2025

dir: Akiva Schaffer

2025

I was a fool to think that just because some people said this was funny, that I would find it funny. ‘Funny’ is more subjective than beauty, sleaze or profundity. Cuteness, hotness, cringe – now they’re universal.

There’s also the factor that seeing something on your own is never the same experience as watching something funny with other people. The collective energy makes a big difference. The involuntary, unconscious group dynamics can take you out of yourself and deliver you a very different experience. Duh, I know you’re thinking, no shit, Sherlock.

I didn’t have the luxury of watching this flick in a cinema. And no-one else at my place was awake to watch this with. So alone I trudged through this relatively brisk 85 minute movie, not laughing at what I am told is a steady stream of gags in the style of the classic Zucker – Abrams – Zucker movies like Kentucky Fried Movie, Flying High, Top Secret, Hot Shots and all those other pieces of shit, including the original Naked Gun movies with Leslie Nielsen.

Nah, that’s not fair, I take that back. I laughed at plenty of those when I was a child. I’ll laugh at anything. Finding stuff funny isn’t some elitist, rarefied pursuit like fox hunting or snorting caviar. Everyone laughs at fart jokes. Not all fart jokes, but the right ones, the most unexpected?

I laughed at some stuff here. Just not that often.

This was less like watching a modern version of those specific films from the past, and more like watching a couple of episodes of Family Guy back to back. I’ve seen plenty of episodes of that animated show, and I probably chuckled a few times, but it’s pretty mediocre in the scheme of things. The New Naked Gun does benefit from having Liam Neeson in the lead role, because you don’t expect him to be funny, and when he is, it’s surprising! I’ve seen him be funny in things (intentionally), including guest roles in The Simpsons and in Derry Girls, and in some other cameos here or there. But putting the whole flick on his massive shoulders, well, now that’s risky.

dirs: Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein

2025

It’s hard to go wrong with such a great horror premise. They’ve gotten six films out of this flimsy premise. All of the flicks are virtually the same, and it doesn’t matter. They all go the same way, and no-one survives in the end.

The reason for that is, that Death is a petty bitch and always gets his way in the end.

The first film set the template: someone about to do something has a premonition that they and a large group of other people (depending on the budget) are going to die. They stop the activity, whether it’s catching a flight or going on a rollercoaster ride, they and their peeps get off or out of the thing, the thing goes ahead and kills everyone else, and then Death starts stalking those who ‘cheated’ until they’re all dead too.

The one mainstay of all the entries is the appearance of horror legend Tony Todd. You don’t know who Tony Todd is? Well, he played the same cameo role in all these films as a coroner, pathologist? Mortician, whatever. But his far more famous role was as The Candyman in the legendary flicks from the 90s (not so much the pretentious remake). And a tonne of other stuff, including The Crow, but he’s also been the mainstay of these films, at critical points, explaining to the protagonists that they’re all fucked.

And he does so here, again, for the last time, since he mentions in the movie that Death has finally come for him too, with cancer, and he died soon after filming his touching scenes here. As a tribute to the man with the subterranean voice, they also incorporate his story into the fabric of the films further by giving him a link to all the shenanigans that we’ve been watching in general, but specifically to the protagonists of this flick.

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: Gareth Edwards

2025

Dinosaurs. Now people are sick of them. Now people are bored of them, apparently.

Except kids. Kids between the ages of, I dunno, 5 and 12 are still fascinated by them, but everyone else is suffering from reptilian fatigue. I guess.

These films do seem to be doing a bizarre meta-commentary on themselves. They seem to be saying “well, sure, we keep pumping these out, and your interest waxes and wanes, but maybe this time…?” The last flick, Jurassic World Dominion, described a world with an abundance, an embarrassment of riches of dinosaurs. A modern world overflowing with them. They were on the streets, in people’s breakfast cereals, on their subways; you couldn’t get away from them.

To combat the plethora of thunder lizards they hired / cast way too many people, humans (if you include Chris Pratt amongst them), including the other OGs of the franchises, being Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum (and 17 other main roles, no exaggeration). And yet when was the last time you heard anyone say anything positive about that flick other than “it was nice to see Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum again?”

I mean, these days… if you quizzed most people, they wouldn’t even be able to tell you what the last one’s title was, they’d probably just say in conversation “the last one.”

Add to that, this one, which people, if they saw it, will just refer to as the last one. As maximalist as the previous one might have sounded, in this one the dinosaurs have made a full retreat by mostly regaining their status as extinct. Only random, narratively convenient dinosaurs still live these days, and that’s mostly around the equator, mostly just doing their thing.

Those areas are marked off limits to humans, and are patrolled etc to keep them out rather than the dinos in, yet of course the characters here will need some reason to break in and be chased by dinosaurs for a couple of hours for our amusement.

It’s very much a return to the traditional model of just having people run around as much as possible as dinosaurs try to eat them. And the classic, most traditional model of this needs kids to arbitrarily be wedged into the story so that kids can be imperiled, which we enjoy more, somehow?