Tag: thriller
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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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Companion (2025)
I just saw Companion and it was really good, a clever and comic satirical take on the classic feminist horror The Stepford Wives, the one where post-sexual revolution men replace their strong and intelligent wives with automatons who wax floors in pinnies all day. It’s tough to synopsise Companion, which comes on the heels of Barbarian (2022). (It shares with that…
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The Exterminator (1980)
The Exterminator is basically a vetsploitation take on the slasher; “vetsploitation” being a sub-genre of the exploitation film wherein Vietnam veterans and their experiences/traumas were used as material for screenplays. Just like in a slasher, a cold open informs what follows before the story structures itself around a series of murders carried out by its…
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Conclave (2024)
I just saw Conclave and it was great. Based on a novel by Robert Harris, it deals with the sequestering period in the Catholic Church when a pope dies and the cardinals must elect their successor. Ralph Fiennes plays the Dean of the College of Cardinals, Thomas Lawrence, a stoic and serious man caught up…
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Heretic (2024)
“Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?” This quote from Edgar Allan Poe opens John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980), but is arguably more applicable to Heretic, the new horror film for Halloween 2024, starring Hugh Grant as an oddball who hosts a couple of young Mormon missionaries straight out…
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The Coffee Table (2022)
A husband, Jesus (pronounced Hey-Zeus, played by David Pareja), and wife, Maria (Estefanía de los Santos), with their newborn baby, are looking to buy a coffee table. The table is composed of two nude women in faux-gold trim supporting a glass top. Clearly, it belongs in a bachelor pad as opposed to a young couple’s…
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Halloween Pick ‘n’ Mix: Shocker (1989) and The Blood Beast Terror (1968)
Surprisingly cheesy and dull Wes Craven thriller, Shocker is nowhere near as good as The People Under the Stairs, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, and his other classics. It’s about a young man pursued by a serial killer, Horace Pinker, who kills most of his adopted family, his girlfriend, and sundry other people in…
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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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Trap (2024)
I just saw Trap and it were crap. (More like Claptrap, amirite?! My humblest apologies.) Of course it was, though, it’s by M Night Shyamalan. He’s only made crap for the last… what? 20 years? Apparently Split (2016) is worth a watch, but I’ve no desire to see another movie about M Night not understanding…
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