2025

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: Paul Greengrass

2025

2018 isn’t that long ago. I mean, I know that the covid years in between were about 10 years long, but in truth the events depicted in this agitating and deeply stressful movie only happened 7 years ago. The so-called Camp Fire of 2018 saw over 13,000 buildings and houses burn down, but far more tragically, 85 lives lost to the fires or the general chaos that ensued.

What this film, with a certain degree of difficulty, gets us to care about, is whether 85 people dying is bad enough, or whether the survival of a busload of kids, their teacher and the bus driver, or not, would make us feel better or worse.

Let’s not fuck around – they wouldn’t have made this if the kids didn’t survive. But watching this flick you would have been convinced that there was no freaking way all these people survived this apocalyptic hellfire, not only including these kids but especially these kids.

And given those circumstances, and the fact that this is the past we’re watching, and not a post-apocalyptic future, its very verisimilitude is what makes it so hard to believe sometimes.

This is a very stressful flick. There’s no two ways about it: every choice the director makes is intended to increase our stress to try to match the terror of the people involved. The camerawork is jittery, handheld, and matches the editing and the overamped nature of the performances, and a lot of the real footage that I’m assuming they got and included in the film.

It feels too real a lot of the time. I have no doubts everything was done safely and no kids or McCounagheys were harmed in the making of this movie etc etc, but the queasy line between fact and fiction is often blurred, deliberately. There are scenes with the firefighters figuring out that the fires are only going to get worse and worse that looked like they were filmed when it was actually happening.

Very obviously, this was a horrific set of circumstances that impacted a lot of people in terrible ways, but some more than others. Everyone else in the film except the bus driver doesn’t get the luxury of a backstory, because you see the bus driver, the one that drives the lost bus of the title, he’s played by Matthew McConaughey. And if he’s playing a character, he’s not confused as to whether he has main character energy or not: he must have all of it. No-one else in this flick is afforded that luxury, which is to the film’s benefit, because honestly, we didn’t need it.

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.