In Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, the myth roars back to life in this mostly successful adaptation. Jacob Elordi’s performance is a standout, while Oscar Isaac is miscast. Filled with beautiful and grotesque imagery, the film struggles for greatness and occasionally reaches it. Recommended. Continue reading Frankenstein (2025, Netflix)
When The Black Phone did well at the box office in 2021, it was a foregone conclusion that a sequel would be coming. This posed a challenge to writer-director Scott Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cartill: how to continue the story with a dead villain? For Black Phone 2, the solution was to delve into the origins of the Grabber (Ethan Hawke). While there’s no evidence of an unhappy childhood, we do see how he honed his skills before taking up residence in a Colorado suburb. Practice makes perfect, right?
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The role of the dog in a horror movie is a thankless one. They appear early on, growl at something unseen and vanish into the night chasing after it. The dog is found dead soon afterwards, a bad omen that the human characters never take seriously. Good Boy turns that cliche on its head by telling the entire story from the dog’s point of view, an inspired choice that makes a run-of-the-mill ghost story harrowing and unpredictable. In addition to its solid horror movie trappings, the movie is also a sobering meditation on what it means to be “man’s best friend”.
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The Conjuring: Last Rites is an effective if unsurprising concluding entry to this highly successful horror franchise. It follows the demonic possession playbook to the letter and manages to be creepy, if not scary. If anything, it sets the table for the upcoming Halloween season. Mildly Recommended. Continue reading The Conjuring: Last Rites
The fact that Weapons begins with its most haunting images tells you something about what writer-director Zach Cregger has in store for us. The movie is ostensibly about seventeen children who disappeared at the same time, but Cregger’s ambitions extend beyond that. Although Weapons is a horror movie, it’s also surprisingly insightful in what it says about how tragedy affects us, the risks associated with everyday human kindness and the lonely plight of victimized children. And on top of all that, it’s very funny. Weapons is a big canvas horror movie that takes big swings and connects every time.
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Remember Nedry, the fat guy played by Wayne Night in Jurassic Park? Rebirth hopes that you do, because its opening scene is a weird callback to his character. Seventeen years ago, before the events in Jurassic World took place, the scientists at InGen were just starting to experiment with dinosaur DNA. One scientist curiously tries to eat a candy bar just before entering a controlled environment. The guy is a slob and carelessly drops the wrapper just before he enters a sealed chamber with a dinosaur in it. The wrapper gets sucked into the door’s ventilation and shorts it out. Uh oh. In the rush to lock everything down, the candy bar guy is left staring face-to-face with a very nasty dinosaur. The lesson here is to not be a slob, because the repercussions are fatal.
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Horror movies have always given sound advice of where not to go on your vacation. For example, you really shouldn’t stay at that ominous-looking hotel up on the hill (Psycho), or your friend’s cabin in the middle of the woods (Evil Dead), or that hostel in Slovakia (Hostel). Dangerous Animals suggests that despite the obvious reasons for visiting Brisbane’s Gold Coast in Australia, you probably don’t want to go there either. Because even an exciting tourist activity like swimming with the sharks may very well end up being unexpectedly life-altering. But if you really can’t resist, definitely let your loved ones know what your plans are before you climb aboard that boat. That way, they’ll know where to start searching for your body parts when you go missing.
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So this is what’s been on writer-director Ryan Coogler’s mind while he’s been making films based on existing IP. Although he left his imprint upon Creed and the Black Panther movies, they weren’t entirely his creation. For example, you could tell which parts of his Marvel movies came from his mind and which were mandated in order to fit into the larger MCU. Sinners, Coogler’s first original film since Fruitvale Station twelve years ago, reflects the freedom he likely felt at no longer needing to tell a story using other people’s characters and storylines. His latest is a rare intimate blockbuster, one that is brazenly adult-oriented, filled with big ideas and told with indelible images that demand our attention. It’s a full-throated cinematic experience that swings for the fences and connects more often than not.
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Everyone has met someone so full of themselves that you wish you could be there for their comeuppance and subsequent humbling. Since this rarely happens in real life, movies like The Rule of Jenny Pen oblige us in this type of wish fulfillment. In it, Judge Stefan Mortensen (Geoffrey Rush) is exactly the kind of arrogant bastard who we can’t wait to see laid low by fate. But, as the saying goes, even the wicked get worse than they deserve.
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Based on how Heart Eyes begins, I assumed the masked killer known as “Heart Eyes” (or HE, for short) hated Valentine’s Day and was taking his anger out on anyone celebrating the holiday. The people HE initially dispatches–an annoying couple and their engagement photographer–indicate as such. Subsequent victims, all engaged in conspicuously lovey-dovey behavior before they were sliced and diced, also appear to prove my hypothesis. However, as we follow the ill-timed courtship of the two lovebirds at the center of this story, I realized that the movie isn’t about homicidal anger, but love. Serial killers just have a funny way of showing it.
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Detroit Cineaste 