by ·Comments Off on Terrifier 3 (2024, Damien Leone)

“a Phil Falcone production” – not the disgraced hedge fund billionaire, but the auteur of a PTSD army drama with Tom Sizemore, and defendant of finance disputes over the first movie in this series. Home-invader Santa carrying an axe is nothing new. “Five years prior” cop finds a decapitated clown in abandoned building, it kills him and takes his head, so the backstory is… Art in various forms of headlessness and disrepair tears some people apart to repair himself?

Teen Vic Secret Angel Sienna is still alive from part two, and continuity is a drag. Her uncle Greg (a Goldthwait regular) takes her home to Aunt Jess (Crazy Joe’s wife in The Irishman) and admiring younger cousin Gabby (who has only ever been in Christmas movies, incl this one). Nerd boy Jonathan is also still alive, growing into a not-great actor. But it barely matters – the dialogue is Hallmark-caliber and the production is at “casting Clint Howard” sequel level, following in the footsteps of The Dentist 2, Silent Night Deadly Night 4, Leprechaun 2, and 3 From Hell.

I don’t like that the girl-clown-demon talks, or that the final scene reveals Sienna’s Wolverine healing ability. Not sure how I feel about Art killing a podcaster with a chainsaw while a novelty “Terrifier Christmas” song plays. I’m fine with the cute niece falling into hell despite a really terrible plan to save her.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 35: SHOCKtober 2026

Evil Dead Burn (2026, Sébastien Vanicek)

Oh right, it’s the New French Extremism sequel, which is actually none of those things. Lot of severed body parts lying around as the girl kills a final zombie with a lawn tool then sets the place ablaze. Nice photography when the girl stands still and there are no CG beasties around, but any action is shot and/or edited like shit. I think her trauma is speaking to her in the form of a crumbling demonified husband who wants to get her holy dagger. The director made Infested (which has the same poster as this movie!) and the girl was a lead in Climax.

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Night Swim (2024, Bryce McGuire)

Someone is being chased by a demonified abusive family member, is this the same movie? Another girl is rescuing a kid from their ghost-filled lake-sized swimming pool. They attack Wyatt Russell with a bat and he simply barfs out his demon, then sacrificially swims back into the ghost pool to save them all. Mom was Kerry Condon from The Banshees of Inisherin, the director looks like Eli Cash in his promo shot.

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Primate (2025, Johannes Roberts)

The latest monkey rampage movie. Girl is being beaten up by the monkey while her deaf dad arrives home, oblivious. Eventually two girls and the dad are all getting beaten up at once in their broken-glass house by the monkey, who appears to be a guy in a fursuit as often as he’s a CG beastie. Doesn’t look like there’ll be a Primate 2 unless whatever substance turned this monkey into such an asshole is still out there, somewhere. I’m not even mad about this one, it looks like a fine monkey movie. The director made the pretty good buried-alive segment of V/H/S/99, a fake Resident Evil, and a couple shark attack pictures.

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M3GAN 2.0 (2025, Gerard Johnstone)

Allison Williams is wearing a powersuit in psychic contact with her own robot, as the new hyper-evil military robot Amelia murders tech boss Christian. The kid Katy is back, with a good bit that I thought would be a RoboCop reference but was actually a Steven Seagal joke. Gerard gets to do his signature camera-cartwheel during the robot battle, which features all the best cyber sound effects and cheesy 90s good-vs-evil cyborg stuff, before all robots are destroyed by an EMP blast. Then it ends with a congressional hearing about the future of AI, boo.

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The Menu (2022, Mark Mylod)

Anya is tormenting gourmet chef Ralph by asking him to make a basic cheeseburger then taking it to-go and tipping a penny. I forget what this movie was about, but I assumed cannibalism was involved? It seems kinda boring. But hey, John Leguizamo is here. As Anya speedboats away, the rest of the customers and staff turn out to be a death cult, suicide-by-smore. The director worked on Da Ali G Show, which is making a comeback.

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Perpetrator (2023, Jennifer Reeder)

I’ve seen a couple of Reeder’s shorts but I’ve heard the turn to genre features has been rocky, let’s see. Mom and kid are rehashing their traumas, whispering. Then at a school assembly, more traumas get rehashed, crying. A couple people spontaneously bleed, the whole auditorium starts swearing in unison, then the mom and kid rip some white guy’s heart out. Whatever was happening here, at least it’s a unique take.

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Humane (2024, Caitlin Cronenberg)

Girl is badly cut and the family tries to do that movie thing of searing the wound shut with a red-hot kitchen implement, but it doesn’t work. Cops arrive to round everyone up. Head police/company guy Enrico Colantoni (Stigmata) isn’t very careful and gets captured by the medical experiment family then killed by BlackBerry inventor Jay Baruchel. I don’t mind when battered bleeding victims take bloody revenge on their tormenters at the end of a movie, but apparently that’s not what this is, and they’ve been attacking each other?

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AGGRO DR1FT (2023, Harmony Korine)

“I smell the blood of a dead man,” growls the villain. “Let’s do this!” This movie has a plot and characters, it’s not just vibes? The dialogue and action are garbage beneath the really unique visuals, so they should’ve stuck with vibes. Watching this on mute over a mix of Zorn music would help, but not enough. The regretfully violent good guy kills the annoyingly violent bad guy, both of them over-narrating, then a dwarf machete gang plays catch with the baddie’s head. I think the repetitive and terrible dialogue might be a gag, but I haven’t seen a more tedious last ten minutes since Source Code. The hero was in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and Travis Scott fortunately went on to better things.

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Baby Invasion (2024, Harmony Korine)

This one’s in twitch livestream mode, the Burial music glitchy and low. Someone’s pissing on a boat. The babies say “let’s go” and “let’s roll” but not “let’s do this.” It’s all onscreen text in the game simulation, no spoken dialogue, so at least that’s an improvement over DR1FT. Long-take first-person camera through 3D tunnels, more Wolfenstein than Eisenstein. I think the twist is it was a game-in-a-game, and God kills the elite baby squad with his lightning hands.

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The Toxic Avenger (2023, Macon Blair)

Toxie has a magic green murder wand, and has teamed up with a girl who keeps whacking people with a toilet. Movie keeps glitching or flashbacking mid-scene. Evil Elijah Wood is vanquished, movie has really good color, and some of the jokes land – what more could you want?

by ·Comments Off on Cult of Chucky (2017, Don Mancini)

Good sequel, tying together all previous plots, while also allowing Chucky to multiply, while also being an Elm Street 3-style psych-ward-set serial killer thriller.

Andy is back, torturing his own personal Chucky head after a cute girl from the latest Final Destination breaks up with him. Wheelchair Nika is still alive too, so is her niece (now Mike Flanagan’s Carrie) and Jennifer Tilly-as-herself and the doll version of Jennifer Tilly, and hey, why not bring back the girl from part two, it’s a party.

Andy gets himself committed by attacking a guard. They charles-lee-ray Nika. Evil wins, kills everyone and gets away with it. I would’ve been happy to watch a couple more movies like this, but apparently the followup was a three-season TV series, and I simply don’t have that many hours to devote to Chucky.

Claire, getting Very-Long-Engagemented:

In the asylum is:
Schizophrenic Multiple-Malcolm (a cop in The Long Walk)
Confrontational Claire of Cube 2: Hypercube
Mom-wannabe Madeline of House of the Dead
Angela who thinks she is a ghost (of both Violent Night and Silent Night Deadly Night Remake)
Nurse Ashley of Malcolm McDowell Silent Night
Nurse Carlos of Jessica Alba The Eye Remake
McDreamy-lookin’ Dr. Foley of The Viewing

by ·Comments Off on Return to Silent Hill (2026, Christophe Gans)

Opening scene is so lousy, but the colors are bright, I remember liking the first movie (and that’s all I remember about it) and there’s promise of a Pyramid Head monster (which is also what I’ve been calling the pileated woodpeckers buzzing around the cabin), so, keeping an open mind.

Ivor Novello (Benediction) meets the lovely Mary (a horror regular, of various Saws and Purges). Flash-forward, she is dead because he’s such a bad driver (this is his defining character trait), but still sends him a letter to return to their home, which is an increasingly dodgy-digi-fx place. I think he has Trauma, and his personal Silent Hill is inside the mind – an ash-covered town, the local duplex playing Jacob’s Ladder and The Tenant. It’s one of those Shutter Island (or Jacob’s Ladder) stories where an empty man gradually figures out who he is/was.

Love at the bottom of the sea:

Some people attempted to write a normal movie review, focusing on what is actually in the movie, most of which sucks, while people with internet madness are predictably calling it a perfect film from a master stylist, or the most affecting onscreen portrait of grief ever filmed. Me, I am postponing plans to rewatch part one this SHOCKtober.

Me, going out to tape Smashing Pumpkins at the Metro:

Metro security, spotting my gear:

by ·Comments Off on 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026, Nia DaCosta)

This one is set 28 days later than 28 Years Later. Our kid Spike has been kidnapped by the Jimmy Gang run by Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, spends most of the movie semi-panicking since his new friends have a kill-or-die policy and they like to torture local homeowners to death for no apparent reason. They plan to grow in numbers and take over the land, but their plan seems mathematically challenging, since you have to kill a Jimmy in combat to become one. Spike Jimmy does make friends with Girl Jimmy (Erin Kellyman, a ghost in The Green Knight), who finds out about Ralph Fiennes and thinks he might be Crystal’s dad Satan.

Fiennes, meanwhile, spends his days hanging out with anesthetized alpha-zombie Samson, and spends his nights dancing to Duran Duran in his bunker. He makes a deal with Crystal to put on a show and impress the others. But things start to turn sour in Jimmyland, with loyalties in doubt, then Jimmy kills the Jimmy who was gonna kill our Jimmy.

Dr. Ralph and the Jimmys destroy each other, leaving zen zombie Samson partially dezombified, and Jimmy Spike running off with Jimmy Kelly. Being an immediate sequel with no new characters, DaCosta (Candyman 3) goes through the motions of setting up part three part three, which is apparently gonna star the ur-Jimmy Cillian Murphy.

by ·Comments Off on Demons 2 (1986, Lamberto Bava)

Sally dances to Morrissey then goes to her room to watch horror movies alone during her own birthday party, relatable. She finds a TV movie about other young people uncovering demons (some idiot hellraisers a dead demon by bleeding into its open mouth) – but this is not the movie Demons. Then a demon videodromes through the TV, demonogrifies her, and she murders all her party guests then… melts(?), and her cursed acid blood plays hell on the apartment building below. Everyone acts like they’re the character in a TV commercial who needs a miracle product to perform a simple task, and no miracles are here, just the manic unstoppable demons of an Evil Dead movie.

Movie is properly disgusting – a demon child breaks into a woman’s apartment then convulses as an Audrey II-mouthed rubber alien bursts out of his chest and chases the woman around until defeated by a murphy bed. There’s an elevator shaft escape, an ineffectual parking garage showdown, and the hetero couple ends up at a quirky movie theater TV studio (which is maybe supposed to evoke the movie theater of Demons 1 but really only reminded me of Scanners 3). Among the doomed women is Asia Argento. Half the crew followed this with Dario Argento’s Opera and prospered, the other half made Graveyard Disturbance and did not. Speaking of Opera, I wrote “Argento characters never behaving like actual humans makes the movies more phantasmagorical,” and that’s sure true of the dialogue here – but I’ve never been to Italy, and what if the people there are really like this?

Hetero couple triumphant:

by ·Comments Off on Ballerina (2025, Len Wiseman)

John Wick spinoff from the writer of Army of the Dead and director of Die Hard 5, oh boy, this is even worse than part three. Tried to half-watch this, which worked fine during the opening backstory, then it turns into a gang war that’s also a dystopian cult thing with not a couple minutes rest between each CG-assisted fight scene. Lotta fighting with hammers at first, then she escalates to an audacious grenade battle in an armory and a flamethrower finale. I didn’t believe a single thing that happened for a second, so the revenge aspect doesn’t register, but eventually Ana de Armas shoots Gabriel Byrne while he’s monologuing, and the guy from Blade lives, which are good outcomes. Only great shot was when Ana whacked a would-be assassin with a TV remote, each blow summoning a different classic action scene on the background TV.

de Armas vs. Buster Keaton:

by ·Comments Off on Wake Up Dead Man (2025, Rian Johnson)

Priest Josh Brolin, Gardener Thomas Haden Church, and Doctor Jeremy Renner conspire with Glenn Close to perform a miracle, but she kills them all, confounding disheveled priest Josh O’Connor until our guy Blanc figures it all out.

The bar with a hell theme has a Ricky Jay poster:

by ·Comments Off on The Naked Gun (2025, Akiva Schaffer)

Not a remake – Liam Neeson is Leslie Nielsen’s son, so this is part four (or part ten if we count the TV series). A good joke every minute, can’t ask for more. Made by the same gang that did the Rescue Rangers reboot, weird. Muskian baddie is Danny Huston of Birth, his head thug is Kevin Durand of Resident Evil 5.