Self-analyzing cinema, Scream without the thrills. Kids in the Hall sense of humor with stunt-cast harbinger Kevin McDonald. “There is a hole at the bottom of the lake where the movies come from.” Sleepaway Camp and Friday the 13th both exist within this movie, they’re both mentioned, but they’re also ripped off (Friday sequel titles, Sleepaway closing shot) by the fake Miasma franchise. The middle quarter of this is just Camp Miasma Part 1, featuring a long-take massacre to Counting Crows’ A Long December, which has never felt longer: digital kills combined with film texture and VHS love (return of the Videodrome flesh slot from TV Glow). I liked it, of course – the fantasy of going inside your favorite horror franchise to make out with Gillian Anderson.
Tag: 2020s
Prey (2022, Dan Trachtenberg)
Extreme amount of leveling-up here. She fights a lion, fights a bear, invents a new way to throw an axe, invents a grappling hook to save herself from quickswamp, learns from everyone else’s mistakes, masters her own weapons, fights French trappers, learns the white man’s weapons, learns the alien’s weapons, then defeats the alien using all these tools and skills.
Amber Midthunder is from X-Men spinoff Legion, where she shares a body with Bill Irwin. Trachtenberg is good – he made my favorite Black Mirror, Cloverfield, and now Predator. I haven’t seen the original in 35 years and still caught a couple of direct callbacks – one cool and one irksome. People online complain about the CG animals, and I’m a big hater of those but didn’t mind it here – it’s very high-energy, and how else is an actor gonna fight a lion?
Obsession (2025, Curry Barker)
First the Spielberg and now this: the summer movies love to reference The Rehearsal. It’s never subtle either – our guy is delivering his romantic confession to a stranger, practicing to unleash the real thing on his bar trivia friend. The point is to set up how hopelessly awkward he is, so terribly bad at verbal communication (and decisions in general) that he can barely make a phone call or talk to his actual friends, so when things get uncomfortably supernaturally murdery, he’s even worse. The movie gets in a couple of good jokes about this, but unfortunately it’s a pretty dialogue-heavy story and we’re stuck with him for the endurance. Hopefully the kids will get over their love of terrible awkwardness and we can swing back to coherence.
Should Obsession 2 be Stick-and-Stacks or ChromaScope?
Great performance by Inde Navarrette, the bar trivia friend who becomes a horrifyingly clingy girlfriend after Bar Trivia Bear makes a wish that she’d love him. Apparently the real Inde is locked away in some hell dimension, replaced by the singlemindedly obsessed Girlfriend Inde until one of them dies. I noted the early setup of “I’ve got pills that’ll kill you” and “I know where dad keeps his gun” sidelined for 80 minutes, until they become Bear’s prime suicide options. The wishing thing is great, folding the supernatural into the everyday as smoothly as Weapons did. Best friends/casualties include the cute smart girl who actually likes him, and his doofy bestie Cooper – fortunately only young people get butchered, so Andy Richter is left alone.
Apparently there was much discourse, and most people (Sicinski, Marsh) disliked it, but my most trustworthy horror guy Adam Nayman said it was pretty good, so I watched it on the exercise bike, and it was pretty good.
Time and Water (2026, Sara Dosa)
Icelandic writer digresses about the loss of glaciers in the world, tells us his parents’ life story, and you can tell he’s self-satisfied about some plaque he wrote about a particular extinct glacier since they take their time building up to it. Pretty good as an essay film, pretty funny that Dosa followed her fire movie with an ice movie, and ultimately the incredible glacier photography put this over the top.
The Furious (2025, Kenji Tanigaki)
Handyman’s daughter is kidnapped, the police are useless and hostile and corrupt, deciding to investigate him instead of the crime. Fortunately, the handyman is ballsy and badass, tracks down the baddies, crashes into their clubs and warehouses and makes a mess of their henchmen. He runs into a reporter guy whose wife is also missing and they team up against various child trafficker tough guys, including Mad Dog from The Raid as a cop-killing bowman, and the rich Heir Trafficker who accidentally murders his own pregnant bride in the movie’s most digital-bloody scene.
There’s a lot of cool fighting but it felt more ridiculous than thrilling at the end – I wonder if Baby Assassins is better. From the director of Enter the Fat Dragon, with Sub-Zero as the journalist, also featuring one of the buttplug guys from Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Backrooms (2026, Kane Parsons)
Chiwetel is divorced and depressed, living in his discount furniture shop, until he discovers a world beneath the world, with layers and layers of increasingly corrupted copies of the ground floor, like Us squared. Text is reversed or mutated, everything’s clipping into the walls, people have the wrong number of eyes, like a discount AI office park. Chiwetel gets his employees involved in documenting and mapping (leading to too much period-accurate VHS footage), then they disappear in there.
Every horror movie needs a couple of dummies to kill off. These two are TV stars from Shrinking (also about a therapist) and the Jodie Foster season of True Detective:
Anyone who has played dungeon games on Apple II knows how to deal with the backrooms:
Cut to the perspective of his therapist Renate, who makes a solo wellness check and manages to find Chiwetel, who is thriving in the backrooms. But she should’ve realized from the crayon wall drawings that her patient had gone ’round the bend, and he should’ve realized that the movie’s gonna become a therapy-backstory drama for a while. He tries to escape this by kidnapping her and showing her around to his new (edible) friends.
Finally we get back to proper horror when Carl is eaten by Giant Pirate Carl, who chases the therapist through ever more messed-up environments, until her apparent rescue by some white guys. We’ve seen these guys before, running their own backrooms explorations, setting up A/V equipment and apparently alarm-activated canisters of gas-that-does-nothing. Movie ends with her being interrogated by Phil, who does not imply that she’ll be safe or released, reminding me of the “rescue” at the end of 28 Years Later.
The Odyssey (2026, Christopher Nolan)
Real animals in this one, and oh that cyclops design, that makes up for a lot. And there’s a lot to make up for: three hours of battle scenes and whinging about the downfall of respectful society. Bunch of excellent actors and the Nolan bombast and the seat-rattling IMAX beat us into submission. MVPs: Cyclops, Travis Scott, the murderous giants, Elliot Page, Leguizamo, Pattinson, Agamemnon’s armor, Samantha Morton, the raven.
Power Ballad (2026, John Carney)
I was already a sucker for this movie, another “song can save your life” narrative from Carney with winning actors and actually good songs and a cute Glen Hansard tribute, then Glen died suddenly, and now I’m ready to declare this the most important film of the year. The Odyssey wasn’t any better!
Wedding band frontman Paul Rudd has a good relationship with his wife(!) and daughter(!) until he gets depressed and obsessed after his one-night bromance with a Jonas brother ends with Nick stealing Paul’s song and making it a massive hit. On the long road to predictable redemption we get to spend time with Rudd, his buddy Peter McDonald (the film’s cowriter giving himself a plum role), and Jack Reynor as the music producer villain.
The Drama (2026, Kristoffer Borgli)
Series of Bad Decisions in the lead-up to Zendaya-Pattinson wedding. Maid of honor Alana Haim does not forgive Z for claiming to have plotted mass murder in her bullied teen years. Alana’s man Mamoudou Athie (Kinds of Kindness) fails to make peace, and Rob starts to spiral, as the accusations (and vomit) fly and people say more things they can’t take back, either stupidly or drunkenly. Pretty decent writing and performances, for every scene where an actor is impressive there’s another where they’re flailing. Borgli’s follow-up to that one where everyone dreams of Nic Cage.