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Resident Evil (2026)
I’ve never played any of the popular Resident Evil video games but I have watched every movie, at least the ones starring Milla Jovovich, as I consider them the right kind of entertaining trash. In no way will I argue that any of the six movies from 2002 to 2017 are defensibly good by traditional standards (I’m purposely ignoring the 2021 failed reboot Welcome to Racoon City). I will, however, gladly sit and watch any of them if they are on TV because they are, at their best, gloriously ridiculous and silly spectacles. My interest dramatically increased in a new Resident Evil movie when writer/director Zack Cregger’s name was attached. The man behind twisty genre-benders Barbarian and Weapons helming a video game franchise best known for schlocky genre filmmakers like Paul W.S. Anderson? Weapons won an Oscar for a performance, a rarity for a horror movie, and now that same filmmaker wants to revive Resident Evil? My interest increased even further when Cregger confirmed it would be an original story and not really beholden to the established characters and plots of the many games (many fans did not agree with me). It felt like a fresh start with an exciting filmmaker on the rise, and having seen Resident Evil, I can declare it a gory blast, a brilliantly-calculated thrill ride to make you laugh and scream in good fun.
The entire 90-minute movie follows one character’s hellish night into the madness of the early signs of a deadly outbreak. We follow Bryan (Austin Abrams) as a medical courier delivering organs to hospitals. He’s ready to head home when he gets a special urgent delivery needed in Racoon City up in the snowy mountains. It will pay double and so he snatches the opportunity. It might be the allure of more money or it might be another chance to think about something other than the frightening reality that his girlfriend (Sara Paxton, off-screen) is pregnant. Along the dark and snowy drive up the mountains, a woman walks into his path and Bryan strikes her with his car. The rest of his night is about to get so much worse.
Considering its basis as a survival horror game, at least until it became a bombastic action-movie opera that better resembles the Jovovich screen spectacles, I think a streamlined approach by Cregger is smart. It narrows down the universe to this one guy’s very bad night, and it presents an immediately immersive experience, akin to playing a game and thinking through what is your best option out of a bunch of very bad options. From the very beginning, we are in Bryan’s frantic perspective. What he knows and experiences are what we know and experience. The clarity of focus provides a satisfying line of escalation as he gets into more and more danger. Cregger allows the audience to think through Bryan’s predicaments along with him, and there isn’t much he does that seems out of question, considering the extreme circumstances. I appreciated how once things really start going sideways that Bryan doesn’t miraculously transform into like an action movie hero. He’s just a normal guy relentlessly in over his head like any of us would be confronting monstrous horrors. I loved how bad he is with guns. Just because Bryan has some experience playing video games doesn’t mean he knows how to operate real firearms, and that doesn’t mean that the weapons of the real world perform like they do in games. There’s an ongoing joke about how he keeps trying to shoot off padlocks and failing that made me smirk every time. These little touches of realism in an elevated space made Resident Evil feel more engaging. It made it feel like even the little things mattered. This guy felt vulnerable, and sometimes his impulsive solutions only serve to get him into more trouble. The screenwriting plotting of A-to-B-to-C has a satisfying logic that manages to ground the mayhem on its own terms. He often has to think through an obstacle.
Cregger’s command of a scene is so enjoyable and assured, and he knows when he wants to make you squirm and when he wants to make you laugh. He can draw out a scene with excellent sound design for chills, like when a figure is quickly advancing on Bryan and clamoring up stairs while he desperately tries to reload a shotgun. The pacing of the moment is terrific. The resignation of desperation can also lead to many dread-fueled moments, like venturing into dark tunnels to sewers to blood-soaked halls. You don’t want to go down there, but you also kind of want to see. There’s also a heightened level that naturally draws mordant laughs, like when he’s being chased around a flipped-over police vehicle and sloppily shooting behind him. The movie wants you to laugh at the absurdity of trying to make sense of this nightmare scenario. It’s the release to get ready for more. Much of the humor is drawn from subverting our expectations of genre movies, like trying to ram open a locked gate, and particularly Bryan’s response to the madness. His panicked, befuddled reactions and clumsy physicality, accompanied with often high-pitched scream, serve as a reminder that he is a normal guy in unusual circumstances (I’d like to try and see you do any better). One of the biggest laughs for me was just a joke about stairs.
This is also a great looking movie. Cregger has the enviable talent of cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, the man who photographed The Crow, the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, and nine (!) Ridley Scott movies since 2012. The man knows how to frame striking contrasts, so the whites of the snow-covered landscapes in the first half visually pop with the dark blacks of the silhouettes and the blood trails. The movements of the camera and compositions add such a charged sense of energy that reminded me of the best of Sam Raimi without feeling like a derivation in Cregger’s overall sense of style. The movie also doesn’t bend over backwards to bring to life the visual dynamic of the game, though there are more than a few passing gun barrel POV shots to sate the faithful.
This is also a very messy movie in the best/worst way. For gore-hounds, there is some impressively gnarly gore, which isn’t surprising considering the viral outbreak is turning residents into split-faced, multi-tentacled monsters. The body horror is gruesomely inventive. There’s one monster that reminded me of a different video game, 2004’s Katamari Damacy, a Japanese game where you start with a small sticky ball and roll it around, collecting more and more items and people, growing in size to the point that you attach the whole world. Imagine that but a snowman of men, and you can only see limbs moving at angles that limbs shouldn’t do. It’s quite unnerving to glimpse. I also found myself audibly wincing during a sequence where zombies are throwing themselves off the roofs of buildings while Bryan runs down an alley, bodies exploding all around him in eruptions of viscera. There’s another sequence of zombie rats that makes me shake my head in disbelief even now remembering it. Credit to Cregger, the man is unafraid to go places other horror movies fear to tread. Whether it’s animals or children, nobody is safe in this disturbing universe. There was one moment in a mutated maternity ward where I cautiously decided to shut my eyes to avoid poisoning my brain with fresh nightmare fuel to review when I came home and embraced my almost two-year-old son. There are some things I just don’t need to see presently.
At a brisk 90 minutes, this is one of those rare movies I think would have benefited from another ten to fifteen minutes, especially with its abrupt ending. The final act loses some of the momentum accumulated beforehand, which isn’t a deal-breaker considering the film was moving like a runaway freight train up until that point. It also feels like a slightly different movie, both in approach and tone, going bigger and not exactly better. There’s also a question over what is gained from giving Bryan a characterization starting point. Over the course of the movie, he certainly re-examines his perspective on being a prospective father (and that’s before the mutated maternity ward). I thought this was going to climatically lead to a significant deliberation over making a selfish versus selfless decision, but Cregger doesn’t go there. The ending is kind of a cinematic middle finger to anyone expecting that character arc to come to something more meaningful, which is fine, but then why include the thread at all unless it’s just intended to be another deliberate rug-pull of your expectations? While the last ten minutes doesn’t quite live up to the amazing alacrity of the prior 80 minutes, it doesn’t ruin the good fun Cregger has earned in excess.
For many years, I thought it was impossible to make a good video game movie. This was because of the interactive nature of games versus the more passive medium of movies, but it was also a statement borne of the adaptations of the time, many of which had Uwe Boll’s name attached. I’m here to say times have changed but also so have the games. Over the last two decades, video games have reached new creative heights and that includes dramatic storytelling depth as well. Playing a game like Red Dead Redemption II is like burning through seven seasons of an epic and invigorating TV series. That’s not the intent of a movie like Cregger’s Resident Evil, a more streamlined and specifically designed contraption that is like riding a perfectly engineered ride. By the end credits, you might just have to catch your breath. While I have some minor quibbles about the ending and some dangling plot threads, Resident Evil is such a nasty, squishy, gruesomely entertaining movie, that I’m thankful for the privilege of watching Cregger operate at B-movie studio level (will Cury Barker be able to find similar results with his looming Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot?). If we can give artists with a vision the berth to see it through, we might be able to turn around every moribund video game franchise. Look out for Ari Aster’s Doom next, and it will still be three hours and a metaphor for penises.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Buddy (2026)
What if Barney the friendly dinosaur was really a murderous monster? That’s the catchy premise of co-writer/director Casper Kelly’s surreal horror fantasy Buddy, a crazy yet admirably committed exploration of kids TV tropes to their fullest extent. Considering Kelly might be best known for his insane yet brilliant deconstruction of sitcom opening theme songs, the Adult Swim short film Too Many Cooks, this makes sense. My first question was whether the pastel-colored, stagey world of Buddy the Unicorn (voiced by Keegan Michael-Key) was supposed to be literally real or was simply a TV set. The universe of Buddy, while adhering to the tropes and mechanics of children’s TV storytelling, is indeed its own reality. I enjoyed how Buddy knows he must gather the children to sing the closing theme song because then “the words appear” (he means end credits) and everything resets, which would allow him to heal from his injuries or perhaps have the children forget witnessing his horrors. The puppet-heavy world of Buddy is interesting, as are the subversive and disturbing edges glimpsed like Buddy trying to explain the disappearance of a child and the strange “red paint” on his outfit. Short of twenty minutes, the entire movie takes place in this strange fantasy setting, so I kept wondering about the lore and workings of this universe, especially how Buddy is capturing kids from the real world. The last ten minutes fulfilled that but I wanted more. That’s because the Buddy set itself, modeled after PeeWee’s Playhouse and Barney, feels a little too closed-off, the building threat of Buddy being rather redundant. I became frustrated at how limited the movie was settling with its subversive satire, at several points feeling like an overextended skit going off the rails rather than a complete movie. Then again that structural gambit might appeal to other viewers who are on the same twisted wavelength of Kelly. It held my interest, but I kept wondering if this was all there was, and whether maybe Buddy was a little too much of the same.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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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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Scary Movie (2026)
The Wayans brothers birthed the original Scary Movie spoof and then after one mixed sequel in 2001 they were ditched by the studio. There were three more Scary Movie sequels that became less and less popular. The Wayans stuck by their raunchy satirical playbook, making two A Haunted House spoofs and even a parody of Fifty Shades of Grey. Now the Wayans brothers are back, along with Scary Movie alums Anna Faris and Regina Hall, the real MVPs of the franchise. It’s a homecoming, a nostalgic throwback for fans of the original Scary Movie, and a hopeful upswing for big-screen studio comedy to make a comeback. If only the movie were funnier.
Since the last Scary Movie sequel in 2013, horror movies have flourished. There’s the Conjuring franchise, which has made over a billion dollars, the miraculous ascendancy of Jordan Peele as an Oscar-winning horror maven, as well as the rise in elevated “A24-style” horror, movies heavy in atmosphere and layered metaphors, by the likes of Ari Aster, Osgood Perkins, Robert Eggers, and Zach Cregger. Coralie Fargeat was even nominated for Best Director for making The Substance, generally unheard of in Academy Award history. There is so much that can be satirized about horror since 2013, especially how it compares to horror from the 1980s and 1990s. Instead of tackling any of these new perspectives and movements in a meaningfully satirical manner, Scary Movie 2026 is, much like the Scream franchise itself, stuck in the past. This movie could have even covered the evolution of modern slashers into grueling gore endurance contests, like the Terrifier films, or the more experimental genre deep dives like Ti West’s Pearl trilogy with Mia Goth and In a Violent Nature. That would require more effort, so since Scary Movie 2026 is setting itself up as a reboot/legacy sequel, there is a logic for it to attach itself to the plots of Halloween 2018 and Scream 5 (it’s shocking how much plot is pulled from Scream 5). However, any satirical derision over the nature of cash-grab franchise reboots is reserved for the very last ten minutes, which happens to be the best part. Instead, there are too many moments where the same joke is run into the ground (like Ray being closeted, which doesn’t make as much sense in 2026 America), or the end result is just somebody getting hurt. Personally, I chuckled maybe about five times, so my entertainment output was not high. The best joke is a visual gag that goes unspoken about the very disastrous Final Destination amusement park.
The spoof pacing requires a lot of material to burn through, and as a result everything gets sucked into the comedy cauldron whether it seems related to horror or not. There’s a parody of the Michael Jackson movie, most likely because it’s popular and not because there are new jokes to be had about one of the most famous celebrities who’s been dead for over 15 years. I’ll save you the time: the punchline is that a man moonwalks and falls down the stairs. Why is there an animated sequence parodying K-Pop Demon Hunters? Why is there an extended John Wick parody? The answer is simple: because they made money. Like the Friedberg/Seltzer (Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans) playbook, anything that has some minute draft of pop-culture cache gets thrown into the mix, sometimes references that have a perishable shelf life that will be considered old only in a matter of months. I wouldn’t ever advise it, but if you go back and watch any of the Friedberg/Seltzer spoofs of old, you probably won’t be able to remember a quarter of the references. This is because the filmmakers are sacrificing the integrity of their comedy for the quick dopamine hits of timely pop-culture recognition. Is anyone in five years going to remember that the Meagan robot became meme-famous from her weird dance? That’s all the Wayans seem to remember about M3agan, so that’s all you’re getting, folks. It all feels like swimming through someone else’s half-forgotten memories of pop-culture relics.
There’s also a string of jokes that I’ll call “these kids today don’t get it” observations from an older generation feeling rapidly out of place and thus resentful. Look, Gen-Z culture is ripe for satirizing and mockery, but when your targets are pronoun preferences and a trans character just… existing, then it certainly feels like your satire is regurgitating the same grievance points as most hacky Boomer comics. Every rendition of this felt like an example of the “old man yells at cloud” Simpsons meme. If they really wanted to hone in on this generational misunderstanding, they could have really gone further in the different perspectives from Cindy (Faris) and her teenage daughter, but that doesn’t really happen. It all makes the comic perspective feel not just out of touch but grasping and desperate. Why include a trans kid if the only joke is going to be a tedious series of misgendering them? These jokes are meant to act as a comedic heat shield, proposing the Wayans as no-holds-barred comics, unafraid to tackle whatever modern taboos we may have across politics. Except the fact that these jokes are so thin and obvious and disposable creates the unmistakable impression that these are sops for a commercial demographic, the same people that would get excited by seeing a character on the poster with a “woke is broke” sign.
Let’s analyze just one example of the creative rut here. Weapons was a popular movie from 2025 and Amy Madigan’s Aunt Gladys character instantly became iconic. There’s plenty you can do with this character and the modern-day scenario of a wicked witch absconding with children (sample: Kristi Noem as Aunt Gladys as she cruelly sets up child abductions as part of ICE – the makeup preferences between the two could also cement the connection). The only thing Scary Movie 2026 does with this Oscar-winning horror movie is so thoroughly lazy and half-hearted. The joke is that the Trick or Treat kids received weed gummies and are running around high. That’s at least a starting point, and you could see where there could be comedic misunderstandings and mischief. However, that setup is just it. There isn’t anything else. We watch kids running like they did in Weapons and they have offhand ADR lines along the likes of, “I’m so high.” The worst example is a kid just saying the “six seven” meme. That’s it, like the utterance of the meme is the joke, another lowly example of the reference being misunderstood as a joke. Then one of the kids gets hit by a car (ha ha). Do we feature the driver freaking out thinking they’ve killed a kid? The kid protected thanks to the weed gummies? The driver mistaking the inebriated child for a dangerous tool for killing like, you know, in Weapons? Anything? The car hitting the kid, bouncing them high into the air like a trampoline, is the end of the scene. That’s it. It’s practically an admission that the writers didn’t know how to end their scene, and there are many, many examples of this throughout where scenes just abruptly end, lacking larger punchlines and escalation. It’s just weak.
The funniest thing might be the unintended poor timing on Scary Movie’s part. Had this movie waited maybe four months or longer, it could have incorporated the summer horror resurgence happening presently at the box-office. Backrooms is slated to become A24’s highest grossing movie of all time, opening at an eye-popping $80 million. That’s superhero movie numbers. Then there’s Obsession, which has grown and grown from its wide release and is now slated to become Focus Features’ highest grossing movie of all time. Obsession is a phenomenon we haven’t seen in decades. It made more money in its second weekend than its opening weekend, and then it made more money in its third weekend than its second, and then in its fourth weekend of release it STILL amazingly made $25 million. This is a genuine word-of-mouth sensation. I don’t want to overload you on box-office numbers, but as of this writing, Obsession has been released for a total of 24 days and only one of those days did it gross less than $3 million, and that was its fourth day of release. This just doesn’t happen, let alone to a movie that cost under a million dollars to make (we’re talking Paranormal Activity-levels of success here, where a $15,000 budget indie grossed nearly $200 million worldwide, and that was in 2009 dollars too).
I bring this up because horror movies are clearly a force to be reckoned with in the larger culture, and with the success and critical accolades for movies like Get Out, Sinners, The Substance, and Weapons, there is plenty of material available to satirize this new ascendant horror movement. That’s why Scary Movie 2026 is even more disappointing and dispiriting, tying itself back to teen slasher movies that haven’t been relevant for decades. There was so much this movie could have critiqued about horror as it is today, and instead we get sketches without punchlines, fleeting reference-based humor, and lazy jokes that settle for easy vulgarity without a wisp of cleverness. With any comedy, especially spoofs, your mileage will vary on the hit-to-miss ratio, and it’s hard to be really mad at the Wayans for doing their same schtick for decades, but Scary Movie 2026 feels less transgressive and edgy and more tired and dated and, sadly, lost. It feels like the Wayans have lost hold of the cultural zeitgeist or the ability to recognize it, and as such Scary Movie 2026 isn’t any better than any other Scary Movie sequel slop. It’s all exaggeration and mugging with the same old scatological punchlines (when there are punchlines) and further diminishing results.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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Backrooms (2026)
I’ve been a fan of horror movies since my high school days. I’ve literally watched hundreds of them over the decades and find myself more drawn to them of late, perhaps a reflection of the horrors we seem to be processing in our daily lives from the deluge of current events, scandals, and moral failures. I will often feel discomfort, dread, and tension from horror and suspense movies, but it’s rare for me to feel genuine terror, to be afraid to the point where I could be haunted afterwards with the threat of nightmares. It takes a lot to get to me. It’s been maybe ten years since a horror movie really unnerved me and got under my skin. Backrooms is that movie. I was deeply affected and jarred from this little liminal horror movie. That’s the highest praise I can offer, and the fact that a 20-year-old director is responsible for that is amazing. Even if you have no knowledge of the popular YouTube series, dive into Backrooms.
Based on the creepy pasta Web series, Backrooms is set in 1990 and primarily follows two characters. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is the owner of a failing furniture store with plenty of personal baggage over his failed marriage and unrealized career as an architect. His therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), has her own parental trauma she’s trying to work through. One day Clark discovers a strange doorway to another dimension in the basement of his furniture store. It’s a seemingly endless hallway reminiscent of an open-spaced office building, and Clark decides he needs to explore this strange new space, but can he make it back, will he hold onto his sanity, and are there malevolent forces inside this space to avoid?
The strength of Backrooms, as a concept as well as a feature film, is how it taps directly into your limbic system to communicate that everything is just inescapably wrong. Everything looks wrong, everything sounds wrong, you worry that another turn of another hallway is only going to bring about further ruin, and so every additional second in this inter-dimensional space makes you want to retreat. It has the living contours of a nightmare world where there is a lack of concrete details, where things are approximating real-life but just a means off, little uncanny differences or limitations that alert your brain that things are not as they should be. There are small examples, like a chair with five legs instead of four or a stop sign with its writing backwards, and then there are more arresting imagery, like chairs sinking into the floor like sand, or a series of telephone poles increasingly bending forward like a splayed rib cage. Exploring a world of these distortions leads to deeply fascinating and also unsettling imagery that can lead to a suffocating atmosphere of unease. It makes for a rather entrancing experience of analogue, dead mall aesthetics that have a subliminal pull that draws you innately while making you feel off-balance. Like the definition of the uncanny, it takes the familiar and mundane and distorts it into something truly eerie.
But this is more than just a 100-minute extension of the short-form YouTube videos. Director Kane Parsons has certainly leveled up his craft in his film debut. This is a weird world he’s intimately familiar with, but the big-screen jaunt is carefully made to be inclusive and adapted like an actual movie. There’s work here on characters using the Backrooms as an exploration of their unresolved personal traumas, for Clark his rage against a world and the people he felt have failed him, for Dr. Kline her oppressive and mentally ill mother. I like that it’s never clarified whether or not Dr. Kline’s mother was just crazy or whether she too became aware of the Backrooms dimension and was trying to protect her daughter. There are hints of larger lore but the movie isn’t drowning in it, just like there’s some basic explanation given to this dimension and its rules, just enough to satisfy without going into too much explanation. This was my main issue with 2019’s Us, Jordan Peele’s creepy and thrilling nightmare about dopplegangers revolting, and also a movie that shattered its own credulity once it attempted to provide a logical explanation. Not everything that’s strange in a movie needs a thorough explanation. We can readily accept the unbelievable on its own terms. There are more traditional horror movie elements, like jump scares, frantic chases, and the Big Scary Something Coming to Get You, but Parsons makes them all work. There’s a jump scare in this movie that didn’t just make me jump but made me gurgle something unintelligibly in response. There are several agonizing setups of characters contemplating journeying through tight or slanted or altogether ominous spaces and I was shrinking in my theater chair, dissolving in the simmering anxiety, and repeating “no” a lot. The use of found footage is perhaps the best in any movie in a decade. Even at the young age of twenty, Parsons shows not just a knack for creepy imagery but on how to craft and escalate suspense set pieces, how to build and punctuate a suffocating atmosphere, while also balancing characters, story arcs (learning acceptance and accountability!), and metaphors (a concrete hand print she carries with her from childhood!) and themes without losing sight of the core scares and their appeal. Parsons has already proven that he’s the real deal and he’s not even old enough to legally drink in the U.S. yet.
There’s an interesting meta commentary here about the junky iterative process of generative A.I., though this is speculation on my part, though I find it founded in logic within the movie. We’re told repeatedly that the Backrooms doesn’t create things as much as it recreates from its surroundings and the memories of its participants. There’s a reason most of what is explored is a reflection of the furniture store it’s attached to. Except it cannot get things exactly right. Clark explains it like describing a dog to an alien that’s never seen or known the reference and then having the alien create what it thinks a dog would be; the larger shape and idea might be there but the details are inexact or incorrect. For me, this corresponds with the rise of generative A.I., where it tries to replicate real-life but is often prone to strange hallucinations, like human bodies with peculiar joint hinges, extra fingers, or smoothly elastic skin. There’s also very Backrooms-esque visuals of furniture being eaten by walls and floors. Generative A.I. is limited to only replicating what it has been fed, and it often spits back something that looks alien, missing those crucial details to seem real. There’s a memorable tracking shot in the movie that descends floor after floor, and we witness the same room layout go through round after round of regeneration and distortion, getting further and further from the original source with each iteration. What begins with a recliner and windows becomes chairs sinking into the floor, the outlines of windows against solid walls, and finally nothing. Parsons doesn’t have to be explicit but the pointed commentary can be found on A.I.’s limits.
I don’t know about you but if I discovered a portal to another dimension, I don’t think I’d take it upon myself to go exploring. I understand why the movie does so because, well, we need a movie, and that discovery is where the horror lies, and it makes sense for Clark since it’s a reflection of his own memories and unfulfilled ambitions. I get it. However, if this was real-life, I would immediately retreat after confirming that, yes, this strange doorway indeed exists. Perhaps I’ve seen enough spooky movies or it’s just an overabundance of caution in my nature, but I would definitely stay home and let someone else become the latest lost entity to the siren song of human curiosity. Somebody else can be monster chow.
The origins of the Backrooms predates Parsons and his popular YouTube experimental shorts, but it was he who really popularized it and took it to another level, and now with his film debut, Parsons has done something remarkable. It’s not just the bold announcement of a new cinematic voice. It really feels like this movie could be the start of something monumental, a tide-changer along the lines of John Carpenter’s Halloween. He’s not the first filmmaker to explore liminal imagery and dream logic, as we’ve seen from Severance, to The Stanley Parable, to the entire career of David Lynch. I can already hear some Hollywood studio exec saying, “Gen-Z kids, they love them their liminal spaces,” or some kind of erroneous lesson from the runaway success of Backrooms. Get ready for a flood of imitators exploring minimalIst abandoned spaces. I was entranced and deeply disturbed by this movie to the point where I kept shuddering even after the credits rolled. It’s not because of shock value or emotional manipulation, it was because Backrooms got to me, unnerved me, and shook me up, in a way no movie has for a long time.
Nate’s Grade: A
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28 Years Later (2025)/ The Bone Temple (2026)
While not officially 28 years after its release in 2003, you’ll have to settle for only 23, comes a sequel to the zombie outbreak that kicked off a resurgence in zombie media in the 2000s. 28 Years Later is a far more experimental and meditative and genuinely surprising and surprisingly poignant sequel than I think many fans were expecting. They thought it was going to be more like a father/son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Alfie Williams) coming-of-age zombie hunt and weekend of survival. It is that, but it’s also a meditation on life, death, family, nature, and how we respond to grief. Director Danny Boyle returns, for his first film since 2019’s Yesterday, and screenwriter Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Civil War) returns, and together they provide a sequel that attempts to answer what society might be like growing up in this new dystopian world. The movie can get weird, with old movies and archival footage thematically mixed into scenes, Boyle’s camera in constant nervous anticipation, an active member of the hunt, and the use of an iPhone rig to provide Matrix-esque bullet time effects for zombie head shot splatter. Garland has also come up with some interesting zombie evolution over those ensuing three decades of development (granted I thought since the “zombies” were infected living people that you just had to wait them all out to die from dehydration). It seems like a father/son adventure thriller, and it’s quite good at being that, but then it transforms into something unexpected, giving mom (Jodie Comer) the spotlight as she confronts the reality of her physical and mental maladies. From there, the movie becomes this beguiling and thoughtful examination on grace and grief, on processing loss and finding a sense of stability in an unstable world. Ralph Fiennes appears late as a former doctor who seems a little crazy, the grave-keeper to an impressive monument built from thousands of human bones. It’s such a welcomed surprise for a movie replete with them, a movie that refuses easy categorization and wants to do something meaningful than just being a zombie action/thriller.
Even more unexpected was an immediate sequel and continuation a mere six months removed from 28 Years Later‘s wide release. The Bone Temple is divided into two stories, both holdovers from the prior film. Spike (Alfie Williams), the son going on his own journey of self, has been conscripted into a weird and violent gang, The Jimmies, lead by Sir Lord Jimmy (Jack O’Connell), the twisted grown-up version of the child seen in the harrowing prologue to 28 Years Later. He’s a sadistic leader who also tells his followers he’s the son of Satan. Then there’s Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) who we initially thought of as menacing but becomes the most humane caretaker in this post-apocalyptic landscape. The two male figures serve as competing responses to unmitigated tragedy, one retreating to religion as a tool for meaning but it’s really exploitation and manipulation through violence and fear, and the other devoting himself to science and making the world just a little more liveable through empathy and trial and error. Dr. Kelson develops an unexpected friendship with one of the big Alpha zombies, “Samson” (Chi Lewis-Parry), after he discovers this behemoth, who was ripping spines out in rage fits in the previous movie, is seeking out relief through the doc’s morphine darts. Dr. Kelson ponders whether or not there is a chemical compound that could bring back the humanity to the infected. The difficulties with communication do not deter the good doctor, and these paths cross in a climax where the Jimmies come to think of Dr. Kelson as the Dark Lord himself. The movie is consistently interesting, further building out this new damaged world began in 28 Years Later. Nia DaCosta (Candyman, The Marvels) takes over as director and offers a more patient camera, forcing us to dwell in the moments, both horrific and moving. There are torture sequences, long demented monologuing, and questions over the tenacity of human connection despite incredible obstacles, and yet the movie is both more a straightforward horror-thriller than its predecessor and a more focused human drama about loss and holding onto one’s sense of dignity and empathy. It lacks the visual fireworks of Boyle’s style, and I found Sir Lord Jimmy to be more tiresome than interesting, but The Bone Temple is an effectively engrossing lateral sequel that slowly builds Garland’s world a little wider. Now I’ll actually have a third 28 Years movie to look forward to that hopefully won’t take 28 (or 23) years..
Nate’s Grades:
28 Years Later: B+
The Bone Temple: B
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Slanted (2026)
It’s The Substance meets Mean Girls and it’s a frustrating execution of a provocative concept. Writer/director Amy Wang follows Chinese-American teenager Joan Huang (Shirley Chen) as she struggles to be accepted in her predominantly white, middle class, suburban school system. She sets her sights on being accepted by the popular girls, so she abandons her Chinese heritage, food, and looks to better adopt the habits of the very blonde popular clique, but bleaching her hair isn’t good enough to get what she wants. She discovers a mysterious company promising a scientific solution: they will genetically alter you to the race that you desire. What a fantastic plot device to explore racial identity, assimilation, prejudice, stereotypes, and more. It’s a crying shame then for this premise to be completely shackled to a high school cliques storyline. It’s so boring for our protagonist to be completely consumed with being prom queen when she’s just undergone an amazing and ethically questionable procedure. I kept waiting and wanting Slanted to do something more, to better explore the social commentary at stake but it’s really no different than your familiar story of non-popular girl sacrifices her personality and old friends to be popular only for them to remark, “You’ve changed!” This is such a crushing waste of such a promising premise. There’s not even memorable body horror; at one point we do get droopy face. Slanted is less a horror movie and more a middling drama too timid to better explore the rich implications of its concept. This is the kind of idea calling for surreal and excoriating satire, something along the likes of Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You). To narrowly frame this story as an outsider wanting to be popular in high school is just terribly limited and disappointing and ultimately dull.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Obsession (2026)
It seems like the world has become obsessed with the new indie horror film, Obsession. It’s the gruesome brainchild of writer/director Curry Barker, a 26-year-old debut filmmaker best known for sketch comedy on his YouTube channel, That’s a Bad Idea. With RackaRacka’s Talk to Me, Chris Stuckmann’s Shelby Oaks, Mark Iplier’s Ironlung, and now Barker’s Obsession, it appears we’re heading into a renaissance of YouTube creators blossoming as indie horror mavens, and this is days away from 20-year-old Kane Parsons’ release of Backrooms, a feature based on his experimental liminal nightmare YouTube video. It’s probably inevitable for Mr. Beast to eventually make a horror movie, isn’t it? That’s scary.
Baron “Bear” Bailey (Michael Johnston) has been nursing a crush on his friend and co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette) for years. He’s never had the courage to just tell her how he feels.Then one night Nikki just point-blank asks him: do you have feelings for me? He stammers and says, “I think we’re good as friends.” Immediately afterwards in his humiliation, he breaks a novelty One Wish Willow stick and says, “I wish Nikki loved me more than anyone in the world.” From that moment forward, Nikki changes. She’s ferociously devoted to Bear and incredibly needy and volatile. She takes clingy to another level.
We’ve seen plenty of iterations of the “be careful what you wish for” tale of horror and irony, but Barker makes it his own with such confidence. There’s a prevailing sense of dread throughout the movie that just sits in your gut, miring every post-wish scene in discomfort. It can be greatly entertaining to anticipate just how things will go wrong with each scene. Barker demonstrates a tremendous sense of restraint and dedication, favoring to tease out the audience discomfort. I appreciate how much of the movie’s focus is on building unease over jump scares. There are moments where Barker’s camera forces you to study Nikki’s face draped in shadows as she stands upright in a corner, and it’s far more unsettling than if she had just popped around a corner to startle the audience. There’s a certain dark enjoyment to watching a character get in over their head, especially when they have robbed another character of agency, the whole reaping the consequences of their actions. Watching Bear get punished is a sort of cosmic reward as well as a test to see how far he will go to try and make this “relationship” work. Barker’s background in comedy is evident through his skill with pacing scenes and as a whole, and the film benefits from the mordant tone often dipping into cringe comedy and nervous laughter. This man clearly has an affinity for horror and the chops to make a compelling movie connect with an audience and leave a mark.
Obsession wouldn’t be nearly as worthy of obsession without the captivating and shifty lead performance of Navarette (Superman & Lois). I initially thought it was a mistake we see so little of the Before Wish Nikki, but limiting our exposure means we’re trapped in defining Nikki through Bear’s perceptions and projections, and I think that’s smart. The majority of her performance is after the wish, and Navarrette is just as terrifying as she is unexpectedly hilarious. She contorts her face into exaggerated, almost Jim Carrey-esque expressions. When she’s trying to be the blithely happy girlfriend, she scrunches her face into a pained smile that approaches a grimace, a mockery of how women might be expected to look when given the unhelpful advice to smile more. Her juvenile meltdowns and tantrums remind us that Nikki has degenerated into a sickening distortion. Navarratte’s performance has layers to it, finding little physical tricks to cue us about the Nikki imprisoned inside her own body. It’s amazing the flickers of “help me” she can manifest through her eyes alone while the rest of her face is pretending to be a different person. Some of the greatest acting performances of our modern era come from overlooked actresses in unfairly underrated horror movies. In a just universe, Florence Pugh would have been nominated for an Oscar for 2019’s Midsommar, Naomi Scott would have been nominated for 2024’s Smile 2, Sophie Thatcher would have been nominated for 2025’s Companion, and Inde Navarrette would be nominated for Obsession.
Obsession has such a great premise and direction, which is why it’s a shame that there are plot turns that feel disconnected from the rules and characterization Barker has established. Having a super obsessive significant other leads to obvious disadvantages, like being dangerously possessive, paranoid, and losing one’s sense of having an independent identity. Having Nikki make awkward scenes in public, test her partner’s love and devotion, and get easily jealous to the point of madness all makes sense as an extreme encapsulation of Bear’s wish for unparalleled love. Having Nikki stand literally in place for hours and wait for Bear to return from work, to the point that she even pees down her own legs, is quite effective at communicating just how much this woman is losing herself under this spell. Those decisions refine and perfectly demonstrate the disturbing outcomes of Bear’s wish. However, not all of her decision-making has this same identifiable logic. Early in the film, Bear’s cat dies from ingesting a bunch of his prescription drugs. How the cat got into the medicine cabinet or broke the child-proof seal without thumbs is never fully explained except for the implicit assumption that Bear had his pill bottles open and accessible (this guy really shouldn’t be trusted with anyone’s care, human or animal). Afterwards, when Nikki is fully under the wish’s evil power, she does two things with this dead cat. The first might be explained as a means of memorializing the pet, but the second one is just inexplicable and feels more like a cruel prank. It’s hard for me to connect this action to the film’s extension of obsessive love. It broke me from the movie, the same as when during a party game, Nikki recites a twisted retelling of Hansel and Gretel that devolves into incestuous role play. Does she think this little performance will impress Bear? If she’s purposely trying to just be oft-putting to the others, why even indulge the game? The problem for me is that Obsession has just enough of these questionable little turns that felt outside the bounds of its rules. The impulsive self-harm as misguided devotion or flagrant emotional manipulation makes sense. Looming over Bear while he sleeps to watch can even make sense. But not every crazy action has the same logic. Now, you could just wave away every crazy act as, “Well, it’s unexplainable magic,” but I find that an unsatisfying excuse for plot developments that feel more arbitrary than organic extensions.
The other area that nagged at me was the ending and how I felt it conflicts with not just the characterization of our protagonist but also the social commentary against Bear. In order to really delve into this, I’ll have to invoke spoilers, so skip ahead TWO paragraphs dear reader if you wish to remain pure. Earlier, when Bear is on the phone with the One Wish Willow customer support, a fabulous scene by the by, we learn that the wish will remain in gruesome effect until either the recipient or the wish-maker is deceased. Barker has set up the possibility for ending this nightmare but it involves permanent death. Late in the film, the “real Nikki” manages to speak to Bear while Nikki sleeps, like a ventriloquist voice sneaking out undetected. In this fleeting moment of communication, she begs for death to end her torment. Bear is aghast at the request but he’s also offended; would a romance with Bear be so intolerable to prefer death? That’s because Bear is a bad person. He shrouds himself in the armor of being the unassuming “nice guy” and yet his ensuing behavior seems far more selfish and entitled. It’s evident to everyone who knows Nikki that, post-wish, this version of her is not the real Nikki. She’s a completely different person. They’re justifiably worried. It’s purposely incredulous for Bear to think that Nikki has just come around and her sudden and very intense fixation is her genuine choice. He’s not that stupid. However, this Nikki is a scary, crazed cartoon version, with her personality, humor, and ambition hollowed out. For all intents and purposes, it’s like Bear has lobotomized his crush. He takes his time before getting physically intimate with her despite her begging, but it still doesn’t stop him. He finally got the girl and he doesn’t want to let go of her even if it means trapping her in a unique hell.
Now, after some unfortunate and bloody consequences, Bear locks himself in his bathroom with the determination to finally take account and end his life. He thinks about putting a gun in his mouth but doesn’t have the resolve for that. Instead, he takes the same prescription drugs his cat overdosed on and swallows the bottle’s contents. From everything I’ve witnessed of this character, I do not believe he would be the kind of person who would accept accountability and sacrifice himself. He’s too selfish and cowardly. He’s also just too meek and incapable of making hard choices. I could believe him wanting to be brave and noble and make the sacrifice to save Nikki but then, after swallowing the pills, he immediately regrets this decision and throws them up. I don’t buy Bear learning from his grave error. I can believe him having to live with it and being consumed by guilt, and yet he’ll grow numb and accept his new normal eventually, with the guilt likely leveling out over time. The pointed commentary is against the toxic entitlement that men feel in possession of women, especially those denigrating being “friend-zoned” as if platonic friendship is itself a worthless compensatory prize from a woman. It’s sizing up guys like Bear who think of themselves as the guy who just wants a break from the universe who also happens to be completely ignorant to those other opportunities within reach. He’s too fixated on what he doesn’t have to the point that it’s become his identity. He wouldn’t know what to do with Nikki if he got her, which is evident by the rest of the movie. God help this guy if he actually decided to work on himself or calibrate his insecurities and projections. This guy sucks and that’s the point. Horror movies typically end with a would-be solution to the dilemma that proves false, ultimately dooming the protagonist to misery. For Obsession to revive the real Nikki through Bear’s ultimate sacrifice feels completely wrong. It’s giving this loser character a chance at unearned redemption as well as harming its critical message.
While not quite living up to its momentous hype, Obsession is still an unnerving and memorably uncomfortable film experience, from its compounding dread, to its macabre laughs, to its provocative performances, chiefly our chief victim. I have some issues with the iffy internal logic too often feeling arbitrary, and the ending feels both rushed and wrong, sabotaging the larger commentary against men like our self-pitying protagonist. Some might complain that much of the movie could have been resolved had the four main characters just had one honest conversation, but that’s what makes the movie tragic. We see the many detours that could have avoided the worst. I know the majority of my review is me assessing my gripes, but Obsession is a good and very disquieting movie. I just felt like it could have been a great film. Still, this is quite a promising debut for Barker, who has now been tapped by A24 to remake none other than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. While I might not be as smitten, Obsession is a creepy and entertaining modern update on an old cautionary adage.
Nate’s Grade: B
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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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Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 (2025)
I wasn’t a fan of the original 2023 movie based upon the insanely popular video game series that serves as an entry point into horror for kids. It didn’t work for me but I thought fans of the series would have fun watching the characters come to life in live-action. Now with the sequel, I don’t know anyone that could enjoy this dreck except for the most diehard of the Freddy’s fanbase. I’ve watched the movie and I couldn’t understand it. I read the Wikipedia summary and that didn’t clear it up. So much hinges on so many characters having peculiar responses and relationships to what are… killer animatronics powered by the spirits and literal corpses of murdered children. Why is this pizza parlor even still standing? These robots went on a killing spree in the first movie, and yet this lonely little girl misses her “friends” and runs away to see them again. This isn’t E.T. here, it’s a weird killer robot horror movie that seems to be making up its lore and rules as it goes, like one unending “yes and?’ improv game you’re desperate to tap out from. I guess there’s more killer robots this time, and some unintelligible distinction between the good bad robots and the really bad robots. I don’t know. I gave up trying to comprehend what was happening and felt like maybe I could just try and enjoy the minimal PG-13 scares and tension. The animatronic designs are solid. Wayne Knight (Seinfeld) appears as a villainous robotics teacher. There’s a marionette character that’s kind of sinister to watch. That’s about it, folks. It’s a fairly nonsensical waste of 100 minutes, and unless you’re steeped in the lore and history of the series, you too will wish that this town would just set fire to the whole parlor.
Nate’s Grade: D+
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