solentuser

Weapons (2025)

If there was an ad campaign for this, it never reached me, but when I heard it was created by the director of 'Barbarian' I got interested.

I read a single review, which described it as a slow-burn exploration of how a small community deals with the sudden disappearance of a bunch of children. So I expected lots of intimate character work and conversations about grief and paranoia, with some spooky happenings and perhaps a central mystery to solve, shot with the same high-quality camerawork and pacing from Barbarian.

Turns out, the mystery was more prominent than I expected. The screenplay was carefully built to walk back-and-forth over the timeline of the disappearance and let you solve it in layers. That was cool, but with so much attention given to plot, the characters don't get as much depth as I was hoping for. No matter; the journey has lots of weirdness and humor, and the ending is so delightful and cathartic that you can't help leaving the theater satisfied.

Death Of A Unicorn (2025)

Oh my god, we get it already, rich people are assholes. Didn't need two hours to learn that.

The CGI is trying very hard to match the puppetry but feels uncanny in the action shots. Will Poulter is amusing, Paul Rudd throws his role way over into cringe -- trying to be funny I guess? Ends up just cringe. Jenna Ortega's role is absolutely thankless. I feel bad for the actress, playing a role that is basically a surly adolescent version of Cassandra from Greek myth. I get the impression that a lot of the dialogue was improvised in repeated takes.

4.5 out of 10 purple dranks up.

Nosferatu (2024)

It's refreshing for a modern director to put a vampire on screen that's much more revolting than seductive. It's got to be a harder sell for a movie studio, but I assume it was due, since Stephenie Meyer and Anne Rice have collectively dominated vampire fiction for almost fifty dang years. Lestat and Edward have cast a long shadow (har har). Meanwhile, What We Do In The Shadows has only engaged with gross vampires for comedic purposes. To see a truly disgusting bloodsucker is novel again.

Be warned, I'm going to walk into spoiler territory in the next paragraph. If you want to stop here, the take-away is this: It's like watching two teenagers with old-school braces trying to make out. It's tragic, sexually frustrated, kinda gross, and goes on too long. But on the other hand, the visual effects are brilliant. I'd give it six diseased rats out of ten.

Perhaps if I sat down and watched it a second time, I would feel properly drawn into the atmosphere. Or perhaps if I'd seen it in a theater with a horde of impressionable young viewers around me, laughing nervously at the gore while speed-munching popcorn. I tried to get ideal conditions at home: A dark room, a nice chair, good headphones, a rainstorm happening outside. But the most I could feel was a sense of respectful appreciation, for the craft in the set designs, the wonderful lighting, and gross practical gore effects.

The director Robert Eggers has thoroughly rewired the story to make it as much about Mina Harker (Ellen in this case, for whatever reasons) and her weird connection to the monster. It's all set up in a creepy prologue that, unfortunately, also sets the tone for the visual standard we're operating in: We've got great practical effects when the bodies of actors are involved, but outside that in the wider shots and the landscape, the universe is a lantern show of computer-hallucinated forests and moldering estates, populated by animals that don't quite move the way you expect. It manages to look really cool and expensive without actually looking real.

But how much should that matter, when we've got a good concept to sink our fangs into? Mina Harker's connection (yeah I'm just gonna go ahead and call her Mina, I find it less confusing) to the vampire is a much more articulated combination of non-consensual and consensual feelings here, and she struggles with it right to the end. When she's around Jonathan, the feelings are at bay and she seems genuinely happy, but as soon as he leaves her side a powerful, terrifying combination of attraction and revulsion for something alien surges up to take his place. Sometimes it's treated like manic depression, sometimes it's used to explore how Mina's social position as a woman confines and infantilizes her: When she's not denied agency outright, she is chided for pressuring the men around her to act on her behalf, as they drag everyone into disaster and then flail ineffectively trying to escape.

And we get another angle as well, one that's more subtext than the others: Mina's helpless attraction to what is socially unthinkable, discovered by herself at an early age and then subsumed out of fear and confusion, then making her miserable as it bleeds through into her adult romance... It's all distressingly familiar. Mina is in the closet. Shut hard, and dying from the inside out. This version of Mina does so much more interesting work than Meyer or Rice or Francis Ford Coppola gave her.

So, this movie doesn't work for me as atmosphere, and the action scenes are frankly bad, and the flailing and hand-wringing in the third act goes on too long, but the concept lingered for a while afterwards even as the bloody visuals drained away. And that Counts for a lot.

Smile 2 (2024)

I had such optimism for this movie. The first go-round was an exercise in style over substance, providing a series of escalating scares and twisted scenes that I enjoyed, even though it didn't have a coherent plot, or hold together as a story in the end. The reviews for the sequel claimed that it was a better film all around, but putting it bluntly: It was a retread, without a coherent plot, that didn't even hold together as a story in the end.

Just like the first film, what you get instead of a story is a series of rug-pulls and fake-outs that get worse and worse until they end, and you are left with no clue what to believe, since apparently all of the secondary characters that the protagonist interacts with for more than a few lines throughout the film - yes, ALL of them - turn out to be hallucinations or false memories or some other nonsense. And by the end it's just as brazen as the first film: The entire third act turns out to be a bullshit rug-pull. Which I would have been more upset about, except that the sequel had already wasted so much of my time with absurdly telegraphed twists and padded buildup that I was bored and starting to impulsively check my email instead of paying attention.

It's that cardinal sin, folks. It's why writing is hard. You can't waste your audience's time, even for a couple seconds.

I assume the writer/director was given the green light to make this based on the box office success of the first. And so he decided - why not - let's just do exactly the same thing, beat for beat, except with more money and longer takes. Well, good for him. Money in the bank. But shame on me, for letting this hack fool me twice.

Arcadian (2024)

This one flew under my radar for most of the year until I read about it in a review for another horror movie. It was a favorable comparison, saying that Arcadian had much more interesting creature design, and a script that did a better job building empathy for its characters.

That review built up my expectations a little too high. I'm a very jaded horror fan, so you can (and should) interpret this as praise, but ... I would place this movie just over the line into "worth watching" territory. The creature designs are indeed interesting and the characters are empathetic, but the movie is also frustrating in several ways. The big problem is, there are too many questions raised and then left unanswered. Like, in a post-apocalyptic world full of weird critters, what caused the apocalypse? In the story, it's been almost two decades since the decisive event - whatever it was - and yet no one knows what it was?

That could be plausible with specific constraints. Like, all communications suddenly stop working, and we're following the story of a community that was already isolated, and the creatures are suitably ambiguous that they could be monsters from space or some kind of plague-addled mutation or dwellers from the sea come ashore, or whatever. But the world of Arcadian is not that constrained, and the clues in the story don't fit together. So you have questions, and none of the characters are asking them. Which is natural for people jaded by twenty years of trying to survive, but unfortunately, not very interesting.

With one exception: One young man, central to the plot, who tries to trap one of the creatures in order to study it. What does he learn? It's unclear; possibly nothing. But that may be deliberate, because it turns out that instead of navigating an apocalypse, or even solving the mystery of one, this movie is mostly about something else:

The absurd angst of teenage masculinity. The way it can make young men behave like morons, and can also make them incredibly vulnerable to exploitation, to the point where it seems completely impossible that any young man would become a responsible father like we see in some of the other characters. It's actually refreshing to see a story about this unfold without pulling any punches.

If you decide to watch this, you will get a decent horror setting, but you will primarily get a platform for some interesting discussions about young men. Might even be useful in a classroom setting.

Six Sesame-Street-inspired weird critter limbs up.

Big Trouble In Little China (1986)

I pulled this one out of the vaults because it had been a very long time and I remembered it being very silly. It turned out, I only remembered a quarter of the silliness. You could say there was 300% more silliness than I was expecting.

I was a kid in 1986, so I didn't notice that this movie was released in a year where it went toe-to-toe with Aliens, Top Gun, Star Trek 6, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It held its own, and has since risen in esteem.

The director, John Carpenter, said this in an interview shortly after the film was made:

"I'm almost 40 years-old now. And since I'm getting older in my career, I thought I'd better do something nuts while I still could do it. But I think the primary reason for making Big Trouble In Little China is to see the world through the eyes of my son, who's now two years old. I can see a really ridiculous, fun world, an enormous, wondrous world."

"Rambo 2 was out, which was the template for action films. They were all patriotic," Carpenter says. "They wanted an action hero. I don't think they realized that I would make the white guy look like a blowhard John Wayne idiot who couldn't do anything."

Kurt Russel chimes in: "John and I wanted to have a guy who wasn't as sharp as he thought he was. Jack's a blustery sort of blowhard who has a lot of self-assurance. And it really is not too handy. That made playing him a lot of fun because Jack gets out of trouble in ways you wouldn't expect him to."

The immediate result was that the Fox studio execs tried to make Jack look more heroic, by forcing Carpenter to add a scene to the beginning of the film, wherein Egg Shen praises Jack's "great courage" to an attorney.

From the liner notes to the official soundtrack: "While Big Trouble In Little China referenced no end of Hong Kong and American action films on its journey, John Carpenter's most referential ode was saved for the rocking end credit song by the Coupe de Villes - a group comprised of the director and his pals Nick Castle and Tommy Lee Wallace. Carpenter had first played with Wallace in their high school band Kaleidoscope, and then jammed with Castle while both studied film at USC."

"The way I look at it, no one's ever too old for rock n' roll," Carpenter says. "I thought this was a perfect chance to do a main title. It was also something else making that music video. We shot it through the course of one night on a little sound stage. The whole idea was to get to sing and strut our stuff. No one else was going to pay us to do this. In fact, we didn't get paid to do it! The experience was ridiculous, and also a lot of fun."

Watch this weird toybox of a movie, preferably with some kids sitting around to laugh at it. A nice use of a few hours.

Non-Horror:

Thunderbolts*:

7 out of 10. Surprising thematic choices for a Marvel film. Dramatic scenes handled much more gracefully than anything James Gunn cranks out, but it's still a "ragtag group of crappy people saves the day" thing, which means it may as well be by James Gunn.

Latest Mission Impossible film

6.5 out of 10. Really cool dialogue-less underwater action sequence. Neat plane stunts. Drags at the beginning. Script is ponderous and overcooked.

Fantastic Four:

6 out of 10. A wisely skipped origin story, some glorious retro-futuristic set design, a really stirring action sequence built around a medical emergency. Good stuff. But the script really, seriously struggles with making us know these comic characters as real people. It's the Marvel formula showing its age, really: You need some greater theme or more interesting premise to explore. "What if there were people with cool fantasy-story abilities we don't see in the real world, marching around using them in the real world" as a concept has been so completely beaten into the ground at this point that you'd need mining equipment and paleontologists to recover it. But what else is Marvel going to do?