Dir - E.L. Katz
Overall: WOOF
Eleven years after his debut, (with plenty of steady genre work in between), director E.L. Katz delivers his sophomore full-length Azrael, which doubles as yet another film that continues the not good trajectory of screenwriter Simon Barrett. Shot in Estonia because movies are expensive yo, this largely stays on the side of insulting. A gimmick movie where every character, (sans a brief cameo), does not talk, but worry not, even though they all belong to some wacko cult who apparently remove their own vocal cords, they can still yelp and make noise when in a kerfuffle. Speaking of which, Samara Weaving repeatedly gets the absolute ever-loving shit beaten out of her, clocked in the head by guns, fists, and a cast iron pan, gets in a head-on collision with no seat belt, has a gun fired right next to her ear more than once, and falls from a tree. Not only does she not even walk with so much as a limp let alone exhibit any noticeable forms of blunt head trauma, but all of this combined injury which would permanently kill or cripple an actual person instead turns her terrified loner into a badass final girl who systematically wipes out her entire ex-tribe. Throw in muck-covered monsters who do that hackneyed deafening screechy noise bullshit, said monsters sometimes running towards their victims at a single drop of blood and other times ignoring people covered in blood, and a painfully monotonous plot, and this just fails on all fronts.
Dir - Tim Burton
Overall: MEH
A legacy sequel in an era of legacy sequels, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice hits the right stride in most respects, but the laughs are few and far between and the member berry adherence sucks out instead of breathes life into the proceedings. As he did by putting on the Caped Crusader garb in 2023's The Flash, Michael Keaten oozes the type of charisma that even the most household name actors can only aspire to, effortlessly slipping back into the title character with the same demented glee that he did in 1988. Likewise, the impossible to hate Catherine O'Hara and Winona Ryder know their respected assignments, the former as a still-pretentious modern artist who gets to lean into the scenery more than the latter, with Ryder accurately portraying what an 80s goth kid would be like in her fifties after botching her marriage, her relationship with her daughter, and tossing her hands up as a corporate sell out with ghost-seeing powers. Everywhere else, this is deliberately silly business which sees Burton relying more on practical effects, actual sets, actual locations, and oddball ideas than he has in decades. Some of these ideas are charmingly weird while others are clumsily executed, and the movie works best when it is not shoehorning in callbacks to the original movie. The plot is still bloated with too many characters and enough subplots to make Beetlejuice's head spin Exorcist style, but it wisely sidesteps any cringe-worthy sentimentality and just goes for ridiculous buffoonery. It was unavoidable that such a follow-up would pail in comparison to its beloved predecessor, (especially arriving so many years later and after Burton has wallowed in CGI mediocrity for so long), but it certainly could have been a lot worse, which at the end of the day is not TOO egregious of a back-handed compliment.
Dir - John Downey/Christian Long/Justin Long/Justin Martinez/Virat Pal/Kate Siegel/Jay Cheel
Overall: MEH
The anthology franchise that refuses to die continues with V/H/S/Beyond, the seventh in the series which has a quasi-sci-fi agenda to each of the vignettes. As always, the results are inconsistent, and the found footage framework is recklessly abused, not least of all because two of the segments literally end in outer space, which should make every viewer scratch their head in annoyance wondering how in the hell of fuck said footage found its way back to earth for us to watch in the first place. There are many other such verisimilitude-obliterating moments throughout, and in order to enjoy anything here, one has to turn that part of the brain off that wonders how the footage was assembled, how the ones involving multitudes of people did not become front page news, and how the ones cobbled together from various cameras were edited in such a cinematic fashion. If one can crank up the forgiveness and get through such lazy foibles, there are some nifty ideas here. The linking segment is still the weakest, (a V/H/S series staple), but the five proper episodes pull off amusing tweaks on a POV/shoot-em-up zombie scenario, a dancing Bollywood monster, a GoPro skydiving extraterrestrial takeover, Justin Long from the director's chair redoing Tusk except with dogs, and one of the dumbest horror movie characters of all time venturing into an alien vessel and touching everything inside of it.
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