Horror

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.

dir: Osgood Perkins

2025

The Monkey is probably one of the best Stephen King adaptations ever. At least, “best of” for this year. There have been so many, probably more than Dickens, adaptations of his work, that probably even he can’t keep track of them all.

But this feels like a perfect melding of King’s gruesome ideas and this director’s various obsessions, into a flick that is often hard to watch in just how gory it gets, but manages to be relentlessly entertaining throughout.

And it’s funny. It’s the darkest humour you can imagine, but damn if it didn’t have me chortling like a foolish thing.

The monkey in question is styled like the stereotypical organ grinder’s monkey (an image / ‘meme’ from a million years ago) with the vest and such, but with drumsticks and drums instead of cymbals. Disney apparently own the copyright on the monkey with the cymbals somehow, due to the Pixar Toy Story movies, because of course they do.

It is large. Its eyes are huge, and terrifying on their own. But the monkey’s grin, those teeth, well it’s the stuff of nightmares. It is not alive but it’s also not dead. If you dismember it, it somehow gets put back together. If you burn it, it reappears, somehow. You can’t give it away, but you also can’t live it. You think you successfully buried it somewhere, and then it’s back in your cupboard behind the Hungry Hungry Hippos and the Connect 4.

It’s especially gratifying for me because, unlike a lot of strange, possibly funny-smelling people, I did not care at all for this director’s previous outing, which was called Longlegs, and I absolutely adore an older film of his called I am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House. I’m not saying this is his best film, but this feels certainly like the time where all the elements have come together to deliver a coherent, nasty delight.

dir: Flying Lotus

2025

This looks like a sci fi flick, but it’s very much a horror flick, just in case the pretty colours and funky music lured you in.

Someone wakes up in some kind of facility, with lots of dead bodies around, and she doesn’t remember what happened, who she is, or what anything is.

What would screenwriters do without amnesia as a plot device? Would they have to actually write cool screenplays that didn’t resort to crutches and timeworn tropes?

That sounds more derisive than I intend it to be. This might be somewhat familiar, and crib certain elements from the Alien films, and probably Carpenter’s The Thing, and elsewhere as well, but it’s well done for what it is. It’s not, to my eye, just an extended film clip from someone who makes music and film clips. There are a number of (predictable) twists, but that doesn’t at all detract from the back half of the flick when shit gets impossibly graphic.

This is a very violent, very gory film, in service of a plot where for the longest time, we, like Riya (Eiza Gonzalez) don’t really get what’s happening. But then we do, and oh gods it’s so awful.

There’s this facility on some planet where humans were hoping they could either relocate the humans from a dying Earth, or find some kind of advancement / technology that could help them back home. The facility would look suspiciously like a New Zealand door factory were it not for the really sexy looking underground bar-like lighting. I didn’t come up with this line, so I can’t take credit for it, but another reviewer referred to it as being the most bisexual lighting ever committed to film. I don’t entirely get what it means but I get what they mean. There are scenes with Aaron Paul’s character of Brion where half his face is bathed in blue gel light, and the other half in red, and you think “wow, this director / cinematographer’s game is really on point”. Or at least that they watched a lot of Dario Argento’s early flicks.

It feels a bit unusual for this kind of flick to feel so carefully crafted. There are times when I regret the level of craft put into some of the horrific imagery and designs. I regret seeing some of that stuff, because it is cosmic horror, the worst kind, and it is now engraved upon my poor brain.

dir: Robert Eggers

2024

I… am scared of this film.

I’ve always found the Nosferatu version of the vampire story far scarier and far more off-putting than the sexy – sparkly – romantic versions. And, yeah, like most people of a certain age, I watched the original playing at a repertory cinema like the Astor or the old Valhalla, back in the day, and once with a live orchestra or band playing either the score or their own score for it. Might have been the Blue Grassy Knoll, if I recall.

It’s just the kind of thing we did back in the 1990s – early 2000s, if you were a film lover / film wanker.

I still find the image of Max Schreck as Count Orlok walking around in his stilted manner as the essence of cinematic horror. Fast hot vampires zipping around faster than the eye can see like The Flash I guess is scary conceptually, because it means you can’t outrun them, but there’s something viscerally horrible about some dread creature slowing coming towards you, as you cower in terror, knowing that you can’t get away.

That’s not to ignore the sexual aspect of these stories, but the Nosferatu version has the creature being a mostly dead being that brings with it pestilence and plague. There’s no threat / promise of eternal life – eternal sexiness, like with Anne Rice’s vampires: there’s just putrescent death wanting to consume everything that is alive.

And, yes, belabouring the point further (of not talking about the present film, and talking around all other sorts of nonsense), there is the Werner Herzog remake Nosferatu the Vampyre from the 1970s, which also had an actual monster playing the vampire, being Klaus Kinski, and I’ve seen that version too, and laughed a fair bit through it, though I think that was unintentional on Herzog’s part. That flick is not as well respected, though it deserves some credit, since you will I hope never see that many live rats in one place again as long as you live, and it uses some of Wagner’s Ring cycle music in superb ways as the plague sweeps across the city.

Last pre-digression – there’s also the superb film Shadow of the Vampire from 2000 that conspires to be a ‘making-of’ of the making of the original Nosferatu, but the sting in the tail is that the director, F.W. Murnau, played with the insanity that we used to admire in John Malkovich, actually found a monster to play Orlok onscreen, and happily lets him eat away at cast and crew in order to get the perfect shots he needs to make the classic that would be still be known a hundred years hence. Nothing says “Hollywood will chew you up and spit you out” more than a movie where none (except the studio executives) are safe.