Backrooms works best as a trippy alternative reality that reflects viewer anxieties of all kinds. The movie held me when it was weird and inscrutable, less so when it became a conventional horror movie. Mildly recommended. Continue reading Backrooms
At one point in Passenger, the heroine uses her van’s camera system to find the ghost that’s been following her. I’ve seen dash cams and backup cams before, but this was cooler. It gave her a 360 degree view outside of the van, which eventually revealed the ghost. While the scene played out exactly as I expected, it was a clever way of using modern technology so that for once, the poor girl can finally look around without her head on a swivel. This and other little details showed that the filmmakers wanted to make an interesting “stalking ghost” movie, and I was entertained by the results.
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Getting your wish is the worst thing imaginable in Obsession, a twisted take on love and romance that horrifies before going full-on horror. I appreciated the movie’s darkly comedic take on desire and relationships more than its gruesome endgame, but it’s a wild ride either way. Recommended. Continue reading Obsession (2026)
If anything, Undertone proves that using podcasting as the basis for a horror movie has minimal returns. While there are spooky moments, the film is a mishmash of ideas that never lead anywhere besides scary noises and shadows. Not recommended. Continue reading Undertone
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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Detroit Cineaste 