THEY WILL KILL YOU

Directing: B-
Acting: B-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-

There are multiple things I don’t understand about They Will Kill You, but the thing I understand the least is the decision to release it all of one week after Ready or Not: Here I Come, which broadly speaking might as well be the same movie. They Will Kill You is even more similar to Ready or Not: Here I Come than to its 2019 predecessor, Ready or Not, which was the only one of these movies that was a morbidly delightful surprise. That movie’s sequel, and this movie, are both about a pair of sisters being hunted in an enclosed space by a large group of violent Satanic cultists. I find myself wondering if one of these movies should sue the other.

Still, I really wanted They Will Kill You to be better. I came for what the marketing promised: creatively cartoonish violence. I should admit that this film does deliver that, for a time anyway—I’m not sure the possessed pig’s head in the climactic sequence really worked. It was effectively gross, I’ll give it that.

The best thing I can say about this movie is that Zazie Beetz is the lead, and she has a very charismatic screen presence. This is her first lead role, and she carries it well. I wish I could say the woman who plays her sister, Myha'la, is as compelling, but in her defense, the writing doesn’t give her much to work with. I’m a little bit at a loss with what passes for a plot in this movie—movies that exist just to showcase fun violence don’t have to be deep, certainly, but they can be better than this. Honestly, Zazie Beetz is better than this. And between this and last month’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, I fear she may start getting typecast as a woman who is better than the movies she’s in. Someone needs to send her a movie script that’s actually good.

Much of the rest of the cast in They Will Kill You punches above its weight, though. Perhaps most significantly, we get Patricia Arquette as Lily Woodhouse, the elevated superintendant and cult leader at The Virgil, the 100-year-old Manhattan building Beetz’s Asia Reeves arrives at to start a job as a maid. She arrives soaking wet without a coat in a nighttime downpour, by the way. Why would that happen? We are never told. But hey, it gives the “plot” an excuse to get Asia quickly into a shower, next to which someone writes THEY WILL KILL YOU into the fog on the mirror.

Lily is also the matriarch of a family, of sorts, with “very special needs,” as she puts it—there’s a reason they must offer a sacrifice to their Dark Lord every night, and tonight Asia is meant to be the offering. Among the family, which also double as bumbling henchmen in the face of a woman who learned how to fight hard while in prison, is Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy himself), and Heather Graham.

You could say that all of these established actors are slumming it in a movie like this, but no one’s going to begrudge anyone having a lot of fun—especially when they’re getting paid to do it. That said, you can only see characters get dismembered and spray blood like they’re in a low-rent Kill Bill so many times before it starts to lose its luster. The action choreography in They Will Kill You is actually pretty good; I would argue it’s even better than in Ready or Not: Here I Come. It’s the writing, and the pointless backstory about these sisters, that’s the problem. They Will Kill You saw how undercooked the sisters’ relationship was in Ready or Not: Here I Come and said, “Hold my beer.”

They Will Kill You even begins ten years before the majority of the action that takes place, with Beetz still playing Asia but a different, younger actor playing her sister, Maria. They are on the run from an apparently abusive father, though the only evidence we get of that onscreen is a really large man stomping through a convenience store looking for them. A shooting occurs but the dad lives, and manages to keep hold of Maria; Asia panics and runs, and now it’s ten years later and she’s come back for Maria after hearing she’s been seen at this Virgil building, where some shit is going down that has nothing to do with any of that.

And with a movie like this, do we need any of that? It would be far more effective to throw us right into the action, and start with Asia’s arrival at The Virgil. There’s a very strange element to this film’s narrative where it tries too hard and somehow the result is a feeling like it’s been phoned in. I was moderately entertained by this movie, but in better hands it could have been a blast. Instead, it feels like a copy of a copy.

Overall: C+

SLANTED

Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: C
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

Slanted has been widely referred to as “Mean Girls meets The Substance.” There is some accuracy to those comparisons, except that Slanted lacks the gonzo savagery of The Substance. And I really want to say it lacks the wit of Mean Girls, except that at the time I even thought Mean Girls was rather overrated, a warmed-over Heathers, which had far greater satyrical bite. This is precisely what Slanted is missing: satyrical bite.

I really wanted Slanted to go harder. A story about a high school girl who undergoes cosmetic—some say “trans-racial”—surgery to become White is some fertile ground for the kind of satire it’s going for. But Slanted is less biting satire, and a little more lower-rung Black Mirror. It does a pretty good job of reflecting the social and racial structure of America, but doesn’t go very deep into it. This kind of movie only really works if it makes you go deep. A bunch of White kids salting otherwise unadorned salads for lunch in synchronized movements isn’t really going to cut it.

There’s a very strange irony to this production as well. Writer-director Amy Wang is herself of Chinese descent, which bodes well for a movie about a Chinese-American family. She casts actors of Chinese descent to play characters of Chinese descent, particularly Shirley Chen, who plays the protagonist, Joan Huang, for the first third or so of the movie; also Joan’s parents, Sofia (Vivian Wu) and Roger (Fang Du). But these are the only characters—or actors—of Asian descent in the entire production, and once the surgery takes place, Joan renames herself “Jo Hunt” and is played for the rest of the movie by Mckenna Grace. The irony is that this is a film about the denial of racial and ethnic identity, made by a woman of Chinese descent, but the vast majority of the actors given work to play parts in the cast are pointedly conventionally—maybe even blandly—attractive White people. You know, the very people afforded the greatest opportunities in this society.

It even seems worth mentioning that Amy Wang is Asian-Australian—not, it must be noted, American. To be sure, there are other international directors out there with an astonishing ability to reflect deeply authentic, American characterizations. But Ang Lee, Amy Wang is not. Much of Slanted takes place in a high school environment that feels like a critique of what an outsider might thing American high school is like, based on countless other American movies they’ve seen. The “Mean Girls” vibe among the popular girls Joan/Jo is desperate to become friends with feel very contrived.

It’s the writing I have the biggest issue with in Slanted, which doesn’t even manage to be consistent. Joan is using an app to create White-faced filters on her phone called Ethnos, which clocks her heavy usage and then offers her a discount on their cosmetic services. Ethnos declares that they cannot do the full surgery without a parental signature due to her being a minor, but they’re perfectly happy to do a hair transplant without it—complete with masking her with gas to put her to sleep. We then see bloody spots where they begin pulling her black hair out. None of this requires parental consent?

I’m fully aware that Slanted is meant to be a fantasy world of subtle horrors, not something to be particularly concerned with realism. After all, when Jo’s face skin starts to droop, a significant plot point in the latter half of the film, Ethnos simply provides her with a cream and some tape. We see hands go to her face without the camera actually showing her face, and suddenly she looks normal again. The sticking point for me is that the parental consent is used only as a plot point in the process of Joan losing her parents’ trust; it otherwise has no point in the plot, if this guy’s going to do a hair transplant on a minor without parental consent anyway.

Where I really must give Wang her due is that the performances in Slanted are actually kind of astonishing. Shirley Chen is serviceable as Joan; it’s when Chen is replaced by Mckenna Grace that the cast truly impresses. Grace performs most of her role in English but does occasionally speak in Mandarin, and quite believably (not that I would have any idea how good or bad her accent is, mind you). Most significantly, even after Joan is no longer shown onscreen, but the character comes home and takes some time to convince Sofia and Roger that she’s actually their daughter, they’re still completely believable as a family. You never stop accepting that Jo is their daughter, even after she’s transformed into a White girl. This is a true testament to the performances of all three of them.

There is a bit of a plot twist that comes along that you can see easily see coming, but the performers involved, particularly Amelie Zilber as Olivia Hammond, the most popular girl in the school, also perform it well. Joan’s best friend, Brindha, is played by Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, from the Netflix series Never Have I Ever, and seems to exist simply to be a fellow Asian character who is not a member of Joan’s family. There is so much potential for a film like this to explore that it does not bother with, most significantly the intersection between White racism and the anti-Blackness of other races. Brindha is a young Brown woman who comes closest to representing the experience of anyone outside the Huang family who is also not White; the only Black people we see in this movie are extras used at the Ethnos clinic, and in one pivotal scene, a nameless and silent Black friend of Brindha’s who Jo is peer pressured into disinviting from a party. This feels like the very essence of Black tokenism.

If Slanted had any real curiosity about the diversity of American experience, even among insecure, White-supremacy-pilled people of all races and ethnicities, it might be easier to like. It’s perfectly fair to tell a story like this from the singular perspective of an Asian-American family, but then it brings in characters of other races and does them a narrative disservice. To be fair, Slanted still has its moments; I certainly got a good laugh out of Ethnos announcing new locations in “Richmond, Virginia; Pittsburgh, and Spokane.” If it spent a lot more time with pointed jabs like that and less time with a misguided undertone of melancholy and barely a hint of the “body horror” it seemed to promise, Slanted would have worked a lot better.

I see White people: this misguided irony of Slanted.

Overall: B-

THE BRIDE!

Directing: B
Acting: A-
Writing: C
Cinematography: B+
Editing: C-

Let’s start with the good stuff. If there is any reason to see The Bride!, it’s Jessie Buckley. She tends to be the biggest reason to see anything she’s in, really; even in subpar material, she elevates it by her mere presence. This is deeply the case here, where she plays effectively three different characters: a rambunctious 1930s Chicago woman named Ida; the reanimated “The Bride” who has no memory of the time before her death; and . . . Mary Shelley.

And this leads us right into how The Bride! is a thematic mess, and pretty much always lacks narrative clarity. It would seem that Mary Shelley is writing this version of The Bride of Frankenstein herself, by possessing Ida before her death, as well as possessing The Bride after being reanimated, in so doing just confusing Ida. To some people this makes sense. To me, it does not.

And yet, there remains a lot to delight in The Bride!, mostly in the casting. Buckley is an extraordinary talent, and it’s worth noting that Ida is American and Mary Shelley is English, and Buckley regularly switches between the two accents with what appears to be effortless ease. (It’s also worth noting that Jessie Buckley herself is an Irish woman with an aptitude for accent work worthy of Meryl Streep; we rarely see her in her native accent, and none of the accents she uses here are her own.) We have a comparable talent in film veteran Annette Bening, who here plays a new version of “mad scientist” Dr. Euphronious. Notwithstanding the prosthetic teeth that border on distracting, I found myself wishing I could see a movie about that character—and it’s always great to see two actresses of this caliber together.

Then there’s “Frank,” as played by Christian Bale, another actor widely considered to be among the best of his generation. He does everything he is asked to do here, and he does it well. This is a world—much like Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein—in which Frankenstein’s monster has gone on living a very, very long time, in this case through the 1930s, and is apparently a known entity. Bale’s monster has simply taken on his maker’s name, perhaps a subtle nod to how often people confuse the two characters. (There’s also a unsubtle nod to the mispronunciation of “Frankenstein” from Young Frankenstein.) Frank has tracked down Dr. Euphronious due to her extensive research, to convince her to create a Bride for him out of a woman’s corpse.

I suppose we’re meant to think Ida’s corpse is found randomly; lucky for Frank, she’s beautiful—”too beautiful,” indeed, he says at first. The Bride! has a lot of feminist overtones, many of them so on the nose they might as well be punching you in the face, including repeatedly shouting the phrase “Me too!” If you really want to look upon The Bride! with a feminist eye, however, I would argue that it fails. Through most of the movie, Ida/The Bride either has no agency, or the film makes her agency very unclear. She’s either pushed around by men, or manipulated by the real-life author who’s ostensibly possessing her. And once we are clearly meant to understand she is taking command of her own agency, and she insists on giving herself a name, the name she chooses is “The Bride”—a generic phrase that exists to connect a woman to a man. Granted, in so doing she’s declaring her independence from Frank, except this makes it unclear exactly to whom she is supposed to be betrothed or married. Is this meant to be irony? I can’t tell. It further muddies the narrative when she cannot tear herself away from Frank even after this occurs.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is credited as both the director and writer of The Bride!; I find her very impressive as a director, less so as a writer (though I did like both elements of her work better in The Lost Daughter). I’d rather like to see what she could achieve as the director of someone else’s writing—and I suspect The Bride! could have benefited significantly from either a completely different writer, or at the very least a collaborator. Then again, there’s also the editing, which went through so many iterations in this case that the film’s original release date of September 2025 was postponed to March 2026. The end result makes it easy to see why.

There are also detective characters Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and Myrna Malloy (Penélope Cruz), a corrupt cop with a kind of remorse that comes across as crocodile tears, and a far more skilled investigator who has no opportunity to get credit for her work because she’s a woman. These characters are given very little to do that is actually interesting, and seem to exist only to have contrived conversations about men and women in the workplace. It’s too bad, because these are also two incredibly gifted actors, and they both deserve better than this.

Some of the writing is downright sloppy. There’s a pivotal scene in a ballroom during which The Bride is pointing a gun at all the revelers and a couple dozen cops who also have guns pulled. The scene is played as though it’s an equitable standoff because they all have guns—except this is The Bridge against countless guns on the other side, and in any universe, even one as characterized by fantasy as this one, the cops would all just shoot her. As if to underscore this point, there is a later scene in which you actually hear a cop say, “She’s got a gun, shoot her!” Um, okay.

The Bride! is one mess of a movie, but it’s also highly stylized, fun to look at, often fun to watch, and characterized by great performances. So is this the kind of mess that’s easily dismissed as stupid, or the kind of mess that’s fun? Because there are fun messes. Hell, it’s fun to make a mess, which is precisely what Maggie Gyllenhaal did here. There’s little doubt that all these people had a great time making this movie, and that can easily extend to the audience. There was a lot in this movie that I found delightful, including Maggie’s brother Jake playing the part of a classic Hollywood star Frank is obsessed with, but when considering it as a whole, The Bride! is very much less than the sum of its parts. It’s a good time a lot of the time, but not something I’ll be eager to revisit.

Still trying to decide to root for or run from Frank and his monster.

Overall: B-

SCREAM 7

Directing: C
Acting: B
Writing: C
Cinematography: B
Editing: C+

Here’s a pro tip on Scream 7: go in with your expectations in the toilet, and you might still have kind of a good time. That was my experience, anyway. That doesn’t mean the movie is good. In fact it might be the worst one yet. It’s certainly the worst-reviewed of the entire franchise, by a pretty significant margin. A lot of media coverage wants us to know Scream 7 is expected to have a “franchise high” opening weekend box office total, but that spends little time noting that this franchise is thirty years old, and that $40 million in 2026 is the equivalent of little more than $19 million in 1996. So sure, the original Scream earned all of $6.35 million its opening weekend that year, but it eventually earned over $100 million domestically—and then Scream 2 opened to $32.9 million its opening weekend just one year later in 1997, the equivalent of nearly $66.6 million in 2026. Might point is, suddenly the “franchise high” of $40 million thirty years in doesn’t seem all that impressive, does it?

Granted, it’s still more than Scream 7 deserves. I’d say it’s beyond me why people even keep going to see these movies, except that I just did—in fact, Scream 7 is the first film in the entire franchise for which I am writing a full review (I saw the first three in theaters, but only ever saw the other three streaming, nearly all of them well after their theatrical run.) I did ask in my personal blog after seeing the 2022 Scream reboot: How many fucking movies do we need in this franchise, anyway? A good question to keep asking. There were only five at that time.

The Scream franchise is becoming a victim of its own success, the only difference from overlong horror franchises of the eighties and nineties being the protracted time in which it happened. The Friday the 13th franchise had seven films within eight years; A Nightmare on Elm Street within ten. I suppose we could look to the Halloween franchise, which is now has a history of 46 years and counting—that one hit seven films within 20 years, so still 33% shorter than it took Scream movies to get there. Halloween managed an additional six films within the next 24 years. How many Scream movies are we going to have 50 years into its franchise life? How old will Neve Campbell be in 2046, anyway? (She’ll be 73. It’s worth noting that Jamie Lee Curtis was 63 in the 2022 film Halloween Ends.)

Anyway, the first four Scream films all had a key element in common, that being that they were all more fun than anyone could have reasonably expected them to be, especially as they went on. The next three films have had the opposite thing in common: none of them have been as good as they could have, or should have, been. Why don’t the people making these films put all that work and effort into making something original and actually good? We all know the answer to that, of course, and I’ll just mention here that Neve Campbell, who appeared in the 2022 Scream reboot, declined appearing in Scream VI because she felt she was worth more than she was offered for the part. And for Scream 7, she was paid nearly $7 million.

I really felt that both Scream (2022) and Scream VI (2023) were overrated, and in this new era of the franchise there’s not enough of the meta elements that made the early films special. You’d think that reuniting Neve Campbell with Courtney Cox for Scream 7 would infuse the franchise with some new energy, even if it’s mostly about nostalgia—the very thing referenced in the one dialogue exchange this go-round about “the rules” of how these movies are supposed to go. With nothing more along those lines, and nearly none of the large amount of humor that also made the earlier films work so well, one is left feeling a bit like this was all time wasted.

Scream movies are also all murder mysteries, and the one that unfolds in Scream 7 is also maybe the weakest in the franchise. Even this many films in, the story could have worked a lot better simply with better writing. The motive revealed for the killer(s?) here is flimsy at best, putting the overall contrivance of the story into sharper relief.

Is it fun to see Campbell and Cox together again? Sure. There’s even a narrative thread involving AI that allows several actors from previous films make cameo appearances, and the three-person team of writers, which includes director Kevin Williamson (who also wrote the first two and the fourth Scream movies, incidentally), seems pretty self-satisfied about its cleverness. It’s not that clever, guys. AI as narrative trope is so overdone I’m falling asleep just writing about it.

Here is the crucial question: does Scream 7, as a slasher movie, feature fun kills? There’s a couple, including one involving a high wire on a play stage, and arguably the best one involves the handle of a beer tap at a bar. This film is populated with young people who are created only for their predictable slaughter, and if that’s all you’re coming for then I suppose you won’t be disappointed. Some of them are even halfway interesting, although Isabel May, as Tatum, daughter of Campbell’s Sidney character, is unfortunately the least interesting of the lot. One wonders how the Scream 7 that might have been as the third of a reboot franchise with Jenna Ortega in it might have compared. There’s a whole lot of bullshit to the story of how this franchise pivoted back to the Sidney character and now her daughter, but given the quality of the last two films, it’s entirely possible that this Scream 7, bland and narratively redundant as it is, is actually better than a new Ortega film would have been.

One franchise tradition Scream 7 keeps is cold open sequence in which the first kills take place. Early films pointedly cast huge stars to get killed in these scenes; most famously Drew Barrymore in the original and then Jada Pinkett Smith in Scream 2. These movies have long since opened with pretty throwaway actors in the cold open—this time Jimmy Tatro and Michelle Randolph. Who are they? Who cares! We know they’re dead the moment the open the door to original killer Stu Macher’s house, which has been turned into a sort of museum / fun hours of horrors. The open the door with a key found a combination lock box, which made me think at first that this was an AirBnB situation. Given how late at night it is when they arrive, what it turns out to be makes little sense, but then so does just about anything else in this movie upon the slightest critical examination.

That’s the primary issue with Scream 7, really, how it falls apart under the slightest bit of scrutiny. There’s some construction going on at Sidney’s house in the new small town she now lives in, filled with walls covered in translucent tarps. As soon as I saw those I thought: those are Chekhov’s Tarps. I usually don’t try to predict what’s going to happen in movies, and allow myself to be surprised, which means that if I do find myself predicting things, then it’s a stupidly predictable movie. Which is to say, Scream 7 is sort of fun it you completely turn your brain off. I just have this thing where I kind of like using my brain.

Can you guess which Scream movie this is from? Does it matter?

Overall: C+

SEND HELP

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-
Special Effects: B

Here is a movie that works incredibly well even though the special effects are not quite perfect. Why? Because Sam Raimi understands good writing, good pacing, and delivering the goods. Send Help has no pretensions, spends no time trying to convince us something it’s not, and then is so well executed it rises above its knowing, trash-entertainment premise. If Sam Raimi had directed 9 to 5, a movie so old now that anyone under the age of 40 probably doesn’t know what the hell it is (look it up, you won’t regret it), it might have been a lot more like Send Help. Come to think of it 9 to 5 and Send Help would make a spectacular double feature.

And this is quite the comeback: Send Help is Raimi’s best film since Spider-Man 2, which was released in 2004. I lot of people really liked the unique touch he brought to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but I didn’t think it was that great—ditto Oz the Great and Powerful. But with Send Help, we see Sam Raimi going back to his roots. And by that I mean pre-Spider-Man, fun-gory roots.

Everything Send Help does, it does incredibly well. This would be an absolute blast to go in blind, as it begins in an corporate office setting, Linda Liddle (a spectacular Rachel McAdams) being a talented worker with no people skills who is dealing with people taking credit for her work, and Bradley Preston (a superbly cast Dylan O'Brien) coming in to take over his late father’s job as the new boss and bluntly telling Linda why he’s offering his frat buddy the job that had been promised to her. Between Anna Cahill’s costume design and McAdams’s performance, Linda’s “awkward frumpiness” is laid on really thick—these scenes are so deeply and so effectively awkward that they made me want to hide under my chair more than any of the horrors we see later in the movie. And best of all, at this point, unless you’ve seen the trailer, you have no idea what’s coming. Someone going in blind would still think this is, say, an awkward office comedy, something akin to a contemporary take on Office Space, perhaps.

And boy, would you be wrong. Of course, you might also wonder why they handed out 3D glasses when you walk in. At least, I did: the AMC booking said nothing about this being a 3D movie. But when Bradley and Linda are on the same flight to Bangkok and there’s suddenly a spectacular plane crash sequence, the 3D starts to make sense. Except, to be honest, I’m certain I would have enjoyed the sequence—and the entire movie—just as much in 2D, perhaps even more. This is here some of the special effects show their seams, but the entire sequence is so well staged, and critically, features so much gruesome humor, the quality of the effects hardly even matter. It really is true that it’s not the size of the budget, it’s how you use it.

Here are the only other things you need to know. Bradley is a douche at his core and he’s a pompous idiot. Linda is a survivalist who once auditioned for the actual show Survivor, and she has skills both in and out of the office that put Bradley to shame. And what becomes increasingly clear is that they would both go to great lengths to achieve their selfish aims—and by “great” I mean “horrifying.”

It was smart to cast Dylan O'Brien in this part for many reasons, but not least of them is his relatively scrawny physique. He’d still be physically stronger than Linda under normal circumstances, but he also spends much of the story being nursed to health after an injury. This levels the playing field when it comes to brute strength, but Linda has the upper hand in the skills department, while Bradley takes some time to register that he’s not the boss anymore. As the story unfolds, it becomes a battle of wills in which they are constantly upping the ante, to the point where they are beginning to literally tear each other apart.

There’s something special about the graphic violence in Send Help. On one level, it’s cartoonish; on another level, it’s just-enough over the top to become effectively comical. I seem to have a weakness for hilarious violence, of which there is plenty in this movie. And yet, Raimi actually employs it sparingly—as this film masterfully convinces you it has slipped into a pleasant dramedy about how two office adversaries learn to get along under extraordinary circumstances. And then, suddenly, one of them reveals one deception or another, and the other one steps further over the line. And it’s always in ways you don’t see coming, like the gouging an eye, or what appears to be castration. I’m barely scratching the surface here. Just ask that eyeball.

Send Help would have been a blast without it, but we even get the most delightful twist near the end. It’s almost shocking how well everything works in this movie, because it’s such a “trash entertainment” premise. But the writing, by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, truly elevates the material, and the inspired casting choices really make the difference. This is a movie that could have been garbage, and in fact it was given a release date usually given to garbage. But this is what a genuinely good January release can and should be—spectacularly well-executive entertainment. I couldn’t have asked for a better time at the movies.

Help is not coming, Bradley.

Overall: B+

28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B+

Lest we forget, after four movies, there are technically no zombies in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. They’re called the infected. And by this film, they are almost incidental. They’re just a normal part of the landscape, something the skilled survivors on the abandoned island of Great Britain dispatch with dispassionate ease—good guys and bad guys alike.

Although Alex Garland wrote and directed 28 Years Later, released just last June, and returning after having written the original 2002 Danny Boyle film 28 Days Later (I guess we’re all expected to just ignore 28 Weeks Later, released in 2007 and written and directed by neither of them—but still pretty good), Garland once again only wrote the script for The Bone Temple; the director now is Nia DaCosta, who directed Candyman in 2021, giving her horror bona fides, as well as The Marvels in 2023, giving her, let’s say, attempted-blockbuster bona fides. It would seem that The Bone Temple is DaCosta’s most critically acclaimed work to date by a healthy margin, and I would say she’s suited well enough for the project.

I found last year’s 28 Years Later to be compelling but flawed, with very high highs (including some stellar cinematography) and some very low lows, including the coda at the end which I still maintain was dumb as shit, when young Spike (the excellent Aflie Williams) is saved from attacking infected by a group of kids doing parkour off of rocks. The only appropriate response to that was: What the fuck is this shit? DaCosta evidently understands that, and opts not to show the “Fingers” gang doing any parkour in The Bone Temple, thank God.

In the opening scene this time around, Spike is forced into a fight to the death with one of the Fingers, and strikes a lucky blow to a main artery in a young man’s thigh. Aflie Williams is still very good in this film, but isn’t given very much more to do than look understandably terrified, forced into this gang of psychotics as an option barely better than dealing with the infected.

The flashy parts go to the two biggest names in the cast: Ralph Fiennes, who returns as Ian, the iodine-covered doctor who has built a shrine to the dead out of all their many skulls; and Jack O'Connell (previously seen as Remmick in Sinners—this guy knows from unhinged) as “Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal,” the leader of the Fingers and effectively a Satanist cult leader. Personally, I prefer the playful Satanists who use freedom of religion laws to expose Christian hypocrisy, but those guys wouldn’t fit in a 28 movie. This is horror, after all. We need at least one scene in which multiple victims are skinned alive just for the fun of it.

O’Connell really digs into a meaty part as a truly horrifying, human villain; the flip side of this coin is Fiennes, who really goes for it as Dr. Ian Kelson, taking the character’s nuttiness a step or two further than he did in the last film. It’s nice to see really talented actors having fun, especially when we get a subtle but unmistakable This Is Spinal Tap reference.

That said, last year’s 28 Years Later spent a whole lot more time on effective world building, placing us squarely in a place abandoned to these horrors for three decades, but with indicators of how life has moved on around the rest of the world, as well as some fascinating evolutionary changes to the infected. It had some truly funny moments that are noticeably absent here; The Bone Temple leans much harder into the gory-horror aspect of the storytelling of these movies. That doesn’t make it any worse, per se; I just prefer a nice sprinkling of humor. Still, I would have preferred a bit more of the world building as well, and this film sticks mostly to how horrible some of the survivors are—a well-worn idea that the original 28 Days Later already presented with far greater finesse.

We do once again get Chi Lewis-Parry with a giant prosthetic schlong as an “alfa infected,” which you might like to know if you’re into that sort of thing. We get no more evolutionary changes of the infected, but instead Dr. Ian Kelson makes some advances in the possibility of treatment—a concurrent narrative thread with Spike’s harrowing experience with the Fingers, through roughly the first half of the film.

The Bone Temple is also beautifully shot, though—not quite as stunningly as some of the sequences in 28 Years Later, but close. Cinematographer Sean Bobbit treats us to several fantastically composed overhead shots of Ian’s Bone Temple, particularly after he lights it up for a climactic sequence that is delightfully weird and features Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast.” The story concludes in this setting, with multiple sudden double-crosses that are pretty exciting, and in the context of a horror film like this, deeply satisfying.

The Bone Temple does have its own coda, and although it clearly sets up the next film (not likely to be released for a few years, as this one is not yet even in production), I feel fairly neutral about it, the surprising cameo it features notwithstanding. At the very least, it’s far better than the coda to 28 Years Later, which was so dumb it really dragged down an otherwise pretty great experience overall. In the end, albeit for different reasons, I feel the same about this movie as I did about the last one: a horror movie whose memorable performances and great cinematography don’t quite elevate it from being simply a solid B movie.

Take me to church!

Overall: B

DUST BUNNY

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B

Why does nobody know about this movie? This is a movie that deserves to be known, and I can’t even remember where I heard about it. If I ever saw a trailer, it was only once. Dust Bunny opened this last weekend on 402 theater screens and it made . . . $341,283. It was #17 its opening weekend. To be a little fair, it made an average of $848 per screen (and if we average $15 per ticket that’s about 57 tickets per screening). I can tell you this much: at the showing I just went to, I was one of three people in the theater. It’s hard not to conclude that someone in the marketing department at Roadside Attractions really dropped the ball.

Granted, Dust Bunny, a dark and twisted fantasty-action-monster movie, is not the kind of movie people pack theaters to see anymore. I actually took a public transit ride, on both a light rail train and a bus, for nearly an hour to a suburban theater to see it—and I found it to be completely worth the effort. I doubt I could find another person who would feel the same. Perhaps a fair number of people will soon discover it on a streamer. I can only hope. I’m already eager to introduce it to people I’m sure will have never heard of it.

This is a pretty impressive feature film debut by writer-director Bryan Fuller, who up to now made a long career out of writing and producing television shows, from Pushing Daisies to Hannbial, not to mention no fewer than four different Star Trek series over the past three decades. Dust Bunny stars Mads Mikkelsen, who played Hannibal Lecter in the aforementioned Hannbal series. This is the one major involvement in Fuller’s past career that has a clear connection to Dust Bunny, which is a lot like a cross between Where the Wild Things Are and Kill Bill.

To be fair, I struggle to pinpoint who exactly the target audience is for Dust Bunny, unless you count—me. I am exactly the target audience for Dust Bunny, which I found utterly delightful. Its playful use of a child’s wild imagination crossed with real-world violence is very much my jam. It’s a fantasy movie, a monster movie, and an action movie all rolled up into one. It has a sensibility largely like a kids’ fantasy, with a little girl named Aurora (a wonderful Sophie Sloan) at its center. Mikkelsen plays the unnamed neighbor hitman who Aurora hires to kill the monster under her bed, who she believes ate her parents.

In the opening sequence, we see a tuft of dust floating through the air, past a city skyline that is clearly a mashup of London and New York, and into an apartment window. The camera follows it as it wafts through the apartment, picking up more tufts, until it becomes a little bunny, hiding under Aurora’s bed. Aurora is terrified, and over the course of the film, the bunny grows into a monster that lives under the floorboards of her room. The angled boards tip up in very cool ways as the dust bunny eventually breaks through the floors to eat its victims—and, spoiler alert, there are many victims.

Several scenes go by before it becomes even halfway clear what the hell is going on, but I was locked in from the first frame, with the darkly colorful production design and swooping camera movements, almost like the movie Hugo had gone through some kind of underworld filter. Aurora follows the hitman through the city, observing him from rooftops as he appears to slay a dragon—something he later insists was a group of men. Many scenes follow in which Aurora insists there is a real monster under the floor, and the hitman insists she just thinks that’s what she saw but there have been dangerous men in her apartment. Dust Bunny never wants to make clear which thing is actually going on, although it does eventually lean hard on one side, at which point I’ll admit that if it was going for metaphor, it kind of lacks clarity on that front.

But I can hardly be bothered to care, I had such a good time with this movie, from start to finish. I haven’t even mentioned Sigourney Weaver yet, who shows up as an associate of our hitman, evidently a longtime mentor, perhaps something with a deeper connection. Weaver is 76 years old now, and after seeing her clearly de-aged in the Avatar movies, it’s refreshing to see her actually looking her age. Her Laverne in Dust Bunny is both subtly and delightfully villainous; two characters get key moments in this movie involving stiletto heels, but Laverne’s hybrid pistol-heels are my favorite. There are also well-played smaller parts by The Woman King’s Sheila Atim and The Suicide Squad’s own Polka-Dot Man, David Dastmalchian.

There’s a peculiarness to the tone of Dust Bunny that really speaks to me, such as the moment we are introduced to Laverne, she suddenly opens her mouth wide in an almost grotesque way, explaining that she needs to do it in order to un-clench her jaw. Laverne spends the entire movie talking about how Aurora needs to be killed, because she’s seen the hitman’s face, and other killers are apparently after her. Eventually we learn that Aurora is a foster child now in her third family; this, I guess, makes it easier to take that who we initially assumed were her parents disappear from the movie after only a couple of scenes. Mikkelsen’s hitman has taken a liking to Aurora, which Laverne deduces is his attempt at working through his own childhood trauma.

The whole London/New York vibe is hard to pin down given that all the characters speak with American accents, save for the hitman, who speaks with Mikkelsen’s Danish accent—something quite directly looped into a running joke about his inability to pronounce “Aurora” correctly. Clearly, Dust Bunny exists out of time and place, lending itself to the fantasy element it leans hard into. As for why the monster under Aurora’s bed is a giant bunny, I couldn’t tell you—except that it rings true as a creation of a child’s imagination. Aurora admits, after all, that she wished for the monster, and I guess she got more than she bargained for out of it. There is a key moment when the hitman says, “He’s your monster, and you’re going to have to live with it.” Aurora says she wished for the hitman as well, though she catches his attention by offering him money, the source of which I won’t spoil here. Suffice it to say that Aurora proves to be a pretty effective badass in her own right. This is a kid who not only knows where the bodies are buried but actively helps dispose of them. What more do you want?

Overall: B+

FRANKENSTEIN

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Special Effects: C-

We need to start by discussing how terribly miscast Jacob Elordi is as “The Creature” in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. Not because he’s bad—he’s actually a talented actor. But, and stay with me here, because he’s too hot. I’m not sure what del Toro was thinking. Did he think that just because Elordi is 6’5”, that would make him a frightening and imposing figure? Hardly. He’s far too youthful, too healthy looking, too strapping—and more than anything, too thin. This movie should have been called Frankentwink.

Indeed, once The Creature is brought to life, by this story’s namesake, Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), we are treated to a memorably large number of shots of Hot Creature in little more than what looks like a sort of mummy-loincloth. I found this distracting enough to hope there is a costume design featurette somewhere called “Frankenstein’s Bulge.”

If you have been living under a rock for the past 207 years and don’t know this, The Creature is made up of the body parts of many different cadavers, assembled into a new being. Whenever injured, his wounds heal with magical swiftness—in this film it’s nearly instant, as opposed to the weeks it takes in Mary Shelley’s original 1818 novel. So, I suppose we’re not meant to think of his flesh as rotting. The Creature is not a zombie. He just can’t die. I still can’t imagine he smells great. He’s too hot in this movie for that to matter, Elordi’s whole body made up to look unsettlingly like an assemblage of disparate body parts. Except that Dr. Frankenstein finds all these different body parts from recently killed soldiers in battle. How did he get them all so perfectly proportioned?

Frankenstein does direct his assistance in the search to find larger bodies, “for scale.” Perhaps you could argue that most such men would indeed be young. This is a change from the novel, in which the body parts are found in charnel houses, slaughterhouses, and graves. I just keep thinking about the idea of The Creature being terrifying. You’d expect such a being to be both tall and thick. I saw Jacob Elordi’s Creature character and I just wanted him to spoon me.

He does have superhuman strength, so I guess I’d have to concede that can be scary, even if it’s an adorable 6’5” 28-year-old. Del Toro is far too indulgent with a lot of these details in this adaptation, however—at one point, The Creature single-handedly frees a dutch sailing ship from the clutches of arctic ice.

And this is where we must move on to the other marks against del Toro’s Frankenstein—namely, how indulgent it is, but also its truly terrible special effects. It does have impressively detailed period production design, but it’s also packed with truly subpar CGI. Fire in particular looks terrible in this movie, whether it’s from a giant explosion or just flames on candles. It practically looks animated. This film had a budget of $120 million; did they spend it only on production design and cast salaries?

It’s also too long, clocking in at two and a half hours. Ten minutes of this are the end credits; another ten are the “Prelude” We otherwise get “Part 1,” which lasts about 80 minutes and is narrated by Dr. Frankenstein; “Part 2” makes up the remaining 49 minutes and is narrated by The Creature. Jacob Elordi’s distracting hotness aside, The Creature’s section is by far the most compelling, as written by del Toro himself in his singlehanded script adaptation. I just wish it wasn’t so often bogged down by such bad special effects, as in one scene in which The Creature is attacked by a pack of wolves who might as well have been pixelated, they are so obviously not real. What the hell are we watching here, The Twilight Saga: New Moon?

I don’t know why it’s so hard for anyone to make a decent modern cinematic adaptation of Frankenstein. Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is so awful that I have never been able to tolerate more than half of it before turning it off to end my misery. To Guillermo del Toro’s credit, this 2025 Frankenstein is far better than that, but that bar is in the basement. At least I was still relatively entertained by this movie, my many complaints about it notwithstanding. Some trimming, particularly of the overlong Part 1 from Dr. Frankenstein’s perspective, would have improved it. I did like that, when the perspective switches, it still continues The Creature’s story right where Dr. Frankenstein’s left off, rather than rehashing anything we’ve already seen.

This film does waste some other major talent, though. Christoph Waltz plays Harlander, Dr. Frankenstein’s benefactor, but he’s just never a very compelling character. Mia Goth is cast as Elizabeth, Harlander’s niece who is also engaged to Dr. Frankenstein’s younger brother William (Felix Kammerer), but all she ever does is dote over The Creature as the only character who ever has any fully informed empathy for him. Goth has made a career of playing fantastic freaks, and this character is just too normal for her. We even get Charles Dance, gone after just a few scenes as Victor and William’s authoritarian father; and Lars Mikkelsen (Mads’s brother) as the captain of the aforementioned Dutch ship. The most interesting of these older character actors in the film is David Bradley (best known as Argust Filch in the Harry Potter films), as the blind man who treats The Creature with kindness and no judgment because he cannot see him.

Finally, and this is where I get a little more nitpicky, there are the lapses in logic, such as when The Creature, in pursuit of revenge against Dr. Frankenstein, allows a stick of dynamite to blow up in his hands. The resulting explosion is huge, the shockwave alone hurling Dr. Frankenstein’s body like a rag doll, and yet The Creature remains standing, unbroken. This would not have at least dismembered him? I suppose I can’t expect a story that ignores science to pay attention to simple physics.

Frankenstein is now streaming on Netflix, and there are multiple reasons why this is a huge part of what kept the film from realizing the potential it clearly had. Netflix has a reputation for allowing auteurs to realize their full vision, and on the one hand that is to be commended. On the other hand, it also means that filmmakers don’t get any notes when maybe they needed some. Had this film gotten a full theatrical release, it might just have gotten some much-needed guardrails. Would The Creature still have been played by Jacob Elordi? Probably, just because he’s a hot young star. The Creature should be a genuinely grotesque being with heart, though—not a young hunk cosplaying as a loinclothed monster like some dude at the West Hollywood Halloween parade. Frankenstein’s monster should elicit pity, not lechery.

Choke me Frankendaddy

Overall: B-

THE LONG WALK

Directing: C+
Acting: B+
Writing: C
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

Stephen King wrote the novel The Long Walk when he was 19 years old. It was the first one he ever wrote, though not the first to be published (that was Carrie, published when he was 27). That would place the writing of The Long Walk during King’s college years in the late 1960s, during the peak of the Vietnam War—for which reviewers later interpreted this novel as being a metaphor.

Now, nearly 60 years after it was written and 46 years after it was first published, The Long Walk gets its first-ever film adaptation, starring Cooper Hoffman (the late Philip Seymour’s son), David Jonsson, Charlie Plummer, Mark Hamill, and more. I don’t know if Stephen King is just trying to cash in on as many film adaptations as possible or what, but I can’t say this film works all that well as a metaphor for much of anything, much less the Vietnam War, which has largely passed out of an active place in the American cultural consciousness. We have young adults now with no memory of 9/11.

The Long Walk is getting some rave reviews, and I can’t quite understand why. It has strong performances and is well shot, so it kept my attention, but I still rather found it lacking. The story is set 19 years after a war has left the United States in economic dire states and a diminished place in the world. I suppose it could be argued that it doesn’t matter, but the story as presented here tells us nothing else about why the war happened or how our society got to a place where there is an annual marathon with one “winner” from each state who must walk through a desolate rural America, always at least at 3 miles per hour on penalty of execution after three warnings, until only one of them is left.

This is where even the Vietnam War “metaphor” idea falls apart, because these young men volunteer for this opportunity—they aren’t drafted. The winner is granted one wish as well as riches beyond their wildest dreams, and much is made of the country being so economically depressed that everyone they know is eager to volunteer out of desperation. But that’s not exactly the same thing, is it? Average young men didn’t enlist for the Vietnam War out of desperation; they were forced into it by the draft.

“The Long Walk” is indeed televised for the country, and Mark Hamill as “The Major” mentions how production picks up all around the country each year after the Walk. This brings in a dark sort of televised entertainment into the premise, which is both similar to and pre-dates the likes of Kōshun Takami’s Battle Royale (published 1999) or Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (published 2008)—or indeed even Stephen King’s own The Running Man (published 1982), which itself is getting a second film adaption released later this fall, starring Glenn Powell (the 1987 adaptation starred Arnold Schwarzenegger).

The Running Man looks to be far more fun than The Long Walk, which leaves me still looking forward to it, albeit with a cautious optimism. At least that one promises exciting action set pieces, of which The Long Walk has none: my companion at The Long Walk today noted that it was the most violent movie she had ever seen with no action in it. It’s just a bunch of young men either walking, or, when they get too tired or get injured so they can’t keep the pace, getting shot. And you should get fair warning here: the kills in this movie are pretty gruesome, especially the first one, which shows a bullet tearing through a guy’s face. In many of the rest of the examples, you see bits flying out the other side of their head when they get shot. There’s quite a bit of this, but it’s not the only type of gross thing you’ll see: I’ll just say that one guy winds up with some gastrointestinal trouble, and we get a direct look at the results. I can only hope that I go with more dignity when I die.

But, basically, all these guys sign up for a 98% chance of an ignominious death. With there being 50 contestants of “The Long Walk,” I found myself running nerdy numbers in my head. For instance: if we assume 10% of the population is queer, then at least 5 of these guys should have been queer, but we don’t get a single gay character—a common issue with Stephen King’s vastly prolific writing, in which nearly everyone is cisgender and straight. Instead, we get a somewhat shocking amount of homophobic banter between these young men. I can’t figure out if JT Mollner, who adapted King’s novel into this screenplay, was just staying true to how King represented young men in the sixties, or if we are meant to rationalize this detail as the inevitable backsliding of social mores in a country that has become far-right authoritarian. The problem is that The Long Walk as a film provides no such clarity, so we’re just left to take the way these guys talk to each other at face value.

We don’t even get backstory on any individual characters. The closest is Raymond Garraty (Hoffman), the lead character, whose letter congratulating him on winning this “lottery” to represent his state serves as the opening title card. We see his mother (Judy Greer) driving him to the meeting point and breaking down when they say goodbye, and later we get the single real flashback regarding what was the ultimate fate of Garrett’s father—who defied national law by sharing old music and pop culture that is now banned with his son. That’s the extent of it with Garraty, and none of the other 49 contestants get even that treatment—not even Peter McVries (Jonsson, who was very impressive as the synthetic, Andy, in Alien: Romulus), who is eventually revealed to be the co-lead of the film.

Garraty reveals a plan to avenge his father, which prompts some wise advice from McVries: “Vengeance doesn’t help.” In the end, this is a big part of what makes how The Long Walk ends—very differently from the novel, to be clear—so baffling. It’s as though writer JT Mollner, and director Francis Lawrence, can’t decide what they’re trying to say. The Long Walk is clearly designed to be unsettling, and it very much works on that front. But, to what end? The character left standing at the end makes a truly momentous choice that is antithetical to what had previously seemed to be his own wisdom, and then walks off into the night in an environment that suddenly changes in a way that makes no practical sense. Are we supposed to take this at face value, or is this a fantasy in a character’s head? Again: this movie doesn’t seem to know. It would be one thing if The Long Walk were being provocatively ambiguous, but it feels more like it just doesn’t quite know what it’s going for. To that end, I can tell you what you should be going for: a better movie.

Are we there yet?

Overall: B-

WEAPONS

Directing: A-
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A+

Weapons is a tricky one, because its success relies so heavily on how little you know going in. How much can I tell you about it, then? About as much as the setup is revealed in the trailer: all but one student in a single third-grade class suddenly run out of their homes at the same time in the middle of the night, run out into the darkness, and no one has any idea where they went. The parents of these students are deeply suspicious of the class teacher, Justine (Julia Garner, perfectly cast), for little reason other than it’s the only thing they have to hold onto, the closest thing to a shred of sense. She is seemingly the only thing all these kids have in common.

I suppose you could argue that it’s strange this community is not equally suspicious of Alex (an exceedingly well-directed Cary Christopher), as he is just as much what these kids have in common as Julia is: he’s from their class, and he’s the only one that didn’t run out into the night. Of course, adults are far more likely to suspect other adults than a child, and while they might also have been suspicious of Alex’s parents, those two are . . . let’s say: incapacitated.

Such is the central mystery of Weapons, and one that remains a mystery for quite a long time in this movie: what made these children run away, and where did they go?

This is perhaps the perfect time to mention that Weapons was written and directed by Zach Creggor, the filmmaker behind the 2022 surprise hit Barbarian, which established him as a bold new voice in cinema. What Weapons proves is that he is far from a one-hit wonder. This is a movie that does everything right. It establishes a mystery, then unravels it before out eyes without ever once telegraphing what comes next. It doesn’t have the wild tonal shifts of Barbarian (one of the many things that made that movie such a delight), but it does provide a fair amount of laughs—just don’t expect them to come too soon. Creggor wants to put you through the paces of nervous tension first.

Horror has never been my favorite genre, but horror with a healthy dose of humor gets me a step closer. Weapons has been likened to a cross between Magnolia and Hereditary, which does reveal a little bit, in an abstract way: we get several chapters, each titled the name of the character being focused on, the first being the aforementioned Justine. Another is Alex, and yet another is Archer (Josh Brolin), a parent of one of the missing children. There’s also Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a local cop; and James (Austin Abrams), a homeless addict who is given far more dimension than such a character is typically given in any movie, let alone a horror movie. Eventually we start to see how the narratives of all these characters intersect, which is where the Magnolia comparison comes in. The broader vibe otherwise can be inferred.

There is no allegory or metaphor to be found here; Weapons is simply a magnificently structured and cleverly written horror story, the kind that makes you remember how exhilarating it can be to go to the movies—especially with a crowd of people. I will admit I spent a lot of time with my hands over my face, and Creggor does employ several well-placed jump scares—something I usually hate. I have some mixed feelings about the multiple dream sequences, and in one of them the apparition of a giant machine gun in the sky feels a little on the nose (that sounds like something close to a spoiler, but believe me, it isn’t). Weapons clocks in at two hours and eight minutes, but to say there isn’t a dull moment is an understatement.

When it comes to the comparison to Hereditary, what I would clarify here is that Hereditary was much more unsettling than Weapons, which still succeeds at it to a degree. Weapons is far more thrilling, though, especially one it takes a decisive turn in the final act—which is where most of the humor also comes along. It’s also an incredible jolt of energy in a story that was already crackling, but it pivots from suspense to a beautifully executed sort of chaos.

Most critically, Zach Cregger shows admirable restraint. The final-act chaos is over just when you think you want more, but in a fully satisfying way. Nothing gets over-explained, or indeed in many ways explained at all. Amy Madigan suddenly shows up, and I won’t dare spoil in what capacity—only that she proves to be the wildest character of all. But whether it’s her or any of the other ensemble cast, they all feel like authentic people with dimension, even when they make you giggle (there’s one moment when Josh Broken delivers a perfectly executed “What the fuck!”).

I haven’t yet mentioned Benedict Wong as the school principal, Andrew, who also gets his own chapter. We don’t even realize for a while that he plays a gay man, and I was sort of taken with the scene in which he is grocery shopping with his partner, simultaneously trying to talk down a paranoid Justine on the phone while pointing at which cereal he prefers. I loved that Wong played his part straight (so to speak), while his partner is played by Clayton Farris with a perfect touch of effeminacy. The fates of both these characters is pretty wild in the end, but in neither case does it have anything to do with their sexuality. They are simply among a great many regular people caught in extraordinary circumstances.

I mean, they’re just caught in a movie, to be fair—but, in the best way. Weapons is not something you will soon forget, and will want to talk about at length, so long as it’s with someone else who has also seen it. No spoilers! Movies like this are why we love cinema.

Run, don’t walk, to the cinema to see this movie!

Overall: A-