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garoteHokum (2026)
I knew nothing going in, except the pedigree of the writer/director, which was enough. Interesting main character, and an interesting twist early in the film. Midway through I started asking myself a lot of incredulous questions about the architecture of the place where most of the story happens, but the rest of my brain said "shut up, I'm having a good time!"
A nicely contained ghost and murder story - not unique enough to be legendary but still very worthwhile - that manages to build a couple intervals of almost unbearable tension, from a director with a strong grasp of the language of horror cinema. Absolutely my cup of tea. I went back and re-watched about half of it as soon as the credits finished.
Seven-and-a-half creepy mechanical clock decorations up out of ten.
Send Help (2026)
It's all over the movie trailer: The main character washes up on an island with a man she hates, and they try to get along. With everyone knowing that going in, Sam Raimi needed to work hard to make the lead-up worth watching, and he knew it. Imagine the rumble of 200 people in the theater simultaneously tapping their feet with impatience as they wait for the island part to start.
He did a pretty good job editing it down to just the necessary pieces of character development, and to my delight, he started throwing in the kind of playful camera acrobatics and gross-out flourishes that I loved in his Evil Dead films, and kept using them through the whole movie. (Fountains of vomit and snot in real life would be harrowing. On a theater screen? Comedy gold.)
I liked how this wasn't just a rote "wronged woman gets revenge on shitty men" story. The men are definitely shitty, but there's more going on. It's a good time at the cinema and I look forward to Sam getting even more playful in the future.
Seven jets of lime-green vomit up out of ten.
M3gan (2023)
Better than I expected. I was figuring it was a jump-scare creepy doll schlock-o-rama, but the central conflict about parenting and developmental psychology was a surprise. I had no idea it was written by the same screenwriter as Malignant.
In fact, though the tin is labeled "horror", this is more like a high-concept sci-fi treatment, and it's only gotten more relevant in the two years since it came out.
Seven trips into the uncanny valley up out of ten.
M3gan 2.0 (2025)
From the opening frame you can tell it's a completely different kind of movie. Instead of a dark house, or a lab, or even the face of some main character, you get an exterior shot zooming over a desert and the subtitle: "SOMEWHERE NEAR THE TURKISH / IRANIAN BORDER".
Yeah, it's pretty disorienting. This is no longer horror at all, but an action movie, wearing the skins of the previous movie's antagonist and main characters. I assume it's a victory lap by the studio, based on the popularity of M3gan. The philosophizing is muddled, the plot is composed of holes, and halfway through there's a heel turn that makes so little sense it goes below zero into negative quantities of sense, pulling everything around it into a vortex of confusion.
But we get to see M3gan do some more dancing, so, yay? Also there's one joke that happens at the end of a ventilation shaft that actually made me laugh out loud. One laugh is better than zero!
Four fake CGI sets claiming to be in Palo Alto up out of ten.
V/H/S Halloween (2025)
Another entry in the found-footage anthology horror series, giving unknown directors and writers a chance to strut their stuff on the medium-size screen. It's been diminishing returns for years now, but I gave it a curious look.
The stories feel as though they were designed in a 4chan comment thread: Lots of "and then this crazy thing happens, for no reason!" Some of my favorite horror-comedy films could be described like that: The first two Evil Dead films, Poltergeist, Gremlins II... But the difference here is the direction. It's hard to keep track of what you're building so it turns into "gross in a fun way" instead of just "gross", and without a good story to tell, you've got to hit that "fun" target squarely.
But hey! Lots of action and camera shake and cheap horror gross-out moments! None of these directors had the command of pacing and visual grammar that a true horror film needs, though Paco Plaza gets closest in his segment "Ut Supra Sic Infra."
4 suspiciously labeled candies up out of 10.
Frankenstein (2025)
It's got frozen wastes, fairy-tale forest, a big stone Art Deco castle, winged angels, plenty of blood and lace, and the usual Guillermo del Toro touches of sadness and madness. I enjoyed it, especially when it tried to be intimate rather than expansive, but I could tell the director was pulling his punches with the horror elements in order to please a Netflix four-quadrant audience. Del Toro has made other films that are way more visceral and dreamlike. But, I'm glad he's getting buckets of money and having fun.
Five battery terminals sticking out of a neck, out of ten.
Freaky Tales (2024)
The first 30 minutes are a love letter to the Oakland music scene in the 80's. It's always fun to see pieces of your childhood culture lionized on the big screen, so I stayed engaged even though both those early chapters didn't have interesting conflicts or stakes. I mean, some cartoonish nazis get beat up: Wow? Some underdogs enter a competition and everything goes really well for them: Wow?
I do regret, though, that I didn't catch this when it was screening near my house. It was playing for a while at the Grand Lake theater. The crowd inside must have been electric. Too much work recently...
The second half of the film continues with the conventional drama, but the stakes are higher. Eventually you reach a point where you're waiting for a grand finale of some kind that will tie it all up, and getting worried it will never arrive. Thankfully it does, and the action and bloodshed almost overcompensate. I mean, I would show the first half of this movie to my non-horror-fan friends, confident they would enjoy it and not be too disturbed. But they wouldn't like the last 20 minutes.
On a more personal level: I didn't expect the movie to rise to this, but it would have been amazing if the actors and the dialogue actually reflected my memory of the way young people were in the 1980's in the Bay Area. They didn't quite. The writers managed to filter out all the modern slang and behavioral tics from the dialogue but they didn't manage to introduce relevant slang to replace it, and the young actors - bless their modern hearts - were uniformly not quite ... what's the word I need here? Not quite scrappy enough? Not outwardly profane, sarcastic, and bitter enough? We were living in a time when the Baby Boomers owned everything, no one cared about our fates, and no one was watching -- including our peers. That meant we were much more comfortable talking like complete and total bastards to each other in public, in a casual way that a modern young audience would probably find very uncomfortable or even disturbing. To get a little spoilery, the hip-hop battle scene with its brutal and unapologetic misogyny was period-appropriate, but the rest of the screenplay was curiously denuded.
But that's fine, really. The film would have cleared a very high bar if it had actually rung true to me as a portal into the souls of 1980's youth.
Worth seeing! Six punk wristbands up out of ten.
Non-horror sidebar
Avatar: Fire And Ash
How is it, as entertainment? Pretty good. Certainly exciting, though very little gets resolved. The action is staged beautifully. The visual effects are absolutely impeccable. There's a weird middle segment where we learn about a new villain character, and that part feels like its own thing, but the two hours that surround it are more of what we got in the second movie: "Gaia: The Ride."
There's something about this mash-up of biocomputing, big grey Tonka-truck vehicles, people connecting with cables, and the fascistic merging of military and corporate culture that feels eerily familiar. It all fits together ... in the sci-fi universe of the 1970's. I'm hard to impress, and the visual effects certainly impress me, but this is an action film at heart, not sci-fi. So I guess it's okay that I'm not impressed by the sci-fi elements, because those feel downright stale.
And since I live partly online, I guess I should say something now about how this film - and series - are received there.
It’s strange to me that hip intellectual types are still (after 15 years) accusing James Cameron of reinforcing a racist stereotype by creating an anti-colonialist story. I recently read one self-important essayist who claimed that because James Cameron is a "boomer" (a term that didn't exist when the first Avatar film came out), his mind is stuck in old western stereotypes about Native Americans. But it’s a story about humans displacing aliens, and the humans are clearly the villains, and they lose. If the audience is keying into some physical traits of the aliens and concluding that they are coded to represent a specific ethnicity, then it's worth asking: What's the movie saying about this ethnicity?
What would the internet have thought if the flat-nosed dreads-having Na'vi had invaded Earth, and a mostly-white human cast had bravely fought them off and won? Would the pounding of keyboards be louder? I don't know, and that's why I'm skeptical of that take. Is the lesson here that, if you're going to portray humanoid aliens from another place, you'd better make sure they're coded as white people underneath the latex and makeup, because otherwise you're equating "non-white" with "other"? The result of that would be ... non-white actors hiding their ethnicity in order to work in sci-fi. Is that really a corrective, or even progressive move?
Or perhaps the lesson is, if aliens are going to be portrayed on screen as resembling a certain ethnicity - whether good aliens or evil aliens - they better be portrayed by actors, writers, and a director of the implied ethnicity. (Stay in your lane, people.) If so, well ... the Na'vi are blue. Are they Native Americans, or are they Black people, or is it somehow worse that James Cameron is not being specific in which ethnicity he is "othering", because then we don't know who to expect in the cast list?
After swirling around in that for a while, I've ended up with a different lesson: The real problem is, most Americans have a very Euro-centric idea of what ethnicity even is, and their own worldview is too limited to comfortably embrace something that is not clearly Black or Asian or Hispanic or Indian - or even "white" - as they understand it, so when you blur those lines in fictional representation, it makes them uncomfortable. Then they write virtue-signaling essays online, trying to kick James Cameron in the balls.
Meanwhile everyone else goes to the theater and watches another 3-hour episode of "Gaia: The Movie" to the tune of another 2 billion dollars, and then three hours after that, they forget completely about it.
I'm pretty sure James Cameron's balls have been removed and sealed inside a chamber with walls 300 feet thick, made entirely of MONEY. We can kick all we want. He absolutely does not care.
Where was I? Oh yeah. Five wavy organic networking cables up out of ten.
I knew nothing going in, except the pedigree of the writer/director, which was enough. Interesting main character, and an interesting twist early in the film. Midway through I started asking myself a lot of incredulous questions about the architecture of the place where most of the story happens, but the rest of my brain said "shut up, I'm having a good time!"A nicely contained ghost and murder story - not unique enough to be legendary but still very worthwhile - that manages to build a couple intervals of almost unbearable tension, from a director with a strong grasp of the language of horror cinema. Absolutely my cup of tea. I went back and re-watched about half of it as soon as the credits finished.
Seven-and-a-half creepy mechanical clock decorations up out of ten.
Send Help (2026)
It's all over the movie trailer: The main character washes up on an island with a man she hates, and they try to get along. With everyone knowing that going in, Sam Raimi needed to work hard to make the lead-up worth watching, and he knew it. Imagine the rumble of 200 people in the theater simultaneously tapping their feet with impatience as they wait for the island part to start.
He did a pretty good job editing it down to just the necessary pieces of character development, and to my delight, he started throwing in the kind of playful camera acrobatics and gross-out flourishes that I loved in his Evil Dead films, and kept using them through the whole movie. (Fountains of vomit and snot in real life would be harrowing. On a theater screen? Comedy gold.)
I liked how this wasn't just a rote "wronged woman gets revenge on shitty men" story. The men are definitely shitty, but there's more going on. It's a good time at the cinema and I look forward to Sam getting even more playful in the future.
Seven jets of lime-green vomit up out of ten.
M3gan (2023)
Better than I expected. I was figuring it was a jump-scare creepy doll schlock-o-rama, but the central conflict about parenting and developmental psychology was a surprise. I had no idea it was written by the same screenwriter as Malignant.
In fact, though the tin is labeled "horror", this is more like a high-concept sci-fi treatment, and it's only gotten more relevant in the two years since it came out.
Seven trips into the uncanny valley up out of ten.
M3gan 2.0 (2025)
From the opening frame you can tell it's a completely different kind of movie. Instead of a dark house, or a lab, or even the face of some main character, you get an exterior shot zooming over a desert and the subtitle: "SOMEWHERE NEAR THE TURKISH / IRANIAN BORDER".
Yeah, it's pretty disorienting. This is no longer horror at all, but an action movie, wearing the skins of the previous movie's antagonist and main characters. I assume it's a victory lap by the studio, based on the popularity of M3gan. The philosophizing is muddled, the plot is composed of holes, and halfway through there's a heel turn that makes so little sense it goes below zero into negative quantities of sense, pulling everything around it into a vortex of confusion.
But we get to see M3gan do some more dancing, so, yay? Also there's one joke that happens at the end of a ventilation shaft that actually made me laugh out loud. One laugh is better than zero!
Four fake CGI sets claiming to be in Palo Alto up out of ten.
V/H/S Halloween (2025)
Another entry in the found-footage anthology horror series, giving unknown directors and writers a chance to strut their stuff on the medium-size screen. It's been diminishing returns for years now, but I gave it a curious look.
The stories feel as though they were designed in a 4chan comment thread: Lots of "and then this crazy thing happens, for no reason!" Some of my favorite horror-comedy films could be described like that: The first two Evil Dead films, Poltergeist, Gremlins II... But the difference here is the direction. It's hard to keep track of what you're building so it turns into "gross in a fun way" instead of just "gross", and without a good story to tell, you've got to hit that "fun" target squarely.
But hey! Lots of action and camera shake and cheap horror gross-out moments! None of these directors had the command of pacing and visual grammar that a true horror film needs, though Paco Plaza gets closest in his segment "Ut Supra Sic Infra."
4 suspiciously labeled candies up out of 10.
Frankenstein (2025)
It's got frozen wastes, fairy-tale forest, a big stone Art Deco castle, winged angels, plenty of blood and lace, and the usual Guillermo del Toro touches of sadness and madness. I enjoyed it, especially when it tried to be intimate rather than expansive, but I could tell the director was pulling his punches with the horror elements in order to please a Netflix four-quadrant audience. Del Toro has made other films that are way more visceral and dreamlike. But, I'm glad he's getting buckets of money and having fun.
Five battery terminals sticking out of a neck, out of ten.
Freaky Tales (2024)
The first 30 minutes are a love letter to the Oakland music scene in the 80's. It's always fun to see pieces of your childhood culture lionized on the big screen, so I stayed engaged even though both those early chapters didn't have interesting conflicts or stakes. I mean, some cartoonish nazis get beat up: Wow? Some underdogs enter a competition and everything goes really well for them: Wow?
I do regret, though, that I didn't catch this when it was screening near my house. It was playing for a while at the Grand Lake theater. The crowd inside must have been electric. Too much work recently...
The second half of the film continues with the conventional drama, but the stakes are higher. Eventually you reach a point where you're waiting for a grand finale of some kind that will tie it all up, and getting worried it will never arrive. Thankfully it does, and the action and bloodshed almost overcompensate. I mean, I would show the first half of this movie to my non-horror-fan friends, confident they would enjoy it and not be too disturbed. But they wouldn't like the last 20 minutes.
On a more personal level: I didn't expect the movie to rise to this, but it would have been amazing if the actors and the dialogue actually reflected my memory of the way young people were in the 1980's in the Bay Area. They didn't quite. The writers managed to filter out all the modern slang and behavioral tics from the dialogue but they didn't manage to introduce relevant slang to replace it, and the young actors - bless their modern hearts - were uniformly not quite ... what's the word I need here? Not quite scrappy enough? Not outwardly profane, sarcastic, and bitter enough? We were living in a time when the Baby Boomers owned everything, no one cared about our fates, and no one was watching -- including our peers. That meant we were much more comfortable talking like complete and total bastards to each other in public, in a casual way that a modern young audience would probably find very uncomfortable or even disturbing. To get a little spoilery, the hip-hop battle scene with its brutal and unapologetic misogyny was period-appropriate, but the rest of the screenplay was curiously denuded.
But that's fine, really. The film would have cleared a very high bar if it had actually rung true to me as a portal into the souls of 1980's youth.
Worth seeing! Six punk wristbands up out of ten.
Non-horror sidebar
Avatar: Fire And Ash
How is it, as entertainment? Pretty good. Certainly exciting, though very little gets resolved. The action is staged beautifully. The visual effects are absolutely impeccable. There's a weird middle segment where we learn about a new villain character, and that part feels like its own thing, but the two hours that surround it are more of what we got in the second movie: "Gaia: The Ride."
There's something about this mash-up of biocomputing, big grey Tonka-truck vehicles, people connecting with cables, and the fascistic merging of military and corporate culture that feels eerily familiar. It all fits together ... in the sci-fi universe of the 1970's. I'm hard to impress, and the visual effects certainly impress me, but this is an action film at heart, not sci-fi. So I guess it's okay that I'm not impressed by the sci-fi elements, because those feel downright stale.
And since I live partly online, I guess I should say something now about how this film - and series - are received there.
It’s strange to me that hip intellectual types are still (after 15 years) accusing James Cameron of reinforcing a racist stereotype by creating an anti-colonialist story. I recently read one self-important essayist who claimed that because James Cameron is a "boomer" (a term that didn't exist when the first Avatar film came out), his mind is stuck in old western stereotypes about Native Americans. But it’s a story about humans displacing aliens, and the humans are clearly the villains, and they lose. If the audience is keying into some physical traits of the aliens and concluding that they are coded to represent a specific ethnicity, then it's worth asking: What's the movie saying about this ethnicity?
What would the internet have thought if the flat-nosed dreads-having Na'vi had invaded Earth, and a mostly-white human cast had bravely fought them off and won? Would the pounding of keyboards be louder? I don't know, and that's why I'm skeptical of that take. Is the lesson here that, if you're going to portray humanoid aliens from another place, you'd better make sure they're coded as white people underneath the latex and makeup, because otherwise you're equating "non-white" with "other"? The result of that would be ... non-white actors hiding their ethnicity in order to work in sci-fi. Is that really a corrective, or even progressive move?
Or perhaps the lesson is, if aliens are going to be portrayed on screen as resembling a certain ethnicity - whether good aliens or evil aliens - they better be portrayed by actors, writers, and a director of the implied ethnicity. (Stay in your lane, people.) If so, well ... the Na'vi are blue. Are they Native Americans, or are they Black people, or is it somehow worse that James Cameron is not being specific in which ethnicity he is "othering", because then we don't know who to expect in the cast list?
After swirling around in that for a while, I've ended up with a different lesson: The real problem is, most Americans have a very Euro-centric idea of what ethnicity even is, and their own worldview is too limited to comfortably embrace something that is not clearly Black or Asian or Hispanic or Indian - or even "white" - as they understand it, so when you blur those lines in fictional representation, it makes them uncomfortable. Then they write virtue-signaling essays online, trying to kick James Cameron in the balls.
Meanwhile everyone else goes to the theater and watches another 3-hour episode of "Gaia: The Movie" to the tune of another 2 billion dollars, and then three hours after that, they forget completely about it.
I'm pretty sure James Cameron's balls have been removed and sealed inside a chamber with walls 300 feet thick, made entirely of MONEY. We can kick all we want. He absolutely does not care.
Where was I? Oh yeah. Five wavy organic networking cables up out of ten.
