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Listen, the source material here is miserable. The Langoliers is a bad short story, and an awful made for TV movie. Setting out to “improve it” is not a difficult task, even if all you do is re-edit it. When Timekeepers of Eternity opened with, what I can only call, the “Take on Me” filter, I thought “ahh, that’s cute - a nice play on the destruction of yesterday motif - what a clever way to open this movie.” When the filter persisted through the roughly 60 minutes of “remake” I ended the film thinking “did they make it worse.”

I like youtube horror shorts. It’s cool what folks can get up to when they don’t have the pressure of a full on “production” on top of them. The chair is a cool idea. Physical Objects of Bad Mojo is a good genre. The writing here was good, the acting was not, and the ending was meh. But a cool idea.

There are two movies here. One that happens before the compactor scene, and one that happens after. The first movie is great, confident, and unhinged Ti West. The logical follow up to X and Pearl. Messy and fun. 3 stars The second movie is just messy and boring. The overarching slasher narrative is uninteresting, and the “reveal” is meaningless. The epilogue is good though. 2 stars.

People talk about Christian movies and roll their eyes. Shit like Soul Surfer or War Room - movies with stories and dialogue written so a 12 year old can understand them. They have no depth, they beg no questions, they pose no threat to the status quo. And it’s because the church feels such an uneasy grasp on its congregation - is so unsure of their devotion - that anything that triggers critical thinking is seen as a demonic. Anything that poses a threat to their control is heresy. Heretic is a movie about control. And it’s a movie about

I..uh...huh. So this is a very earnest movie. Geno Walker is great as the movie's protagonist, and does what he can with what he is given. Which isn't much. This is a covid movie. No actors share the same space, everyone communicates over zoom, and the monster is always 6 feet away from our hero. In typical monster fashion, it does not wear a mask. The crescendo of this movie is.....exceptionally dumb. On a scale of which where it strips any redeeming aspects of the movie. Michael Shannon is in this movie...and he knows. But he tries too.

I hope that whoever scored this movie was paid handsomely. Not because the score is particularly remarkable (it’s fine), but because it is constant. I would be surprised if there were more than 5 minutes of the movie’s 100 minute runtime that didn’t have some sort of music playing in the background. The folks making this movie had no confidence in it. Every bit of it feels amateurish. You can see the direction given to the actors in each scene - nothing feels natural. The story is fine. Did you like Life? How about The Thing? How would you feel

Man, what is it with 3rd act reveals that both set up and reveal the twist in the span of 20 minutes? And what is it with quality actors taking these gigs that are well below their ability? Kate Mara and Lawrence Fishburne are good in this. They do everything they can to lift a bad script into mediocrity, and they mostly succeed. The ending dumb, however. There is nothing to overcome that.

Tuesday’s concept is..incredible. What if death could be reasoned with? What if death had feelings? What if death were vulnerable? What would happen if you cared for death? My rating here has more to do with where I wished the story had gone, rather than whether or not it’s a good story. It is a good story. And this is a VERY A24-ass movie. I wanted it to do other things with its premise, but what it did do wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t what I wanted.

So nothing in this movie really succeeds. Meh acting, dumb story, preposterous reveals, and no closure. I think the worst part is that it is just a tired concept. A remix of this has been done a thousand times, and this one doesn’t add anything interesting to the beat. However, it’s competent and doesn’t insult you, so half marks for that, I guess.

Ever wonder what a Hallmark horror movie would be like? Yeah me neither, but here we are, watching Within. It's a story about a ghost, or it is a story about squatters? Or is it both? It's a story written solely for white women. You know, like a Hallmark movie.

I was pretty cool on Talk to Me. It didn't really feel...I don't know...serious? It felt like a member of Meal Team Six walking back into a McDonalds to complain about the amount of Oreos in their McFlurry. It was cosplaying as a horror operator. Bring Her Back will murder your whole fucking family and claim you shot first. It is as serious as they come - a complete 180 from Talk to Me. I won't spoil it, but Jesus it's a hell of a thing. I take back everything I said and thought about Danny and Michael Philippou -

I like sea superstitions. Even today, watching a show like The Deadliest Catch, there are very strict, unspoken rules of the Ocean. One of those rules is that if another ship is in peril, you do everything you can to help rescue its sailors… If you break that rule: Sea Demons. The Damned is about a Sea Demon. And while they may not be as fleshed out as, say, biblical demons, they are still very cool. The Sea Demon in question here a Draugr, and it is not impressed when a small fishing village breaks the rules of the sea.

I liked Presence even though it’s more of a family drama with some thriller bits at the end. It’s hard to be scary when you play the part of the ghost, but this movie isn’t really about scaring you. It’s like…found footage, only that found footage is a hallmark movie. I am not selling you on this, am I? It’s good, and the end revelation is cool. It’s not remarkable, I’ll never watch it again - but I’m glad I watched it. For those of you keeping score: 3rd cool dad movie.

Is it Sci Fi? Is it Horror? I dunno, it was good though. If nothing else, as someone who doesn’t really dig Nicholas Cage, I thought he was excellent in this. Early theme for this years list seems to be “Dads not fucking around.”

This is the tiktok found footage horror movie, and that should be enough reason. This is not to say that tiktokers couldn’t make a horror movie - they absolutely could, anyone can - but this one is not it. It’s lazy, boring, and absolutely cookie cutter. It’s one of those situations where I’m not sure how much more in-depth I need to go to prevent creating a lazy, boring, and cookie cutter review of this movie… There is a moment in the movie (after these idiots decide they need to stay in the house that literally just tried to kill

It is tradition that we start these things on a banger, and Weapons is no exception. I watched Barbarian last year (Zach Cregger's 2022 opus) and noted that it "fucking ripped." One of the keys, though, was that I went in with zero idea what it was about. So when trailers for Weapons dropped earlier this year, I stayed away from them. I wanted to go in with as little information as possible. Did that make this movie better? Maybe? I dunno, going in blind can be beneficial even if the movie isn't built around it (like Barbarian was). Because