criteria.

Organized by year of release.

Includes the expected masked killers run-amok films, and also horror/thriller/sci-fi films following a deranged killer as the main focus, and also horror/thriller/sci-fi movies tinged with the supernatural and/or creature features that follow the basic criteria, tropes, and formulas of the Slasher film, as I see them.

• The Bat
• The Vampire Bat
• A Shriek in the Night
• The Gorilla
• Tower of London
• The Ape
• The Devil Bat
• Invisible Ghost
• The Corpse Vanishes
• The Ape Man

...plus 783 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The title of the list says it all. I watch movies with a feverish regularity, as do most of us on this website.

I would love to think that I could write a review for each movie I watch, but that proves more and more impossible. This is my way of trying to keep track of the ones I've watched, on what day I watched them, in the hopes that eventually I can get around to writing my thoughts about them. Some, quite frankly, don't deserve a review and will probably never get one. But there's plenty in here I'd love to sit down and ramble on about.

Any suggestions or requests for reviews on this list are greatly appreciated, if solely to get me focused and writing.

• A Cure for Wellness
• Vamp
• Burial Ground
• Catacombs
• Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
• The Axe Murders of Villisca
• Eating Raoul
• The Drownsman
• The Windmill Massacre
• Cobra

...plus 1418 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A lovely list consisting of movies I’ve seen where there is (at least one) creative, fun, gory, ridiculous decapitation or cranial mutilation and ruination.

I love when the ole heads go flying in my horror movies, far more then I care for the other common methods of offing the cast, but I especially love the inventive ones. The bloodier the better.

And if the headless body can walk around, or maybe even do a little dance or something, oh that shits primo.

• The Mutilator
• Dog Soldiers
• Man
• Maniac
• Attack of the Sabretooth
• Brawl in Cell Block 99
• The Void
• Beyond the Gates
• The Belko Experiment
• The Barn

...plus 1204 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

My personal treasure collection. Mostly individual DVD's and Blu-Rays, but also a fair amount of box sets and mutli-packs ranging anywhere from 4 to 50 a set.

I try to keep it in alphabetical order, but Letterboxd’s comprehension of the ABC’s and mine seem to differ.

• #Horror
• '71
• +1
• 10/31
• 12 and Holding
• 12 Hour Shift
• 13
• 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
• The 13th Warrior
• 1883

...plus 4763 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A list dedicated to the many deaths by falling I come across in my film watching adventures.

I don't know if it's people not watching where they're going, if they're being pushed, if they're being tossed, if the contraption or earth extension or tool for climbing they're standing on isn't very solid. I'm not sure what it is, but people fall a lot and in the movie making world that usually means death.

They don't have to fall very far either. They could be shoved through a relatively low level window and land in the middle of a grassy yard, or the edge of a driveway. Doesn't matter; immediate pancake person. The same applies if they fell off a boat of some sort; they hit that water and they might as well vaporize cuz' we ain't seein' em' again.

Here's a list to those splattered souls.

• Cliffhanger
• Die Hard
• American Gothic
• Just Before Dawn
• GoldenEye
• The Untouchables
• Lethal Weapon
• The Wind
• Death Ship
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

...plus 305 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Piranha 3DD
• Hush
• The Sacrament
• The Conjuring
• Sharknado
• World War Z
• V/H/S/2
• The Purge
• The Colony
• Knights of Badassdom

...plus 478 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I always enjoy visiting new places. Especially in my horror movies. I love learning about new folklores and legends and monsters.

Hodophobia is the intense fear of travel. This is a list of all the horror movies I have seen/own that do a solid job of convincing me to cancel any future travel plans.

*Film entries are based on where the movie is supposed to be taking place, NOT the countries associated with making it or where it was actually filmed if that differs from the plot.

**Alphabetized by Country, then film title.

• The Lair

  Afghanistan

• Painkillers

  Afghanistan

• Beast

  Africa

• The Night of the Sorcerers

  Africa

• Castle Freak

  Albania

• Cannibal Ferox

  The Amazon

• Massacre in Dinosaur Valley

  The Amazon

• On the Third Day

  Argentina

• Terrified

  Argentina

• What the Waters Left Behind

  Argentina

...plus 299 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

These contain at least one character that suffers grievous, if not mortal, wounds throughout the course of the movie but just keep on truckin'.

Until they finally die, and its almost a relief.

(Some of these are very drawn out, like Summer Camp and The Evil Dead remake. Other's contain briefer periods of suffering, but just as horrendous maiming.Lastly, there are a few on here that are best described as just incredibly long exchanges of a dialogue before death even though the person is torn wide the fuck open etc.)

• Summer Camp
• Evil Dead
• The Lesson
• Gravy
• The Cabin in the Woods
• A Serbian Film
• The Loved Ones
• The Horde
• Antichrist
• Laid to Rest

...plus 369 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

These are movies that I paid to go see in theaters, for better or for worse.

• Alien: Covenant
• Beauty and the Beast
• Logan
• John Wick: Chapter 2
• Sleight
• Underworld: Blood Wars
• The ant
• Mechanic: Resurrection
• The Legend of Tarzan
• Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping

...plus 128 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Characters bare knuckle duking it out. Fist fights galore; bloody knuckles and broken fingers for sure.

Some are epic brawls that go on forever, some are comparatively brief. Some of the movies have many fights, some only have one or two. Regardless, if you're looking for a good knuck-up scene or two, these will deliever.

Martial arts movies are not the kind of brawls I'm thinkin of, but are still typically included. Especially those with solid one-on-one fights. Cuz' they're awesome.

• Lethal Weapon
• Lethal Weapon 4
• Cliffhanger
• Die Hard
• Sleepless
• John Wick: Chapter 2
• Logan
• Arsenal
• I Am Wrath
• Bastille Day

...plus 675 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Firefights abound in these films; sustained gunbattles till the earth runs out of bullets. (Non war films)

• The Way of the Gun
• The Matrix
• Heat
• The Boondock Saints
• The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day
• Live by Night
• John Wick: Chapter 2
• The ant
• Underworld: Blood Wars
• The Purge: Election Year

...plus 333 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A list of all the utter trash horror films I have seen or that I own.

I have a crippling addiction to the shittiest horror movies ever made that has done nothing but worsen over the years. Every time I come across a new SyFy Original monster movie, or any abysmal monster movie for that matter, I gotta have it. Awful action flicks? Fuckin' hit me. Grade Z Zombie jamboree? Need it. Slasher film filmed on cell phone from the early 2000s? Gimme. Weather gone wild? Naturally. I want em all, I need em all, I'll watch em all. Usually with friends and some booze, but occasionally the urge it too great and I'll just pop one in for the hell of it.

This list helps me keep track of all the ones I've survived. It's also a cry for help.

• Day of the Ax
• 2001 Maniacs
• 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams
• 666: The Beast
• Anaconda 3: Offspring
• Attack of the Sabretooth
• Aunt Rose
• Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan
• Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned
• Abominable

...plus 180 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

My backlog of reviews is outlandish. And I find it impossible to keep track of how many things I watch since I don’t consistently update my movie diary/ log thing or write reviews with any regularity. This list will help remedy that.

185 first views. 32 rewatches.

• The Survivor
• Mako
• Ditched
• The Kindred
• Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Kickboxer: Vengeance
• Evil Aliens
• Annabelle
• The Pale Blue Eye
• Tower of Evil

...plus 207 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A compilation of all the found footage horror movies I own and/or have seen.

Found Footage films have pretty much proven themselves a mainstay of the horror universe whether we really want them or not. Some are good, some actually achieve a level of greatness, but most are pretty shitty. This is just my way of keeping track.

• The Blair Witch Project
• Cold Ground
• As Above, So Below
• Quarantine
• Hell House LLC
• Jeruzalem
• They're Watching
• The Visit
• The Gallows
• Frankenstein’s Army

...plus 110 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A list of all the Zombie movies I have seen and/or that I own in my collection.

I've said it in a few reviews, and I'll say it again, Zombie films are a staple of the Horror World. They aren't going anywhere. There will always be some new approach, some attempt at retelling or reimagining. New visions and stories of the world overrun and gone to shit at the teeth of the living dead. Some of these films will fail, maybe even most, but there'll be some scattered throughout that will deliver everything needed from such a classic and beloved sub-genre.

This list will help me keep track of all the ones I've seen, survived, and all those already added to my collection while we wait for the next Romero of the Living Dead.

• Night of the Living Dead
• Dawn of the Dead
• Day of the Dead
• Land of the Dead
• Diary of the Dead
• Survival of the Dead
• Night of the Living Dead
• Dawn of the Dead
• Zombie Flesh Eaters
• Zombie Flesh Eaters 2

...plus 194 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A list of all the vampire movies I have seen and/or own.

Vampires are a huge sub-genre of horror fiction, and movies about the Monsters That Breathing Men Would Kill will be coming out forever. Probably until there's only zombies, witches, mummies, demons, and Vampires left roaming this sick rock.

I already have my Creatures are the Features list and vampires are included in that. This is a separate compilation to help me keep track of the many bloodsuckers I've staked.

kids; The Blood is the Life.

• The Lost Boys
• From Dusk Till Dawn
• From the Dark
• Dracula
• Nosferatu
• Dracula
• Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat
• Vampire's Kiss
• Near Dark
• Vamp

...plus 112 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

My backlog of reviews is outlandish. And I find it impossible to keep track of how many things I watch since I don’t consistently update my movie diary/ log thing or write reviews with any regularity. This list will help remedy that.

January- 13, 1 season of a show, 3 rewatches

February- 20, 1 season of a show, 2 shorts, 4 rewatches

March- 22, 2 seasons of a show, 1 miniseries, 3 shorts, 4 rewatches

April- 18, 1 season of a show, 5 rewatches

May- 13

June- 20, 1 season of a show, 6 rewatches

July- 27, 1 rewatch

August- 25, 7 rewatches

September- 23, 3 seasons of a show, 2 shorts, 12 rewatches

October- 37, 2 seasons of a show, 8 rewatches

November- 21, 3 seasons of a show

December- 26, 3 seasons of a show, 6 rewatches

OVERALL: 265 films (209 new viewings), 17 seasons of shows, 7 shorts, 1 miniseries, 56 rewatches

• Saw X
• The Wailing
• Satanic Hispanics
• New Year's Evil
• What Have They Done to Your Daughters?
• The Retirement Plan
• Suitable Flesh
• Five Nights at Freddy's
• The Gray Man
• Anger Management

...plus 255 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A wintry themed assortment of snow blown, ice covered horror.

• Cold Prey
• Cold Prey II
• Blood Runs Cold
• The Thing
• Black Christmas
• Wendigo: Bound by Blood
• The Last Winter
• Ice Sharks
• Shredder
• Whiteout

...plus 115 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A list of horror movies that take place in amusement parks, festivals, carnivals, funhouses, fairs, ragers/parties or any such related gatherings.

It's a subgenre that I find myself gravitating to fairly often and this keeps track of the ones I've seen/own.

• The Funhouse
• The Funhouse Massacre
• Hell Fest
• Blood Fest
• Fright Fest
• Knights of Badassdom
• Jurassic Park
• Jurassic World
• Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood
• Freaks

...plus 21 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Sixth annual spooky season horror flick challenge. 31 new viewings over 31 days. I’ll be adding the total amount of horror flicks I watch this month to the list, then tally the new views at the end of the month.

A valid attempt, I almost had it!

35 total horror films
27 first time watches
2 seasons of shows.

Better luck next year! I hope everyone had a Happy Halloween!

• Clickbait: Unfollowed
• Speak No Evil
• Salem's Lot
• Fright Night
• Final Destination
• Salem's Lot
• V/H/S/Beyond
• Time Walker
• The First Omen
• MaXXXine

...plus 25 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A list of horror movies set in, or during, any known war. Any time and any place. At the very least a realistic war setting or war games type scenario. No fictional wars or battles and no futuristic conflicts. 

War is inherently horrific and provides an intense backdrop to any horror movie, before the creatures or creations even come into play. It also seems to be a subgenre that doesn't get much love and has a fairly limited filmography. But when this mash up does occur, more times then not it delivers a hell of a visceral punch.

• Overlord
• Trench 11
• Outpost
• Dog Soldiers
• War of the Dead
• Zombie Massacre 2: Reich of the Dead
• Deathwatch
• Dead Birds
• The Squad
• R-Point

...plus 37 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A list of all the horror anthologies I have seen and/or own. 

I don’t usually go for anthology films, I find most of the vignettes to be miss rather than hit, but that doesn’t mean I don’t check out my fair share. And there’s some I genuinely like, if not love! 

Always on the lookout for other great ones. Or at least ones that won’t make me so hesitant to check out this subgenre more often.

• Creepshow
• Creepshow 2
• V/H/S
• V/H/S/2
• V/H/S/94
• Popcorn
• Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror
• Campfire Tales
• Scare Package
• Scare Me

...plus 16 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Movies I own that were produced/released by Shudder

• The Ranger
• Revenge
• Terrified
• Blood Quantum
• Yummy
• Scare Package
• Monstrum
• Party Hard, Die Young
• The Marshes
• Host

...plus 26 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Retribution
• Resident Evil: Death Island
• 65
• The Pope's Exorcist

Fifth annual spooky season horror viewings. Aiming for 31 new viewings as usual.

My most epic failure to date hahah. 8 new, 1 rewatch. 

But I’ll afford myself some grace. I was busy this month. My first novella is getting published and that took up a lotta my time. 

It comes out on the 12th for anyone interested!

• Bad Things
• Totally Killer
• V/H/S/85
• Night of the Living Deb
• Pontypool
• The Taking of Deborah Logan
• Dark Stories to Survive the Night
• Killer Book Club
• The Last Voyage of the Demeter

A list of the films that I have seen/own that fit under the "Ghost Ship" subgenre, a personal favorite of mine that isn't used nearly enough.

All horror/science fiction movies based around a haunted, abandoned, stranded ship or vessel of some kind. A ghost ship, a possessed ship, a ship full of monsters, a ship that does the possessing, a trapped ship, an abandoned sea/space station or base etc etc.

Most of my focus here is for ships floating out in the wide open sea, but I will make an exception for their space based counterparts that fit the same basic criteria.

• Ghost Ship
• Death Ship
• Triangle
• Event Horizon
• Sunshine
• Virus
• Deep Rising
• Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre
• Pandorum
• The Ferryman

...plus 32 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Films that contain products/product placement from where I work. An occurrence that, however briefly,  never fails to disrupt my enjoyment and send me crashing into a wall of almost inconsolable rage.

• Smile
• Fight Club
• Under the Silver Lake
• Everything Everywhere All at Once
• World War Z

The fourth entry in this horror flick saga. 
31 horror movies over the course of October, preferably ones I haven’t seen before. 
Let’s go.

FINAL TALLY:

24 newly watched films. 
4 shorts. 
3 rewatches. 

VERDICT: FAILED.

• My Best Friend's Exorcism
• Raven's Hollow
• Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin
• The Seed
• Terrifier 2
• Old People
• Heartbeat
• The Den
• The Haunting of Alice D
• The Innkeepers

...plus 21 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

This is a list of movies played, by the shop, while I’ve been getting tattooed recently  (I know I’m forgetting several and it’s gunna drive me nuts ha).

• Secret Window
• Black Mass
• The Return of the Living Dead
• Night of the Creeps
• The Toxic Avenger
• Class of Nuke 'Em High
• The Shining
• The Founder
• Father Stu
• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Take three.

After a middling attempt a couple years ago I almost pulled off 31 horror flicks over the course of this most sacred month last year. Here I go again.

Trying to only watch horror flicks that are new to me. Any decade goes, any subgenre is a treat.

* Final tally- 3 rewatches, 21 new views, 24 total: Another year, another failed attempt. Here’s to next year.

• There's Someone Inside Your House
• V/H/S/94
• Killing Birds
• Little Monsters
• Pumpkins
• Cannibal Apocalypse
• Till Death
• Suspiria
• The Devil Below
• Scared Stiff

...plus 14 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

...Let's try this again.

After my less then abysmal attempt last year (a measly 17 entries) I will again attempt to watch 31 different horror movies over the month of October. Preferably ones I have not seen before.

• Storage 24
• War of the Dead
• Red Summer
• The Rake
• Vampires vs. the Bronx
• Here Alone
• Ghost of Goodnight Lane
• The Convent
• Black Water: Abyss
• Tiger House

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

My list of all the horror, or horror adjacent, movies I watch during this sacred spooky season. Aiming for a solid 31, but the more the bloodier.

• Doom: Annihilation
• High Moon
• Itsy Bitsy
• Killer High
• Last Ones Out
• Ruin Me
• The Night Sitter
• Haunt
• Mandy
• The Grapes of Death

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.