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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)
After 2024’s I Saw the TV Glow, writer/director Jane Schoenbrun became an indie darling with a daring perspective and a genre-bending feel for combining 90s nostalgia with coming-of-age ennui. While the movie didn’t exactly entrance me, I did write, “It’s a weird movie but it’s designed for weird kids, or weird adults who used to be weird kids, who found kinship through weird media.” I think this might be Schoenbrun’s style from here out. Their follow-up, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, is another conflation of tones and styles, looking at the slasher movies of the 1980s with satire and fondness. We follow Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a Sundance-darling director whose big artistic break has now given her the opportunity to reboot the dormant Camp Miasma horror series. The killer, a gender fluid camper that was drowned in the lake, comes back as Little Death, wrecking bloody havoc across camp. Kris wants to approach the franchise’s original Final Girl, Billie Presley (Gillian Anderson), who voluntarily left Hollywood afterwards and has been a mystery. Kris wants Billie’s blessing to reboot the film, but Kris might also be looking for something more from Billie, and their relationship changes dramatically.
At one point, Billie gently chastises her special guest to stop thinking about film in such exclusively academic terms and to see it as a movie and less a discourse, and I feel like that advice could have been heeded by Schoenbrun. I come away from Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma feeling like it is a movie that exists in air quotes, that resides on a level of discourse far above the events of the movie, that it’s intended less for artistic expression and entertainment and more as a film theory thesis for smug Letterboxd users. That’s not to deride the movie because it has a point of view or is another deeply personal exercise that feels like Schoenbrun turning their awkward coming-of-age into a transformative tableau for public consumption and, well, discourse. I don’t have an issue with Schoenbrun’s movie wanting to go deeper in an analysis of our personal connections to problematic art, in this case the schlocky slasher movies of the 1980s, otherwise known as a genre built upon “flesh and fluids,” as Billie informs us. My nagging issue with the film is that I don’t feel like it adds up to much, that Schoenbrun is so busy operating on that academic level with the material that it feels beyond reach. If the movie wasn’t occasionally elbowing you in the ribs by underlining its metaphors, I wouldn’t ultimately know what the larger themes or messages are amidst a miasma of haphazard ideas and genre riffs. I love the premise and how it twists into a Lynchian psycho-sexual nightmare that causes our characters to question what is real, but the end results left me shrugging and wishing I was enjoying the finished product more.
The idea behind Camp Miasma has all sorts of juicy layers-within–layers fun. Kris is obviously a stand-in for Schoenbrun and their experiences shuffling through the studio system as the Next Hot Indie Auteur, likely offered all manner of IP slop and zombie franchises similar to the flagging Camp Miasma horror franchise. Kris knows that her queerness and perspective is being commoditized to resuscitate an outdated franchise that has a history of transphobia (the Sleepaway Camp allusions are pretty clear here). Kris accepts these studio suits want to use her to provide cover for bringing the franchise back, but she wants to use them as well. Instead of delivering the same old schlock, Kris wants to go back to the original Final Girl who swore off acting afterwards, using the movie as her personal vehicle to interrogate a reclusive actress that she just happens to have a formative sexual connection with. Combine that with our Norma Desmond-like faded star literally living on the camp grounds where the original movie was shot, and that’s a terrific mixture of intrigue and obsession, of fantasy and reality bleeding together. So why does the finished movie feel rather unfulfilling to me then? Why does the sum feel less than the pieces?
Maybe it’s because the obviousness of some of Schoenbrun’s points acts as an artistic ceiling. The voyeurism of slasher cinema in particular, born from Norman Bates and given new form by Michael Myers, is endemic to the genre, placing the viewer in the perspective of the mad murderer and the nubile teens finding silly ways to slink off to their gory demises. Kris is obsessed with one moment in the original Camp Miasma when a young Billie had a certain look in her eye that has always haunted her. It just so happens this moment was during the scene where Billie’s character lost her virginity on film, and there is an added context to the scene that makes the moment even more unsettling. Schoenbrun hinges Kris’ sexual awakening to a moment of old media that also happens to be Billie’s own sexual awakening, linking the two characters through a mirror of art, with the camera serving as transport. The nature of the scene involved Billie imagining Little Death coming for her and killing her, with her seeing the moment from her own eyes but also simultaneously from the eyes of the killer. It’s the voyeurism that unlocked something in both of these women, and yet Schoenbrun doesn’t seem interested in going further with an examination on this topic, only setting it up to be repeated and shared as supposed personal growth. Maybe, but maybe it could have been more interesting to dig into why disassociating from her own body during sexual congress was the key to pleasure for this woman, especially from a trans filmmaker. Likewise, there are some points that are blunt but to the point of making me want to sigh. Our killer has a long phallic spear that he struts around repeatedly thrusting and penetrating his victims. We get it. The killer is named Little Death, the pithy French term for an orgasm, which is perhaps why he wants to spear all these people. We get it. It’s so obvious it circles back from meta clever and back to just being too obvious. The ending descends into a wacky Ari Aster-like dark cartoon of fantasy convergence, like the movie had just been consumed from the inside out, but the insights are limited and glancing, amounting to little more than, “Hey, everybody can like the art they like and we don’t get to choose what turns us on.” Sure, I guess. Like what you like, folks. I was hoping the movie might be more than one woman’s quest to harness her big O under very specific scene-dependent circumstances.
Far be it from me to dictate what artists should do with their personal stories hewn from their souls, but there’s a strong part of me that feels like I would have enjoyed a more straight-forward (pun not intended) version of this story. I think a fledgling director getting in over their head and blurring professional and personal lines with their subject is ripe for engrossing drama and conflict. Likewise, having a reclusive actress on the cusp not just of a comeback within the industry but possibly of a fellow artist that really took the effort to understand her perspective and wanted to give it a meaningful platform, that too could be intoxicating, so for the both of them to feel an attraction would only further complicate boundaries. Simply delving into that would be a fascinating exploration of fantasy, projection, and power dynamics. It could also explore the difference between when reality doesn’t match our personally-curated fantasy. Throw in some repressed sexual kinks tied directly to the problematic art/genre, like Kris admitting she can only feel pleasure if she imagines herself as the highly sexualized Final Girl of 1980s horror, and that’s quite a fascinating brew destined to challenge characters and their identities and desires. Now imagine that movie had an extended sequence of Little Death’s point of view while he speared and decapitated people with set to the Counting Crows’ “Long December.” Now imagine the concept that the movies aren’t movies but real life is the movie, and we’re all the characters that Little Death is watching in his underwater video store. Okay. Sure, I guess. Look, maybe you’ll click with Schoenbrun’s wavelength but I felt like it was too often operating outside itself, keeping me distant.
That’s not to say that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is without its virtues. It’s an often funny movie, though keeping to an awkward chuckle best personified by Anderson’s deep-fried Southern charm and peculiarity. Just listening to this woman opine about breakfast cereals could make me laugh. Both actresses give quite good performances and they have strong chemistry together, finding ways to sell lines and moments that might be too goofy to accept with actors of lesser talent. The gore is over-the-top and enjoyably ridiculous without the violence feeling uncomfortable, which itself is a feat considering there are some loaded themes of exploitation, hate crimes, and sexual assault throughout. The first ten minutes might be my favorite part because the precise period details of creating the fake history for the Camp Miamsa series, including the 8-bit arcade video game, are so wonderfully perfect. I appreciate how personal Schoenbrun makes every one of their movies, often exploring how art shapes our sense of ourselves and reckoning with that into the uncertainty of adulthood. Schoenbrun is a talent that exists on a slippery dream logic level, who likes to throw out questions without clear answers, and I appreciate their artistic ambition even if this is the second movie in a row that feels overburdened with ideas and stubbornly underdeveloped in execution.
There will be plenty that sing the praises of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and find personal connections that provide added depth and meaning. Art is personal, and every one of Schoenbrun’s movies is almost unbearably personal. There is a distinct affection and appreciation for what most would classify as “bad art,” these old junky movies that probably didn’t mean much to those making them but could be indelible to the right kid at the right moment late at night. Maybe some day Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma will be that movie for some kid late at night, and that’s something even if it wasn’t quite something for me.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Mortal Kombat II (2026)
The 2021 Mortal Kombat movie was a mostly successful kick-start for the franchise to, at long last, stretch its legs on the big screen as a reverent representation of the appeal of the popular video game series. It was the first R-rated movie that showcased the inventively disgusting gore that is the hallmark of the bone-crunching series. It wasn’t a huge hit at the box-office so soon after the COVID shutdowns but it proved to be popular on HBO Max’s streaming network, and so now we have Mortal Kombat II, not strictly a straight adaptation of the game Mortal Kombat II, which was my favorite as a 90s kid when I had all the fighter moves and fatalities memorized. This time there is an actual fighting tournament germane to the story, and we’ve got the inclusion of movie star-turned-Kombatant Johnny Cage (Karl Urban). Can it escape the doomed fate of other Kombat movie adaptations and actually be good?
Early on, there’s an extended clip from one of Cage’s cheesy 90s action movies. It’s bad, goofy, and unintentionally funny as Cage fights his way through a warehouse of goons and does a jumping split kick over an incoming RPG. It’s a fitting send-up of the bombastic excesses of 90s action movies while demonstrating Cage’s limited real-life martial arts application. I wasn’t expecting Mortal Kombat II to essentially transform into that self-parody of 90s action movies. Watching the movie and trying to make sense of its runaway plot and throwaway explanations, I was reminded of the story modes in the newer games, how convoluted and ridiculous they are, bridging timelines and reincarnations and multiple iterations of characters and how it lacks excitement and engagement. For a fighting game, an okay story can be enough to connect between the different playable matches because the point is the hands-on fighting. This feels more like I’m watching someone else play the lousy story mode of the video game. It doesn’t feel like a movie to the point that I’m re-evaluating the 2021 movie on a higher level.
That at least felt like an adaptation that intended to exist as a film story, streamlining certain elements and making others accessible. This movie feels like it’s just made for diehard Kombat fans, not because it’s heavy in lore complexity and intrigue but because the fans will be the most easily forgiving. With Cage being the fish out of water, you would think his arc would take center stage. He’s the washed-up actor living off his fading reputation. He’s seen by the Outworld as a tremendous and worthy fighter but he’s just an actor. This misconception from his movies could have provided a more intriguing, grounded, and funny story along the lines of Galaxy Quest, where an actor has to keep up the ruse. This plays into the best scene of the movie, where Cage has to challenge the dentally-challenged blade-armed Baraka (CJ Bloomfield) among his community of angler fish-mouthed working class monster-people. Cage has to lean into his persona to become intimidating and then to escape the threat of his opponent. It’s the best fight in the movie because it has more setup and makes actual use of its geography. There’s also a fun dynamic of Cage having to live up to the reputation his running mouth has presented. This could have been the whole movie. Cage’s character arc is a dull zero-to-hero transformation, where I guess he has to believe in himself enough and then he’ll become a legendary fighter. Why this makes sense I do not know. It would make better sense if he was tapping into the muscle memory of his old fighting routines, like we watched him mirror those moves we saw in that introductory film clip. That would produce a setup and payoff. Instead, Cage becomes a deus ex machina fighter through his unshaken belief he can kick real good. His protagonist status is split evenly with Kitana (Adeline Rudolph), who is a familiar and boring archetype of the overthrown princess training to avenge her fallen father and restore her kingdom. For a supposed double agent, it never feels like Kitana is in any danger, especially as she travels back and forth between secret bases in broad daylight without bothering to cover her tracks beyond obscuring her special magic necklace. Because her character arc is so stock, we could have pared down her screen-time considerably and gotten the same effect, giving those precious minutes over to Cage for a fuller arc.
Not that you were coming to Mortal Kombat II for a story, but it’s plenty bad. We have a second entry point character to learn the ways of inter-dimensional combat between gods and monsters, after the 2021 movie gave us… an entry point character. Seems rather redundant to go through this again, right? Do you even remember that character’s name? Do you remember what his special power was once he became fully self-actualized? I didn’t either, so when he appeared briefly in this sequel, it wasn’t until it was long over that I thought to myself, “Oh wait, that was that guy?” Even the protagonist of the first movie is a discarded afterthought. The story elements from the first movie are tacked on like calling upon support at the last moment, akin to hailing Godzilla to come out and fight the big monster terrorizing Japan for the first two acts of the movie. “Hey, remember the spirit of the Scorpion warrior? Well now he’s back to once again kill the spirit of Sub-Zero who is now Smoke with different powers, I think.” The entire universe-defining inter-galactic tournament feels so underrepresented and insignificant. There’s a culminating fight that requires not one energy beam blast, not two energy beam blasts, but three different energy beam blasts and a very special kick, and every moment feels as arbitrary and airless as the last. Even if you’re not expecting much from a movie that spells “combat” with a K, it should still follow the expectations of a movie, namely that the characters are meaningful and there’s an internal connectivity. Once you start introducing the mechanic that we can bring fighters back from the dead, or just stroll into the Netherworld to hang out with the dead and ask them favors, the stakes lessen dramatically. If death in the fight-to-the-death tournament is just a transitory phase, then why even stress about the tournament?
I know this sequel has a bigger budget than its 2021 predecessor but it looks so much worse visually. The increased number of special effects look dodgier and all of the sets look like big empty green screen stages. Too much of this world looks dim and fake. The fighting stages (acid pit, spike pit) are faithfully recreated from the video games but at a cost. There’s so little that feels tactile or even interactive with the actors onscreen. The environments feel empty and vast and often visually unfinished. There’s one stage surrounded by what looks like a screen saver of old with glowing stars moving like in Star Wars hyperspace. It’s not just that it looks phony, it’s that it doesn’t even appear to look otherwise. There are some gruesome deaths but even they are limited by the range of attacks from the primary villains. Having a big guy wield a big hammer limits what can be done. Often people are just being impaled, and I hate to sound like a jaded Spanish Inquisition flunkey, but you see one bloody impaling, you’ve seen most. Even by the standards of its memorable gore and intensity of its brawls, Mortal Kombat II falls flat. It’s too goofy to be as serious as it is, and it’s too serious to really generate a passing sense of fun.
By most accounts, Mortal Kombat II is going to be a movie that most viewers have a sliding scale of expectations for because it’s based on a fighting video game, because it’s a sequel, and because it’s populated with silly characters in colorful regalia. Is it my fault that I was expecting better? I don’t think so. The results of the 2021 movie show what could be possible, especially with its thoughtful and terrifying opening flashback to 1600s Japan establishing the deadly prowess of Sub-Zero. That’s what a Kombat movie could be like, elevated and cinematic and devastating. It doesn’t have to be junk. Mortal Kombat II doesn’t aspire to be anything other than tasty, disposable junk, and it’s not even good at that.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026)/ They Will Kill You (2026)
It’s not uncommon for Hollywood to have similar movies. It’s not even that uncommon for them to be released months apart, like the great 1998 dualities of Antz/A Bug’s Life and Deep Impact/Armageddon. However, I don’t know if I’ve ever witnessed two movies with such similar plots and tones being released on the exact same day. Well, if you’re a diehard fan of Satanic cults hunting down a rebellious sacrifice who is trying to save her sister amid locked-in locations and lots of explosions of ruby-red blood, then you’ll be in luck with a splatterific double-feature of Ready or Not 2 and They Will Kill You.
2019’s eat-the-rich predecessor, Ready or Not, was one of the best movies that year with one of the most joyously memorable endings. It didn’t need a sequel because it felt complete and satisfying. Even with the same returning directors and writers, it can’t help but feel like a contrived retread. Instead of one family hunting down a target over the course of one night now we have five families hunting down the same target over the course of a day. There are new rules like only one hunter from each family at a time, and they’re not allowed to kill the other hunters lest they and their entire bloodline explode as punishment. The extra rules and moving pieces cannot hide the fact that it feels more of the same. This time it’s not just Samara Weaving as our bloodied bride Grace but now Kathryn Newton as her reluctant and estranged sister, Faith. Their bickering dynamic never really evolves into something more interesting or genuine. It feels like the filmmakers roped the sister into the plot but then didn’t know what to do with her besides as someone Grace could talk to throughout the ordeal. I wish more was done to reveal their history than the old staples, “You were never there. You run when things get tough. You’re selfish.” The nature of the family-versus-family competition could have been sharply satirical in so many different aims, from intra-class warfare to generational relatability difficulties to even demented summer camps. I wanted to know how and why each family got into this pact with the Devil, but alas. Due to the rules, you know each family rep is only going to be onscreen for so long, which means we’re briskly running members of this cast into a meat grinder. It admittedly keeps things fresh but also means few if any of these supporting characters are going to leave an impression (beyond a stain on the wall). The best part of the sequel is Elijah Wood as a hilariously nonplussed keeper of the arcane bylaws and rules. Too often Ready or Not 2 feels like a less developed, less thoughtful, less entertaining knockoff of its original. If there is a Ready or Not 3, I hope it breaks free from the franchise constraints stifling its ongoing creative longevity.
The sensationally stylized and enormously entertaining They Will Kill You is certainly not subtle about its genre influences, from Rosemary’s Baby to Kill Bill and even Wes Anderson’s formalized dollhouse presentation. It’s about a co-op building filled with Satanists who make human sacrifices to their “boss,” and Zazie Beetz (Deadpool 2) just so happens to be a newly hired maid they’ve set their sights on. Too bad for them that this underestimated maid is a scrapper fresh out of prison. The first big fight sets the stage for the glorious entertainment that follows, with Beetz taking on a team of over-confident garbage bag-slicker-wearing cultists. The limbs go flying, the blood spurts in gallons, and the fight choreography is fun and demented even before a supernatural twist complicates later bouts. They Will Kill You doesn’t offer much on characterization or themes. Its story is spare. It doesn’t offer much on world-building (the building is designed so each floor caters to a different vice, though this gets unfortunately forgotten after the orgy floor). What the movie offers is copious bloodshed, inventive violence, and a celebration of carnage and spectacle. Its fiendish mayhem and superb choreography are the primary selling points, like the John Wick franchise. The results can be exhilarating when executed at such high levels of craft. There’s a standout sequence where Beetz is attacking multiple people in a dark dining room. She wields a flaming axe and every vicious strike ignites the victims, accumulating more light in the dim room. I was grinning and cackling so hard (then I unexpectedly teared up because I knew, deep in my soul, that my father would have loved this). Beetz is terrific as our ferocious fighting force, and the long takes and creative ingenuity allow us to appreciate her efforts even more. She deserves more action roles. I don’t know if the final boss is worth the buildup but it is different, and the climax follows the established rules in clever fashion. The un-reality of the movie, which often feels like a stage, becomes yet another charm in a movie that feels beholden to absurd style. It never takes itself too seriously and delivers the goods when it comes to fun, funny, ridiculous, and ridiculously cool action.
Grades:
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come: C+
They Will Kill You: B+
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Frankenstein (2025)
One of the reasons Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein has been so richly relevant two hundred years later is because of her thought-provoking themes and concepts, which still prove potent with each new malleable reinterpretation from the newest creative caretaker. It’s the “be careful what you wish for” adage combined with man’s hubris and our self-destructive impulses to play with things we don’t fully understand. It’s also a monster story that asks us to reconsider the perception of who the monster may truly be, and under writer/director Guillermo del Toro, the answer is always and forever man himself. This isn’t a surprise from the same filmmaker who gave us Hellboy and The Shape of Water. The man identifies with the monsters more than other people. The man turned his astounding stop-motion animated Pinocchio movie into a deft Frankenstein allegory, so the famous story has been on his mind for quite some time. It’s been an obvious influence, and now that he’s gotten his chance on his own imprint, it’s hard not to see elements of del Toro’s other movies everywhere. It creates this bizarre echo chamber of creative influence where the movie can feel derivative at times even though the source material was an influence on those other del Toro works. It’s just the nature of finally tackling the influence later in his career. It reminds me of 2012’s John Carter, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ highly influential sci-fi series, and yet because it took 100 years to leap to the big screen, it couldn’t help but seem derivative of the same popular movies that were inspired by it. This is a convoluted way of saying del Toro’s Frankenstein is a much better Guillermo del Toro movie than a Frankenstein adaptation.
You probably know the story well enough to recite it yourself. Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) is obsessed with conquering death after his own mother’s demise in childbirth. He gathers the parts of criminals and dead soldiers to reanimate into a new being, a Creature (Jacob Elordi) of superhuman strength and regeneration who cannot die. Victor’s cruelty punishes the Creature and disowns it, setting the stage for a showdown between dysfunctional father and son and the havoc caused by recklessly playing God.
There are deliberate decisions that mitigate some of the more compelling characterization of the novel. With del Toro’s version, Victor is the clear-cut villain. There’s some setup given to his strict childhood where his domineering father (Charles Dance) would quiz him and physically abuse Victor if he failed to recite the correct answers to his medical questions. Dear bad dad was doing this, you see, out of a belief that good doctors need to know intuitively because any hesitation could cost lives. When we witness Victor abusing the Creature in the same manner, we’re meant to see the connection between abusive fathers confusing disappointment with defiance. In the original story, Victor abandons the Creature on the night of its birth and then it’s gone. In this version, Victor imprisons the Creature, keeps him chained, attempts to train him, grows frustrated, and then tries to destroy the evidence. That’s a little more diabolical than simple morning-after regrets. This Victor can also be viewed as a forefather of incels the way he projects his romantic feelings onto Elizabeth (Mia Goth) and then gets huffy when she doesn’t return them. There are other deaths later in the story that are directly attributed to the Creature that are now Victor’s doing, which continues to squeeze out moral ambiguity from Shelley’s novel. If the Creature is purely innocent and Victor is purely villainous, that makes the relationship between father and son, Creator and Creature, far less meaningful and layered. It’s so obvious that another character, in their literal dying words, says to Victor, “You are the real monster.” It all becomes an ongoing cycle of bad fathers and the Creature ultimately trying to reach forgiveness. Even if the Creature ultimately finds that, is this Victor even worthy of redemption?
Another significant feature of del Toro’s retelling is, how do I put this delicately, the inherent magnetism of the Creature, a.k.a. Sexy Frankenstein. Elordi (Saltburn) is a tall, lithe actor to begin with with classical Hollywood features, but there was a conscious choice to portray this figure in a certain light, a sexy light. You might find parts of you that are suddenly alive while watching the character onscreen. That’s why even though he’s a literal assembly of corpses the makeup effects are very minimal and less intentionally grotesque or monstrous. The delicate lines around his body make me think of a cross between the Engineers in Prometheus and the body paint of that Gotye music video “Somebody I Used to Know.” The gentle makeup is meant to further convey the Creature as a sensitive figure; granted, he’s also capable of ripping the jaw off a wolf. By swerving away from the Creature’s physical deformities, the movie is also inadvertently downplaying the isolation that he felt that led to such rage and resentment. Is this man that hideous that some good woman couldn’t love him as is? The movie is already presenting Elizabeth as someone who sees through to his gentle nature, and she certainly also seems more than a little attracted to what he’s got going on. This Sexy Frankenstein reconfirms del Toro’s penchant for identifying with the monster, the outcasts, the underdogs. However, Sexy Frankenstein also takes something away from the horror and cost of the creation if he’s just going to be another brooding, misunderstood Byronic hero. Still, there are definitely worse pieces of meat you could be watching, so enjoy monster sweethearts.
With all that being said, del Toro’s Frankenstein is still a sumptuously made and entertaining Gothic spectacle. The production design is immense and immersive with del Toro’s knack for perfect details to create such a lived-in sense of mood (never enough giant stone face edifices). I loved Victor’s models of human torsos that looked almost like ballet dancers at rest; granted, ballet dancers having their skin peeled back by dozens of hooks. I just wanted to spend as much time as possible soaking up these sets and this heightened Gothic realm. It’s the kind of world where Victor’s laboratory needs to be an opulent abandoned castle complete with a pit in the middle of the floor plan that goes through several floors to a sewar/aqueduct basement level. There’s even what appears to be a water slide out of the estate, and the Creature gets to escape it in the most fun way. The movie is gorgeous with del Toro’s signature orange/green color palette bathing his universe. Even if the story isn’t quite reaching the heights it could, the visuals are always sterling and inviting. There’s also a surprising amount of gore, which maybe shouldn’t have been that surprising. I don’t know if we needed as much of the Arctic framing device, which itself was structured as a series of letters in the novel. It’s a platform for del Toro to demonstrate the Creature’s physical prowess and get some quality big-screen bloodshed flowing. I don’t know if we needed to keep cutting back throughout the whole running time like it’s a Christopher Nolan movie. Regardless, if you’re a general fan of monster movies, there’s going to be plenty here to proverbially sink your teeth into and savor on that super Netflix budget.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein gave birth to science fiction in 1818 and the James Whale movies from the 1930s gave birth to some of cinema’s most iconic and lasting images and influences. There’s quite a legacy for anyone who wants to put their own stamp on the material, so it helps that Guillermo del Toro has quite a legacy himself, a career built upon the dark recesses of a verdant imagination (I’ll always lament what could have been his version of The Hobbit movies, alas). His Frankenstein has all the hallmarks of a classic del Toro film experience, from the impeccable technical qualities, to the celebration of the mythic and Gothic, to the sympathetic portrayal of the outsiders condemned by a society too square to accept them, and an unironic emotional undercurrent that can approach self-parody. It’s a little long, a little ungainly in its shape, and a little too simplistic with its themes and characterization, but it can also be fittingly transporting and romantic and easy to feel that swell even if it’s all too familiar. For my money, the best Frankenstein adaptation is still the 1994 Kenneth Branagh version, flaws and all.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Death of a Unicorn (2025)
Unfortunately, this never became the glorious B-movie its premise promises, a monster movie with ghastly gore that also satirizes the rich business elites. Death of a Unicorn has enough appealing elements, from the father/daughter relationship between Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega, to some ridiculous gore and kills, to impressive creature prosthetics to bring the unicorn to life (and death). The setup has Rudd and Ortega run over a unicorn in a secluded nature reserve on their way to meet dad’s boss. They discover the unicorn blood can be miraculously healing, which is a fortuitous discovery considering Rudd’s boss runs a pharmaceutical company. You can see where this goes, especially when you learn that there are more unicorns out there and they are not happy. It becomes a wily creature feature from there, with unicorns picking off the characters one-by-one as they try and escape. The satirical broadsides are a bit too broad, thus only really glancing in their pointed attacks that the people in charge of medical care are themselves venal and selfish. Got it. Much of the humor is related directly to the absurdity of watching a unicorn as a blood-thirsty monster. If you replaced the unicorn with, say, a yeti, would the situation still be amusing? Maybe, but I seriously doubt it. Death of a Unicorn could have been a little scarier, funnier, even freakier, and maybe carried through on the courage of its convictions.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Together (2025)
With co-dependency as its anchor metaphor, Together is a body horror movie asking the question how intimate you’d ever want to be with your beloved? It’s a relationship drama about two people that should probably break up and move on but are clinging to some sense that they need to stay. Real-life married couple Dave Franco (The Disaster Artist) and Alison Brie (Horse Girl) play pretend couple Tim and Millie who relocate to the small-town countryside and come across a mysterious sinkhole belonging to an abandoned New Agey church, as one does. After Tim, in his desperation, drinks the water out of a pit that looks like it was designed by H.R. Giger, his body and mind are hijacked with the compulsion to be as close as possible with his long-time girlfriend. Now the two of them are fighting strange impulses, like swallowing one another’s hair, or trying to physically meld their bodies together. Can they learn more about their predicament and the history of this symbiosis before they are forced together forever?
Considering its premise, there is plenty of potential here for grandly gross body horror. There are certainly some squirm-worthy and disgusting moments of vivid imagery that could induce nightmares. I’m not even talking about the direct body horror moments. Seeing a man swallowing a majority of your ponytail in his sleep might make you gag like it did me. Things get more wild after an hour and stay that way to the end, as the couple has to thwart their bodies from literally fusing together. The sticky skin-to-skin, or eyeball-to-eyeball sequences are dreadfully unnerving, but the imagery of them literally being dragged by invisible forces across the ground to one another like literal magnets is less horrifying and more absurdly ridiculous. That’s the rub. There’s some terrific body horror grotesquery here, and writer/director Michael Shanks has a sneaky way with dread, building things to a monumental point and then cutting away. However, some of the other aspects of this curse come across as far goofier, like the aforementioned being dragged across the floor. For some it might come across as terrifying, the whole supernatural exaggeration of being out of control of your own body, but it reminded me of Tenet where it looked like characters were just rolling around on the ground in a supremely silly way when it was supposed to be “backwards time.” There are also some middling jump scares relating to Tim’s trauma with his parents that, I guess, is the explanation for why he has intimacy problems. Still, if you’re coming to Together for the outlandishly gross potential of its premise, there may be enough to sate your curiosity for macabre oddities.
Together is more a movie about a couple who should retire. There’s far more about the struggles and pains of this relationship than weird body horror. She wants to get married, he doesn’t. She wanted to move for a new job, and he did not. She wants to have regular sex, he hasn’t wanted to for months for unspecified reasons (unresolved childhood traumas?). The relationship is very one-sided and unlike 2019’s Midsommar, which was about a poor woman realizing it was time to kick her no-good boyfriend to the curb, or burn him alive via cult intervention, this movie is more about Millie wearing down Tim’s defenses. He’s connecting with her again but it’s through this metaphysical compulsion that he can’t fully explain. He’s expressing real physical interest but he’s still finding ways to reject her, which just drives her crazier. One minute they’re trying to resolve their intimacy issues, and the next they’re working together to slice their arms apart. There are some memorable discomforts, like having to physically dislodge after some vigorous yet impulsive bathroom stall sex. That sequence made me uncomfortable for several reasons. The film’s shock value and tone flirts with darker humor without committing. The final shot of the movie is also a bit silly, and while it achieves the articulation of the movie’s main theme, the concluding imagery is more like, “Oh, well, okay then.” It might even produce a few guffaws. It’s not quite the lasting image I think the filmmakers wanted to go out on. It made me think of Kevin Smith’s man-becomes-walrus horror film, Tusk, where it ends and you go, “Oh… well, they did it, all right.” Some things are better in theory than finally visualized where they come across as anticlimactic.
That’s the other thing with Together, it’s practically bludgeoning you with its obvious theme, having every other line relate back to codependency. Multiple times you will hear, “It would be better to separate now. It will just be harder the longer we wait.” Can you get how this will be applied in multiple contexts? These are characters that feel stuck. Get it? Franco and Brie have an easy-going chemistry and an innate ability to find the darker humor amidst all the body horror splicing. I might argue their chemistry is too good considering they’re supposed to be a couple that shouldn’t really stay together and have passed their relationship expiration date. I don’t think you should want them to stay together considering this relationship is killing the both of them, now very literally. I was surprised there wasn’t more combustion to how this complicates their interactions and mobility. If this is a relationship that has had its rocky points and toxicity, you would think something this unnatural and against their autonomy would produce some friction (no pun intended). I suppose you could examine the entire movie as an analysis of how easily people will subsume themselves in order to stay in something even they would admit isn’t healthy. I’m not going to pretend The Substance was subtle either, but that movie was more fable and mixing in its over-the-top elements with verve, rather than fitting them into a relationship dirge.
Right before its nationwide theatrical release, Together was accused of plagiarism by another filmmaker who approached Franco and Brie with a similar concept in 2020. Shanks has defended his film by saying he registered his first draft back in 2019, and the producers of Together, including Franco and Brie, have dismissed the claim. I haven’t read the competing script, nor do I pretend to be an insider on this matter, but it’s easy for me to see how this concept could have been independently generated by dozens of screenwriters and aspiring body horror gurus. It’s taking its theme and making it quite literal, forcing the challenged couple who shouldn’t be together to literally, physically, irrevocably be together. It’s all pretty straightforward, which makes Together a workable but limited body horror experiment. I liked it, as much as one can like a movie where characters have to forcibly unstuck their genitals, but I found myself wanting a little more from Together. The added Tim back-story spooks feel out of place, the ongoing mystery of what happened to a previous backpacking couple is over represented, and the theme is so obvious at every turn that the metaphor is in danger of being stripped bare. Its concept is undeniable, and the body horror imagery can be aces, but the development and execution could have been a little more, well, together.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)
A funny thing happens once you conclude a Final Destination movie. You start to see the world differently. After I finished watching Bloodlines, the first new film in the franchise since 2011, I found myself elevated by creative paranoia. I was holding onto an empty aluminum can and thought, “What if placing this on the counter will create a chain of events that leads to disaster?” Then I was washing our kitchen sink and looking at how close other electrical devices were to the faucet spray. Then I began thinking of all the dog toys that could position themselves underfoot and cause me to hit my head against our tile, perhaps then having that aluminum can fall on my head as a finishing move. If you’ve ever seen one of these movies, they are games of misdirection and dramatic irony, anxiously anticipating that any little item will contribute to a Rube Goldberg-esque wave of death. In many ways, the franchise brings an outlandish fear home and makes you just as crazy as the doomed characters. Final Destination: Bloodlines is a return to form for a franchise that never should have been on the brink of death. As long as people can come up with clever deaths and misdirects, there should be sequels.
Having watched and enjoyed every Final Destination movie, I will readily admit that while each of the five previous entries can be gory good fun they cannot be described as great movies, and that’s okay. They are delivery systems for amusement and absurd deaths, asking the audience to try and guess the ridiculous series of events that will contribute to the demise of whomever fills the screen. It’s a reliable formula that can be replicated again and again, where death itself is the main villain, or star, and where the appeal of the franchise is the winking game the movies are knowingly playing with the viewers. We’re here for the over-the-top machinations and dark humor of trying to guess what combination will succeed. The later sequels were populated with repellent or powerfully bland characters that we happily awaited their fateful demise, but the deaths were also getting stale, becoming more mean-spirited or more flimsier in design, giving to obvious obliteration options and then cheap shock alternative as mini-twists. If you’re going to have a game, it’s better to play by your rules. That’s where things began to go sour with me, but that doesn’t mean good writers who fully understand this franchise cannot revive it. I just thought it would have taken less time considering the inherent rebooting potential at play.
This brings us to Bloodlines, by far the most ambitious of all Final Destination movies. It attempts to really explore the mythology and history of the franchise while also grounding the characters and their drama in a surprisingly emotionally resonant manner. I’m not saying anyone is going to confuse this movie with, say, Sophie’s Choice, but the filmmakers have put in the work to make us actually care about the doomed characters and their fledgling efforts for survival. Usually these movies follow a group of strangers along with a small friend group that becomes our core. This is the first movie where all of the characters in peril are family members across generations. Watching your mother or aunt or brother die horribly before your eyes and knowing that someone else in your family is next is just more impactful than if the relationships were based on high school friendships, work colleagues, or strangers. That kind of trauma just hits differently. Also, the ages of the family dynamic present a clear direction for the path that death is planning to take, going from oldest to youngest, although death seems to put this chronological pecking order on hold to wipe out a line of siblings. Excuse the math word problem setup of what will follow. Let’s say you have Oldest Child and Youngest Child and both have two kids but Oldest Child’s kids were both born after Youngest Child’s kids. Rather than killing the descendants in descending chronological order, death would wipe out Oldest Child’s offspring first even though they are younger than the children of Younger Child. As always, it appears death is a stickler with its rules.
The opening sequence is an all-timer for the franchise, and because it sets everything in motion I don’t feel like discussing it is particularly spoiler-y, but you may decide otherwise and can skip this paragraph. According to the new mythos, this is the event that sets the entire Final Destination universe into effect. It’s a spectacular disaster set in a high-rise restaurant 400 feet in the air atop one of those Sky Needle skyscrapers. The entire sequence is brilliantly executed and edited with extremely heightened periods of dread. These first ten minutes introduce us to a young romantic couple and get us invested enough to feel bad about what’s to eventually come. They also set up the stakes as well as the twisted gallows humor to follow. I loved tracing the different elements at play, from the cracking glass dance floor, to a loose chandelier shard (if one little chandelier piece could cause cracks then this must be the weakest floor in history), to a loose penny causing mayhem all because of a snotty little brat, the real villain of the franchise. The cross-cutting between the different incidents as things ratchet up is wonderful, and the clever cuts to the creme brule being broken as that glass dance floor is cracking is just superb. This is more than just a sequence in vertigo terror. There’s a gas explosion, a falling elevator, a Titanic-esque splitting of the restaurant, and the use of a grand piano as a slapstick coup de grace that left me cheering. This opener lets you know you’re in bloody good hands with Bloodlines and it also begins to emotionally ground the film too.
This is the most self-aware of the Final Destination movies but I think it works considering it’s the sixth entry, so having characters essentially be voices for the audience’s frantic clue-guessing is appropriate. One of the better sequences in the movie is when our protagonist, Stefanie (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), is walking through her neighborhood and trying to absently predict the everyday dangers on a garbage day. It begins as absurd and then it becomes even more absurd when everything she predicted lines up, though not as we might have expected. The whole thing plays out like a demented and extended joke setup with death as the punchline. Thankfully, it doesn’t take long for the family to get on board with this crazy idea that death is after them, so the second half of the movie is more their scrambling to plot how to cheat death established by the previous movies by either dying and being brought back or by taking a life and getting that person’s remaining time. There’s a gasp-inducing joke where characters, after discussing these rules, glance at a maternity ward and consider, “Could we actually kill a baby?” before shaking away the dark idea and going back to their original plan. It’s self-aware without being overly meta, working through the rules and expectations but without an ironic detachment that can cheapen the enjoyment of the drama and thrills. That’s important because this might be the Final Destination movie with the lowest amount of deaths after the big opener. Part of that is because we’re setting the story decades after that establishing catastrophe, where death has been busy chopping away the survivors before coming back around to our core family (there’s got to be a mathematical formula here how long it took death to catch up). You’ll have to wait longer for some kills, and a few are just haphazardly thrown together, but there’s still plenty of dreadful squirm and rueful chuckles to be had.
Considering its runaway success at the box-office, out-grossing all of the previous Final Destination movies, I doubt we’ll have to wait anywhere close to another 14 years for more franchise mayhem. These movies are perfect vehicles for twisted entertainment when they have the right people calibrating them. They may not always be great but they can be consistently great fun, and under the right mindset, exactly what you need to wash away the blahs and laugh at the absurdity of death and fate. It will also make you re-examine your home decorative plan for your own pre-emptive protection. Feng shui or die, ya’ll.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Heart Eyes (2025)/ Fear Street: Prom Queen (2025)
Slasher movies have been a popu;ar staple of horror, enough so to go through different phases of resurgence and ironic reinterpretation. They rose to prominence in the 1980s but are still wildly popular today, perhaps proving that there’s something timeless about a masked maniac chasing after dumb teenagers with his or her weapon of choice. Mix in heavy amounts of blood and gratuitous nudity, and it’s easy to see why this cost-effective entertainment strategy continues to endure. Two new 2025 slasher movies show the highs and middling lows of this horror genre known for its graphic kills and little else.
Heart Eyes is ostensibly about a romance-hating masked killer who stalks happy couples on Valentine’s Day and gets all stabby with their insides. However, it’s really a pretty charming romantic comedy that just so happens to also have a healthy amount of gore. The clever screenplay follows many of the same tropes we come to expect from the rom-com genre but now with a twist. It’s Boy Meets Girl, as Jay (Mason Gooding) and Ally (Olivia Holt) are forced to work together to save a romantic ad campaign gone wrong. It’s Girl getting over the pain of her recent breakup with the emergence of a handsome new man in town. It’s Guy and Girl butting heads before creating sparks. And then they’re chased repeatedly by the masked killer. They yell, “We’re not even a couple,” but it makes no difference; their chemistry is just that undeniable. In that regard, this murder menace is actively driving these two would-be lovebirds together, forcing them to rely upon one another for survival, and revealing parts of themselves. If you cut out all the horror parts, it would still work as a romance, but it’s even more entertaining to watch how the two genres, both beholden to their formulas, mash so bloody well. The banter is witty, the silly are over-the-top gory, and this is a rare movie that could be loved by gorehounds and foolish romantics. It’s an elevation that is self-aware but not obnoxiously, more silly tongue-firmly-in-cheek. You can tell there is a love for both of these genres from the filmmakers. Heart Eyes is a fun and refreshing spin on the old.
The newest Fear Street movie, based on the scream teen novels by R.L.Stein, is by far the weakest in the Netflix horror anthology series. Prom Queen is a pretty straightforward rehash of your 1980s high school movie staples of horny teens, bitchy popular girls, the less popular girl striving for Prom Queen and having to reconcile the changes she’s willing to make to be a winner, and a knife-wielding killer. Ah, the nostalgia. The issue is that there’s nothing separating this movie from, say, Prom Night, either the 1980 original or the PG-13 remake in 2008. The most thought put into this movie is the gruesome kills with some decent gore, but the whole movie doesn’t even play like a cartoon. It plays like a TV special you’ve watched before, something not just outdated but that’s been iterated upon iterations, a bland copy of a copy of a copy. The mystery of who might be the killer has some slight fun but the culprit should be easy enough to suss out when you take into account what actors have names that you remember. There’s nothing wrong with emphasizing the more gruesome exploitation elements of the genre, but the kills aren’t that memorable or clever, nor are the characters that interesting even as generic stock roles. I found myself confusing many of the multiple Prom Queen candidates (why are there so many pale brunettes?). The previous Fear Street movies released in 2022 had an interesting gimmick connecting them with the history of the town going back centuries to explain its crushed nature. Prom Queen just exists in this space without doing anything to connect to the larger Shadyside mythos and cross-generational storytelling. It feels so dreary and perfunctory and rather boring, shuffling along like a zombie wearing the husk of Fear Street. It’s just not fun. It’s not outlandish enough to be silly and too dumb to be self-aware. It’s mostly unimaginative cliches warmed over and unrelated to a far more stylish and ambitious horror series. This is a Prom Queen that deserves a bucket of blood and social ostracism instead of any accolades.
Nate’s Grades:
Heart Eyes: B+
Fear Street: Prom Queen: C-
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The Monkey (2025)
It was only minutes when I thought to myself, “I think I love this movie.” To be fair, this movie might only jibe for a very select few with a penchant for gory, outlandish horror and a demented sense of humor, but it just so happens that specific population includes yours truly. The Monkey is a dark comedy about the cruel indifference of fate disguised as a supernatural thriller adaptation of a Stephen King short story. It’s about two twin brothers (both played by Theo James as an adult) coming to terms with a family curse, a toy monkey that, when wound up, will beat its drum until the final blow correlates with the sudden, often shocking death of a random person. It’s essentially a death device and the brothers are haunted by it since losing both of their parents to it as teenagers, both grasping for meaning from their tragedy. One of them blames himself and the other blames his brother, and this has warped them into adulthood and how they view themselves, their responsibility as a parent, and their hostility to one another. The movie becomes a cagey reunion between the two brothers while also vying for power over a dangerous totem that loves elaborate Final Destination-style calamities. These deaths are over-the-top, often with bodies exploding in bloody heaps, and I found myself cackling along in response to the ridiculous violence. This is quite a change of pace for writer/director Osgood Perkins who just last year helmed the Satanic serial killer thriller Longlegs. Whereas that movie was a bit too lost in its slow-build atmosphere and a jumbled story burdened with underdeveloped plot elements, The Monkey is refreshingly straightforward and always entertaining in its contained madness. There are some bold and dark choices made and I appreciated every one of them. This is really a movie about trying to make sense of death and grief but it’s through the visage of spilled viscera and gallows humor. I didn’t think I’d walk away saying this, but I can’t wait to show my wife the movie about the killer windup monkey.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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Smile 2 (2024)
In 2022, thanks to genius viral marketing and the acknowledgement how deeply unnerving happy people can be, Smile was a surprise horror smash hit. Writer/director Parker Finn expanded on a previous short film and made serious money, which meant a sequel was a given. Finn returns to lead Smile 2 to even creepier genre pastures, this time following the mental demise of a pop star, Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) trying to make sense of this malignant curse. As much as I enjoyed the first Smile for its careful development and visceral intensity, I think Smile 2 might be even better.
From the opening sequence, it’s clear that we’re in the hands of a filmmaker that knows exactly what they’re doing. This is not merely another paycheck for Finn. He’s thought about how a sequel can build from its predecessor, stand on its own, incrementally build out the mythology, but mostly how to be an expertly made horror thriller designed to get under your skin. There were multiple sequences where I kept muttering variations of , “No,” or, “I don’t like that at all,” enough so that my wife in the other room would inquire what was directing these responses. Finn is tremendous at setting up the particulars of a scare sequence and allowing the audience to simmer in that anxious period of dread as we wait for something sinister to happen. He reminds me of James Wan and his ability to set up a nasty little scenario and then traps you inside awaiting the worst. There are sequences that compelled me to look away, not simply because they were overpowering, though the gore and makeup effects can best be described as impressively gross, but because the movie was finding different ways to make me uncomfortable, but in that good horror movie way. Finn’s camera makes what we should fear very clear, and his editing is precise. This is a movie that wants you to see the darkness and persistently worry about what’s coming just out of the frame.
One of my minor complaints with the first Smile was that there wasn’t much below its grinning surface. Sure, the entire premise of a curse that spreads through witnessing horrific acts of self-harm lends itself toward the discussion of how trauma begets trauma, but beyond that the first film was more reliant upon supreme craft and well-engineered scares. There’s nothing wrong with a movie that exists primarily as a thrill ride as long as those thrills deliver upon their promise. However, with Smile 2, Finn uses the character of Skye Riley as a beginning point to discuss the toxic relationships that come with fandom. It should be very obvious for every viewer that Skye is going through some serious issues. She’s overcoming addiction, physically rehabilitating her body as well as socially rehabilitating her image, and trying to learn all her new choreography for an intense world tour. This is a woman who could use a significant break. And yet, as the movie progresses, you start to sense that there is this large machinery around her that needs her to perform because that is how she makes them all money. Even her own mother-as-manager (Rosemarie DeWitt) can seem questionable as far as her motivations; is she pushing her child because she knows it’s what best for her to focus on for recovery, or is she pushing her because the tour pays for her lifestyle? As the movie progresses, the characters fret that Skye’s increasingly bizarre behavior is going to ruin the tour first and foremost, and concern for her actual well-being is secondary at best. All these people have their paychecks attached to this woman fulfilling her contractual obligations. You can also extrapolate the intense pressure the industry places on people with mental illness and self-destructive personalities to conform to standards that are unfair and often un-meetable. You might question why more pop stars don’t have head-shaving outbursts.
Because we know that the evil entity has the power to alter our sense of sight and sound, it means the viewer must be actively skeptical about what is happening. Is this really happening? Is this sort of happening but elements are different? Or is this completely a hallucination? It makes the plot the equivalent of shifting sand, never allowing us to be comfortable or complacent. This can lead to positive and negative feelings. It keeps things lively but it can feel like the plot never really moves forward, at least in a cause-effect accumulation. It can often feel like the movie is moving in starts and stops, and if you’re not onboard for the craft, the acting, and the scares, then the results can likely feel frustrating, especially when large swaths of time are canceled out. For me, I enjoyed the extra sensory game of keeping me alert because it led to a barrage of surprises and rug pulls, some of them admittedly annoying, especially losing what amounts to maybe an entire act of the movie, but also they were a definite way to keep upending the narrative certainty. This sneaky approach also very viscerally places us in the paranoid mindset of our protagonist, as we too are unable to trust our senses and tense up with certain unsettling auditory cues. Mainly, I was having too much fun with the devious twists and turns, and some wickedly disturbing imagery from the director, that I felt like it was an ongoing thrill ride through a funhouse of insanity that kept me guessing.
In a just world, Scott (Aladdin, Charlie’s Angels) would be at the front of the pack in the discussion for the Best Actress Oscar. This woman is put through the proverbial wringer and she showcases every frayed nerve, every degenerating thought with such verve and command. It’s essentially a performance of a woman completely breaking down mentally, but Scott doesn’t just go for broke, putting every ounce of effort into inhabiting the breakdown, she creates a character that reveals herself through the breakdown. It’s not just screaming hysterics and histrionics; there are different levels to her dismantling psyche, and Scott portrays them beautifully. I felt such great levels of dread for her because of how successfully Scott was able to anchor my emotional investment. She’s also portraying different versions of Skye, and some key flashbacks reveal just how toxic her former addict self was that she’s trying to put to rest. It’s a performance about metaphorical demons and literal demons haunting a woman, as well as guilt that is eating her alive. Scott allows us the pleasure of watching a first-class performance through her shattering.
There’s a curious motif to the movie that many will probably ignore but my wife and I fixated on, and so I feel the need to briefly discuss this so that, you too dear reader, can have this fixation as well. There are at least four scenes where Skye drinks a large bottle of water in a manner that can be best described as monstrously destructive. She drinks that bottle like a lost man in the desert finding his first drink of water. She attacks it. My best analysis is that this is a character detail about Skye’s addictive personality and sense of dependency, projecting the same all-consuming need onto water that she had previously for narcotics. One of the best laughs is when a doctor takes stock of Skye and says how dehydrated she is. Regardless, take in how desperately Skye Riley drinks and think about perhaps applying that technique next time you need a refreshing drink.
By its nightmarish conclusion, Smile 2 finds a fitting and satisfying end stop that promises a possible even bigger and more disturbing escalation for a Smile 3. Finn has established himself with two movies as a major horror filmmaker who can work within the mid-major studio system and still keep a perspective and integrity. I’m pleased that Smile 2 isn’t just more of the same old Smile, and in fact very few instances involve strangers with that signature facial expression. By the time you’re seeing the smile, it’s usually too late. I enjoyed the choice to find menace and darkness in a world of pop music brightness (the fake pop songs actually sound indistinguishable from what currently airs on the radio, bravo). I enjoyed the continuing tradition of casting famous Hollywood scions, like Jack Nicholson’s son playing Skye’s dead boyfriend (that family grin is uncanny, also bravo). What I really enjoyed was Scott’s uncompromising performance. Smile 2 has convinced me that Finn is the real deal, Scott might be one of our best modern scream queens and young actors, and to confirm introverted habits to avoid anyone who looks directly at me and smiles.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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