by ·Comments Off on Hokum (2026, Damian McCarthy)

Movie’s lesson is to bring a cutting tool wherever you go, and that despite The Monkey we should continue making Adam Scott horror movies. McCarthy’s Oddity was a slow burn with a delicious ending, he follows it up with a mostly fun movie with a bum ending, oh well.

Adam is an ornery writer staying at a rural hotel to scatter his parents’ ashes and/or finish his dreary conquistador novel and/or commit suicide. When he gets out of the hospital the hotel is closing for the season, the girl who’d rescued him is missing, and everyone suspects Psilocybin Jerry (David Wilmot of every Irish movie, also sinister boss of Little Joe) of kidnapping her but nobody can find Jerry (Adam strolls up to Jerry’s van and there he is).

I got a couple guys named Fergal and Mal mixed up, but obviously if one character is named Mal he’s the killer. Later on Mal has stuffed the girl in a dumbwaiter, shot Jerry with a crossbow and locked Adam in the burning hotel, all of which is complicated by ghosts in the honeymoon suite and witches in the cellar. Not only is the attempted real-world explanation of Adam’s spooky ordeals bad (he was drugged all along), they also try to make us care about the amended ending of his novel.

by ·Comments Off on Oddity (2024, Damian McCarthy)

My second movie this week where someone runs a cursed antique shop – in this case it’s the blind sister of “Brian May” Ted’s murdered wife (Carolyn Bracken, playing both sisters, was my mother in You Are Not My Mother). On the anniversary of her sister’s death, Blind Darcy comes over bearing cursed antiques for the husband and his new hotgirl (“Do I look stupid?” “I have no idea what you look like. You sound stupid.”) Backstory ensues, the argument of whether Asylum Olin with weird eyes (who also had weird eyes in The Northman) or Asylum Ivan (The Hole in the Ground) actually did the murder is academic, since the husband definitely ordered it. The hotgirl and blind sister both die, the husband can’t help himself from ringing the little bell he was gifted, leading to the best final shot of the season.