Horror Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Brec Bassinger in a burning restaurant: "Another fondue party turns deadly."

Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

May 15, 20252025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Theatrical

***/****
starring Brec Bassinger, Richard Harmon, April Telek, Tony Todd
screenplay by Guy Busick & Lori Evans Taylor
directed by Zach Lipovsky & Adam B. Stein

by Walter Chaw I love the Final Destination franchise that James Wong started with writing partner Glen Morgan–all six films, but particularly the two Wong directed. Wong and Morgan were, of course, instrumental in the creation of “The X Files” and its stickier, gloomier spiritual brother, “Millennium”. I love the absolute nihilism of Final Destination‘s premise and its suggestion that Death is a mysterious force more interested in contriving incredible machines to complete its dread duty than in, you know, just giving someone a heart attack. But is it Death in a playful, Ingmar Bergman sense, playing chess on the beach in the middle of a mass-casualty event with a survivor of a genocidal campaign who’s come home to find he’s brought the plague with him? What kind of person must one be for Death to want to hang out with them? The type of person who’s very good for business. No, Final Destination is more Death as an artificial intelligence, I think–an algorithm fed vaguely conflicting instructions that labours to maintain this corner of the Matrix of which it’s in charge: fix glitches but, and here’s the rub, don’t let the subjects know there’s been a glitch and that it’s being fixed. So it’s not a sentience, exactly, but a subroutine in a larger system. A celestial calculator. The biggest twist left for the series would be the identification of the being that made our lives an accounting problem it sent a somewhat limited clockwork to manage in the first place.

Hailee Steinfeld in Sinners: "Children of the night. What music they make."

Sinners (2025)

April 30, 20252025, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Horror, Thriller, Vampire

***/****
starring Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Jack O’Connell
written and directed by Ryan Coogler

by Walter Chaw Movies used to make me feel all kinds of ways. Usually, it was Adrian Lyne’s fault. Fatal Attraction was unapologetic. Flashdance was unashamed. 9½ Weeks? Brothers and sisters, 9½ Weeks was a sin. Movies were everything to me once: friend, secret sharer, father confessor, mother, and, yes, lover, participating in the formation of my object choice and foundational in the encouragement of my onanism. I still feel a butterfly in the pit of my stomach thinking of the curtained room at the back of the video store–the stolen, lidded glances as I pretended to peruse the “Foreign” section. I think about how VHS brought the forbidden pleasures of grindhouses and peepshows into the middle-class living room of otherwise “traditional” nuclear families, tucked behind rows of hardbound books on respectable bookshelves or in the leather-clad storage ottoman set in the middle of the party, holding drinks and hiding corpses, perversely, in plain sight. “Help yourself to another cocktail wiener off the tray there, Father O’Shaughnessy.” Did you see No Way Out in a theatre when you were 14? How about Angel Heart? No? How about The Big Easy or Sea of Love? Ellen Barkin? No? I’m sorry to hear that.

Jack Quaid with a knife through his hand: "No more Mr. Knife Guy."

Borderline (2025) + Novocaine (2025)

March 28, 20252025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Horror, South Africa, Theatrical

BORDERLINE
***½/****
starring Samara Weaving, Ray Nicholson, Jimmie Fails, Eric Dane
written and directed by Jimmy Warden

NOVOCAINE
*/****
starring Jack Quaid, Amber Midthunder, Ray Nicholson, Matthew Walsh
written by Lars Jacobson
directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen

by Walter Chaw Samara Weaving is the best Bruce Campbell since Bruce Campbell. They even worked together on the “Ash vs Evil Dead” show. Her timing is impeccable, her control over her physicality and facial expressions prodigious. She seems to have emerged specifically to anchor horror slapsticks like the second coming of Mabel Normand: a screwball Venus on a meshuga clamshell. Her short filmography is already heavy with cult classics like The Babysitter, Ready or Not, Guns Akimbo, and Joe Lynch’s fantastic Mayhem–each savvy enough to highlight Weaving’s charming, self-deprecating sense of humour. In another time, she would’ve given Lucille Ball or Carol Burnett a run for their money. She’s the dream improv partner, a champion bull rider. I don’t think there’s a scenario she wouldn’t seem unnatural in–no situation you could ask her characters to overcome that is too absurd. She’s a unicorn: the great beauty men think they might have a chance with and women don’t entirely resent. In her very small cameo in Babylon, she provides a tantalizing glimpse into what that film could have been with her in the lead instead of the ego doppelgänger to her id, Margot Robbie. Not good, mind you, but at least well-cast.

The Rule of Jenny Pen (2025)

March 14, 20252025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, New Zealand, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring John Lithgow, Geoffrey Rush, George Henare, Nathaniel Lees
written by Eli Kent, James Ashcroft, based on the short story by Owen Marshall
directed by James Ashcroft

by Waler Chaw James Ashcroft’s The Rule of Jenny Pen scares the shit out of me. Not just as a horror movie, but also as a reminder of how our elder-care system is so broken that most of us will end up dying at the hands of overworked caregivers in underfunded facilities. My plan is to kill myself before the dementia takes over completely, but that boat may have already sailed. In The Rule of Jenny Pen, Eunice (Hilary Norris), a dear old thing, believes that every day is Christmas, and tells everyone her family is due to visit. Every day ends with her disappointed, but then she wakes up the next morning thinking it’s Christmas again, thus hope springs eternal. We later learn that she’s been in this loop for years. Is she in Hell or is she in Heaven? Is anticipation sweet, or is it torture? Was Sisyphus happy because he knew what was expected of him? At a terminal point, is there much difference between sweet delight and endless night? Is there much of a difference between this limbo in God’s waiting room and the limbo of lives meted out in coffee spoons and the long shadows of regret?

The Monkey (2025)

February 25, 2025****/****, 2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Stephen King, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Christian Convery, Elijah Wood
written by Osgood Perkins, based on the short story by Stephen King
directed by Osgood Perkins

by Walter Chaw Oz Perkins’s The Monkey plays like WWI frontlines poetry. Like something by Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen documenting the birth of irony as a literary device–the only appropriate response to mechanized, impersonal, mass and random death. The house poet for the DAILY MAIL, publishing under the pseudonym “Touchstone” in 1916, wrote about doomed British Captain Nevill’s decision upon his last, suicidal charge to have each of the four battalions under his command kick a soccer ball towards the German lines:

In the Shadow of Loss: Walter Chaw interviews Leigh Whannell

In the Shadow of Loss: FFC Interviews Leigh Whannell

February 4, 20252025, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Interviews

by Walter Chaw I met Leigh Whannell through the miracle of social-media DMs a few months into the pandemic, when reaching out was all anyone had to do. His The Invisible Man reboot had landed just a couple of weeks before the first lockdown, and I was so floored by its prescience I had to let him know. We’ve kept in touch. The Invisible Man hit that enviable sweet spot for popular cinema: smart without being an asshole about it; thrilling without sacrificing its depth. I came to it from Upgrade, Whannell’s cautionary tale about artificial intelligence, and then worked my way backwards to Insidious: Chapter 3, his directorial debut, which, separated from franchise expectations, proved shockingly soulful and introspective.

Lucy Liu in Presence: Not just a subpar Led Zeppelin album anymore

Presence (2025)

January 24, 20252025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, Eddy Maday
written by David Koepp
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw The subjective camera is nothing new, of course. 1947’s Lady in the Lake is a largely failed Raymond Chandler adaptation in which Philip Marlowe is the camera, while director RaMell Ross cannily attaches the technique to a critic-proof project in the current Nickel Boys. First-person shooter (FPS) video game enthusiasts are more than familiar with the concept, and purveyors of porn know that VR-ready stereoscopic smut has its own niche market. Everything “new” is ancient, in other words, and the experience of Steven Soderbergh’s Presence at times reminded me of playing the first-person, text-based INFOCOM games of my childhood: floating in and out of scenes; picking up bits and pieces of information and trying to cohere them into an unrevealed storyline. Horror aficionados will certainly have moments of déjà vu here, what with the camera being yoked to a predatory point-of-view. (Halloween, I’m looking at you.) Which is to say that Presence definitely pulls the odd pleasure-lever in my lizard brain, not that it’s good. Funny, because even Soderbergh himself has said he never thought a “POV” film could work because you don’t get to see the reaction of the protagonist–but then he goes ahead and makes Presence anyway…and cheats.

Blind man sitting with his daughter in a movie theatre as the lights go down in Demons

Demons (1985) + Demons 2 (1986) – 4K Ultra HD Discs

January 22, 20251980s, 2025, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Dario Argento, Horror, Italy

Dèmoni
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Urbano Barberini, Natasha Hovey, Karl Zinny, Fiore Argento
screenplay by Dario Argento, Lamberto Bava, Dardano Sacchetti, Franco Ferrini
directed by Lamberto Bava

Dèmoni 2… l’incubo ritorna
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring David Knight, Nancy Brilli, Coralina Cataldi Tassoni, Virginia Bryant
written by Dario Argento, Lamberto Bava, Franco Ferrini, Dardano Sacchetti
directed by Lamberto Bava

by Walter Chaw It’s one of the best horror premises ever: A mysterious figure (legendary director Michele Soavi, doing double duty on screen and off as creep and AD, respectively) hands out invitations for a movie premiere to beautiful teens, pimps and their hookers, and other manifold riffraff in the Berlin Underground. The venue is a mysterious theatre, “Metropol,” that no one’s heard of before, and when the curtain goes up, it’s for the pleasure of a dozen or so cinephiles down for a show and maybe some sordid adventure. Then the demons come. Setting a horror movie in a cinema is nothing new, of course (the meta implications of it are too delicious to resist), but I like how the moviegoers in Lamberto Bava’s Demons–these marks, these fools–have been sucked into the freak tent without even having been mesmerized there by an able barker. Turns out, some of us don’t need a showman to pique our curiosity. Turns out, even though we should know better than to show up at a party we’re invited to by some guy in a metal mask on the subway, caution goes right out the window now and again. Maybe I can relate because, for as risk-averse as I am, this is the sort of provocation I could be vulnerable to under the right–which is to say wrong–circumstances. (“Sure thing, friend-o, I’ll watch your movie.” God knows I’ve agreed to worse.) Maybe this is the perfect metaphor for being a film critic in a festival setting: stuck in an auditorium with the creators and no easy way to escape if things go pear-shaped.

Nosferatu (2024)

December 20, 2024****/****, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Vampire

****/****
starring Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe
inspired by the screenplay Nosferatu by Henrik Gallen and the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker
written for the screen and directed by Robert Eggers

by Walter Chaw

The hysteric female can be viewed as a ‘flipped’ version of the male paranoiac; while the male represses his fears about the nature of his sexuality, the female’s hysterics seem to circle around her inability to direct her sexuality as she pleases, or her desperation to maintain her purity. It is difficult to consider female hysterics in the Gothic in the Freudian sense of repression, however, since her sexuality is repressed from without, as well as within. Much of the time, the Gothic female is both literally and figuratively kept in a cage, crypt, cell, or cave in which she does not have the choice of how her sexuality will be exploited.
-Dr. Wendy Fall (The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. NY. Arno Press, Rev 1980)

SDAFF ’24: Love Lies + Dead Talents Society

November 20, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, Horror, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Taiwan

LOVE LIES
我談的那場戀愛
*/****
starring Sandra Ng, Cheung Tin Fu, Stephy Tang
written by Hing-Ka Chan, Miu-Kei Ho
directed by Miu-Kei Ho

DEAD TALENTS SOCIETY
鬼才之道
*/****
starring Chen Bo-lin, Gingle Wang, Sandrine Pinna
written by John Hsu, Kun-Lin Tsai
directed by John Hsu

by Walter Chaw I want to grant that comedy is difficult to translate. But it’s not impossible–there are enough examples to the contrary to make this a specious argument–so I’m willing to give Hong Kong film Love Lies and Taiwan’s Dead Talents Society the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they play better in their native cultures and tongues. Maybe they’re better with an audience–some films are, you know. Or maybe not. Maybe this middlebrow, low-aspiring, derivative dreck receives the same kind of derision everywhere and we’re not so different after all. It’s not a matter of cultural superiority, mind; in suggesting the delicacies of humour can be lost in translation, I’m not saying that Chinese people are incapable of detecting garbage when presented with it. I have to tell you, though, that both of these films are multiple nominees at this year’s Golden Horse Awards (frickin 11 for Dead Talents Society by itself)–our cultures are not so far apart when it comes to giving out movie awards. I’ll also acknowledge some personal bias in reviewing Asian pictures: a toxic brew of barely understood self-loathing and the deep-rooted desire not to be lumped in with behaviours that could be coded as racially humiliating or even, at times, identifying. It’s like using the word “honoured” around white people: I try not to do it. This is a long way of saying Love Lies and Dead Talents Society are technically well-made films that vibrate at frequencies I can, incongruously, neither hear nor tolerate. Your mileage may vary.

Heretic (2024)

November 18, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Hugh Grant, Sophie Thatcher, Chloe East
written and directed by Scott Beck & Bryan Woods

by Walter Chaw Heretic‘s premise is childish wish-fulfillment, an exercise in mental cruelty in which a medium-schooled skeptic challenges a pair of comely young missionaries, hoisting them on their own insinuating, syllogistic petard. And who better to function as audience avatar than Hugh Grant? Rather, this elderly iteration of Grant, crusted over with a shell of sociopathic nastiness, like his brittle accent made manifest in flesh and wool cardigan? Get ’em, you ossified piece of British shit! Grant plays Mr. Reed, a cozy hermit secreted smugly in his richly-appointed hobbit hole who invites Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) in from a God-is-wroth thunderstorm to indulge their desire to share with him the Good News courtesy of the Church of Latter-day Saints. He has a fire roaring, a blueberry pie in the oven, and, allegedly, a shy wife cowering in a back bedroom, so the girls aren’t in a strange man’s home alone with the strange man. The Mission wouldn’t allow that, you see, but Mr. Reed is reassuring. The amiable chatting soon turns to wicked jousting, and the jousting becomes inappropriate and uncomfortable. When Barnes and Paxton try to leave, they find that the front door is locked and their only option is the Stockton prize of lady or tiger. That is, they are offered the choice of two doors–one marked “BELIEVE,” the other “DISBELIEVE”–as their only possibility of escape from his unctuous, patronizing company. Behind one is the back entrance to the house. Behind the other? Tiger or, rather, Tyger, of the “here there be” variety.

Smile (2022) + Smile 2 (2024)

October 22, 20242022, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

SMILE
***/****
starring Sosie Bacon, Kyle Gallner, Jessie T. Usher, Robin Weigert
written and directed by Parker Finn

SMILE 2
***½/****
starring Naomi Scott, Rosemarie DeWitt, Lukas Gage, Kyle Gallner
written and directed by Parker Finn

by Walter Chaw I was distracted by what I saw as the narrative looseness of Parker Finn’s Smile, based on his short film Laura Hasn’t Slept. I thought it made a bit of a splash for a high concept carried obsessively–the titular smile maybe really just the Kubrick stare: lowered brow, manic grin. Although I admired the craft of it and Sosie Bacon’s star turn as a traumatized shrink with a troubled past seemingly losing her mind in the wake of a patient’s suicide, I dismissed the picture as thin and forgettable. But it nags and tugs, enough so that I started to wonder if I’d judged it too quickly and too harshly. I revisited Smile after watching its sequel; I realized I’d misplaced a few of the story details and flat-out forgotten the rest, and I wanted to give both films a fair accounting. Smile is two things: it’s a short film’s high concept expanded to feature length that may have one too many subplots; and it’s a solemn, principled piece on suicidal ideation and the theory it can be passed on–triggered, if you will–like other mental health crises such as eating disorders. Could someone in recovery from a self-annihilating disorder be pulled back into active crisis through exposure to someone else in the throes of the beast?

Terrifier 3 (2024)

October 14, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Horror, Theatrical

***/****
starring David Howard Thornton, Lauren Lavera, Elliott Fullam, Samantha Scaffidi
written and directed by Damien Leone

by Walter Chaw Damien Leone’s Terrifier films are empathy tests for a culture, for a creature, that has amused itself to death. No longer able to discern the line between reality and the media we consume, we are presented with these Voight-Kampff tests designed to replicate the social conditions of our steady dehumanization. You see, I’m sick. I’m afraid it’s mortal but I don’t know–I mean, every second is a second I will never see again, so isn’t everything mortal? I have, for over a year now, watched Israel gleefully, defiantly wage genocide on the Palestinian people and consumed images of the human body in various states of dismemberment, violation, and humiliation that before this I had only glimpsed with horror in grainy photographs smuggled out of Nanking during WWII–that I had only imagined while reading war stories written by men destroyed largely by just the act of bearing witness. This is the shape of my astonishing privilege. If I didn’t want to see it, I didn’t have to. Something changed.

Apartment 7A (2024) + The First Omen (2024)

October 5, 20242024, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Italy, Serbia, Streaming, Thriller, UK

APARTMENT 7A
***/****
starring Julia Garner, Dianne Wiest, Kevin McNally, Jim Sturgess
screenplay by Natalie Erika James & Christian White and Skylar James
directed by Natalie Erika James

THE FIRST OMEN
***½/****
starring Nell Tiger Free, Tawfeek Barhom, Sônia Braga, Bill Nighy
screenplay by Tim Smith & Arkasha Stevenson and Keith Thomas
directed by Arkasha Stevenson

by Walter Chaw The sense of dread in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Richard Donner’s The Omen originates from the sacrifice of anonymous young women, dead before the stories proper begin. They are the black grasping soil, the damned ritual cycle from which feelings of claustrophobia and destiny extend backwards into an infinite past and forwards into an inevitable future. These dead girls give the stories a sense of eternity, in other words, and the feeling of inescapability. I love that the latest entries in these peculiar franchises are by women. About a third of the way through Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen, two concentric circles of novitiates sing and dance around troubled young Carlita (Nicole Sorace) like pagans around a maypole while above them a nun, Sister Anjelica (Ishtar Currie Wilson), sets herself on fire after promising her immolation is “all for you!” For whom, it’s not clear. Possibly Carlita, the red herring of the film’s first half and the obvious source of demonic visitation at the Italian convent in which the film is set, where inexperienced Sister Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) is assigned, fresh from America like Suspiria‘s Suzy Bannion. Or maybe Sister Anjelica’s messy end is meant for Sister Margaret as a strange welcome or a dire warning. “Ring Around the Rosie” was created to teach us about the symptoms of the Black Death. I don’t know what sort of death the circling children are teaching in The First Omen, though it doesn’t matter nearly so much as Stevenson’s absolute command of the unsettling, uncanny image and the ineffable gravity of archetype.

TIFF ’24: The Substance

September 15, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, TIFF, UK

***/****
starring Margaret Qualley, Demi Moore, Dennis Quaid, Hugo Diego Garcia
written and directed by Coralie Fargeat

by Walter Chaw Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance starts as David Cronenberg’s The Star before transitioning into Frank Henenlotter’s Black Swan. Toss in a pinch of Paul Verhoeven as well. Yet even at that, the picture suffers not for a lack of conviction but for a lack of breadth. The Substance carries a message warranting righteousness, no doubt, lamenting how women, especially in Hollywood, are valued for their sexuality and little else and how this trope eventually metastasizes within the victim as self-hatred and self-harm. But once eloquently expressed in the first (mesmerizing) 20 minutes, The Substance, in its dedicated mashing of its single outrage button, misses a few opportunities to broaden its scope, losing sight of its high concept. At least with Revenge, Fargeat’s straight-line rape-revenge flick (which ends with the pulverizing shotgunning of one antagonist’s scrotum), there’s no elaborate pretense it will engage in a broader dissection of male sexual violence. Its eventual bloodbath is less liberating and uncompromising than it is a shrine to the tradition forged by genre predecessors like I Spit on Your Grave and Ms. 45. Fargeat seems like a genuinely gifted filmmaker with a sense of humour skating on the outer edges of good taste. She wears her influences on her sleeve. She is, in other words, awesome, but her films so far are largely just slick celebrations of her Letterboxd favourites.

TIFF ’24: Aberdeen + Seeds

September 11, 20242024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF

ABERDEEN
**/****
starring Gail Maurice, Billy Merasty, Liam Stewart-Kanigan, Jennifer Podemski
written and directed by Ryan Cooper and Eva Thomas

SEEDS
***/****
starring Kaniehtiio Horn, Patrick Garrow, Dylan Cook, Graham Greene
written and directed by Kaniehtiio Horn

by Bill Chambers It opens on a manipulative but striking juxtaposition. A First Nations girl, Aberdeen (Ashlyn Cote-Squire), and her little brother Boyd (Lucas Schacht) go fishing with their grandparents at a lake–a sun-dappled tableau that fades out on young Aberdeen’s bright smile and fades back in to find middle-aged Aberdeen (Gail Maurice) passed out on a bench, being kicked awake by the turtleneck Gestapo on park patrol. Across town, Boyd (Ryan R. Black) is at the doctor, receiving the devastating news that he’s terminally ill. As he’s taking this in, his phone rings: could he come get his big sis out of jail? There’s an implied “this time” when the police inform Boyd that Aberdeen’s lucky they’re not pressing criminal charges, but Boyd, espying a Bible on the officer’s desk, appeals to the man’s religious convictions (and gambles on his latent racism) in blaming her actions on a “beer demon,” saying he’s been trying to get her to church. The Indigenous people we meet in Aberdeen have to be nimble code-switchers to navigate the world, and that’s something our proud, mercurial heroine steadfastly isn’t. She’s all out of fucks to give–that is, until Boyd informs her of his cancer, which has forced him to place her grandchildren, who became Aberdeen’s responsibility after her drug-addicted daughter ran away (and then Boyd’s when flooding left Aberdeen unhoused), in foster care. With a white family, no less, something “Abby” resents more than Boyd, who was raised in a white home, apart from his sister. For Aberdeen, it feels like nothing is ours and everything is theirs. What follows is a Dardennes-ian narrative in which an anxious Abby attempts to clean up her act faster than the ticker of red tape will allow.

Dafoe and Bob in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

September 9, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Fantasy, Horror, Theatrical

**/****
starring Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by Tim Burton

by Walter Chaw Somehow lugubrious at under 100 minutes, overburdened by five or six storylines and an unnecessary new lead character who dominates its first half, Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice leans hard on Burton’s established weaknesses while largely ignoring his established strengths. It treats women like shrill caricatures, for instance, saving its deepest contempt for Monica Bellucci’s Mrs. Beetlejuice, Delores, a bride so ‘Zilla she reconstitutes herself from her violently dismembered parts for the sole purpose of reuniting with her lost love and murderer, Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton). Lydia (Winona Ryder), the little girl lost from the first film who, by the end, discovered adoptive parents in the now-absent Maitlands, has grown into a ghost-hunting television charlatan engaged to unctuous workshop SNAG Rory (Justin Theroux). As Rory, Theroux appears to be doing Phil Hartman doing Glenn “Otho” Shadix and is asked to carry the comedic load of this thing for far too long. (It’s like showing up for Patti Lupone and getting fucking Florence Foster Jenkins for an hour.) Then there’s young Astrid (Jenna Ortega), Lydia’s kid, who resents her mother for being a nutjob and her dad (Santiago Cabrera) for becoming piranha food early in her life.

Strange Darling (2024)

September 2, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Willa Fitzgerald, Kyle Gallner, Madisen Beaty, Barbara Hershey
written and directed by JT Mollner

by Walter Chaw Defenders will say that JT Mollner’s Strange Darling exists, in an ancillary way, in the Martyrs universe, but it isn’t playing the same game. It lacks that movie’s meanness, for one; for another, it lacks the discipline required of ecclesiastical curiosity, the doom and fear and loathing that comes with any honest spiritual examination of the biological roots of fear. I want to call it “Martyrs for Dummies,” but that’s not exactly right, either. The only things Strange Darling ultimately shares with it–and with Christopher Nolan’s Memento–are a destabilizing narrative and an unreliable protagonist. It lacks the rigour of Martyrs and Memento, too, a clear grasp of what it’s after and how. When all’s said and done, Martyrs, which has nothing to do with Clive Barker, remains the truest adaptation of Barker’s marriage of atrocity and communion that I’ve ever seen. Strange Darling is mostly a life-support machine for a twist given away by its title. It’s like handing someone a ukulele in wrapping paper. Surprise! A gimmick tied to a high concept. A Shyamalan flick shot like a series of 1970s grindhouse trailers, featuring a lot of good work in the service of a disappointing puzzle box. Worse is that one of its red herrings involves consent and BDSM, which, you know, are serious and personal issues dangerously marginalized in horror movies that want to treat kink like a moral issue in need of correcting. Imagine the version of Strange Darling that follows through on the idea that a perfectly normal person might like to get stepped on between the sheets. Even better, imagine the version of the film interested in asking: If there is a line, how hard would one need to push to turn a “nice” man into a violent rapist?

Danny Huston and Bill Skarsgård in The Crow

The Crow (2024) + Blink Twice (2024)

August 26, 20242024, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Fantasy, France, Horror, Mexico, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE CROW
***/****
starring Bill Skarsgård, FKA twigs, Sami Bouajila, Danny Huston
screenplay by Zach Baylin and William Josef Schneider, based on the comic book series by James O’Barr
directed by Rupert Sanders

BLINK TWICE
***/****
starring Naomi Ackie, Channing Tatum, Christian Slater, Alia Shawkat
written by Zoë Kravitz & E.T. Feigenbaum
directed by Zoë Kravitz

by Walter Chaw “Eric, I had this dark dream,” she says. She doesn’t know these are their last moments together, here and for eternity–that she’s been dead and that her lover has bartered his life for hers, and that whatever there is of mercy in this blighted place has briefly reunited them as they pass each other in purgatory. It certainly doesn’t feel like mercy. It feels cruel. Cruelty is all there is. When I was a depressed, moony kid, I believed in my heart there was a grand melodrama in which I had a part to play. A delusion of grandeur, a symptom of narcissism (should one fail to outgrow it): you dressed the part with eyeliner and black trenchcoats, Doc Martens and clove cigarettes–the borrowed identity, the illusion of disaffection in language affected by quotes pulled from Shakespeare, Wilde, and our patron saint Morrissey. Most of my childhood and adolescence was a dark dream. I lived in a fugue. I lived in the spaces where my brain needed to mature, and I didn’t know what I was doing from one moment to the next, not really. I believed I was responsible for not only the feelings but also the fate of others. I was always performing. I was never performative.

Alien: Romulus (2024)

August 15, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**½/****
starring Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced
written by Fede Alvarez & Rodo Sayagues
directed by Fede Alvarez

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It’s at least an hour before the fan service begins in earnest, and until it does, Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus is a sterling example of how to tell another story in a familiar universe without regurgitating what came before. Although I’m a sucker for Rogue One, I can’t really defend its exhumation of Peter Cushing and a young Carrie Fisher to live as zombies in digital eternity. It feels infernal, a punishment invented by Dante. In space, no one will let you die. But, oh, that first hour of Romulus, in which we’re introduced to Jackson’s Star, a miserable, exploitative, blue-collar mining colony teeming with poverty and indentured servitude. (In a nice touch, these exhausted 22^nd-century schlubs still carry canaries in cages and black lungs in their chest.) Orphaned miner Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her adopted, Black, android brother Andy (David Jonsson) dream of starting a new life in an off-world colony (time to begin again!) but find their entreaties to the company store falling on corporate’s deaf ears. The films in the Alien universe are at their best when they’re invested in the working class: first miners, then soldiers, then prisoners. Though centring Romulus on miners again demonstrates a lack of imagination and should have been a red flag, after the strained mythopoetics of the last couple of Ridley Scott pictures, it actually ratcheted my hopes up high. I mean, even Rain’s ship is named, again, for an element of a Joseph Conrad novel, the “Corbelan”–just like the “Nostromo” of the first film, the “Sulaco” of the second, and the “Patna” of the third. Hearts of darkness, indeed. Capitalism will destroy us all.