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Salem Horror Fest 2025, Saturday: House of Ashes (2024) and Troll 2 (1990)

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2025/05/salem-horror-fest-2025-saturday-house.html>

Third day of the Salem Horror Fest, and my second day there. It started with a screening of The Substance followed by a live episode of the Faculty of Horror podcast discussing the film, and ended with a horror trivia contest at the Bit Bar, Salem's retro barcade. (I had fun, let's just say.) In between, I checked out two additional films, the first of which wasn't nearly as good as I hoped it would be and the second of which was exactly as bad as its reputation suggested -- and I wouldn't have had it any other way.

First up...

House of Ashes (2024)

Not rated

Score: 2 out of 5

House of Ashes is a film I wish I liked far more than I actually did. It was competently made, it had a compelling lead in Fayna Sanchez, and it touched on a lot of heavy and timely themes that could've made for an interesting film... and yet, not only did it fail to stick the landing, but all too often I found myself wondering if this was actually a horror movie. Over on The Writers' Haven, a message board devoted mostly to movies (especially horror movies) that I've been active in for years, they created a subforum for something they call "Fake-Ass Horror," their self-explanatory term for dramas and thrillers that wear the trappings and aesthetics of the genre without actually committing to the bit. They're the kind of films that give the phrase "elevated horror" a bad name, films that feel ashamed to be called horror movies and fail to understand what makes those kinds of movies work, instead thinking that you can throw some ghostly or witchy stuff into an otherwise ho-hum domestic drama and come away with something deep, profound, and bone-chilling. Here, the exact nature of whatever is bedeviling the heroine felt incredibly inconsistent and vague, with a slew of subplots that all went nowhere even after the film built them up to seem more important than they actually were, all while the male lead's performance was far outclassed by his female counterpart. I can tolerate ambiguity in a film, but not when it gets to the point when, even after the movie is over, I'm wondering if anything I saw actually mattered. This film drove itself into a ditch and never got out, and while writer/director Izzy Lee may have had good intentions, it otherwise felt like a bad, unintentional parody of everything wrong with modern supernatural horror.

The plot was this film's biggest weakness, and the thing that dragged everything down around it. The basics are that our heroine Mia is under house arrest after the death of her husband Adam in a situation that also saw her have a miscarriage, and while she was cleared of involvement in her husband's death, a new law that's been passed means that her miscarriage is treated as manslaughter. Unable to step outside of her house, she's living with Marc, an old friend of hers, so that he can support her and go out shopping for her. Unfortunately, Adam's ghost is haunting her house, and it means trouble. There are a lot of subplots piled on from there, including some people stalking the house, a true crime podcaster who thinks Mia murdered her husband, Mia possibly going insane, and a parole officer who exemplifies every stereotype of power-tripping cops, but here's the thing: you could cut all of them from the movie and not only not lose anything, but make it feel more coherent. The stalkers are nothing more than a red herring, while the podcaster and the parole officer are complete nothing characters. The plot element about the dystopian new law cracking down on miscarriages feels like a contrivance that only comes up at the very beginning, the excuse for why Mia is under house arrest, like how the first Purge film used its worldbuilding solely to give an excuse for the events of the story. Even the exact nature of the haunting is shrouded in so much ambiguity that, when the film finally revealed what was actually happening, I found myself wondering why it played so coy for so long. After seeing what this film was going for, I'd have written it not as a straightforward supernatural horror film where the ghost is spending more than half the runtime terrorizing our heroine, but as a gothic romance where it is trying to save her from an all-too-human evil in her life. This film is so filled with ideas that nothing in it has room to breathe, leaving a story where only about thirty minutes' worth of it actually seems to matter.

Competent production values were really the only thing that saved this movie, and even then, just barely. There are some nifty special effects shots later in the film as the ghost's presence becomes increasingly overt, and even before then, director Izzy Lee did do pretty good work building atmosphere, especially with how the film used mist to signal the ghost's presence. While Mia as a character was all over the map, her actress Fayna Sanchez did her best making her feel like an actually coherent character, somebody who was still grieving the death of her husband and whose situation is only made worse by the people who falsely suspect that she killed him. Unfortunately, I can't say the same of Vincent Stalba, the other half of what is mostly a two-person show here. His performance as Marc felt flat, to the point that it arguably telegraphed certain plot twists way too early in the film, making it hard for me to buy him as a supportive friend for Mia. What's more, inconsistent writing meant that his behavior and motivations seemed to constantly change, making it hard for me to get a grasp on his character at all.

The Bottom Line

This film had too many redeeming qualities for me to really hate, and the Salem Horror Fest did a screening of the infamous Troll 2 later that day to remind me what a truly awful movie is. Those are the only reasons why this didn't get a 1 out of 5. This was a forgettable, overstuffed nothing of a film that was made with good intentions but felt like every bad stereotype of "elevated" horror brought to life.

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Fortunately, the final movie I saw on Saturday sucked in the way you actually want a movie to suck...

Troll 2 (1990)

Rated PG-13

Score: 1 out of 5 (objectively), 4 out of 5 (unintentional comedy)

"They're eating her. And then they're going to eat me. OH MY GOOOOOODDDDDD!!!"

Troll 2. What is there to say about Troll 2 that hasn't already been said before by bad movie aficionados? It's my generation's version of Plan 9 from Outer Space, widely recognized as one of the worst movies ever made to the point that Michael Stephenson, the actor who played its kid protagonist Joshua, later made a 2009 documentary about its cult fandom that was titled Best Worst Movie. Nothing about it works. The protagonists are stupid, the acting is either wooden or overwrought across the board, there's an evil witch character who feels like she stepped in from a completely different movie, the special effects are comical, the monsters are just people in cheap goblin masks and sack clothes, the story is largely an excuse for writer/director Claudio Fragasso's wife to vent about her hatred of vegetarians, the dialogue is written by somebody who didn't speak English natively yet insisted it be delivered as written, Fragasso seems convinced that he made high art with this movie, the behind-the-scenes stories that have been told about its production are more interesting than anything that happens in the film itself, and if you go in trying to take it seriously as a horror film, you will break your brain.

I loved it.

Joe and Sean, the hosts of Bloody Disgusting's podcast The Horror Show, handled the screening of this film, and they treated it like old-school horror hosts with regular breaks during the film to laugh at the things we'd just witnessed. Everybody in that little theater went in knowing to expect a slow-motion trainwreck, the kind of film that has given hope to countless amateur filmmakers on the grounds that surely nothing they make can be this bad. It's a movie where the badness is so over-the-top that it loops back around at some point and you're actually watching a comedy, and a damn funny one at that. When "the line" came, I, somebody who'd never seen the whole movie from start to finish but damn well knew that line by heart thanks to how it's been burned into movie geek lore, recited it right along with the character, and I wasn't the only one in the theater doing so. And that wasn't the only line in the film that got the crowd roaring, either. Make no mistake, this is a truly wretched film with absolutely no redeeming qualities on its own. But in that, it accidentally stumbles upon an unintentional one: being an object example of everything wrong with the B-movies of its era to the point that it becomes great entertainment in its own way.

The Bottom Line

There's really no way to describe the experience of watching Troll 2, especially in a live screening with a crowd. My reviews for good comedies are usually short, lest I give away the best parts, and so too is it the case with this. If you wanna laugh your ass off at one of the worst movies ever made, throw this on, preferably with some friends and some quality intoxicants, and have a blast.

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Salem Horror Fest 2025, Friday: The Rebrand (2024) and Pater Noster and the Mission of Light (2025)

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2025/05/salem-horror-fest-2025-friday-renewal.html>

Now that I live in Massachusetts, the Salem Horror Fest has become my new go-to horror film festival. Work meant that I had to miss the opening night festivities on Thursday, but I was damn sure able to make it to Friday night and check out a pair of indie horror flicks. While the first one was a disappointment, the second one blew my damn socks off.

To start...

The Rebrand (2025)

Not rated

Score: 2 out of 5

The Rebrand is a found-footage horror-comedy satire of influencer culture that would have worked better as a straight comedy than a horror film, as it's clear that that's where the talents of Kaye Adelaide, the film's director and (with its star Nancy Webb) co-writer, lay. A film about an eight-months-pregnant videographer named Nicole who travels to the lesbian influencer couple Thistle and Blair to film their "comeback" documentary after they got canceled following Thistle spewing a transphobic rant on a livestream, only to find herself in a house of horrors, I was most engaged when the film was focused on sending up the vanity and artificiality of influencer culture, only for it to lose me when it tried to get serious and turn into both a horror movie and an exploration of what is clearly an abusive relationship. The two sides together made it feel like a film that had no idea what it wanted to be, and while it was well-made on a technical level and had moments that either worked well on their own or could've been the seeds for something good, as a whole movie it just fell apart.

Above all else, there is one big central problem that holds this movie back: Nicole is a fucking dumbass. When she arrives at Thistle and Blair's house, the very first thing she sees is Thistle smacking a sack with a hammer and then dumping it off her porch, and it's not long after when we find that Blair's cat was beaten to death. What's more, the entire house is rigged with cameras, including in Nicole's guest bedroom and even in the bathroom, and she frequently catches Thistle and Blair getting into heated arguments that blow up the image as a perfect couple that they want to sell to their fans. It is telegraphed extremely early on that Thistle is bad news, such that anybody with a working brain should figure out immediately that something bad is going to happen to them if they accept Thistle's offer to stay the night. And yet, not once does Nicole voice any thoughts about what's plainly obvious to anybody watching this. Even as the weird shit starts escalating, such as sugar being poured into the gas tank of Nicole's car (which Thistle awkwardly tries to claim was their homophobic neighbors being jerks -- so, uh, why is Thistle and Blair's car alright?), the road being allegedly closed off by flooding with the only evidence being a "trust me, sis" from Thistle, and Thistle's own increasingly unhinged behavior, it takes far, far too long for Nicole to realize the shit she's in.

Instead, Nicole is a completely passive figure, little more than a camera operator even though she's the ostensible protagonist. Even during the big blowup where Blair figures out what Thistle did to her cat, Nicole never has anything to say about it, not even a "hey, Thistle, I thought I saw you smacking a sack with a hammer when I got here." Blair, too, has very little character beyond just being Thistle's partner, the film unable to decide until the third act just how involved she is in Thistle's scheme. On one hand, it's clear that their relationship is a domineering and abusive one in which Thistle controls Blair and pushes her around, but on the other hand, there are hints throughout that Blair may be more than just an unwilling and reluctant partner to Thistle, the film trying to build a sense of ambiguity around her that it never follows through on. A more engaging film would've been one in which Nicole realized immediately that she can't trust Thistle, and tries to escape sooner only to find that Thistle has sabotaged such, all while trying to find a place where she can voice her thoughts without Thistle finding out about it. At the very least, it would have had me questioning her intelligence a bit less by showing her trying and failing to escape.

What saved this movie was its comedic side. The film opens with a framing device revealing that the footage Nicole filmed is being screened by an LGBTQ-themed true crime web series hosted by a flamboyant trans woman named Tranna Wintour (a real-life figure playing herself), and the meat of the film consists of plentiful jabs about how influencers market a fake version of themselves for the cameras all while professing "realness." Nancy Webb absolutely dominates the film as Thistle, the twisted caricature of an influencer whose cancellation and attempted "rebrand" into a mommy vlogger now that she's just gotten pregnant (or so she says) is presented as something grotesque, the kind of person who, sadly, is all too common in the world of online fame. When on camera, her interactions with everybody around her, including the people she presumes are watching, are obviously scripted to the point that the film shows us the literal scripts that she and Blair are reading from. Other films, including other horror-comedies, have tread similar ground, but Webb's performance, over-the-top as it is, always kept me from getting bored. Again, to go back to what I was saying before, I'd have dropped the pretense much earlier in the film and been upfront about Thistle's villainy, because Webb was clearly having so much fun playing a psycho influencer. What's more, while Nicole and Blair were both sorely underwritten characters, I did like the actors playing them, Naomi Silver-Vézina and Andi E. McQueen, who did what they could with their characters. Silver-Vézina got to show off her skills with a harp in one great scene, and while the writing did Blair no favors, McQueen always seemed to have a very clear idea of who she was, somebody who's clearly suffering under Thistle's thumb but is too afraid to challenge her. Again: having Nicole figure out early what's going on would've also allowed for a great arc for Blair, as Nicole helps her find the courage to stand up to her lover's abuse.

The Bottom Line

There were some good ideas here that could've been brought out by a better script, but unfortunately, its flat and frankly stupid protagonist let it down in fatal fashion. I'd skip it.

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Second film of the night, fortunately, was a hell of a lot more entertaining.

Pater Noster and the Mission of Light (2024)

Not rated

Score: 4 out of 5

Now this is what I'm talking about. Pater Noster and the Mission of Light is an homage to, and satire of, the golden age of psychedelic rock, hippie culture, and record store culture that was apparently filmed on a budget that cost as much as a used car (as the closing credits state), yet you'd never be able to tell watching it. It was a very fun and propulsive folk horror bloodbath made with a clear affection for its subject matter, specifically writer/director Christopher Beckel's love of music and horror movies, and while the satire of consumerism that Beckel was discussing in the Q&A session after the movie wasn't something that really came through for me, I certainly did get the jabs at the values of the Baby Boomers peppered throughout the film. More importantly, it's clear that he knew what he was doing behind the camera as well and managed to translate that love into a good movie, a film that's often amusing in its more comedic touches but which knows how to bring the pain when it counts, all of it anchored by a great cast and a visual style that combines homages to the aesthetics of '70s horror movies with more modern touches that make this more than just a simple throwback. Right now, I'm ready to call this my favorite film of this year's Salem Horror Fest, and I suspect it still will be by the end of it.

Our heroine Max is a young clerk at a record store and an enthusiastic collector of old vinyl records who, one day, encounters an extremely rare and valuable record recorded by a hippie band in the early '70s called Pater Noster and the Mission of Light. When the guy who sells it to her lets her know where she can find more, she enthusiastically runs out and grabs them, and winds up getting a call later that night from somebody associated with the hippie commune that produced the records. Together with her co-workers Sam, Abby, and Gretchen and a local metal drummer named Jay Sin who also owns one of the band's records, Max is picked up by the cult and brought to their commune, where they have lived largely cut off from the outside world after an... unfortunate incident about fifty years ago.

There are no points for guessing that the Mission of Light is evil and is going to do horrible things to our protagonists. We're told early on, via a cameo appearance from Tim Cappello as a radio host laying out their backstory, that this group, which was involved in various "fringe science" experiments on top of recording music, retreated into isolation in the mid-'70s after a murder case and that some of their music and writings are cursed and can drive people to madness. It doesn't take long for things to take a turn for the sacrificial once Max and her friends reach the commune, as the cult is harvesting orgone energy (a real-life pseudoscientific concept that's floated around in occult and countercultural circles for nearly a hundred years) from one of the most potent sources there is: human fear, meaning that their suffering is drawn out as the cult drugs and tortures them. We get brutal stabbings, a castration, a bear trap, somebody getting torn apart Day of the Dead-style, and more, all brought to life with shockingly high-quality gore effects for such a low-budget film. While many sequences are shot like a normal, modern-day horror movie, once the action starts getting spooky we start getting the color, psychedelia, and other audio and visual cues straight out of the trippier films of the '70s, like the influence of the decade from which the Mission of Light came is starting to creep in and warp the minds of our protagonists. Beckel was clearly influenced by stylish retro filmmakers like Dario Argento and Brian De Palma here, but at the same time, he's interested in more than just making a simple homage, and the fusion of old-school and new-school styles makes this a film that, while reverential towards classic '70s horror, is very much interested in being its own thing.

That battle between old-school and new-school likewise informs the cast, as young heroes square off against older villains who we find are using some of their weird science to keep themselves young(ish) even as they're pushing 80. The protagonists are a realistically flawed but likable bunch, having all embarked on this mission for purely mercenary reasons (they want to score some valuable records to either sell or hoard) but still having generally good hearts underneath, while the cultists are committed to maintaining their "pure, natural" lifestyle at all costs, to the point of being willing to sacrifice people from the decadent outside world to do so, and the cast all did solid work in making these feel like real people who I grew to either care about or dread. I bought the protagonists not realizing until it was too late that they were in trouble, and even then, they figure things out pretty quickly and are a generally smart bunch all things considered. Max especially made for a good final girl, the one who the cult turns out to have bigger plans for than simply sacrificing her, managing to be strong and resourceful but at the same time not above acting out of pure selfishness while her actress Adara Starr turns in a fine performance. By the end, she felt about as realistically traumatized as I imagine anyone would be if they'd gone through the things she did. The music recorded for this film, meanwhile, also did a lot to pull me into it and sell me on the hippie villains, feeling like real-deal '70s psychedelia and lending authenticity to its hippie cult. Plot-wise, things started to go sideways in the third act once the film brought in the demon baby, but even there, the film's sense of style was enough to make me embrace the growing madhouse atmosphere I was immersed in. Even some minor continuity errors I picked up on were forgivable on account of having happened during some of the film's trippier moments, flowing into the dreamlike atmosphere and giving me a sense of "wait, did I see that? What's going on here?"

The Bottom Line

Clearly informed by a love of '70s horror and music yet still standing as its own beast, Pater Noster and the Mission of Light is admittedly kinda rough in spots but otherwise looks and feels like a far more expensive film than it actually is. I really hope it gets some attention going forward, because this was a damn good one.

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Review: Sinners (2025)

Sinners (2025)

Rated R for strong bloody violence, sexual content and language

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2025/04/review-sinners-2025.html>

Score: 5 out of 5

Ryan Coogler has never made a bad movie. His feature debut, the based-on-a-true-story drama Fruitvale Station, was a heartfelt examination of a tragedy that would later spill over into a much broader movement. He then made the jump to franchise blockbusters with Creed and Black Panther, and unlike many young, hotshot indie directors who find themselves chewed up and spit out by the Hollywood franchise machine, he managed to retain his creative voice throughout and turn in a pair of excellent films. Even Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, without a doubt his worst film, was one that was clouded by unavoidable real-life circumstances that had a direct impact on production, and he still managed to turn in a decent superhero movie in spite of them. He is easily one of the best filmmakers working today, so when I found out that his next movie was not only an original story that wasn't based on true events or a preexisting property, but also a vampire horror movie (not much of a spoiler, no matter how many reviews have treated it like one, given how the trailers made it obvious), my ears perked right up. It was a gamble, to be sure, an R-rated horror flick with a budget of at least $90 million, a runtime of over two hours, and a period setting in the Mississippi Delta in the 1930s, the kind of film that could've easily gotten Coogler thrown in director jail if it failed, especially given the reports of some of the back-end deals he negotiated for it. But I love horror, I love vampires, the premise sounded interesting, the other reviews I'd seen were uniformly excellent, and it boasted an all-star cast led by longtime Coogler collaborator Michael B. Jordan, so I went in optimistic...

...and was profoundly blown away by a film that will likely make my list of the best films of 2025. It's a Black, bluesy, period-piece version of From Dusk Till Dawn, a film that starts out as a crime drama about two twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, in 1932 returning home from Chicago to the Delta town of Clarksdale, Mississippi seeking to open a juke joint with money they stole from the Chicago mob, enlisting their musically gifted cousin Sammie Moore as their first headliner and a host of locals to staff it while also contending with the racism and poverty of the Jim Crow-era Deep South... only to transform into a gritty, bloody, and terrifying vampire movie about halfway in once a mysterious Irishman named Remmick shows up in town, raising an army of vampires and besieging the juke joint while its owners and remaining staff, musicians, and patrons fight to survive until sunrise. And through it all, it quite clearly remains the same movie that it was in the first half, not only demonstrating that Coogler is just as adept making a graphic horror movie as he is at making a slice-of-life period drama but also carrying forward the themes from the first half and using them to wrap its vampire menace in all manner of pointed metaphors. It is a hell of a horror movie that I can see quickly entering the canon of great vampire flicks and "social horror" movies alike, and even without having the distinctly Black perspective that Coogler infused throughout it, I had the time of my life watching it.

My praise starts with the cast, led by longtime Coogler collaborator Michael B. Jordan in the literal twin roles of Smoke and Stack. Right away, I got that these characters were two very different people, with Smoke a bit more rough-hewn and down-and-dirty dressed in a flat cap while Stack comes off as much slicker in his fancier suits and hats. Whereas Smoke will shoot a man in the street for trying to rob his truck, all while teaching a young girl how to be a lookout for him, Stack will be diplomatic and wear a smile on his face even when negotiating to buy property from a Klansman. Even with the same man playing them both, not once did it feel like they ever blended together, the two of them instead feeling like very different people with a lifetime of history together. Jordan is without a doubt one of the best actors of his generation, and this dual role confirms that, especially with the brothers' paths diverging once the shit hits the fan, Smoke turning into an action hero as the leader of the survivors while Stack, having been one of the first people in the juke joint to get bitten, spends the rest of the film as a vampire trying to tempt his brother into joining him.

Surrounding Jordan is an impressive supporting cast comprised of a mix of recognizable faces like Hailee Steinfeld as Stack's old flame Mary and Delroy Lindo as the old blues musician Delta Slim, TV and character actors like Li Jun Li as the shopkeeper Grace and Wunmi Mosaku as Smoke's estranged wife Annie, and some standout newcomers, most of all Miles Caton as "Preacher Boy" Sammie Moore. Sammie, above all else, is the "final boy," for lack of a better term, the opening scene set the following morning revealing him to be the sole survivor of the mayhem that happens over the course of the film. He's a good-hearted son of a preacher man who nonetheless wants to escape his conservative upbringing and make a name for himself as a musician, no matter how much his well-meaning but overly strict father tries to warn him against doing so. As much as this movie is a crime drama when it's about Smoke and Stack, it's a coming-of-age drama for young Sammie, both before and after the vampires arrive, as he becomes a man over the course of the night fighting to save himself and watching the people he cares about get picked off one by one. Caton, an R&B musician by trade, is at the center of many of the film's big standout music scenes, but more than that, he also turns in a performance that had me in disbelief that this was his first acting role, so self-assured he felt as Sammie growing from an ordinary Southern boy to a badass survivor who's likely scarred for life but has still proven himself. Mark my words, Caton is going places as an actor after this, much as Jordan had done after the first time he worked with Coogler.

And finally, there is Jack O'Connell as the villain Remmick, which is where this film's real themes and message come into play. A vampire who's over a thousand years old going by what he says late in the film about his upbringing in Ireland, Remmick feels like the vampire version of the Armitages from Get Out in how he's framed and what he represents in the broader context of the film. He's no bigot, and in fact looks down on the gutter-level racists around him, as evidenced in his introduction where his first victims are a Klansman and his wife who foolishly dismiss the warnings of the Choctaw vampire hunters who were after him. He is, after all, an Irishman, and he has a long memory of how White supremacists treated his own people. On the other hand, he tells the protagonists explicitly that Sammie's music was what drew him to the Delta, and that he wishes, above all else, to make Sammie a vampire in order to claim his musical gifts.

I have read a lot of interpretations online about the many metaphors that Coogler wove into this film's story, many of them from Black people who have a more intimate lived experience with the things he was talking about here than I do, so one should probably take my interpretation with a grain of salt. But for my money, Remmick feels like a metaphor for cultural appropriation, selling out, and the necessity of gatekeeping within subcultures. He loves the music, but he does so at the expense of the people who make it, as seen with how he and his fellow vampires try to insert themselves into the juke joint and claim the culture of the people there as their own. Mary, the first person among the protagonists who gets turned and the one who serves as the first crack letting them in, is a mixed-race woman who passes for White and struggles to reconcile her Black upbringing with the fact that living as a White woman has brought her a material comfort she'd never have received if she embraced her roots. (Side note: great way to make use of Hailee Steinfeld's real-life mixed-race heritage there!) And the ending, without spoiling anything, indicates that Coogler does not exactly have a very high opinion of some of the more commercial directions that hip-hop has evolved in over the years. (To say nothing of the complicated manner in which African-Americans' relationship with Christianity is presented in the film. Without going into too much detail, let's just say that this film's version of vampires do not cower before the cross or holy water.) Even beyond just Black audiences, I can see this movie gaining a following among anyone, from punks to geek fandoms, who's part of a subculture that's ever faced attempts from outsiders to take it over and commercialize it for their own gain at the expense of the people who built it. It's a movie about staying true to what you believe in, even if selling out may seem like the path of least resistance at first -- a message that Coogler, by all accounts, took to heart when it came to the deal he secured to get it made.

Coogler himself, of course, was the filmmaker who put this whole movie together, and even putting the deeper themes aside, it's clear why he has the reputation he does when it comes to big, blockbuster filmmaking. The first act of this film feels like the sort of prestige drama that you'd expect to see around Oscar season, a gritty, grounded portrait of rural Mississippi in the 1930s that works to set up what's to come. We don't get any vampires until roughly 45 minutes in when we're finally introduced to Remmick. It's a masterful example of the kind of first-act character development that so many horror movies try and fail at, the kind that demonstrates that Coogler could've just as easily made a straightforward, non-horror period piece and done it just as well. That's not what Coogler had in store, though. After we meet Remmick, the proceedings suddenly take a turn for the sinister as we know that there's a force out there that's slowly coming for the main characters. People outside the juke joint are picked off one by one, in scenes that show us just enough to let us know what's really happening but cut away before we see what the vampires are truly capable of, before the big attack begins and this movie finally shifts gears into outright action-horror in its second half, filled with bloody kills on the part of both humans and vampires as the remaining protagonists battle a brutal late-night siege with all the panache that Coogler brought to the Black Panther movies. And then, Coogler decides to take the opportunity to let audiences know that he could probably direct a straight-up musical if he wanted to, as well. The setting means that music, especially blues and folk, flows throughout the film, with many great blues and folk numbers peppered throughout, from the most fucked-up Irish jig in the world to Sammie's big performance that indicates that his musical gifts may be genuinely supernatural, seemingly summoning the spirits of both his ancestors and his descendants in a breathtaking scene that combines the blues, African tribal music, and more contemporary rock and hip-hop into one exhilarating package. Even more than anything involving the vampires, I imagine that "I Lied to You" will stand as this film's signature scene.

The Bottom Line

A beautiful, haunting, terrifying, and kick-ass movie with a lot on its mind, Sinners is a genre-bending masterpiece that will go down as one of the all-time great vampire movies and a landmark in the careers of everybody involved. Consider this my very firm recommendation.

[kevinsreviewcatalogue]

Review: Death of a Unicorn (2025)

Death of a Unicorn (2025)

Rated R for strong violent content, gore, language and some drug use

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2025/04/review-death-of-unicorn-2025.html>

Score: 3 out of 5

In the movie Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, there's a scene where the titular duo are chatting with their geeky buddy Holden about the movie being adapted from the comic book based on them. They're surprised to hear that Miramax is making the movie given their classy, highbrow reputation, to which Holden responds that the studio has never been the same ever since they produced the hit teen comedy She's All That.

I've been thinking about this scene a lot lately whenever the subject of A24 has come up. Having built their reputation in the late 2010s and early '20s as a modern-day Miramax (except without the sleaze of the Weinstein brothers) that specialized in arthouse dramas and "elevated" horror films that film geeks went gaga for, in the last couple of years they have enjoyed an explosive surge of success in the wake of Everything Everywhere All at Once, a genre-busting sci-fi action-comedy that paired a bonkers story with the kind of broad appeal that helped them win both critical acclaim and mainstream success. Seeing an upstart independent studio from outside the Hollywood system take off as a legitimate mini-major has been exciting for me as a movie buff, but lately, I've started to wonder if success has started to change them, as their core brand seems to have shifted from a decidedly indie one to something that resembles the Hollywood of the '90s and early '00s, before the rise and dominance of modern, interlocking mega-franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They still make offbeat films like Bodies Bodies Bodies and I Saw the TV Glow that feel true to their roots, but increasingly, these come paired with films like the topical action thriller Civil War, the teen horror-comedy Y2K, Ti West's X trilogy, the prestige wrestling biopic The Iron Claw, and the upcoming romantic comedy Materialists that feel like the kinds of movies you'd see coming out of Hollywood twenty or thirty years ago. Not that this is a bad thing, mind you. A lot of the young film geeks who propelled A24 to where it is now are themselves quite nostalgic for that era of Hollywood, a time when movies were big but they still remembered that they were movies that had to tell complete stories in three acts, not advertisements for the next installment in a franchise. A24's brand these days, increasingly, feels like "the studio that makes the movies that they just don't make like they used to." And in a time when the 2010s mega-franchise model of Hollywood has come in for increasing backlash, A24's pivot to a '90s throwback as they went from indie to a major player can feel refreshing in its own way.

Which brings me to Death of a Unicorn, a film that I feel encapsulates a lot of what A24 now seems to represent. On one hand, the premise, a horror-comedy monster movie in which the monster is a unicorn, is the kind of goofy thing you'd expect A24 to make. On the other hand, beneath the goofy premise this is a remarkably straightforward monster movie that's a world away from "elevated horror," one that's kind of thinly written and uneven but is propelled by a great cast, a good sense of humor, and plentiful violence and gore. It's the kind of horror "programmer" that the genre is built on, a crowd-pleasing bloodbath that doesn't take itself too seriously and seeks to have fun with its premise above all else, and on that front, it did the job and had me leaving the theater with a smile on my face.

Our protagonists Elliot and Ridley Kintner are a widower and his teenage daughter who are traveling to the sprawling estate of Elliot's boss Odell Leopold in rural Alberta for a corporate retreat. Along the way, while driving through the vast nature preserve surrounding the estate, Elliot accidentally runs over a strange animal that is immediately recognizable as a unicorn foal. Not knowing what else to do, they stuff the body in the back of their car and continue on their way, only for it, not quite dead, to alert everybody at the Leopold estate to its existence. What's more, Elliot and Ridley were both exposed to the unicorn's blood and saw their various minor ailments (Elliot's poor eyesight, Ridley's acne) go away as a result, leading Odell, the frail and elderly CEO of a pharmaceutical company, to order experiments on the unicorn in order to study its seemingly miraculous healing properties in the hopes of not only curing his own cancer but also getting rich selling the cure to others. Unfortunately, this unicorn being just a foal means that its parents are out there, as Ridley quickly realizes when she does some research on unicorn legends, and they are now coming for the Leopolds and everybody else at their estate in the hopes of getting their kid back.

The leads in this are what you'd expect. Jenna Ortega and Paul Rudd as Ridley and Elliot are mostly just playing themselves, Ortega the moody, snarky teenage girl who'd make great casting for a live-action Daria movie and Rudd the mix of the self-aware funny man and the dashing leading man. There wasn't really much done with the backstory involving the death of Ridley's mother, a plot point that only becomes important because an old photo of her at a museum in front of the Unicorn Tapestries winds up giving Ridley important clues as to what's really going on with the unicorns, which itself felt like an infodump that existed just to get the audience up to speed on the film's fantasy lore. There was a plot thread here about Elliot being an overworked Movie Dad whose relationship with his daughter has grown frayed thanks to his commitment to his job and who has to patch things up with her in order to get through this, but while it is part of the film's broader "eat the rich" message, it's not really something the film lingers much on. That said, while their characters are underwritten and fairly two-dimensional, Rudd and Ortega sell them. Again, they could both play these characters in their sleep, and they made for a pair of charming leads who I wanted to see succeed.

The real stars of the show, however, were the Leopolds, the film's main human villains. Richard E. Grant plays the family patriarch Odell Leopold as a pseudointellectual slimeball who, even when dying of cancer, can't be bothered to show any empathy for others and only cares about himself, and whose attitude and actions grow increasingly egomaniacal once his unicorn horn treatment heals him and makes him feel invincible. Téa Leoni as Belinda doesn't get the same amount of character development, but she still makes her feel like the kind of rich, obnoxious housewife who every service worker is intimately familiar with, the kind who's just as greedy and selfish as her husband and, while she does indeed love her family, has no love to spare for anybody else. The MVP in the cast was Will Poulter as the Leopolds' douchebag son Shepard, the kind of guy you know is gonna get a gruesome and well-deserved death the moment you see him show up in swim trunks. He decides to test the, uh, narcotic properties of the unicorn's body parts in the name of science (i.e. he snorts rails of ground-up unicorn horn), and as everything goes to hell around him, he grows ever more deranged and delusional. Together, the Leopolds conspire to get filthy fucking rich off the unicorn, reserving the miracle treatments derived from it for the super-rich once they realize that it only exists in finite quantities, all while treating their staff and employees (played by a who's who of talented, scene-stealing comic and character actors like Anthony Carrigan as their long-suffering butler, Sunita Mani and Stephen Park as scientists studying the unicorn, and Jessica Hynes as the head of their security) like dirt and hiding behind them as cannon fodder during the unicorns' rampage. They were a well-cast and well-written family that you just love to hate and cannot wait to see get fucked up by the unicorns.

And the movie delivers on that front. It's never particularly scary, with writer/director Alex Scharfman interested more in the comedy and the silliness than the horror, but that's not to say he doesn't bring the pain when the unicorns come out to play. The kills are all bloody messes, featuring impalements, dismemberments, a head getting stomped on, and one poor sucker getting disemboweled. The unicorns are kept in the dark for most of the film, less to build tension and more because the CGI-heavy effects work for them when we see them in full honestly wasn't the greatest, but it did do the job in establishing them as fearsome presences who should not be trifled with, a world apart from the majestic, fantastical creatures we normally think of when we hear the word "unicorn". Scharfman clearly loves retro monster movies like Alien and Jurassic Park, and while the influence can at times go a bit beyond the level of "homage" into just straight-up copying various beats from those films, I won't deny that it worked.

The Bottom Line

This was a movie that deserved a bit more love than it got. It's not a great movie, but it's one I can see being rediscovered down the line as a hidden gem of a little monster movie that's fairly shallow but still fun and funny, a film that set out to do one thing and did it well. Check it out when it hits VOD and streaming.

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Review: The Monkey (2025)

The Monkey (2025)

Rated R for strong bloody violent content, gore, language throughout and some sexual references

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2025/04/review-monkey-2025.html>

Score: 4 out of 5

The Monkey is the Stephen King version of a Final Destination movie. It's a movie that's all about creative and gory death scenes in which a lot of the appeal is less about being scared and more about figuring out how they're gonna be able to top the last one, a film that feels like it was made knowing that one of the biggest horror channels on YouTube, Dead Meat, has as its main attraction a show called The Kill Count where they catalogue deaths in horror movies and then go into detail on their production. But whereas the Final Destination films all take themselves fairly seriously and try to make the death scenes scary even if there is on some level a winking acknowledgement of how ridiculous it can get, The Monkey is infused with the particular kind of black comedy that King's writing frequently indulges in. It's not the lighthearted humor that I often associate with horror-comedies, but rather, a sort of blue-collar gallows humor, like you're chatting with your friend at work or a bar about how some guy you knew died in a spectacularly fucked-up way that you both can't help but laugh at. Underneath its story about jealousy and family tensions boiling over, this is fundamentally a movie about how we're all gonna die, because that's just the way life is. I mean, the tagline on the poster is literally "everybody dies, and that's fucked up." It's a dark and nihilistic movie, to be sure, but rather than force viewers to stare into an abyss of misery and despair, writer/director Osgood Perkins instead makes one big cosmic joke out of it, one that comes courtesy of a great cast and a great story that, in true King fashion, is all about how human beings can be some of the biggest monsters of all. It's an offbeat but very fun movie that feels made for horror fans, and if you count yourself as such, I recommend checking it out.

The film's titular villain is a mechanical organ grinder monkey with a curse attached to it. You see, every time it is wound up and plays its song, somebody nearby inevitably dies. The more brutal the death, the better. It also seemingly has the ability to teleport and put itself back together after sustaining damage, meaning it can't be easily destroyed or dumped at the bottom of a well, as the film's protagonists, the twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn, attempted to do when they were kids who watched a bunch of people close to them die after they played around with it and eventually realized what was going on. The monkey is a scary-looking motherfucker, and the damage it deals makes up the film's big horror set pieces, with a whole bunch of victims who seem like they're made of plasticine as they get dismembered, maimed, and mutilated by everything from a hibachi knife to a harpoon gun to a bowling ball to a swimming pool. While some of the deaths are meant to be tragic, many more are explicitly designed to make viewers laugh their asses off at the ridiculous circumstances involved, like a feature-length episode of 1000 Ways to Die where you just wanna see how ridiculous they get, and this film did indeed make me laugh my ass off at the gratuitous violence it proudly threw up in my face. It is a bloody joyride of a movie from start to finish, using gory deaths as punchlines the way the Farrelly Brothers or Judd Apatow would use sex jokes, and the deaths are very well done in everything from the effects work to the effect they have on me watching them.

And that effect was a grim one underneath the laughs and the yuks. Make no mistake, while this is a horror-comedy, the comedy is in the blackest sense of the term, establishing a bleak and nihilistic tone in which life is just one big joke before we all die. Again, read the tagline: "everybody dies, and that's fucked up." Moreover, it's less the gleeful nihilism of, say, an Eli Roth movie, in which terrible things happen to terrible people and we cheer for them getting what they deserve, and more the world-weary kind of somebody who's seen it all, knows just how sick and depraved people and life in general can be, and can't help but laugh at it because there's not much else you can do. The film ends with the surviving protagonists resigned to the fact that they are never going to fully rid themselves of the evil in their lives, and can only manage it going forward and try to keep anybody else from trying to use it for ill. (And then ending on one last gory gag, just because.) It is a dark movie with a lot going on beneath the surface, and it would not have worked as well as it did without Theo James playing both of its leads. James is an actor I only ever knew as a pretty boy thanks to the Divergent movies, but here, he's a mile away from a YA dystopia, playing a pair of twin brothers with opposite personalities who have both deeply resented each other since they were kids and clearly don't like having to come back together again to defeat the evil from their childhood. This movie is stacked with great actors in small but memorable parts, from Tatiana Maslany and Adam Scott as Hal and Bill's parents to Elijah Wood as the new husband of Hal's ex-wife to Christian Convery playing the same double act as the younger versions of Hal and Bill in the first act, but it's James who carries the film on his shoulders and makes Hal and Bill into a pair of protagonists who I found myself rooting for and buying as two very different guys.

Behind the camera, the film's writer/director Osgood Perkins continues the hot streak he started last year with Longlegs with a movie that couldn't be more different from it in terms of tone. Perkins has proven himself to be a rising star of a horror filmmaker, proving that he can tackle not only a grim psychological thriller with minimal gore but also a darkly comic bloodbath like this one. It's his work that makes this such a damn funny movie at times, showing us all the ridiculousness in both Hal and Bill's normal lives and that which the monkey forces them into, a tone that had to walk a fine line but which Perkins nails. A synopsis of the original Stephen King short story suggests that a lot of this movie's plot, especially the relationship between the brothers, was Perkins' idea, and the fact that he managed to make something that felt so true to what I know of King's writing style puts him up there with Mike Flanagan in the ranks of filmmakers who I would trust, sight unseen, with any adaptation of King's work. This guy has a long career in horror ahead of him, and I'm eagerly anticipating what he has in store next.

The Bottom Line

There isn't really much to say about this one, except that it's probably gonna be one of my favorite films of 2025. It's not perfect, but it manages to nail the sweet spot between being too cartoonish and flippant on one hand and too grim and dour on the other. It's a hell of a treat for horror fans that I can see myself going back to.

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Review: Heart Eyes (2025)

Heart Eyes (2025)

Rated R for strong violence and gore, language and some sexual content

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2025/02/review-heart-eyes-2025.html>

Score: 3 out of 5

What happens when a romantic comedy and a slasher movie have a meet cute under the pen of Michael Kennedy and Christopher Landon, two filmmakers who, in the last several years, have started a mini-trend of horror/comedy parodies of classic movies? You get Heart Eyes, a film that, instead of spoofing a specific movie (as Happy Death Day did with Groundhog Day, Totally Killer did with Back to the Future, or It's a Wonderful Knife with It's a Wonderful Life), is instead sending up a broader genre, the romantic comedy. Specifically, it's a sendup of the '90s romantic comedy formula that Nora Ephron popularized, with specific allusions to Sleepless in Seattle even though the two films otherwise don't have much in common beyond the setting. And, if I do say so myself, it's a film that honors its inspirations even if it's ultimately not much more than empty-calorie popcorn entertainment to be dumped into theaters on Super Bowl weekend in the hopes it finds its legs around the double Valentine's Day/President's Day weekend to follow (a strategy that, by all accounts, worked). It's at once a fun slasher with a very high body count and also a legitimately good romantic comedy anchored by two leads who feel like they would've been just as good in a straightforward "chick flick" as they are in a horror movie. There were plot contrivances that didn't entirely ring true, it's built on clichés on top of clichés lifted from both of the genres it's rooted in, and the big reveal of the killer's identity was telegraphed a bit too blatantly, but watching those clichés interact with each other was like... well, like watching the central relationship in a rom-com flourish. It's a fun diversion, and a movie I heartily recommend.

The film starts with an obnoxious young couple (implied to be influencers) and their photographer getting brutally murdered at a winery by the Heart Eyes Killer, a serial killer who strikes every Valentine's Day, targets couples, and is named for the glowing red, heart-shaped eyes in their mask. Having previously struck Boston and Philadelphia, "HEK", as the media has dubbed the killer, has now come to Seattle, just in time for Ally McCabe, who works in marketing for a jewelry company, to be forced to work on a new ad campaign with the hotshot designer Jay Simmons after a previous ad campaign she designed goes over like a lead balloon. Ally and Jay insist that there's nothing between them, to each other most of all, but HEK thinks otherwise and decides to go after them.

Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding are this film's twin anchors as its protagonists, the young co-workers whose sparks of chemistry make them a target. It's classic rom-com boilerplate, and they play it well, their characters both feeling like they could've stepped out of an actual romantic comedy, Holt as the frazzled heroine who doesn't realize she's longing for love and Gooding as the handsome hunk with a heart of gold who shows up to supply her with what she's missing. It's with their characters that the film stands apart from other slashers, the two of them never really feeling like conventional horror protagonists but rather like they got dragged into a horror movie against their will from a completely different genre -- and then reacting as a rom-com couple would to suddenly finding themselves in the middle of a slasher flick. It was a chemistry that needed to work for this movie to succeed, and the two of them hit it off wonderfully, anchoring the rom-com side of this film's genre fusion while director Josh Ruben handled the horror. Ruben is no stranger to horror-comedies, and he makes this one both funny and bloody, with a staggeringly high body count paired with a lot of supporting characters acting like cartoonish assholes so that we don't feel so bad when we watch them die. There are some graphic highlights for gorehounds, including a kill with a tire iron that the trailers sadly spoiled, the creative use of an industrial wine press, and a beheading that stands as one for the ages. HEK, too, is a solid presence, the admittedly goofy-looking mask not only working with the film's more comedic tone but also giving the killer an immediately recognizable and memorable image, while also being shown to have night vision capabilities to make them more threatening. The big reveal of the killer's identity wore its homages to Scream on its sleeve, complete with a moment preempting a common debate among fans of those films by showing us exactly how certain things went down, and not only was it amusing, but I think I liked the killer even more after the reveal than before thanks to some charismatic acting.

Alas, it's in the writing where the film is held back from greatness. While this is an admittedly well-made example of both a romantic comedy and a modern slasher, I'd be hard-pressed to find any moments in this movie that actually surprised me where either genre was concerned. I correctly called who the killer was almost immediately after one scene that played a particular game with one character's "death" that I'm all too familiar with from watching whodunit slashers, which was just the most glaring example of an overreliance on clichés in the writing department. At times, the film did some interesting things with these tropes, most notably when it takes the archetypal rom-com "race for your love" ending and spins it around into one character having to race to save the other from getting killed. That said, sometimes a cliché is just a cliché. This is a movie where you will see everything coming from a mile away, and it doesn't particularly try to excel beyond just playing the hits. There were also a few moments where I didn't fully buy the plot developments going on, particularly how it takes the "second-act breakup" and has it here be Ally suspecting that Jay is the killer after the actual killer tries to frame him, a contrivance that felt forced and made Ally look like an easily-misled dumbass. It felt like it was trying to copy what Scream did in casting suspicion on the boyfriend, but whereas Skeet Ulrich played Billy Loomis in that film as a pretty sketchy guy who could very well be Ghostface, absolutely nothing in this film pointed to Jay being the killer barring some flimsy evidence. I would've made Jay a slightly more troubled figure in order to sell this conflict, somebody who, instead of a completely perfect, idealized boyfriend, is still a good guy but one who has some darkness in his past that he needs to confront and overcome. Maybe he watched somebody close to him die violently, and this experience is bringing back all sorts of awful memories that are causing him to act strangely? Finally, I think some of the supporting cast were wasted, especially those from the rom-com side of the story. I was waiting for Ally's cute best friend to get targeted to raise the stakes, or for her asshole boss to get what was coming to her, but they vanished from the film for most of its runtime and had little bearing on the plot except as seasoning for Ally's character.

The Bottom Line

My Bloody Valentine is still the reigning champion of Valentine's Day slashers, but this easily makes the cut as something a bit more lighthearted that, while imperfect, still delivers where it counts. Go check it out. I expect it to have pretty long legs as a film for this holiday.

[kevinsreviewcatalogue]

Review: Companion (2025)

Companion (2025)

Rated R for strong violence, sexual content, and language throughout

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2025/02/review-companion-2025.html>

Score: 5 out of 5

Okay, when did January horror movies suddenly stop consistently being total dogshit? I mean, don't get me wrong, we can still get a good "fuck you, it's January" movie like last year's Night Swim, but increasingly, it seems like January's becoming a go-to month for wild, wacky horror films that didn't fit in elsewhere in the year but certainly weren't forgettable enough to debut on streaming. (And I think I might have just answered my own question: streaming scooped up all the crap that normally goes to theaters in the dump months.) Two years ago, we got M3GAN, one of the biggest horror movies of this decade so far and a film whose sequel is getting released this summer with all the hype that goes with that, and this year, while the latest Wolf Man movie was by all accounts a disappointment (I have yet to see it), it wasn't outright terrible either.

And now, we have Companion, the first 2025 film I've seen and one that will likely make my personal year-end best list. It's a film I've seen compared to The Stepford Wives given the broad strokes of its premise and its feminist themes, but in practice, it's a film that takes that famous premise and flips it on its head. Our protagonist Iris is a young woman who, unbeknownst to her, is actually a robot created to serve as the perfect lover for her boyfriend Josh. She learns this when the two of them are on vacation with some friends at a remote mansion owned by a sleazy Russian businessman named Sergey, where Josh uses her in a plot to kill Sergey and steal his money, hacking into her systems in order to increase her aggression and then putting her into a situation where he knew the lecherous Sergey would sexually assault her and she'd have to fight back. None of this is really a spoiler given how it all takes place in the first act or so and was given away by the trailers, but what the trailers didn't spoil was that, instead of the killer sexbot horror movie they sold this as, this is a darkly comedic romantic crime thriller in which Iris is the protagonist, fighting to survive as Josh's plan to kill and rob Sergey and use her as the fall guy quickly falls to pieces and he and his friends have to take her out. What it comes closest to is a sci-fi version of Revenge, one with less rape, more robots, and a deeper streak of black comedy but a very similar feminist subtext behind its mayhem (and just as many Russian douchebags) -- and a similarly high standard of quality, this being a film that marks writer/director Drew Hancock (a TV writer making his directorial debut) as a filmmaker whose work I am now very interested in going forward. (Apparently, he's lined up to do a remake of The Faculty, a sentence that makes me feel old typing it, but after seeing this, I fully trust him to pull it off.) This movie is stylish, funny, intense, well-written, boasting a star-making lead performance, and most importantly, just really damn fun, and a film I'd immediately recommend to anybody interested in any of those descriptors.

The film plays coy as to what it's actually about for much of the first act, giving us a few hints that Iris is a robot beneath her manic pixie dream girl skin but generally creating a feel that something is wrong, even if we're not sure what. It's a very humorous film, too, both before and after the big robot reveal, the trailers having leaned heavily into a "subverted romantic comedy" tone (complete with a "from the studio that brought you The Notebook") that reflects the film itself quite well. The writing and the cast had a lot of fun sending up hackneyed rom-com tropes, from the "meet cute" to to the classic line "it's not you, it's me," all while Josh and his friends feel less like horror movie protagonists than characters who've wandered in from a Coen Brothers caper about stupid crooks in over their head watching their hare-brained scheme to rob Sergey fall apart as Iris proves annoyingly unwilling to cooperate. Jack Quaid as Josh makes for a great doofus, the kind of sad-sack loser who would buy a sexbot in the first place and isn't the sharpest tool in the shed, constantly fucking up and revealing exactly what kind of asshole he is beneath his "nice guy" exterior. The supporting cast, too, is filled with plenty of great performances, most notably Lukas Gage as Patrick, the boyfriend of Josh's friend Eli who gets a lot to do over the course of the film, starting as a seemingly shallow hunk but soon revealing that he's a lot smarter than he presents himself as before turning into something else entirely.

The real MVP here, though, is the film's leading lady Sophie Thatcher. I've been a fan of Thatcher ever since I started watching Yellowjackets, and here, she plays a character a world apart from the sexy, punkish Natalie Scatorccio. If Josh and his friends feel like they stepped out of a crime caper, then Iris feels like she was built to be the heroine of a romantic comedy (literally so, given... y'know), dropped into a tense survival thriller but still not feeling like a traditional horror heroine no matter how much dirt, blood, and grime she gets covered in. Thatcher made that cute little robot feel human, spending as much of the film grappling with the fact that she's not actually human as she does staying one step ahead and trying to outsmart Josh, on a wild journey through the woods that Drew Hancock shoots the hell out of. There are some vicious moments in this film, but much of it is a tense cat-and-mouse game between Josh and his friends on one hand and Iris on the other, with twists and turns unfurling for everybody involved as each side seeks the upper hand. It did a great job of putting viewers right into Iris' shoes and making them feel as alone as she is, outnumbered with nobody to turn to and forced to rely on her wits to get the edge over her assailants. The subtext beneath that plot isn't beat-you-over-the-head obvious, but it isn't subtle, either, the film taking a very dim view of domestic abusers, misogynists, modern "manosphere" types, and the kind of guys who would see sexbots as good replacements for girlfriends while suggesting at the end that Iris' payback is just the start of something bigger. There's a reason I brought up Revenge earlier, and that's because I can imagine there being a similarly cathartic feeling here for anybody who's ever had a lout of a lover.

The Bottom Line

The marketing may have given away one of this movie's big twists, but there's plenty more that it didn't, so I'm just gonna stop here and tell you to go see what's probably gonna wind up as one of my favorite films of this year.

[kevinsreviewcatalogue]

Review: It's a Wonderful Knife (2023)

It's a Wonderful Knife (2023)

Rated R for bloody violence, drug use and language

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/12/review-its-wonderful-knife-2023.html>

Score: 3 out of 5

It's a Wonderful Knife is the latest in the recent string of horror-comedies whose main gimmick is a retelling of the plot of a classic film in the form of a slasher movie. Happy Death Day was Groundhog Day as a slasher, Totally Killer and Time Cut were both Back to the Future as slashers, Freaky was Freaky Friday as a slasher, and this movie, written by the same guy who did Freaky and Time Cut, goes back a bit further and does the 1946 Frank Capra Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life as a slasher. Beyond just the obvious inspiration, it's also the slasher version of a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie, between its bucolic mountain town setting, a plot about a villainous land developer who wants to take over the town (only with, y'know, more stabbing), and the general aesthetics and tone of the film, which director Tyler MacIntyre manages to meld with slasher thrills surprisingly well. It's a shallow and often clumsy film that didn't really fully tap into many of the ideas it leaned into, perhaps taking a bit too much influence from Hallmark there, but as a lightweight, empty-calorie holiday horror-comedy, I was nothing if not amused for its brisk 87-minute runtime. If you're a horror fan who wants to have some fun around Christmas, give this one a spin.

Our protagonist Winnie Carruthers is a teenage girl who, last Christmas Eve, became the final girl in a holiday slaying when she stopped a masked murderer who turned out to be Henry Waters, the local businessman who employed her father David. Unfortunately, Henry still managed to kill three people before Winnie stopped him, including her best friend Cara. One year later, while David now runs Henry's company and the family seems to be doing better than ever, Winnie has fallen into a funk. She's still grieving Cara's death, her brother Jimmy is clearly the favorite in the family, and she's just found out that her boyfriend Robbie has been cheating on her with her friend Darla. Winnie finds herself wishing she'd never been born... and under the light of a strange aurora in the sky, her wish is granted. Now, she finds herself in a world where Henry's killing spree was never stopped, the killings having turned out to be part of a plot on his part to buy up various local businesses in order to build a massive development bearing his name and take over the town. Henry is now the mayor, his douchebag brother Buck is now the sheriff covering up the deaths (the last sheriff, you see, needed to go for Henry to carry out his plot), Jimmy and many other people Winnie cares about are dead on top of the initial three victims, and nobody knows who she is, not least of all her family, with David stuck working for the man who he knows killed his son in order to control him, her mother Judy a disheveled drunk carrying on an affair, and her aunt Gale grieving the death of her wife Karen. Together with a lonely outcast girl named Bernie who winds up serving as the Clarence to her George Bailey (and perhaps something more), Winnie must now stop the killer all over again if she wants a chance to go back to a home timeline where she didn't realize how good she had it until it was almost too late.

Beneath all the killing and bloodshed, this is fundamentally a movie that runs on pure, unadulterated Hallmark schmaltz. Angel Falls, at least the Bedford Falls version in the early scenes before Winnie's wish comes true and turns it into Pottersville, is presented in as idealized a manner as one would expect from Hallmark. There is romance in the air, both straight and queer, but it is as chaste as it comes. The protagonist Winnie looks and acts the part of a Hallmark heroine, while the villain Henry is a land developer overseeing a villainous gentrification scheme while hiding behind an aw-shucks demeanor. Make no mistake, this is still a parody of a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie, a film whose main hook is imagining what one of those would look like if you had a killer in an angel costume running around giving Lacey Chabert flashbacks to the Black Christmas remake she was in. But it's a parody made by people who, at the very least, have a clear affection for those films and understand why people enjoy them. Personally, they've never been my speed, and that extends to some of this film's faults in the storytelling department, which had a poorly-explained supernatural twist in the third act (though I think I figured out what happened there) and seemed to end with a neater, happier ending than it probably should've had. But when it came to pure vibes, director Tyler MacIntyre made a movie that felt really damn Christmasy, a candy-cane sweetness that came through even when it got violent. It was a tone that, beyond the holiday setting, felt like a slightly more comedic version of the Scream movies, a semi-serious pastiche that did have some funny jokes in there but otherwise took itself fairly seriously, and it was a tone that more or less worked for me. It's not particularly scary, but something tells me it really wasn't trying to be.

Rounding it out was a great cast, led by Jane Widdop as a final girl going through life after the trauma of a horror movie killing spree who suddenly has to do it all over again on hard mode. It's increasingly well-trod ground for modern slashers, but Widdop, who I've become a fan of thanks to Yellowjackets, sells it well, whether they're playing the cheerful girl in the prologue, the morose and bitter girl afterwards, or the scared survivor once Winnie's wish comes true. The interactions between Winnie and Bernie in particular turn out to be central to the film's sweeter side, and I bought the burgeoning friendship and eventual romance between the two of them thanks to Widdop and Jess McLeod's performances. Justin Long's villain Henry, meanwhile, also makes for a fun and deliciously hateable slimeball, from his "I'm the best, fuck the rest" ads to his vocal delivery going for a deliberately obnoxious affect that adds a level of smarminess and phony compassion to him. Every time that little bastard showed up on screen in the altered timeline, I wanted to wring his little neck, and I cheered when the final showdown came. The supporting cast, too, was great fun to watch, from Joel McHale as Winnie's traumatized father who knows what a terrible situation Henry has him in but feels powerless to stop him to Katharine Isabelle as Gale demonstrating that she's aged into "cool, boozy aunt" roles remarkably well. The body count was high, but the kills were generally fairly light, and some of them were better than others, with highlights including a slit throat and a giant candy cane through someone's head but lowlights include a mostly offscreen axe slaying and a kill in a movie theater that was lit up only with brief camera flashes where I could barely make out what was happening.

The Bottom Line

It's a Hallmark slasher movie, for better or worse. It has some of the flaws of its inspirations, and it's definitely not made for hardcore horror fans, but for my money, it's a nice movie to throw on around the fire during December, especially if you've already watched Krampus or Gremlins for the hundredth time and wanna pair it up with something similarly lighthearted.

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Review: Sands of Iwo Jima (1949)

Sands of Iwo Jima (1949)

Approved by the Production Code Administration of the Motion Picture Producers & Distributors of America

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/12/review-sands-of-iwo-jima-1949.html>

Score: 4 out of 5

In the canon of Movies That You Watch With Your Dad, Sands of Iwo Jima is one of the big ones, referenced as such by everything from King of the Hill to NCIS. That's how I wound up watching it, the first John Wayne movie I've reviewed (though not the first one I've seen; I watched Rio Bravo a long time ago). Last weekend, I went over to my father and his girlfriend's house for lunch, hooked up his old combination VCR/DVD player to their television so they could watch his old movies (it needed an RCA-to-HDMI adapter), used his VHS tape of this film (the colorized version from the '80s, specifically) to see if it worked, and ultimately sat down and watched it with them. It's enjoyed this reputation for a very long time, too, as many of the fathers who shared this movie with their sons first saw it themselves with their own fathers, who were probably around when it first premiered 75 years ago and may have seen it in theaters with their own fathers. And given the themes of this movie, revolving as they do around an authority figure whose stern discipline of the men under his command is ultimately vindicated, I can definitely see the appeal this movie has for dads, even those who aren't veterans, though its unvarnished love for the United States military (the Marine Corps especially) has also undoubtedly boosted its reputation there. What's more, while it's very much a movie of its time, it's also a very well-made war movie with two standout battle sequences and a lot of interesting character moments in between that help set up the drama in those battles, anchored by a great performance by the legendary Wayne in the kind of role that defined his image and got him his first Oscar nomination. It's still a classic, and one I can see enduring for another 75 years among both fathers and the US military.

John Wayne is Marine Sergeant John Stryker, a man with a name out of an action movie, video game, or comic book from the '80s or '90s and a backstory to match (or at least about as much as one could get away with under the Hays Code). He's a harsh commander of the squad he leads, and also a man with personal demons, an alcoholic whose wife left him and took their son and who seems to be taking out some of his issues on his men. Needless to say, his fellow Marines hate him and see him as a tyrant of a squad leader, feelings that Stryker reciprocates as he comes to see the Marines he's in charge of as a green, undisciplined rabble fresh out of boot camp who are dangerously unprepared for battle. It's not much of a surprise to say that, when these Marines face their first actual combat in the Battle of Tarawa, they very quickly realize that Stryker wasn't just a cruel, heartless bastard, but was actually trying to prepare them for the harsh reality of warfare. At Tarawa, the battle-hardened Stryker comes off as the only man in the squad who was actually ready for combat, while the men under his command make constant errors in judgment that get some of them killed or badly wounded, forcing them to shape up after the battle while on leave in Honolulu before they're shipped back into the meat grinder of the Pacific War, specifically to the famed battle in the title.

For all his public image and reputation as the paragon of mid-century rugged, stoic, conservative masculinity, from both fans of his who celebrate that image and people who are deeply critical of what it stood for then and now (and a reputation that he himself cultivated in his lifetime), Wayne's actual performances had depths beyond that, and this film, despite playing a key role in building that image, was no exception. He may not have had the most range, but he knew where his limits and strengths were as an actor, which allowed him to make the most of his image and occasionally play around with it. Here, Stryker comes across as a man who, the more we learn about him, seems like he threw himself into soldiering as a way out of a broken personal life, coming to see the men he commands on the battlefield as his surrogate family after his wife left him. He is ultimately the good guy trying to do right by his fellow Marines, as evidenced at Tarawa when they have to learn the lessons he tried to teach them the hard way, but he is a flawed leader who, before Tarawa, did little to earn the respect of those men, his alcoholism in particular having gotten him demoted recently and causing him to wind up blackout drunk while on leave in New Zealand, an affair that causes his men to see him as a hypocrite. In this, the comparisons between Stryker as a "father to his men" and a literal dad, especially the idealized patriarchs of the postwar era, become unavoidable. Stryker may know best, but he has to soften up and come to terms with some of his own vulnerabilities if he wants to earn the trust of his men, and not risk another situation like the one at Tarawa where he saw that everything he tried to teach them went in one ear and out the other. He's a hardass with a heart of gold, a more idealized version of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket whose "tough love" approach does in fact make his men into better Marines in the end but could probably stand to tone it down a bit, if for no other reason than to more effectively teach his men.

As an action film, it's clearly a movie of its time. A ton of unironic postwar 'Merica drips from nearly every frame, which can feel hokey watching it today but is still admittedly enjoyable in its own way, with me being of the opinion that the best propaganda is the kind that is proud and unashamed of the things it is standing for. A message delivered with conviction, as this film does, is a lot more persuasive than that same message delivered halfheartedly. Something that feels a bit more dated nowadays, though, comes in the effects department with the use of archival World War II footage for the battle scenes, a decision that on one hand guaranteed realism but on the other also let you know that Republic Pictures, even on one of its bigger-budget productions, had its roots in a collection of smaller indie studios that are often referred to by the self-explanatory name of "Poverty Row". That said, while the real-life war footage wasn't quite seamlessly woven into the film, it did fit remarkably well, and the action they did shoot for this was very well-done. Tarawa felt like a mess of a battle where the fresh recruits were constantly screwing up and had to be bailed out by an increasingly frustrated Stryker, Iwo Jima by contrast made them feel like a well-oiled machine who had learned how to function as both a unit and as individual Marines, and both scenes did a great job of establishing the lay of the land for the battles and the Japanese soldiers as a credible threat to the Marines.

The supporting cast were all outshined by Wayne, obviously, but they too made for a likable or at least interesting bunch, a group of men who all bring their own baggage to the table and have to overcome it if they want to become better Marines, my favorites probably being John Agar as the arrogant rich kid Pete Conway and Forrest Tucker as the tough guy Al Thomas who has old beef with Stryker. The biggest weakness was probably the romantic subplot with Conway meeting and marrying a woman named Allison in New Zealand. It felt like an afterthought, there simply to put a romantic image on the poster and broaden the film's audience, between the fact that Adele Mara didn't even bother with the accent and the manner in which she almost completely vanishes from the film after that scene. Given Stryker's own history with his wife, some more development there could've helped to flesh out both Conway and Stryker as characters, giving Conway something to fight for and reason to shape up while Stryker hopes that Conway doesn't make the same mistakes in his relationship that he did with his own. Instead, not only do we barely see Allison again, the subject of Conway now being a married man is only rarely broached after the Marines ship out from New Zealand.

The Bottom Line

While it's undoubtedly a movie of its time, Sands of Iwo Jima is otherwise a rock-solid war movie anchored by a Hollywood legend in his prime delivering one of his most iconic performances. It's worth checking out whether you're into history, the military, or action movies, if for nothing else than to see an exemplar of the kind of movie that generations of later American war films would find themselves responding to.

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I think that last one is Elon Musk's remote

1998 nickelodeon trade ad

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Review: Y2K (2024)

Y2K (2024)

Rated R for bloody violence, strong sexual content/nudity, pervasive language, and teen drug/alcohol use

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/12/review-y2k-2024.html>

Score: 3 out of 5

The '90s have become for my generation what the '50s were for my parents' generation. It's funny, given that I still remember movies like Pleasantville and Blast from the Past that were actually made in the '90s and presented the '50s as the utter antithesis to such, an era of wholesome family values and patriotism versus the decadent and depraved times in which a lot of people believed we were living back then. (Or, alternatively, stories like Fallout and -- again -- Pleasantville that explored the flip side of this, depicting the '50s as an era of authoritarianism and social repression that probably shouldn't be romanticized.) And yet, while the finer contours of '90s nostalgia are obviously different from those of the '50s, framing it not as a time when people were more morally upstanding but one where they were cooler and more chill, the broad strokes are similar: it was a more innocent time when everybody more or less shared the same values and most of society's "real" problems were assumed to have been solved.

And just like the '50s, everybody has a theory as to where it all went wrong and the dream of the '90s fell apart. People on all corners of the political spectrum have used this question for partisan ax-grinding, to say nothing of the impact of 9/11, but one rather apolitical theory that I'm partial to is that the internet was what killed it. The subject of breathless hype at the time (and well into the next two decades) from hacker and techie culture and the nascent Silicon Valley tech industry about how it was gonna revolutionize the world and bring us into a new golden age, its actual consequences for society have been far more of a mixed bag. On one hand, it empowered previously marginalized voices and let them speak truth to power, allowed academics and niche communities to network and share their ideas, and allowed independent artists and journalists to cut out the middleman of an often extortionary mainstream media and entertainment industry. On the other hand, however, it also elevated unhinged conspiracy theorists, hostile foreign powers, and rank bigots, allowing them too to network and spew retrograde, anti-intellectual garbage, all while the shared culture that we had dissolved into a mass of subcultures and the tech industry slowly but surely became a corporate behemoth even worse than the "legacy media" it displaced.

It's this theory that the movie Y2K, in its better moments, is sympathetic to and tilts towards. It's a movie about the worst predictions about the Y2K bug coming to pass and then some, in the form of a sentient AI computer virus that hijacks everything with a computer chip in it in order to exterminate humanity. It's a very dumb and silly movie whose presentation of computer technology is laughably inaccurate to the point of explicit parody, and whose sense of humor is overreliant on '90s pop culture references and plot points lifted from other, better teen movies. Fortunately, once the plot gets rolling it finally finds its footing, still a pretty dumb and silly movie but one that manages to tread the line between a farcical horror/comedy spoof of that period in time and an exploration of our relationship with computer technology. It felt like a movie made for people like me who remember not only the hype surrounding the Y2K bug but also the broader pop culture and aesthetics of the time period, and while I feel that there were a lot of ways in which it could've cut much deeper than it ultimately did, it still hit the spot as pure, empty-calorie cheez whiz, a fun throwback that does for the late '90s what Stranger Things does for the '80s.

The worst parts of the movie are unfortunately front-loaded, with a teen comedy plot that's mostly a second-rate retread of Superbad (whose star Jonah Hill produced this) but with characters who aren't half as interesting. On December 31, 1999 in the anonymous American suburb of Crawford, high school loser buddies Eli and Danny decide to crash a New Year's Eve party that their rich jock classmate Chris is throwing at his place, largely so that Eli can ask out Laura, a friend of his who he has a crush on. The big problem is fundamentally one of asymmetry between its male and female leads. Rachel Zegler is charming and charismatic as Laura, but unfortunately, I could not say the same about Jaeden Martell as Eli. This film's protagonist may as well have been a blank slate, a generic "cool loser" of a sort we've seen in countless teen comedies before who's motivated purely by a desire to get laid, and neither the writing nor Martell's performance do anything to elevate him. While Laura is the one who actually figures everything out and drives the plot forward in the second half of the film, and she was clearly having fun doing its spoof of Hackers towards the end, it still asked me to treat Eli and his quest for Laura's love as a story on equal footing with such even though I couldn't be bothered to care about it. If it were up to me, I would've switched around Laura and Eli when it came to their importance to the film. Spend more of the first act focusing on Laura not just as the cute "girl next door", but also as the computer whiz who designed her school's web page. Have her get an inkling early on that the Y2K bug might not be as much of a nothingburger as everybody thinks, so as to build up some tension in the first act. Keep Danny, because he was pretty entertaining as the comic relief who embarrasses our protagonist in front of the cool kids, but have him be Laura's friend in addition to Eli's (maybe he's part of the computer club with her?) so that his arc affects her as much as it does him, the two of them even perhaps bonding over it. Don't make Eli the hero, make him the love interest, a well-meaning guy who Laura initially finds cringy but eventually warms up to as he proves himself. As it stood, though, half this movie's story felt like the most basic, boilerplate teen sex comedy I could imagine, and after a certain point I was just waiting for the real action to start.

It's a good thing, then, that once this movie gets to that point it picks up admirably. As the title suggests, the Y2K bug arrives at the stroke of midnight, and it does far more than just knock out the power. No, it's a sapient, malicious AI computer virus that takes over everything with a computer chip in it, from actual computers to RC cars to microwaves to Tamagotchis, and uses it to try and kill humans like in Maximum Overdrive, with various hijacked objects eventually coming together into humanoid, mechanical monsters. The party turns into a very fun bloodbath full of creative kills, and both the violence and the killer robots are done with gnarly practical effects. It's never a particularly scary movie, but it is a very fun joyride, with the supporting cast getting far more room to shine. Fred Durst shows up as himself, the movie making all the requisite jokes about Limp Bizkit but also clearly having an unapologetic affection for the much-maligned nu metal band, especially when Lachlan Watson's "rebel" chick Ash meets him. The subplot with the off-the-grid stoners who call themselves the Kollective was an amusing diversion that fed nicely into the themes of the story, which the film doesn't beat you over the head with but which are readily apparent if you're paying attention. You see, the Y2K bug doesn't want to wipe out humanity, but wants to enslave them, implanting chips into everybody's heads in order to use their brains for processing power while trapping their consciousnesses in a digital realm, like a version of The Matrix that went much heavier on the retro '90s internet aesthetics. After all, we've already outsourced plenty of our decision-making to technology and have grown more and more dependent on it, so it may as well make our enslavement to the internet official. The Y2K bug itself, presented on various screens as a polygonal digital being straight out of The Lawnmower Man, is one of my favorite characters in the movie, a foul-mouthed, malicious creature that holds nothing but naked contempt for the stupid, lazy meatbags that make up most of the human race, like if Bender from Futurama decided to turn evil one day. The science fiction side of this film's comedy was far better than the teen sex romp it started out as, making me wish that the film had leaned that much further into it, its teen movie homages being less a throwback to American Pie and more a spoof of WarGames and Hackers.

The Bottom Line

Y2K was a movie that didn't know what its best qualities were, especially early on, but once it got going it became a fun nostalgia trip of a sci-fi horror/comedy, even if I will admit that my own personal affection for the era of my childhood probably caused me to like this more than I should've. Consider this a qualified recommendation for children of the late '90s and early '00s.

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Review: Wicked: Part I (2024)

Wicked: Part I (2024)

Rated PG-13 for some scary action, thematic material and brief suggestive material

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/12/review-wicked-part-i-2024.html>

Score: 4 out of 5

Many years ago, back when I was in middle school, I went on a class trip to Broadway to see Wicked, a musical adaptation of Gregory Maguire's novel of the same name that was itself a revisionist retelling of The Wizard of Oz from the point of view of its villain, the Wicked Witch of the West, featuring the original cast led by Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth. My memories are hazy, but I do distinctly recall enjoying it, with the highlight of my evening being the show-stopping performance of what has since become its signature song, "Defying Gravity", a song that Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, the writers of Frozen's music, leaned heavily on when they gave Menzel a very similar musical number in the form of the equally iconic "Let It Go". My mom, who was a chaperone, wound up getting the soundtrack and playing that CD in her car for years. I was never much of a theater kid, so I didn't really fall into the fandom of the show or the original book, but looking back, I'm not surprised that Wicked became the runaway smash hit that it did, a show that's still playing on Broadway to this day (the fourth-longest-running Broadway show in history) and has inspired many other revisionist takes on classic fairy tales. The only surprise, really, is that it took more than twenty years for a film adaptation of the musical to come out.

But it was worth the wait. This movie had its problems, to be sure, feeling padded out to the point that some of the themes it explored felt like they could get lost in the noise. When it comes to the important stuff, however, this movie shines. Its two protagonists were both perfectly cast, the music was amazing, it managed to pair a whimsical, often humorous tone with some genuine darkness lurking behind the curtain, and director Jon M. Chu made it beautiful to watch. It's a film that does justice to its source material and which I can see bringing a whole new generation into Wicked's fandom, and one where I'm excited to see the inevitable second half of it next year.

The main hook here is that this is an origin story for the Wicked Witch of the West, who was previously a woman named Elphaba Thropp. Born from an affair between her mother and a traveling salesman, she came out of the womb with green skin that caused her parents and her fellow children to treat her like dirt, bonding only with her paraplegic sister Nessarose. What's more, her skin isn't the only thing strange about her, as she seems to have some sort of innate magical powers. Now, Nessa is heading off to Shiz University, and Elphaba has been sent to help her move in. However, when Elphaba accidentally displays her powers in a fit of emotion, Shiz's dean of sorcery studies Madame Morrible takes notice and offers to make her a student and teach her proper magic. Elphaba eagerly accepts, hoping that this could be a stepping stone to meeting the mysterious Wizard in the Emerald City, even if it means having the rich airhead Galinda Upland as her roommate. Here, Elphaba and Galinda navigate college life, learn to become friends after their terrible first impressions, and get caught up in a conspiracy to suppress the rights of the sapient animals in the Land of Oz.

First things first, there is Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba. Nailing the look of the Wicked Witch of the West was the easy part, as she gets most of the biggest musical numbers in the film and otherwise has to more or less carry the whole thing. Fortunately, this is a task that Erivo, with her background on Broadway and the West End, pulls off remarkably. She may be just the latest in a long line of actresses who've played Elphaba, but as a fan of good acting and good show tunes, I can certainly say that not only did she honor the part and do it justice in such a manner that I can see her take on the character becoming as iconic as Menzel's, but she also brought a particular subtext that you don't normally see with Elphaba by simple virtue of who she is. A key part of Elphaba's alienation from those around her comes from the color of her skin, and while Erivo spends the film covered in heavy green makeup, it's not that difficult to make out the fact that she is a Black woman underneath it. (And a quick trip to her Wikipedia page will also reveal that she's queer and in a relationship with another woman.) With this, the already-existing subtext of Elphaba being a metaphor for minorities reacting to a lifetime of discrimination and abuse becomes something pretty close to outright text, especially when you get into the major story thread about the sapient animals facing discrimination veering into a campaign of outright erasure (a fairly obvious metaphor for Jewish people, LGBTQ+ people, or any other real-life group subjected to such), much to Elphaba's horror as somebody who can sympathize with their plight. When "Defying Gravity" kicked in, it felt like a pissed-off "screw all of you and your rules" from a woman who has Had It with both respectability politics and what others have done to her, and watching this in a theater at this moment in time in particular, when rank misogyny and racism have come crawling back out into the open, it felt downright righteous. Erivo owned the screen and knocked it out of the park, the kind of role I can see making her a star.

An even bigger surprise, however, was Ariana Grande (credited here by her full name, Ariana Grande-Butera) as Galinda. I've always known Grande as a pop star first and foremost, and as an actress only in Nickelodeon sitcoms during her teenage years that didn't exactly show off her range, not even knowing until now that she too had a background on Broadway as a young girl. What's more, her public image is the pinnacle of the modern "influencer celeb", known for having an Instagram follower count higher than the population of the United States. In short, a talented actress, singer, and dancer who still had the capacity to surprise me with a great performance. Which is exactly what she delivered, leaning heavily into her public image to play Galinda as more or less an exaggerated parody of her real-life self with all the worst elements played up for humor. She's a rich, self-absorbed brat who looks down her nose at Elphaba when they first meet and have to share a room, her attempts at activism are self-serving, airheaded, and disingenuous, and the fact that we know she grows up into Glinda the Good Witch seems almost comical at first. Grande is clearly playing Galinda as a more modern version of the archetypal "dumb blonde" than Chenoweth did, but like Erivo, she does the role justice while clearly enjoying herself in it.

As for the look of the film, much hay has been made over how director Jon M. Chu tried to make the visuals more grounded in realism as opposed to the vibrant colors that the original 1939 movie is famous for, but if that's the case, then maybe I'm just desensitized by the flat color palettes of modern movies, because I thought this looked incredible. Chu has a long track record directing both movie musicals and dance films, and he put that talent to great use here, not only showing off the musical talents of Erivo, Grande, and a supporting cast stacked with both character actors and Broadway veterans but also giving the film's fantasy-with-a-touch-of-steampunk world the room it needs to shine. This was always a fun film to actually watch, even when the plot was getting into some heavy territory, a modern movie musical that wasn't ashamed to fully embrace being a musical while taking full advantage of everything that you can do on screen that you can't on stage. Big set pieces like Elphaba taking flight, or things like the talking animals, get exactly the glow-up you'd expect in a Hollywood blockbuster adapted from a stage play where all the effects have to be practical and capable of fitting onto a stage and being reset in a matter of hours for the next showing. This movie felt big, showy, and and epic in all the right ways.

Unfortunately, size was a double-edged sword here, and the source of this movie's biggest problems. The stage play runs for roughly two hours and 45 minutes, including a 15-minute intermission, and yet despite this movie explicitly covering only the first half of the musical, it has a runtime almost as long. Only some of the bloat can be attributed to the filmmakers taking the opportunity to stage more elaborate scenes, as there are a lot of long stretches of nothing at all taking place to the point where, when the plot suddenly kicked back in, it was at times a jarring shock. While the film was gorgeous to watch and listen to, the pacing was jerky and stop-and-go and often left me wondering when it would get moving again. What's more, a lot of these added scenes did little to get me invested in any of the characters they were focused on. I barely cared about Elphaba's love interest Fiyero, and Nessarose (whose importance to the plot was largely in the second half) had barely anything to do here beyond serve as a prop. In all honesty, this should've been one movie rather than two, even if it would've meant dragging out the runtime to over three hours. There were a lot of moments that I believe could've been cut to not only bring the runtime down but also, more importantly, tighten up the pacing without sacrificing the music or the wonder here, but modern Hollywood, unfortunately, is finding itself increasingly warped by the binge-watching economics of streaming, which favors movies that get downright decadent with their runtimes so that people will stay tuned in for as long as possible.

The Bottom Line

Even with its bloat, this is still a damn good movie musical carried by two standout performances and a ton of style. Whether you're a fan or a newbie, this is, for better or worse, a faithful translation of what made the Broadway show so memorable to the silver screen, and one I'd happily recommend.

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Goncharov (1973) dir. Martin Scorsese

“The greatest mafia movie (n)ever made.”

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Review Double Feature: Smile (2022) and Smile 2 (2024)

Another day, another double feature, this time of a movie that came out a couple of years ago but which I'm just now getting around to seeing and its newly-released sequel. How were they? Read on...

Smile (2022)

Rated R for strong violent content and grisly images, and language

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/10/review-double-feature-smile-2022-and.html>

Score: 3 out of 5

Smile is a good movie, but one that I feel like I should've liked a lot more given how much it had been hyped up. It felt bloated in a lot of ways, and while it tried to tell a story about a woman who's never gotten over the childhood trauma caused by her terrible mother, it never gave that story the attention it needed, to the point that its focus in the third act felt almost like it came out of nowhere. That said, it's also a clear-cut example of how rock-solid technical craftsmanship can salvage a movie from an otherwise bad script. It's dripping in atmosphere and mood, it's filled with unsettling imagery and scary moments, it manages to create a feeling that one is slowly going insane, and the cast is excellent, particularly Sosie Bacon as its haunted heroine. It's a movie that other people seem to have liked a lot more than I did, but even with its problems, it was still enjoyable, a film that, even if it never quite manages to capture the depth of the "elevated horror" films it's clearly imitating, still manages to be a scary ride that nails their aesthetics, tone, and frights.

The film starts with Rose Cotter, a therapist at a psychiatric hospital, watching a patient named Laura Weaver freak out in front of her, talking about being stalked by a malevolent entity, before slitting her own throat. The scariest part: after the freakout, Laura suddenly developed a gigantic smile on her face that she held until the moment she died. What's more, Laura, a promising graduate student, had no history of mental health problems until about a week ago when she watched her professor kill himself right in front of her. And now, Rose is suddenly seeing the same entity that Laura described. Doing some digging with her detective ex-boyfriend Joel, Rose finds that Laura was just the latest in a chain of mysterious suicides that, as she soon realizes, are the result of a curse, one that is now coming for her.

Notice how nowhere in that plot description did I mention Rose's mother. The opening scene is a flashback to Rose as a young girl watching her mother, who had been an abusive, mentally ill drug addict, dying of an overdose, and the third act especially tries to bring Rose's relationship with her mother to the forefront of the story. And yet, from my perspective it felt far more minor than the film seemed to think it was. There's a message board I frequent where we have a running joke about a cliché that we've seen come up in a lot of modern horror movies: "TROWmah", the cause of all the protagonists' problems turning out to be trauma buried in their backstories, usually related to their families. There have been a lot of horror movies in the last ten years like The Babadook and Hereditary that have done this kind of drama well, but there are also many lesser films that have fumbled such, and this is one of the latter, feeling like it shoehorned in a traumatic backstory for Rose simply because that's what modern supernatural horror movies do. For much of the film, Rose's mother barely figures into the events. We're told by Laura that the entity stalking her can take the form of anyone, including people who have died, but only towards the end does it take the form of Rose's mother. The final confrontation taking place at Rose's dilapidated childhood home, her metaphorically confronting all of her bottled-up feelings about her mother, was visually exciting but felt unearned as a result.

The worst part is that there was a far better movie sitting right there under the surface, one that could've used the entity as a metaphor for a completely different problem in Rose's life that the first two acts do, in fact, very much establish. We're shown throughout the film that Rose is a workaholic, clocking in 70-hour weeks at the hospital, being nagged by her sister Holly because she's willing to miss her nephew's birthday to work weekends, and slowly driving away her fiancé Trevor and her family. Instead of childhood family trauma, this movie would've worked a lot better if the entity/curse had been a metaphor for Rose's adult trauma, specifically that of an overworked white-collar professional who has sacrificed everything for a career that doesn't love her back, subjecting her to the sight of one of her patients committing suicide right in front of her (which caused the curse to target her in the first place). Even the film's title would've lent itself to such a story, about somebody who has to show up for work every day and put on a happy face for the people whose mental health problems she's trying to heal even though she herself is crumbling inside, the sad kind of phony smile juxtaposed with the scary ones she encounters throughout the film. It's a story that anyone who feels worn down by their job could've related to, especially health care workers whose job description involves occasionally watching people die and having no way to save them (which, in 2022, would've been especially timely), and more importantly, it would've fit what this movie established about Rose a lot better than the story it did tell. When the time came for Rose to exorcise her demons both personal and literal, it shouldn't have been about learning to put her mother behind her even though the film was barely about her mother before then, it should've been about finding some work/life balance. I wonder if there were some major rewrites on this movie, or if it was a consequence of writer/director Parker Finn trying to stretch his 11-minute short film Laura Hasn't Slept out to feature length, because its attempts at exploring Rose's personal problems felt incoherent.

Fortunately, unlike Night Swim, another recent horror movie adapted from a short film, this manages to still be an effective horror movie in spite of itself thanks to Finn proving to be a better director than he is a writer. It's mostly supernatural horror boilerplate, but it's done well, with a mix of tried-and-true jump scares and deeper, more unsettling chills as Rose and the viewer are both thrust into scenarios where something is just wrong and we can't trust anything we see. While its attempts to tie Rose's problems to her childhood trauma fell flat, it did otherwise succeed in putting me in the headspace of somebody who's slowly going mad with nobody to help her, as with the exception of Joel, nearly everybody in her life abandons her in her darkest hour. As a metaphor for mental illness, it was chilling, and Sosie Bacon pulls off an incredible performance as Rose here, one that I can see taking her places in the future as more than just "Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick's daughter." Kyle Gallner, meanwhile, makes for a likable male lead as Joel, the only person who seems to believe Rose even despite their history together as he, in his capacity as a detective, uncovers the truth about what is happening to her. Finally, Rob Morgan only appears in a single scene scene as the one person who managed to beat the curse, at considerable cost to not only his psyche but also his physical circumstances, but his performance, clearly terrified of the entity and everything it represents, was enough on its own to considerably up the stakes for Rose in her journey.

And as for scares, this movie's got 'em. Again, there's not a lot here that's new, but this movie plays the hits well, not just with the obvious jump scares but also with the setup for them. We get moments where we just know that something is watching Rose from just off camera and are eagerly waiting for her to turn around and see it, a scene where Rose is with her therapist (more or less remade from the original short film) that establishes that she's not safe even with people she thinks she can trust, and plenty of other scenes that lend to the film's oppressive atmosphere, in which we feel that we're starting to lose our minds as much as Rose is. Towards the end, when the scares shift to Rose facing the entity head-on, it is represented as a genuinely chilling monster brought to life by some grotesque creature effects. The entity is a hell of a monster, used only sparingly but looking downright horrifying when it does show up. Between the scares, the perpetually gray New Jersey setting, and Rose's slide into what looks like madness, this movie carries a bleak, nihilistic tone all the way to the finish line, and refused to pull its punches.

The Bottom Line

Even with its derivative nature and bad script, Smile demonstrates how a horror movie can succeed purely on the strength of its direction, which manages to make the most of what it's given and deliver an effective little chiller.

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And now, for the sequel...

Smile 2 (2024)

Rated R for strong bloody violent content, grisly images, language throughout and drug use

Score: 5 out of 5

Smile 2 is the movie that the first Smile should've been. The scares are bigger, badder, and more effective, the central story is better written and more focused even as it dives much deeper into the idea that we can't trust what we're seeing on screen, the direction is far more stylish, kinetic, and exciting, and it's all anchored by what ought to be a career-making performance by Naomi Scott. The funny thing is, not only was this written and directed by the same guy who did the first movie, Parker Finn, but on the surface the two films hit most of the same story beats, and yet this sequel pulls them off far more effectively. It feels like Finn went back and took a close look at the first movie to see what worked and what didn't, and made a sequel that fixed all of its biggest problems while still keeping everything enjoyable about it, its more glamorous protagonist and setting doing nothing to detract from how raw it felt and in some ways making it feel even more intense. Even though, just from the premise and how the first movie played out, I was able to figure out exactly how this one was gonna end well in advance, that simply had me anticipating something grand rather than feeling like I'd spoiled the movie for myself. It's everything a great horror sequel should be, and a film that will probably make my list of the best films of 2024.

(Also, spoilers for the first Smile. You have been warned.)

The film starts right where its predecessor left off, to the point of opening with a "six days later" tag without any context, as if to say "hey, you've seen the first one, we don't need to tell you what's going on here." Joel, who at the end of the first movie became the new bearer of the curse after a possessed Rose killed herself in front of him, decides to kill two birds with one stone: not only pass on the curse, but pass it on to a genuine scumbag in the form of a murderous drug dealer by killing one of his fellow crooks right in front of him. The whole thing goes horribly wrong and ends with both Joel and the criminal dead, but he did manage to pass on the curse to one Lewis Fregoli, a guy who was at the dealer's place at the time to score some drugs. Lewis is himself a dealer -- and more specifically, the dealer for Skye Riley, a Grammy-winning pop superstar with a long history of substance abuse issues, including a pill addiction that she developed after being badly injured in a car accident that killed her actor boyfriend Paul Hudson and left her with scars and chronic pain ever since. A week later, when Skye goes to Lewis to score some Vicodin, a deranged Lewis kills herself right in front of her and makes her the entity's new target.

Unlike the first film, where the source of Rose's trauma felt like something that was tacked on to the point of becoming an unwelcome distraction, this one always knows exactly what Skye's problems are: addiction and the perils of stardom. Skye's life is miserable behind the scenes, in many ways because she's a rich and famous celebrity. She has a drug problem, she has body image issues, she has to deal with stalkers, her schedule is micromanaged by her momager Elizabeth, her relationship with her fellow celebrity Paul is shown to have been a mutually destructive one before he died, she has to watch her every move lest she face the wrath of a ravenous tabloid press, and the entity preys on all of this. If this movie has an overarching message, it's that fame and fortune are not worth it (with a side of "drugs are bad, m'kay?"), with the entity's torment of Skye framed from start to finish as a classic celebrity meltdown straight out of TMZ or Perez Hilton. She snaps at her mother and her assistants as she suspects the entity lurking everywhere around her, fan meet-and-greets and charity events turn into living nightmares as she veers wildly off-script, her dressing room is trashed, and in the third act, she gets sent to spend a night in a rehab center before her big concert. While Skye's fashions may have been inspired by Lady Gaga, her behavior will be unsettlingly familiar to anybody who remembers the 2000s and how celebrities like Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton were covered.

And they found an outstanding talent to convey this meltdown in the form of Naomi Scott. At every step of Skye's journey, I fully bought into Scott as a pop diva on the edge of a complete breakdown, to the point that the film barely even needed to show any supernatural occurrences in order to convey that she was not well. Much like last time, this movie is at its best when it's putting us in the shoes of somebody who feels like she's going insane, and just like Sosie Bacon, it wouldn't have worked without Scott. She had to do a lot of heavy lifting here in terms of acting and emotion, and she made it look easy. What's more, I didn't just buy Scott as a troubled heroine, I bought her as a pop star. Lots of movies about pop music feel as though they were made by people who are clueless about the genre, often settling into tired tropes while the music they have their main characters perform is often insipid garbage that would flop like Katy Perry or Justin Timberlake's last couple of albums if they tried to release it in real life. Here, however, I came away with the impression that, in another life, Scott (who has a background as a singer, including in the Disney Channel movie Lemonade Mouth and in the live-action version of Aladdin) could've become a pop star instead of an actress. There are multiple scenes dedicated just to Skye's music, all of it performed by Scott herself, and it is legitimately good, as are the performances she puts on at multiple points in the film, where she feels like she has the kind of star power that pop careers are made of. This is the kind of larger-than-life performance that makes stars out of actors, and while it's long been a cliché to say that horror never gets recognition from "professional" critics or award shows, I hope to the heavens that this isn't the case here, and that Scott gets some juicy roles after this.

The fact that the film's story was so on point in what it was satirizing and commenting on is all the more remarkable given how much more it leans into the idea that we can't trust what we're seeing on screen. Building on the first film having a protagonist who increasingly could not trust her own senses as the entity caused her to hallucinate, it's strongly hinted that many scenes in this movie, even outside of its more overt horror sequences, are not happening precisely as Skye and the viewers are perceiving them. I don't want to give much more away than that, but I can say that, once it became clear(ish) what was actually happening and what the entity was doing to Skye, I had to reevaluate large chunks of the wild events that took place before then. Amidst all the creeping dread, effective jump scares, shockingly potent gore effects, and the possibility that anybody around Skye might be the entity, this was the part of the film that freaked me out the most. Behind the camera, Parker Finn also shot the hell out of this, taking full advantage of the bigger budget to go wild with far more kinetic and stylish camera work. This was a damn fine-looking movie to watch, making use of long one-shot takes, sweeping shots, horror sequences that felt like the creepiest music videos this side of late-night '90s MTV (especially one bit in Skye's apartment that calls back to a scene of a dance rehearsal earlier in the film), and simply a level of production polish that indicates that everybody involved knew what they were doing and acted accordingly. It all builds to a hell of a climax that I saw coming the moment I learned this movie's premise, but which felt like exactly how it needed to go -- and which set up one hell of a Smile 3.

The Bottom Line

Smile 2 is a dream sequel, a movie that fixes every problem I had with its predecessor, keeps what worked about it, and ultimately winds up as one of the best movies of the year. Not much more to say than that. If you're even remotely in the mood for something scary this Halloween (or, frankly, at any other time of year), this should be near the top of your list of movies to watch.

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Review: Deadstream (2022)

Deadstream (2022)

Not rated

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/10/review-deadstream-2022.html>

Score: 4 out of 5

Deadstream is a movie I'd heard a lot about when it first came out, but never got around to watching until now. A found footage horror/comedy in which the main hook is that the protagonist is livestreaming everything for his fans, this film is largely a one-man show for Joseph Winter, who co-wrote and co-directed it with his wife Vanessa Winter. It is an often hilarious spoof of the culture surrounding YouTubers and livestreamers paired with a genuinely scary supernatural horror movie, one where the two sides come together to create the feel of a topsy-turvy Scooby-Doo episode, with ghostly frights and impressive creature effects paired with self-awareness and a moral parable out of The Twilight Zone. I did have a few nagging questions about some things, but other than that, this is perfect spooky season viewing for somebody who wants a movie that's actually scary but still fairly lighthearted.

Our protagonist Shawn Ruddy is an internet personality known for livestreams on a fictional site called LivVid in which he, a guy who's "afraid of everything," pulls dangerous and often illegal stunts with the stated purpose of overcoming his fears. In truth, however, it's all for the clicks and views, as evidenced when one stunt he pulled ended with a homeless man winding up in the hospital, forcing him to record an insincere apology video in order to salvage his career and reputation. Six months later, he's making his triumphant comeback to streaming with what he calls his most dangerous stunt yet: spending the night in Death Manor, a house in rural Utah where several people have died and which is reputed to be haunted. Sure enough, the place has ghosts up to the rafters, and naturally, they don't want him around. Unfortunately, as a self-imposed challenge to make sure he wouldn't back out and lose sponsors, he locked the door to the house and threw away the key, meaning that he's trapped in there for the night even though his life is now in clear danger.

The basic concept is ingenious, and a very modern twist on found footage for the age of livestreaming. The film is not subtle in its parodies of people like PewDiePie (who Shawn mentions by name) and MrBeast, aggressively mercenary and often unethical entertainers whose only qualms come from the possible legal or social consequences of their actions, not any sense of right and wrong. Everything we see of Shawn in the first act paints him as a deeply phony person who doesn't take the situation he's in seriously, but is pretending he does for the people watching. He aggressively watches his language (and bleeps it out when he does curse) to avoid saying any bad words that might get his videos demonetized, but he also built his career on doing things that should not make him a role model for children, the product of hyper-literal online moderation systems that fixate on dirty but otherwise harmless language and sexuality while letting genuinely toxic behavior slide. Whenever he grabs some of the energy drink that's sponsoring his show, he always knows to make sure the logo on the label is facing the camera so his viewers can see that he's enjoying a healthy, energizing can of Awaken Thunder. Once the actual ghosts come out, of course, this demeanor starts to crack as genuine fear enters his voice, culminating in a breakdown where he realizes what a terrible person he's been. It's still very much a comedy too, of course. Even during his big breakdown, Shawn still brings up, without any prompting, a racially-charged stunt he did in the past that he was criticized for in order to insist that he's not racist. Watching this, I got the sense that Joseph and Vanessa Winter have Thoughts about the crop of influencers who have risen up on sites like YouTube and Twitch, with Shawn serving as a symbol of everything that people find rotten about those sites and their personalities. Joseph's performance walks a fine line, making him enough of a jackass that I wanted to see him suffer but still lending him enough humanity that I wanted him to survive. Shawn is not exactly a likable guy, but he's not a one-dimensional caricature, and making him come across as an ignorant doofus instead of actively malicious oddly enough makes the satire sting harder. There is an actual person beneath the character he plays online, but the line between the real man and the character has been blurred by the pressures of online fame pushing him to go further and further in pursuit of the constant high.

Beyond Shawn, most of the living human characters we see are the people watching his stream, some of whom record videos in order to give him advice and let him know the house's history and that of the various ghosts within it, a fun use of the livestreaming conceit to let us know that Shawn's nightmare is being broadcasted to the world and that people are reacting to it with both horror and gallows humor. The only person Shawn actually meets face-to-face is Chrissy, a fan of his who followed him to the house and knows a lot more about what's actually happening than she lets on. I don't want to spoil anything except to say that I was able to figure out pretty quickly what her actual deal was, but I can say that Melanie Stone (who worked with the Winters again that same year on V/H/S/99 in one of that film's best segments) made Chrissy an exceptionally memorable character. From the moment we meet her, we see that she's kind of unhinged and clearly has a hidden agenda, one that Shawn is right to be suspicious of. She was an excellent companion for Shawn, her weirdness treading the line between hilarious and creepy and often managing to be both at the same time. Whenever Stone was on screen, I knew I was in for something good.

Finally, there are the scares. This was filmed in a house that's reputed to be haunted in real life, and the Winters exploited that to the fullest, making heavy use of its dark, dingy environments to make it feel like a place where Shawn would be in danger exploring even if there weren't any ghosts around. As for the ghosts themselves, all of them are realized with creative practical effects work that gives us a hint as to the awful ways in which they died. Mildred, the house's first occupant, gets the most screen time out of them and the most ways to torment Shawn. An heiress and failed poet in life who killed herself after her lover (who also published her poems) died, she turns out to have a number of uncanny similarities to Shawn, the both of them having pursued fame in their respective times to the point that Shawn even compares her to himself as an old-timey version of an influencer. She has a creepy look that the film makes the most of as she stalks and taunts Shawn, serving as a highly entertaining antagonist with a flair for the dramatic. The other ghosts, ranging from a young boy with his deformed conjoined twin growing out of him to a bloated woman to a 1950s cop to a man covered in moss, were all imposing presences with appearances that called to mind zombies more than ghosts. This did raise a few questions with how they were presented as corporeal presences in the house who Shawn is seemingly able to fight with normal weapons, even though Mildred is shown to require a special ritual to defeat her for good. That said, the vagueness felt like the point here, like Shawn had no idea what to do either and was just winging it as he fought to survive.

The Bottom Line

Deadstream was a lightweight but incredibly fun horror/comedy whose premise is golden in its simplicity, and which largely fulfills it thanks to a pair of great performances, cool ghosts, and its sense of humor. This is excellent spooky season viewing, and between this and their work on V/H/S/99, I'm excited to see whatever movie the Winters are working on next.

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Something I thought about with Art the Clown...

In All Hallows' Eve and the first Terrifier, Art the Clown is presented as an overt misogynist, murdering women in very sexualized ways and in one case carving sexist slurs into a woman's body. The sequels tone down these implications, but not by having Art be less violent towards women. Rather, they make him just as violent towards men as well, including inflicting brutal violence on their genitals.

Coincidentally, one of the common things you see in the histories of spree killers is that they often have track records of domestic violence and hatred of women.

And hey, will you look at that. One of the most notorious scenes in Terrifier 3 is a mass casualty event in a shopping mall that's framed less like a slasher movie kill and more like a terrorist attack, even if it's with a bomb instead of a gun.

Now, I'm pretty sure this was unintentional... but it's kind of right there.