Horror

dir: Michael Shanks

2025

Now this is a bit more my tempo.

This, too, is a film about a couple in danger of tearing each other and themselves apart, but this works far batter, way way better even if it doesn’t have Sir Lord Esquire Benedict Cumberbatch and Academy Award Winner Olivia Colman in the lead roles, unlike the bloody Roses.

In fact, it has Alison Brie and Dave Franco, instead. You could probably not get two actors more opposite than them to the classy Brit thespians of the aforementioned title. Dave Franco is the younger, non-problematic Franco compared to his brother James, who, while a great actor, is also a notorious serial assaulter of women. Alison Brie is, if you like her work, a delight in shows as varied as Mad Men, GLOW, Community and a bunch of films, and yet also an accomplished actor capable of tremendous nuance and complexity in her roles. And she’s pretty fearless.

And Dave Franco… is Dave Franco. You wouldn’t think that they would suit such roles in a keen body horror flick, but they’re perfect for these roles.

Another key difference is that Brie and Franco are married in real life, so when they’re playing a couple in distress, it is somewhat more believable. They’re not playing a couple who have turned murderous due to decades of resentment and generally being very shitty people – they are playing a (younger) couple, despite being in their 40s who have only recently moved to the country, and who don’t seem to be sure of each other even after nearly ten years of being together.

Excruciatingly, Brie’s character Millie gets down on bended knee, for some reason, to propose to Tim when they’re having their hipster abundant going away party with all their friends. He awkwardly demurs yet they still go through with the move. He doesn’t really have a job and doesn’t want to give up his dream of being an unsuccessful musician, whereas she’s a teacher, and has apparently been supporting them both for the longest time.

In a new town, in a small town where they don’t know anyone, they are similarly repelled by and entirely dependent on each other, which creates its own pressures. Couples who spend too much time together, without clear boundaries in their heads, can get confused: Where do you end and I begin? A lack of boundaries, projected harsh boundaries that are too extreme or exclusionary; withholding oneself, depriving the other of what they want or need; relationships are hard, aye?

dirs.: Bryan M. Ferguson Diet Phantasma, Casper Kelly Fun Size, Micheline Pitt-Norman & R.H. Norman Home Haunt, Alex Ross Perry Kidprint, Paco Plaza Ut Supra Sic Infra, Anna Zlokovic Coochie Coochie Coo

2025

Well, this year’s installment of this found footage horror sub-genre franchise is probably one of its best outings so far, which is extraordinary considering how these things usually go. This time out might not have an overarching thematic link (as opposed to a shared setting, being obviously Halloween except for the Spanish segment Ut Supra Sic Infra, I think), with the interstitial bits between segments having nothing to do with any of them or Halloween, but it hardly matters.

What most of these segments benefit from is brevity, which I believe is the soul of both wit and lingerie, according to Dorothy Parker. Most of them don’t have enough of a premise to sustain a feature length horror flick, except perhaps Kidprint, but the fact that they’re only generally ten or fifteen minutes long means they’re around for long enough to shock, horrify, provoke discomfort, and then they’re gone. Short, punchy, lethal, to the point.

I like that, or at least I appreciate that, to not have my time wasted.

The opening scene, telling a quite pointless story about how far soft drink companies are prepared to go in order to add bizarre components to their best selling products, doesn’t really do much other than deliver spasmodic gore in even shorter bursts than the segments themselves (in the interstitials). Test subjects file into a recently cleaned room, in order to take a few sips of the new product being tested, being Diet Phantasma, and then horrible things happen to them. For whatever reason, as in, not for any explicable purpose, they’ve added some kind of poltergeist juice or demonic essence to the drink. Not as a mistake, not even to cut costs, but just to kill their own customers, I guess, because they can?

Take that, late stage capitalism!

That’s trenchant satire, that is. The first real segment is Coochie Coochie Coo, which is deeply discomfiting and an appalling / great start to the proceedings. Two obnoxious girls, one of whom is meant to leave town for college soon, go trick or treating, knowing full well that they’re probably actors in their mid twenties masquerading as even teens too old to trick or treat.

As they’re quite rude to people and irritating even when they’re on their own, when they get to a particular house and face a supernaturally horrific mother organism that turns people into milk-saturated babies, it’s hard to know what to hope for. I didn’t exactly want anything bad to happen to them, but I didn’t particularly want them to have a narrow escape and happy lives afterwards either.

dir: Zach Cregger

2025

It was, at least for me, always going to be hard for this director to follow up his last, very excellent horror flick Barbarian. It was so good and so unexpected that, yes, okay, I demand, in full Karen mode not to speak to his manager but for him to make another solid, unexpected, unpredictable flick.

I guess he did that. It was successful, more successful than Barbarian financially, and it had ads on tv and on bus shelters in my strange neck of the woods.

So why didn’t I like it that much?

There are parts of the so-called “American Experiment” that, to the people outside of America, make it look utterly insane. I’m not going to lower myself to talk about the political stuff. The gun thing, the collective shoulder shrug after each new gun massacre, the thoughts and prayers and business as usual after classrooms get shot up, and countless children die, that makes them all look collectively fucking insane.

Weapons, perversely, pops us into this national psychosis, but has nothing to do with gun violence. It’s animated by something that almost seems like one of the tragedies alluded to, but instead takes it into an unpredictable yet unfortunately unproductive direction. Because of how insanely comical the ‘solution’ is, how outside of actual human experience, for me the flick itself becomes something of a shoulder shrug, where you wonder what the point was.

The set up is fine, the explanation is meaningless.

One particular night in an unremarkable Pennsylvanian town, a bunch of kids, all from the same 3rd grade primary school classroom go missing, all bar one, being Alex (Cary Christopher). All seventeen of the kids snuck out of their homes at exactly 2.17am, and started running in the same direction, with their arms out behind them.

Everyone thinks the teacher, Justine (Julia Garner), must know something or be responsible. Everyone thinks Alex must know something, but he couldn’t be responsible, could he, and he’s not forthcoming with info.

dir: Parker Finn

2025

Fucking hell. That was nasty.

Following on directly from the first movie, which I thought was pretty mid, this one feels like a significantly better flick than its predecessor, by dint of maybe having a bigger budget, but more so because it leans in to its premise of being an absolute fucking nightmare for the protagonist, even as it tries to find new ways to one up the Final Destination franchise.

The first flick, as best as I can remember, introduced its premise about some kind of supernatural entity that attaches itself to a person, torments them for about a week, then compels them to kill themselves in front of someone else, thus furthering the infection by transferring to a new host. It’s a somewhat laborious premise, and it’s been done a few times before already, and better, in many of those other cases. Many of them try to be more elaborate, or convoluted, or American, but they’re really all rip offs of the original Japanese Ringu saga. You watch the tape, Sadako comes and gets you, you die.

To fill out the running time, this iteration, which like I said earlier I think is significantly better than the first installment, has a tremendous performance from its lead, being Naomi Scott playing a pop starlet called Skye.

I think Skye is meant to not quite be at the Taylor Swift / Beyoncè level of superstardom, but she’s probably at the level just underneath them. Maybe the Sabrina Carpenter / Chappelle Roan / Charlie XCX level. Fantastically wealthy, dealing with the aftermath of a terrible car accident and the subsequent addiction issues, being bossed around by a terrifying stage mother (Rosemarie DeWitt), her life is tough, but for the next week of her life the Smile entity, for lack of a better descriptor, will make her life a living hell such that death itself might seem like sweet relief.

But it won’t be. Oh no.

This is not a horror flick that holds your hand, oh no it does not. It puts Skye (and therefore us) through the absolute fucking wringer, and it’s not like she deserves it at all. I mean, there are allusions made to the car accident that damaged her physically and mentally, which resulted in her boyfriend’s death, and maybe there’s a lot of guilt there.

But I’m telling you, once we’re shown the scene which leads up to the accident, wow, the little Baby Jesus himself would have murdered that motherfucker with his bare hands.