2025

dir: Kiah Roache-Turner

2025

It’s literally the 50th anniversary of when Jaws came out. As such, every film released in the second half of 2025 has to be a shark film where sharks eat people.

Australia is not exempt from this, in fact, for whatever reason now shark movies have taken over from coal as one of our main exports.

When I saw the introduction to this film where it said “Based on a True Story”, I blurted out, out loud, involuntarily, “Bullshit!”, quicker and louder than Natasha Lyonne does on that show Poker Face where she sorts out the liars from the lied to, the murderers from the murder-curious. Because there is no way any part of this movie conforms to anything that ever happened to anyone, except in that there was a World War II, there were Australian soldiers, and that sharks exist and occasionally eat people.

Beyond that, this film is purest fantasy. Yeah, the HMS Armadale sank in 1942, but that's got nothing to do with this, .

The starting sequence will be familiar to anyone who has ever watched a) any war movies or b) anyone who has watched a movie. Boot camp. Young soldiers being yelled at. Recruits who are wonderful, wholesome and handsome (like our hero Leo played by Mark Coles Smith), or awful, ugly, mean, racist, selfish jerks (like the necessary villain beyond the shark played by Sam Delich, who has an unfortunate resemblance to that FriendlyJordies chap). There are no in-betweens, there are no grey areas on the battlefield or in personalities.

dir: Jay Roach

2025

I really wonder what Americans think British people are. Watching a film like this makes you think Americans think Brits are like these polite but profane aliens who don’t really physically exist in the same world as them, but they have those delightful accents, so what’s not to like?

Olivia Colman and Benedict Timothy Carlton “Cumbersomely Named” Cumberbatch are probably great actors who have been great in all sorts of things. They are, shall we say, less than great here. They are game, they’re trying, you can tell they’re trying, but this script, the stuff these Americans make them do in order to amuse other Americans…ugh. It’s ugly.

It’s ugly and unpleasant, and pretends constantly that it’s not, and they play terrible people, so I question how anyone thought this was going to work. I mean, I have no doubt people saw this flick, as in, might have even bought tickets and such, popcorn, the works, maybe on a date night out. Why didn’t they release it around Valentine’s Day, I’m sure some marketing genius is lamenting?

But, fucking hell. I know that the story is based on a book, and I know they made an earlier movie from it starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas, and I remember watching that movie, back in the day, when I was still a kid. A young, impressionable kid. I can’t lie I hated that fucking film too, but at least that had some good actors in it. Good American actors, that is.

The novelty was that these two people had starred in these moderately successful romantic action flicks, Romancing the Stone and Jewel of the Nile, in which Danny De Vito was also along for the ride, and then the thought was to have a flick where Turner and Douglas play a couple whose divorce gets messy and murderous. Ha ha, so funny, and De Vito can direct and play the third wheel!

I think what I really hate about these kinds of flicks, ones that pretend to be about the breakdown of a relationship or a marriage, is just how inherently dishonest they are. There’s nothing even vaguely hilarious about intimate partner violence, domestic violence, people trying to kill each other. It happens every day. Every week in Australia a woman is murdered by her partner or her former partner. That’s not to ignore the countless thousands of people who endure physical and emotional abuse, threats to murder, threats to suicide, every awful permutation possible, each and every day. Not exclusively women at the hands of men, but the vast majority being women on the receiving end.

dir: Mike Flanagan

2025

The Life of Chuck is a flick that seems to have not found much of an audience, despite being the creation, at least in its written form, of America’s most prolific, best and possibly most handsome writer, being Stephen King. He is a one man industry, or at least, his ideas are so great that all of them have to be adapted into something.

Unlike most of his stuff, this isn’t horror – this is something… else. Maybe it’s existential in nature, maybe it’s a gentle “live life to its fullest because we never know when it’s going to end” type of story, maybe it is a story about how life is like a box of chocolates, so you might as well dance before the world ends.

Who knows (Stephen King probably knows)? What I did see in reviews of the flick, from those reviewers that I follow, or respect, or both, is that those who loved it really thought it was one of the films of the year. I’m going to lazily say that half the people who saw it thought it was great and half thought it was absolute hollow dogshit, because I’m not sure I want to take the time to calculate the real statistic.

Reviews were very much like that. I only mention it (I mean, who cares what reviewers say about anything, huh?) because it really was one of those cases where those who loved it really did, and those who didn’t thought it wasn’t mediocre, they thought it was fucking terrible. That level of hostility, I’m not going to read too much psychology into it, but to me that kind of extreme comes from people feeling actively betrayed by what they watched.

I don’t really get it. I neither think it’s a great film, nor do I think it’s terrible. I didn’t find its central conceit too insulting, nor did I find its seeming message to be anything that extraordinary. I find it perplexing that Tom Hiddleston is in this, because he really doesn’t have that much to do, and he doesn’t even play the Chuck character for the majority of the flick.

My main agreement with anyone else that might complain is that it is a very strange story told arse-backwards for a very good reason, that reason being it’s about the life of Chuck rather than his death. We know he’s going to die, because everyone does, but if there’s anything this flick is trying to impress upon us, is that you should really take up every opportunity to dance with someone while you can.

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.