Tag: slasher
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Black Phone 2 (2025)
About five years after siblings Gwen and Finn defeated the Grabber, a serial killer targeting boys in their neighbourhood, they’re both still troubled by the events. Finn self-medicates with marijuana, while Gwen has dreams of a phone call being made by a Christian camp counsellor in the late 1950s, talking about numbers written on ice…
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Heart Eyes (2025)
Pretty clever mix of slasher and rom-com tropes that, while not a game changer to any degree, is novel enough to help keep the slasher genre going another decade. Slasher films in recent years have been moving more towards comedy than ever before. Post-Scream (1996), these movies were almost always ironic or self-aware to some…
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Terrifier 3
The basic appeal of the Terrifier films is that they’re of the same crude simplicity as the Friday the 13th franchise (1980 to 2009, as of Halloween 2024) and other Golden Age slashers, but with much more gore that you couldn’t get away with back then. It’s amusing to think of how slashers of yore were pilloried…
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Alien: Romulus (2024)
I just saw Alien: Romulus and it was so good it made up for every bad sequel in the franchise and has earned its place as the third best after Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986). A group of young people living as indentured servants on a mining outpost owned by those dastardly villains of the…
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In a Violent Nature (2024)
I just saw In a Violent Nature and it was really good. I would have thought that there were no more places to take the slasher film, a subgenre that’s been played both straight and ironically in just about every permutation imaginable. But this Canadian entry manages it, pitching somewhere between (very) black humour and…
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Motel Hell (1980)
All the way back in 1980, over 15 years before Scream (1996), slasher films were still being parodied. Back then, movies like Motel Hell were referred to as “sleazoids” and “geek shows” by unimpressed critics including Roger Ebert, who nonetheless gave this film a rare-for-the-genre 3/4 for bringing laughter to the formula. A sun-scorched and…
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High Tension (2003)
Perhaps all you need from a slasher film is a lot of gory killings and cat-and-mouse scenes. If so, Alexandre Aja‘a High Tension is for you. As for me, this is a film that forced upon my consciousness a realisation: whatever mood I’m in, I do at least need a story that makes a basic…
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Saw X (2023)
“You people are f***ing sick…” You’re telling me. How did the Saw franchise end up spawning 10 films? Why, of all the films to come out of the dark days of “torture porn” in the early ‘00s, did this premise have such longevity? Well, a few reasons. The most important probably being Tobin Bell as…
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Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Released seven years after the 1984 original, Terminator 2 famously makes a protagonist of the original villain, having Arnie sent back in time not to kill future resistance leader John Connor (Edward Furlong) but to protect him from another killing machine, the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), a mass of liquid metal that can assume the shape…
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The Blackening (2023)
I just saw The Blackening and it was good. Based on a comedy sketch, it’s a satirical slasher film starring a black cast of actors playing former college friends who reunite at a cabin in the woods, but not before a couple of them make a rest stop at the proverbial rustic gas station run…
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